“Googling While Muslim. Aunty, did Isma tell you anything about this person?”
“Why don’t we all call her now?” Aunty Naseem said brightly, and the girl—who made less sense with every second—said, “Please stop trying to make me speak to her. Anyway, I have to go out now. And Mr. Lone, since you’ve delivered the M&M’s you can leave with me.”
Despite Aunty’s noises of protest, he followed the girl out. She didn’t say anything until they were at the end of the street, and then she turned sharply on her heels to face him.
“What’s going on here?”
“I really don’t know what you mean,” he said, holding up his hands. “I was just delivering a package for Isma. As your . . . aunty said, we met in a café. In Massachusetts. Became friends, sort of. Two-Brits-abroad kind of thing.”
A man in a bright red suit that appeared not to have been washed in several years stopped next to Aneeka and held out a filthy square of fur. “Have you met my cat?”
Before Eamonn could chivalrously interpose himself, Aneeka was reaching out to stroke the matted fur as if it were the smoothest mink. “Of course I’ve met Mog, Charlie. She and I are old friends.” The man made happy noises, tucked the fur into his jacket against his heart, and carried on.
After that moment of gentleness, the harshness of her voice when she turned her attention back to him was particularly unsettling. “That doesn’t explain why she asked you to come here.”
“She didn’t. I offered to post it.” He couldn’t imagine articulating to this woman his curiosity about a lost piece of his father, so instead he said, “Okay, this is embarrassing, but I saw a photograph of Isma’s sister, and wanted to know if anyone could really look that beautiful in person.”
She gave him precisely the look of disgust he deserved for such a statement, and strode away without another word.
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The train pulled out of Preston Road station, and he turned in his seat to look out at the houses alongside the tracks. Beyond the back wall and garden sheds of one property a girl flew up, hovered for a moment, fell, flew up again. A trampoline. She made her body a starfish, and though he knew she couldn’t see him, he raised his own hands to mirror hers. He continued to look through the window after the train picked up speed and left Preston Road behind.
When he finally turned to face forward, a woman standing farther along the mostly empty carriage came over and sat next to him.
“Do you live alone?” Aneeka said.
“Yes.”
“Take me there.”
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After the boldness of that line, she barely spoke all the way from Preston Road to Notting Hill. At first he tried to fill the silence with conversation about Isma, but her response made it clear theirs was not the relationship of closeness Isma had portrayed. “Did she tell you—” he started to say, and she replied, “I’m discovering the list of things Isma hasn’t told me is far longer than I would have believed,” which made any further conversation along that line impossible.
On the walk from the tube station to his home she looked around like a tourist, and he was embarrassed by the affluence of the neighborhood he lived in while unemployed. It was an embarrassment not aided by entering his flat, which was paid for and decorated by his mother, with its central open-plan space that combined kitchen, living room, and dining area in an expanse that could double as a playing field and provoked Aneeka to say, “You really live here alone?”
He nodded, offered her tea or coffee. She asked for coffee, before turning to walk the length of his flat, looking at the framed photographs on his shelves—family picture, graduation picture, his friends Max and Alice’s engagement-party picture.
“One of these your girlfriend?” she asked, looking up from the last photograph.
He was all the way at the other end of the flat, by the coffee machine, but his emphatic “No, I’m single” would have carried down a room twice as long. He waited for her to return to the kitchen end and slide onto a high stool at the counter before asking, “And you? Boyfriend?”
She shook her head, dipped a finger into the coffee foam, checking its depth, didn’t meet his eye. Why are you here? didn’t seem like a question he could ask, and might make her leave, which he didn’t think he wanted, although it was hard to know what to want of a silent, beautiful woman in a hijab sipping coffee in your flat.
“Isma prefers turbans,” he said, to say something, indicating her head covering.
She unpinned the hijab, folded it carefully, and placed it between the two of them on the counter, then pulled off the tight-fitting cap beneath it. She shook her head slightly and her hair, long and dark, fell about her shoulders like something out of a shampoo advertisement. She looked at him, expectant.
Eamonn knew what to do when a woman asked to come home with him and began to undress. It was not a situation he was unfamiliar with. But he didn’t know if this was that situation. Though what was it, if not that?
He leaned forward, placed one elbow on the counter, and extended the rest of his arm across the glass-topped distance between them, palm up, resting it close enough to her hand to be an invitation, but distant enough to be ignored without too much awkwardness. She downed the rest of the coffee in a gulp, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, which slightly smeared her lipstick, and placed the hand on his wrist. Coffee foam and lipstick on her skin. He was conscious of the hammering of his heart, the pulse leaping out at her. She smiled then, finally. Taking his other hand, she placed it on her breast but over her shirt. That too was confusing until he realized, no, not her breast, she had placed his hand on her heart, which was beating frantically too.
“We match,” she said, and the promise of her voice made the situation familiar, and thrillingly new.
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The next morning, he is pressing his nose against the sofa, breathing in the smell of her. All these surfaces of his home—walls, bed, sofa—marked with her scent. He walks from one surface to the next, his senses still filled with her.