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8

T
he man who came to pick us up from Leyton station was tall, slim, with a huge smile. His name was Yusuf, and this was to be the first
time I clapped eyes on my future husband. Not that I knew it at the time. Nasra and Habiba had been talking about us getting a place of our own for a few weeks now. Three months had rolled by in
the hostel, queuing up for our breakfast each morning and paying £1.70 for an evening meal. We got used to the rules of the place, that we had to be in before 10pm or we’d be locked out
by Melanie, who guarded the front door. Nasra said a place of our own would give us more freedom; we’d be able to cook together, come and go as we pleased.

Margaret offered to help me fill in the forms for housing benefit, and Nasra had heard of some other girls who had found their own place. They’d had help from some Somalian guys who knew
an estate agent in Leyton, east London, so Nasra said she’d go and meet them for us, to find out if we could do it too. She arrived home that evening, not full of news about the house, but of
Yusuf, and when I saw him arrive at the station I felt heat race to my cheeks because I understood why.

Yusuf was also to be the first Somalian man I’d ever spoken to without being chaperoned by my mother or an auntie. I had, after all, been warned that speaking to men would give me a bad
name, so even though I was miles from Somalia and its dusty streets, I was glad to have the other girls from the hostel there with me. Each Friday when I called my mother, it was always the first
question she asked: ‘Have you been talking to any boys?’

Yusuf took us to the house he shared with two other Somalian men, which was just five minutes from the station along ordinary suburban streets where life peeped out from net curtains behind each
window. We went up to his room on a morning that was full of firsts for me. I had never so much as been alone with a man before and now I was in a man’s bedroom. The room was very basic, and
I told myself he had it set up more like a sitting room anyway. A single bed was pushed up against the wall; there was a TV and a prayer mat at the foot of his bed. But even the intimacy of knowing
that was where he slept made me feel nervous. The other girls must have noticed how I was drinking in every detail.

Yusuf was up and down the stairs bringing us tea.

‘Who’s making this tea for him?’ I whispered to Nasra as he left to go and get us some biscuits.

‘Yusuf is,’ she said.

‘Wow. He knows how to make tea?’

‘Of course!’ she laughed at me.

I knew that I sounded stupid even to other Somalian girls, but they had been in Europe longer than me. They had made friends, they had got used to the sights and sounds, and I was so naive
compared to them. All I knew was that this wasn’t typical of any of the Somalian men I’d known back at home, the uncles who drifted in and out of their kitchen, expecting the women
would make their food, or the male cousins who weren’t required to clear the table or clean the pots and pans like we girls were after we’d eaten. Where I came from men were waited on
– none who visited our villa would ever have dreamt of making tea. This man was obviously different, and I found him intriguing from that moment onwards. Not that I thought of him in that
way, he was Nasra’s friend, and it was clear from the way that she talked about him – dropping his name into conversations, giggling when he picked us up from the station – that
she hoped for more from their relationship.

He appeared at the door again.

‘I’m going to have lunch soon – shall I make some for all of us?’

While the other girls nodded in appreciation, I looked up at him dumbfounded.

‘You cook?’ I said, failing in any attempt to hide the surprise in my voice.

‘Of course!’ he replied, that wide grin of his seeming to fill the whole doorframe. And off he disappeared again downstairs. Sitting there with the girls, I couldn’t stop
thinking about this man. He makes tea, he can cook? I had to see this for myself.

I made an excuse that I needed to go to the toilet and then wandered down the stairs, following the smells into the kitchen. And there he was.

‘I was just looking for . . . You know how to chop onions?’ I said, as I watched him carefully slice the flesh of the pale vegetables with precise, tiny movements.

He looked up then. ‘I’m making pasta.’

‘You are chopping onions?!’ I said again.

He laughed then. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘How long have you been chopping onions?’ I asked him. ‘Doesn’t it hurt your eyes?’

He laughed once more, and that smile of his caught my attention again.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you about onions.’

I sat down on a chair as he told me about all the other Somalian recipes he could cook and we laughed together.

