After the conversation with Aunty Naseem, Isma called her sister repeatedly, but it was late at night London time before she replied. The lamp at her bedside cast a small pool of light that illuminated the book resting on her chest—an Asterix comic, an old childhood favorite—but left her face in darkness.
“The Migrants have a new car. A BMW. A BMW in our driveway. What next? A pony? An AGA? An au pair?” When the tenants had moved into the house in which the siblings had grown up, and replaced the net curtains with obviously expensive blinds that were almost always lowered, Aneeka said she sympathized for the first time with residents of a neighborhood who felt aggrieved when migrants moved in. The nickname had stuck despite Isma’s attempts to change it.
“I’m surprised you noticed—Aunty Naseem says she hardly sees you. And neither do your uni friends.”
“I must really be behaving badly if Aunty Naseem is driven to complaining,” Aneeka said.
“She’s concerned, that’s all.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to worry her. Or you. It’s just easier being on my own these days. I suppose I’m learning why solitude has always been so appealing to you.”
“I’ll come home. Spring break is starting soon. We can at least have a week together.” The thought of London was oppressive, but Isma kept that out of her voice.
“You know you can’t afford it, and anyway, you don’t want to have to go through that airport interrogation again. What if they don’t let you board this time? Or if they give you a hard time when you return to Boston? Also, I’ve got papers due. That’s the main reason why no one’s seen me. I’m working. The law makes you work. Not like sociology, where you get to watch TV and call it research.”
“Since when do we lie to each other?”
“Since I was fourteen and said I was going to watch Parvaiz at cricket nets, but instead I went to meet Jimmy Singh at McDonald’s.”
“Jimmy-Singh-from-Poundland Jimmy Singh? Aneeka! Did Parvaiz know?”
“Course he knew. He always knew everything I did.”
The night they discovered what Parvaiz had done, Aneeka had allowed Isma to brush out her long dark hair as their mother used to do when she had a daughter in need of comforting, and partway through Aneeka leaned back into her sister and said, “He never explained why he didn’t tell me about the Ibsen tickets.” Months after their mother died, Parvaiz, a boy suddenly arrived into adolescence in a house where bills and grief filled all crevices, had decided he needed a laptop of his own so that his sisters wouldn’t disrupt his work on the sound projects that had recently become an obsession. One night he sneaked out of the house when everyone had gone to sleep, took the bus to Central London, and waited from midnight until mid-morning outside a theater in the West End for return tickets to the opening night of an Ibsen play that an actor recently elevated, via a superhero role, to the Hollywood A-list was using to reestablish his credentials as a serious thespian. Parvaiz bought two tickets with money he’d “borrowed” from the household account using Isma’s debit card, and quickly sold them both for an astronomical sum. He announced all this, sauntering into the house like a conquering hero, only to be confronted with his sisters’ rage. Isma’s anger came from the thought of the overtime she worked to keep the debt collector from the door, and from the thought of every horror that could befall a young boy in a world of racists and pedophiles; but Aneeka’s rage was far greater. “Why didn’t you tell me? I tell you everything—how could you not tell me?” Both Parvaiz and Isma, accustomed to Aneeka’s being the buffer between them, had been completely unprepared for this. Six years later, that story was all Aneeka could grasp to help her understand her brother’s subterfuge. Isma had an easier answer: his father’s son; a fecklessness in the gene pool.
“Boys are different from us,” Isma said. “They see what they want through tunnel vision.”
The screen became a place of confusion, all motion and shapes, for a few seconds, and then she saw her sister lying in bed, face turned toward the phone that had been settled in its dock.
“Maybe if we start looking now for cheap flights I could come to you for my Easter break,” Aneeka said, but Isma shook her head firmly before the sentence was finished.
“Don’t want me telling the security monkeys at Heathrow how much I admire the Queen’s color palette?”
“I do not.” Her muscles tightened at the thought of Aneeka in the interrogation room. “Are we really not going to talk about the fact that Parvaiz has reappeared on Skype?”
“If we talk about him we’ll argue. I don’t want to argue right now.”
“Neither do I. But I want to know if you’ve spoken to him.”
“He sent a chat message just to say he’s okay. You get the same?”
“No, I got nothing.”
“Oh, Isma. I was sure you had. I would have told you otherwise. Yes, just that. He’s okay. He must have assumed I’d tell you as soon as I heard.”
“That would imply he remembers how to think about anyone other than himself.”
“Don’t, please. I know anger is the way you express your concern but, just don’t.”
Anger is the way I express my anger, she would have said on another night, but tonight she said “I miss you.”
“Stay with me until I fall asleep,” Aneeka said, her hand reaching toward Isma, swerving to switch off the light.
“Once upon a time, there lived a girl and a boy called Aneeka and Parvaiz, who had the power to talk to animals.”
