and he would be all attentive trying to answer her but in the end he knew that his mother wanted him to brush his teeth. Last night, after their aunt cooked them their meal, she said to both of them not to forget to brush their teeth when they are supposed to. Ahmad already feels that there is something missing.

For the past two months now Ahmad and Habib have made some friends with the neighbours though the aunt is a little bit overprotective. She tells them that she has to be extra careful because they are her responsibility. 'Responsibility' means that they're not really her kids and she can't do whatever she wants with them and if they hurt themselves very badly then she would hear a lot of blame from their father. "But we'll tell him it was our fault". She wants to be easier, more relaxed, and she feels for them, but she still can't do it. She lets them out, but they have to be in her sight; if she comes out to the balcony she wants to be able to see them, and if she can't see them then they should be within hearing distance to respond to her. They play, but not like the other kids who can go a bit further to the next two streets.

Their aunt is also a little bit smelly sometimes. The days get hot and she would have been knitting and she would have had a shower the previous day and she would want to have another one but she couldn't be bothered - these are just some of the habits that come from living on her own. Ahmad's mother was never smelly, she also never put on perfume like the other people who would come and visit her, well, she would only put it on then, but for the rest of the time she didn't need to. She had her own smell; soft, really nice, and it was her, nobody else smelled like that. He would get glimpses of it every night when she gave him a few kisses before she left him to sleep, but he got the full scent when he cried. She would hold him against her chest, and by the end of his crying he would be waking up to her scent, and then she would say something to him that would allow him to tell himself that he could stop crying now, that if he wanted more of her touch and smell he could always cry later. Well, it might be difficult to just invent something to cry about but if he really wanted to, he knew he could, so he would stop, and he would start to miss her smell as she withdrew from him, but then very quickly she would distract him by coming up with something for him to do, something that he would him lose himself in.