Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

  “Leave this on?” she said. He had learned already that everything new she offered was posed as a question. It was not because she doubted his desire, as he’d thought the first time, but because it seemed important to her to hear the “yes,” its tones of want and need. Now he hesitated, though his body’s reactions were answer enough as she touched her nipple through the white cotton, colors contrasting. He reached a hand out to her, but she stepped back and repeated the question. “Yes,” he said, “please.”

  Now he picks the white fabric off the sofa, wraps it around himself like a loincloth, beats his chest, and makes gorilla sounds. Just before leaving she had put on that tight-fitting object she referred to as a “bonnet cap,” ignoring his comment that this was as superfluous a name as “chai tea” or “na’an bread,” and taken a blue scarf from his hall closet, which she started to wrap around her head. “Why’d you have to do that?” he said, and she brushed the end of the scarf against his throat and said, “I get to choose which parts of me I want strangers to look at, and which are for you.” He had liked that. Against his will, against his own self, he had liked it. Dumb ape.

  After breakfast they lay together on the sofa in a square of sunlight, and either the dimensions of the cushions, or the thought that she soon had to leave, made her finally curl up against him, her head on his chest.

  “So, Isma,” he said tentatively. “She speaks about you as if you’re close.”

  There was silence for a while, and he wondered if mentioning Isma had been a bad idea. He felt strangely guilty about her; straitlaced, pious Isma. She wouldn’t approve of what they had done here. If he was thinking that, surely Aneeka was too. He threaded his fingers through her hair, wondered if her sister’s disapproval would be a reason for her never to come to him again, held her tighter.

  “We used to be close,” she said. “But now I don’t want her anywhere near my life. Are you in touch with her?”

  “Not since I left. But I thought I’d drop her a line to say I’d been to Aunty Naseem’s. Why, would you rather I wasn’t in touch with her?”

  “Would you do that for me if I asked?”

  “I think I would do any number of outrageous things for you if you asked,” he said, tracing a beauty mark on the back of her hand. “But don’t give me too much credit for this one—it’s not as if she’s written to me. I think we both recognize it was just one of those holiday friendships which there’s no point trying to carry into the rest of your life.” The complication of fathers was not an issue he felt any need to bring up while they were lying naked together.

  There was another stretch of silence, then she said, “When I leave, will you want to see me again?”

  “That can’t possibly be a serious question.”

  “If this is something that’s continuing, then I do want you to do something outrageous for me. Let me be your secret.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She placed her open palm against his face and dragged it slowly down. “I won’t tell anyone about you, you don’t tell anyone about me. We’ll be each other’s secret.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t ask ‘why’ about your fantasies, do I?” she said, sliding a bare thigh between his legs.

  “Oh, this is a fantasy, is it?” Distracted by the beginnings of a rocking motion she was making, the friction of her skin against his.

  “I don’t want my friends wanting to know when they can meet you. I don’t want Aunty Naseem inviting you round for a meal. I don’t want Isma thinking she can use you as a conduit to me. I don’t want other people interpreting us. I don’t want you wanting any of those things either. Just want me, here, with you. Say yes.”

  “Yes.” Yes, yes, yes.

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  Over the next few days he discovered her version of secrecy meant he didn’t have her phone number, couldn’t contact her online (couldn’t find her there, in fact), wasn’t permitted to know when she was planning to come and go. She’d simply turn up at some point in the day, sometimes staying for so short a time they never even got completely undressed, other times remaining overnight. Secrecy was an aphrodisiac that gained potency the longer it continued, every moment filled with the possibility that she might appear, so there was no time when he was away from home that he didn’t want to return there, and no moment at home when he didn’t race to the front door at every imagined footstep, every pressed buzzer. Soon he found himself almost incapable of thinking about anything but her. And not just the sex, though he thought about that often enough. The other things also: the concentration with which she brushed her teeth, her fingers tapping on the sink, counting out the number of strokes up and down and to the side; her habit of spraying on his aftershave before showering, claiming the scent would linger under the shower gel, so subtle only she would know it; the way her face transformed into a cartoon—eyes narrowed, lips pressed together, nose wrinkled—when she ate slices of lemon with salt with her morning tea; the precision with which she followed recipes, one tooth biting her lip as she measured out ingredients, even while praising his skill at culinary improvisation. Aneeka drying her hair with a towel, Aneeka balanced cross-legged on a kitchen stool, Aneeka’s face settling into contentment when he took hold of her feet and massaged them.

  In the beginning, he was afraid she might choose simply to stop coming around one day. There was a skittishness to her manner, now passionate, now distant. Once she’d even broken off at a moment that left him crying out in dismay to say, “No, I can’t,” dressing quickly and leaving, refusing to explain. He suspected it was her God and His demands that made her want to deny what she clearly had no wish to be denied; he knew he couldn’t win an argument on that score, so there was nothing to do but stay quiet and trust that her headstrong nature ensured that no abstract entity would set the rules for her life.