Nasra must have heard me giggling from upstairs because suddenly she was at my side with a look on her face that instantly silenced me.

‘What are you doing?’ Nasra said.

‘She’s obsessed with onions,’ Yusuf said. And I smiled at him, knowing then that our moment was over.

I left them in the kitchen, but even in the bathroom I found myself still giggling. What was this strange feeling, like thousands of butterflies fluttering deep inside my tummy and making my
heart quicken to keep up with the beat of their wings? I remembered Nasra, and instantly felt guilty, so I was determined to put all thoughts of him out of my mind. We spent the afternoon at his
house, talking about our plans, and Yusuf offered to speak to an estate agent and help us find a house to rent. He walked us back to the station, through streets I recognised from the journey to
his place, past green bins tucked away behind short garden walls, past cats that looked out from their pretty pathways, across roads and down side streets. All the time I walked behind him, I could
only think of that smile that had its back to me.

At the station I watched as Yusuf hugged each girl goodbye and the anxiety grew as he got closer to me. Immediately, and riddled with more guilt, I thought of my mother thousands of miles away.
What would she say if she could see me hugging a man in the—, but before I had finished that sentence in my head, he’d already wrapped his huge arms around me. I returned his embrace
with a brief, awkward hug and then dropped my arms as my face burned with embarrassment.

As we parted ways I turned to the girls and asked, ‘Is it normal to hug men in the street?’

‘Oh Hibo!’ they said, and their laughter rang out across the train tracks.

That, of course, was not the last time I saw Yusuf, because he turned up at our hostel the next day. Not to see Nasra, but to see me. Despite the fact that I’d thought of
nothing but him since we’d met, when I saw him standing there on the front steps I panicked.

‘Hello, Hibo,’ he said, that smile there with him on the doorstep.

‘Nasra’s not here,’ I said.

‘It’s not Nasra that I’ve come to see . . . It’s you.’

I slammed the door shut almost before the words had finished leaving his mouth.

I stood behind the door, my heart pounding. Me? He’d come to see me?

Slowly I opened the door again; he was there on the other side of it, smiling, unfazed.

‘What do you mean you’ve come to see me?’ I said.

‘I like you. I’d like to talk with you.’

This time I slammed the door so quickly it rattled within the doorframe. And yet the draw of him on the other side was too hard to resist.

‘OK, what do you want to talk about?’ I said, opening the door again, hesitantly.

‘Let’s go to that coffee shop across the road,’ he said, pointing and laughing, undeterred by my brusque manner.

‘One coffee,’ I said, pointing my finger so he could count.

I grabbed my coat and we walked across the street. I was aware of him at my side, and when our jackets brushed together, I took another step away. But more than that I was aware of my heart
fluttering in my chest; he wanted to talk and yet I was afraid the fear might steal my words. In the cafe, he ordered me a coffee and we sat down. My face was set like stone; I could only hope he
wouldn’t notice that my hand was shaking as I stirred sugar into my hot drink.

‘Well, you wanted to talk, so talk,’ I said abruptly.

And he did, he told me all about himself, where he was from in Somalia, how he’d left there when he was eighteen and had gone to Egypt, how he’d slept rough in the parks there, and
even how he’d fallen in love with a woman there but her parents wouldn’t allow them to marry. The thought of this made me feel a little sick. I wasn’t sure why – after all,
we were only having coffee. Even though I was fascinated by every little detail I tried my best to appear as if I wasn’t interested in the least.

‘Now tell me about you,’ he said.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything.’

And so I did. I told him about our house back in Mogadishu, about my mother, my aunties, my cousins, about Kenya, about London. And unlike me, he smiled and laughed and raised his eyebrows, just
as interested in every single part of my story as I’d been in his, only he dared to show it.

‘I’d like to see you again,’ he said, once we’d drunk down the last of our coffees.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘It’s Nasra who likes you and she’s my friend.’

‘But I like you,’ he said. ‘Nasra is more like a sister to me.’

