Piece by piece the article dismantled yesterday’s principled man of action and remade him: an ambitious son of migrants who married money and class and social contacts in order to transform himself into an influential party donor, which allowed him to be selected ahead of more deserving candidates to run in his first election. He used his identity as a Muslim to win, then jettisoned it when it started to damage him. It remained a mystery how he had had the privilege of running in a by-election for a safe seat after his constituents threw him out following Mosquegate; it had led to resignations within the party. Rather than fully address the questions regarding his connections to known terrorists in the mosque he frequented, he’d taken on a new role as the loudest voice of criticism against the community that had voted him out. Working-class or millionaire, Muslim or ex-Muslim, proud son of migrants or antimigrant, modernizer or traditionalist? Will the real Karamat Lone please stand up? And the final blow, again from Anonymous Cabinet Member: “He would sell out anyone, even his own son, if he thought it would move him closer to number 10.”
It escalated from there. Britain woke up to a chorus of tweets, hastily written online columns, and morning TV interviews all placing the home secretary on trial. “Personal animus” the phrase they all picked up on, which one wit turned into #PersonalEnemas.
A professional, coordinated effort, all in all. Why had it taken him so long to work out who was behind the camera?
“Alice, you’ve never liked me, have you?” he said, when the Halibut deigned to answer her phone on the fifth ring.
“Mr. Lone, your son hired my family’s PR firm,” she said, in a tone of warm honey dripped onto cold fish scales. “This is purely professional. No personal animus.”
He hung up, laughing, and unbuttoned his cuffs. “Hold your nerve, marshal your forces,” he said to James. It wasn’t quite eight a.m. yet. Plenty of day yet to come, and there was only so much the Halibut could spin.
He clicked on the video file on his desktop. A shadow on the desert sand of a man kneeling, a curved sword like a crescent moon above his head. Exceptional production values, the work of people who cared about camera angles and light and—he pressed a key repeatedly to increase the volume of God’s name being sung in praise—sound. This came from the media unit for which Parvaiz Pasha had been working. He didn’t want to release it to the British public—barbaric, nightmare-inducing stuff. He shouldn’t have to. If he had gauged the situation correctly—and he was sure he had—it would take only the sight of Eamonn walking into that most un-British spectacle in the park to switch the conversation from personal animus to Eamonn Lone’s clear lack of judgment. But just in case it didn’t work that way, it was useful to have a backup plan to remind the public that the only story here was that of a British citizen who had turned his back on his nation in favor of a place of crucifixions, beheadings, floggings, heads on spikes, child soldiers, slavery, and rape. And did Karamat Lone take this personally? By god, yes, he did! He thumped his hand on the desk, practicing, wondered if “by god” was a good idea, as a head rolled in the desert sand.
The first time he’d watched the video he had been unable to eat meat the rest of the week. Had barely been able to shave without thinking of that blade on flesh. Now it was his weapon. He looked up from the computer screen to the television, which he’d switched on as soon as he’d entered the office. The girl was cross-legged beside the ice coffin, hair still caked with mud, once white clothes soiled, everything about her older and more tired. Do you even know the man you’re mourning? he wondered.
His phone buzzed with a text message from Terry: Get home now or the next news headline with your name in it will have the story of your wife moving out to a hotel.
He ran his hands through his hair, not knowing whether to be admiring or despairing that she’d written to the politician rather than the father or husband. Not even a video of a beheading would shift the story away from the Asian family drama if Terry Lone, celebrity interior designer, style icon, the most admired of Westminster wives by a mile, according to a recent poll, backed up her son’s story of personal animus.
Checkmated, Teresa. I’m on my way.
||||||||||||||||||
Terry’s signature aesthetic was muted colors, sleek-lined furniture, and wooden floors, on display in every room of the house except her husband’s lair and the family room with its red walls, deep carpet and sofas, and white bookshelves filled with the family’s best-loved books. As Karamat approached this room he heard an unexpected voice telling him his footsteps had started to sound more portentous since he’d become home secretary.
He covered the remaining distance in the largest possible strides and held his arms out to his second-born, Emily the Uncomplicated, the son he’d never had.
“I’m here to find out if any of that racist, misogynistic ho-jabi nonsense is coming from your office, and to fire whoever is responsible,” she said, pulling away and beaming at her father. Beautiful Emily, physically her mother’s child, with the light brown hair and hazel eyes, the delicate hands with their quick gestures.
“Oh and here I thought you had come to support your old man,” he said, tugging at her nose.
“My old man will be fine. He always is. But my brother’s turned a little loopy, hasn’t he?” She threw herself down on a sofa and resumed attacking a half-eaten croissant. “Still, he is my brother. And he is your son. I thought I’d come and remind you what parental feeling feels like. And then I can whisk him off to New York until this whole thing goes away.”
He was aware of Terry in her dressing gown with her back toward them, her fingers moving along the spine of the children’s books as though they were piano keys. It was cowardly, but easier, to talk through Emily. He sat down next to his daughter, took a sip from her teacup, and wrinkled his nose at the lack of sugar.
