Things Left Unsaid by Sara Jafari (Excerpt)

BRIXTON Now They arrive at the housewarming party at 10 P.M. The Edwardian house sits squarely between Brixton and Herne Hill stations. Shirin Bayat does not particularly like going to Brixton because she feels complicit in the jarring, and ever-increasing, gentrification each time she is in the area. And that is likely because she is. She begrudgingly enjoys the overpriced coffee shops, with their excessive number of plants, millennial-pink sofas, and rose-gold accents, spending money on various vegan dishes that even she can make at home for a fraction of the price. Every so often, to alleviate her guilt, she will go to the shops and restaurants that have been there long before the gentrification began, and she will buy something she might not even want. It never quite clears her conscience though. There are clusters of people in the living room, some sitting on the three-seater sofa, others standing. The interior of the house could be sponsored by Ikea, the furniture white and familiar. There is a Malm dresser in the living room, and she is reminded of making said dresser many years ago and it eventually crumbling, the drawers breaking one by one. She remembers the many ways she tried to fix it because she couldn’t afford another one, until in a fit of frustration she threw the planks of wood down the chute outside her East London flat. Millie leads Shirin straight to the living room, like she has been here before, and kisses her boyfriend Henry on the lips in greeting. Millie is wearing red lipstick, and he rubs his lips after they kiss, to remove the stain. Millie has been with Henry coming up on two years now. Shirin dislikes Henry and tries to avoid all gatherings he attends. It is difficult to be around them because Henry critiques most of what Millie does, due to his own sad insecurities. He has an air about him as though he is better than his girlfriend, although Shirin is not sure where his inflated ego derives from. He is the type to go on Twitter and reply to women’s tweets that what they’re saying did not happen, with his profile picture as an anime character. He will encourage debates about race or sexism, playing “devil’s advocate,” though she suspects he believes the racist, sexist side. He is not quite an online troll but almost, teetering on the edge of what is acceptable, though Millie cannot see this side of him. She is, sadly, too far gone. When they first got together, Henry had sent Millie a dick pic, which she had shared with both Shirin and their friend Hana, not knowing that he would soon become a long-term fixture in her life. It is something Shirin and Hana bring up between themselves every so often, mostly to justify why Millie is with such a man. Millie returns to Shirin’s side, looking off toward the connecting kitchen, and says, “That’s one of Dylan’s housemates. I’ll introduce you.” She lightly touches the top of Shirin’s arm before leading her toward the other side of the room. Indeed, Shirin has gone to a housewarming party for people she does not even know. She found herself with nothing to do on a Friday night—an ever-increasing problem as she ages—and Millie reassured her that more was merrier, that it would be fun. The final push came when Millie added, “You should have just stayed in Hull if you don’t ever want to leave your flat.” Millie always knew the precise words to fire Shirin up and make her do something she didn’t want to do—it was always like that at university, and Millie has only got better at it once her friend graduated and progressed in her career in public relations. And that is how Shirin found herself here. The man Shirin is being taken to meet has dark hair, short on the back and sides and long at the front. His shoulders are broad, his waist slender, and he is tall. Very tall. It is curious that how much space one is able to take up is often seen as attractive in a man, but is seldom the case for women. She can only see him from the back, but he’s wearing a black T-shirt in a soft jersey fabric. “Kian, hey,” Millie says. He turns around and then Shirin’s breath catches. There is a painful feeling in her chest, an acute ache, from the surprise. Millie had said that Henry’s friend Dylan was moving into a flat in Brixton. She had said that he was moving in with three other boys. What she did not say, though, because of course she didn’t know, was that Shirin and Kian know each other, and haven’t spoken in ten years. SOMEONE I USED TO KNOW “Shirin,” Kian Rahimi says, lips parted, his eyes squinting slightly, like he is wondering whether he is mistaken, whether it is really her. Shirin is also taken aback by the image of him before her. In her mind he is always sixteen, baby-faced but beautiful. His face has developed a sharpness to it that it didn’t have back then—his jaw and cheekbones strong and well-defined. It is the strangest sensation, to see someone you once knew very well as a teenager standing before you, matured, as though out of nowhere. “Hi,” she eventually says. She has imagined this moment many times before and she always says something much grander than hi. “You know each other?” Millie asks, looking from one to the other. “Yeah, we went to school together,” Kian says with apparent ease. “Back in Hull.” Seeing Kian again after all these years makes Shirin regret coming here. Her gut, she knows, is usually right about these things, and she should have listened to it. Being so close to him now brings memories to the surface, up out of her belly, almost spilling out of her throat. Even him saying “we” makes her heart thud wildly and pathetically. All this is made infinitely worse by how nonchalant he sounds now. “Oh. Small world, I guess?” Millie says, uninterested