Page 38 of The Mismatch

‘The food,’ Soraya said softly. Her legs slackened their hold. Magnus didn’t pay attention to her words. ‘Stop,’ she said again.

He removed his hand and stepped back. ‘Huh?’

‘I can hear the food burning.’ She pointed to the frying pan. At least she was telling the truth. The vegetables he had been frying were now blackened. That said, she didn’t dare look him in the eyes, as though hers would reveal everything. The real reason why she was seeing him. That she had no intention of seriously dating him. That she was a virgin. A fraud.

He laughed. ‘Oh, fuck, shall we just order pizza?’

‘Yeah, let’s,’ she said, getting off the counter and pulling her dress down.

Only a couple of minutes ago she was a normal twenty-one-year-old woman. But now her in-between state – of thinking of herself as a Muslim but not acting like one – was asserting itself again.

It was inescapable.

CHAPTER 16

Soraya

London, 2014

All Soraya knew about her sister Laleh was that she had left the family fifteen years ago to be with her boyfriend. Laleh had been just seventeen years old then. She was subsequently disowned by the family. Though Soraya was never sure whether this was because Laleh had disowned them first.

Soraya had been too young to actually remember Laleh when she lived at home. This was both a blessing and a curse. She couldn’t miss her because she didn’t know her – but wasn’t it weird not to miss a sister you hadn’t seen for fifteen years?

It was only recently that Soraya had thought about Laleh more frequently. Perhaps she finally understood her eldest sister a bit more. Understood what it was like to want to see a boy behind their parents’ backs. But resounding in her mind were so many unanswered questions. Why couldn’t Laleh just wait until she was eighteen, and off to university, before having a boyfriend? Was any boy really worth leaving your family for?

Soraya’s image of Laleh was always blurred, never fully formed. She had seen pictures in the photo albums that were kept hidden away. Laleh at sixteen, in her school uniform,smiling at the camera. She was so naturally beautiful, her eyebrows thinly shaped and her lips a perfect cupid’s bow. Her hair had been cut into a long bob, slightly frizzy in the way teenage hair always is.

Soraya reached under her pillow to retrieve her diary. She wrote in it when she couldn’t make sense of her emotions. Lately the majority of her entries had been about Magnus. She opened the last page and the photograph she was looking for fell out.

Her sister’s face stared back at her. She had a mole between her eyebrows that always struck Soraya as unique. She tried to imagine her sister in her thirties. Would her hair be thinner, sleeker? Would she be bigger in maturity?

Laleh wasn’t on social media. At least not under Laleh Nazari. No one in the family talked about her, and it wasn’t until Soraya was much older that she realised how strange that was. When she tried to bring up the subject of her sister the atmosphere always changed and she was abruptly shut down. After a while she learnt not to try.

Every few months Soraya would attempt to find Laleh online. She would Google search her, check every social media platform for her sister. But there was no trace of her. It was clear she didn’t want to be found.

In some of her daydreams she pictured Laleh living in Paris, or somewhere equally glamorous, in a cafe somewhere, drinking espresso, not thinking about the family she’d left behind. Her image of her sister was always her as a teenager, like the girl in the photograph. She could not imagine what she looked like now.

In her nightmares Laleh was living in a tiny flat, struggling to make ends meet. Or worse: on the streets. Homeless because her parents abandoned her when she was seventeen – would rather lose their daughter than accept she had a boyfriend. Surely, the whole point of families was to be there for each other? Not to disown a young person for falling in love.

That was the problem with the forbidden love that Soraya relished reading about: it was easy to idealise only if you ignored the wreckage it caused.

She doubted Laleh was still with that boyfriend. The odds, statistically, were against them. They had been a teenage couple that idealised love. She imagined that when Laleh had left home cracks had begun to form. How could they not? It was a sad thought.

She put the photograph away and tucked her diary back under her pillow.

Either Laleh was doing well and wanted nothing to do with them. Or she was doing badly, and needed them, but couldn’t reach out.

The two thoughts haunted Soraya.

Staring up at her ceiling, feeling the ever-present emptiness inside her, she couldn’t help but wonder if she was one step closer to being like Laleh.

To being tarnished.

Or perhaps free.

CHAPTER 17

Neda