Fair Trade Heroin E-Book

Rachael McGill

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In the mid 1990s, with the Taliban poised to take over Afghanistan, young NGO worker Gwen is posted in a remote mountain village. Foreign NGOs begin to recall their workers, fearing for their safety, but Gwen refuses to leave. She's full of ideas to empower the women and bring new income to her impoverished community. When she meets and falls for the opium trafficker Syed, she begins to look on the cultivation of poppy in a new light. Together they formulate a plan.Fifteen years later, Gwen is working for a charity helping migrants in the UK. Her teenage daughter Nadia has never met her Afghan father and is frustrated by life with her opinionated mother. When Gwen's past catches up with her, mother and daughter must negotiate the clash of two worlds.'Sublime in its rawness, elegant in its outrage and compassionate in its fury.' Ece Temelkuran, Author of The Time of Mute Swans.

Leseprobe

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

Fair Trade Heroin

Rachael McGill is a playwright for stage and radio, prose writer and translator of novels and plays from French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. Her short stories have been published in several anthologies and online.

She has translated two books for Dedalus: The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk and Co-wives, Co-widows by Adrienne Yabouza. Her translation of The Desert and the Drum was shortlisted for The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and her translation of Kerstin Specht’s play Marieluise won The Gate Theatre/Allied Domecq Translation Prize.

Fair Trade Heroin is Rachael McGill’s first novel.

for Mum and Dad

Contents

Dedication

Story 1

Story 2

Story 3

Story 4

Story 5

Story 6

Story 7

Story 8

Story 9

Story 10

Story 11

Story 12

Story 13

Story 14

Story 15

Story 16

Story 17

Story 18

Story 19

Story 20

Story 21

Story 22

Story 23

Story 24

Story 25

Story 26

Story 27

Story 28

Story 29

Story 30

Acknowledgements

Copyright

She unscrewed the top of her biro, pulled out the ink part. ‘It won’t melt, will it? It’s my last pen.’

She was long out of toilet paper, toothpaste, rehydration salts, but a pen was important. She might need to draw a map, make a flow chart of the heroin production process, write down her curry recipe for those of the traffickers who could read.

Syed shrugged. Dusk sharpened his cheekbones, made his nose an arrow. The grey chunks of number 2 started to smoke.

‘Now?’ asked Gwen.

Syed re-crossed his bony ankles, smoothed the blanket they sat on. He nodded.

Gwen’s lower back twinged. How long would it take till she got used to sleeping on the floor? She handed the pen casing to Syed, said, ‘You go first.’ He put his face close to the burning stuff and inhaled. He passed the improvised pipe back to Gwen, then leaned against the wall. He’d closed his eyes before Gwen could see if their colour changed. She let the smoke inside her.

The air was freezing, but she went out of the hut, twirled under the million sharp stars, called, ‘I can see you!’ at the mountains. Syed stood in the doorway. She cried, ‘Look at you, a tiny man! But your eyes have got fires inside!’

She smelled the night on his hair. His heart was out of synch with hers, his breathing barely perceptible.

‘Your heart’s too slow. Are we going to die?’

He lay on the scrubby grass, arms behind his head. She crashed down beside him.

‘Are you feeling sick?’

He said, ‘Shhh.’ She fell into his voice.

‘I felt sick, but now I’m… whirring.’

Syed said, ‘You’re imagining things. It didn’t do anything.’

‘Your heart was different. And I’m full of sky. I think I’m turning into an eagle.’

He laughed, swallowed it. ‘That’s not from smoking number 2. That’s you.’

‘But bigger. Me plus number 2.’

‘Number 2’s not real heroin; it’s only the first stage.’

‘It’s special. It’s ours.’

‘We shouldn’t do it again,’ he said. ‘The men…’

‘Of course not. Not the men.’

‘Not you either, Gwen.’

His stern face. It made her want to climb inside his mouth, tickle behind his teeth.

‘Serious Syed. Mr Big Boss drug trafficker. Always teasing me.’

Syed’s mouth looked as if it had been drawn on his face with a 2H pencil. His daughter’s was the same. Nadia’s mouth, eyes, long limbs frustrated Gwen’s attempts not to remember her child’s father. There were no photographs, she wouldn’t have been able to summon his features, if it wasn’t that Nadia was more like him every day.

‘Your face is getting beautiful, you know, Naddie.’

Nadia flinched, curled the sculpted lip. ‘Answer the question, Mother.’

