by Sara Jafari
“Really? The girl you were talking about on the phone?”
“No, someone different. This one is loud, a bit classless too. Terrible hair.” Her sister shook her head.
“His type then,” Soraya muttered. Parvin nodded. “If he snuck her in, how did you see her?”
“I heard them laughing outside the back of the house, and saw them out of my window. He doesn’t even try to be inconspicuous, but hey, that’s Amir.” She paused. “Wait, are you going to cry?” Parvin asked.
Soraya hadn’t realized her irritation at these double standards was so plain to see. If she was about to cry, though, she doubted Parvin laughing in her face would help.
“No, I’m just tired.” During the silence that followed, Soraya picked at the skin around her nails. The dry, hard pieces were best, and when she found one she yanked hard. The act stung ever so slightly. “You know what though,” she said, her voice rising. “Imagine, just imagine, if we ever brought a boy home.”
Parvin laughed, a high-pitched, girlie sound. “They would kill us, not invite the boys round for baghali polo.”
Soraya’s phone pinged. They both glanced at it.
“Magnus, ey?” Parvin said, snatching Soraya’s phone from the bed.
Soraya smiled. “You don’t have my pass code.” Her smile turned into a frown when she saw Parvin sniggering. “What?” Soraya climbed off the bed and dashed to her sister’s side. “Oh my God, how did you get in?”
“Your pass code is your date of birth.” Soraya snatched back the phone from her sister. “So…” Parvin plopped herself onto the mattress. “He can’t wait until Friday, apparently.” Soraya’s cheeks colored. “What’s happening Friday?”
Soraya put a finger to her lips and tiptoed a short distance down the stairs. Seeing that the coast was clear, she went back up and shut the door. “Could you be less loud?”
“Mum went to Lidl, Amir’s in town, and Dad’s two floors down watching TV. Not that he even listens to us when we’re in the same room as him. I’m not stupid.”
Soraya couldn’t help but be paranoid despite Parvin’s words; imprinted in her mind was a memory of her dad telling her when she was a teenager that he would kill her if she talked to a boy.
“It’s nothing.”
“Oh, come on, spill.”
“It’s honestly nothing.”
Parvin gave her a piercing stare. “If you say so.”
Soraya opened her mouth, almost said a word, so that a strange groan came out, but then quickly shut it.
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
Parvin raised a perfectly threaded brow. “OK…whatever it is, I think you should go for it. You’re only young once.”
Her sister had had numerous long-term boyfriends that she had hidden from the family, even sometimes from Soraya. It would be only when she was going through a breakup that Soraya would learn that Parvin had actually been dating someone for years. Her sister had mastered the art of leading a double life.
Parvin went to look at herself in the full-length mirror. She leant close to it, focused on her face and then her hair. “Enjoy your youth and not having gray hair,” she sighed as she pulled on a few.
The staircase groaned again, but this time under heavy, slow footsteps. Soraya resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the prospect of what was to come.
“Hello, girls,” their dad said as he entered the room.
Parvin, still assessing herself in the mirror, said, “Hi, Dad.”
Soraya grudgingly said, “Hi.”
His face was red and his clothes hung baggily on him. She wondered if he had always been so thin. It was rare that Soraya properly looked at him these days. His presence often filled her with anger, so much so that she refused to settle her gaze on him most of the time. Refused to really look at her dad.
She hadn’t always felt this way about him; once she’d even liked him. However, years of hearing her mum’s complaints about him had built a growing resentment towards her dad, and Soraya had told her mum this. But despite knowing exactly where her youngest daughter’s unhealthy hatred of her dad came from, her mum continued to express her frustration with him to Soraya. And Soraya loved her mum too much to turn her away when she needed to vent; she felt her mother’s anger viscerally when she complained about her husband. Amir and Parvin dismissed their mum’s complaints, so she had no one else to talk to. She would never tell her friends, not even her best friend, Mena; her pride was too great.
But looking at her father now, Soraya felt pity. His gray T-shirt had a ketchup stain on it, and small holes in the hem. Where did the holes even come from? And when was the last time he had changed his clothes? Her mum had once said he was a handsome man, that all her friends were secretly jealous she had married a onetime professional footballer.
“Do we have any food in the house?” their dad asked, giving a toothless grin. He had forgotten to put his false teeth back in.
And then any sympathy she’d briefly felt for him completely disappeared. Soraya hadn’t expected much. But as usual, her low expectations were met with an even lower outcome. This was the first time he’d seen her since she’d come home. He’d given her no “Congratulations,” made no mention at all of her graduating. No apologies about him not attending her graduation ceremony, no explanation. Nothing.
Instead, he asked if there was any food in the house, a hint for someone to make him something.
“I don’t know, why don’t you look?” Soraya said. She was bolder because it was clear he was in good spirits today.
Soraya knew just how to approach him in his various moods. Now his eyes were wild, his movements shaky, erratic, his voice loud and excited. In this mood he would happily take sarcastic comments and frowns, might even throw money at his children in an attempt to get them on his side.
