I Can't Think Straight (8 page)

In the ensuing pause Leyla felt the blood rise up to her cheeks.

She could think of nothing to say, nothing that was acceptable and friendly, no phrase to move the conversation on, no question that would not open up her heart like the quiet slit of a scalpel.

‘Why did you call?’ Leyla asked.

‘I wanted to thank you for last night,’ she offered at last. ‘But more than that, to thank you for giving me your stories to read. I loved them. You are very talented Leyla.’

Leyla felt herself blush and stammered out her thanks, which Tala interrupted.

‘Would you like to come with me to Oxford at the weekend? My family are sponsoring a lecture series about Jordan. And we have a meeting at one of the colleges there to discuss starting it in Oxford.’

Tala hesitated, before adding ‘My sister Lamia will be there. She’s flying in from Jordan.’

‘Okay,’ Leyla said.

‘Really?’

Leyla laughed. ‘Really.’

She looked up to find her mother watching her from the fish counter, and she moved casually away to continue the conversation.

Maya had heard Ali’s phone call come in that Sunday but had been unable to get any sense out of her husband. She suspected, therefore, that something had been hidden from her, but by Monday evening, as she led her daughters through the supermarket, she decided against instigating a formal investiga-tion. Maya looked over at Leyla, and a smile touched her face. Her daughter was skulking around the Tinned Fruit and Veg aisle, whispering into her mobile phone, blushing and giggling. Obviously, Ali was on the phone, managing the situation perfectly, for her daughter was finally behaving exactly as Maya had always hoped – like a young woman in love.

She turned away and back to the fish counter, where the whole fish she had selected had now been weighed and priced. The shock of the number that the woman in the soiled white apron had just spoken jolted Maya out of her thoughts of Leyla’s wedding and focused her attention on the ice-packed counter before her. Maya wavered. She could easily afford the fish; that was not the issue.

Whether it was value for money was the question. Thank God Yasmin was at the cheese counter and not there to pressure her. But there was a short line of people queuing behind her. Ranged along the display of clear-eyed dead fish, each one of them was watching her, politely but with quiet intimidation, waiting for her to accept the specimen that she had requested and move on. She calculated in her head – perhaps she should just buy six or eight fillets, but would the saving be worth the difference in prestige when she produced a beautiful dish of masala fish?

‘I’ll take it,’ she said. She felt an immediate elation at having made a decision – the right decision – before doubts again assailed her. Perhaps the fish was too showy. After all, she was contributing food to a post-funeral gathering, for in their community it was traditional that no food was prepared in the house of the deceased. She would be taking this enormous, gleaming salmon to a house where a death had just occurred. A subdued house, a house of mourning, a house where simple food should be the order of the day. She now realised that she had just spent fifty pounds to purchase a fish she couldn’t use. One that her family would now have to eat, when she could have fed them with four fillets at a cost of two pounds and ninety nine pence each. Dazed, Maya accepted the plastic-wrapped fish corpse and pushed her trolley over to where the toilet rolls were.

‘You see,’ Yasmin’s voice chimed in behind her. ‘If you ordered online, you wouldn’t need to schlep loo rolls around. They could just deliver them.’

Maya ignored her and looked gratefully at the toilet rolls. These, at least, were on special offer. One pound off a pack of nine. So that if she bought around four hundred rolls of toilet paper, she could recoup the price of the fish. Why did they make trolleys so small? She felt like weeping. Every day, life was full of such uncertainties, such decisions, such disappointments. Without her faith in God and her conviction that there was an afterlife where there was peace, she could not have survived the daily pitfalls of existence. Without her faith that He had an ultimate plan for her in this life, that He had made her buy the fish for a reason, she would simply cave in and give up. Something within these last thoughts made her stop dead.

She stopped piling toilet paper into the trolley and considered. He had made her buy the fish for a reason. And that reason was suddenly completely clear. The funeral was for a member of the Surti family. They were rich. Obscenely wealthy, in fact. Of course she should prepare the fish for them. The dead man had undoubtedly been used to such dishes, had probably demanded them daily from their cook (they had three, she had heard). It would be exactly right, extremely appreciated, and perfectly impressive. Maya smiled.

