by Joe Bennett
I have never been an adventurer. I don’t stray far from reasonable coffee and flush toilets. But I still do feel that travel should present me with some discomfort, some minor tribulations, some difficulties to surmount – if only to remind me that I am privileged, that I live a life of ease and luxury that would be the wonder of even my grandparents’ generation, and the envy of perhaps ninety per cent of the world’s population.
But here in Dubai, while ostensibly travelling, I am staying as a guest in a house far better appointed that my own and I have more or less perpetual access to that most blessed of devices, the washing machine. And as I hang my pants and shirts on a rack within a closed balcony – no unsightly washing lines allowed in Arabian Ranches – in a climate that will dry them within minutes, I feel this somehow isn’t right. And I resolve to get out of Dubai at some stage of this trip and see some of the UAE. At the very least it will put the city in context. But not this afternoon, which I spend by the pool with Wilfred Thesiger and San Miguel.
I feel belittled by every page of Thesiger. At the point I’ve reached in my re-reading, his five-man party is starving and almost out of water in the heart of the Empty Quarter. Then one of the Bedouin catches a hare. They stop to cook it and to feast:
When it was ready he divided it into five portions. They were very small, for an Arabian hare is no larger than an English rabbit, and this one was not even fully grown. Al Auf named the lots and Makhaut drew them. Each of us took the small pile of meat that had fallen to him. Then bin Kabina said, ‘God! I have forgotten to divide the liver,’ and the others said, ‘Give it to Umbarak.’ I protested, saying that they should divide it, but they swore by God that they would not eat it and that I was to have it. Eventually I took it, knowing that I ought not, but too greedy for this extra scrap of meat to care.
At which point I put aside the book and my beer, haul myself up from the reclining poolside chair, and amble to the fridge to fix myself a sandwich.
It isn’t hard to imagine what Thesiger would have thought of our dinner and dance in the desert. My contribution to it is two bottles of ‘Wine from the Holy Land’. My concession to it is a plastic Phantom of the Opera mask, chosen for me by Stephen’s daughters. I don’t know if they mean to suggest anything by the choice. The mask is uncomfortable to wear and difficult to see through, but at least it doesn’t hinder drinking.
We leave the tar seal, slither the back wheels on the sand, drop over the ridge and descend into a place transformed. Within the loose circle of tents and 4WDs the desert has been lit and set for dinner. Plastic furniture has been draped in dense white napery and laid out with bottles and glasses and wrapped presents and heavy silver cutlery that sparkles in the artificial light. That light comes from the table decorations, elaborate cones of mesh, a metre tall and wound round with fairy lights and tinselly bits. The matting dance floor is lit from a gantry from which there also hangs a hefty mirror ball. Big music is emerging from a small box of electronics. The electricity for all this is supplied by an unseen generator, its existence betrayed by snakes of cable leading up and over the further dune and away into the darkness.
The Indian caterers are cooking on gas burners. Dogs hang around the food or chase infants and each other in sandy circles. Children too old to frolic with dogs sit around on camp chairs looking early-teen moody and sucking on cans of pop, while perhaps twenty masked adults stand and drink their way through the initial awkwardness. The indomitable Lynn takes me by the arm and introduces me cheerfully to a string of masked South Africans. I shake hands with a pirate, a gorilla, a Pierrot, a tragedy, and two other Phantoms of the Opera. Several people have got Venetian masks on sticks that cause terrible problems with introductions. One hand holds the mask and the other a drink so they end up just nodding hello.
Lynn leaves me in the company of an electrical engineer who, from the nose up, is Batman.
‘Great party,’ says Batman.
‘Yes it is.’
‘Isn’t Lynn a great hostess?’
‘She’s terrific.’
‘Do you know her well?’
‘We’ve only just met. I’m just a friend of a friend. I feel like a bit of a freeloader.’
‘Oh.’
And then we stand in silence for a bit, Batman and the Phantom in the desert, and I struggle to suppress a surge of laughter. Only the cooks and the dogs are active. Everyone else just waits for the booze to kick in.