  Sometimes he thought of calling Isma, just to speak to someone who knew Aneeka, just to hear her name. But Aneeka didn’t want him to, and he wasn’t going to get caught in the rupture between sisters that, it turned out, centered around some issue of inheritance. “There was something that belonged to me. She had some claim on it, but mostly it was mine. From our mother. And she took it away from me.” Although he couldn’t believe that Isma would steal something, he could imagine her deciding to sell some family heirloom for financial reasons and seeing no reason to discuss it with the sister whom she sometimes spoke of as though she were still a child in need of parenting.

  “And what does your brother say about this?” he asked.

  In Eamonn’s mind this brother—Parvaiz—was a slippery ghost, sometimes an ally, sometimes a rival. The slipperiness came from the fractured nature of Aneeka’s stories about him. In her tales of growing up he was her ever-present partner in crime, the shadow who sometimes strode ahead, sometimes followed behind, without ever becoming detached from their twinness, an introspective boy who disapproved of her relationships (“always with older boys, of course”) but helped her keep them hidden from her sister and Aunty Naseem, while remaining perpetually in love with one or another of Aneeka’s friends, who all insisted they loved him as a brother. (Eamonn knew well the pain of this, thanks to his sister’s childhood friend Tilly, of the long legs and bee-stung lips—“I don’t want to know about it,” Aneeka said, which was a balm to her mention of the older boys.) But after school, their lives diverged. Unlike Aneeka, Parvaiz hadn’t received any scholarships; unwilling to start his adult life by taking on crippling loans, he’d instead gone traveling, in the time-honored fashion of drifting British boys. Here he disappeared from her stories.

  “I haven’t told him what she did. When he comes back, I will.”

  “And when is he coming back?”

  She shrugged, and continued clicking through the photographs on his computer, watching his life from childhood to the present day—all the family holidays, all the girlfriends, all the hairsty
les and fashion choices and unguarded moments.

  “I can’t actually tell if you’re on better terms with him than you are with your sister.”

  She zoomed in on a picture of Eamonn with his arm around his father’s shoulder, both in matching T-shirts with the words LONE STAR written on them, the resemblance between them everywhere, from smile to stance. Unlike her sister, Aneeka didn’t seem to have much of an opinion of his father as a political figure, and he sometimes wondered if she’d been too young when her own father had died to have been told what Karamat Lone had said about him.

  “He knew Isma was leaving and then he went and left too. It’s nothing I won’t forgive when he comes back. Until then, I’m holding it against him.”

  It struck him as unfair to take issue with a nineteen-year-old boy wanting to see the world instead of sitting at home keeping his sister company. But then Aneeka clicked to the next photograph—the Lone parents and children hamming it up for the camera in Addams Family Halloween costumes—and he reminded himself that growing up an orphan obviously created an interdependence between siblings that he, with his affectionate yet disengaged relationship to his sister, couldn’t understand.

  There was, in fact, a great deal about her he didn’t understand. Most days that was part of her allure, but one morning, less than two weeks after they’d first met, he woke up resentful. The previous afternoon he had returned from the bakery around the corner to find a note she’d slipped through the communal letter slot in the front door saying “Was here. Left.” He canceled his evening plans in case she came back, but she hadn’t, and all that secrecy he’d been enjoying suddenly seemed a tiresome game in which she held all the power. Impulsively, he packed his bags for a week away and caught the train to an old school friend’s home in Norfolk. To begin with, he enjoyed the thought of her returning repeatedly to his front door only to find him gone. Let her know what it felt like to be the one who did the waiting around. But on the second night, when his hosts were asleep, he called his father’s personal assistant and asked him to find a cab company nearby that could get him back to London.

  He arrived home at nearly three a.m., half asleep as he came up the stairs to his front door, and saw a figure curled up on the landing, his doormat rolled up as a pillow. He crouched down next to her, and when she opened her eyes her relief was both shaming and thrilling.

  Once they were inside he walked straight to the living room, withdrew a set of keys from a ceramic bowl on a shelf, and handed it to her, saying it was hers to use anytime, day or night. She butted her head against his shoulder and said, “Don’t be this nice.” He asked her what she meant and she replied by kissing him, slow and intense.

  Something shifted between them that night. When he woke up the next morning and walked toward the sound of Aneeka making breakfast in the kitchen, she left off blending a smoothie to show him the chart she’d made of all the blocks of time when he shouldn’t expect to see her—times when she was on campus, or in study groups, or the Wednesday evenings when Aunty Naseem insisted on a family dinner, and any day between three and five p.m. “Why not then?” he said, and she nipped his shoulder and said, “Let a woman hold on to her mystique!”

  “Okay, okay. Block out Sunday afternoons too,” he said.

  She kissed his shoulder where she had nipped at it. “The weekly Lone family lunch in Holland Park. Is it very civilized? Do you say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ and talk about the weather?”

  “Why don’t you come some Sunday and see for yourself.”

  She stepped back. She was wearing nothing but his T-shirt, and the tightening of her shoulders transformed the look from sexy to vulnerable. So she did know about her father and his. He caught her hands in his, reassuring them both that they could survive the conversation he knew they had to have. “I know that’ll be difficult for you. Isma told me. About your father. And about what my father said about him.”

