The Last Living Slut (10 page)

Some of the men here have tattoos on their arms and wear earrings and their hair is long and messy. It looks horrible.

Write Back Soon,

Your daughter

In the five months I attended Long Acre, I was allowed to visit Manchester only twice. What I saw darkened my spirit further: My grandmother’s life now consisted of sitting alone in her flat between frequent hospital visits. From a sunny laughter-filled home brimming with loved ones where she tended to the fruit trees in her garden, to sitting in a high-rise flat watching the clouds—it was too much to bear. I didn’t understand why we had come to England. The bullying at school made me miserable, and my grandmother’s life was killing her. Had we given up love for this? What did freedom mean? Surely not this.

My grandmother survived England for nine months. During one of her hospital trips, she caught a bug. That evening, while washing the dishes at my uncle’s place, my aunt told me the news. “Anneh died this morning at four a.m.,” she said simply. I looked at her for a moment, then carried on wordlessly with my work. I would always remember my grandmother as she was in Iran: joyful, laughing, loving. I felt an overpowering relief soothe my spiky insides because my grandmother wouldn’t suffer anymore.

My aunt winced with unease as she watched me quietly bury myself in my schoolbooks. I was determined that my grandmother’s sacrifice for me would not be in vain. When I achieved the best marks in my class in French, my teacher rewarded me with a Dairy Milk chocolate bar. This achievement had dire consequences: That day at lunch break, Sally and her gang circled me, gripping sticks and cricket bats.

“Paki, Paki, Paki,” they chanted, doing impressions of freaks with screwed-up eyes, distorted limbs, and tongues hanging out of their mouths. “Go back to your own country, Paki!”

I didn’t speak. I just carried on reading—lovely, lovely reading. Bad boy Huckleberry Finn, being wild and rebellious.

I was also teased for the things I ate and drank. “It’s piss she’s drinking,” the boys taunted when I opened a bottle of apple juice at lunch. I blushed, embarrassed.

I knew I wasn’t completely dark, but I knew I wasn’t completely white either. My skin was olive, but secretly I wanted it to be very white—luminous, pure, snow white. One day, I decided to try to bleach it. In the Carsons’ bathroom, I slathered thick creamy hair-lightening paste all over my face, avoiding my eyebrows and eyes. I laughed at the snowman in the mirror! Beneath the layers, my face tingled and sizzled like bacon and my eyes burned. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I scrubbed the paste off. But instead of turning white, I had only become red and raw.

My mother knit clothes and sent them to me. They were invariably thick wool, soft and so warm because she was afraid I’d catch cold. In one package was a traditional Persian folk skirt and a head scarf. Although she must have spent hours knitting the intricate pink-and-blue designs, I looked at the two items with horror. I knew the consequences would be grim if the gang of girls at school saw me wearing them.

Instead, I hid the clothes in my room. And, for the first time, I began wearing my skirt short. I also shaved my legs within an inch of their lives and left the top buttons of my shirt undone. The day I showed up at school looking that way was the day the girls no longer teased me. I was a Western girl now.

One Friday afternoon in June, I found a bit of blood on my underwear. I looked for a cut and didn’t see anything. But there was a screaming pain in my tummy, like an angry alarm clock. The Carsons’ toilet was a minuscule room with a frosted window facing their garden. I could hear birds chirping and smell jasmine from the garden. But the scent made me want to retch. The only way I could think to stop it was to dab at the blood from where it was coming with clumps of tissue and hope it would close and dry up.

That weekend, I walked around thinking I was bleeding to death. I didn’t dare tell anyone. It was only when I started leaking onto my jeans that Mrs. Carson noticed and pulled me aside. She promptly issued me little diaper things and explained that bleeding happens to all females every month. In the bathroom, I peeled off the plastic strip and mistakenly stuck the sticky side of the diaper thing all along my pubic hair.

In July, my mother managed to leave Iran with my brother and sister. My stepdad couldn’t make it; he would remain stuck there throughout the war, sitting on the roof watching bombs hit Tehran night after night.

My mother arrived at the Carsons’ doorstep heavy with gifts and my darling brother and sister, bundled up against the chill she was worried they’d get. My mummy was here! Nothing bad would ever happen again.

We moved to student residences on a campus in Manchester that were cheap but clean. My mother, an academic, was forced to clean rich people’s homes for money.

Around this time I also got into pop music. I started back-combing my hair and dressing up in short skirts, lace gloves, and tiny tops. Then I’d rush off to care for my cute little siblings. I loved playing mummy to my baby brother and sister, two naughty kittens running around bewildered in this new world in which they had landed.

My brother was now five, and had clearly not shaken the life he was born into. He was stuck in war mode: all of his drawings featured airplanes dropping bombs on the people below. I watched as he made explosion sounds and pretended he was in the middle of battle with the Iraqis. It was all innocent fun to him, but I was worried by how much he’d been affected by the war.

My mum rushed around day and night trying to keep us fed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my mother do anything for herself. One day after breakfast, she brought out a box full of photos. From underneath the pile she removed a twin-set of pearls, given to her as a wedding present. She quietly told us she’d be back soon. When she came back, there was no necklace, just bags full of food.

Chapter 19

I was Thirteen and Slipped My White Panties Down, Spread My Legs Open, and Watched AXL Rose In This Band Guns N’Roses.

I
was eleven years old when I had my first orgasm. It was to a porno magazine I’d stolen from a convenience store. I didn’t know the facts of life then. Two years later, I had my first gushing-out ejaculation, to Axl Rose.

