Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

  “Take it straight to the home secretary,” Hari said. “At least he’s drinking Pimm’s, so we know we haven’t lost him completely.”

  He hardly drank anymore. Aneeka hadn’t told him not to, but the first time he’d moved in for a kiss with alcohol on his breath she’d recoiled. Even after he’d brushed his teeth, she said she could still smell it. “Sorry,” she’d said. “We can do the other things, but just don’t kiss me.” That distilled the issue in a way that made only one outcome possible. He leaned back in his chair, looked at his friends and tried to imagine walking into this garden with Aneeka—the hijab, the refusal of alcohol, Wembley. Everyone would be perfectly polite, but at some point the following day, either Max or Alice would call him up to say, “Lovely girl. I hope she didn’t mind our sense of humor?” No relationship had ever withstood “hope she didn’t mind our sense of humor.”

  “What would you have done if I had walked in with a full beard?” he said, picking a piece of apple out of his Pimm’s and chucking it at Max.

  Alice made one of those annoying humming sounds of hers that was meant to, and did, stop Max from reacting, and came around to pull Eamonn’s head to her stomach, stroking his hair as if he were a child.

  “We’d hold you down and shave it off, my darling. Friends don’t let friends become hipsters.” It was the kind of glib answer he’d previously have found amusing, but now he was impatient with it, with her, with the stale dynamic of all of them. What was the point of surrounding yourself with other versions of yourself all the time?

  He allowed Alice to hold his head against her almost concave stomach, so that his friends could exchange whatever glances they needed to, and all the while he was thinking, before Aneeka there was Alice. This body, these hands, this scent. Less than two months after it ended he had given his blessing when Max wanted all that for himself, and he’d meant it. How had he ever imagined what he’d felt was passion, let alone love? Before Aneeka, there was only the facade of feeling. And now he was in so deep that everyone but Aneeka was blurred and indistinct, poor creatures of the surface, their voices receding.

  |||||||||

  Every so often there were times she would switch out of the frequency of their relationship. That was the only way he knew to describe it to himself; a sudden transformation, as if an elbow had accidentally pressed against a radio button and, mid-note, jazz became static. She’d turn cold, or sad, sometimes angry, and any attempts to talk to her about it were futile. One particularly strange night he woke up in the early hours of the morning to see her standing at the foot of the bed, staring at him with one of her unreadable expressions. When he called to her she said, “Go back to sleep and tell yourself you dreamed it.” He tried talking to her instead—demanding to know what was wrong, made angry by his own inexplicable fear—and she ended up leaving, Eamonn following her on the street in boxers and flip-flops to make sure she was safe until a cab came along and she stepped into it.

  Worse followed just a few days later. They were having a languorous afternoon, lying on a thick-pile rug, playing favorite songs from their childhood for each other, swapping stories of growing up. Aneeka was teasing him gently for thinking that his was the more “normal” life despite his millionaire parents, both of whom regularly appeared in the newspapers. The trace unpleasantness of that strange night had finally disappeared, and they were both grateful for this return to happiness, slightly silly with each other. Her mouth against his arm, blowing out to make trumpetlike noises in time with the music, when her phone announced an incoming Skype call. She always ignored calls, no matter who it was—from one particular expression of distaste he guessed it was often Isma—but even so, she had to check her screen when she heard the sound.

  “You’re not going to answer it. Stop with the Pavlovian response,” he said, pretending to grab for her ankle as she scrambled to her feet. He was too lazy, though, to turn and watch her reach for the phone. The next track that came on was one he loved and hadn’t heard in ages, and he turned up the volume and sang along. It was a few seconds before he realized she had left the room, and he went in search of her to apologize for raising the volume just as she answered the phone, which is what must have driven her away.

  She wasn’t in the hall or the bedroom, but the bathroom door was closed and through it he could hear sounds but not the words they formed. He stepped up to the door and put his ear to it.

  “I’m making sure of things here,” he heard her say.

  At the end of the sentence her voice seemed to move closer to the door, and he backed away and quickly returned to the living room. It was a long time before she joined him there, and when she did her eyes were bloodshot, as if she’d been crying, but also glinting with a kind of frenzy that he’d only ever known in the manic or the high.

  “Who were you talking to?” he said.

  “One day you’ll know,” she replied. She burst into laughter and wrapped her arms around him. “Soon, please God, soon.”

  She was a weight against him, unwanted, clinging. In that moment he could imagine not loving her; he could imagine wanting her gone from his life, with her secrets and her strangeness, her swerves of mood, the sheer inconvenience of her. But then she pulled away, put a hand over her eyes, and when she looked at him again she was Aneeka once more.

  “I’m acting a little crazy, aren’t I?” she said. “I’m sorry. Please bear with me. Please.” She rested the back of her hand against his cheek, a touch he’d never had from her before. He bowed his head and rested it against hers, a moment of love between them that made all obstacles surmountable, even the ones around her heart.