Sensing the situation, Parvin said, “Dad, we have some oven pizzas in the fridge. I could put one in for you?” Despite living in this house for decades, he still didn’t know how to work the oven. Or didn’t want to know. Didn’t think he needed to.
“You’re my good girl, you know that?” He rubbed the top of Parvin’s head, and then looked at Soraya. “You are too, don’t feel left out!” He came over to her and she held her breath. He ruffled her hair too, a bit too roughly, but probably not intentionally so. He pulled it too, in the act.
“Ow!”
“You’re such a moody girl,” he said. “What are you girls doing today then?” He stood in the middle of her room, like a boulder she wished she could remove. But for once he was in a chatty mood.
As in all situations, Parvin knew exactly what to say and do.
“We’re going to town, and I’m going to buy Soraya lunch to celebrate her graduating.”
“Oh, yeah! My youngest daughter the graduate.” Soraya felt a faint hope expanding in her like a balloon. “What are your plans now then? Are you applying for jobs?” And then they were popped with a needle, confusing her. In some ways it was worse than disappointment, this feeling. She didn’t have time to fully form a hope before it was snatched away from her.
“Don’t you want to congratulate me?” This was what Amir and their dad often called Soraya’s “back chat.”
“Congratulations,” he said, going over to her again to pat, or rather whack, her on the back. “You know what, girls? Lunch is on me, wherever you want to go.”
“Maybe Jamie Oliver’s then,” Parvin chimed in, excited by her father’s offer.
He rummaged inside his trackie bottom pockets and produced two twenty-pound notes, which he gave to Parvin. He didn’t have much money, so would regret that later. “There you go, take your little sister on a girls’ day out and enjoy yourselves.”
Another popped balloon.
While Soraya would rather go for lunch with Parvin than with her dad, she wondered if it was asking t
oo much for him to want to spend time with her. That was why she and Oliver had bonded so closely when they first met: they both had dysfunctional families. Families who pressured them into acting a certain way, and then were vocally disappointed when their creatures didn’t turn out as they were expected to.
“Thanks, Dad!” Parvin jumped over to give him a half hug, not wanting to risk inhaling the stench. And this was how she and Soraya were different. Parvin’s takeaway from this would be that their dad paid for them to go out for lunch, a nice thing to do. But all Soraya could think was that he was too lazy to spend time with them, to attend her graduation, or even to make up for that by going out to lunch with them. Instead he preferred to pay them off. With money he didn’t have. And perhaps Parvin was fine with that, but Soraya knew she never could be.
* * *
—
When Soraya had finished binge-watching The O.C. in the early hours of the morning, she made her way down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen for a snack. As she reached the ground floor she saw that her dad was in the living room watching TV. She took the door straight into the kitchen, instead of walking through the other room in front of him.
She could hear the TV narrator talking about a murder that had occurred. His voice was classically American, ominous, unremarkable.
Opening the fridge to get out a bottle of milk, she realized her dad hadn’t called out from the living room. She put the milk bottle on the counter and walked to the door connecting the two rooms, a box of cereal in her hand. Her dad was lying on the sofa with his back to her. His headphones were plugged into his laptop. Soraya forced herself to stand there for a moment, trying to understand what she was seeing playing on the screen. At first all she saw was flesh. Breasts. Normally when Soraya caught him watching porn, she would quickly look away. Shake her head. Mutter something under her breath along the lines of “disgusting.” But today she willed herself to understand what he was watching. On his screen was a girl going down on another girl.
His clothes were all on, his hands still by his sides. This made the whole sight stranger. He was a passive onlooker, observing. It seemed he took no pleasure in it. But then, perhaps he wasn’t an expressive person. Soraya didn’t really know him that well.
She also wondered, as she always did, why? Why in the living room? Why in their public space, when he had taken a bedroom that wasn’t his anyway and made it his own? Couldn’t he watch porn there?
“Ridiculous,” she said under her breath, following her own ritual unthinkingly.
And he continued watching, completely unaware.
So Soraya returned to the kitchen, poured the milk and cereal into a bowl. Returned the items to their respective places and headed back to her room, turning off each light as she went.
It wasn’t anything new.
She left the bowl of uneaten cereal on her bedside table and took a shower. She turned the dial so the water was hot, almost scorching. She got in, held her breath as the water stung against her bare skin. She breathed through gritted teeth, focusing on nothing but the water.
When she shut the water off, she wrapped herself in a scratchy towel and went back to her bedroom, not sure why she had done that. But it helped her feel a little cleaner.
By now the cereal was soggy and unappealing.
Soraya met Magnus in one of the nicer bars in Brockley, one she had never been in before. She wore a black turtleneck jumper tucked into a midi-length baby pink skirt, and silver cut-off Doc Martens. Over this she wore a black duster jacket and a silver mini backpack. It was an outfit she’d deliberated over for an hour, until she forced herself out the door because, despite living only fifteen minutes away, she was already late.
Magnus was there when she arrived, sitting in one of the booths looking at his phone. Something about seeing him there—dressed all in black, which suited him a lot more than the green top he’d worn at the party—sent her anxiety into overdrive. There was a reason why she always liked a certain type, and why Magnus was not included in it. He made her nervous, and not in a good way. He reminded her of the boys at school who had made fun of her.