  “You know about my father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did she tell you? We don’t talk about that to anyone.”

  “If you ever speak to her again you could ask.”

  She walked away, poured out a smoothie, left it next to the blender, and returned to him. Shoulders still held in, looking at him with some of the mistrust she’d shown at their first meeting.

  “Who else did she tell you about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not who else. I meant what else. What else did she tell you about him?”

  “It’s okay,” he said, touching her hand. “It’ll be okay. You never even met him. No one will judge you by him.”

  “Not even your father?” She sat down on one of the high stools next to the kitchen counter, looking at him very seriously.

  “Especially not him. He says you are what you make of yourself.” He raised and lowered his shoulders. “Unless you’re his son. Then he indulges you even if you don’t make anything of yourself.”

  “He indulges you?”

  “Yes. My sister’s like him, so she gets all the expectation. I get the pampering and the free passes.”

  “Do you mind that?”

  “I mind a lot. And you’re the first person to ever guess that might be the case.”

  She hooked her feet around the back of his legs and drew him to her. “I never held it against your father that he said what he did about mine. He was right—we were all better off without Adil Pasha. But now I mind. Because when I think about it, he comes across as unforgiving. I don’t like the idea of you having a father who is unforgiving. I want to know he’s different with you.” She kept kissing him as she spoke, light kisses on his mouth, his neck, his jaw, slightly frantic.

  He drew back, took her hands in his. “It’s fine to talk about this. It’s true, he can be unforgiving, particularly of people who betray his country.”

  “What if you were the one asking him to do the forgiving?”

  “You want me to ask him to find out what he can about your father?” But she was shaking her head emphatically. No, she didn’t want to know. Her father was nothing to her—it was her grandmother who had needed to know what had happened to her son; maybe her mother, maybe Isma. But not her, not Aneeka. She wanted to know about him, about Eamonn. She would like to have a picture of what it meant to be Karamat Lone’s son beyond what the photo album revealed.

  “He’s one kind of person as a politician. Another kind as a father. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for me.”

  “That’s good,” she said, a new note in her voice, one he couldn’t place. “That’s how it should be.” She put her arms around him, and he tried to ignore how relieved he felt at knowing she didn’t expect him to raise the issue of her father with the home secretary. Of course if this continued—and he desperately wanted it to—Eamonn would eventually have to tell his father that he was involved with the daughter of a jihadi. Not now, though, not yet. Let Aneeka’s game of secrecy allow things to remain simple for as long as they could.

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  The weeks went by. Life adjusted around the rules she set. In the hours when he knew Aneeka wouldn’t visit, he went to the gym, did his shopping, dropped in on his mother to prevent her dropping in on him. He fired his cleaning lady, who also worked for his parents, claiming it was a temporary situation until he started earning again—then hired someone else, whose details he found in a corner shop window. In the time he had at home without her he started learning Urdu, the difficulty of it made worthwhile by her delight in his growing vocabulary, which she augmented with words no online tutorial would ever teach. She started e-mailing him surprisingly interesting articles related to contract law, and they were both pleased to discover that his short time in the working world had given him insights she wouldn’t necessarily find in course reading. They cooked together, alternating roles of chef and sous-chef with perfect good cheer. Parallel to a
ll this, his friends’ teasing about his “double life” faded away—as did their invitations to join them on weekends in the country, Friday evenings in the pub, picnics in the park, and dinners within the two-mile radius in which they all lived. He knew it was a paramount failure of friendship to disappear into a relationship, but to be in his friends’ company now felt like stepping back into the aimlessness that had characterized his life before Aneeka came along and became both focus and direction.

  “When you’re ready for reentry let us know,” his ex-girlfriend, Alice, now engaged to his best friend, Max, said sympathetically one Wednesday evening when he was over at their place with the rest of the old school gaggle, the discomfort of the patio furniture dulled by Pimm’s. A few glasses in he learned that his friends had decided he was in a slump brought on by unemployment, his feeling of failure exacerbated by his father’s continued conquest of the world. This midweek gathering in Brook Green, consequence of Alice calling up and demanding a date from him, was an intervention. Helen recommended a doctor who would prescribe pills without making a fuss, Hari invited him to join a rowing club on the Thames, Will offered to set him up with a “fantastic” work colleague who wouldn’t expect anything serious, Alice proffered a job in her family’s PR company, and Max rested a hand on his shoulder and reminded Eamonn that he was as good at listening as he was at creating distractions.

  “I love you all,” he said, meaning it. He felt in love with everything: the Pimm’s, the furniture, the ironic gnomes in the garden, the sky with its bands of sunset colors. “But I’m really fine. Just doing my own thing, under the radar.”

  “I don’t know,” Max said. “Twenty-something unemployed male from Muslim background exhibits rapidly altered pattern of behavior, cuts himself off from old friends, moves under the radar. Also, are we sure that’s an evening shadow rather than an incipient beard? I think we may need to alert the authorities.”