I n the last few months of 2005, my father moved out of our home bit by bit until all that was left of him were his old jackets in the hallway, hanging there like shed skin. First he took his clothes, then he took his letters, but throughout much of that period, his red Toyota Corolla remained parked in the estate car park.

I was twelve then, chubby and angsty, with a penchant for journals that I discreetly wrapped up in old copies of the Greenwich Times. Every day, as soon as I woke up, I would climb onto the windowsill and look down at the car park to check if the car was still there. Then I would pull out my journal and write. One day I wrote that, if his car was gone, it would mean my father had truly left us for good—that was the final stage. And sure enough, I peeped through the curtains one foggy morning and the Corolla was nowhere to be found. I spent many mornings thereafter staring at the empty concrete space where it should have been. On New Year’s Day 2006, he came back for just a few hours. It was a Sunday morning, and my mum was in a bad mood.

As children we thought it was because we had woken up late, bickered at the breakfast table and watched cartoons instead of reading or drawing. She finished cleaning the kitchen and bathroom and put some coal on the gas cooker for the uunsi. When she wasn’t looking, I would poke the whitened parts of the coal with a fork and watch the embers shoot out of it like molten birds. This was thrilling because it could get me a sharp clip around the ear. It became a little game; my mum would turn around, and I would make the sparks skitter through the air without her noticing.

Qur’an played on the radio. My mother recited along to the verses until her memory failed her, sometimes going on for as long as an hour. We had kept those cassettes since our days in Mogadishu, so the voice of the reciter had become intimate and familiar to us. He was like a family member, even though he was Egyptian and long dead.

“I don’t want to stay here,” said my father. I remember not knowing what he meant by here, and to this day I’m still not sure. Did he mean here as in the home where my mum had started to burn the frankincense resin on the coal, so that it became difficult to breathe? Did he mean London—or England, the country itself, and what it stood for, and the fact that he never quite learned to be a part of it? Or did he mean here with us, as a family? Did he no longer want to be a part of our tragic situation?

I took note of the differences in their tone of voice—my mother’s curt and sharp like a knife compared with his slow, soft voice. This time my parents did not close the door. We were free to witness all of it.

What I find strange is that I can’t remember what my father said to me before he left, but I remember fragments of the conversations he had with my mum and brother. My mother bit her lower lip as she spoke calmly about the money that he owed her. She told him he needed to send the money frst, and he promised that he would. There was some disagreement about how much it was and what it would be used for. She told him that everything was khasaaro, a waste, and he replied by saying that there was nothing wasteful about the family they had made together. Through their parting argument, I was learning the defnitions of words I had never understood before. I learned that optimism can be violent.

Ahmed carried on watching cartoons, and I merely pretended to. The whole time, my parents sat close to each other in the living room. I don’t think I had ever seen them sit that close together, except in faded pictures from a time when I was not yet a thought in my mother’s mind. I think they sat that close in an effort to keep their voices low. Maybe they wanted to make it look like everything was OK, like Hooyo and Aabo were just talking, and not discussing the logistics of a man ripping himself away from a family and a country.

Ahmed, then six, asked us to watch him climb the door, jump, and spin a web like Spider-Man. My dad clapped his hands in a theatrical display of awe. Ahmed tried to ask him about superheroes and which one was his favorite, but all he could do was laugh and pat Ahmed on the head.

I sometimes wonder if he said anything to me at all. With my mum, he knew how to be serious when they discussed money and matters of the household, and with my brother he put on the silly, overly impressed act that grownups adopt to play along with small children. For me, he could never find that middle ground. I was old enough to be slowly becoming aware of the world they had constructed around me. I saw the holes and the seams in the structure that we called family life. I questioned things more, and most importantly, I knew which questions never to ask.

Once he left, we spent the rest of Sunday cleaning. It went on for hours, past the normal time that my mum would allocate for things such as hoovering our rooms and folding our school uniforms. I had never cleaned so much in my life, and even when I showed my mum that I had done enough, she would fnd something else for me to clean. I got on my hands and knees to wipe off the felttip pen Ahmed had scribbled onto the skirting boards in the kitchen. I tried all kinds of solutions—washing-up liquid, bathroom detergent, wood polish—but it wouldn’t come off.