‘Of course I never took heroin. We smoked opium, your dad and I. It was a common thing there.’

The dizzy, floating feeling of getting out of the bath too quickly, combined confusingly with razor-sharp vision.

Gwen moved the breakfast plates from the table to the sink. In next door’s garden, a squirrel had given up trying to extract seeds from the bird feeder and was exploring how to unhook the whole structure. Gwen tried not to lie to her daughter, but everyone had a couple of secrets. Nadia hunched over the phone in her hand to conceal its screen whenever Gwen came near.

‘Don’t believe you.’ Nadia’s foot kicked the chair, rebelling against her otherwise listless body, a body in shock at the shapes it was stretching into. ‘Did he force you?’

‘I… it’s not easy to separate…’

A grey blanket, dark blue threads running through it, another colour too. Pink? Or was Gwen mixed up with the pink sunrise, afterwards? She’d wanted Syed, beforehand.

‘Either he pressurised you to take drugs or he didn’t.’

‘Oh, I thought you meant…’

That was a different time. Gwen remembered the wanting. Like being peeled.

‘Mum! Hello? Was my dad the kind of bloke who gets women off their faces?’

Afterwards, there were no ragged edges. Just a desire to move on, do it better the next time.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Gwen. Was Nadia familiar with that kind of bloke? It was hard to know if her assertions were based on imagination, pop videos or experience.

‘You don’t think so?’ Nadia’s th was an f. Her arms and legs came from her father, her voice from her school friends. Seemingly nothing from her mother.

‘People were always telling me your father was evil,’ Gwen said. ‘My friend Jamila compared him to Satan. But I never saw that. Maybe I was looking for other things.’ A wide, rare, smile, blue eyes, red Marlboro. ‘Evil’s not so interesting, is it?’

Nadia looked sceptical. She wouldn’t appreciate the banality of the varieties of evil until she’d encountered a few of them. Which would happen. There was nothing her mother could do about that.

‘Your uncle, Pamir, now he was a bastard.’

Nadia wasn’t in the mood for a story about her uncle Pamir throwing cooking oil over a goat. She studied the screen of her phone, mumbled, ‘Don’t you have to go to work?’

‘I’ve got a ten o’clock at the Refugee Council. I’ll go straight there,’ said Gwen.

‘If you see David, tell him I need to know what time on Saturday. He like, never looks at his phone.’

Gwen wondered whether she could make David Rice look at his phone. The fact she was having that thought was so ridiculous she let out a snort. Rice was a human rights lawyer she’d been sparring with at meetings while her organisation worked with his on a judicial review. Since Gwen had found her daughter a holiday job minding his child, Nadia had become the man’s unlikely defender.

‘David Rice doesn’t hang out at the Refugee Council,’ she told Nadia. ‘I only see him at government events, where the budget can stretch to filter coffee.’

Nadia got up, took a satsuma from the fruit bowl, headed for the door.

‘Hang on!’ Gwen called. ‘Why the questions about heroin?’

Nadia leaned against the door frame, as if the effort involved in conversing with her mother left none for staying upright. The rogue foot that had attacked the chair leg still fidgeted. She sighed. ‘There was a talk at school by this policeman? He said the streets are, like, saturated with it? North East London is one massive heroin market. He said we should never try it, cause, basically, it’s amazing. If you do it once, you’re hooked.’

‘He didn’t say that.’

‘He basically did.’

‘Well, I know you’re not stupid enough to –’

Gwen didn’t know. In the last few months, everything she knew about her daughter had become irrelevant. A glowering new girl-woman had taken ownership of Nadia’s bedroom.

Gwen stood at the window watching Nadia board the bus. Gawky, embarrassed to be alive. The girl-woman was different every day. Today she was like the rubber monster with wobbly arms that went on the end of a pencil. Gwen wanted the child Nadia back, the one who’d cut the penguins out of Penguin biscuit wrappers and stuck them on the wall by her bed. Fifteen year old Nadia, inside the rubber monster, probably wanted that too.

This stage would pass, as all the others had. And then? The idea of her child as a separate being, leaving home, was unimaginable. There would be no more reason for Gwen to stay still.

She’d fucked up again, forgotten to listen. Nadia wasn’t asking about Syed because she’d developed an interest in the father she’d never met. Gwen’s line should have been, ‘What about you? Did someone try to force you to take drugs?’ Would telling Nadia she’d been conceived in a makeshift heroin lab help her negotiate teenage rebellion, or encourage her to follow in her parents’ criminal footsteps?

