Free I Can't Think Straight by Shamim Sarif Page B

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