I Can't Think Straight (18 page)

* * *

Tala walked quietly into her parents’ living room when she returned, where only the otherworldly luminosity of the screen flickered in the darkened room, but the sound of her steps was enough to rouse Reema, whose coiffed head bobbed into view above the top of her favourite armchair, followed immediately by the yellow gasp of the lighter flame.

‘Mama, you’re late tonight,’ Reema commented. Her voice was thick with sleep, Tala noted, as she walked in and stood before her mother’s chair. Sure enough, Reema’s heavy-lidded eyes peered at the television screen, their confusion betraying that she had lost the plot of the action some time ago.

‘It was a business dinner. They liked my plans and the products.

And I saw Ali.’ Tala said, but her mother did not appear to be listening.

‘This guy was in prison five minutes ago,’ Reema complained, examining the television with dissatisfaction. ‘Now he’s out. They don’t write proper stories these days,’ she said. ‘Stories about love. Who wants prison and shooting all the time?’

‘Why don’t you go to bed, mama?’ Tala suggested. ‘You look tired.’

Reema heard this last comment without a problem, for it touched on one of the subjects on which she was most sensitive – her appearance. ‘Of course I’m tired. I’m worried all the time. You’d be tired, if you had my concerns.’

Reema regarded her daughter with rheumy, smoke-darkened eyes. Tala smiled briefly, then turned away. It was too late, too dark, too depressing to sit here and talk to her mother with only the neon flicker of the television lighting their awkward faces.

‘I’m going to bed, I’m shattered,’ Tala said, yawning slightly to lend credence to her statement. But Reema was already re-absorbed in the movie, and Tala was at liberty to make her escape to her own room, which she did swiftly and with as little noise as possible.

Once there, she shut the door, turned on lamps and opened the drawers of the plain, antique writing bureau that stood in the corner. The bureau was adorned with monogrammed stationary, heavy and rich to the touch, a fountain pen that her parents had given her one Christmas and a solid silver seal with her initials etched upon it, which had been a present from Lamia. She rarely used any of these items, except as decorative touches in an otherwise cleanly furnished room. The exposed wood, white paint and clean granite of her bedroom upstairs was very unlike the ornate, gilded melange of furnishings and decoration that encrusted her parents’ world beneath.

She searched two drawers of the bureau without success, and was coming to terms with the fact that she really must have discarded Leyla’s stories – for after her sudden departure and in the maelstrom of her own guilt over Hani, Tala had decided she must throw them out – when she found them folded and pushed into one corner of the bottom drawer, like shameful reminders of her past uncontrolled feelings. Methodically, Tala took them out, flattening the magazines on the top of the desk. Just reading the name printed beneath the titles caused a prickle of sensation, of elation, on her skin, that she wished she could stop, or could control, for she did not know if what lay behind it was something real, or a mere desperate imagining that had transformed a short, intense encounter into a mean-ingful relationship. It hardly mattered, because these stories were all that belonged to her, here and now, for she had walked away from the chance to be with the person behind them, and did not know if she would ever be forgiven.

Tala left the stories on the bed, and showered and changed, deliberately delaying the pleasure of reading them. Outside the soft pallor and quiet atmosphere of her bedroom, the life of the city continued unabated. There were police sirens and motorbikes, and Arabic music that issued from a car in the street far below. A rough accent broke the night air down there too, cursing drunkenly at a driver, and a couple passed by quickly, talking excitedly. Tala closed the window, sealing off the intensity of these sounds, and got into her bed. Its clean, ironed sheets felt coolly pleasurable to her warm skin and she lay there gratefully for a moment before reaching for the crumpled stack of paper.

Quickly, she read through them, hardly daring to hope that the stories would affect her as they originally had, but they did, perhaps even more so, for now Tala felt the prickle of tears in her eyes as she reached their sorrowful endings. Instinctively, she reached for the phone, and for Leyla’s number, studiously ignored for too long in her address book. But it was almost midnight, and she had, after all, some sense of propriety. She would wait until morning, she decided, but then she would definitely call.

