Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

  “Let’s go back to pretending it’s a game,” she said, flicking the stone onto his bare leg. “Who needs other people? Who needs to leave London on a vacation when everything we want is right here in this flat?”

  “I’m not bloody spending my summer locked up in here. Neither are you. Come to Tuscany with me. Come to Bali. You don’t want other people, fine. We’ll find a remote island somewhere.”

  “If we try to leave the country together the people who work for your father will know.” At his puzzled look: “MI5. They listen in on my phone calls, they monitor my messages, my Internet history. You think they’ll think it’s innocent if I board a plane to Bali with the home secretary’s son?”

  It was a mark of his love for her that he felt nothing other than protective about the Muslim paranoia she’d revealed the previous day. Gently he said, “My love, I promise you MI5 isn’t watching you because of your father.”

  “I know. They’re watching me because of my brother. Ever since he went to Syria, to Raqqa, last year.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said automatically.

  “Yes you do.”

  He rubbed at the cherry mark on his leg. It was something to do while his brain sat inert in his skull, offering him nothing that would make this explicable.

  “He’s fighting there?”

  “Parvaiz, fighting? God, no! He’s with their media unit.”

  Their. The black-and-white flag, the British-accented men who stood beneath it and sliced men’s heads off their shoulders. And the media unit, filming it all.

  He stood up, walked to the edge of the roof. As far from her as it was possible to go. In his life he’d never known anything like this feeling—rage? fear? What is it, make it stop. He kicked out, knocked over the kumquat tree. Shoved with his hands, toppled the cactus plant. The kumquat fell straight, flower pot shattering as it hit the ground; for an instant the root-entangled soil held its shape, then the plant leaned forward and collapsed, orange fruit rolling around the garden patio. The cactus, by contrast, wheeled in the air, upturning itself as it fell, never before so anthropomorphized as with arms outstretched in a headfirst plummet, its neck snapping in two on impact.

  He became aware of everyone in the communal garden looking up to see the madman on the terrace, the woman in a dressing gown stepping forward to take him by the hand and pull him toward the window. He allowed himself to be led, but once indoors he shook himself free of her, strode into the kitchen area, and opened a bottle of beer, which he downed in two long drafts, maintaining eye contact with her the whole while.

  “Fight like a man, not a boy,” she said.

  “That the kind of advice that gets passed down from father to son in your family?”

  The words hung horribly in the beer-stenched air. He put down the bottle and hunched onto a stool, looking at the cherry stains on his hands. Through the open window he could hear the raised voice that was his neighbor coming outside to see the carnage on his patio. Aneeka sat down on the stool facing him, the long room with its tasteful decorations extending behind her, its track lighting in the ceiling, its expensive art. All of it his mother’s handiwork. Every part fitting seamlessly together except this woman whom he’d allowed in.

  “He wants to come back home,” she said.

  “Well, he can fuck off and stay in the desert he chose, can’t he?”

  “Please, Eamonn.”

  “Please, what? Oh, god.” His thumb bit into the corrugated edge of the bottle cap, deep enough to draw blood. “Why did you get into the tube with the home secretary’s son that day?”

  She took his hand and placed his thumb in her mouth, drawing his blood into her. He pulled away with a No.

  “I got into the tube because I thought you were beautiful.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” He slammed his hand on the kitchen counter, making the fruit bowl jump, making Aneeka jump.

  In a voice so low he could barely hear it she said, “I got into the tube because I thought the home secretary’s son could help my brother come home and avoid charges.”

  No pain had ever felt quite like this. “That’s what this has all been about?”

  “No!” She tried to take his hand again, and this time he physically pushed her away from him. “I know you don’t have reason to believe me, but the truth is . . . the truth is . . .”

  “Give me enough respect to avoid the ‘From the first time we kissed I fell in love with you’ line. Do that much for me.”

  “You were hope,” she said simply. “The world was dark and then there you were, blazing with light. How can anyone fail to love hope?”