Gwen took a soapy salad bowl from the washing up, failed to remember to dry it, put it in the cupboard. In the bedroom, she removed her dressing gown, then put it on again. She went back to the kitchen to turn the tap off. She put the kettle on. She nearly slipped on a pool of water that had trickled out of the cupboard where the bowl was. A boy in Kabul, the first child she’d ever seen carrying a gun, had stood with his feet in a puddle.

The government’s new immigration policy meant she’d have to write a briefing about Afghanistan. How bad was it there these days? For fifteen years, she’d avoided reading more about the place than she had to. A disgraced twenty-three-year old had flown out over the Kabul hills. She’d pictured the mountains coming together behind her, gathering up cities, villages, people, landmines, and tipping them all into a valley. Then folding themselves over it, obliterating her own bad judgement along with everything else.

Back in London, the details had faded quickly, until there were only pictures in the middle of the night, while the baby sucked. Fabrics on market stalls, abandoned soviet tanks, hairy spiders. Gwen’s therapist told her to try not to remember. The therapy was a condition of keeping her job, so she went every week, with the baby. She didn’t respect the therapist, but she took his advice about forgetting.

She plunged her hands back into the soapy water. The mugs had slogans: struggles people had dedicated themselves to, kept plugging away at, though they were out of fashion.

‘We didn’t ban the bomb, did we?’ she asked a mug. ‘And I didn’t achieve a thing out there, did I?’

While she’d been bringing up Nadia in a badly-connected scrap of North East London as it gentrified around her, filling in forms for weeping refugees, arguing about politics, turning down dinner offers from male colleagues, washing up mugs, Afghanistan had continued to suffer.

The end of Year 10 party started off like the epic disaster she’d been expecting. Then it got weird. Then it turned into the coolest night of Nadia’s life.

The weird bit happened when she ran into the toilet to get away from Phil, and the rest of them telling her to give him a chance, saying it was sweet he was crushing on her. Phil was disgusting; he squeezed the spots on the end of his nose in maths. But if Nadia waited for a cool boy to move on her, she’d probably be waiting forever.

She sat on the toilet trying not to cry about being a freak that only got clocked by other freaks, because of having a witch mother who cut her own hair and wouldn’t get double glazing. She heard fast breathing in the next cubicle. It sounded like an asthma attack.

She called, ‘You OK? Knock on the wall if you wanna borrow my inhaler.’ The knock came immediately. Nadia went round, expecting some smurf like Katie Byers. She nearly screamed when she saw it was Danielle. The coolest black girl in the year. God knows what she was even doing at a school party.

She passed Danielle the inhaler. Danielle’s hand was so wobbly she couldn’t work it. Nadia pressed it down for her, told her when to breathe in.

Danielle’s breathing calmed, but she was still shaking, wiping sweat, tears and make-up off her face with handfuls of loo roll. Nadia said, ‘Try to relax, it’s no biggie.’

‘Can you get a ambulance?’ asked Danielle, ‘But don’t tell no teachers? What’s your name, Nadine?’

‘Nadia. I don’t think you need a ambulance. It’s just asthma. You’re OK now. You can keep my inhaler if you like. I’ve got another one.’

‘I ’aint had asthma since I was a kid. Feel this.’

Danielle grabbed Nadia’s hand and pressed it on to the side of the huge breast that was bulging out of her tiny top. Nadia braced herself for Danielle’s gang of thugged-out princesses to pop up from wherever they were hiding and start calling her gay.

Danielle’s heart was beating at double speed. Nadia said, ‘The inhaler can do that.’

‘It was that way before the inhaler. It’s the coke. I’m one of the poor cows who takes it once and drops down dead, innit? I’m gonna kill my brother, I swear.’

It was pretty funny that Danielle had managed to get coke into the party when the teachers were so paranoid about searching everyone for booze and fags. But Nadia didn’t laugh; she knew that now and again someone did drop down dead (though the witch said they exaggerated that at school and in the media to stop you from doing it).

‘Coke and asthma together ’aint too good,’ she told Danielle.

‘How do you know?’

Nadia told the truth by mistake. ‘When I got diagnosed with asthma, when I was, like, twelve, my Mum said in front of the doctor, “Your uncle’s got asthma. Just go easy if you ever snort coke, OK?” It was too embarrassing.’

‘Your mum sounds safe,’ said Danielle.

‘Nah, I hate her. She’s just cool about drugs.’

