I Can't Think Straight (5 page)

‘Mama, its obvious,’ Reema sighed, exasperated with her daughter’s lack of acumen. ‘They need the work. They’re strong people, used to hard work. You can run factories twenty four hours a day and you can pay them virtually nothing. Isn’t South America in big trouble now?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘You should try there. Then you could use your Spanish too.’

A spreading blotch of red appeared in Tala’s mind – it was there when she closed her eyes momentarily. She could see it, could feel it, bleeding out at the edges, covering her whole internal frame of vision, until she was certain that when she opened her eyes, she would scream at her mother.

She opened her eyes. She reached for her water glass and took a sip, and she replaced it and she did not scream. Reema, incredibly, was still talking.

‘Ali was telling us his grandfather had factories in India. All over the country. How do you think they became so well off?’

‘They had factories in India, because they sold to the Indian market,’ Tala said slowly. ‘And they chose factories there because they lived and worked there, not so they could exploit poor people and make even bigger profits by overworking and underpaying them!’

Tala paused, aware that she was shouting, albeit in an undertone that had been adapted specifically for restaurant use. While she was taking a breath – and it was only one, quick breath – her mother managed to slip past and take over the conversation. It was as though she had heard nothing Tala had said.

‘You can buy a factory in India for nothing,’ her mother informed her. ‘You can buy it, you can adapt it, and you’ll never run out of cheap labour. Here they have rights; they can only work so many hours, and they have tea breaks, and lunch breaks, and minimum wages. There’s no way for a business to make an honest profit. They have unions,’ she added with distaste.

‘For a reason,’ Tala told her. ‘To prevent exploitation. Would you like to work all day with no lunch? Or no minimum wage?’

And this, in a nutshell, was her daughter’s problem, Reema thought. She asked questions that had no relevance to herself. Tala’s lot in life was to own the companies that employed these people, and therefore her duty was to maximise the profits they made. If she was born on the other side,
then
let her lead a workers’ mutiny. This last idea reminded her of another argument.

‘Don’t you remember how the trade unions brought this country to a standstill with all their strikes?’

‘That was years ago,’ Tala said irritably. ‘The whole economic structure of this country is different now. It won’t happen again.’

‘They said that after the First World War, and look what happened twenty years later. Another war. Complacency,’ Reema replied sagely.

Tala looked at her mother. She marvelled that, once again, she had been drawn down the path of what seemed like a standard (if ill-informed) discussion, only to find that she was trapped in a sticky morass of meaningless comparisons. She knew if she attempted to answer the war analogy she would only run up against an even more bizarre and unrelated argument.

‘The bathrooms are very clean,’ Omar said, sitting down. ‘There are about twenty hand towels in each one.’

‘Good,’ Tala said, as though this was the news she had been waiting for the entire evening. ‘I’ll go.’

She took her time in the bathroom, splashing water onto her face, which was, to Reema’s chagrin, free of make up. She blotted the cool drops from her forehead and cheeks slowly, gently, with one of the many hand towels, and her mind went back to the conversation with Leyla a couple of hours earlier. She had been harsh, she realised, and didn’t know why. What was it about Ali’s girlfriend that had inspired her to needle her in that way? Tala smiled briefly at the memory of Leyla’s surprised face and then sighed, recalling her troubled eyes. She lingered at the basin for a few moments more, moments of quiet. Her parents would be gone the next day, Tala reminded herself, back to Amman, and she would remain here to work, alone, until she returned for the wedding.

To her relief, the bill had been paid when she returned, despite Reema’s protests that she was still eating her tiramisu. The street and the fresh cold air of the night were a release after the compressed tension of the last hour and a half, but Tala found herself turning alone in the direction of their house.

‘I want a few minutes in the casino, Omar,’ Reema said. ‘I feel lucky.’ This statement was absolutely true. After the unpleasant moment Reema had suffered earlier that evening when Tala had made that comment about Leyla and marriage, things had slowly picked up. First, her daughter had proceeded to rattle the girl with her bizarre views on religion, no doubt offending her terribly in the end.