  “A love that’s entirely contingent on what hope can do for your brother.”

  “I couldn’t have done this, for all these weeks, if my feelings for you weren’t real. You’ll have to choose whether you believe that or not. No words I say here will convince you.”

  “Get out.”

  She went, without another word. He could hear her in their—his—bedroom, and could imagine too clearly her body as she unbelted the bathrobe and bent to open her drawer of silky underwear. He put on a shirt, walked downstairs with a dust pan and brush, and rapped on his neighbors’ door. He had accidentally knocked over the plants, he said to Mrs. Rahimi, surprised to hear how ordinary his voice sounded, and yes, it was fortunate he hadn’t fallen himself, and yes, she had warned him that he needed to build a proper terrace or this kind of accident could occur. Despite her protestations he insisted on helping her unprotesting husband clear up the mess on the patio. Even with his vigorous, concentrated sweeping it took longer than he expected, shards of pottery and clumps of soil everywhere. The kumquat plant was recoverable, Mr. Rahimi said, but the cactus, poor thing, was for the compost. There followed a conversation about the absurd smallness of the compost bin the council had provided, which Eamonn threw himself into with great verve. They moved on to kumquats after that—there was a Persian tangerine stew that might work very well with kumquats, Mrs. Rahimi said. Eamonn told her there was an old Notting Hill saying, “If you drop a tree on your neighbor’s patio, all the fruit it ever bears is theirs by right—particularly if that stops them from suing you.” Even Mr. Rahimi was won over by that, and Eamonn remembered how easy it was to be a social being, well liked, surrounded by uncomplicatedness.

  Eventually Mr. Rahimi said he was returning to watch the test match, and would Eamonn care to join him. Eamonn said he would. He still hadn’t heard the sounds telling him she’d left the flat.

  “When I first arrived in England as a student I decided I had to understand cricket in order to come to grips with the subtlety of English character,” Mr. Rahimi said, ushering Eamonn into the TV room. Holding a finger to his lips he withdrew two bottles of beer from a mini fridge, and handed one to Eamonn. “Then I encountered the figure of Ian Botham and discovered that the English aren’t nearly as subtle as they want the world to believe. You Pakistanis, on the other hand, with your leg glances and your googlies.”

  Eamonn’s response to statements like that had always been, “I’ve never even been to Pakistan.” But he didn’t want to say that now.

  Mrs. Rahimi walked in, took the beer bottle out of her husband’s hand, and replaced it with a glass of something yogurty. Mr. Rahimi said something in Farsi, his tone one of affectionate protest. They’d married over thirty years earlier, despite the disapproval of their families—a difference of class, more insurmountable than any other difference in his family’s eyes. Better you had married a Sunni from Iraq, Mr. Rahimi’s mother had said, the same mother who now spent months in London, telling anyone who’d listen how all her other daughters-in-law took such little care of her compared to this one, whom she’d treated so badly at first.

  Eamonn stood up, apologizing. He had to go, he said. He was sorry, he’d forgotten in the warmth of his neighbors’ hospitality that he was expecting someone.
He left the Rahimis sitting in front of the TV, Mr. Rahimi drinking from Eamonn’s bottle of beer, Mrs. Rahimi sipping from the bottle she’d confiscated from her husband.

  He took the stairs two at a time, calling Aneeka’s name as he opened the door. When there was no answer he thought she’d left, but he found her sitting on the edge of their bed, still in the stained dressing gown.

  He sat down next to her, for once not touching. She held her hand out to him. Within it, the phone with the factory-set picture for a home screen and security settings that ensured no one without the passcode could see who had called or texted. She tapped in the code and pulled up a photograph. A boy with headphones on turned toward the camera with an open smile and a thumbs-up gesture. He had Aneeka’s skin tone and her fine bones—but while hers made her look fierce, like a panther, his gave him a breakable air. His eyes were sleepy, his shoulders narrow. If he was standing in a room with his sisters, your eyes would go straight over him to Aneeka’s beauty, Isma’s gravitas. “That’s Parvaiz,” she said unnecessarily, and leaned into him. “That’s my twin. I’ve spent every day the last six months sick with worry about him. Now he wants to come home. But your father is unforgiving, particularly about people like him. So I’m not going to get my brother back. And I don’t really know what to do . . . half of me is always there, wondering if he’s alive, what he’s doing, what he’s done. I’m so tired of it. I want to be here, completely. With you.”