‘My mother ’aint cool about nothing. If they find out about this, I’m excluded, innit? Skitz is already. We got bare feds and social workers nosing round. They’ll probably put us in care.’

Nadia knew who Daneille’s brother Skitz was, because she was shit scared of him. Everyone was. He was nicknamed that because he did stuff like nut people at bus stops for no reason. She said, ‘Where’s your mates?’

‘Dunno. Maybe gone house party in Old Street. Hey, your bag is nasty.’

Perhaps the coke had made Danielle nicer. The bag was a purple satin handbag with sequins. Someone normal, who didn’t think pretty stuff was materialist, had given it to Nadia’s mother. Nadia had rescued it from her room when the witch was too busy shouting about the government to notice. It was crushed under a chair leg. There was biro stain on its pink inside. Gwen did it on purpose, to show she hadn’t fallen for capitalism saying women should adorn themselves. That was probably the main reason she hadn’t had a bloke since Nadia’s father.

Nadia said, ‘Thanks. Klepto-d it off my Mum. I couldn’t decide if it was sick or granny-ish.’

‘It’s big,’ said Danielle. ‘How come your mum’s cool about drugs anyway? She take them?’

‘She used to, I think. And my dad… I never knew him or nothing, but he was kind of… well, a drug smuggler.’

Danielle stared. ‘Shut up!’

‘For true.’

Then she said, ‘Wanna go party in Old Street?’

Nadia was woken the next morning by Gwen hitting her feet with The Guardian society section, shouting, ‘Why are we letting them get away with this demonisation of the poor?!’ She’d been using Nadia’s antibacterial moisturiser for teenage skin – there was a blue blob on her cheek where she hadn’t rubbed it in.

‘Not just the poor,’ Gwen went on, ‘But anyone who’s interested in anything other than making money. If you want to be a scientist, or an artist when you grow up, you’ll have to move to another country, if they’ll let you. The only people welcome in this one are bankers.’

Nadia sighed. She said, ‘Mother, you are queen of the exaggerage.’ She didn’t add that actually she wanted to be rich (who in their right mind wanted to be poor?). That would only start the all-the-things-that-are-more-important-than-money lecture. ‘Can you get out of my room now? And get out of my face with your politics too.’

Gwen obeyed only the first command. She stood in the hall discussing the dire state of everything with herself, while Nadia tried to get ready to go to work at David’s. Nadia’s head was still at the party the night before; trying to process all of its older, cooler people, its bewildering happenings. At one point, she’d stumbled into a room where a girl with dreadlocks was on the bed with two men, kissing them both.

Gwen followed Nadia to the bathroom. ‘How could open racism become socially acceptable again?’ she demanded. ‘They make the Taliban look tolerant.’

At the party, Danielle had told everyone Nadia’s dad was a drug dealer from Afghanistan. She’d pushed Nadia towards some men, saying, ‘Talk to these guys – they’re from somewhere like that.’ The men were Turkish. Where they lived, they told her, the police assumed you were a heroin dealer anyway, so why not be one? Getting smack was as easy as getting a cup of coffee. Coffee made Nadia feel twitchy. She wondered what heroin would do. When she asked the men what it was like, they claimed never to have taken it. They pointed at an older guy, said, ‘He does.’ The man didn’t look like a junkie.

When Danielle’s brother Skitz turned up with his gang, Danielle said the same thing to him. Skitz looked Nadia in the eye, said, ‘You and me gotta talk, baby girl.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘It’s not like I know my dad or nothing.’

Skitz did a laugh like a cough.‘Not for that. I’m sorted for that.’ He licked his lips while staring at her. Nadia’s stomach did something, like it had jumped out of her body on to the floor.

Gwen was saying, ‘What’s happened to the world?’ right at Nadia, as if she actually wanted to know the answer, so Nadia replied, ‘It’s fucked, innit?’ Gwen was so fixated on the intolerance of whatever it was that she didn’t even say ‘Don’t say fuck’, or ‘Don’t say innit’.

Nadia had to slam the bathroom door in her mother’s face so she could get in the shower. This was no way to start the day. Gwen specialised in discussing the most gruesome things on the planet – wars, genital mutilation – as early in the morning as possible.

By going to the party in Old Street, Nadia had received an unspoken invitation to join Danielle’s posse of gangsterettes. If she took too long to decide if that was what she wanted to be, the invitation would go elsewhere, such as to Shayla, who’d been snorting everything in the world up her nose, while Nadia was still wearing last year’s jeans and drinking vodka and orange that was ninety-eight per cent orange.

