Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

On the walk from the tube station to his home she looked around like a tourist, and he was embarrassed by the affluence of the neighborhood he lived in while unemployed. It was an embarrassment not aided by entering his flat, which was paid for and decorated by his mother, with its central open-plan space that combined kitchen, living room, and dining area in an expanse that could double as a playing field and provoked Aneeka to say, “You really live here alone?”

He nodded, offered her tea or coffee. She asked for coffee, before turning to walk the length of his flat, looking at the framed photographs on his shelves — family picture, graduation picture, his friends Max and Alice’s engagement-party picture.

“One of these your girlfriend?” she asked, looking up from the last photograph.

He was all the way at the other end of the flat, by the coffee machine, but his emphatic “No, I’m single” would have carried down a room twice as long. He waited for her to return to the kitchen end and slide onto a high stool at the counter before asking, “And you? Boyfriend?”

She shook her head, dipped a finger into the coffee foam, checking its depth, didn’t meet his eye. Why are you here? didn’t seem like a question he could ask, and might make her leave, which he didn’t think he wanted, although it was hard to know what to want of a silent, beautiful woman in a hijab sipping coffee in your flat.

“Isma prefers turbans,” he said, to say something, indicating her head covering.

She unpinned the hijab, folded it carefully, and placed it between the two of them on the counter, then pulled off the tight-fitting cap beneath it. She shook her head slightly and her hair, long and dark, fell about her shoulders like something out of a shampoo advertisement. She looked at him, expectant.

Eamonn knew what to do when a woman asked to come home with him and began to undress. It was not a situation he was unfamiliar with. But he didn’t know if this was that situation. Though what was it, if not that?

He leaned forward, placed one elbow on the counter, and extended the rest of his arm across the glass-topped distance between them, palm up, resting it close enough to her hand to be an invitation, but distant enough to be ignored without too much awkwardness. She downed the rest of the coffee in a gulp, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, which slightly smeared her lipstick, and placed the hand on his wrist. Coffee foam and lipstick on her skin. He was conscious of the hammering of his heart, the pulse leaping out at her. She smiled then, finally. Taking his other hand, she placed it on her breast but over her shirt. That too was confusing until he realized, no, not her breast, she had placed his hand on her heart, which was beating frantically too.

“We match,” she said, and the promise of her voice made the situation familiar, and thrillingly new.

The next morning, he is pressing his nose against the sofa, breathing in the smell of her. All these surfaces of his home — walls, bed, sofa — marked with her scent. He walks from one surface to the next, his senses still filled with her.

He glances around the room. How is it possible that it appears exactly the same as yesterday? It should look as though a storm has been through. There should be broken vases, torn blinds, upturned furniture. Something to mirror this feeling of turmoil, of everything having changed. He stands in front of the mirror, touches the scratch on his shoulder as though it’s a holy relic. At least there’s this. Cups his hands and lifts them to his face, breathing in. His personal act of prayer.

To start with she’d been hesitant, tentative. During their first kiss, she’d broken away and started to put her hijab back on, before his entreaties convinced her to stay. Then things swung the other way, and she seemed to think she had to prove to him that she really wanted to stay, in the way of a certain kind of adolescent girl who had always made him uncomfortable in his teenage years — the ones who thought they were required to give to the older boys without anything in return. So he stopped her, showed that wasn’t how this would work, and she said, “You’re nice,” as if that was a surprise, and they set about discovering each other in that slow-quick way of new lovers — testing, exploring, building on what each was learning about the other.

At daybreak he woke to discover she’d risen from the bed, to which they’d finally made their way. Hearing the sound of the shower, so early, he thought she was planning to leave without saying good-bye. But when she left the bathroom her footsteps didn’t move in the direction of the door. Eventually he swung himself out of bed and walked into the living room to find her praying, a towel as her prayer mat, the hijab nothing more alien than a scarf loosely covering her head without the elaborate pinning or the tightly fitted cap beneath. She made no sign of being aware of him except a slight adjustment of her shoulders, angling away from his naked form. He should have left immediately, but he couldn’t help watching this woman, this stranger, prostrating herself to God in the room where she’d been down on her knees for a very different purpose just hours earlier. Finally, the depth of her immersion in a world other than that of bodies and senses made him go back to the bed, wondering if she’d return.

“What were you praying for?” he asked when she came back in and started to unbutton her long-sleeved shirt, starting at the base of her neck.

“Prayer isn’t about transaction, Mr. Capitalist. It’s about starting the day right.”

“You had to put on a bra for God?” he said, as she unbuttoned further, needing her to laugh with him about it. “Did you think He might get distracted by your… distractions?”

“You do other things better than you do talk.”

That burned in ways both good and bad. He held back from mentioning that he could say the same for her. When openings for conversation had arisen she preferred to pillow her head in her arms and look up at the ceiling, or doze with her back to him, the soles of her feet pressed against his legs, combining rejection and intimacy. He watched as she continued to undress until there was nothing left but the white scarf covering her head, one end of the soft fabric falling just below her breast, the other thrown over her shoulder.

“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.