We hear the Jeep before we see it, hear the music pulsing through the darkness. Then it drops over the dune into the lights of the party, a fat-tyred brute of a vehicle, open-topped and ostentatious, and bearing a freight of the boisterous young. They leap out over the doors and are welcomed as saviours. Beefy, grain-fed South African boys and girls, the sons and daughters it seems of these sober adults. They’ve been drinking. They haven’t bothered with masks. They are happy. They head straight for the drinks supply, then to the stereo where they change Gene Pitney to reggae. The lights from the generator seem to brighten and the adults become infected by the infusion of energy.
Suddenly, out here on the sand, there is the unmistakable fizz of a party about to happen.
The male youths are like giant puppies. They wrestle and clown, chasing each other out of the pool of light and onto the dark dunes, then two of them roll back down a dune into visibility, locked in a play-fight to the death. Their parents look on in indulgent delight at the zest they have brought to the world in the form of these hundred-kilogram children.
Batman loosens up. He’s been several years in Dubai and when I tell him that rather than being resident I am merely visiting, he proves eager to tell me how things really work here.
‘Dubai’s an experiment, conducted by Abu Dhabi,’ he says. ‘Abu Dhabi’s got the cash but the ruling family’s terribly conservative. It doesn’t like to be associated with failure, so it uses Dubai like a test tube, trying things out here, basically experiments in ways of making money. Behind the scenes it supplies the money to test tourist markets and business markets and finance markets and all the rest of it to see what works. If the place crashes, Abu Dhabi will just say tut-tut and wash its hands of it. But it will milk everything that succeeds and imitate the best things in its own emirate. Follow the money and it all traces back to Abu Dhabi.’
Dubai, he insists, is massively in hock to its neighbour, inescapably so. Abu Dhabi owns majority shareholdings in all the big contractors and even in Emirates, the hugely successful airline.
I have no idea how true any of this is. And Batman is so clearly convinced of it that there is no point in questioning him. But in my few days here I’ve already heard more or less the same conspiracy theory from several people.
‘Dindins,’ announces Lynn, clapping her hands. ‘Dindins.’ The young sit down immediately while the old, though every bit as keen to get at the nosh, hover and defer in the expectation of some system of precedence. As the outermost of outsiders I hover longer and more deferentially than any until Lynn takes my arm and sits me down at her table.
Masks come off. Some are laid beside plates, but most are tucked under seats, where it is my guess they’ll be forgotten as the night grows raucous. They’ve done their lubricant job, and now the shifting sands will bury them for ever or they will be eaten on some distant unrecorded morning by camels. Camels will apparently eat anything carbon-based. Stephen claims to have seen one devour a wooden cable reel. ‘The lot,’ said Stephen. ‘It ate the whole bloody thing.’
There’s a present at every place setting. Again we adults hesitate. There is something so nakedly selfish and acquisitive in tearing the wrapping from a gift. Kids do it pell-mell, their eyes on fire, but adults shrink from such honesty. The same distinction holds when the present is revealed. A disappointed kid looks disappointed. An adult feigns delight.
‘Oh, how sweet,’ I exclaim, when I unwrap, at Lynn’s urging, a little box containing a chunk of coloured glass shaped vaguely like a horse’s head. I’ve no idea what it is, unl
ess, that is, it’s what it seems to be, a chunk of coloured glass shaped vaguely like a horse’s head.
A few glances reveal that everyone else has also got a chunk of coloured glass though not all of them are shaped like horses’ heads.
‘A toast,’ says Lynn, ‘to the New Year. May it be better than the last one,’ and glasses rise towards the night sky. They glint and clink. ‘To the New Year.’
‘Let’s eat,’ says Lynn, clapping her hands, but the young have pre-empted her. The beefy boys are already at the buffet: steak, chicken, vegetables, a stew of some sort, all laid out in metal dishes over spirit burners and constantly replenished by the Indian caterers. Quiet of a sort descends on the desert. The sky above and beyond us is glittering ink.
Plates are finally pushed away, rinds of fat slipped to the patient dogs, and the man on my right, who has so far not spoken, touches me on the arm and shows me his chunk of glass.
