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away and make himself a cup of tea. By the time she was ready to leave, he was out of bed, washed and dressed, and sitting in the living room with one of his books. In those days, after he began to get better, it was The Odyssey again, and that was how she left him, thinking that soon he would have to go back to work and that would be the end of his enforced holiday. Some mornings he went to the newsagent to get a paper, but he could not bear reading about what was happening in Iraq, so some mornings he did not and went for a short walk instead.
    Then late one Saturday morning, when she was in the kitchen unpacking the groceries she had just brought home from the supermarket, she heard a small noise in the living room, and had time to think to herself that he had dropped his book, before she heard him say in a muted voice, Oh yallah . She hurried to the living room, and found him sprawled in the chair panting for breath. His face was twisted in agony, and his whole body was leaning to one side and shaking uncontrollably. She did as she was instructed, wedged his teeth open with a spoon to check that he had not swallowed his tongue. Then she called the emergency number, laid him out on the floor so he could breathe properly, and was ready to give him mouth-to-mouth if he faltered. By the time the ambulance arrived he was unconscious but still breathing on his own. In the ambulance, Maryam was shaken by a panic whose name she knew well. He is going to die.
    Hanna and Jamal both came down the same day, and they all learned from the doctors that Abbas had suffered a stroke and that it would take a few days to assess the damage. In the meantime he was sedated to allow his body to recover some equilibrium, although he was probably out of immediate danger. They went in to see him together, and saw him lying shrunken in his bed, a thin brown man with tubes coming out of his nostrils and his arm, but breathing on his own. He is not going to die , Maryam thought firmly, He is not going to die . She wanted to say this to her children, but perhaps it had not occurred to them how close he had come. The doctor had been very reassuring in his report. Perhaps to the children Abbas looked even stranger than he did to her, because they had not seen him since he fell ill, and had seen neither him nor her for weeks and must have imagined them well and at ease in their absence. But perhaps she was being sentimental, assuming her children were more innocent than they were. They were probably not at all surprised to be standing around their father’s hospital bed despite her reassurances that he was getting better after his collapse. They knew quite well enough how old he was, and maybe had been secretly dreading that something terrible was yet to happen.
    The shock of their Ba’s illness made them solemn when they got home, but drew them closer together in a kind of mourning. They followed her to the kitchen while she prepared supper, talking about their Ba and remembering his antics. After a while, Jamal went into the living room to watch their ancient TV , as he called it.
    ‘Have you got a drink in the house?’ Hanna asked, looking into various kitchen cupboards. Maryam nodded towards the right cupboard and watched her daughter turn towards it with a resolute look. She really wanted that drink. Hanna was then twenty-eight years old, had been teaching for five years, and was about to give up her job to follow her boyfriend Nick to Brighton where he had just got his first job as a university teacher. Each time Maryam saw her, she seemed more assured: in her voice and in the movement of her eyes, in the way she dressed, as if complicated choices were involved in the way she looked as she did. Well, yes of course complicated choices were involved, but it was as if she was deliberately remaking herself from someone she did not like. Maryam thought her speech was also changing, leaving one voice behind and taking up another one, still warm (most