Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire

“No,” Terry said when he pushed the door open. “No. Out.”

“I’ll sit there,” he said, pointing to the stool next to her dressing table.

“I spoke to our son. He told me what you said. About the blow job. Are you an expert on the better ones out there?”

“Whatever my failings are you know that isn’t one of them,” he said, loosening his tie, kicking off his shoes.

“Karamat, I mean it. Out.”

There was no arguing with her in this mood. Unbelievable that his son should have repeated that part of the conversation to his mother — did he know nothing about the rules between men? Down the stairs he went again to the consolations of a laughably expensive bottle of red wine, a gift that Terry had been saving for a special occasion. The ground floor was the place for formal entertaining, the basement the space in which he shut himself away from his family — each as alienating as the other, in the circumstances. He took the wine outside to the patio, where the moving shadows made him drop into a squat to offer as small a target as possible before he realized they were there for his protection. He finally ended up in the kitchen, sitting on the counter, swinging his legs as his children used to do when he would prepare breakfast for them while his wife was on a business trip somewhere. The kitchen table had long since been removed and a gleaming chrome island was in its place to allow more space for cheese boards, platters of canapés, glasses — sorry, children, “flutes”—of champagne. He rolled up his sleeves, picked up the wineglass. The first Indian cricketer to be loved by the English, Ranjitsinhji, always wore his sleeves buttoned at the wrist to hide his dark skin — something about holding an expensive glass of wine made Karamat understand how he’d felt. He let the wine sit in his mouth before it slid down with all the languor of the overpriced.

There was a gentle knock on the door leading outside, and a moment later Suarez entered.

“You’re supposed to be off duty.”

“My men called. There’s someone who’s been walking repeatedly up and down the street. Jones finally asked her what she wanted and she said she knew you lived on this street but didn’t know which house, and thought if she loitered long enough your security detail would identify themselves.”

Karamat grunted in amusement. “Who is she?”

“Isma Pasha. The sister—”

“I know who that is. Bring her in.”

“In here, sir?”

“My mother didn’t raise me to turn women out onto the street at midnight. And Suarez, there are only male officers tonight, aren’t there? Keep the pat-down minimal.”

“Too late for that, sir. Your security comes first.”

When she entered her eyes scanned the dimensions of the kitchen and Karamat could already feel a judgment being passed. He poured wine into a second glass and slid it across the chrome island toward her.

“No thank you,” she said, instead of the expected purse-lipped I don’t drink . She looked nothing like the girl — not just a matter of coloring and features but also the way she was holding in her body, as if aware enough to understand she was in the presence of a man who had all the power and might just choose to exercise it. Probably a virgin, he thought, and wondered when he’d become the kind of man who reacted in this way to the sight of a woman with a covered head who made no effort to look anything but plain.

“It may just be worth going to hell for,” he said, taking a long sip.

She picked up the glass with both hands and sniffed its contents. “Smells like petrol.”

There had been a moment, experienced in the pit of his stomach, in which he’d thought she was going to take a sip because she believed he was demanding it as the price of listening to whatever she had to say. “What do you want?” he said, the tone of his voice making Suarez step forward from his post near the door to see what the girl had done.

“I want to fly to Karachi in the morning without anyone at the airport stopping me from going.”

He took her glass and poured it into his. “Your statement to the press was exactly as it should have been. It made me think you were reasonable.”

“She’s my sister. Almost my child.”

“She doesn’t show much concern for you, though, does she?”

“Do you love your children based on how much concern they show for you?”

“Watch yourself.” Not a girl, this one. An adult, far more dangerous than that banshee in the dust.

“Eamonn worships you. And you’ve allowed the world to think he’s a fool.”

“That was his doing, not mine. A girl that obsessed with her brother never said anything about him that should have raised suspicions? Or about her father?”

She leaned back against the fridge, her elbow pressing a button on the LED panel that smoothly ejected two cubes of ice from the dispenser before she jerked away. The noiseless efficiency had always been a disappointment — in his childhood he coveted the rattling, groaning ice dispenser in the fridge door of one of the Wembley relatives. Isma Pasha of Preston Road, the upmarket end of Wembley, picked up one of the ice cubes from the grille onto which it had been deposited and briefly became the embodiment of all his childhood ambitions. Surely she was among those who could be saved, despite the wreckage of her family.

“Eamonn knew about our father all along. I told him, before he even met Aneeka.”

She was standing there with an ice cube melting between her fingers, not knowing what to do with it now that she’d picked it up. A picture of harmless awkwardness. A wolf in lamb’s clothing.

“You’ve been sensible so far. Keep being sensible,” he said, swirling the wine in his glass, looking contemplatively into the miniature blood ocean.

“What? No, I didn’t mean…” She placed the ice in the empty wineglass, where it soaked up the color of the remaining droplets of red. “Do you think I’d try to make it my word against the office of the home secretary? Or that I’d try to make things worse for Eamonn? I only meant to suggest your son has more character than you give him credit for. There’s strength where you think there’s weakness.”

“You’re very impassioned on the subject of my son. Pity he didn’t end up with you instead of that sister of yours. You I’d accept.”

“He didn’t want to end up with me,” she said, her tone flat.

He raised his eyebrows at her over his wineglass. “Was that an option?”

“No.”

“There are interesting shades of ‘yes’ in that ‘no.’ We may have to return to it one day. But first let’s deal with the situation in which we find ourselves. You’re here to ask a favor. All right. Let’s see how sensible you are. Will you convince her to let the body be buried, in Karachi? No airline would carry it in the state it’s now in anyway.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the ice cube in the glass, now pinkly melting.

“There’s no convincing her. I want to be with her, that’s all.”

Those were almost exactly the words Eamonn had used. I only want to be with her. Meaningless words from a weak boy. He had been repeating that word to himself endlessly about his son: “weak.” He took hold of the almost-emptied glass on the chrome island, swallowed the numbingly cold water with its tinge of something else. A foreign body in ice.

“Suarez, where is my son?”

“Normandy, sir. On Miss Alice’s estate.”

“Is someone watching him?”

“Sir, no. I thought it would be enough to watch his… Aneeka Pasha… to ensure there was no further contact, as you asked. Would you like me to—”

“No, no. You’ve done the right thing. Well, thank you, Suarez, for coming out so late. You can leave me here with her. I’m closer to the knife block than she is.”