“Some guy what?”
She swiveled the stool around. “What do you say to your father when he makes a speech like that? Do you say, ‘Dad, you’re making it okay to stigmatize people for the way they dress’? Do you say, ‘What kind of idiot stands in front of a group of teenagers and tells them to conform’? Do you say, ‘Why didn’t you mention that among the things this country will let you achieve if you’re Muslim is torture, rendition, detention without trial, airport interrogations, spies in your mosques, teachers reporting your children to the authorities for wanting a world without British injustice’?”
“Wait, wait. Stop it. My father would never . . .” He had never heard her speak of any of this since the first time they met, when she’d made her Googling While Muslim comment, which he’d managed to put out of his mind until now. “Do you think he doesn’t know what it is to face down racists? He wants people like you to suffer less from them, not more. That’s why he said what he did, even if it wasn’t the best way of phrasing it.”
A small, sad smile. “‘People like you’?”
“That came out wrong.”
“No, I don’t think it did. There are people like me and people like you. I’ve always known it. Why do you think I did all this ‘Let’s be secret’ stuff? I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in your life if you had to tell your family and friends about me.”
“I know.” The admission surprised them both. “But that was before. Now if the world wants to divide into Aneeka and everyone else, there’s no question where I’m standing. Or kneeling, which is really what I’d like to do right now, but I don’t know if you’re anywhere near ready for me to do that.”
“Do what?”
“I just proposed proposing to you.”
For a moment he thought he’d made a terrible mistake, Aneeka looking at him as though he’d said the craziest thing in the world. And then her mouth was on his, his hands on her shower-warm skin, everything he wanted in the world right here, right now, this woman, this life, this completeness.
||||||||||||||||||
Although they never went as far as the private communal garden, the flat roof jutting out a few feet from Eamonn’s bedroom window, which he’d failed to turn into a terrace in the four years he’d lived here, had become a favorite retreat. With a little nudging from Aneeka, he had bought a variety of tall plants—cactus, chili, kumquat—which they placed along the edge of the roof, and although they shut out the view of the gardens below, they also made privacy possible while alfresco.
The morning after the “proposed proposal,” as she enjoyed calling it, they sat outdoors pitting cherries for jam, the sun beating down almost as palpably as the previous day’s rain. Eamonn in a pair of khaki shorts and Aneeka once again in the blue-and-white dressing gown, now hiked above her knees. The concrete warm on their skin as they sat cross-legged at the very edge of the janglingly colorful floor cushions that had been her way of objecting to the muted tones of Eamonn’s flat. She’d carried them in a couple of weeks earlier, her glare daring him to comment on the fact that she was claiming his space as hers, as he’d wanted her to do almost from the start. He placed a cherry in his mouth, considered kissing her, the cherry passing between them, but settled for watching her instead, enjoying her evident satisfaction at the clean workings of the cherry pitter she’d mocked not an hour earlier as an accessory of the rich who don’t know what else to do with their money. It’s a cherry pitter. It pits cherries. How is that some wild extravagance? In response she’d opened a kitchen drawer and held up one utensil after another: A cherry pitter to pit cherries, a garlic peeler to peel garlic, a potato masher to mash potatoes, a lemon zester to zest lemons, an apple corer to core apples. She’d grinned at him. All you need is basic cutlery and a little know-how. But here she was now, making a small satisfied noise with every cherry pit she neatly punched out using the gadget in her hand. She’d gathered up the dark weight of her hair and twisted it into a loose knot at the base of her neck. A temptation to tug just so and watch it tumble down.
“Whatever you’re thinking, the answer is, not until we’ve finished with the cherries.”
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.”