  It was what she’d say if she were still only trying to manipulate him. It was what she’d say if she’d really fallen in love with him.

  You think marriage is in the large things, Mrs. Rahimi had once said. It’s in the small things. Can you survive the arguments about housework, can you learn to live with each other’s different TV viewing habits. He thought of Aneeka opening his kitchen drawers, mocking the cherry pitter that pits cherries, the apple corer that cores apples. A life of small things forming between them.

  “I’ve broken us, haven’t I?” she said.

  He put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. “No,” he said, and felt the relief go through her body, and his own. “Tell me everything about your brother.”

  ||||||||||||||||||

  His mother had warned him about increased security following the attention brought on by the Bradford speech, but that didn’t make it any less strange to see SO1 officers where previously there’d been trees at the bottom of the garden. Makes it less likely for a terrorist to get in undetected, his mother had said on the phone when he asked if he could stop by for breakfast, and she told him the noise he was hearing in the background was his beloved childhood tree house and its support structure being sacrificed. She had sounded unbothered, but there were dark smudges around her hazel eyes, and she was crossing her arms with hands tucked beneath her armpits as she did when she wanted to hide her usually immaculate nails bitten down to stubs. She was the portrait to his father’s Dorian Gray—all the anxiety you’d expect him to feel was manifest in her.

  Terry Lone, mistaking the uneasy looks her son was directing at the officers, turned her back on them and slipped a check into his pocket. When he shook his head and returned it to her, she raised her eyebrows. “You mean that’s not why you’ve stopped by at this ungodly hour? That shouldn’t have come out as an accusation—you know I’m happy to help.”

  He draped his jacket over his mother’s shoulder, as a show of affection rather than a response to any sign of her feeling the early-morning cold. “You’re magic. But some of the bonds you bought for me years ago just matured. And anyway, I’m going to get back to work soon. Alice thinks PR and I will be a good fit—she has a job waiting for me.” He wasn’t at all sure that was what he wanted to be doing, but he knew he couldn’t turn up at Aunty Naseem’s door as Aneeka’s intended if he didn’t have a job.

  “Well, you know my thoughts on the matter of employment for the sake of employment. But your father will be pleased,” his mother said, allowing him to ask where the man in question was.

  “In his study, of course. See if you can drag him out, while I consider the roses.” He watched for a moment while she walked toward the rose bushes: Terry Lone, née O’Flynn, of Amherst, Massachusetts, one of Europe’s most successful interior designers, with a chain of stores from Helsinki to Dubai bearing her name. When she was sixteen, her parents pulled her out of school a few weeks before the end of the semester to travel to London with them, hoping the visit to a city of “real culture” would cure her growing interest in the worrisome feminist movement that was so active on the nearby Smith College campus. They arrived to stay at the Savoy on April 29, 1978, and the next morning, while her parents slept off jet lag, she dutifully walked down to Trafalgar Square to see the National Gallery, and ran into the thousands gathered for a Rock Against Racism march, which was just setting off for Victoria Park to hear the Clash and other musicians raise their voices louder than the racist chants of the National Front. “You coming?” said a Spanish boy with dark hair falling around the shoulders of his black leather jacket covered in badges letting onlookers know NAZIS ARE NO FUN and RACISTS ARE BAD IN BED. They’d been marching awhile by the time she discovered his parents were from Pakistan, a country she’d never heard of. Considerably later that day, when the compliant side of her personality asserted itself and she said she had to return to her parents, he insisted on accompanying her all the way to the Savoy, even at the risk of missing the Clash, and when she burst into tears at the thought of saying good-bye to someone so thrilling, he vowed to marry her one day. For the next two years they communicated by letter, until she enrolled at Chelsea School of Art, by which point he’d left university and swapped his leather jacket for a banker’s suit, which she found both a disappointment and a relief.

