No one understood me. Every teenager has the right to feel that way. I was completely alone. I didn’t like my schoolmates and daydreamed about the school collapsing on their heads, killing everyone but me and Radwa.
Radwa was my only friend. She understood me and approved of the Slash poster that had pride of place on my wardrobe door. Radwa knew me, and we did everything together—we were silent together, skipped school together, read trashy novels together, and hated everyone together. I liked going to Radwa’s house, and Mom let me go as often as I liked, because Radwa was clever and got good grades and “if only you could be like her.” I went over to Radwa’s on weekends to listen to rock music—which she didn’t really like but listened to for my sake—and eat fries that her father made for us, and browse her little home library. I would usually bring a few books from my little library—or rather my father’s, which he let me share—and we’d swap. She also had a little gerbil that she bought at a pet shop in Heliopolis. She would say mysteriously that it was her guinea pig, then add with affected innocence, “But I wouldn’t do any experimentation on him. I wouldn’t want him to die.” Her mother hated the gerbil and hoped he would escape, but was too disgusted by the animal to open the cage it lived in.
The main difference between Radwa and me was her passion for science. She did really do some silly experiments at home. She would steal things from the school’s laboratory, buy strange liquids, put it all in test tubes, and stare admiringly at the colors and vapors. I thought she was insane, until she ended up as a successful surgeon at a big hospital on the other side of the world. She was strange: she not only liked physics and chemistry, but also got excited about surgery.
So I put on rock music tapes in the little cassette player next to the balcony in her room and painted my nails black, while she poured liquids into test tubes. Then we both read stories and hated the world together.
My mother died when I was fourteen years old. She died suddenly. The doctor from the public hospital next to our house wrote “heart attack” on the death certificate, but that’s probably what all doctors write when they have no real explanation. I didn’t cry, which was normal for me. I never cried, not as a child nor as a teenager. My father didn’t let me attend the washing of the body. He thought it was too much for a girl my age, and I didn’t insist. More than anything I was curious about my father’s reaction to my mother’s death. He surprised me, as usual, by crying silently at her burial. I didn’t understand why he cried. I was sure he had stopped loving her ages ago. His tears confused me. I had seen him cry in silence once before, while poring over his papers. But seeing him cry on the day of the burial was more confusing and left me nervous and distressed.
After my mother’s death, the shape of our lives changed. I had new responsibilities. Cooking for myself and my father was relatively easy, but my father also decided I was now the lady of the house—he insisted on sharing all the particulars of the household expenses with me. He wrote down the different items of expenditure in small handwriting in a little notebook:
Newspapers
Rent
Butcher
Garbage collection
Electricity
Nadia’s pocket money
Medicine
School fees
Schoolbooks
School uniform
My father’s salary wasn’t great, but it was enough. He was proud of the fact that we didn’t need help from anyone and didn’t want for anything and that we got to that without him ever accepting a bribe or stealing or doing anything we would (both) regret later. Life wasn’t unhappy. My father talked all the time. I listened to him in silence, as he told me unending stories about his childhood, his father, his sisters, and his prison years in the sixties. He also told me about his travels, the long travels and the short travels. He didn’t often talk about my mother, but sometimes he did. He talked about his previous lovers, describing them in detail, and sometimes opening his second drawer to get out photos to supplement his stories. I was mostly silent, but sometimes I asked questions, and I always enjoyed the stories. I linked arms with him as we sat on our blue sofa and he talked and talked until I fell asleep.
I didn’t abandon my father. But it was necessary to leave. Since I was a kid I’d been against the idea that a girl goes straight from her father’s house to her husband’s house. I did not abandon my father in his illness and old age. I just wanted to break away from that norm. He’d known me since I was in my mother’s womb: he knew my restlessness that had kept her awake at night. He knew I couldn’t sit still in a place that I hadn’t chosen of my own volition. I sat him down and informed him of
