by Sara Jafari
“I just want you all to be decent, OK?” he said. “Everything I say is so you don’t end up…”
“Like Laleh?” Parvin laughed in his face. “Yeah, OK.”
“I never stopped talking to her,” their mum said quietly. “I always send her money, text her, call her.” Tears still streamed down her face. Soraya was struggling to keep up. “I never stopped caring.”
“What?” Their dad looked confused, but the anger had left his expression and what remained was betrayal. He had never suspected his wife to be capable of such deceit, even if it was necessary.
“You think I’d disown my own daughter? Never talk to her again? Never speak to my granddaughter? You’re the idiot.”
He put his hands to his almost bald head, as though forgetting he had no hair left to pull. “I was doing what I thought was right.”
“Right for who?” their mum asked. “You’re nothing like the man I married. He was understanding, loving. He would never have made me disown my precious child.”
“You all think I’m so heartless. Like I don’t think of Laleh, like I wanted this to happen—”
“You never let us talk about her!” their mum shouted. “She’s become like that evil character in Harry Motter, Potter, whatever it is—”
“Harry Potter,” Soraya interjected, and then quickly shut her mouth.
“I didn’t want her behavior to influence our other children. For them to think sleeping around is OK, that it’s OK to fuck up your life and act like English girls.” He looked his wife in the eye, solemnly. “But don’t you ever think I simply washed my hands of Laleh. She’s always in my dreams. She never goes away. Even when I want her to leave me, she’s always there.” He shook his head.
“She’s your daughter, of course she won’t go away,” their mother said. “How did you become so selfish, so self-centered?” She looked like she was about to spit on him, an expression of pure disgust on her face.
Their dad noticed this. Soraya saw the way his shoulders slumped, and it was as though something clicked in him. She noticed his eyes were suddenly very shiny, but couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“Yes, I know, I’m the worst. I’m bad, worthless. That’s what you all think. You think I don’t know this either? That I ruin everything?” He looked at Soraya then, and she diverted her gaze to the floor, hoping he would stop staring at her. His eyes on her made her feel uncomfortable, her heart beating even faster until she wished she could run. “You especially, you’ve always hated me, haven’t you?”
Soraya shrugged her shoulders, unable to form words.
“Everything I’ve done has been for my family, even if it doesn’t seem that way. Sometimes you’re rude, you have no manners, so I get angry. But I didn’t mean for things to get the way they did before, you know that…”
“That’s no justification for the things you do—the things you did!” Soraya snapped. Her body shook; tears were desperate to escape her eyes.
“I—I didn’t mean to hurt you, any of you.” He looked to his wife briefly. “I can’t do this anymore. What’s the point in any of it?” He said the last part quietly, almost to himself.
All eyes turned to him.
“Hossein, what are you talking about?” their mum said sharply.
“I do everything wrong. No one respects me. No one even likes me. What am I doing here?”
The question was vague; Soraya wondered if he meant in England, or in existence altogether. It was something she often wondered, but hearing it said aloud was chilling. Such talk belonged only in movies, felt totally unexpected coming from her emotionless dad.
Despite such apparent candor, part of her didn’t believe it, didn’t believe her dad was truly in as much despair as he made out. It seemed to her that he was trying to distract them from all the secrets that had been revealed. From all the wrong he had done. Even though his tears were real, she believed his reasons for them were quite different from what he wanted them to believe.
“Dad, you’ve done so many bad things—you’re hardly the innocent person in all this!” Soraya said.
“I can’t believe we have a niece you didn’t tell us about,” Amir said quietly to his twin.
Her head was down. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s the drugs I take. They make me so angry—” their dad was saying.
“No, Hossein, don’t blame everything on something else. What about the online dating, eh? Are you going to blame drugs for that too?”
Suddenly he slammed his hand against the coffee table, making them all jump, except for their mum, who perhaps expected this reaction.
“My life is shit. I sleep all day. You all work, have fun, enjoy life. I have nothing. I went online pretending to be a normal man and talked to women so I could feel something, anything!”
“But you never think how I feel. All you think about is yourself,” their mum said.
“Does this even matter right now—we’ve found out why Laleh left, and the fact you both hid the reason from us!” Amir interjected.
“It does matter because he’s my husband and your father,” their mum hissed. The vehemence of her voice surprised her children. They had never seen their mum so angry, especially towards them. “He sleeps all the time, doesn’t work…the least he could do was not cheat on me, on us. To think, once upon a time, I believed you were a good man, Hossein.”
“It wasn’t cheating, we didn’t meet—”
“This isn’t the first time—I’m not stupid!”
Their dad was picking at his nails, but there was nothing left to pick, they were virtually nonexistent.
“I’m sorry, OK! I’m sorry!” he shouted. “I’m a loser. My family thinks it…even my fucking doctor thinks it. I can’t do anything right.”
“Yes, you are, Hossein. You are a loser! So stop feeling sorry for yourself and do better,” their mum said.
