The next morning, I crept into Malik’s room and nudged him, trying to wake him up. It was 7 a.m. and I had agreed to meet Lucy outside Hampstead Heath to complete number eight on the list: SWIM IN HAMPSTEAD HEATH POND! But now that I was on the verge of catching pneumonia, I couldn’t bring myself to take public transport. I had woken up shivering in bed because every winter, my dad refused to turn on the heating until icicles formed on my eyelashes. I also needed moral support – something or someone to make sure I would see this through and wouldn’t get off at a different stop and go shopping instead.
‘Hmmm?’ Malik grumbled after I resorted to tickling his nose to wake him up. His eyes slowly opened and he blinked them rapidly as he stared at me in confusion. ‘What the hell, Affa? What do you want? It’s still dark outside!’
‘I need a lift,’ I whispered. ‘Shh, don’t wake Ma and Baba up. I don’t feel like seeing them.’
‘Are you still avoiding them? It’s been like, two weeks,’ he closed his eyes again. I pulled the covers off him.
‘Malik! Please!’
‘Leave me alone, man. I’m tired! Get your own car!’
‘I can’t drive.’
‘Learn then!’
We went back and forth for a few minutes and I almost felt bad for dragging my brother out of his warm, cosy bed so early at the weekend. But I rarely asked him for anything, so after a couple of seconds, the guilt was replaced by the sort of entitlement only the eldest child could have.
‘Fine!’ he growled after I opened the curtains and, feeling accomplished, I left him to get dressed while I made him coffee in a travel mug. Five minutes later, Malik appeared wearing a black tracksuit with the hood pulled up over his head and I followed him outside the house to where his BMW was parked on the street behind my dad’s.
‘Where to?’ he said, taking the mug from me as he turned on the engine and pulled away from the kerb. ‘And more importantly, why?’
‘Hampstead Heath,’ I told him, looking up the nearest gate to the ladies’ pond on Google Maps. ‘I’m going to swim in the pond there.’
‘What? Are you serious?’ Malik stopped the car, right there in the middle of the road and turned to stare at me as though I had told him I was pregnant.
‘Deadly,’ I shrugged nonchalantly, pretending that I didn’t feel nauseous at the prospect. I was hoping that if I feigned confidence, I would eventually feel it.
‘I’m getting worried about you,’ he said as he began driving down our road again and onto Turnpike Lane. ‘What’s all this about? First going back to uni and then meeting biodata guys, going running and now this? I know you’re old, but you’re not old enough for a mid-life crisis. It can’t be all about that list you found.’
‘Relax, I’m just enjoying trying new things,’ I replied. ‘And the biodata thing wasn’t because I want to get married. Ma and Baba said that if I want to do my LLM, then I have to be open to marriage.’
‘And you had to try out this “new thing” in the depths of winter? You couldn’t wait for the summer when there was less chance of you getting hypothermia?’
‘No, I want to do it all chronologically, as it appears in the notebook.’
Malik shook his head at this, like he really couldn’t understand or comprehend my reasoning. I didn’t expect him to. It was my journey and only someone who had been living the same life as me, in the same skin as me, would understand it.
‘I quite liked that guy, the one you turned down,’ he said after a couple of minutes of driving in silence, as we drove past Hornsey and my old secondary school and towards Crouch End.
‘Why?’ I replied, still staring out the window.
‘We had a good chat. He was decent and respectful.’
‘Hmm,’ I said non-committally. Decent and respectful? More like judgy with double standards. Who knew what my brother’s decency and respectability yardstick was anyway? This was the boy who was so busy with his secret girlfriend that he barely spent any time at home. Although, to be fair, he was always there when my parents or I needed him. Nobody else would bother to drive me to Hampstead at the crack of dawn at the weekend. He also still lived at home when he could have easily moved out. He was renovating our family house with money he could have been spending on a deposit for a flat. He was actually very responsible, more so than a lot of boys his age. I couldn’t imagine Arjun from the office doing for his family half of what my brother did for us.
Maybe Malik did know a thing or two about decency and respect after all.
As the car weaved through the narrow, tree-lined roads leading up to Hampstead, I wondered for the hundredth time if I was wrong to dismiss Zakariya. My parents, Dina and my brother all thought I should have given him a chance. That was a lot of people whose opinions I usually trusted who thought I was wrong.
The car pulled to a stop outside the heath and I climbed out wearily, cheering up only slightly when I saw Lucy waiting for me outside the gate. Malik sped away almost before I could close the door properly and Lucy faltered for a second and then came hurrying towards me.
‘Maya,’ she called out. ‘I’ve been calling you and texting you!’
‘Hey, what’s up?’ I replied, giving her a quick hug and bursting into laughter at seeing her dressed in a fluffy onesie with a furry coat on top and black Hunter wellington boots. ‘I need to take a picture of your look.’
‘Look, I read all about winter swimming and you need to make yourself warm as soon as you come out. I even brought tea and banana bread! But that’s not the point.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The pond’s closed! It’s closed for the winter and won’t open until February. I tried to go there and the gate was locked and everything.’
‘There’s a gate?’
‘Yes and a lifeguard. You have to buy a ticket. I can’t believe we’re both paralegals and we didn’t research any of this.’
I tried to hide the enormous sense of relief I felt at not having to jump into an ice-cold pond in December and tutted sadly instead.
‘What a shame,’ I said, barely able to contain my grin.
‘Oh, piss off,’ Lucy laughed, shoving me. ‘This isn’t over. We’re coming back here in February when it opens up again.’
‘Fine, we will. But what do we do until then?’
‘Let’s have a look at the list and see what’s next. We’ll move on to that and come back to this one later.’
‘Can’t I go for a regular swim?’
‘No! You can’t!’