What was she doing? And why had she let herself be egged on by her friends? She was beginning to think this was a very bad idea. It didn’t help that she’d been out the night before, her comedown well and truly sparking the negative feelings she had about herself and how this date would go.
As she edged closer he looked up and said, “Hey,” before standing up and leaning in to hug her. She hugged him back, raising herself onto her tiptoes. He smelt very good, like cinnamon and citrus fruit combined. When she let go, they slowly disentangled themselves. Wanting to create some immediate distance, she quickly sat opposite him in the booth.
The red and black walls gave the bar a boudoir feel. The waiters wore waistcoats and bow ties, and the host had a fancy mustache. Slow contemporary music played in the background, jarring with the retro décor.
It was a hipster bar through and through.
Ordinarily, Soraya would have felt right at home, though she’d probably deny that to him, but something about the kind of people around them made her feel out of place. Made her feel immensely stupid for being the one to suggest coming here. She hadn’t known it would be like this.
She grabbed a menu; it was an old hardback novel with a menu insert stuck inside. Her book was To Kill a Mockingbird. Magnus’s was The Catcher in the Rye. The whole concept was completely unnecessary.
“So,” he began. “What you having?”
She looked over at the bar, finding the thought of alcohol nauseating at that moment.
Oliver had broken up with Charlie a couple of days before because he had caught him messaging other guys on Grindr. In order to be a supportive friend Soraya had feigned enthusiasm for his suggestion of a night out in Elephant and Castle the night before. They’d ended up in a club until 4:00 a.m. She hadn’t taken a great deal of MD, but enough that her first meal of the day had been at 5:00 p.m. Her insides still felt hollow. “I kind of had a big night out last night,” she said slowly. She didn’t want to mention casual drug taking because his stance on it was clear from their first conversation. “I think maybe just a Diet Coke.”
Magnus laughed and scratched his head. “To be honest, I have a big game tomorrow morning so wasn’t planning on drinking either.”
“Why did we go for a drink then?” she said, laughing.
“I don’t know, you’re the one who suggested it.” He let out a quick laugh. “No problem, two soft drinks it is.”
He left to go to the bar, which gave her the opportunity to wipe her now sweaty palms against her skirt. In fact, she felt as though her entire body was perspiring profusely.
When he returned with the drinks she asked him about his week. It wasn’t as though they could go straight into kissing. Or could they? She imagined leaning in, grabbing his face, and mashing her mouth to his. But then what would she do? The thought made her inwardly cringe. She sat on her hands.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
Or maybe she was outwardly cringing.
“Yep, yep. Fine. Sorry, what were you saying?”
He’d been at work—he tutored children in English in Lewisham—and then showed her his bandaged hand. His pinkie and ring finger were bound together.
“I spent some time in A & E too,” he said. “I had a rugby match on Tuesday.”
“Oh, shit,” she said. “Did you win at least?”
He looked down at her, a smug and competitive glint to his eyes. “Yeah, obviously.” He winked.
She remembered what he’d told her when they were messaging, about how he was a writer, had even written a draft of a novel. Though he wouldn’t tell her what it was about.
It was difficult to correlate the different versions of Magnus: the one she had known in their classes, the boy who was often quiet but clea
rly smart and studious, the person she had been texting and who now sat in front of her, and the boy she saw online. He posted so many pictures, mainly selfies pouting in the mirror with his pecs out. This person ticked the stereotype of a university rugby player, a lad. This was who she had assumed he was for the past three years. And yet, through their texting he’d presented a very different version of himself, and she couldn’t work out which one was the façade. Though she wasn’t sure why she cared. She had one task for this evening and didn’t need to make it more complicated for herself.
Still, she couldn’t help but ask, “How’s the writing going, then?”
He was leaning his elbows on the table. His arms strained against the fabric of his shirt.
He frowned. “OK, I guess.” He took a long sip of his drink. His hands were large and callused. She watched as he lifted his glass, trying to imagine that hand cupping her face as he kissed her, but every time it came, she would nervously block the image from her mind. “Do you write?”
Soraya chuckled nervously. “No, I can’t write.”
“Have you ever tried?” His eyes were wide, encouraging, and she had to remind herself that this was the way he spoke to everyone with a vagina, not just her specifically.
“Beyond writing in my diary, not really. Me and my friends have been talking about creating our own literary journal though.” It was an idea Priya, Oliver, and Soraya had been floating around for a while, but so far they’d failed to put it into action.
“That’d be really cool.” He paused, as though deliberating what to say next. “You know, I saw your drawings on Instagram. You’re really good.”
Her face colored with the knowledge that it wasn’t just she who had been social media stalking.
“I think people would pay good money for your illustrations,” he said. His confidence was contagious. No one had ever told her that; rather they had agreed with her that drawing was a hobby, nothing more. “I know I would,” he said, smiling.
“Thanks. I’m trying to develop my style more, especially now we’ve graduated. I’d love to be able to do more detailed drawings. Like Studio Ghibli style, colorful with lots of landscape detail.”