by this moment that is so monumental to Shirin. She tucks a blond strand of her hair behind her ear before continuing to say, “Well, I’m sure you have lots to chat about…” And Millie is gone, returning to Henry, and Shirin is left reeling, thinking: Please, for the love of God, don’t leave me alone with this person I used to know. “Well, hello,” Kian says, beaming. It is an uncomplicated smile. The kind of smile Shirin cannot imagine having. She struggles to smile on cue, her face a permanent frown that she often tries, and fails, to soften. Like now, the tops of her lips are raised upward, but the rest of her face is unmoved. The smile does not touch her eyes because, when she looks at Kian, she does not just see a person she cared so deeply for, she sees all of the shit from her childhood that she has worked so hard to leave behind. Her heart aches, wrestling between the soaring excitement at seeing him after so long and stomach-punching dread that she can no longer pretend to escape her past. “It’s been a while,” she says, her voice cooler than she feels. “What are you doing here?” “I came with Millie. I didn’t know you lived here.” She scratches her neck to have something to do with her hands, and to mask that they are shaking. Kian tells her that he sometimes hangs out with Henry—because Henry is Dylan’s hometown friend—and that Dylan went to university with Kian. It is a too-coincidental and long-winded connection. What are the chances, she cannot help but think, that these two people from Hull have found themselves in a connecting friendship group ten years later? Isn’t that the whole point of moving away from your hometown, so that things like this don’t happen? “It’s weird that we’ve not seen each other before, at parties and stuff, when I’ve come down to London,” he muses. Due to her avoidance of Henry, it is not that weird. But the fact that Kian, of all people, is tenuously linked to her friendship group is. In the past, Shirin attempted to look Kian up on social media, curious to see what he was doing with his life. His Instagram, however, displayed no photos of him, instead showing landscapes lacking in filters so that they looked dull, or his paintings, which Shirin thought were impressive and experimental, almost dizzying if you looked at them for too long. She admired that he had continued with his art. She’s realized how easy it is to lose sight of your passions, of who you were before adulthood kicked in. “So, you’ve just moved here?” she asks. “Yeah. I was living in Manchester before. You’ve been here awhile though, right?” She nods, conscious of every part of her body. Her head bops too aggressively. She makes a mental note to chill the hell out, though that’s easier said than done. “I went to uni here, at Queen Mary’s, and stayed since.” She pauses as though she is thinking, trying to be slower and more considered in her movements. She is attempting to play the role of a cool girl, albeit terribly. “Where’d you go to uni again?” She knows already though, from her aforementioned stalking. “Glasgow.” “Right, nice,” she says a little too quickly. She did not pace her response correctly, and there is a short silence before she fills it by blurting, “You’ve lost your accent?” It’s not really a question, though she says it like it is. He raises an eyebrow, laughs. “I definitely haven’t.” The side of his mouth twitches upward as though he is deliberating about whether he will say what he wants to next. There is a glimmer in his dark eyes, and her insides flip. “Yours hasn’t toned down, though, I see.” Despite not living in Hull for eight years now, Shirin’s accent has remained, just as strong as it was when she left. People she meets for the first time habitually comment on it, like it is a quirk of hers. Sometimes they do not understand her, sometimes it colors their perceptions of her—they see her as less intelligent because she has a soft drawl and elongates certain words. Kian’s accent, by contrast, sounds neutral to Shirin, like it has been tempered through the years. She narrows her eyes at him. “It’s a good thing,” Kian adds. “It reminds me of home.” She resists the urge to smile—the urge in general to pick up where they left off, which she is realizing would be very easy to do. In her fantasies—or rather nightmares—of this moment, Kian is cold and bitter toward her. They argue. He is not friendly, and perhaps that’s because it’s harder to think of him as he was all those years ago. Perhaps she needed him to be a villain to justify the things she said. Her gaze wanders past his shoulder, toward Millie’s back as she leans into Henry, and other people Shirin does not know well, chatting together. “What are you doing then? Did you get a job here or something?” she asks. “I got a place to do an MFA in fine art at Goldsmiths.” His tone is marginally less confident and quieter when he says this. He clears his throat, covering his mouth with his fist. Her gaze returns to his eyes and she cannot help the real smile then. “That’s amazing. Congratulations. I always knew you were talented.” He looks away and presses his lips together. It is a somewhat embarrassed, uncertain expression. “Thanks.” He then scrunches his nose before adding, “I know some people say masters’ are pointless, but I think it’ll be good for me. There’s the potential to spend some time abroad, too, which would be sick—and it was partially funded.” “I don’t think it’s pointless. It’s your passion. It always has been.” Kian smiles then. It touches his whole face, lights him up entirely. It’s like he needed this validation, this confirmation that he is doing the right thing, from Shirin specifically. His mouth is open, and he’s about to say something, when Hana comes over, as though