by Joe Bennett
‘Hey, Mr America,’ comes a stage whisper from across the arcade. A shopkeeper is beckoning me in a manner both conspiratorial and furtive. He is holding in his arms identical Rupert Bear trousers. I cross the arcade. His shop seems to stock the exact same stuff as the one across the way.
‘Forty dirham him,’ he says grinning, ‘thirty dirham me. What your name?’
‘Joe.’
‘GI Joe,’ he says, still glancing nervously at the shop across the road. I get the sense that the gap between them is stained with bad blood.
‘My name Jack.’ He shakes my hand softly. ‘How many you want?’
I explain that I’d like to try them on. I have already spotted a little changing room at the back of the shop with a curtain on a pole.
‘You try here,’ he says glancing up and down the almost empty arcade. ‘Here good.’ I don’t mind. I undo my belt and step out of my trousers. Jack inspects my legs and crotch with a directness of gaze to which I am frankly unaccustomed. I pull on the Rupert Bears.
‘They fit good? They fit good here?’ And so saying he lays a hand firmly on my crotch and squeezes, like a housewife testing fruit for ripeness. ‘Good, Joe?’ And he looks me in the eye with a nervous appeal that I find simultaneously sad and comic. He is middle-aged, Indian, prissily dressed and quite obviously desperate.
I gently remove his hand and tell him that I like the trousers and will buy them. He is delighted and seems not in the least abashed. ‘Forty dirham,’ he says.
‘You said thirty dirhams.’
‘Thirty-five. Thirty dirhams two trouser.’
I like the Rupert Bears a lot. I take a second pair and hand over a hundred dirhams.
‘You want shirt?’ He gestures at his racks. ‘Jacket. Nice jacket.’
‘I want my change,’ I say. He extracts his wallet from his too-tight trousers, stashes the hundred and counts the change with exaggerated care, licking his fingers as he checks the notes. Then he hands me thirty dirhams.
‘Forty dirhams,’ I say. ‘You owe me forty.’
He smiles, and gives me the other ten as blithely as a man who knows that he’s tried his best but this time it just didn’t come off.
‘Have a nice day, Joe. Thank you.’
And I walk down the deserted arcade chuckling. I have just been sexually propositioned in Arabia by a middle-aged Indian haberdasher, who then tried to rip me off. Add one to the catalogue of absurdities to cherish in a random world.
The Lulu Hypermarket in the town centre is not especially hyper. It specializes in cheap clothes from China and ornaments for the home that would find no home with me. The books section is dominated by a splendid notice saying ‘Reading Not Allowed’. I’m not tempted. There are only children’s picture books and, in a separate glass cabinet, a stack of Korans. ‘Holy Qoran’, says a paper taped to the glass. ‘Please touch with respect.’ Tired from so much walking I go for coffee on a first floor balcony.
‘Got any scones, love? I fancy a scone. Sort of settle me stomach.’
The speaker is a dumpy middle-aged woman in a dress that wouldn’t look out of place in a family album from the Sixties. Her husband is wearing a Liverpool shirt, stretched over the sloppy tumescence of his fifty-something gut.
The Filipina waitress doesn’t understand the word scone.
Don’t worry, dear,’ says the Englishwoman, patting the waitress sweetly on the arm, ‘just bring me a cup of coffee, love. White. And tea for his lordship.’
His lordship leans towards me. ‘You live here, do you? ’Cos we was just wondering what there is to do. We got the whole day. All seems a bit quiet to us, like.’
They’re from a cruise ship. I noticed others of their number half-heartedly nosing round the jewellery and tat stalls in the entrance to Lulu. All were close to retirement age, dressed in leisure gear, a cut-price crowd.
His lordship is not best pleased by this leg of the trip. They docked at Khor Fakkan just up the coast from where they were bussed to Fujairah and dumped in the Lulu car park with a day to kill. ‘I mean, is this it? I could get all this at home. And Jesus, we even had to pay for the bus. Should have stayed on the bloody ship.’
‘But we’re enjoying the weather, aren’t we?’ says his wife, distressed by the asperity of his tone. In private it just washes over her, but in public, well, there’s other people to consider. ‘Warm, isn’t it,’ she says, ‘and nice to have a bit of sun in winter.’
She’s a full-hearted woman and keen to chat. They flew to Dubai, joined the cruise and steamed round the rhino horn to Muscat. Whereupon the ship turned round and brought them here. Next stop’s Dubai again, followed by Abu Dhabi and ‘Bayrain’. Then the plane back to Manchester.