Aneeka laughed. “Tell the one with the ostrich,” she said, voice muffled by her pillow.
She was asleep before Isma was done telling the childhood story their mother had invented for her firstborn and Isma had modified for the twins, but Isma stayed on the line, listening to their breath rise and fall together as in all those times when Aneeka would crawl into Isma’s bed, awakened from or into some night terror, and only the older sister’s steady heartbeat could teach the younger one’s frantic heart how to quiet, until there was no sound except their breath in unison, the universe still around them.
2
ALL MORNING SHE PRETENDED not to notice him sitting across the café basement, working on a crossword. But when she ordered a sandwich for lunch and brought it to her table, he came over and said he was about to have a bite himself, would it be all right if he sat with her.
“Preston Road,” he said, returning a few minutes later with a plate of pasta. “It sounded familiar when you said that’s where you grew up but I didn’t know why until I looked it up on a map. That’s in Wembley. My father’s family lives somewhere around there. I used to visit every Eid.”
“Oh, really?” she said, choosing not to mention that she knew exactly where his father’s family used to live, and that she also knew, as he seemed not to, that they’d moved away, to Canada.
“There was a song my cousins used to sing to my little sister when the adults weren’t around. I’ve had a line of it stuck in my head for years. Drives me crazy that I can’t remember the rest, and my sister has no memory of it. Do you know it?” Unexpectedly he broke into a Pakistani pop song that predated his birth—he was four years her junior, she’d discovered. She recognized the song by the tune more than the words, which came out as gibberish tinged with Urdu. He sang two lines, softly, face turning red—a self-consciousness she wouldn’t have expected, particularly given how pretty his voice was. She pulled up a song for him from the music library on her phone and watched as Eamonn plugged in his headphones—unconscionably expensive; Parvaiz had coveted such a pair. He listened, eyes closed, recognition rather than pleasure in his expression.
“Thank you,” he said, when he was done. “What does it actually mean?”
“It’s in praise of fair-skinned girls, who have nothing to fear in life because everyone will always love their fair skin and their blue eyes.”
“Oh, ye
s,” he said, laughing. “I knew that once. They sang it to tease my sister, but she just treated it as a compliment and made it one. That’s my sister for you.”
“And you? Are you like that too?”
He frowned a little, sliding the tines of his fork into the little tubes of pasta. “No, I don’t think so,” he said in the unconvinced manner of someone who isn’t accustomed to being asked to account for his own character. He raised the fork to his face and with little sucking sounds drew the pasta into his mouth. “Oh, sorry. My table manners are usually better than this.”
“I don’t mind. Do you know any Urdu?” He shook his head, a response his singing had anticipated, and she said, “So you don’t understand ‘bay-takalufi.’”
He sat up straight and raised his hand like a schoolboy. “I do know that one. It’s informality as an expression of intimacy.”
She experienced a brief moment of wonder that a father who hadn’t taught his son basic Urdu had still thought to teach him this word. “I wouldn’t say intimacy. It’s about feeling comfortable with someone. Comfortable enough to forget good table manners. If done right, it’s a sort of honor you confer on the other person when you feel able to be that comfortable with them, particularly if you haven’t known them long.” The words rushing out to cover how her voice had caught at “intimacy.”
“Okay,” he said, as if accepting a proposition. “Let’s be comfortable with each other beyond table manners.” He pushed his plate toward her. Extravagantly, she dipped the crust of her sandwich into his pasta sauce and leaned forward over his plate to bite into it.
At the end of lunch—a lunch that was relaxed, swift-flowing—he stood up and said, “See you here again one of these days? I’ve discovered that when the coffee machine is working, this place has the best cappuccino in town.”
“I only have afternoon classes, and this is my favorite place to spend my mornings,” she said. In fact, she sometimes went to her second-favorite café when it seemed too crowded in here, but really, what was the need for such fussiness?
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The siblings watched one another, and watched one another watching one another. At least it felt that way, though in all probability she was far more aware of the twins than they were of her. She raised her eyes briefly from the screen to see Eamonn at a table neither too close nor too far away from her, so intent on some story in the local paper that he didn’t take his eyes off the page even as he lifted his mug of coffee and drank. Existing in another world entirely from the one she now inhabited for these few seconds each morning at eleven a.m. Her brother had always been a creature of habit, and that at least was something to be grateful for, else hours of every day might go like this: watching Aneeka waiting for Parvaiz to come online, then that moment when the green check mark appeared next to his name, Isma wondering, What is he saying is he telling her something that will upset her is he asking her to become part of this madness he’s joined oh no please he wouldn’t do that but why can’t he just leave her alone; but every day it was only a few seconds before his name moved into the offline column again. Just after, Aneeka would text Isma to say: he checked in. Check in, one twin used to say to the other when there were school trips or sleepovers that kept them apart, and at some prearranged hour a text would arrive saying nothing more than checking in.
