Her last lucid thought before the convulsions seized her body was that eclampsia would make such a pretty name for a flower.

20

‘Where’s that friend of yours? The one who used to come around. Did you two fight?’

Faizl was standing at the foot of the bed, blocking Eram’s view of the spot on the wall he had been staring at. It was still early, a little before 9 p.m., but Eram was already in bed. Or maybe he hadn’t left it at all that day. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

‘Gehna,’ he said. It was the first time he had said her name out loud in three months. If you touch something that is cold enough, it feels confusingly like a heat burn. He wasn’t sure if the sharp stab he felt in the aortic region of his chest at the sound of it was pleasurable or painful, so he did it again just to check. ‘Her name. Gehna.’

Yep. Definitely pain.

Faizl, who had generally been responding well to some new medication of late, still had a lousy memory when it came to names. It wasn’t the Parkinson’s; he had just always been like that. ‘Gehna. Gehna? Doesn’t ring any bells. You shouldn’t fight with your friends.’ He looked around, as if searching for clues that might reveal what it was he was supposed to be doing in that room, and then wandered out again.

Eram knew that his dad knew that there was something wrong. It was kind of obvious, what with the not shaving, not sleeping and the mooching around the house all day. Eram had stopped running. He had stopped playing poker, because what was the point?

Faizl’s way of showing he cared had been to pepper his son with questions about random topics, in the vague hope that he would open up about what was actually troubling him. It hadn’t worked for the longest time—except that this particular night he woke a restlessness in Eram simply by forgetting a name.

This is how it starts, thought Eram. First, you don’t say her name often enough. Then the features of her face come unfixed in your mind. The fall of her hair, how she rolled her eyes. All the different voices she used. The way she stuck her nose inside books to smell the paper. And then, in time, she’s a girl you loved once, but you don’t remember why.

It suddenly seemed terribly important to remember. He could hear Faizl making tea in the kitchen, and the sound of the boiling milk rushing to the top of the saucepan mimicked the urgency he himself felt. Eram got up.

He began his project right there in the room, remembering all the afternoons that had faded into night as Gehna and he did nothing more or less important than lay about in bed together. Sometimes they would speak of things that had already happened, sometimes about things they hoped were yet to happen. Gehna seemed to find his ordinary body a source of endless wonder and explored it for hours with just her fingertips. They each liked to stick a foot out from under either side of the duvet; if you saw them lying together like that you would be forgiven for thinking they were just a single, huge creature occupying the entire bed, with two heads but only two feet—one pale and the other nut-brown.