He seemed shocked by these words, a look of pure hurt on his face. His wife had never been so outspoken before, so brutal.
“Neda, how could you say that?”
“Because it’s true. I’ve had enough.” She crossed the room and went upstairs, leaving him sitting with his hands on his head. For the first time ever, Soraya saw her parents as they really were. They were vulnerable, and they had no idea what they were doing, winging a failing relationship. She could almost see them in their twenties, making bad decision after bad decision, never speaking to each other. Her dad bottling everything up, and her mum talking to her children but not her husband about their problems.
Amir went over, put his hand on his father’s shoulder, patted it gently. “It’s OK, Dad.”
“It’s not OK. Everything’s a mess. I just want to sleep forever. If I could take a pill that would let me sleep forever, I would. What’s the point?”
“Don’t say that, Dad!” Parvin cried.
“I want to go back to Iran, back to my sisters, I need to get away from here,” he said. “I’ve wanted to go back ever since we moved to England. I’ve never liked this country.”
“But we’re your family,” Amir said.
“And all I do is make you upset.” He looked straight into Soraya’s eyes. “I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
The rest of Soraya’s days in Brighton passed quietly. Neda avoided her husband until Amir dropped him off at Gatwick Airport a week later. Everyone was still taking in the shock of his departure.
The news about Laleh had changed everything. It wasn’t as though the thought that her oldest sister may have gotten herself pregnant, and that’s why she left, hadn’t crossed Soraya’s mind before. But she had always dismissed it, hoping her parents were not capable of keeping such a huge secret for so many years. It made sense, though. Soraya had never understood, really, why Laleh would leave her family for a boy so young. Now everything made sense.
As people needed to be sold overpriced clothing, Soraya returned to London on New Year’s Day.
A week later she arranged to see Oliver and Priya. It was the first time in too long that Soraya had been able to feel excited about something. It gave her hope.
“Where is she?” Oliver asked, just as a petite girl with a messy bob walked up the stairs, coffee cup in hand. “Priya, hello! Loving the new hair by the way.”
“Hey! Thank you, and sorry I’m late, guys,” she said, sitting down next to Soraya. “Hey, you.”
“Hiya.” Soraya smiled at her. She could smell Priya’s perfume, sweet and floral, as she sat down. Priya wore bright red lipstick and a pair of glasses with thick black frames. However, the first thing Soraya noticed were her huge pineapple-shaped earrings. She had recently gotten a job at an art gallery. Soraya was not sure what exactly her friend did there but it seemed to suit her.
“I can’t believe we’re finally doing the journal. It’s only taken us two bloody years.” Priya laughed, pulling her laptop out of her bag. “Shall we dive straight in?”
“OK, so the theme could be…” Oliver said, letting the sentence hang as he tapped his pen against his nose.
“Growing up?” Priya said.
“Nah, too cliché,” he said.
“Sex!” Priya exclaimed, a grin on her face as she typed away.
“Again, cliché.” Oliver sighed. “I know it’s not really a cliché, but don’t we want it to be something new…fresh…something that means something to us?”
Priya looked furious for one millisecond. He didn’t see. But Soraya did. She often saw things others didn’t. In fact, she could almost feel the resentment rolling off Priya. Oliver’s dismissal of her idea wasn’t intentional, he was only trying to brainstorm random ideas. Whereas Soraya knew Priya believed in her ideas; they were thought out. To her, this was original stuff.
“Breaking free?” Soraya said, very quietly. It was more of a mumble really.
“What was that?” Oliver asked.
With both her friends now looking at her, Soraya struggled. Her ideas always felt stupid, unless someone told her they were good. Only with positive affirmation could she see her potential.
“Nothing, I was thinking aloud.”
“Did you say ‘breaking free’?” Priya said.
“Yes, I know it’s totally lame. It’s a High School Musical song, in fact!” Soraya gave a fake laugh.
“I think it works,” Oliver said. “You could write about sex in breaking free, growing up, and…” He looked at Soraya in a peculiar way. But she knew what he was thinking. And he knew what she would say if he said it. She wasn’t a writer. And she wouldn’t write about her dad.
And besides, had she broken free? Or was she still chained to him? Her parents still spoke on the phone, but their relationship seemed different now. Her mum had more control. With her dad away, and everything out in the open, the air around them was clearer, there was less tension in the family.
Soraya hadn’t broken free from Magnus, emotionally at least. She thought about him every day, still struggled to sleep while rehashing how it all went wrong, how he was now in Paris, that it was really over.
She wondered about Laleh. Soraya had always assumed Laleh had left the family for freedom, but now she realized she had really been forced out. Her imaginings of her eldest sister, the type of person she might be, changed once more. She would finally get to meet her, soon she hoped, and while the thought made her nervous, it broke the cycle of wondering around her sister. She’d finally be able to see Laleh, rather than let her imaginings take hold.
“Hmm,” Priya mused. “Breaking free. I like it.”
In the weeks that followed Soraya led them towards their goal. They decided to create a biannual literary journal and it was the first time in a very long while that she felt like she had a purpose, like she was in charge of something important.
