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closed Gmail and given a curt thank you on his way to his room that I came to wonder about the question of age. He didn’t look seventeen years old to me. Why lie to me? What other lies might he be telling? He said Nalin was fourteen but she might be older too. Perhaps she wasn’t even his sister. Perhaps they weren’t refugees at all, but criminals, or even terrorists.
    My dreams were turbulent that night, but not seething with anxiety about the lies that Omid might be telling. Instead, his story of crossing the sea to Greece set me on a boat all night, through the dark. It wasn’t a dream of empathy, however – it concerned myself, as all dreams do, I suppose. As the waves rose and fell, the dream dinghy crashed from zenith to trough and I was thrown out, first high into the air, then down into the surging water. I laboured desperately through the waves to reach the boat; I clawed at the rubber surface seeking purchase; I reached for the rope ringing the boat edge, the lashing; but again and again I slipped back, down into the depths, weaker each time.
    Waking at last, exhausted, the winter morning still dark, I was pinned to the mattress by a heavy grey melancholy. I understood that I am now old. Whatever new waves rise beneath me, I will fail to catch them, to rise in the way I have always risen before. The adventureron the motorcycle is gone. I am an old woman. The tide subsides.
     
    Nalin came back happier. Girlish. She hugged me in the kitchen. What had she been doing with her friend in the Jungle? ‘We sew,’ she told me. And when she grew up, what did she want to do then? She gave answers, Omid translated: ‘Well, she said she’d like to be a housekeeper, or a fashion designer. Or no! A crime reporter on television.’ She ragged her brother (if he was in fact her brother) about his typing skills. He was back on my laptop, pounding away at the keys, and I asked where he’d learned English.
    ‘Facebook,’ he said. ‘I have many friends in US. And Norway.’
    ‘Pff!’ Nalin said. ‘He don’t know English. Is lazy. He don’t study.’
    ‘And you?’ I asked her. ‘Do you study?’
    ‘She knows nothing,’ Omid said. ‘I do everything for her.’
    But he was smiling. She swatted him with her table napkin.
    Perhaps they were lovers, like the fake ‘brother and sister’ in that Terrence Malick movie, Days of Heaven . All this time, everything I knew about them I’d heard from Omid. It was more than the language barrier – he kept Nalin tucked behind him, he spoke for her. But then again, he’d had to protect her across God knows how many thousands of kilometres.
    ‘Madame,’ Nalin said, settling down on the chair beside mine at the table, teacup in her hand. ‘Kurdish language. I teach you.’
    She called out words, I tried to spell them phonetically in roman script and Omid made corrections in capitals, pressing hard on the paper, along with the Kurdish version, each symbol a kind of artwork. ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ and ‘I am fine’. I could remember only supas – ‘thank you’. Pronounced, it sounded to me, like s’pass .
    ‘How old were you when you left Syria?’ I asked, out of the blue. Omid looked up sharply. He translated for Nalin and they consulted in Kurdish.
    ‘I was ten and she was six,’ Omid said.
    So unconvincing, I found them. How old when they arrived in Turkey? How old when they left Turkey? I was a terrier – I would not let go. Nalin’s sweet face fell. Omid turned resentful. I kept asking, interrogating. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to understand if they were lying to me, and if so why. Their answers were hesitant and unhappy.
    ‘Thank you for tea, madame,’ Omid said, standing when I paused for breath.
    ‘ S’pass, ’ I said brightly, but neither of them even smiled. ‘If you want to learn French I can teach you,’ I said.
    Omid turned in the doorway and shook his head. ‘English is international language, madame,’ he said.
    Nalin