Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

“So, Isma,” he said tentatively. “She speaks about you as if you’re close.”

There was silence for a while, and he wondered if mentioning Isma had been a bad idea. He felt strangely guilty about her; straitlaced, pious Isma. She wouldn’t approve of what they had done here. If he was thinking that, surely Aneeka was too. He threaded his fingers through her hair, wondered if her sister’s disapproval would be a reason for her never to come to him again, held her tighter.

“We used to be close,” she said. “But now I don’t want her anywhere near my life. Are you in touch with her?”

“Not since I left. But I thought I’d drop her a line to say I’d been to Aunty Naseem’s. Why, would you rather I wasn’t in touch with her?”

“Would you do that for me if I asked?”

“I think I would do any number of outrageous things for you if you asked,” he said, tracing a beauty mark on the back of her hand. “But don’t give me too much credit for this one — it’s not as if she’s written to me. I think we both recognize it was just one of those holiday friendships which there’s no point trying to carry into the rest of your life.” The complication of fathers was not an issue he felt any need to bring up while they were lying naked together.

There was another stretch of silence, then she said, “When I leave, will you want to see me again?”

“That can’t possibly be a serious question.”

“If this is something that’s continuing, then I do want you to do something outrageous for me. Let me be your secret.”

“How do you mean?”

She placed her open palm against his face and dragged it slowly down. “I won’t tell anyone about you, you don’t tell anyone about me. We’ll be each other’s secret.”

“Why?”

“I don’t ask ‘why’ about your fantasies, do I?” she said, sliding a bare thigh between his legs.

“Oh, this is a fantasy, is it?” Distracted by the beginnings of a rocking motion she was making, the friction of her skin against his.

“I don’t want my friends wanting to know when they can meet you. I don’t want Aunty Naseem inviting you round for a meal. I don’t want Isma thinking she can use you as a conduit to me. I don’t want other people interpreting us. I don’t want you wanting any of those things either. Just want me, here, with you. Say yes.”

“Yes.” Yes, yes, yes.

Over the next few days he discovered her version of secrecy meant he didn’t have her phone number, couldn’t contact her online (couldn’t find her there, in fact), wasn’t permitted to know when she was planning to come and go. She’d simply turn up at some point in the day, sometimes staying for so short a time they never even got completely undressed, other times remaining overnight. Secrecy was an aphrodisiac that gained potency the longer it continued, every moment filled with the possibility that she might appear, so there was no time when he was away from home that he didn’t want to return there, and no moment at home when he didn’t race to the front door at every imagined footstep, every pressed buzzer. Soon he found himself almost incapable of thinking about anything but her. And not just the sex, though he thought about that often enough. The other things also: the concentration with which she brushed her teeth, her fingers tapping on the sink, counting out the number of strokes up and down and to the side; her habit of spraying on his aftershave before showering, claiming the scent would linger under the shower gel, so subtle only she would know it; the way her face transformed into a cartoon — eyes narrowed, lips pressed together, nose wrinkled — when she ate slices of lemon with salt with her morning tea; the precision with which she followed recipes, one tooth biting her lip as she measured out ingredients, even while praising his skill at culinary improvisation. Aneeka drying her hair with a towel, Aneeka balanced cross-legged on a kitchen stool, Aneeka’s face settling into contentment when he took hold of her feet and massaged them.

In the beginning, he was afraid she might choose simply to stop coming around one day. There was a skittishness to her manner, now passionate, now distant. Once she’d even broken off at a moment that left him crying out in dismay to say, “No, I can’t,” dressing quickly and leaving, refusing to explain. He suspected it was her God and His demands that made her want to deny what she clearly had no wish to be denied; he knew he couldn’t win an argument on that score, so there was nothing to do but stay quiet and trust that her headstrong nature ensured that no abstract entity would set the rules for her life.

Sometimes he thought of calling Isma, just to speak to someone who knew Aneeka, just to hear her name. But Aneeka didn’t want him to, and he wasn’t going to get caught in the rupture between sisters that, it turned out, centered around some issue of inheritance. “There was something that belonged to me. She had some claim on it, but mostly it was mine. From our mother. And she took it away from me.” Although he couldn’t believe that Isma would steal something, he could imagine her deciding to sell some family heirloom for financial reasons and seeing no reason to discuss it with the sister whom she sometimes spoke of as though she were still a child in need of parenting.

“And what does your brother say about this?” he asked.

In Eamonn’s mind this brother — Parvaiz — was a slippery ghost, sometimes an ally, sometimes a rival. The slipperiness came from the fractured nature of Aneeka’s stories about him. In her tales of growing up he was her ever-present partner in crime, the shadow who sometimes strode ahead, sometimes followed behind, without ever becoming detached from their twinness, an introspective boy who disapproved of her relationships (“always with older boys, of course”) but helped her keep them hidden from her sister and Aunty Naseem, while remaining perpetually in love with one or another of Aneeka’s friends, who all insisted they loved him as a brother. (Eamonn knew well the pain of this, thanks to his sister’s childhood friend Tilly, of the long legs and bee-stung lips—“I don’t want to know about it,” Aneeka said, which was a balm to her mention of the older boys.) But after school, their lives diverged. Unlike Aneeka, Parvaiz hadn’t received any scholarships; unwilling to start his adult life by taking on crippling loans, he’d instead gone traveling, in the time-honored fashion of drifting British boys. Here he disappeared from her stories.

“I haven’t told him what she did. When he comes back, I will.”

“And when is he coming back?”

She shrugged, and continued clicking through the photographs on his computer, watching his life from childhood to the present day — all the family holidays, all the girlfriends, all the hairstyles and fashion choices and unguarded moments.

“I can’t actually tell if you’re on better terms with him than you are with your sister.”

She zoomed in on a picture of Eamonn with his arm around his father’s shoulder, both in matching T-shirts with the words LONE STAR written on them, the resemblance between them everywhere, from smile to stance. Unlike her sister, Aneeka didn’t seem to have much of an opinion of his father as a political figure, and he sometimes wondered if she’d been too young when her own father had died to have been told what Karamat Lone had said about him.

“He knew Isma was leaving and then he went and left too. It’s nothing I won’t forgive when he comes back. Until then, I’m holding it against him.”

It struck him as unfair to take issue with a nineteen-year-old boy wanting to see the world instead of sitting at home keeping his sister company. But then Aneeka clicked to the next photograph — the Lone parents and children hamming it up for the camera in Addams Family Halloween costumes — and he reminded himself that growing up an orphan obviously created an interdependence between siblings that he, with his affectionate yet disengaged relationship to his sister, couldn’t understand.