There was the question, first, of funding. Soraya had no savings; all the money from her hours at the shop went towards rent, and each month was a struggle for her. She wouldn’t ask her mum. This was something she wanted to do independently, and to ask for help would forfeit the pleasure she felt in the process. So Priya and Oliver offered to band together to cover the cost of printing.
Next was finding people to write in the journal for free. That was easy. They used their pool of Goldsmiths friends, who had a lot to say. The journal would include poetry, articles, and short stories on the theme.
Soraya filled every spare moment with tasks for their journal. Every time she thought of Magnus, she looked up different design techniques. It provided her with a good distraction, but that didn’t mean that every day she didn’t remember him, didn’t think back over every date and turn over every detail to assess whether he’d been pretending then.
It was a week after their meetup, and after work Soraya scrolled through her phone on the bus, her mind too distracted to read. Her mum had texted her to say that she had been speaking to Laleh, and told her that the family now all knew what really happened. Laleh was apprehensive to meet them with Zara. Soraya imagined if she were in Laleh’s shoes she would feel the same way. That didn’t mean her sister’s reluctance didn’t sadden her, though.
She went on Facebook and clicked on Magnus’s profile. She wasn’t sure why she was doing it, it was clearly emotionally cutting, but she couldn’t help herself. It was almost involuntary.
What she saw made her pause, eyes focused on the image. He was tagged in a photo by a girl called Angélique. The picture showed him sitting outside a café with an espresso cup in his hand, smiling into the distance, tagged somewhere in Paris. The caption was “the boy.” What did that mean? The boy. Her boy?
After a minute had passed, Soraya realized she was still staring at the picture blankly, her vision blurry. She put her phone in her coat pocket. Removed her headphones. In such a mood she couldn’t concentrate on music; the sounds spiked her anxiety levels. She needed a clear head to focus on what she had just witnessed.
Her hands were suddenly cold, clammy. She hated the way her body reacted to things, the way her heart speeded up, but she also managed to feel outside of her body at the same time.
The bus was fairly quiet apart from the group of teenagers jokily arguing at the back.
“Don’t be a pussy, man,” one of them was saying. But the sound was muted, and all Soraya could focus on was “the boy.”
She looked out the window, out at London. Watched as the bus went over the river. She looked at the London Eye, and then Elephant and Castle with its busy, ugly roundabout, bursting with people, until the bus went down Old Kent Road with its takeaways, launderettes, and hipsters walking by. Some of the people she saw looked as lost as her dad. As each image passed her by all she could think about was Magnus.
He’d moved on so quickly, she thought, so ruthlessly.
She didn’t even know how anxious she was until she looked down and saw she had ripped the skin by her nails with her teeth, her eyes stinging with a mixture of tears and liquid eyeliner.
Familiar feelings she thought she’d managed to shut out invaded her thoughts. Did she miss Magnus, or did she miss being liked by him? Somewhere, deep inside, she wondered if maybe she had loved him, but didn’t want to admit it to herself. He had even said he was falling in love with her. Was that true? Or was that part of the lie too? It was cruel, in a sense, that their relationship had ended before she could find out. Suddenly she could no longer talk to him. And that’s what hurt the most. That someone she’d spoken to every day, she would never speak to again. If she contemplated talking to him, sending him a message, friends
scolded her. They scolded her for trying to talk to someone who didn’t want her anymore. Someone who had never truly wanted her. Soraya had acted just like these friends when other people were going through a breakup, she understood where they were coming from, but they weren’t in her relationship, they didn’t know how she felt about Magnus. Not really.
Another wave of anxiety. A minor detail Soraya kept choosing to ignore rose to the surface of her mind again. It was all a bet, she reminded herself. I was one of many.
She scratched on Oliver’s door, catlike, so he’d know it was her, despite the fact that they were the only two people living in the flat. It had been their tradition since they lived together in student halls, a signal to indicate that the person behind the door wasn’t the weird girl who frequently requested hugs from them.
“Come in!”
Soraya pushed the door open. She knew without saying anything that he’d know what had happened. Her tearstained face communicated it all. Although she’d tried to wipe her face clean on the walk from the bus stop to their flat, tears rematerialized.
“You saw it?” he asked.
“Yes.”
She sat down on the armchair opposite his bed, her usual spot, while he lay down. In these positions, she should have been the therapist and he the patient, but they never did things the right way around. They never stuck to convention.
“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” he said.
“But you would, wouldn’t you?”
He threw a roll of toilet paper at her, which she caught. She blew her nose, multiple times, surprised by how much snot one could produce when devastated.
“God, why did he have to be such a…such a cunt.”
Oliver whistled. “Oh, you are mad.”
She threw her arms up in the air. “It’s not even an insult, is it? It just means vagina. I never get why people dislike the word so much.”
He watched her carefully, as he always did. “I’m just saying, we don’t know for sure what the post means yet. You need to unfriend him from Facebook for your own sanity, though.”