Then Hani had called from Amman and after Reema had spent twenty minutes with him, ensuring that he was following up on all the necessary wedding preparations back home (he was), he and Tala had spent half an hour talking and laughing. Now, she felt, her daughter was considering the advice she had given on the factory.

These were all good, reassuring signs.

On the quiet, lit street, Tala sighed. ‘I’ll meet you at home,’ she said.

‘Wait five minutes,’ her father said. ‘You and I can have a coffee while your mother loses some money.’

Reema paid no attention to this cynicism. The soft lights of the casino entrance, the handsome, tail-coated, top-hatted doorman who greeted her by name, the sleek cars that pulled up to the kerb, the unseen hands that whisked away her wrap, the chandeliers that lit the grand staircase leading up to the gaming rooms – all of these sent a quiver of excitement through her. Now she felt alive, now she felt all the distilled emotion of life pulsing in her veins. She sat down carefully on a velvet-swathed high chair and watched a few rounds of blackjack without playing. She waited, impatient but disciplined through years of experience, and then, with the first hand that went against the dealer, she laid her money on the table and took into her palm the short stack of chips that she received in return.

Tala looked at her mother, noted the widened, excited eyes that had watched her so narrowly throughout dinner, and she turned away, in time for Omar to steer her into a lounge, designed to evoke an English country library. Tala’s irritation with her mother was being replaced with something deeper and more disturbing, a sense of dissatisfaction with herself; and below that lay a whole stratum of sorrow. In her disaffected state, she noticed at once that the ‘library’ was filled with whole shelves, whole walls, of fake books. The only reading material was a copy of a society magazine that had been laid on one of the coffee tables. Omar moved towards two deep leather chairs before a roaring gas fireplace and they sat down and Tala ordered herbal tea.

‘No coffee?’ Omar asked her.

She shook her head. ‘I want to sleep tonight. I haven’t been sleeping well.’

He considered asking her why this was the case, but hesitated in case he should uncover a can of emotional worms that he would have no idea how to deal with.

‘I guess it’s the wedding and everything,’ she offered, knowing that if she wanted to attempt to speak to him, she would have to make the approach herself.

‘You shouldn’t worry,’ he replied. ‘Your mother and Lamia have everything under control.’

That was true, insofar as cutlery, dresses, jewellery and invitations went. Her sister Lamia’s wedding two years before had been tastefully showy, and people in Amman still talked about it. Lamia and Reema, therefore, were judged to have impeccable credentials when it came to organising such events.

‘Hani’s a good man,’ Omar offered, because he had been given to understand that the weighing up of the prospective groom was his territory. ‘Like Kareem.’

She could not argue with that either. Hani was very good, and had survived every rigorous test she had internally and silently put him through. Like her father, she had unconsciously begun the process by comparing him to Lamia’s husband, Kareem. But the more she observed the latter, the more she became aware that Kareem shone mostly by comparison to other Arab men, rather than in his own right. Tala had therefore quickly discarded this method of evaluation for Hani, and had refused to be grateful that he had no issue with having a wife who worked for a living, for example. But even as she raised the bar, Hani contrived, unconsciously, to reach it. He really was extremely intelligent, emotionally aware, sensitive to her moods. He was also hard-working and handsome. In the six months that they had been together, they had discussed everything, from sex to politics to religion, and the more outrageous of her views succeeded not in turning him away, but in making him think, and then argue back coherently, or adapt his own ideas accordingly. In short, she had been unable to find one single reason why she should not marry him.

‘Baba,’ Tala said. She swallowed, but knowing that there would rarely be a better time, determined to ask her father the question that was in her mind. ‘How did you know you wanted to marry Mama?’

Her father shifted uncomfortably. This was not the kind of thing he had ever expected or hoped to discuss with his daughters. But he felt trapped by Tala’s earnest gaze. He fought the urge to panic blindly, like a fly in a bottle, and simply shrugged.

‘I saw her once,’ he said. ‘And I knew she was the one for me.’