Nadia watched her mother through the bus window, relieved that no one she knew could see this. Gwen was in the front garden, picking up a crisp packet, letting dirty water run out of it down her ancient dressing gown. Her hair was sticking up on one side where she’d cut it herself. It was good to escape to David’s swanky flat, to pretend David was actually her father and she was little Isabelle’s sister (adopted, obvs, because Nadia wasn’t black), but it made it worse when she had to come back home.

If her mother was still distracted by the demonisation of the poor at the weekend, Nadia might get away with going out in her short, see-through dress that was really a nightie. It didn’t escape her that this was a contemptibly superficial thought. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t care about people she didn’t know the way her mother did. It probably made her quasi-Taliban.

Danielle wanted to go to a place in Camden that the ‘Feds are always busting.’ This was something you were supposed to laugh at, not be frightened of. Nadia was also supposed to be excited about hanging out with Skitz again. The new version of Nadia she’d become since she’d said by mistake, ‘My dad was sort of a drug smuggler’ had to be up for swallowing pills with psychos like him. And whatever else was suggested. Not that she didn’t want to. Kind of. Maybe.

He tried to tune out the man talking on his phone about the resolution of his smart TV being ‘the highest currently available in the world’. The coach – the slowest and cheapest currently available in Roshan’s world – was full, so there was no option of moving. It was nearly a year since Roshan’s last visit to London, his first meeting with his father’s old friend, Omid. A hopeful beginning, that could have evolved into an uneventful middle. Now someone at the Home Office wanted to fast forward to the end.

He had the letter in his jacket pocket. A thick, brown envelope, postmarked Croydon. Everyone knew what Croydon meant. An Eritrean man who went to the legal advice centre had told everyone he was ‘born in Croydon’ in 2008, when he was finally awarded Leave to Remain. No one got that kind of Croydon letter these days; they all got the kind Roshan had. The page called ‘reasons for refusal’ said the government believed the Taliban had threatened to kill him, but Kabul was now safe. The last line mentioned the right to appeal, leaflet and form enclosed. He had ten days to submit his argument that the Afghan state wouldn’t protect him. Another leaflet, ‘New rules on eligibility for legal aid’, said he would have to pay for the appeal. More than the small stash of savings from his taxi shifts that he kept in a locker at the gym.

If he didn’t find the money for the appeal, he was promised eviction, detention and deportation. The only immigrants allowed to stay in Britain were people so damaged in their homelands they would never be well, like the Somalian man who sorted clothes in the Cancer Research shop. His forearms were etched with scars. His eyes flicked across his face, as if he was always reading.

Roshan had no reason to believe there was anything Omid could do. He was only partly visiting to ask for help. The other part was a compulsion he hadn’t defined, to do with apologising to Omid, and by extension to his own long-dead father, for having failed. Still, he couldn’t prevent his hope from bouncing up, like an idiot dog that crawled back however many stones were hurled at it. In the two years he’d been in Britain, the country had tantalised, soothing him with its calm and its highly-flavoured convenience foods one minute, spitting hatred in his face the next.

He got out of the coach, shook his tingling limbs, and began to plough through the crowds. London had got even more confusing. Posters and screens told him he could spend his money on a film or a play featuring a woman in tight clothing, a vitamin supplement, online dating… if he didn’t want to spend it, he could invest it. There were people everywhere, eating sandwiches from plastic packets, drinking coffee from cardboard cups, on bicycles weaving through traffic, shouting abuse. They belonged to every race on the planet. There were few old ladies.

The London underground headache began as soon as Roshan descended into Victoria station. On the tube, a woman staggered down the carriages, her baby clinging to her. She might have been Afghan. She held out one of the cardboard coffee cups, begged for pennies in a high-pitched voice. The baby joined in with a grumbling sound. The woman had no front teeth. London people usually ignored everyone around them in a casual way, but this woman was ignored decisively, through the swivelling away of heads and bodies.

‘Forget the appeal,’ Roshan’s former housemate Mahyar had said. ‘You don’t need their pieces of paper.’ Mahyar had left their dilapidated terraced house the day he was denied asylum, before he could be removed by force. He ‘disappeared’, without going anywhere, spending days in his taxi and at the gym, nights at the casino eating the free food. He was a cocky Pashtun who acted like an American, enthusiastically profane. Back home, Roshan would’ve ignored him, thought him uneducated, like ninety per cent of the Afghan population. In Britain, they belonged to the same social class.

