King Farouk's Barn.

The bird, rushing about like a mad golfer in gelatinous plus-fours, was spraying the barn with crimson arcs. Its head, severed by my uncle, witnessed its body’s desertion like a fearsome guardian spirit, the spark of life dying in its eyes. My infant brain could hardly take this in. My screams were rather compounded when Francois began chasing the poor headless carcass with his cleaver. My world imploded. I decided then and there that I would create my own society, of which I was lord and sovereign, its realm, geographically spread to my ten toes in the south, five fingers east and west and the fuzzy headlands in the north of my brown curly crown.

His point had been to create a small agricultural holding in suburban Alexandria. An utterly absurd and vain desire – absolutely, but Francois was an utterly absurd and monumentally vain man. In fact, the perfect personage to lessen the clearly unbearable weight of emotion that had laden itself upon my father, Jacques. The recent disappearance of my sister and mother, I had understood to be the result of one of their fairly regular fights. She was forever tearing off into the dusky street on a Friday cradling my baby sister in her arms and promising never to return. The first time this happened, I was utterly traumatized, and hardly slept through the night. I was comforted only when my father read to me from his antique collection of ‘The Arabian Nights’ translated by Richard Burton.

Hearing the stories of flying wooden horses, of ropemakers of Djinni emerging from sealed waxed jars – and re-animated heads decapitated by violent and irrational kings, only to wreak their terrible revenge on the law-givers that had so self-servingly rewarded their kindness with suspicion and murder. But these episodes had continued with such frequency, that I had come to understand them in the same way one understood the sun’s fall beneath the sky at dusk and it’s rise at evening. They were merely circumstances that punctuated our chaotic lives. I accepted all these rituals however non sensical they appeared at first to me. The only ritual I couldn’t accept with the butchery of chickens. They were forever hacking at the poor birds in the marketplace. Strapped as they were together by the claw with their cell-mates in giant steel wire cages, before being pointed at by some accusing finger and then led to their executioners block, for the prosecution of a crime, that was alien to them. Tried in a language they could not conceive. That, I could not accept. But this time was different. Mother had not returned the next day. I had heard snippets of conversations the night they had left. I had heard talk of a man, a Swiss. “Leave then!” – But I heard no more as they had seen me through the crack in the door and bid me away. At the moment, my ama bustling down the corner swooped at me, whispering imprecations: ‘Mashallah!’ look at this boy, listening as his parents are at each other's throats – get to bed and leave them be, in the morning they will be at peace again, Allhamdullah!’ Her strong arms bundled me to bed, where I strained my ears for intelligence of the result of the argument. But I was asleep by the time she left. I am convinced the moment the door had slammed taking my mother and sister from my life for good, I was them both above me. I opened my eyes in the darkness paralysed by sleep and there above me two indecipherable figures fizzing in the dark, peering over me. I screamed but no voice came out. My eyes, the rods and cones struggling to grasp definition in the enormity of the darkness came up with nothing. I sat awake paralysed for a full hour before succumbing to sleep.

That was days ago of course. Now my anxiety had melted into something rather more sinister and uncanny. A settled hope – the kind of conviction one has a few days after you learn intelligence that an old friend you once know has died – that the reports are false, and one day, walking down the road you will see them, you will catch eyes in the street and laugh at the absurdity of the news of their passing, before walking off to meet again in another lifetime. That rather eerie hope seems the mind's prevailing defence against reality. My subconscious knew I would never see her again – and it was about its ingenious business of concealing that fact from me, as long as it was able to. With that sharpest knife in the torturer’s armoury: hope.