Most of what I did was in secret. At school, I was a nerd who loved reading and writing poetry. At home, I was the big sister looking after my siblings. But alone, in my room, I was Axl Rose’s teenage slut. Guns N’ Roses screeched from my Walkman under my blanket. Dressed in fishnet stockings, lacy gloves, and black stilettos like the girls in music videos, I strutted around the room.

One summer afternoon, I was watching TV at my aunt’s house. I didn’t even know what the word orgasm meant, yet this boy on the screen with the bandana and long hair falling over his shoulders made me fall in love with what my body could do.

Watching him sway his snake hips onstage, howling a loud American rock song—a bad, nasty, trashy boy with strawberry-blond, lank hair; upturned, flared nostrils; and arms with tattoos like a prisoner—suddenly I felt that familiar, crude clench in my belly. The panic-filled urgency conquered me, a gigantic, detonating love-hunger making my vulva throb like a frenzied animal. I had to find a long, hard object, so I grabbed the closest thing: my cousin’s bicycle pump. It was my savior, a delicious secret tool. I wanted to be a nasty girl. There was no one around, which made me hornier. I was being naughty.

I slipped my white cotton panties down, spread my legs open, and watched Axl in this band called Guns N’ Roses. He was sweating on stage, snarling, and I spread my legs wider for him. Taking the bicycle pump, I slid it between my legs, my vulva dripping wet. I rubbed the bicycle pump all along my wetness until something gushed out of me. It sprayed all over the floor, giving the carpet a clammy smell. I lay on my back, knees trembling. Relief and peace glowed inside me. My body felt warm and grown up. I looked at Axl and smiled. Who was this beautiful boy and what was this exploding feeling that had gushed out of me?

Chapter 20

B
y the time my stepfather arrived in England a few years later, we were living in Bristol in a ground-floor flat. My stepdad needed work; he was a proud and accomplished man, a trained architect with his own successful construction company in his homeland, but here he knew no one.

I took my stepfather to all the restaurants I knew, asking if he could get a job as a dishwasher. He stood sheepishly behind me as I pleaded in English. Inside I cringed in embarrassment for him, but I put on a casual act, as if it were all just a laugh and oh-so-normal. I knew he must have felt a cavernous nothingness being in this situation, but working as a dishwasher was better than not having a job at all. Slowly, he learned to speak English and found better jobs, but I think he harboured some resentment toward me because my fluency in English had somehow given me a higher rank in the family than him.

The five of us slept in one room, lent to us for free by a kindly lady who’d befriended us. There was a kitchen and a bathroom where umbrellas of dry rot mushroomed on the walls and under the side of the bathtub. I’d lived in England for five years and still it didn’t feel like home. English culture was not warm and family-oriented like Persian culture. People were cold and stilted, and didn’t hug and kiss and laugh as much as Iranians did. They shared no banquet of colorful foods, as Iranian people did every day and night, gathering around, dancing and gossiping. My family was cut off from the sense of community and quality of life they’d once known. My brother and sister, tiny and unaware of poverty, thought it was all a big adventure and that any day now we’d pack up and head back to Iran—back home.

Though she spent her days cleaning for the rich, my mother’s spirit stayed strong. But my stepfather, defeated, slowly began to fade away. He was a nothing in this land far away from his family and the business he’d built—lost in a country where he was a nobody, where his friends, achievements, status, and identity were incinerated as if they had never existed. He became silent, sometimes sitting on a chair in our room for hours and staring into space.

At my new school, I became known as the silent Iranian girl. My shyness and dorkiness, along with my early development, which ballooned my mortified chest into two giant blubbers, made my social life even more wretched. Shy to the point of freaky I munched on lunch alone in the playground and wrote poetry about the aches of love, the boys I longed for, and the kisses I craved.

One Saturday afternoon, I decided to write my first book. It was about the street kids of São Paulo, Brazil. I wrote by hand—page after page—about a brother and sister surviving life on the streets. By Monday night, they had escaped their city and ended up on a train bound for Peru. I didn’t ever think of the logistics of this; I just loved their journey to find family and a real home. By Thursday night, my hands were sore, but the characters had found their parents. By the time I was through, I’d written thirteen chapters; I called it
The Secret Garden
. It went into the pile where I collected my writings.

Chapter 21

Once He’d Knocked Me to The Ground, I’d End Up Wailing There like a Baby.

A
s I became a teenager, the smacks in the face my stepfather gave me turned more creative. He had a deep reservoir of rage—and would aim it at my back, stomach, and legs, dumping his seething resentment of his worthless status onto me.

We were now living on the top floor of a public apartment building and had been given an old piano by a neighbor. I practiced constantly, letting the plinky-plonk of the notes wiggle and tremble under my fingers. My uncles and aunts visited often, and they’d all sit around the piano to take in my recital. Behind our fancy, sugary banter, none of them knew I was getting punched and kicked. A couple of other relatives knew, but no one ever said a thing. I told my teachers at school, but, again, nothing happened. I guess they didn’t want to interfere.

I was a difficult teenager, and stubborn with him, refusing to change the channel when my favorite programs were on. My brother and sister looked on as he raised his fists to wallop me on the head and threatened to kick me in the stomach. I tried with all my strength to fight back, but it was hopeless. My waist-length hair would tangle like angel-hair spaghetti in my face, blinding me as I tried to bite his arm and scratch his face. But he was stronger than me, and my arms were just jelly. Once he’d knocked me to the ground, I’d surrender and end up wailing there like a baby.

In a frenzy one night, he grabbed my new kitten and dangled it from our balcony. The kitten hissed and spit, wriggling in his grip. I was afraid he would crush her. My mother screamed at him. I begged him to stop; the kitten was so innocent and lovely. But he wanted to piss me off because he knew how much I hated animal cruelty. In the end, though, he put the kitten back safely on the ground.