  4

  COCOONED IN WHITE SOFA CUSHIONS and the sound of rain outside, Eamonn watched a man dancing on the top of a train, declaring in Urdu, with subtitles, that if your head is in the shade of love then surely your feet are in paradise. It was a sentiment Eamonn would have sung along with, trying to get the accent right by the time Aneeka arrived, but today the world was sitting a little too heavily on his shoulders. He clicked out of the video and returned to the clip of his father addressing the students at a predominantly Muslim school in Bradford, which counted among its alumni Karamat Lone himself and two twenty-year-olds who had been killed by American airstrikes in Syria earlier in the year. There he was, no notes in hand, the lectern ignored as he stood front and center on the stage, the old school tie drawing attention to how little he’d changed physically from the head boy whose image was projected onto the screen behind him, other than a graying around the temples, a deepening of character in his face. “There is nothing this country won’t allow you to achieve—Olympic medals, captaincy of the cricket team, pop stardom, reality TV crowns. And if none of that works out, you can settle for being home secretary. You are, we are, British. Britain accepts this. So do most of you. But for those of you who are in some doubt about it, let me say this: Don’t set yourself apart in the way you dress, the way you think, the outdated codes of behavior you cling to, the ideologies to which you attach your loyalties. Because if you do, you will be treated differently—not because of racism, though that does still exist, but because you insist on your difference from everyone else in this multiethnic, multireligious, multitudinous United Kingdom of ours. And look at all you miss out on because of it.”

  More than twenty-four hours after the speech that ended with those sentences, the media attention had barely died down. Across the political spectrum, except at its extreme edges, the home secretary was being lionized for his truth-telling, his passion, the fearlessness with which he was willing to take on both the antimigrant attitudes of his own party and the isolationist culture of the community he’d grown up in. #YouAreWeAreBritish was trending on social media, as were #Wolfpack and its Asian offshoot, #Wolfpak. The phrase “future prime minister” was everywhere.

  The Eamonn of a month ago would have been proud. Now, he kept imagining a meme of his father’s voice saying “Don’t
set yourself apart in the way you dress” played over a video of Aneeka standing up from her prayer mat and walking into his embrace, shedding her clothes along the way until only the hijab remained. The video wouldn’t reveal the things that were most striking about her in those moments: the intensity of her concentration, how completely it could swerve from her God to him in the time she took those few footsteps, or her total lack of self-consciousness in everything she did—love and prayer, the covered head and the naked body. He heard the door open—Aneeka entered and called out from the hallway to say she was taking a shower.

  He no longer had feelings of dread if she didn’t turn up when he expected, or of relief when she did—he had come to accept that he was who she wanted to be with. The joy of that moved through the days with him, burnishing every moment, even this one in which he stretched out on his sofa, listening to the different tones of the rain—clattering against windows, slapping against leaves, pinging off bricks. In Aneeka’s company he’d learned to listen to the sounds of the world. “Hear that,” she used to say in the beginning, somewhere between a command and a question. Soon he learned the pleasure of being the one to say it to her, hear that, the London we never enter together: the lawn mower rattling against pebbles at the edges of the garden; the differing weight of vehicles on the street outside—the swoosh of the motorcycle, the trundle of the van; the voices of drunk English lovers, matched in pitch though not in tone by caffeinated Italian tourists. Hear that, the varied creaks of the bed frame: the short cry of disappointment when you leave, the long groan of pleasure when you return. Hear that, the quickening of my breath, my blood, when you touch me, just so. At her urging, he started to record snippets of the time he spent without her, playing them back and asking her to identify the sounds he linked together to form a narrative of life without her: tube barriers opening and closing, his mother’s pruning shears cutting through stems in the rose garden, the heavy thud of the door to the newly constructed panic room in his parents’ house, a row of men on treadmills at the gym engaging in unacknowledged competitions of speed and stamina, conversations with the interactive Urdu learning tutorial, his hand bringing himself to climax while he thought of her. When he asked her why she didn’t bring him the soundscape of her days, she shrugged and said he’d have to think up a game of his own for her to play, he couldn’t simply borrow hers. But his mind didn’t know how to do that.

  “Caught in the rain?” he said, going over to kiss her when she entered the room in his blue-and-white-striped dressing gown, carrying an armload of wet clothes. She pulled away almost immediately, holding up the wet clothes as explanation. When she’d deposited them in the dryer, she sat down on one of the stools at the kitchen counter, and he walked over to dry her hair with a towel.

  “Does anyone give you a hard time because of the hijab?” he said.

  She tilted her head back to rest it against his chest and look up at him. “If you’re nineteen and female you’ll get some version of a hard time for whatever you wear. Mostly it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to shrug off. Sometimes things happen that make people more hostile. Terrorist attacks involving European victims. Home secretaries talking about people setting themselves apart in the way they dress. That kind of thing.” He didn’t say anything to that, just gripped a fistful of her hair and squeezed while moving his hand down along the length of it, water dripping onto the wood floor. “And no, I wasn’t showering because I got caught in the rain. Some guy spat at me on the tube.”

  “Some guy what?”