* * *

In a direct assault on her mother’s funereal demeanour and the continued silence from her room, Yasmin descended the stairs early the next morning, before anyone was up and went straight to the kitchen radio which she switched on loudly enough to send a shiver through the china cups that Maya hung along the counter wall but never used. As she had hoped, her activity enticed her sister downstairs. Leyla came into the kitchen gingerly, checking for signs of their mother. Once she had ascertained that the coast was clear, she sniffed.

‘What’s that?’

‘Real coffee,’ said Yasmin, dancing around the kitchen to the music. ‘I thought it was time we broke the tyranny of weak tea.’

Leyla smiled, and helped her sister bring cereals and cups to the table. Under the thrilling thump of the bass drums from the radio, only Yasmin heard the shrill ring of the phone, which she answered before holding out the handset to her sister.

‘Who is it?’ Leyla asked frowning.

‘Tala,’ mouthed Yasmin with a twinkle in her eye.

‘I don’t want to talk to her,’ Leyla said, without thinking.

Yasmin turned around and made a few lascivious dance moves, before dropping to her knees and beating her chest while clutching her hair, a plea on Tala’s behalf that left her sister unmoved. Leyla shook her head and turned away, sitting down at the table, back straight and unmoving, her hands rested flat against the wood as if touching it for support. Yasmin noted all of this, noted how her sister was straining to appear unconcerned about Tala. She frowned and put the phone back to her ear.

‘Sorry, she can’t come to the phone right now,’ she said. With a sigh, she switched off the handset and turned the music back up.

Up in her room, Maya shifted uneasily. The thud of the music pumped up through her floorboards and was barely muffled by the heavy carpet. She had enjoyed her few days of self-pity sealed mainly in her room, as long as everyone else was sealed in theirs, but now the house, the kitchen was being taken over, and God knows what odd concoctions Yasmin would be trying to cook up in there.

And, truth be told, she was getting weary of imagining the wedding she would never now attend. She got up from the bed, quickly put on a shirt and slacks and stomped downstairs where she found that everything was worse than she had imagined. There was music pounding away, if you could call that racket music, and the horrible stench of coffee everywhere. Maya reached to turn off the radio, with a disapproving flick of the wrist.

‘How can you think straight with all that noise?’ she demanded.

‘Apparently, Leyla can’t think straight at all,’ Yasmin snorted.

Maya glared at her daughter. She didn’t quite understand what she had just said, but she could sense it had something to do with Leyla and her affliction. Lips pursed, Maya made her way to the kettle which was cold, she noted, casting her gaze at the strange metal coffee pot that stood bubbling on the stove.

Leyla gave her sister a sign to ease off. She wanted to handle this more persuasively; she would rather spend repetitive and achingly slow hours attempting to change Maya’s perception, than charge in to war and face months of tiny battles, which would play themselves out on the most remote fields of engagement, such as how she did her laundry, whether she ate at home often enough, or used the telephone too much. But Yasmin seemed in no mood to heed anybody’s wishes.

‘You know, Mum, this is not Leyla’s fault. She hasn’t done anything wrong. And yet you’re treating her like a leper.’

‘Oh! So I am to blame,’ Maya said. ‘Of course I am. I am good for nothing in this house but to be a scapegoat.’

Yasmin sighed and sat down at the table, sorrowfully realizing that the anticipated moment of bliss with her coffee and croissant was all but over. Maya left the kettle boiling and reached for the remote control, carefully aimed the end of it directly at the tiny red spot at the base of the small television that she kept on the counter, then spent a good twenty seconds locating the correct button before pressing it. The exaggerated attention to this simple act, this elevating of a mundane movement into a technological event irritated Yasmin further, but she resisted putting out her hand for the remote control. In her current mood, her mother would not give it up easily.

‘Mum, can we just discuss this?’ Leyla began, but Maya’s eyes were fixed doggedly on the screen which displayed a talk show panel made up of the wives of cross-dressing husbands. Yasmin cast a glance at the television and snorted again, struggling to contain a mouthful of coffee through her mirth, while Maya felt the pinpricks of tears in her eyes, a manifestation of her sorrow that nowhere in this world was she safe from the tentacles of depravity. Maya repeated the achingly slow process with the remote control in reverse, and in the profound quiet that ensued, looked at Leyla.