‘Muscat was nice enough, sort of old like,’ says his lordship, ‘but here. I mean what is this place? Is there a marina?’
I suggest that they might enjoy the fort, or perhaps the fish market, but neither idea galvanizes them. The waitress disposes their drinks on the little table. ‘Thanks, love,’ says the wife, ‘very nice. Do we pay you now?’
She turns back to me. ‘Dubai’s big, isn’t it? But our hotel could have been a bit quieter.’
‘Right under the flight path, it was,’ says her husband who seems intent on dominating any moaning that’s going to be done. ‘They was roaring till all hours. And then there was this nightclub underneath us. Kept going till three in the morning.’
‘We got a taxi down to that palm thing,’ his wife chips in. ‘You’ve got to see it, haven’t you? But there was so much construction everywhere. We liked the Creek though, didn’t we? That was nice. Them abras and that. It’s the only old bit left. They’ve knocked the rest down.’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘there wasn’t an awful lot there to knock down in the first place.’
This brings no response. Husband looks at his watch. ‘The bus don’t come back till six. Bloody hell.’
In the end they get a taxi to the museum. Though I’m a little worried that it may have closed.
Mahmoud’s from Cairo and dressed like a nightclub predator in a tight cotton sweater and tighter jeans, with chunky gold chains round his neck and wrist. His hair is gelled. He radiates sexual desire, a sense of assured young potency. But where he finds the women to gratify him I don’t know. There appears to be a slightly more normal distribution of the sexes here, but I would imagine that Emirati women are off-limits, and he expresses a profound dislike of Indians. ‘Too much Indian here,’ he says. ‘Is big problem. Indian food big shit.’
We’re in a cheap Lebanese restaurant in the middle of town. From the next table to mine, Mahmoud rescued me from a menu choice that he assured me I would regret. ‘Is big shit,’ he said, as I indicated a kebab-like item. ‘I choose. You like chicken?’
Mahmoud’s come to the UAE to make money but it’s been a struggle. ‘Egypt no good,’ he says, ‘I leave Cairo because no money. And because Mubarak. Everybody hate Mubarak. But they choose him. In Dubai everybody love Sheikh Mo. But they no choose him. Is funny. But here very expensive. Is hard here, the life.’
He sees Fujairah as a staging post on his inevitable journey to Dubai where the streets, if not paved with gold, are at least littered with possibility. ‘Is much work in Dubai. You do job, you no like, you quit job, you do new job. Is good.’
When I ask him if he has any sense of a decline in Dubai’s fortunes, he shrugs. ‘Is good, Dubai. Here no good. Too small. Too much Indian.’
He works in one of the two hotels in town that have aspirations to posh. But he’s unimpressed by it. Being smack beside the main road and shoddily built it is noisy. ‘Every day guests go away for noise. Every day. I don’t care. They say me too much noise. I say tell manager. Manager big shit.’ Whether the missing verb in that last sentence is ‘is’ or ‘gets’ I can’t tell you. Either way Mahmoud laughs broadly, exposing more gold in his mouth.
My chicken is unrecognizable as chicken. It comes as a sort of mash, with pickles and a pile of warm flat b
reads to wrap it in. But unlike the pint of avocado juice that Mahmoud also ordered for me, it’s delicious.
‘Is good?’ asks Mahmoud, who watches me eat and occasionally discreetly adjusts his crotch.
‘Is good.’
‘You have woman?’
‘No, I no have woman.’ How easy I find it to lapse into pidgin. And how readily the uninflected English language lends itself to it.
‘Is OK,’ says Mahmoud generously, and I leave him picking his teeth. He has eaten and drunk nothing while I’ve been there.
Seven in the evening and out of curiosity I drop into Mahmoud’s hotel. The bar is empty. I have a beer. The bar remains empty. I leave. At the reception desk a huge African man with a veiled and tiny wife is demanding to see the manager. He wants a refund on their room because of noise.
The other principal hotel in town is set further back from the road. The bar is of the tinkling-piano and waiters-in-waistcoats variety. The bar staff are Filipino and the only customers a couple of Brits. One’s from Durham, the other Scotland and they’re both cops. They’re here on business, consulting to the Fujairah police.
They’re both heartily welcoming, whilst retaining the cagey confidence that police acquire from belonging to a paramilitary brotherhood. They exude a sense of power in reserve, of inside knowledge, of a slight condescension towards mere civilians. They know how things really work.