“You know what he’s done, don’t you?”
“Mum just showed me the video. That was stupid of him. How are you going to fix it?”
Astonishingly, the story about Eamonn traveling to Karachi hadn’t yet become public knowledge. Whoever had tweeted the picture of him at the departure gate had since taken it down—whichever branch of the security services was responsible for that, Karamat was grateful. He must remember to thank James, the only one to notice it because he was the only one who had thought to include among his Google Alerts the misspelling #EamonLone. Not that it mattered very much—everyone would know soon enough. But at least he could be the one to tell his wife, who had finally turned around, her expression making it clear what a terrible idea it had been to leave the house this morning without waking her up first. “Get some rest while I talk to your father,” she said.
Emily sat up straight, looked from one parent to the other. “Sorry,” she said, kissing her father’s cheek.
When she had gone Terry walked over to the balcony doors and opened them. Her fresh-air mania undeterred by the early-morning cold. Some irritations dissipate in a marriage, some accumulate.
“Sometimes I forget how much like you she is,” she said.
“Only compared to her brother, who’s nothing like either of us.”
“That’s not true. He’s who I was. Before you. Before I concentrated my life on making myself good enough for you.”
He had to laugh at that. “I think you have that the wrong way round, my blue-blooded East Coast heiress. Remember the first time I took you out for dinner?”
But she shook her head, wanting to be alone in some distorted version of their life together. He tossed the remnants of Emily’s tea into the flowerpot with the money plant and poured himself another cup. No sugar in sight so he dropped in a teaspoon of jam and stirred vigorously. But not even that outrage reached her. Instead she stayed at her end of the room, gnawing at whatever remained of her thumbnail.
“You used to ask me what I thought,” she said. “Every campaign, every bill, every speech.”
This, again. In all the times she’d brought it up he’d always stopped himself from pointing out that in the early days it was her because there was no one else. He was the boy from Bradford who’d made his millions and bought his way into the party no one expected someone like him to join. “Is it so terrible that I want my home to be a haven away from the noise of Westminster?”
“Don’t you talk to me as if I’m some housewife here to bring you your slippers at the end of your working day. Have you even stopped to wonder what I think about this business with the boy?”
He watched the bits of jam bobbing in the tea, felt mildly revolted, but took a sip rather than admit it. “You want to protect your son. Of course you do. It’s your job. But it can’t be mine, not in these circumstances.”
“I’m not talking about Eamonn, you self-important idiot. I’m talking about a nineteen-year-old, rotting in the sun while his sister watches, out of her mind with grief. He’s dead already; can’t you leave him alone?”
His family. His goddamned family and they were the ones least able to understand. “This isn’t about him. It isn’t about her. It isn’t about Eamonn. Perhaps I don’t ask your advice anymore because your political mind isn’t as sharp as it was. And close those doors—my tea’s turned to ice already.” A way to stop drinking the jammy liquid and make it her fault. Satisfying, that, even though she seemed entirely oblivious to the whole thing.
“Sharp enough still to see what you don’t. That within the party you have enemies rather than rivals, backers rather than supporters. That brown skin isn’t made of Teflon. Why do you think I really stepped away from my business?”
The question was a surprise, and he followed it back along the thread of conversation to understand its logic rather than admit as much. Oh. “To spend your energies being—which one of us first came up with the phrase?—the silk draped over my too-dark, street-fighting muscles. As you did at the start.” He held out his hand to her, prepared to be indulgent. “It’s true I wouldn’t be here without you. That’s never forgotten.”
She finally closed the balcony doors but only, it seemed, in order to slam something. “You arrogant idiot. You arrived at the foothills and your mind catapulted you to the summit. You’re the one person who doesn’t realize the article this morning was the beginning of an avalanche that it’s already too late to stop.” She finally came over to him, but it was to pick up the remote and point it at the television. There she was, the girl, still cross-legged, no change since he’d left the office. He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Eamonn would be landing soon.
“A few days ago your greatest rival was a man born with a diamond-encrusted spoon in his mouth, a party insider for years. And now it’s this orphaned student, who wants for her brother what she never had for her father: a grave beside which she can sit and weep for the awful, pitiable mess of her family life. Look at her, Karamat: look at this sad child you’ve raised to your enemy, and see how far you’ve lowered yourself in doing that.”
The ice coffin was sealed up now, slabs laid on top of the corpse, the face no longer uncovered. What state of decay had it reached for her to allow that? Where before there were people nearby, now she seemed to be alone with the body, in the singed grass, beneath the banyan tree, rose petals desiccated around her. The smell, Karamat guessed. It had pushed everyone to the periphery. Soon his son would walk into this park, into the stench of death, the woman he loved at its center.
“Oh, god,” he said, seeing it—his boy surrounded by the rot-drenched horror.