‘Why are you doing this to me?’

Yasmin turned on her mother. ‘She’s not doing anything, she
is
gay. It’s not a choice. So I think, actually, that you should be telling us why you have such a problem with it.’

Leyla knew that her chance of avoiding the stress of hand to hand combat with her mother had evaporated with this last speech, but she applauded it inwardly all the same. She looked at her sister, lanky, beautiful, her eyebrows drawn in with concern and anger, her arms folded loosely in an attitude of complete self-assurance.

Maya needed time to think. On the one hand she could indulge her instinctive response, which was to bemoan the fact that after all her years of nurturing and care, this was the way her daughters chose to speak to her. No respect, no decency, nothing. She went through the speech in her head, and derived from it the sweet sap of instant satisfaction, which was made all the more delicious by the fact that her ungrateful daughters could not answer back. Having accomplished that immediate gratification, she turned her attention to Yasmin, and found that she had nothing to say. All she could feel was fear, sitting in her chest like a ball of steel. She was fifty-two years old, and had done nothing except raise these children and support her husband. That was work enough – she had certainly complained about it almost daily for the past quarter of a century, and now, her one reward, the prize she had anticipated with such relish for so long, the wedding, would no longer be taking place. Without it, without the preparations and shopping and congratulations and general elevation of status amongst her peers at the mosque, she could not imagine what else would be left for her when Leyla was in lesbian bars picking up girls, and Yasmin was, God forbid, backpacking somewhere on the subcontinent. Sam was more and more immersed in his work, it never ended, and only seemed to get worse even as she nagged him to slow down and spend more time with her. And she would not know what her daughters were doing, nor whom they were doing it with. They would be away, alone, learning things she had never considered from books she had never heard of.

They would be completely out of her sphere of influence. She shut her eyes briefly and considered how best to encapsulate all that she felt into one, comprehensible sentence.

‘What do two women do together?’ she said. And at once, the dropping of her shoulders, the lowering of her own, confused, angry eyes, held the ache of failure – that she could never truly say what she meant. Yasmin shook her head and sighed while Leyla touched her mother’s shoulder with a gentleness that Yasmin felt was overly kind and not in the least warranted.

‘Knit?’ offered Yasmin. ‘Make jam?’

‘It’s not natural,’ Maya offered.

‘Jam-making? I agree. Not when you can buy a decent jar for a couple of quid. All that peeling and boiling. And what is pectin anyway?’ Yasmin looked to her mother and sister for confirmation and found them both trying not to smile. She pushed a coffee cup in front of Maya.

‘Here, try this,’ she said. ‘It’s time to broaden your horizons, Mum.’

Maya sighed with annoyance, and sniffed at the cup as if it might be arsenic, but after a short moment, conscious of her daughters’ eyes upon her, she picked it up and sipped at it, if only so she could have the satisfaction of telling them how bad it tasted.

Chapter Fourteen

Tala kept the phone pressed to her ear, and listened once again to the room tone of Leyla’s house, as though it might hold a clue to the future. Twice in the past few days she had spoken to a polite voice on the other end (once her sister, once her father) and each time they had confirmed that Leyla was there, before coming back on the line to say that she was busy.

‘Hello?’ The father’s voice was back, not a good sign. ‘She’s tied up with something right now,’ he said.

‘Thank you. I’ll call again,’ said Tala. She waited for the final click of the receiver to cut the line at the other end, waited for the ugly, cold blare of the dial tone. She should have asked for their address, she realized, because she was now faintly aware that she could not call again, not after such emphatic and obvious rejection three times, not without veering into the domain of stalkers.

Quickly, summoning all her reserves of energy, she walked past her bed, which looked so inviting. It would take only a second to drop down onto it, to curl up between the duvet and the pillows and close her eyes and think about Leyla, or better yet, fall asleep and forget about her. She moved on, into the bathroom, and stripped off her clothes, turning on the shower, waiting for the heated water to flow through. She watched herself in the mirror for a moment as she recalled Oxford, recalled their night together, that night of insanity and reality. She shook herself, tied back her hair and stepped under the soothing rivulets of water. She was due across London in two hours to attend a lecture, and still had work to do in the meantime.