Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi

Author:Mona Arshi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contemporary fiction;literary fiction;novel;Family;women;generational;suburbia;mental illness;childhood;humour;City life;diasporic;fictionalised memoir;poetry;love;grief and trauma
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2021-09-30T18:55:24+00:00

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It’s safe to say that Rania was the difficult daughter. Rania was the spirited, disruptive one. She was the daughter who tried to bring foxes into the house, the one who tried to operate on her friends with sterilised safety pins, and the one who lured me into the old chest freezer in the shed, that one you could only open from the outside. Somehow my skin-of-her-teeth sister was allowed to remain in school. She was the one who retaliated when Mr Bagley, the geography teacher, threw a bullet of chalk at her. It bounced off her forehead. She stood up and blurted out, ‘Wanker.’ Mr Bagley’s face reddened.

‘What did you say?’

Rania rubbed her forehead but stood her ground. She was escorted to the head’s office, where Mrs Cumberland, who was on the cusp of retirement, swished around nervously in her black robes.

‘Wanker. Wanker,’ repeated Mr Bagley; he kept repeating the word because he actually really liked saying it, the hardness of the word, and the look on the head teacher’s face – her flinch-and-rest every time he pushed out the word. No one investigated why Mr Bagley was allowed to hurl hard pieces of chalk at his pupils, and neither did they investigate why he was inviting sixth-form girls over to his flat at weekends to play his white-reggae records. Rania was never suspended for that incident, or for smoking and fighting, or for getting mixed up with boys. She was finally suspended after she threw a tampon across the classroom for a dare and it landed in Alison Riley’s spirally hair and hung there limply like a stunned bird, after which Mrs McGee needed a sedative from the staffroom medical cupboard and also something for her bunionettes.

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