Mahyar was stupid and irritating, but he seemed to thrive, even be happy. Could Roshan disappear from the authorities too, re-invent himself as someone who didn’t care that he belonged nowhere? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been running and hiding for most of his adult life. To avoid the Taliban, he’d moved from one job and house to the next. Sometimes he was caught by the men in beards, imprisoned for a few days, beaten till he said what they wanted to hear and gave them what he’d earned the month before. He’d escaped to Europe by foot, boat, lorry, train, via detention centres and refugee camps. He’d stayed alive because he happened not to die. None of it came naturally.

‘If you got a bit less judgemental about what you did for money, you’d be fine,’ Mahyar had told him.

‘I’m disgusted with myself already,’ Roshan replied. ‘You’ll never see me in a casino.’

Mahyar laughed, punched Roshan on the arm, said, ‘We won’t let them send you home. We know you wouldn’t last five minutes back there.’

Roshan didn’t say how come I lasted thirty four years then? Or, ‘You’re talking to someone who had a gun held to his head by a drug trafficker.’

Omid’s flat was in a dark, low-rise housing estate near the Kilburn High Road. Omid lived in block A, referred to by everyone as ‘Afghan block.’ If there were any non-Afghan inhabitants, they kept a low profile. Roshan climbed the stairs past gangs of toddlers chasing each other, supervised by older children lounging in doorways. Familiar cooking smells wafted out of homes. These people lived in Afghanistan while being thousands of miles away, lived in London without living there.

Omid and another older man, Aryan, sat on cushions on the floor, drinking tea and smoking. Omid embraced Roshan. He had the tobacco smell of Roshan’s father. The memory produced an ancient ache. Aryan patted Roshan on the back, muttered, ‘Good boy’. Hearing the words in Dari made the ache expand. It merged with a creeping shame. The life Roshan lived now would not have made his father proud.

‘Good to see you, friend,’ said Omid. ‘You’re thin. We’ll feed you up with lamb stew. Stay for as long as you like.’

‘Not too long,’ said Roshan. ‘I have to get back for my taxi work.’

Aryan shook his head, said, ‘I don’t know how you can live in that backwater.’

Roshan hadn’t chosen his provincial town, just been dispersed there. He had no British friends, was not integrated into society. But he still defended the place if it was criticised. ‘It’s quieter and cleaner than here,’ he said. ‘Everyone says “thank you” to the bus driver.’

‘Hah!’ Omid had the smoker’s laugh of Roshan’s father too. ‘You’ll never find an Afghan wife there.’

‘You’re not married yet?’ said Aryan. ‘Then you must come here. There are plenty of girls from good families.’

‘London is the place for a young man,’ Omid agreed.

‘We have Tajik poetry evenings.’

‘Come to mosque with us tonight,’ said Omid. ‘Then we’ll talk about an Afghan wife.’

‘You’re going to mosque?’

‘Aryan and I don’t, of course,’ said Omid. ‘But we go down with the others. If you don’t go to mosque any more, you’re welcome in the café opposite with the old communists. We can point out the eligible girls to you from there.’

‘I do go to mosque. I’m not –’

‘I know. You’re not your father.’

Roshan had been engaged to be married when he was eighteen, but the fighting was bad in Kabul. The girl’s family took her to Canada. Then Roshan lost most of his own family. It was hard to find a wife without a mother or sisters to set it up. He was glad it hadn’t happened. He’d felt his only real connection with a woman a few years later, standing at a window on a rusty upturned bucket, in a destroyed mountain village. Whether because that girl was the only one in the world for him, or because pain and sin had killed the parts of him that could love, he knew he wouldn’t feel that way again.

‘I can’t get married in Britain,’ he told the men. His throat constricted with anger; he could hardly get the last word out. He resented these gentle, generous old people, because they’d had it easy. ‘I’m an asylum seeker. We’re not allowed to marry. And as of yesterday, I’m a failed asylum seeker.’

He threw the Croydon letter on the floor between them. A glance passed between Omid and Aryan. They thought Roshan ungrateful, an impetuous fool. Or maybe it was Roshan’s father who thought that.

Omid’s brow furrowed as he read. When he finished, he started at the beginning again, struggling to comprehend; not the English words, but the worldview they expressed.

Roshan tried to keep the irritation out of his voice. ‘The UK government has a new immigration policy for Afghans. We’re not of interest any more. The right to appeal is just a formality they have to go through. They probably won’t even read it.’