a boy on campus started sending her explicit texts, she reported him to the university and he narrowly avoided being thrown out
when a classmate was raped and broke down in front of her, Nenet paid for a lawyer who got the rapist imprisoned for six years
after which, they all agree, he’ll be back on the streets raping more women
Waris is dating Einar, a Somali-Norwegian boy she’s been with since they sat in History together at school
they’re both big anime fans and go to London Comic Con every year
Waris draws cartoons as a hobby and is developing a female Somali superhero
who hunts down men who hurt women
and castrates them, slowly
without anaesthetics
while they lounge around, Yazz makes everyone hot chocolate from sachets and offers the shortbread biscuits Mum makes for her as she’s weirdly taken up baking since Yazz went to uni, almost like she realizes she’s not been the perfect picket-fence mum and is making amends
three-quarters of the squad don’t drink much, if at all Yazz’s mind is her most valuable asset and she’s not going to mess with it
Waris says yes to the hijab and sex outside marriage, no to booze and pork
Nenet says she expects to start drinking after a few years of marriage to Kadim when he takes on his first official mistress, which is what happened with her own mother, who starts the day with a G&T and ends it with a liqueur, having consumed a bottle of wine or three in between
Courtney’s the only one whose social interactions are accompanied by red wine
Yazz was drawn to Waris on the second day of Fresher Week at the welcome party in the sports hall where they both skulked on the periphery; Yazz gravitated towards Waris’s resting bitch face, as she later told her, which Waris took in good humour, asking Yazz if she’d looked in the mirror recently
they agreed that their peers were really immature, while sipping iced tea in a corner of a Starbucks on campus far away from the bedlam of the other freshers running around with their foam parties, disco paintballing, treasure hunts and group pub crawls that were bound to end up with A&E emergencies, Yazz predicted
whose idea was it? she wrote on the official Fresher Week feedback form
to introduce these poor young things to alcohol poisoning the first week they’re away from home?
why don’t you also book them into rehab now instead of waiting for the first signs of liver damage to show in their second year?
Waris
matches her headscarves with the colour of her flowing clothes
she has green days, brown days, blue days, floral days, fluorescent days – never black days (she’s not a traditionalist)
she often sticks her phone just inside her hijab to carry out handsfree conversations, which Yazz tells her is an excellent blend of religiosity and practicality
to which Waris replies that she wears a hijab to make a statement about her Muslim identity, and while there are those who make out it’s a proper religious thing, there’s nothing about women covering up in the Koran, you know?
Waris doesn’t ever leave her room without applying a smooth paste of foundation on to her already perfect complexion
whole tubes of mascara to thicken already forested eyelashes and her eyebrows are painted into a high arch that practically stretches all the way to her ears
Waris says she’s ugly without her ‘face on’, even though Yazz reassures her that Somali women are the most beautiful in the world, and that includes you too, Waris
Waris says she’s fat, even though she’s perfectly normal-sized, pinching her thighs so hard they go mottled then showing Yazz her ‘cellulite’, which is non-existent, Waris, it’s just flesh being squeezed so tightly it nearly pops
she sometimes wears sunglasses when there’s no sun – at night and inside buildings
she even tried it on in class, looking fierce and super-cool until one brave lecturer, Dr Sandra Reynolds (call me Sandy, guys and gals), showed she wasn’t the pushover they thought she was when she ordered Waris to take them off unless she had a medical condition and certificate to prove it
or to leave her class
it’s to make myself look fearless, Waris explained to Yazz after they’d treated themselves to a pizza one Saturday lunchtime and were making their way back to campus on the slippery and rainy cobbled streets of the university town where they stood out
or maybe it’s to hide your fear, Yazz suggested, you’re actually feeling fear-ful, the words are separated by a few letters, fear-ful or fear-less, similar but diametrically different, see?
Yazz felt a surge of preternatural wisdom beyond her years
it was one of those moments
Waris looked pensive as they walked on in silence, and then replied, equally sagaciously, perhaps it’s both
in that moment Yazz understood why they got on so well, they were on the same intellectual wavelength
life was different before 9/11, Waris said, as they left the town behind and walked along a busy main road passing big old houses made of thick slabs of grey stone; she was too young to remember the ‘before era’, when her mother said people looked at hijabbed women with surprise, curiosity or pity
then there was the ‘after era’, when her mother said they began to be viewed with a blatant hostility that gets worse every time a jihadist blows white people up, or mows them down in a truck
at times like these Waris braces herself to get even more shoved, spat at and called names such as dirty Arab when I’m not even Arab, Yazz
Waris said it’s crazy that people are so stupid to think over one and a half billion Muslims all think and act the same way, a Muslim man carries out a mass shooting or blows people up and he’s called a terrorist, a white man does the exact same thing and he’s called a madman
both sets are mad, Yazz
I know, Waris, I know
Yazz sees the dirty looks Waris gets when they’re walking through town
she gives dirty looks back on her friend’s behalf
Waris said her grandmother rarely left their council flat in Wolverhampton any more, it was too hard for her to walk the street and get such hostility, and she’s never stopped mourning everything she’s lost
she lived a well-off lifestyle in Mogadishu until 1991, in a family where all the adult men worked in the family dental practice, until they were killed and she fled here with her daughters
these days her grandmother pops prescription pills
she sits in the living room disappearing into herself
until one day she’ll be lost to them for ever
Xaanan, her mother, is completely different, though, she drummed it into us kids that we could either decide to be crushed by the weight of history, and modern-day atrocities, or we could go into warrior pose
Dad works in a factory, Mum has two jobs, the first is working in a refuge for Muslim women and the second is teaching self-defence to women who cover up, so they can learn how to protect themselves from the ‘hijab grab’ and related assaults
she teaches a mixture of Krav Maga, Jiu Jitsu, Aikido and Pencak Silat at the local community centre, Waris said proudly; Waris herself learned mixed martial arts alongside her mother
Yazz and Waris arrive back at the campus and walk down the lane, rain abating,