Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

‘Why would anyone do this to my father?’ Sonia said.

I hoped it was a general question, and not one addressed to me. I didn’t wait to find out, or turn around to see if she was looking at me. I just squeezed past Zia, who was yelling down the phone: ‘No, I’m not calling about the quiche,’ and went out of the front door, round to the back garden.

Zia came after me. ‘So where’s this wonderful fiancé of hers? Why hasn’t he called? All of Karachi knows by now. Someone’s bound to have got hold of him in London and told him. And why hasn’t she called him?’

‘Go and ask her,’ I snapped.

‘Oh, one of those moods,’ he muttered, and stalked back to the house. Then he turned and strode back. ‘What happened with you and Karim in Mehmoodabad when I went to get my sweater?’

‘I wish I knew. I just seem to have this knack for saying the wrong things sometimes.’

‘If there were prizes awarded for it, you’d win gold, baby.’ He pulled an orange-gold flower out of a flowerpot and handed it to me.

I tucked the flower behind my ear. ‘I can understand Sonia’s friendship with me lasting through the years. She’s a saint. But how the hell have I managed to keep you from slamming the door on your way out?’

‘Well, to start with, we never actually have serious conversations about anything for more than twenty seconds. So there’s a sort of beautiful superficiality to our relationship which sometimes gets covered up by all the genuine affection flowing back and forth.’

‘That must be it.’ I kicked his ankle. ‘So if I actually ever bared my soul to you, it would all be over.’

‘Could be. I know I would never subject you to my bare soul. You, I don’t know. I mean, whether I want to take a joyride in a stolen car, or drive two hundred miles across America to find the perfect milkshake, you’re the girl I call, and you don’t even hold it against me when someone shoots at you or the milkshake machine is broken. But here’s the thing: even in your finest moments you always seems so suspicious of yourself.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Twenty seconds up. End of discussion. I have to try to get hold of my father again.’

I didn’t follow him in, but walked over to the crescent-shaped fish pond, and sat cross-legged on the grass beside it, watching for streaks of gold to fin past between the green pond vegetation. A crow dropped a twig in my lap, and I dipped it beneath the surface of the water and watched the ripples.

A Karim-shaped shadow cast itself over the surface of the water. ‘Whatever your problems are at this moment, they’re totally insignificant compared with Sonia’s, so stop being so bloody selfish and get back inside and at least pretend to be a goddamn friend.’

A fish darted past, a streamlined streak through my reflection. ‘I don’t know how,’ I said.

Karim dropped to his knees beside me. ‘Rubbish.’ But his tone was gentler now.

‘I’m so sure her father’s guilty, Karimazov. And she’s going to know it. I’m such a damned awful liar.’ I shook my head, and swooped my hand down to within millimetres of the water in a bird-of-prey imitation, terrifying the fish into zipping madly about. ‘You know, everyone keeps going on about my wonderful trait of honesty. But it’s only because I know I can’t get away with lying. I squint, or I shift, or I scratch my nose, or I concentrate so much effort on not doing any of those things that I become a statue. It’s pretty pathetic, really.’

‘That is pathetic. And who says your honesty is wonderful? It can be brutal. And will you stop trying to give the fish a heart attack.’ He slapped away my hand, which was still making diving motions towards the water. ‘Maybe you need practice, that’s all. Say something to me that’s a blatant lie. Go on.’

‘I haven’t missed you at all.’

‘Ah, but that’s no good.’ He crossed his legs, and we sat kneecap to kneecap. ‘I would have to believe that’s a lie, no matter how much conviction you put into saying it.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because I’ve missed you too much to be able to bear the thought that it was all one-sided.’ He linked his fingers through mine and we bounced our clasped hands from one knee to the other. We seemed to be encased in such a fragile moment of perfection that I hardly dared breathe for fear of destroying it.

‘Something you want to ask me?’ he said.

‘When did it stop being awful, your parents’ divorce?’

Never letting go of my hand, he pivoted round on his backside and lay down in the grass, resting his head on my knee. ‘Never.’ He held my hand against his chest, and I could feel his heart beat. ‘But you kept telling me I needed to allow my mother to be happy.’

‘When did I say that?’

‘In my head, always. And you were right.’

I ran my fingers along his scalp, tracing the contours of his head beneath the soft, cropped hair. ‘I think there’s a better me inside your head than there is out here in the world. Is that why I make you so angry, Karim? Because I fail to live up to the person you thought I’d turn out to be?’

In those moments just before he answered I wondered how things might have been different had Karim never left. Perhaps we would have grown apart, the secrets between us multiplying as adolescence took over our bodies and our lives, his parents’ marital woes placing a strain on their friendship with my parents, no one sure where loyalties should lie. But instead he left, and that allowed both of us to remember — or re-imagine — our friendship as something mythic, something fated, something waiting to be renewed and transfigured into a more adult version of itself.

He looked up at me and when he breathed out I could smell oranges on his breath. ‘You turned out great,’ he said.

What we both wanted then was impossible in Sonia’s back garden, and would have been utterly foolish anywhere, and I was close enough to forgetting both those things to know we had to go back inside. But when we returned to the house, Sonia looked at the two of us walk in, and though she would never admit it I know it was something in our faces that made her tell everyone that she wanted to sit with her mother for a while, so could we come back later? I started to protest but Zia whispered, ‘Go. Take my car. I’ll stay here.’ The twins nodded agreement and Nadia handed me her mobile and said someone would call if there was any news of Sonia’s father.

I drove Karim to the Club, stopping at Zia’s house and mine just long enough to pick up towels and swimming gear. I knew there’d be hardly anyone there at this hour, and I was right — the only other people in the pool area were a foreigner sunbathing, a father and his daughter playing ping-pong at the table to one end of the pool enclosure, and a man with the physique of a serious swimmer doing laps.

By the time I was out of the changing room, Karim was already standing under the shower at the edge of the pool, his back towards me; I stood on the hot cement strip outside the changing room, watching water stream down his bare limbs. I dug my nails into my palms, reminding myself how idiotic it would be to do anything that I was so close to doing that I could almost taste it.

Stop it, Raheen. I slapped my knuckles.

Karim called out to me, and I walked over to the deep end, laughing to see him walk away from the shower with tiny steps that tried to keep time with the tick-tick-tick sound of unbreakable eggshells bouncing which echoed from the ping-pong table.

‘All right,’ he said, when we stood side by side. ‘So what are we doing, and do you mind if I put my glasses back on and just look at you for a few seconds?’

I smacked him on the back of the head, and lowered myself into the deep end. ‘Just look? You wimp,’ I said, and fitted my goggles over my eyes, the rubber around the eye-pieces pressing securely against my skin. The world was blue-tinged and smelled of chlorine.