And it was all I could do not to trip over the tables and chairs I was so desperate to leave that cafe, because, of course, I liked him too.

That night in the hostel, I couldn’t contain myself. I was skipping and jumping around the kitchen like a little kid, humming songs and making jokes with the other girls.
It was all I could do not to mention Yusuf’s name, and then, it just came out. I couldn’t resist the urge to talk about him, even if it was to Nasra.

‘Yusuf came here today. I think he was looking for you.’

Nasra looked up. ‘Did you speak to him?’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘I just saw him out of the window.’

She looked at me as if she wasn’t sure whether to believe me or not.

The following day, Nasra came to my room and told me that Yusuf had called her and told her he’d been to see me. She said all the right things, but I could tell from her eyes that she was
a little hurt. The atmosphere between us was tense; I felt bad for my friend.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I saw the way that you looked at each other. Yusuf is a decent man, you’re lucky; you should get to know him.’

I could see that she was trying to be happy for us.

‘He said he likes you,’ she said. ‘He also told me you like him too.’

‘What? How does he know I like him?’ I said.

And then she dissolved into giggles because she had caught me out. For the first time in my life, I had to accept that I liked a man.

The next few months were spent walking the streets of London with Yusuf as pink buds started to open up on the trees, and the last of the dead leaves were blown away by a final wintery breeze.
Soon shocks of golden daffodils burst from the ground and, if I’d thought London was beautiful in the winter, it was even more lovely in the spring. And I couldn’t help thinking that
Yusuf played his part in making it feel so special.

My sister had arrived in London during the time Yusuf and I were getting to know each other and my mother had insisted I left the hostel to move in with her. I tried to keep my relationship with
Yusuf a secret, a guilty feeling washing over me each time I arrived home to Hadsan’s suspicious face. Not that we so much as held hands! Instead, we walked and walked, getting to know the
whole of London, sometimes talking about everything and nothing, sometimes strolling in a comfortable silence; but I noticed how tiny electric shocks shot through me if our arms so much as brushed
against our thick winter coats.

‘I want to hold your hand,’ he’d told me one day as we walked along the Strand.

‘Why do you want to do that?’ I said. ‘Just walk along beside me.’

By now Yusuf knew better than to accept my initial curt responses; he knew there was a soft centre inside and that I was scared. He could see that by the way I looked away shyly when he told me
what beautiful hair I had, or how pretty my eyes were.

‘I love the way your hair brushes your face,’ he’d say. I saw in his eyes just how much he meant it, and even though his compliments made me wriggle with discomfort, at the
same time I loved every single one of them. So one day, after about three months, when he stopped dead in the street and kissed me on my cheek, I’d returned it with a hug, and we decided
there and then that we wanted to get married.

But first, there was something I needed to tell him, and I was frightened. I realised by now that I loved this man, but I also knew that my revelation might mean I’d lose him for good.
I’d been brought up with the strong message that men only wanted women who’d been cut, and I still carried the physical scars of that message even though I had been opened. Would Yusuf
be the kind of man who would understand about all this? Over the weeks I’d tried to find the courage to bring up the subject, but how could I? How could I talk about my vagina with a man who
I wouldn’t yet allow to hold my hand? I’d started, I’d tried, I’d said to him that there was something I needed to talk about. And then I’d closed down, too shy, too
terrified, to explain any more. But if we were going to have a future together I knew I had to say something.

We were sitting in a cafe that day, him sipping at his espresso, me hugging my hot cappuccino. I asked if I could try his espresso, but he laughed and said I was hyper enough as it was.

‘I need to talk seriously for a moment,’ I told him, and I watched his face change, a mixture of curiosity and perhaps a little fear.

‘I’m not like other Somalian women,’ I explained.

‘I know that . . .’ he said, grinning at me.

‘When I arrived in England, I went to a doctor and . . . well, I’m not “signed, sealed, delivered” . . .’

Yusuf looked confused.

I sighed before trying something else, but my own racing heart was distracting me from what I wanted to say.