Ahmed washed for prayer at the small sink behind the office door at ten to eleven, dried his hands on the towel that hung from the pipe, and set two chairs facing his own.
The office was one room on the ground floor of the building where he lived, with a window onto the road and a calendar from a tyre shop on the far wall. He had rented it twelve years ago so that families would stop arriving at his kitchen. A ceiling fan turned slowly. Across the road the mosque's loudspeakers were fixed to the minaret with wire, and a pigeon sat on one of them.
They came at five past. The father first, holding the door, a thin man in a pressed grey shirt with a lanyard from the port trust still around his neck. He had come straight from his shift. The mother came behind him in a brown shawl, holding the hand of a girl in a school pinafore with a pink plastic clip in her hair.
"It's started again," the father said, and shook Ahmed's hand too hard. Asif Baig had shaken it the same way a year ago. "Since Tuesday. You remember Mariam."
"Hello," said Mariam.
She sat in the chair nearest the window with her feet a hand's width off the floor and swung them. She looked at the fan, and at the calendar, and at Ahmed's old Quran on the desk in its soft leather cover. She looked at him last, openly, the way children look at a doctor who has not yet done anything to them.
He took the history as he always took it, in order, writing as they spoke.
Tuesday, at the call for the night prayer, she had been doing her homework at the kitchen table. When the call began she put her pencil down, got off the chair and went to stand facing the corner by the fridge. Her mother had known at once. She had seen it the summer before, until it stopped as it had begun, for no reason anyone gave her. When the call finished Mariam came back and picked up her pencil and asked what eight sevens were.
Wednesday, at dawn, she was out of bed before anyone else, standing at the bedroom wall in the dark. At noon her teacher phoned. At the afternoon call she was in the car, and she unclipped her seat belt and turned round on the back seat on her knees and faced the rear window until it was over.
"Every time," the mother said. "Every call. Then she comes back and she's herself."
"She's eating," the father said. "She's sleeping. She plays with her cousins. She knows her own name and ours and the cousins'. Nothing else is wrong. Nothing."
Ahmed asked about Monday night. Nothing unusual, they said. A hot night. The tanker had not come, and the power had gone off for an hour around nine and come back.
He asked whether anyone in the house had been unwell since the long weeks of last summer, when so many had been. The father's jaw moved. A cousin, the mother said. Better now. Another reciter had come.
He wrote it down. Then he came round the desk, crouched in front of Mariam's chair so that his face was level with hers, and asked whether he might look at her eyes.
She held them open for him without being asked twice.
He had three names for what he looked for, after eighteen years. A glaze, when something sat behind the eyes and looked out through them. A slide, when the eyes would not stay on his, as if pulled. A flatness, when they stayed on his too well. Mariam's eyes were brown and wet and clear, with a fleck of something gold in the left one and no darkening in the creases at their corners. They looked at him as a child looks at a man who is too close: politely, and with some interest in his beard.
"When the call comes," he said, "and you go to the wall. What do you see?"
"The wall."
"And what are you doing there?"
She thought about it. "I'm waiting."
"For what?"
She swung her feet and did not answer, and he understood that she was not hiding it. She had not been told.
At twenty to one the loudspeakers across the road clicked and the pigeon left.
The call for the noon prayer came in through the window, the caller's voice a little hoarse and too close to the microphone, the way it always was on Fridays, with the sermon still to come. Ahmed had heard it in this room perhaps four thousand times.
Mariam stopped swinging her feet.
She slid off the chair and walked past her mother's knees and past the desk to the far corner of the room. She stood with her face a hand's width from the wall, beside the tyre calendar, with her arms at her sides.
Ahmed's eyes went to the window. The direction of prayer from this room lay through it, west and a little south. He had set his prayer mat by that window every day for twelve years. Mariam stood with her back to it, facing north-east, as nearly opposite as the walls allowed.
"Mariam." The father was already up. He took her shoulders, gently, and turned her round to face the room.
She let him do it. Her feet went where he moved them. Then, when his hands lifted, she turned back to the wall, at the same unhurried speed, the way a compass needle swings back when the finger comes off the glass.
He turned her again. She turned back. He held on that time, and she stood under his hands with her face toward the room and her eyes looking past his elbow at the corner, patient, waiting for him to let go.
"Mr Baig," Ahmed said. "Please. Let me."
The father let go. Mariam turned back to the wall.
Ahmed stood behind her, an arm's length away, and began to recite in Arabic. He recited the Opening first, then the Throne Verse, slowly, every letter given its weight. He watched her as he had watched hundreds of people at the same words: the shoulders, the hands, the back of the neck, the breathing.
In those other rooms something always answered. A tremor in the fingers. Heat coming off the skin, a smell like struck matches, a voice that was not the host's trying out his name. Sometimes the answer was silence, but a held silence, with weight behind it, a door with someone leaning on it from the other side.
Mariam breathed. Her hands hung at her sides. The pink clip in her hair caught the light from the window.
He recited the last three chapters, and the verses from the end of the chapter of the Cow that he had recited in more bedrooms than he could count. The call from the minaret finished somewhere in the middle of them and the loudspeakers clicked off. He kept going to the end, because he did not stop. That was the rule. He had paid for the rule in his second year.
Nothing pushed back, and the air in the room stayed as it was. He felt for the thing he always felt for when a recitation landed, the pressure that leaned away from the words, and found the same thing he had found in the boy with the night terrors on Thursday and in the woman on the telephone. It was an open window somewhere he could not find. A draught on the side of his face. Nothing in the room was in it.
He finished. His mouth was dry.
Mariam turned round. She walked back across the room, past him, and climbed into her chair and pushed the clip up where it had slipped.
Her mother was crying without any sound. Her father stood by the door with his hands in fists, looking at Ahmed.
"Well?"
"I didn't find anything to send out," Ahmed said. It was the truth, and he watched it land on the man like a slap. "I'm not finished. I want to see her again. Monday, at the same time."
"You didn't find anything." The father's voice went up. "She is standing at walls five times a day."
"I know."
Ahmed sat down in front of Mariam again. She was swinging her feet. He asked her, quietly, as he would have asked about a pain, whether she knew who she waited for.
She looked at him with her clear brown eyes. The fan turned overhead.
"He's on the road now," she said.