Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire

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?”