more time with him. Then, three months after we met at the funfair, we got engaged. Mum didn’t approve – whether of Baashir himself, the fact of our engagement, or because I was just 16 was never really clear. Whatever her reasons, she said she had ‘tried for years’ and that she was now ‘washing her hands’ of me.
After we got engaged, I more or less moved into Baashir’s shared house, where there always seemed to be a party going on. This time, though, I was a guest at the parties and didn’t have to sleep with anyone except Baashir. It felt as though I was being given the chance to start again and to rewrite my own history.
Baashir and I often sat together in his bed while he described the little shop he was going to get and the flat above it where we would live and raise our family. After the countless hours I had spent imagining the life I would have with Diyan, it was nice to be able to share someone else’s dream and to know that I was a vital part of it.
One of the best things about dreams is that they aren’t constrained by reality. In a dream, you can live with a man you love and your perfect children in a beautifully furnished flat above your own, thriving business without having to consider any of the practicalities of the real world. It was that sort of dream we were pursuing when we started trying for a baby.
Although Baashir was Afghan, he had lived in refugee camps in Pakistan from the age of eight until he came to England at 17. To anyone born and raised in a house with brick walls, decent furniture, heating, hot water and all the other things most of us take for granted, it’s impossible to imagine what his childhood must have been like. Whatever else had been missing from mine, at least I had lived, for most of it, in a solid, clean house.
Baashir had a strong personality, which was fascinating to me because I had almost no perceptible personality at all when I was 16, and absolutely no idea who I was. I don’t know if it was because of his experiences as a child that he often got involved in physical fights. It was one of the reasons why I was always a bit wary of him, although he didn’t ever threaten or frighten me – at least, not to begin with.
There was a lot of anger bottled up inside Baashir, which I could understand, having felt the same way myself for much of the previous five years. Inevitably, his anger would often erupt when he was drunk and he would sometimes walk down a road kicking lamp posts and cars. He attacked his friends, too, when they tried to restrain him so that he didn’t damage other people’s property or hurt himself. The guys who had been in refugee camps had a bond that united them and set them apart from everyone else. So Baashir’s friends never held it against him however many times he lashed out at them and kicked or punched them. Even when he broke someone’s nose on one occasion, they all still stuck by him and continued to try to protect him from himself.
Whenever he lost his temper, he didn’t ever mention his violence the next day, when he had sobered up. His way of apologising was to slap his friends on the back and ask, ‘You all right, mate?’ and they would turn and smile at him and tell him they were fine. They had shared the same childhood experiences so they must have felt the same sense of anger and fear themselves; they were just better at hiding it, or perhaps they gave vent to it in different ways. What also helped to retain those friendships was the fact that Baashir was a charmer: when he wasn’t drunk or stoned, he was good company and everyone’s best friend.
In the first couple of months after we got engaged, I had at least one very early miscarriage. It sounds a terrible thing to say, but I was almost pleased when it happened. I knew I wasn’t ready to have a baby. But a child was such an essential part of the dream that, in my mind, becoming a parent came as an indivisible package that included the marriage, the home, the family and the security. I’m ashamed to say that I got pregnant because I was bored too. Becoming a mother and a wife can seem like a good ambition to have when you’re 16 years old and don’t have any discernible place in society, or anything constructive to do to occupy your time. So we kept trying, and three months after Baashir and I got engaged, I fell pregnant again. And this time it stuck.
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