  She swiveled the stool around. “What do you say to your father when he makes a speech like that? Do you say, ‘Dad, you’re making it okay to stigmatize people for the way they dress’? Do you say, ‘What kind of idiot stands in front of a group of teenagers and tells them to conform’? Do you say, ‘Why didn’t you mention that among the things this country will let you achieve if you’re Muslim is torture, rendition, detention without trial, airport interrogations, spies in your mosques, teachers reporting your children to the authorities for wanting a world without British injustice’?”

  “Wait, wait. Stop it. My father would never . . .” He had never heard her speak of any of this since the first time they met, when she’d made her Googling While Muslim comment, which he’d managed to put out of his mind until now. “Do you think he doesn’t know what it is to face down racists? He wants people like you to suffer less from them, not more. That’s why he said what he did, even if it wasn’t the best way of phrasing it.”

  A small, sad smile. “‘People like you’?”

  “That came out wrong.”

  “No, I don’t think it did. There are people like me and people like you. I’ve always known it. Why do you think I did all this ‘Let’s be secret’ stuff? I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in your life if you had to tell your family and friends about me.”

  “I know.” The admission surprised them both. “But that was before. Now if the world wants to divide into Aneeka and everyone else, there’s no question where I’m standing. Or kneeling, which is really what I’d like to do right now, but I don’t know if you’re anywhere near ready for me to do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “I just proposed proposing to you.”

  For a moment he thought he’d made a terrible mistake, Aneeka looking at him as though he’d said the craziest thing in the world. And then her mouth was on his, his hands on her shower-warm skin, everything he wanted in the world right here, right now, this woman, this life, this completeness.

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  Although they never went as far as the private communal garden, the flat roof jutting out a few feet from Eamonn’s bedroom window, which he’d failed to turn into a terrace in the four years he’d lived here, had become a favorite retreat. With a little nudging from Aneeka, he had bought a variety of tall plants—cactus, chili, kumquat—which they placed along the edge of the roof, and although they shut out the view of the gardens below, they also made privacy possible while alfresco.

  The morning after the “proposed proposal,” as she enjoyed calling it, they sat outdoors pitting cherries for jam, the sun beating down almost as palpably as the previous day’s rain. Eamonn in a pair of khaki shorts and Aneeka once again in the blue-and-white dressing gown, now hiked above her knees. The concrete warm on their skin as they sat cross-legged at the very edge of the janglingly colorful floor cushions that had been her way of objecting to the muted tones of Eamonn’s flat. She’d carried them in a couple of weeks earlier, her glare daring him to comment on the fact that she was claiming his space as hers, as he’d wanted her to do almost from the start. He placed a cherry in his mouth, considered kissing her, the cherry passing between them, but settled for watching her instead, enjoying her evident satisfaction at the clean workings of the cherry pitter she’d mocked not an hour earlier as an accessory of the rich who don’t know what else to do with their money. It’s a cherry pitter. It pits cherries. How is that some wild extravagance? In response she’d opened a kitchen drawer and held up one utensil after another: A cherry pitter to pit cherries, a garlic peeler to peel garlic, a potato masher to mash potatoes, a lemon zester to zest lemons, an apple corer to core apples. She’d grinned at him. All you need is basic cutlery and a little know-how. But here she was now, making a small satisfied noise with every cherry pit she neatly punched out using the gadget in her hand. She’d gathered up the dark weight of her hair and twisted it into a loose knot at the base of her neck. A temptation to tug just so and watch it tumble down.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, the answer is, not until we’ve finished with the cherries.”

  He grinned, stretched out a leg, laid it over her knee, part of her thigh, and picked up the knife he was using to cut into the cherries and flip out the stones with his thumb. “This reminds me of a summer holiday in Tuscany when I was ten or eleven. Cherries and gelato, that’s all my sister and I ate the whole summer. A
t least in my memory.”

  “What do people do when they go away on holiday? Other than eat cherries and gelato.”

  “You’ve never . . . ?”

  “There was a trip to Rome once, the year before my mother died. The travel agency she worked for gave her free tickets—but it felt more like a school trip than a holiday. She thought we should see as many sights and spend as little money as possible.”

  “What was she like, your mother?”

  “Stressed. Always. It’s what killed her. Isma said she used to be different—when my grandfather was alive and paying the bills, when my father wasn’t yet a terrorist who could have us all driven out of our homes if any of us said the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

  “I really don’t know how you survived your childhood.”

  “Didn’t feel like it was something that needed surviving until she died. Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.” She smiled, shrugged. “But then again, no one told me I was missing out on holidays with cherries and gelato raining down. If I’d known that, I would have been much more disgruntled.”

  “Well, we should go somewhere together. As soon as your summer holidays start.” She gave him the look of exasperation he was accustomed to receiving every time he suggested anything that involved leaving his flat. “Come on, it’s time we entered the world together. We can start with Max and Alice rather than my parents if you want to ease into things. And isn’t it time you told Isma? Maybe even that brother of yours?”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  Exasperated, he threw a cherry pit into the bowl with such force that it bounced out and landed on the dressing gown, leaving a crimson stain on a white stripe.