out of nowhere, sidling her way between them. She is wearing a black leather bustier and red flared trousers, her lips a wine red to match her bottoms. Her skin is buttery smooth. Shirin has never seen Hana with a blemish, even in their late teens at university. Having witnessed Hana’s skin-care cabinet, though, she knows such faultless skin takes supreme effort. It somewhat softens the blow of how gray and lackluster Shirin’s own skin is, despite various The Ordinary serums that she uses. “I didn’t know you were here yet,” Hana says to Shirin, almost accusatory. “I just arrived.” Hana looks at Kian pointedly, then back at Shirin, with an expression that reads What’s going on here? Shirin cannot help but feel a twitch of irrational irritation then, like Hana needs to know—or be involved in—every facet of her life. “You said you couldn’t come,” Shirin says. Hana smiles, pleased with herself. She likes to show up unannounced, declining invitations and then appearing suddenly. So Shirin shouldn’t be surprised, really. At the start of their friendship Shirin found this energizing and unexpected. Now, though, she perceives Hana’s actions as indulgent, as though she always requires special attention, even at a party for people she barely knows. Shirin dislikes herself for thinking such things about her best friend. She thinks there is an ugliness inside her sometimes, some kind of repressed anger that she takes out on other people in her mind. “I live to surprise. You know me,” Hana says. She touches Shirin’s hair gingerly. “I like the color. It’s very 2015.” On a whim, the night before, Shirin dyed her hair a color that Bleach London calls Awkward Peach. Hana’s words make her question her decision, given it is now 2018. She resists the urge to touch her very dry locks, which are coated in argan oil, in response. Her annoyance must show on her face because Hana backtracks and says, “What I mean is it looks cool.” The doorbell rings. Kian’s eyes flick to Shirin’s, hold them for a moment, before looking back toward the door. “I better get that,” he says, leaving them. “So,” Hana begins once he has left. “Aren’t you happy to see me?” Just looking at Hana, so immaculately put together, results in Shirin straightening out her geometric-patterned wrap dress, which by comparison feels frumpy—like Shirin is going to a garden party, and Hana to a club. Shirin used to dress edgy, though she’d never actually use the word edgy. She doesn’t know when that changed. She tries not to compare herself to others but often cannot help it. Especially when she gets the feeling her friend is also doing it to her, as she does now. Hana perches herself on the armrest of the sofa and crosses one leg over the other. “God, have you seen them? Could they get a room?” she says with derision. Shirin turns to see that Henry and Millie are kissing. His arms are around her waist, and hers are wrapped around his neck. They are the same height, which makes the kissing appear more intimate. She does not know what to say. Ordinarily she would join in, to appease Hana, but she is too wired, her heart beating too quickly. She feels a scary mix of wanting to take flight and wanting to freeze. Seeing Kian has made her feel so unsure of herself, unsure of anything. What are the chances of him being here, in her world, with her friends, after all this time? It’s like she has reverted to being an unhappy teenager, and she needs to be alone to process it all. She knows that not even Hana, who she loves but who also sometimes annoys her, can assuage her anxiety right now. So she shrugs and says, “I need to pee,” before leaving the room, allowing no time for her friend to reply. She does a solitary tour of the house and finds herself in the kitchen, looking out onto the garden. People are smoking by the patio, and at the far end of the garden is a summerhouse. She opens her phone and sees that Uber has surge charging and so she decides to stay. Tonight is a balmy summer evening and the sky is black, pollution providing a mask over the night stars. She makes her way outside for some air. Voices from this party, and other people in other houses around Brixton having parties too, spill out into the gardens. Occasionally there are the sirens of ambulances and police cars, and it is only now that Shirin is alone, with her heart finally beating more steadily, that she notices them. Unthinkingly she finds herself by the summerhouse. Phoebe, her friend from back home, has one and it has always struck Shirin as a middle-class addition to a house. The glass doors are left slightly ajar, the inside unlit. As she enters, her phone’s torch illuminates the interior of the room. She shines it around the walls to find a light switch, and the bulb gives off a soft, dim light. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to her surroundings. Against the wall is a white corporate-looking desk with gray legs and a clashing pine chair. The desk is bare, except for a Sports Direct mug containing pens and pencils. Boxes are stacked against the opposite wall. She peeks inside one of them. It contains various vinyl records, and atop the pile is Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. She picks it up and runs her hand over the sleeve. It is covered in a thin layer of dust, which she brushes off with her fingertips and instantly regrets, wiping her now-dirty hand on her dress. She remembers listening to “Every Single Night” on repeat one summer when she was still at university, with an unrequited crush and feeling as though she might die from the lack of attention. She remembers thinking of Kian during that time, too, wondering what it might have been like if things were different between them. Copyright © 2025 by Sara Jafari