‘Mum?’ Leyla said, switching off her mobile as they queued at the checkout. ‘I’m going to Oxford this weekend.’

‘Oxford? Why Oxford? Oxford’s where you go to get a degree, not to get away.’

Leyla said nothing, just looked mutely at Yasmin, who sighed and started unloading the trolley.

‘It’s only an hour away. Why do you have to go for a weekend?’

‘So if it takes me three hours I can spend the night?’ Leyla snapped.

‘Who are you going with?’ Maya asked Leyla. Now Yasmin cast a sly glance across at her sister who folded her arms crossly.

‘Nobody. A friend. They have some work there.’

A knowing smile began to crease over Maya’s face. ‘Ooh. Ali!’

‘No, not Ali. Does everything have to revolve around him?’ Leyla’s voice held pure irritation now.

‘I don’t understand,’ Maya said plaintively.

‘What is there to understand?’ Yasmin interrupted. ‘She has a friend, she’s invited her to Oxford for a weekend. I don’t see the problem.’

Neither could Maya, when the situation was laid out in this way, but she refused to be upset for no reason. If it took all day, she would find one. She turned to Yasmin who was staggering under the weight of the wrapped salmon.

‘What do you have in here, Mum? Moby Dick?’

‘Just be careful with that fish, young lady. It cost me an arm and a leg.’

‘And it might eat everything else in the trolley,’ commented Yasmin. Leyla smiled at the joke, but was disconcerted to find that under her surface smirk, Yasmin’s eyes were watching her piercingly.

She looked away and started to pack carrier bags with groceries, resolving to call Ali when she got home and alleviate her guilt.

Chapter Six

Lamia arrived in Oxford for the lecture meetings armed with her father’s credit card and her mother’s detailed instruc-tions regarding Tala’s trousseau. Though what she was expected to buy in Oxford, she wasn’t sure. The place was pretty enough, but it was also all museums and culture. As far as she knew, there wasn’t even a Gucci. Still, it was the first time since her marriage that Lamia had travelled without her husband, who had remained in Amman, working, since the dual purpose of her trip (charitable lectures, shopping for a wedding) were not events he could justify leaving his work for. She had enjoyed her solo flight tremendously and felt a certain guilty freedom in travelling alone. All of her journeys with Kareem were meticulously planned, and there was undoubtedly a positive side to this, since her husband’s conscientiousness allowed her to slip into a kind of auto-pilot mode where she did not have to worry about anything like passports, timings or packing; but in the end she also found their trips emotionally draining. For Kareem had a tendency to be compulsive. His clothes, for example, had to be folded in a certain way and he would allow neither the staff nor Lamia herself to actually place them into the suitcase. He had a system for packing, as he had systems for almost everything, and the proper adherence to the packing system ensured that he could fit a maximum number of garments (plus one hardback book, business-related, and a washbag) into his suitcase, without causing anything to crease unnecessarily. This aspect of his personality had been one of his attractions for Lamia during the brief period when they had been dating. Within Lamia burned a hollow of insecurity, which Tala and Zina had together traced back to her unfulfilled need for their mother’s attention (as the middle child she had been even more overlooked than the other two), compounded by the lack of a strong character of her own. Lamia herself was not convinced by such Americanised psycho-babble. All she knew was that Kareem’s carefully arranged routines, his meticulous attention to every detail, the comfort he derived from knowing that everything was in its proper place – from knowing that everything (and everyone)
had
a proper place – all of this, even down to the standardised perfection of his features; these were all soothing to her and infinitely reassuring.

But she had found, during these two honeymoon years of her marriage, that they could also be tiring, not to say exhausting. There were days when she longed to stay in bed and perhaps eat breakfast there – something Kareem would never countenance, because breakfast always created crumbs, and the mere idea of crumbs on the sheets, of stray food particles insinuating themselves, unseen, into folds and creases and lying there, potentially for hours, pollut-ing their sleep space, was too terrible to contemplate. Then there were afternoons when she would put down a book she had been reading and toy with the idea of just leaving it there. Once or twice she had done so, but within moments of Kareem returning home from the office, she found the book had disappeared, back to the shelf where, admittedly, she was easily able to find it again thanks to his logical, alphabetised system.