The ostensible romanticism of this reply became less obvious when Tala considered that she could indeed understand that this might have been the case – it was only when her mother began talking at length that most people realised her limitations.

‘But after you got to know her,’ Tala pressed. ‘Did it just stay with you, that feeling?’ Omar looked bewildered, and she felt that she was losing him. She tried again, desperately.

‘Did you just become more sure she was right for you? Didn’t you ever doubt it?’

Omar hailed the waiter and asked for the bill. When he had recovered himself somewhat, by counting out coins and notes and then re-aligning them before folding them back neatly into his money clip, he spoke.

‘Tala,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t think about everything so much.’

And then Reema called to them from the edge of the room.

Quickly, Omar swallowed the last of his tea and stood up to greet his wife, who stood stiffly, avoiding their gaze. Purely from this pos-ture, Tala could tell that the money was lost, and her father read the situation also. He smiled.

‘What do you have to smile about?’ Reema snapped.

‘I had a lovely cup of tea with Tala,’ he said. ‘And it only cost me five hundred pounds. Plus the tip for the limousine,’ he grinned, reaching into his pocket.

Reema turned on her heel and walked back through the hallway, pausing to collect her fur wrap from the attendant, and motioning to her husband to give the girl a tip as she passed. Omar did so, and helped Tala on with her coat. Outside, Reema swept into a waiting Rolls Royce, provided with the compliments of the casino management to save them the three hundred yard walk back to their home.

Tala watched her mother’s angry profile as she sat in the back of the car and stared straight ahead, and knew that she would be frustrated that the cards had cheated her. She took all gambling losses personally, could not bring herself to understand it as a game of chance in which the odds were forever stacked a little against her.

‘If she saw it that way, she wouldn’t do it,’ her father had told Tala once. ‘She thinks she’s controlling it.’

Reema’s argument was that she was controlling it, that there were rules, and if, for example, you took a card against a high number then you ruined the table for everyone else. Rules were of para-mount concern to Reema, particularly when flouting the accepted conventions could throw off the people around you, and she had, in moments of deep introspection, considered that the principles she applied to blackjack held true for life itself. One strove to be noticed within the game of life, to be successful by rising above the other players who were all following the same route as yourself. And one rose in a number of ways – by achieving greater financial wealth than the others, or by marrying better, and by having good-looking children who got excellent degrees and then married well themselves. These were the basic blocks upon which all other desires were finely balanced. Once these foundations were in place, one could finesse one’s success with smaller, but equally impressive achieve-ments (keeping a youthful appearance, training an excellent cook for entertaining, learning bridge to tournament level). One did not step outside the game and try to begin a separate game. Nobody would play with you if you did; or worse – how could you tell if you were doing everything correctly? The rules were tried and tested and had worked well for centuries, possibly millennia, though her knowledge of history and anthropology did not extend far enough for her to affirm the millennia argument with conviction. In any case, it seemed to her that this idea that you could make your own rules and then delight in spitting in the face of society, was the fatal flaw in western education today. Original thought, in Reema’s view, had very little to recommend it. Lamia had seen through this pitfall correctly, and Tala also, at last. But she worried about Zina, over in New York, now talking about taking a Phd in International Relations. She would speak to Omar about it again tomorrow. She did not want a daughter who was a doctor, unless she could at least prescribe pills.

Chapter Four

Leyla was lost, and happily so. In the quiet of her room, which the occasional birdsong from the garden made tangible, she sat at her desk, entangled in her writing, entwined with another life, with people she had never met but whom she had created. It made the bellowing of her name up the stairs by her mother all the more of a shock.

‘Leyla!’ Maya called, at a pitch designed to be noticed. ‘He’ll be here soon!’

Concentrate, Leyla, told herself. Hold on to the moment. For a few seconds more, she typed desperately, but the enchantment had been shattered. With a sigh, Leyla slid back her chair and went downstairs. She moved quietly, lightly on her feet, as though enter-ing the kitchen unobtrusively might help ease her into real life. But Maya was waiting at the door, waving a wooden spoon.