The plum sat on the kitchen table beside Tariq's keys, dark purple, with the bloom still on it.
Layla stood in the kitchen doorway in her cardigan and looked at the two things for a long time. The house keys on their ring with the little plastic olive Hamza had bought him at a school fair. The car key on its own. The plum, set down carefully next to them, the way you leave a tip.
She went back to the bedroom and opened the wardrobe. His side was empty. The hangers swung a little when the door moved, and touched each other, and made a small sound like a wind chime.
She sat down on the bed.
"He went at four," her mother said from the passage. She had her prayer beads in her hand and her reading glasses on her head. "By the clock. I was up for the dawn prayer. I saw him from the window with his bag. He walked down to the trucks on the main road." A pause. "He waved up at me. He looked happy."
"You didn't wake me."
"No," her mother said. "I didn't."
Layla got up. She put her shoes on without socks. She went down the stairs past the Saeeds' door with its pencil ring. Out in the white street she ran.
The camp's buses stood at the junction of the main road where the trucks had been parking for a month, three of them, long and clean, with their engines idling and their doors folded open. People were climbing on with bags and children. A man in a pale shirt stood by each door with a clipboard. Nobody was being forced. Everybody looked pleased.
She found him in the window of the second bus.
He was sitting by himself with his bag on his knees. He had shaved. The blue shirt she had ironed for their son's graduation from primary school was too tight across his stomach now, because he had been eating. He was looking out at the street with an expression she had not seen on him in a year, open and rested, a man on his way to a holiday.
She knocked on the glass.
He turned and saw her. He smiled. It was a kind smile, a polite one, the smile he gave Mrs Saeed on the stairs. He lifted his hand to her the way he lifted it to a neighbour. Then he looked past her, up the street, at the green on the Saeeds' balcony. He said something to the woman in the seat in front, and the woman laughed.
The doors folded shut. The bus pulled out.
Layla stood at the junction in her shoes with no socks and watched it go down the main road toward the highway, until the next bus pulled out after it and hid it.
When she got back, her mother was in the kitchen doorway with the plum in her hand. She held it out at arm's length, the way she held a mousetrap.
"Do you want it?"
"No."
Her mother went past her to the front door, opened it, and dropped the plum into the rubbish bin on the landing. Then she washed her hands at the kitchen tap, though only a cupful of brown water came, and dried them on her skirt.
"We don't keep his fruit in this house," she said. "Go to your clinic. Sitting here won't bring the bus back."
She did her shift. She had not known she was going to until she found herself at the post office with her hand on the black-painted door.
Karima looked up from the camp bed in the first cubicle, where she was holding a bus driver's wrist and counting, and looked at Layla's face, and looked at her bare ankles, and said nothing about either. She pointed at the register with her chin.
Layla kept the register. Name, hours slept, prayers kept, what they asked. Her handwriting was steady. She noticed that from a distance, as though it were someone else's. A girl with sunburned shoulders. A grandfather who opened his shop four times a night. A woman whose husband had stopped knowing her name, which Layla wrote down in the last column in her steady hand, and then sat looking at.
In the last cubicle the calm man in the good shirt was back, the one who did not want the sun to set. His brother had not brought him this time. He had come to say goodbye. He was going to the camp in the morning, he told her, smiling, and he wanted to thank the clinic for its kindness. Layla wrote "leaving" in the last column and thanked him back, and watched him walk out into the white street with his hands in his pockets.
At the clock's two in the afternoon a man came in from the street with a radio held to his ear and said, to the room, that they were walking out of Medina. Thousands, the radio said. After some kind of tremor. Walking out to the camp on the salt.
Layla's pen stopped.
"Ring him," Karima said, without looking up from the bus driver.
She rang. It went to a recorded voice in Arabic she could not follow, then to nothing. She rang the old number too, out of habit, though it had not reached him since the spring. Nothing. She put the phone face down on the register and wrote down the next name.
Karima came and stood beside her afterwards, while the room was quiet. She didn't touch her. She smelled of the clinic's soap.
"The ones walking out are the ones who were going to leave anyway," Karima said. "That's what the shaking is for. It shakes out what was loose." She looked at the black window. "Your boy went there to learn ten verses. He isn't loose."
"My husband wasn't loose either. Once."
Karima didn't answer that. She picked up her bag and went back to the cubicles.
At the clock's ten at night the flat was dark behind its foil and its towels. Her mother had prayed the night prayer and gone to bed. Layla sat in the hall on the low stool where Tariq used to sit to take off his shoes, with the phone in her lap, and looked at the photograph.
It hung where it had always hung, by the door: the three of them on the beach at Hamza's eleventh birthday, squinting. Hamza had a plastic spade. Tariq had his arm round both of them and his mouth open. He was saying something she could not now remember. Two weeks ago he had stood in front of it with his shoes in his hand and asked her, kindly, who the boy was.
She had told him. He had said "Of course," and smiled, and gone into the kitchen, and she had heard him eating.
In the year of the surge, in the four days she had lost, he had sat by her bed and held her hand while something else used her mouth. Her mother had told her afterwards. He had not let go once, her mother said, not even when she bit him. He had a small white scar on the side of his thumb from it. She had kissed it once, in the kitchen, and he had laughed and told her not to be soft.
She wondered whether he still had the scar, and whether he knew where it came from.
She sat and looked at the photograph until she could not see it for looking.
The phone rang in her lap.
It was the new number, the cheap local one Hamza had texted her in the winter, saved in her phone under his name and a little crescent moon he had put there himself. She fumbled it and nearly dropped it. She held it to her ear with both hands.
There was a noise on the line like wind. It might have been a crowd, a great many people talking a long way off. Then his voice, too close, out of breath, as if he had been running or crying or both.
"Mother," he said. "Mother, the city shook three times."