She shook off these recollections as the car that had collected her from the airport drew nearer to the spires of Oxford’s centre. The main points to remember – and she was assiduous about remembering them – were that Kareem was a decent man, with good values and solid ethics. He had a charm, a sense of humour that she had not found to be widespread in other Arab men she knew, and she enjoyed the way that he could make their friends – even her parents – laugh over dinner or tea parties. This way he had with her parents and the approval and attention that Lamia had felt emanating from Reema since her marriage had also been gratifying. And Kareem was liberal. She still kept an office in Amman, at her father’s head-quarters and, if anything, he was always overly concerned to ask her about what exactly was happening with her family’s businesses. He had many such flashes of consideration, she realised, and so many of her friends’ husbands did not. She liked having the office there, it gave her a focus. She did not want to become one of those women with nothing better to do after seeing their husbands off to work than to frequent the gym and have coffee afterwards. She would maintain her desk until she had children, at least, and then her life would be devoted to them. She sensed, sometimes, that life was made of something more, that there was a spark which could elevate it to another plane; she had, in fact, felt something of this during those early days of Kareem’s attentions. That feeling had left her some time ago, eroded by routines and habits and familiarity, but she could still summon it up sometimes, when she focused hard, but she remembered to do so less and less often.

Outside, the late morning sunlight was soft and unobtrusive, very unlike the glare of Amman. Lamia ventured to remove her sunglasses as the car pulled to a stop outside the hotel. Even without proper shops, parts of this city were quite beautiful and she was further pleased to remember that she would not have to share a room with Tala this time, because Tala was bringing a friend and the friend would share with her, leaving Lamia to luxuriate alone in her crisply-sheeted bed.

In the café where they had just finished breakfast, Tala slipped her phone back into her pocket. ‘A text from Lamia,’ she explained. ‘She arrived at the hotel.’

‘Should we go and meet her?’

Tala shook her head. ‘Count on an hour for her to shower and change. Plenty of time for you to go to the bookstore. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you here.’

Leyla stood up. ‘What will you do? Have a coffee?’

Tala nodded, drew two magazines from her bag and smiled.

‘I want to read your stories again.’

‘Then I’m definitely going,’ Leyla smiled and left. Tala watched her weaving through the tables, her gait a little awkward and shy, as though she sensed she was being watched. Leyla stepped outside and glanced back to wave. The sun fell on her now, burnishing her skin, gleaming on her hair. Tala raised a hand in acknowledgment and then quickly looked down.

She had been trying hourly to ensure that this new friendship with Leyla remained such, to be certain that it would not slip out of the careful grasp of her fingers and into the darker chambers of her heart. That had happened to her once or twice before, with women she had felt an instant connection with, and somehow the friendship had tipped over into something more, something wrong and Tala felt it was just a flaw or a need she had to correct in herself. Certainly she had no wish to negotiate the viscous swamps of despair and self-disgust that had accompanied those times in her life. Yet now Leyla had begun to fill a space in Tala’s heart, a desire for intimacy, for friendship. She had felt Hani fill that space once, not so long ago. For he too was a good friend to her, someone with whom she laughed and from whom she learned. But they had been mostly apart for the past few months – he working in Amman, she in London – and when she had found Leyla insinuating herself into her daily thoughts, Tala had told herself that it was not wrong for her to want a close friend. But she also knew that it was essential that she stopped noticing the sunlight on her hair and the nuances of her eye colour; that she cease communicating with her constantly and silently with the heightened intimacy of exchanged glances.

She looked at the stories lying on her lap. It was these stories, which Leyla had given to her so tentatively after the theatre, which had begun, too easily, to weaken the taut pull of her resolve. The stories were exceptionally good, which was not a surprise as much as a pleasure. They had vastly diverse settings and tones, but both were tales of love almost found but ultimately lost – a classic theme which was handled lightly and delicately, yet which evoked in Tala a mood of such profoundly delicious regret that it had permeated all her responses for hours afterwards. And here, in the vibrant restaurant, as she began to read the words again, Tala tasted again the light, delicious mist of melancholy upon her tongue.