New Year’s Day
NEW YEAR’S DAY
Shirin and Phoebe are seated at Ethel’s, a café often frequented by young mothers and that serves various speciality teas and all-day breakfasts. On the table between them are eggs, pancakes, and hash browns. Phoebe wanted a bit of everything and ordered various plates to pick from.
At 8 A.M. Phoebe texted Shirin to see if they were still on for brunch and if anything had happened between her and Kian. Shirin replied Yes, and that she would tell her in person. Sitting opposite her now, it’s clear that Phoebe is either very skilled at acting or maybe she does not recognize that they had an argument. “Did you guys… then?” Phoebe asks between bites of crispy hash brown. “Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?”
Shirin is wearing the same outfit from last night with a black jumper that Kian lent her. It is a struggle to look her friend in the eye.
The night before, Kian took Shirin aside from the dance floor at about 1 A.M. and said he was going home. She wanted to go home too, though she was staying with Phoebe, a person who by this point she resolutely did not want to go home with. Just beforehand, she had been in the smoking area with Phoebe. And it was there that Shirin first saw him: Tom. One of Rob and Jordan’s friends from their school days. He was among a crowd of people smoking their cigarettes jubilantly after the countdown. If she had kept her head down half a minute longer, perhaps not looked in his direction at that moment, she might not have known he was there too. But she had.
“Is that who I think it is?” Shirin asked Phoebe. “Tom Possitt?”
“Oh, yeah, it is,” Phoebe replied. She was hammered by this point, seated on one of the benches, her head resting against a wooden support beam. “He’s all right now, you know.”
“All right?” Shirin repeated, her voice unexpectedly sharp. “He’s a huge racist. That doesn’t go away with age.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“He was awful. How don’t you remember?”
“It was years ago now, anyways,” Phoebe slurred, waving her hand in the air to mean Leave it .
Shirin knew Phoebe didn’t really get the hard parts of her school experience, but this was different. Phoebe was reimagining their school experience, whitewashing it as though Phoebe’s own experience was in some way akin to Shirin’s. Like she could ever understand how it was for Shirin.
“How can you say that?” Shirin asked, trying to keep her voice neutral but failing. “He and the others terrorized me. What the fuck?”
And just when she thought Phoebe would get the memo, would apologize like a normal human being, she did the exact opposite and waved Tom down. Tom caught Phoebe’s signals and made his way toward them—and Shirin was so surprised by this that she simply stood there. Then Tom was next to her, his shoulder almost touching hers as he greeted Phoebe.
“You’re all right now, aren’t you, Tom?” Phoebe said, patting his back.
Tom’s face was fatter now, compared to back then. His teeth a pale yellow. His eyes a bright green. He laughed at Phoebe, like it was all a joke. Turned to Shirin and said hello, said she looked great now, that he had seen she was working down in London. He asked her how it was, and she said nothing, looking between her close friend and her enemy like this was a terrible dream.
She considered leaving wordlessly, had her shoulder poised to turn, but then thought of her maman bozorg. About how she needed to defend herself, even if it frightened her, even if it was easier to run.
“Don’t talk to me, you racist prick,” she said through gritted teeth, jabbing her finger in Tom’s face. Then she turned to Phoebe. “And you—you should know better.” She pushed her way out of the crowd of people and made her way to the dance floor, where she bumped into Kian, who had just retrieved his coat to leave.
And this was why Shirin did not want to crash at Phoebe’s as originally planned. Her dad thought she was going to Phoebe’s house to spend New Year’s Eve, so she couldn’t return home. She explained this to Kian.
“Jesus. You can crash at mine, if you like,” he said. And so she went back to his.
She had never been to his house before, though she had walked past it many times back in the day. He lived in Kirk Ella, the posh part of Hull, much farther away from the club than her own family house. When the taxi dropped them off, she asked if his parents would be home. Kian told her they were at a party in Leeds and they had booked a hotel for the night there.
As she entered the house, she noticed the way the floor was tiled, the hallway large and open. She left her heels by the door, walking barefoot into the house, though there were slippers for visitors in a box next to the shoe rack. It was much neater than Shirin’s mother’s past method of frantically searching the bathroom and garden for plastic slippers when Iranian visitors arrived.
He turned on the lights as he walked deeper into the house and they walked up two flights of stairs to his bedroom. His room was a large loft space with its own en suite. Most of his belongings looked like they were from his teen years, with tickets from bands that he’d seen live collaged over one wall. He had pictures of himself as a teenager, with people she recognized and some she didn’t.