“And you’ve lost your son too,” Terry said. She placed her hand over his eyes, and her touch made something in him stop, something else in him start. He bent his head forward, resting the too-great weight of it against his wife’s palm. Once, on an afternoon when rain beat on the windows, he’d sat here with his arm around his son’s shoulder, comforting him through his first heartbreak. Eamonn all of thirteen, just the age at which he’d stopped allowing a father’s embrace, except in this moment of pain. The elements raging fierce outside, and Karamat helpless with love for the boy weeping into his shirt. He knew he should tell him to be a man, to take it on the chin, but instead he pulled him closer, grateful beyond measure that it wasn’t mother or sister or best friend that Eamonn had turned to but his father, who loved him best, and always would.
Terry removed her hand. “Be human. Fix it.”
A flutter of silk and she was gone. Now there was only him and the girl who reached out to touch the ice. He bunched his hands together, blew on his cold fingertips. The night his mother had died he’d kept vigil over her body until the morning, reading the Quran out loud because she’d have wanted him to although it touched nothing in his heart. How important it had seemed to do everything with unwavering devotion—not because he believed there was anything left of her to know either way but because it was the last thing he could do for her as a son.
It felt like an effort to reach into his jacket pocket and pull out the phone to call James.
“Thanks for having the tweet about Eamonn taken down, and get me the number of the British deputy high commissioner in Karachi,” he said.
“It wasn’t us who took it down, sir. I’ll text you the number in a minute.”
Hanging up, he considered going to his wife. No, he would fix it, for his son, for the girl, and then he would tell Terry. He stretched out on the sofa, arms crossed over his chest, eyes open. Who would keep vigil over his dead body, who would hold his hand in his final moments?
||||||||||||||||||
Thunder in the house, on the stairs, in the hall. He stood to meet it just as three men from his security detail charged into the room, a human wall around him, a moving wall running him down the stairs, lifting him off his feet and carrying him like a mannequin when he tried to veer away to find his wife, his daughter. Calling out their names, “Terry, Emily,” the only two words in the world that mattered. “Behind you,” his wife’s voice, rapid footsteps following him down. “I have them, sir.” Good man, Suarez! Sirens outside, the human wall moving away from the front door down toward the basement. Guns out, voices coming through the walkie-talkies, Suarez commanding: “Lock the door, don’t let anyone in until we give you the all-clear.” Into the safe room, wife and daughter behind, door pulled shut, Terry turning the multipoint lock.
“Why are we in the bathroom?” Emily said.
It took Karamat a moment to remember his daughter hadn’t been back since he’d become home secretary. She was a visitor from the past, a reminder of a life before. “It’s a safe room now.”
“Oh my god we’re going to die.”
His daughter’s face something he couldn’t bear to look at so he busied himself running his hands along the doorframe. As if he were a father capable of finding a point of vulnerability and fixing it. “Suarez,” he shouted, banging on the door. “What the hell is going on?”
A voice on the other side—Jones, was it?—said, “We’ll get you out as soon as possible,” as though the home secretary and his wife and daughter were in a malfunctioning elevator. The English, sometimes. Even when they were Welsh. He reached into his pocket, but the phone wasn’t there. On the table waiting for James’s text. Emily and Terry didn’t have theirs either. Banged on the door again. “I’m going to need something more than that.”
“Sir, we picked up chatter. About an imminent attack.”
“This isn’t helpful,” Terry said, her arms around their daughter. He should go over to join them, think of something comforting to say, but instead he sat down, back to the tiled wall. What could he say? That they would be all right?
“I’m sorry,” he said, and waited for one of them to tell him it wasn’t his fault.
Terry turned her face away from him, started speaking in a clear, practical tone to their daughter, explaining security protocols, the safety features of this room, the likelihood that chatter
meant nothing was going to happen because why would anyone broadcast plans of an attack that they actually intended to carry out? “Blast-proof” . . . “bulletproof” . . . “air supply.” These were the words with which she reassured their child.
How beautiful they both were, his wife and daughter. While his enemies were out there playing politics to bring him down—leaks and innuendos and muckraking, the stuff that gave Westminster a bad name—he was in a reinforced steel box with his wife and daughter while terrorists tried to kill him. He cupped his hands together like a man about to pray or a father cradling his infant son’s head. Or a politician examining the lines of his palm. He didn’t believe in any form of mumbo jumbo but someone once told him that according to palmistry the lines on your left palm represent the destiny you were born with and the lines on your right the destiny you make for yourself. It had since pleased him to note the wide divergence of the two. Heart line, head line, fate line, life line. At what point had he made himself into a man who thought of saving his political career while his daughter was in need of a father’s reassurance? He patted the floor next to him and took her hand in his when she sat down, her head on his shoulder. Counted her fingers as he’d done when she was born, though until Eamonn he’d always thought that was some myth of parenting that no one actually did.
“Your mother’s right,” he said. “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, go online.” That got a small laugh. “To be honest, I’m pretty sure Suarez is pretending this is a bigger deal than it is as a sort of drill. That’s the way he is. Likes to be very certain all his men—and women, before you correct me—know how to act under pressure.”
Home Fire Page 21