Home Fire(44)

He took the phone from Farooq, was surprised by the time on the home screen—later than he’d thought. The flight from Istanbul to Karachi would be en route; soon his cousin would call Aneeka to say he was at the airport, the passengers had exited, but there was no sign of Parvaiz.

“Stay here while you speak to her,” Farooq said when Parvaiz started to get up.

He logged on to Skype and called Aneeka, imagining the bubbling sound of an incoming call bouncing around the interior of her tan-colored handbag slung on the handle of the door leading into the living area. He wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers, waited.

When Aneeka answered, his first thought was that her strange expression could be explained by the fact that she expected him to still be on a flight. “Where are you?” she said, voice catching.

“Hey. Before I answer that, promise you’ll . . .”

“Who’s Farooq?”

He glanced at Farooq, who took hold of his wrist and seemed about to pivot the phone toward himself, but the Scotsman quickly caught his shoulder. “Not if she’s unveiled,” he said.

“Who are you with? P, where are you?” she said.

“Why are you asking about Farooq?”

“You should be on a plane. The plane left on time. I checked. Why aren’t you on the plane?”

“Calm down, it’s okay. Why are you asking about Farooq?”

“Abdul told his mother you’ve gone with his friend’s cousin Farooq. To Raqqa. Where are you really?”

“Can’t even trust your own family to keep secrets anymore,” Farooq said, but without looking unduly displeased.

“I would never go to the place you think Raqqa is. But it’s not that place.”

Something was squeezing his voice box, making the words come out funny. The American was giving him that look again, that shake of the head. Aneeka’s face was unfamiliar to him for the first time in his life—an expression there he hadn’t seen before and didn’t know how to interpret. Her mouth a strange shape, pursed, as though she were eating something awful that she could neither spit out nor swallow. Then she vanished, and Isma was there.

“You selfish idiot,” she said. This was easier to contend with—he rolled his eyes at Farooq, placed two fingers against his temples to mime a gun firing into his brain. “Watch your manners, brother. We have company.” She swiveled the phone, and two men were standing in their living room, everything surrounding them as familiar as his own heartbeat. “Say hello to the men from the Met,” Isma’s voice continued, conversational. “They’re going to turn our house and our lives upside down. Again. Do you have anything you want to say to them?”

He was conscious of the three men on the balcony watching him, waiting to see his response to the news that the police knew where he was and now there was no going back.

“My sisters didn’t know anything,” he said to the men from the Met whose faces were made of stone.

Farooq took the phone from him. “I will plant the flag of the caliphate on Buckingham Palace myself,” he said, and jabbed the phone to end the call. “What?” he said, in response to Parvaiz’s cry of outrage. “I should’ve said Downing Street instead?”

The Scotsman leaned forward, touched Parvaiz’s knee sympathetically. “It’s all right. Allah will protect them while you’re here doing His work. Inshallah.”

Parvaiz looked at the man’s shining eyes, his certainty, and lowered his head as if in prayer so that the others couldn’t see his panic.

||||||||||||||||||

Panic was a familiar companion, months later, of the man who sat at the back of the café, where the bright light of the June afternoon couldn’t reach. Every so often he reminded himself to look down at the tourist guidebook, sip the apple-flavored tea.

The open-fronted café allowed him to observe life along the narrow Istanbul street that carried tourists and residents between Galata Tower and the Golden Horn. The tiniest things seemed exceptional: a silver bracelet catching the light on a woman’s wrist; a woman’s wrist itself. Voices speaking over the azaan from the city’s mosques, the sounds of trade continuing undisturbed, as though muezzins demanded as little attention as car horns.

The tray on the table provided a reflective surface, allowing him to see the slight, unremarkable boy from Preston Road whom the barber a few streets away had sheared back into existence. His face was deceptive now with its promise of familiarity to those who had known him when he still was that boy. He ran his hand along the clean-shaven chin, its contrast to the rest of his skin tone worrying him, pulled the baseball cap lower over his close-cropped hair, hunched. Take me somewhere far from here where I can buy clothes, he’d said to the cabdriver he’d frantically hailed after running away from the electronics shop. Then he’d phoned Aneeka.

A voice from the outdoor table, raised, spoke excitedly of “the meeting point of Asia and Europe.” Such outmoded concepts, why did people still think they meant anything? The language of violence, spoken by the powerful of all nations, erased the distinctions beneath the surface. Two girls walked past, laughing, uninhibited. The sound—continuing on, burrowing down from the girls’ throats to their bellies—was more remarkable than bracelets or wrists. Perhaps surface was all there was to fight for. He remembered how it felt to float on a surface of freedom and safety, to feel himself buoyed up by it, and longing tugged at his heart.