‘Do you know what it is?’ he whispers.
I shrug and he falls silent, turning the thing over in his hand and staring at it as if it held a secret.
‘Meryl Streep’s bought Cambodia,’ says a chubby girl across the table.
‘It was Angelina Jolie, actually.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, but then she sold it.’
‘To Meryl Streep?’
‘Dunno. Don’t think so.’
They’re discussing The World, the set of artificial islands being built to resemble a map of the world, when viewed from a plane. Viewed from sea level it’ll look like islands. The World is another of those audacious show-off ideas that Dubai does so well, big but simple ideas that the popular mind latches on to immediately and retains. It’s also yet another project that’s rumoured to have stalled, with cash running low and the islands plagued with subsidence. But there is great interest around the table in who’s bought what, although I have heard it said elsewhere that whole islands have been gifted to celebrities in order to generate exactly this sort of conversation.
Whatever the truth of things, there seems to be a consensus that Ireland’s been bought by a couple of Irishmen and that they plan to turn it into, of all things, a miniature Ireland. Whether this means the real thing, with too much rain, or the tourist version with quaint cottages, quainter pubs, colleens, fiddlers and Daniel O’Bloody Donnell, I don’t know. Conversation then moves seamlessly from The World to the Palm Jumeirah and the exciting news that David Beckham has given his house there to his mum.
The South African on my left doesn’t join in the discussion of celebrity doings. He’s a middle-aged businessman wearing a long-nosed mask of elaborate design that he has tilted to perch on the top of his head in order to eat. I think he’s forgotten he’s wearing it. It tops a face that suggests the holding of severe opinions. He’s clearly the father of at least one of the meaty young men.
When I ply him with a few gentle questions about Dubai he responds like a paterfamilias, delivering emphatic judgements from on high. If I knew enough to argue with his statements, I still probably wouldn’t.
‘Arabs,’ he says, ‘are greedy, dishonest and short-sighted.’
‘All of them?’
‘Pretty much. Except for that Sheikh Zayed, the one before the present one. What he did for Abu Dhabi makes him one of the great statesmen of the twentieth century. A visionary. Farsighted.’
‘But there aren’t many like him?’
‘None that I know. They all love to trumpet success but most of them have got no idea how to do business. They just pay others to do it. Take Emirates. Ever flown Emirates?’
I have. They flew me here. The service impressed me.
‘The whole organization’s a mess. I fly first class and I fly a lot. They’re supposed to send a limo to collect me. One time in three my limo doesn’t turn up. Hopeless. And they hire cretins.’
As he speaks, the nose on his mask jiggles at the night sky.
‘Look, they’ve got a great wine list on board and the girl says to me, ‘Red or white, sir?’ I say I’d like the chardonnay. ‘Certainly, sir, red or white?’ I mean, I ask you. What they don’t seem to understand here is if you pay shit you get shit. Cheap labour is expensive. Look at the Filipinos. You’ll find them everywhere in Dubai. They’re dirt cheap because the Philippines is a shit hole that they’re all gagging to get out of. They smile nicely but they’re all stupid. They must be the most stupid people on earth.’
I’d guess this man is roughly my age. He is clearly intelligent and successful. Is it the legacy of apartheid that causes him to judge the world in terms only of race?
Gradually, as the level in the wine bottles sinks, a mist settles into the little depression. It’s surprisingly thick, surprisingly cold. It dampens everything except the spirits. With food and drink now taken, the middle-aged resume control of the music. ‘Stand by your man,’ sings either Tammy Wynette or Dolly Parton through the desert mist, and women with waistlines bulging beneath their finery and no hope of being young again, kick off their shoes and hang around the necks of their men and lay their heads against chests and do their best to dream, or to remember, or just to pretend. It’s sweet.
The fire’s been lit, a huge thing. I make it my business to feed it. Find me the man or woman who doesn’t enjoy staring into the heart of a bonfire, and I’ll show you a corpse. I love the sense of danger harnessed. I love the pulsing orange-pink intensity of its primal heart, its rapacity, the way it feasts upon itself. Since our species lost its fur the words hearth and home have been synonyms. An electric fan heater just doesn’t cut it. I hunch forward, letting the invisible heat toast my face and front while my back is turned to the dark and limitless hostility of the world beyond. I like it so much my prose could easily get a little overblown.