Uncle Francois, eternal clown that he was, had come in to reconcile my father to his fate. They had initially gone together, then in turns to look for my mother and the Swiss. The maid and the porter had both been engaged in the search – and as these things do, before long, the news of her scandalous defection had spread like wildfire. When we went to Stanley beach that summer, my father was met with the false pity of the tidy wives with their tidy families, and the ingratiating double-entendres of the widows, whose designs on my father were plain for all to see. My parents had been the subject of much gossip among the Jewish community of Alexandria as it was, given the frequency which in their youth they had joined the communist movement’s glitterati. My mother had been the main driver of their attendance: they had the best parties after all. But now the memory of the Great War was in abeyance, and my father’s service in the British navy had secured some level of social acceptance for our little family unit, the eye of scandal had looked elsewhere. Until now. Many were grateful for the opportunity to laugh at us. This manifested itself for me, at school. Three spiteful girls informed me my mother had become a whore for Greek sailors in Cairo. When asking my father to verify the intelligence he slapped me so hard, I thought he might take my head off. Thankfully Uncle Francois was there to take me to the pastry shop to make amends, though I had to go home when I vomited all over my new shirt and suit which my father had brought me from Les Grand Magasins de Cicurel. He conjectured I had been spoiled by all the sugar and that my constitution was not used to such luxury. I neglected to disabuse him of his self-serving narrative. I had felt the bile rise when I saw him handling the confectionary and watching as a beetle-red strand of juice sluiced down his fat cheek and he masticated. Flashes of his bloodied hands made me dizzy. As soon as we were home, he tidied me up – in the barn, despite my ashen-faced protests. He threw pail over pail of tepid water over me – washing my clothes clean and stirring the dusty-blood splattered straw a tepid pink. Taking one look at me, my father decided we should go out for dinner. I was to have boiled vegetables and rice, nothing too stimulating. So we set out in the car again. As we reached the line of restaurants in Francois’ Lagonda, my father and I got a seat while Francois parked up. But when we had sat down at the outdoor seating area, we could see he was struggling to get out. He wound down the window and began to call to people in the street to help him. I rose to assist him, but my father’s hand stayed me with a smirk and a finger to the lips. I watched as 5 burly men, a Greek, A Turk, and 3 Egyptians each with a date they needed to impress – heaved my uncle, with considerable difficulty out of the window. He thanked them profusely, shaking each of their hands. As soon as they had resumed their seats, with a friendly wave he opened the car door with ease and drove off. Something snapped inside me and I squealed with heart-wrenching paroxysms of glorious laughter. I laughed until I cried and felt distinctly unwell. My uncle returned some fifteen minutes later with 5 bouquets of roses which he offered to each of the burly men’s dates (at which he received a standing ovation) – then before sitting down at our table entertained the entire restaurant with his incomparable tenor – with a selection of arias from Verdi’s Aida. It was the first night in those dark days that I remember feeling truly happy.

We were a sorry bevy of males, rattling around the house like a group of lost and traumatized soldiers, ears still reeling from the sound of cannon. The cannon was at that moment buffeting the stretch of El Alamein. You could hear it from our Verandah. At the outbreak of war, father had attempted to have himself put down for active service. I was to be sent to boarding school, but the plan failed when it was determined that he was not medically fit. I learned years later he was turned away as a result of his weak heart and its erratic beat, not to mention his advancing age. What was required was young men. They asked him to bring his son in. He smiled and nodded and cursed them in his heart. Now, marooned on this island that had once contained a family – and now merely broken memories – a new force swept us. Nanna came to stay. She was a short, stout woman of Syrian extraction, who slapped and kissed and fed and embraced and finger-waved her way through life, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the self-satisfied. She treated father like a prince and me like a small god. As for Francois within weeks they had begun a pitched battle. He would capture large species of venomous tarantula from local dealers and put them in upturned glass bowls in regions of the house she visited for a quiet moment. The lavatory. The kitchen table. Inside the fruit bowl. Her shrieks and Francois’s booming laughter drowned out the explosions and rat-tat-tat of gunfire, until, unable to take his inveterate practical joking one second longer – we all moved to Cairo for a year.

It was a tradition among Sephardic families, who could trace their roots back to the times of the Spanish inquisition, like ours, that they would retain the key to the property they lost by forcible expulsion all those years ago. Our family had lovingly passed down this totemic heirloom from the Spain that had given us our last name: Barcilon. It was a cumbersome cast iron affair with hexagonal teeth emblazoned with a family crest – and it lived in a box hidden in the straw of the barn. Seeking to escape Francois’s various escapades, we left early in the morning to Cairo. Francois was sleeping off a hard night out on the town, after gambling much of the wage-packet he had earned at the La Borse, Alexandria’s magnificently colonnaded Stock exchange on Cherif Pasha street – after a number of unofficial games of cards with some high profile British officers, letting off steam after many days in the desert. He told all and sundry that he ‘let them win’, as a form of welcome and thanks to those men who were keeping us safe. But he had a far more devious purpose as I was to learn. If you ever want to make friends you can rely on: lose money to them regularly. After a while, those with power and a conscience will remember you when you are in need. “All people remember” he used to intone in that aggravating baritone of his, “is not what you said to them, where you were… but how they made you feel!” So he was snoring drunk when we left.