Page 86 of The Mismatch

‘You can’t face up to things. I don’t believe you. I know you like me. I know this was more than just “practice”. But you bottle upeverything. I mean, you didn’t tell me about your dad, that you were a virgin – plus there’s all this stuff about someone called Laleh! Who even is she? We would never have been able to work because I didn’t know who the fuck you are.’

‘Oh, fuck you. You had a really good read of my diary then? Who even does that anyway? And maybe I didn’t tell you everything because I knew you’d never understand!’

‘What, because I’m white?’

She sighed with frustration. ‘Yes, because you’re white! Because you’re the kind of guy who sees an Asian girl you think looksexoticand a bit different, and then decides,You know what? I’m going to try and sleep with her. For sport. For a laugh. How could youeverunderstand why I needed practice with guys, why I’m a virgin, why my sister was disowned, what it could possibly be like to grow up in my family!’ She paused for breath and added, ‘Youcould never understand.’

Magnus grabbed her arm.

‘Soraya,’ he said.

She shook him off, shoved his chest so that he stumbled away from her. ‘No. Whatever this was, it’s over. It’s done.’

The girls at the bus stop started making excited noises.

‘Oh, shut the fuck up!’ Soraya shouted at them, before leaving.

This time he didn’t follow her.

CHAPTER 40

Neda

Liverpool, 1986

‘Baba kojas?’

Four-year-old Laleh pulled at her mum’s thin cotton trousers while she asked where her dad was.

Neda looked down at her small daughter. Her own back was aching, the weight of the two babies growing inside her taking its toll. And yet when she looked into her child’s large brown eyes, needy and loving, she couldn’t help but lift her up and place her on her knee.

She combed Laleh’s silky hair. ‘I don’t know.’ Neda couldn’t keep the worry out of her voice. She had no one to talk to. She could hardly trust her peers with her troubles, and didn’t want to say anything to Mena lest she dislike Hossein even more. Despite her never voicing it, her opinion of him was clear. Besides, Maman had always taught Neda to keep family matters private.

Mena had finished her PhD quicker than Neda, as she didn’t have multiple pregnancies to contend with, and had moved to London the year before. It was only with her departure that Neda realised how lonely England could be.

Life with Hossein had its peaks and troughs, and right now they were in a trough.

She already had enough to worry about with the news from her family back home. Every day Neda feared a family member would be lost to the Iraq bombings. Sometimes she would ring and ring and receive no answer for days, and then would find out they were hiding in a basement, waiting out Saddam’s attacks. Accounts of bombings over three thousand miles away shook her to the core. She wanted desperately to return but her family had encouraged her to wait it out, to take the opportunities given to her, not waste them. Wait until things had calmed. But by now it had been eight years.

‘You wouldn’t like it here at the moment,’ her baba had said.

‘Yes, she would! We’re all wearing hijabs now, she’dloveit!’ she heard Rabeh say. Baba shushed her.

‘We’re proud of you in England, azizam, just stick at it. So many people would kill to be in your position, remember that,’ he’d said.

One of her younger brothers, Ali, the most liberal of them all, had come to Liverpool to study two years ago. He told her everyone who could was leaving Iran. It was a comfort to have him in the same city as her, even though they weren’t particularly close.

So, Neda held in her troubles and doubts. She often suspected her marriage had been a mistake but reminded herself frequently that Iranian marriages were different from English ones – and how quickly she was forgetting her roots! They weren’t about true love or passion, but about companionship, having a partner in life. And didn’t all relationships have issues to overcome?

What if your partner was cheating, though, as she now suspected Hossein was? That was recognised as grounds for divorce; if she had evidence, the courts in Iran would allow them to separate. But what would people say? That it was her fault for making them go to England, for not listening when he said he wasn’t happy, for not being enough for him?

‘Boys are stupid, Laleh azizam, remember that,’ she told her daughter.

‘Why?’ Laleh’s inquisitive eyes grew larger.

‘They cheat and lie,’ Neda muttered. Laleh looked strangely as if she understood this information. It brought Neda a wave of shame, that her four-year-old daughter understood the reality of marriage. But shouldn’t she know early? And Neda was lonely, who else could she tell?

‘You’ll grow up to be strong, won’t you?’