She sat on the end of his bed, folding one foot underneath herself, while he went to the bathroom. She heard his electric toothbrush’s vibrations. It wasn’t clear in what capacity she was there. During the taxi ride they’d sat close to each other, his hand on the top of her thigh, though he’d looked absent-minded as he’d done this. Whereas she’d been acutely conscious of his hand there.
When Kian came out of the bathroom and sat down next to her, the first thing she could smell was his minty breath. She liked it very much.
“Do you need anything?” he asked. She shook her head. “I’m sorry about how the night ended.”
“Let’s not talk,” she whispered.
His hand caressed her face then. She removed his top, and he attempted to unlace her corset. The front laces were decorative, and she reached over to her side to unzip it. His hands were on her chest, her stomach, her cheek. Her nerves were hypersensitive to his touch. They kissed slowly, tenderly. It felt both like she had finally sighed, after holding her breath for so long, and like it wasn’t enough, that she needed more. His grasp on her tightened and she shifted even closer to him. He kissed her sides, and she focused on her breathing, trying to steady it, and failing. He hovered over her, the weight of his body on his biceps. He asked her if she was sure she wanted this, and she said yes, thinking there was nothing she wanted more than this with Kian.
Afterward, they lay in bed together. His hand lightly on her stomach, the other arm around her shoulders. He nuzzled her neck, planting a soft, supple kiss there.
She played with his hands, and he took her thin hair bobble from around her wrist and put it around his. Even his wrist was handsome, so she let him keep it there.
“I like you,” she said.
“I like you too,” he replied, smiling.
“It’s quite rare that I like someone.”
“I mean, I’ve always liked you, Shirin.”
Now, with Phoebe, in the cold light of day, her stomach turns at the sight of the café food; she’s definitely not ready to eat. She places both hands on the table and spreads them out, thinking over her words, before blurting out, “Are we not going to talk about last night then?”
Phoebe’s chewing slows and she swallows audibly. “What is there to say?”
“I feel like you gaslit me with Tom. I can’t believe you called him over to us after everything he did. That you’re even friends with him—”
Phoebe frowns, then her whole face crumples. “Gaslit?”
“You know, made out something didn’t happen when it did.”
“Shirin, you’re annoyed at Tom for something that happened so long ago. It’s not healthy to hold on to it all. People change. And the way you spoke to him was so rude. You should really apologize. You’re an adult now.” She speaks with authority, her face the picture of composure again. Her words shock Shirin into almost giving in. But she needs to do this. She regrets not backing up Mariam all those weeks ago. It’s impossible to change the past, but she can do things differently now.
“No, I don’t believe any of that. He and his friends were awful to me. Don’t you remember? They never apologized to me—why the hell should I apologize to them?”
“They were mean to everyone then, weren’t they? It was school, we were kids then; it’s different now, Shirin.” Phoebe has moved on to the pancakes, eating a stray blueberry on the side of the plate, while Shirin’s heart is hammering in her chest.
There are only a few other people in the café. It’s relatively quiet for a bank holiday, though that doesn’t stop Shirin from leaning forward to Phoebe, speaking in hushed tones so they don’t hear. “They got Kian and me suspended—don’t you remember that? How can all of that not be something you’re bothered about?”
Phoebe gives Shirin a sharp look, like she is seeing her for the first time and it is an ugly sight. “I thought we’d have a nice brunch, and that, I don’t know, you’d maybe comfort me about everything I told you yesterday. I thought maybe you’d ask how things were between me and George, seeing as you snapped at me while you were drunk and left without saying goodbye. It’s always about you, Shirin. I’m sorry I tried to patch things up between you and Tom, but it’s in the past now. I have real-life problems right now and you don’t give a shit.”
What few people there are at the other tables are now looking over at them.
“I do give a shit.” Shirin’s voice wobbles. “I just wanted you to know how you made me feel is all.”
“Yeah, but that’s the problem—you have major main-character syndrome. You act like you’re this big deal living in London, that your feelings are the only thing that matter. Whenever you call me, you bang on about work, when your job sounds cushty to me—or it’s about Kian and how you’re obsessed with him. You only ask about me as an afterthought.”
“That’s not true—”
“It is, Shirin.”
Shirin looks down at the food, focuses on it because it’s the only thing that seems real and makes sense right now. The conversation is not going how she envisaged at all. She thought Phoebe might defend herself but would eventually apologize. While the things she’s saying don’t make sense, they’re also things Shirin has thought about herself. That she is a shit friend, that she uses people to offload her own anxieties, that she’s sad for clinging on to the past so tightly.
“Well, I’m sorry if I’ve been doing that,” Shirin eventually says.
“Okay, let’s forget about it. All right?”
Shirin nods, not wanting to argue anymore, though she knows it’s not all right. It never has been.