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see my brother on the corner with those other boys just shooting the breeze.
    I wore a white blouse. It was covered with blue fluff from my wool jumper. For the first time I did not cross the road. I walked straight through the group of boys but inside I was shaking. Two of the Staffordshire terriers wore hoodies; one of the boys wore all black except for his white trainers. He looked like a tall upside-down glass of Guinness.
    'Yo, sis. Wha' you saying?' he said and then he pushed another boy in the back and they laughed. It was a soft and polite voice but how was I supposed to reply?
    The boy who had been pushed approached me, bouncing as he stepped, his chest puffed out like a pigeon's. He was a sandy-coloured boy with bright eyes and a round face. He wore a T-shirt that said 'Dreams of fuckin' an R&B Bitch, Badboy Inc.' He looked at me like a lizard might look at a small, meaty rat. Once he was away from his friends all he said was 'Hi'. I hardly heard him and kept my eyes fixed on the weeds growing in the cracks in the pavement and did not open my mouth. I felt him looking at my tits slowly and exactingly. I looked up at him when I felt my nipples harden and his cheeks flushed. He walked away with his head bent so that I could see the raised bumps of his spine.
    None of the boys were particularly handsome and all of them looked like they spent too much time in front of the mirror for my taste. They would never know – nobody would – but I would have fucked any one of that group that day if only one of them had said a kind word. I would have invited him home and given him sweet kisses on his mouth and let him touch my beautiful places and I would have given him what my husbands always took by force. I would have held him and told him how handsome he was and how strong and I would have made him feel golden sparks, if only for a little while.
    I stared at the group. They reminded me of the teenage boys – a mixture of Islamist fighters and militiamen from the Hawiye clan – at home who, in protest over the presence of Ethiopian troops, blocked the roads with trees and threw stones and rocks at the armoured trucks. Ultimately, the boys offered no resistance. Mostly, they were like a great blot of incompleteness, shadows merging together to speak about dreams and girls in some poor attempt to supplement a meagre existence. As I passed I began to feel differently about the boys standing around. I began to think that maybe they huddled together to keep hold of their dreams. I thought of all the hidden emotions of boys. Maybe they were right to disengage from the world.
    When I was at home I would visibly shake around men, any man who so much as looked at me. When I arrived in London I thought the world would change, that men would be different. I was wrong. I guess men are the same wherever you go, like mosquitoes always ready to suck blood from any available vein.

THREE
MEINA
    I GUESS I SHOULD say how Ashvin met James. They were in the same class, 4T, but they didn't even notice one another to begin with. Ashvin had started the term late on account of our visa restrictions. The teacher, Miss Raisa Bukolov from Gomel, decided to stand him in front of the class to give him a proper introduction, one of those ruinous decisions that teachers are remembered and hated for. With a flicker of amusement she mispronounced his name and sent him off to his seat. There was a pause as the boys in the class stopped talking among themselves. Their adolescent interest nudged, a rare and complete stillness took hold of class 4T. And then they started to laugh.
    Ashvin lifted his chin, trying his best not to make a sound as he crossed the room to a seat at the back, in the darkness. He slumped into his chair, pulling at a thread on the frayed edge of one of the holes in his orange jumper, thinking about how popular he had been at home; how the teacher would always hand him the cutlass and ask him to lead the boys out to cut the thick grass