Beyond the light, party-goers make discreet sorties up the face of the nearest dune to disappear briefly into the mist. Their footmarks show black in the sand.
‘Uugh,’ says Lynn, coming over to the fire, and she pronounces uugh exactly as spelt, ‘isn’t this mist just horrid?’ She has put on a fur coat.
‘Danish mink,’ she says. ‘I bought it in the scariest place I’ve ever been. It looked like an abattoir. I only get to wear it about twice a year now, but when I lived in Beijing it was minus ten for half the year and I used to wear it just to go out and buy vegetables. I didn’t care. Did you know fur has to be kept refrigerated?
‘No. What were you doing in China?’
‘Pearls,’ she says, ‘cultured pearls. They’re my business. Look.’ And she unhooks the neck of her mink and fingers a massive necklace that she’s presumably been wearing all evening but that, entirely typically, I haven’t noticed. It consists of sizeable golden pearls interspersed with sizeable actual pearls.
‘Solid gold, each of them. My own design. I tried casting them as cardamom seeds, as chilli peppers, then I thought why not just make gold pearls. I think they’re rather lovely.’
A teenage girl, drawn to the fire, lowers herself onto a canvas chair then screams as if bitten. I jump up, thinking scorpions.
‘Oh,’ she screams, like one who has seen the end of the world, ‘it’s like soaking.’
‘Stay there, dear,’ says Lynn, ‘I’ll fetch you a towel.’
I keep the fire fed, building the pyramid, watching the flames eat through the struts, anticipating the collapse and drinking my Wine from the Holy Land. Few people come to talk to me and I don’t mind. The party begins to seem a long way away. It’s just me and the fire.
As midnight nears the party migrates to the ridge above the campsite, the men helping the women up the dune, the women carrying their shoes and slithering. The mood is joyous. With a beaker of holy wine I slip away in the opposite direction. These are decent people but I am not intimate with them and the moment of the year’s turning seems intimate to me.
A fox terrier follows me. I do nothing to discourage him. A couple of hundred yards away I stop and sit on damp sand and the dog noses around for a bit then
settles at my side. My watch says almost midnight. I trawl my mind for distinctive memories of the year just ending and come up with nothing.
It was not so at twenty. Then the peaks on the graph soared and the troughs sank low. At fifty-one the graph has flat-lined. Each successive year seems less volatile, less distinguishable from its predecessor.
Cheers reach me faintly on the breeze. The moment, it seems, has come and gone. We are made new. I raise in the mist my glass of wine and pledge it, as I do every year if I’m sober enough, to the few people I’ve loved. It doesn’t matter. I pat the dog.
Faint noise from the far ridge. Are they singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’? Here in the Arabian desert? I hope so. A gathering of Africans of Dutch descent singing a Scottish archaism in the Arabian desert would be another trinket for my collection of relishable oddities.
Half an hour later I’m curled in a sleeping bag in a tent. The terrier has joined me, scrabbling down inside the bag and plugging itself against my belly. Its warm, taut, furry presence is a pleasure. Beneath the groundsheet the sand makes a moulding mattress. The oldies have clearly regained control of the music system. ‘All you need is love’ sings the dead John Lennon. Or perhaps it’s the living Sir Paul, who has married and divorced a one-legged woman and who looks every year, as someone recently pointed out, more and more like Angela Lansbury. Mulling over such vital matters I fall asleep.
The sun wakes me. It has turned the little borrowed tent into a sagging greenhouse, the light somehow submarine. The terrier’s gone. I crawl out onto sand like something evolving. The mist has burned off but my shoes are still damp. I shake them carefully for scorpions. I am the only person stirring. I amble over the dune and piss, turning the sand black. A few hundred yards away a pair of camels sway across the desert with their steady, loping, patient gait. That’ll do me to kickstart a year.