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swollen-shut eye and she snorted and touched his swollen-up lip, and they looked at each other and
silently agreed to start their day without growling.
• • •
AFTER THE RIOTS the talk on the television was of a major operation, one city at a time, starting in
London, to reclaim Britain for Britain, and it was reported that the army was being deployed, and the
police as well, and those who had once served in the army and the police, and volunteers who had
received a weeklong course of training. Saeed and Nadia heard it said that nativist extremists were
forming their own legions, with a wink and a nod from the authorities, and the social media chatter
was of a coming night of shattered glass, but all this would probably take time to organize, and in that
time Saeed and Nadia had to make a decision: whether to stay or to go.
In their small bedroom after sunset they listened to music on Nadia’s phone, using the phone’s
built-in speaker. It would have been a simple matter to stream this music from various websites, but
they tried to economize in all things, including the data bundles they had purchased for their phones,
and so Nadia downloaded pirated versions whenever she could find them, and they listened to these.
She was in any case glad to be rebuilding her music library: from past experience, she did not trust in
the continued availability of anything online.
One night she played an album that she knew Saeed liked, by a local band popular in their city
when they were in their teens, and he was surprised and happy to hear it, because he was well aware
she was not overly fond of their country’s pop music, and so it was clear that she was playing this for
him.
They sat cross-legged on their narrow bed, their backs propped up by the wall. He extended a
hand, palm up on his knee. She took it.
“Let’s agree to try harder not to speak shittily to each other,” she said.
He smiled. “Let’s promise.”
“I do.”
“I do, as well.”
That night he asked her what the life of her dreams would look like, whether it would be in a
metropolis or in the countryside, and she asked him whether he could see them settling in London and
not leaving, and they discussed how houses such as the one they were occupying might be divided
into proper apartments, and also how they might start over someplace else, elsewhere in this city, or
in a city far away.
They felt closer on nights when they were making these plans, as though major events distracted
them from the more mundane realities of life, and sometimes as they debated their options in their
bedroom they would stop and look at each other, as if remembering, each of them, who the other was.
Returning to where they had been born was unthinkable, and they knew that in other desirable
cities in other desirable countries similar scenes must be unfolding, scenes of nativist backlash, and
so even though they discussed leaving London, they stayed. Rumors began to circulate of a tightening
cordon being put in place, a cordon moving through those of London’s boroughs with fewer doors,
and hence fewer new arrivals, sending those unable to prove their legal residence to great holding
camps that had been built in the city’s greenbelt, and concentrating those who remained in pockets of
shrinking size. Whether or not this was true there was no denying that an ever more dense zone of
migrants was to be found in Kensington and Chelsea and in the adjacent parks, and around this zone
were soldiers and armored vehicles, and above it were drones and helicopters, and inside it were