When Parvaiz logged off, followed shortly by Aneeka, Isma felt herself released of the day’s burdens and texted a steaming-mug emoji across the room to Eamonn, who in response went upstairs to buy them both fresh cups of coffee. This too had become part of the morning routine over the last week or so—why pretend she wasn’t keeping track? It was nine days since he decided they should be informal in intimacy together. “What’s happening in the world today?” she asked when he returned and sat down across from her, and he presented her his highlights of the local news stories: a bear was reported clawing at a garage door, traffic in the adjoining town was briefly held up because of a three-car accident in which no one was injured, a statue of Ronald McDonald was reported missing from a family’s garden. She said it was clear the Ronald won gold medal for “most local” of the local news stories, but he disagreed on the grounds that Ronald was a global icon.
Daily, after their elevenses, he’d set off to “wander” by wheel and on foot, a Christopher Columbus of modest ambitions, retracing childhood paths and discovering new ones. He would sometimes arrive at the café the next morning with an offering from his journey: a jug of maple syrup from a sugarhouse, a one-dollar bill he’d found nailed to an oak tree with an oak-leaf shape cut out of it, a rubbing from Emily Dickinson’s gravestone, with its peculiar wording—“CALLED BACK”—which he said made Dickinson sound like a faulty product. She learned more about this part of the world from his retelling than from her own living, but when she asked him the point of it all—imagining a travel book—he said surely experience and observation were point enough. What would happen when his savings ran out, she asked, and he said, actually, those savings he’d mentioned were his mother’s—she had recently semiretired and decided that people gave too much of their lives and relationships to work; while there was no talking her daughter out of her seventeen-hour days, she had quite easily convinced her son to try to find other ways of constructing meaning in life than via paychecks and promotions. Isma found this idea compelling and Eamonn’s less-than-halfhearted pursuit of it disappointing. Surely he should be learning a new language, or piloting a ship through waters where refugees in search of safety were known to capsize in their pitiful dinghies.
In the first few days she had thought he might suggest they do something together past elevenses—a movie, a meal, another walk—but she now understood that she was just part of the way he divided up his days, which had structure in place of content. Between “morning newspaper” and “daily wander” there was “coffee with Isma.” Even the fact that spring break had now started and she’d made it clear she had time on her hands hadn’t changed that.
His father was often a topic of conversation during coffee, but always as “my father,” never as a man in the public eye. The picture Eamonn conjured up, of a devoted, indulgent, practical-joking parent, was so at odds with Isma’s image of the man that she sometimes wondered if the whole thing were an elaborate fiction to disguise the truth about his father. But then she’d observe Eamonn’s unguarded manner and know this wasn’t true.
One morning he was late to the café. She thought it was because of the weather—winter had returned. Snow slashed across the windowpanes, the sky was white, cars alerted cops that they’d overstayed their two-hour parking limit by the depth of snow on their roofs. Just as she’d got past the distraction of his absence and submerged herself in the problem of missing variables for her statistics course, a text arrived from Aneeka:
Have you heard? Lone Wolf new home secretary.
She must have said something out loud because the woman sitting next to her asked, “Are you okay?” but she was already clicking on a bookmark in her browser, pulling up a news site with a BREAKING NEWS banner announcing a cabinet reshuffle, the most significant change of which was the appointment of a new home secretary. There he was—the man whom she had thought Eamonn looked just like before she’d spent enough mornings noticing the particulars of his face, his mannerisms. The accompanying article described the newly elevated minister as a man “from a Muslim background,” which is what they always said about him, as though Muslim-ness was something he had boldly stridden away from. Inevitably, the sentence went on to use the phrase “strong on security.”
She felt sick before she could form the thoughts to understand why. Her phone buzzed and she looked down to a series of messages.
It’s all going to get worse.
He has to prove he’s one of them, not one of us, doesn’t he? As if he hasn’t already.
I hate this country.
Don’t call me, I’ll say things I shouldn’t.
Stop spying on our messages you arseholes and find some bankers to arrest.
“Hey, Greta Garbo, why so serious?”
He sat down across from her, one arm slung over the back of the chair. Such a languid contrast to the coiled spring of his father. She slammed the lid of the laptop, flipped the phone screen over.
“You’re late,” she said.
“Big family news.” He leaned forward, smiling, a proud son. The table was so small his knees knocked against hers. “My father’s just been appointed the new home secretary. Karamat Lone. You know who he is, right?” She nodded, took a sip of coffee for something to do. “I guess you’re one of the people who doesn’t see my face, hear the surname, and put two and two together.”
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