Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

He wanted to be done with it, his own grief. It was unbearable, seeping into everything. Her ghost everywhere along these SoHo streets. Did Kim feel it too? He glanced sideways at his daughter, easily keeping pace with his long strides, everything about her appearance a warning: combat pants, steel-toed boots and a bomber jacket half unzipped to reveal the black T-shirt beneath, freshly shorn copper hair sleeked against her cheetah-skull, tipped with the black dye which still hadn’t entirely grown out.

‘Penny for your thoughts, panther,’ he said, wincing at his own inability to exit cliché.

‘Gran was half the reason I’m moving to New York.’ She glanced up at him. ‘You didn’t know I’m moving to New York, did you?’

‘No. But that’s great. I mean, I always picture you here. I know you’ve been in Seattle a while but. the hills, the grunge, the self-conscious coffee drinking! No, no, not my daughter. It’s always seemed like one of those short-term flings, you know?’

‘I know short-term flings, Dad. Just not as well as you do.’ She grinned, and put her arm through his.

Surprised, but far from displeased, he squeezed her arm and tried to think what a father should say in such a moment, his daughter’s eyes still red with weeping as they had been ever since he arrived yesterday just in time to bury Ilse.

‘Sweetheart, she died as she would have wanted to. In her sleep, at peace, after what Hiroko tells me was a raucous dinner with her closest friend. We should all be so lucky.’

‘Doesn’t make me miss her less,’ Kim said, resting her head against her father’s shoulder.

They walked that way for a while, though the posture was slightly awkward. The SoHo crowds were thinned in the post-Christmas doldrums, for which Harry was grateful. Too much time in narrow mountain passes these past weeks, and his body was still primed for danger. The fire escapes running in zigzags along the length of cast-iron buildings looked like misshapen spines, deliberately twisted out of shape, and on either side of the street buildings loomed, their windows reflecting sunlight as the barrel of a gun might do.

‘What’s the other half,’ he said, ‘of the reason why you’re moving to New York?’

‘This.’ Kim waved her hands in the direction of the flags flying from every edifice, then gestured to the emptied skyline. ‘The thing about structural engineers, Dad, is that we knew right away. Switched on the television, saw the flames, and knew the building would fall. The rest of the country had a few minutes’ grace but we were the Cassandras standing in front of the first images, saying it’s coming down, all of it. And then the second one. From that moment, I haven’t wanted to be anywhere except back here.’ She looked around fiercely. ‘We’ll keep building.’

The Cassandras! Harry thought. Because you predicted total disaster an hour before it happened? Just one hour.

‘If you slow down construction the terrorists have won,’ Harry said, and felt her arm slip out of his.

‘I suppose this is all very mundane to you,’ she said. ‘Death and destruction. Good for business and entirely unsurprising.’ She knelt down by a lamp post and buried her hands in the thick fur of the collie leashed to it, furious at how much she had wanted his understanding. The cold seeped from the sidewalk through her combat pants.

Harry held his hand out and the collie, who had accepted Kim’s attention with the air of an aristocrat receiving nothing more than what’s due, nuzzled at his palm.

Traitor , Kim thought.

‘Unsurprising, yes,’ Harry said. It’s true, he was entirely unsurprised by 9/11 — had, in fact, assumed a jihadi connection to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 — but he was also stunned by his reaction to it, the depth of his fury, the wish for all the world to stop and weep with him for the city which had adopted him when he was eleven. He was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the time, overseeing the setting up of Arkwright and Glenn’s operation to provide security for a Belgian diamond-export company, and was well aware of how disproportionate his attitude must seem in a country which had lost more than two and a half million people in a war which seemed to have pauses rather than an end. He sat down with a calculator on 12 September, and worked it out to more than two thousand deaths a day, each day, for over three years — but he couldn’t find any way to connect those numbers to his emotions. ‘And good for business, very definitely.’

‘Well, that’s honest,’ Kim said, standing up and swatting at her combat pants with far greater vigour than was necessary to brush off the dust.

‘It’s only part of the story. We only ever hear part of each other’s story, panther.’

‘We?’ She stared at him and shook her head. ‘You’re the one who keeps leaving.’

‘I’m here now.’

‘How long?’

He looked away.

‘Thought so.’ Despite the disappointment there was a satisfaction about being right.

‘Kim, you and I — we’re going to spend a lot of time together soon. More than you want. Take that as a threat or a promise.’

‘Sure,’ she said, her voice tight with disbelief. ‘When the abstract noun is defeated. or will you be going after horror and misery next?’

He couldn’t help laughing.

‘Your father’s an old man. I’ll be sixty-five in June. Retirement time, sweetheart.’

Kim snorted.

‘You’ll never retire.’

‘Well, OK,’ he admitted. ‘But I’ll take a holiday. How about we go to Delhi together? I’ll show you my childhood.’

It was an old promise, but she couldn’t help being drawn in by it. That was the thing about Harry Burton which made his smiles so impossible to resist — when he said a thing, he meant it. For that moment.

As they walked down the street there was a strangled sound behind them — Kim turned to see the collie straining at his leash, eyes fixed on Harry. Pathetic , Kim thought, even as she allowed Harry to take her arm and loop it through his own again.

‘Mom sends her condolences,’ she said. ‘She offered to fly across, but I’m not sure I can handle dealing with both of you at the same time.’

Harry’s laugh was an acknowledgement of the truth behind that lightly uttered comment.

‘How is she? Still masterfully hiding the heart I broke behind a veneer of total happiness with what’s-his-name?’

‘Yes, Dad, she’s still very happily married. Desperately worried about me, though. She thinks the fact that I’ve been single for over three months is some kind of curse. Last time we spoke she said when I meet men I shouldn’t tell them what I do for a living. Apparently, engineering is too macho. It scares off the boys. I think she’s trying to tell me I come across as a lesbian.’

‘You come across as you,’ Harry said. ‘And if the boys think that puts you out of their league, they’re probably right!’

She knew he wasn’t just trying to win her over with cheap compliments. Whatever else could be said about Harry as a father, he left no doubt about his belief that his daughter was the best thing his life had ever produced. She took his hand in hers, as she used to when she was still young enough to pretend she needed his help crossing the road.

Further down the street, a woman — elegantly dressed in camel-coloured winter coat with a beret jauntily angled on her head — was staring intently at a store window.

‘What is she looking at?’ Harry whispered, horrified, and Kim laughed and let go of his arm to rush forward to Hiroko.

The window was dominated by a male mannequin dressed in skintight leather, an improbable bulge below his waist. Kim put her arms around Hiroko’s shoulders and they stood there — half laughter, half tears — recalling Ilse stopping in front of the mannequin on her ninetieth birthday, saying, ‘I wonder what this decade will be like? My eighties were not what I anticipated — Viagra, you know. All those old lovers crawled out of the woodwork.’