Page 103 of The Mismatch

‘He’s a dirty, dirty man,’ her mum said, sitting back down on the bed. Her fingers laced together, she looked at the wall. ‘This isn’t the first time he’s done something like this, you know. I’ve always told you, men are bastards.’

Soraya had been told about her dad’s past exploits many times before. The same stories were repeated, changed slightly, exaggerated in different places each time.

She wished her mum told her friends about her problems, was less fearful of their judgement, instead of always offloading onto her children.

It was this fear of telling other people about your problems, your flaws, that her mum had passed down to Soraya. To them it was shameful to let others know about any unpleasantness they experienced. Magnus had tried to shake Soraya out of that way of thinking, but the damage had already been done.

She couldn’t imagine a world in which her parents liked each other consistently – or rather, a world in which her mumliked her dad. And yet, despite all this, the hurt on her mum’s face was palpable.

‘What are you going to do?’ Soraya asked.

Her mum collected the laptop and left the room without saying a word. Soraya scrambled out of bed, put on her dressing gown, and tentatively followed her down the stairs.

But instead of going towards her dad’s, or rather Laleh’s, room, her mum walked down another flight of stairs, towards Amir’s room. She tapped on the door twice sharply before entering. Amir was playing his Xbox. He was smiling until he saw the looks on their faces.

‘What’s going on?’ He sat up straighter in bed. In one swift move, his mum turned off the TV, silencing the sound of gunfire. Amir made a noise of disapproval, but she shut the door and brandished the laptop in his face.

‘Your father is pretending to beyouon a dating site! Astaghfirullah.’ She muttered the last word.

She paused, and Soraya knew what she was thinking. That it was preposterous she had been reduced to this; Dr Neda Nazari, a biomedicine lecturer who had written numerous notable research papers, a woman highly respected in her field, was sneaking around spying on her husband’s laptop. Did she ever dream it would come to this? That this would be the life she led in England, surrounded by transgression, including that of her cheating husband?

In that moment, Soraya felt deeply sorry for her.

At first Amir was in denial, ‘You’re being paranoid, Mum,’ he said, but then when he clicked through the website, likeSoraya he realised the extent of his dad’s disrespect. He, too, saw the messages. Messages they knew they couldn’t show their mum.

And it made Amir even angrier to see that the filth his dad was spouting to these unsuspecting women, presumably while looking for love, was being sent to them under his son’s picture. Amir could actually have bumped into one of them in person, unaware that online his image was being used to ask them if they ‘wanted a bit of fun’ … and both Soraya and he wanted to projectile vomit when they read the explicit ‘fun’ their dad was detailing. No one wanted to know about their parents having sex – or, even worse, their failed sexts to other people. And because their mum was so pure, one thing was clear to all: she deserved better.

These thoughts must have been swimming around Amir’s mind as well until he couldn’t take it anymore.

‘Fuck this!’ He scrambled out of bed, laptop in hand. Despite just being in his boxer shorts, a sight Soraya didn’t want to see, he left his room without a care and stomped up the stairs. Her mum trailed behind him whilst Soraya lingered in the hallway. Resounding in her head was the question she often asked herself:Why is my family such a circus show?She had planned to talk to her mum about Laleh, but this news overshadowed everything.

Amir ripped open the door to her dad’s room. He turned on the light, waking up their always-sleeping father, with their mum hot on his trail. Soraya followed close behind, reasoning that the shouting would be worse if she couldn’t see the action.

Hossein had been asleep on the single bed and was now squinting at the crowd of people around him. The depths of sleep didn’t soften his facial expression.

The bedroom still held hints of Laleh. There was the floral bedspread and teddies in the corner of the room, even a stack of girls’ magazines, featuring theFriendscast, and Justin and Britney. Why hadn’t her parents thrown them out? Why had they kept these reminders of the child they’d disowned?

Laleh’s basic cream wardrobe still had her clothes hanging inside. Every so often when Soraya was a teenager she would secretly go and try on these clothes that screamed of the nineties and imagine what her sister had been thinking when she left without them.

‘What are you doing, idiot? I’m sleeping,’ her dad hissed, mostly to Amir.

His son’s hairy chest rose and fell rapidly. ‘Why are you usingmypicture on a dating website?’ He thrust the laptop in his dad’s face, holding it by the screen, the movement awkward, mirroring his mum’s earlier.

Soraya hid behind them both. She could feel her insides knotting. Amir was not exempt from a beating from their dad; if anything he would go harder on Amir, though it was rare. When Amir got expelled from school for a week for punching a bully who called him a ‘Paki’, their dad had thrown the coffee table at him and kicked him out.

Their mum had smuggled him back into the house in the middle of the night.

‘You’re talking stupid, that wasn’t me,’ their dad replied, turning away from the family to continue sleeping. Hisreaction wasn’t surprising; it was confirmation that he knew he had done wrong. But, of course, he wouldn’t admit that. He was burying his head in the sand, or rather his duvet.

Amir put a hand on their dad’s shoulder.

‘Eh!’ he said, slapping it away.

‘Why are you trying to deny it?’ Amir said.

‘Don’t talk back at me.’

Amir sighed. ‘I’m not, Dad. I don’t want to. It’s just you’ve really upset Mum, and you’ve usedmypicture. Accept you’ve done something wrong—'