Home Fire(23)

“I love you all,” he said, meaning it. He felt in love with everything: the Pimm’s, the furniture, the ironic gnomes in the garden, the sky with its bands of sunset colors. “But I’m really fine. Just doing my own thing, under the radar.”

“I don’t know,” Max said. “Twenty-something unemployed male from Muslim background exhibits rapidly altered pattern of behavior, cuts himself off from old friends, moves under the radar. Also, are we sure that’s an evening shadow rather than an incipient beard? I think we may need to alert the authorities.”

“Take it straight to the home secretary,” Hari said. “At least he’s drinking Pimm’s, so we know we haven’t lost him completely.”

He hardly drank anymore. Aneeka hadn’t told him not to, but the first time he’d moved in for a kiss with alcohol on his breath she’d recoiled. Even after he’d brushed his teeth, she said she could still smell it. “Sorry,” she’d said. “We can do the other things, but just don’t kiss me.” That distilled the issue in a way that made only one outcome possible. He leaned back in his chair, looked at his friends and tried to imagine walking into this garden with Aneeka—the hijab, the refusal of alcohol, Wembley. Everyone would be perfectly polite, but at some point the following day, either Max or Alice would call him up to say, “Lovely girl. I hope she didn’t mind our sense of humor?” No relationship had ever withstood “hope she didn’t mind our sense of humor.”

“What would you have done if I had walked in with a full beard?” he said, picking a piece of apple out of his Pimm’s and chucking it at Max.

Alice made one of those annoying humming sounds of hers that was meant to, and did, stop Max from reacting, and came around to pull Eamonn’s head to her stomach, stroking his hair as if he were a child.

“We’d hold you down and shave it off, my darling. Friends don’t let friends become hipsters.” It was the kind of glib answer he’d previously have found amusing, but now he was impatient with it, with her, with the stale dynamic of all of them. What was the point of surrounding yourself with other versions of yourself all the time?

He allowed Alice to hold his head against her almost concave stomach, so that his friends could exchange whatever glances they needed to, and all the while he was thinking, before Aneeka there was Alice. This body, these hands, this scent. Less than two months after it ended he had given his blessing when Max wanted all that for himself, and he’d meant it. How had he ever imagined what he’d felt was passion, let alone love? Before Aneeka, there was only the facade of feeling. And now he was in so deep that everyone but Aneeka was blurred and indistinct, poor creatures of the surface, their voices receding.

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Every so often there were times she would switch out of the frequency of their relationship. That was the only way he knew to describe it to himself; a sudden transformation, as if an elbow had accidentally pressed against a radio button and, mid-note, jazz became static. She’d turn cold, or sad, sometimes angry, and any attempts to talk to her about it were futile. One particularly strange night he woke up in the early hours of the morning to see her standing at the foot of the bed, staring at him with one of her unreadable expressions. When he called to her she said, “Go back to sleep and tell yourself you dreamed it.” He tried talking to her instead—demanding to know what was wrong, made angry by his own inexplicable fear—and she ended up leaving, Eamonn following her on the street in boxers and flip-flops to make sure she was safe until a cab came along and she stepped into it.

Worse followed just a few days later. They were having a languorous afternoon, lying on a thick-pile rug, playing favorite songs from their childhood for each other, swapping stories of growing up. Aneeka was teasing him gently for thinking that his was the more “normal” life despite his millionaire parents, both of whom regularly appeared in the newspapers. The trace unpleasantness of that strange night had finally disappeared, and they were both grateful for this return to happiness, slightly silly with each other. Her mouth against his arm, blowing out to make trumpetlike noises in time with the music, when her phone announced an incoming Skype call. She always ignored calls, no matter who it was—from one particular expression of distaste he guessed it was often Isma—but even so, she had to check her screen when she heard the sound.

“You’re not going to answer it. Stop with the Pavlovian response,” he said, pretending to grab for her ankle as she scrambled to her feet. He was too lazy, though, to turn and watch her reach for the phone. The next track that came on was one he loved and hadn’t heard in ages, and he turned up the volume and sang along. It was a few seconds before he realized she had left the room, and he went in search of her to apologize for raising the volume just as she answered the phone, which is what must have driven her away.

She wasn’t in the hall or the bedroom, but the bathroom door was closed and through it he could hear sounds but not the words they formed. He stepped up to the door and put his ear to it.

“I’m making sure of things here,” he heard her say.

At the end of the sentence her voice seemed to move closer to the door, and he backed away and quickly returned to the living room. It was a long time before she joined him there, and when she did her eyes were bloodshot, as if she’d been crying, but also glinting with a kind of frenzy that he’d only ever known in the manic or the high.