Home Fire(26)

He grinned, stretched out a leg, laid it over her knee, part of her thigh, and picked up the knife he was using to cut into the cherries and flip out the stones with his thumb. “This reminds me of a summer holiday in Tuscany when I was ten or eleven. Cherries and gelato, that’s all my sister and I ate the whole summer. At least in my memory.”

“What do people do when they go away on holiday? Other than eat cherries and gelato.”

“You’ve never . . . ?”

“There was a trip to Rome once, the year before my mother died. The travel agency she worked for gave her free tickets—but it felt more like a school trip than a holiday. She thought we should see as many sights and spend as little money as possible.”

“What was she like, your mother?”

“Stressed. Always. It’s what killed her. Isma said she used to be different—when my grandfather was alive and paying the bills, when my father wasn’t yet a terrorist who could have us all driven out of our homes if any of us said the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

“I really don’t know how you survived your childhood.”

“Didn’t feel like it was something that needed surviving until she died. Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.” She smiled, shrugged. “But then again, no one told me I was missing out on holidays with cherries and gelato raining down. If I’d known that, I would have been much more disgruntled.”

“Well, we should go somewhere together. As soon as your summer holidays start.” She gave him the look of exasperation he was accustomed to receiving every time he suggested anything that involved leaving his flat. “Come on, it’s time we entered the world together. We can start with Max and Alice rather than my parents if you want to ease into things. And isn’t it time you told Isma? Maybe even that brother of yours?”

“Not yet,” she said.

Exasperated, he threw a cherry pit into the bowl with such force that it bounced out and landed on the dressing gown, leaving a crimson stain on a white stripe.

“Let’s go back to pretending it’s a game,” she said, flicking the stone onto his bare leg. “Who needs other people? Who needs to leave London on a vacation when everything we want is right here in this flat?”

“I’m not bloody spending my summer locked up in here. Neither are you. Come to Tuscany with me. Come to Bali. You don’t want other people, fine. We’ll find a remote island somewhere.”

“If we try to leave the country together the people who work for your father will know.” At his puzzled look: “MI5. They listen in on my phone calls, they monitor my messages, my Internet history. You think they’ll think it’s innocent if I board a plane to Bali with the home secretary’s son?”

It was a mark of his love for her that he felt nothing other than protective about the Muslim paranoia she’d revealed the previous day. Gently he said, “My love, I promise you MI5 isn’t watching you because of your father.”

“I know. They’re watching me because of my brother. Ever since he went to Syria, to Raqqa, last year.”

“I don’t understand,” he said automatically.

“Yes you do.”

He rubbed at the cherry mark on his leg. It was something to do while his brain sat inert in his skull, offering him nothing that would make this explicable.

“He’s fighting there?”

“Parvaiz, fighting? God, no! He’s with their media unit.”

Their. The black-and-white flag, the British-accented men who stood beneath it and sliced men’s heads off their shoulders. And the media unit, filming it all.

He stood up, walked to the edge of the roof. As far from her as it was possible to go. In his life he’d never known anything like this feeling—rage? fear? What is it, make it stop. He kicked out, knocked over the kumquat tree. Shoved with his hands, toppled the cactus plant. The kumquat fell straight, flower pot shattering as it hit the ground; for an instant the root-entangled soil held its shape, then the plant leaned forward and collapsed, orange fruit rolling around the garden patio. The cactus, by contrast, wheeled in the air, upturning itself as it fell, never before so anthropomorphized as with arms outstretched in a headfirst plummet, its neck snapping in two on impact.

He became aware of everyone in the communal garden looking up to see the madman on the terrace, the woman in a dressing gown stepping forward to take him by the hand and pull him toward the window. He allowed himself to be led, but once indoors he shook himself free of her, strode into the kitchen area, and opened a bottle of beer, which he downed in two long drafts, maintaining eye contact with her the whole while.

“Fight like a man, not a boy,” she said.

“That the kind of advice that gets passed down from father to son in your family?”

The words hung horribly in the beer-stenched air. He put down the bottle and hunched onto a stool, looking at the cherry stains on his hands. Through the open window he could hear the raised voice that was his neighbor coming outside to see the carnage on his patio. Aneeka sat down on the stool facing him, the long room with its tasteful decorations extending behind her, its track lighting in the ceiling, its expensive art. All of it his mother’s handiwork. Every part fitting seamlessly together except this woman whom he’d allowed in.

“He wants to come back home,” she said.