  Terry Lone picked up a yellow petal, brushed the smoothness of it against the tip of her nose. It was only now that Eamonn understood how you could decide you wanted to marry someone in the course of an afternoon, and without drugs being the primary factor, as he and his sister had concluded many years ago. Did she ever wish she’d continued on to the National Gallery, he wondered. His parents weren’t unhappy together, but there was a separateness to their lives. His mother winding down her daily involvement in her business just as his father became too busy for holidays or even breakfast—that seemed somehow apt for the state their marriage had reached. Today particularly, he wished they were more like the Rahimis.

  Glancing around the terrace, he tried to imagine an occasion later this summer when two families might be sitting out for dinner on a balmy evening. Karamat and Terry and Emily and Eamonn, Aneeka and Isma and Aunty Naseem, and maybe even Parvaiz. He acknowledged to himself he had no idea how the world might take him from this moment to that imagined one—he knew only that they all would have to find a way to make it happen.

  He entered the house and made his way to his father’s basement office, a room that lacked his mother’s signature spare style and featured instead dark wood and solid lamps and windowlessness. Those years of nocturnal study had left their mark—Karamat Lone was at his most productive when there was no glimmer of natural sunlight.

  “Since when does my son knock before entering?” he said, standing up to kiss and embrace Eamonn, a form of greeting that had embarrassed him for years, until one day it didn’t.

  “Since my father started bringing home top-secret documents. Do they actually have ‘top-secret document’ written on them?”

  “No, they have ‘If you aren’t important enough to have clearance for this, you’ll be dead soon’ written on them. In very, very small print, otherwise there wouldn’t be room for anything else. Why are you awake, let alone here?”

  “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Can we sit a minute?” He gestured his father back to his worn leather chair and perched on the edge of the desk, facing him—the position in which he’d spent so much time in tense arguments with his father (hi
s GCSE subjects, backpacking with Max, arrangements for his girlfriend’s abortion) through that period of adolescence when Karamat Lone was a backbencher with more time for parenting than his wife had. Terry Lone was the one to whom Eamonn and his sister would turn when they wanted new gadgets, cars, and, later, a flat each of their own—the relationship’s binary options of “yes/no,” usually “yes,” giving it solidity. But with father and son everything was more abstract, the baseline love threaded through with contradictory emotions that left the women of the family exhausted by the up-and-down of it all. Who is this posh English boy with my face, the father would say, sometimes with disappointment, sometimes with pride. Who you made me, so blame yourself, the son would reply, and his father would respond with either There is no blame, my jaan, my life or That was your mother’s doing, not mine.

  “I’m seeing someone,” he said, and watched his father’s eyebrows lift. One morning, in the brief period when Eamonn was pining over Alice, the door of his bedroom had been kicked open and Karamat Lone had walked in, knees buckling slightly under the weight of the halibut in his arms, ice chips glinting on its skin. He had lowered the massive fish onto his son’s bed, with the single word “replacement.” It was the coarsest thing anyone in his family had ever known him to do, and Terry and Emily Lone were both horrified, words such as “misogynist” and “chauvinist pig” echoing around the house. Eamonn pretended to side with them, but he had been more amused than he’d ever admit, and the act put a decisive end to his pining. Though it was only since Aneeka that he’d come to agree, yes, Alice really had been a cold fish.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Eamonn said. “She’s not like the others.”

  “How so?”

  “For starters, she’s not from around here.”

  “She’s not British?”

  “She’s not West London.”

  This was received with his father’s extravagant snort, which his children were always amazed he could restrain from in public life. “Well, that is a change. Where’s she from then? Cheltenham? Richmond—my god, not south of the river!”