My father stayed in touch for a while after that. He would call us from Mogadishu every weekend, giving us updates on how the country had changed and the many ways it would change again when things got better. All the neighbors we had known left the country in the nineties, around the same time we did. Some had gone to Denmark,

Sweden, the Netherlands, the States. A new family had moved into our childhood home in Xamar Weyne. My father promised to send things over to us, but he never did. I didn’t hold it against him, though. I decided that maybe we had everything we needed in England, and that things from Somalia would only remind us of the life we had left behind.

Very quickly, he got married again and had children. He told me the story over the phone as if he were telling me a bedtime story. The new woman was kind, beautiful and fair. Their home was by the sea. His daughter had fine, silky hair, more hair than he had ever seen on a newborn baby, and they called her Nour—light. Light of his life, perhaps.

I looped a lock of my hair around my finger and passed the phone back to my mum.

After that phone call, my mum told us that we didn’t have to talk to our father every weekend if we didn’t want to. He was busy with his new family and wouldn’t have much time for us. I think she made excuses for why we couldn’t come to the phone when he called. We were doing our homework, or we were playing outside. The phone calls began to dwindle down over the years until we only heard from him on Eid or on birthdays. And then the calls stopped completely.

“Is he even alive?” I asked my mum one day, when we hadn’t heard from our father in over a year. There was a lump in my throat.

“Yes, he is, but he won’t ask to see if you’re alive. And he doesn’t care, either.”

“Will you get married again?” I asked, cautiously, but with genuine curiosity.

“I don’t know. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.”

“Why did you get married to Aabo, if he’s so bad?” I asked her another time.

I believed she had a role in why he was the way he was. Could she have not been wiser in her decision to love him in the first place? Why did she do whatever she did that led to their union? There would be no pain if she had thought twice. No quiet suffering, no children, no me. I was sitting on the floor between her legs as she rubbed almond oil into my scalp.

“For love,” she said, and I was shocked. I hadn’t expected her to say that. I was fifteen at the time and to me, love was a Jennifer Lopez movie at best. Love, as I understood it in terms of flowers and dates and romantic walks, only existed in Hollywood or Paris. I couldn’t imagine my parents participating in love.

“And where did you meet him?”

“I met him through my brother, Aadan. They worked together on a ship.”

“When did you realize you loved him?”

“When he asked me to marry him,” she said. I didn’t know what to ask after that. I was waiting for her to describe their long telephone calls, the gifts that he would buy her, and the way he would say her name, but all she said was “Turn your head.” She grabbed a strip of my hair between her fngers. The formation of a new braid was always tight and painful.

When I was seventeen, my mum was engaged to be married again. She announced it to my brother and me, along with some of our aunts, on a July afternoon when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. We were sitting in a relative’s garden, eating watermelon on the grass. The women made high-pitched ululating sounds with their tongues against the roofs of their mouths, a sound I had heard at weddings. It was a celebratory sound. It was primal and passionate, nothing like the delicate, soundless tears that flowed at white people’s weddings. We are loving people, I learned. I took in the sight of a house full of people gathered for love.

I know that she defnitely loved this man because she would spend hours talking about him on the phone, and how he reminded her of Michael Jackson— in her words, when Michael Jackson was still Black and beautiful. She cooked for the extended family and filled many dishes with food and Somali sweets. The men came. And then the women. Negotiations happened behind closed doors.

Many years later, she told us why she broke their engagement. It was because he didn’t believe that girls should become educated. My mother had dragged herself through nursing school and worked two jobs. She had a family to send money to back home, an example to set, a life to look forward to. She wasn’t going to throw it all away. Not for this man. Not for anybody. She spent months in bed, when all was said and done I couldn’t understand why her choice had filled her with so much sadness and fatigue. I couldn’t understand a lot of things back then.

I think of that July still, years later, when it rolls around and the sun is bright and unrelenting. And when I think of December, the month my father left us, I remember the emptiness of the car park space where his Toyota belonged. I catch glimpses of his non-farewell in the speech of other people. I pay attention to how people say goodbye now, even if they aren’t loved ones, even if they are simply colleagues I am fond of moving on to new jobs, or old classmates I have never connected with in any special kind of way. I ache after parting from near-strangers because of what they force me to remember.

Salma Ibrahim is a novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel Salutation Road was published in February 2025. She is a winner of the London Writers Award and a runner-up in the Future Worlds Prize.