When I press them for scuttlebutt on local policing, all the Scot will vouchsafe is a cryptic ‘Things are not as they seem.’ A couple more Heinekens, however, and the Durhamite becomes more expansive. The Indians, he says, are by and large law-abiding, and the Emiratis are effectively immune to everyday policing, especially traffic offences. ‘I won’t say they get away with murder, but pretty well everything short of it. Though actually,’ he adds after a pause, ‘when you consider how they drive, murder too.’
When I ask if the cops here are corrupt, the Scot smiles. ‘Let’s say some of them are not incorrupt,’ he says, ‘but things are getting better. Remember this place has been like the Klondike for the last couple of decades. It took a while to get law and order in the Klondike.’
And that’s about all I can get out of them, except for their shared bewilderment that anyone would want to come here on holiday, and a shared wonder at local building practices. Inspector Durham tells me that in his brand-new apartment he had to call in, on successive days, a plumber, a carpenter and an electrician. And all three turned out to be the same Indian who, in his desire to please, somehow managed to both nod and shake his head at the same time. ‘This is a weird place,’ summarizes Inspector Durham. ‘But we’re not having a bad time.’
A Filipino lad serves my drinks with polite deference and evident fear of an unseen manager. When I am up at the bar paying I ask him how he enjoys life here. He looks over his shoulder before answering. ‘Oh, sir,’ he whispers, and his face is pained, oppressed, conflicted, ‘it’s hard.’ His lip puckers. For a moment I think he’s going to cry. I give him a hundred dirhams. He gasps.
13
Wadi Filler
Dibba’s an hour or so up the coast, and I’ve been told it’s worth a day trip. I decide to hitch. As soon as I’ve made that decision I feel happy. I have never liked driving and I’ve always liked hitching. It makes me feel part of a place and its people. It also makes me feel comparatively young again, and it sticks a toe into the waters of chance that age and money generally keep me out of.
The Fujairah Beach Motel may not be ideally situated for anything else, but the highway that heads directly up the coast from its entrance could have been made for hitching. Though I have to admit I haven’t yet seen anyone with his thumb out there. Or anywhere else.
I walk half a mile or so, find a patch of roadside gravel for the driver to pull over, and raise a thumb. I still find it astonishing the effect it has on me. I feel a tasty little worm of nervousness at the importunity of it, and awareness of making myself an item to be judged. But with it comes a flood of nostalgia, a welter of associated memories and a sense of being young and excited by the world, by million-petalled possibility.
The weather is as benign as ever, the air warm, the sea breeze a zephyr. Across the way behind the township of Fujairah the toothed crest of the Hajar mountains is lit sandy by the morning sun. Behind me the smooth ocean, and on the horizon a whole fleet of tankers and container ships a mile or two out to sea and, in the manner of distant ships, seemingly immobile.
Traffic is spasmodic and I am reminded of the virtues of standing still. The senses work in repose to etch a place in the mind.
Fifteen minutes, and the ships seem not to have shifted relative to me or relative to each other. I watch them more carefully. It seems they are actually immobile. Why, I don’t know. Queuing to enter the port of Khor Fakhan perhaps, or to round the rhino horn and squeeze through the busy Straits of Hormuz before carrying on to dock at Dubai? Or are they just suddenly unemployed because of the recession?
After an hour the only car that has shown any interest has belonged to the police. It slowed, dawdled past me, the two officers staring with the licence of authority. I smiled, convincingly enough it seems to induce them to drive on. They then pulled off the road a hundred yards further on and parked. Acutely conscious of their presence I carry on hitching.
A car slows. It is the right sort of car, a battered Toyota Anonymous, with a single male driver. It stops. I’ve got my first lift in Arabia. The driver leans across and opens the door for me and urges me to get in quickly. He’s wearing the slacks and short-sleeved pastel shirt that is effectively an Indian uniform.
‘I’m Joe,’ I say and offer him my hand, but he has already turned to look over his shoulder. He says his name but I don’t catch it.
He pulls into a gap in the traffic that I would not have considered a gap, then becomes so engrossed in the act of driving that I am reluctant to initiate conversation. He repeatedly checks his mirrors. He fingers a stalk to ensure the lights are off. He glances at his speedo. Once he even looks down at his feet, as if he distrusts them. He seems oblivious to my presence. Less than a mile further on he turns onto a side road that leads towards a warehouse. He brakes. He stops. He turns to face me for the first time. ‘Good bye,’ he says, and smiles rather sweetly. The lift is over.
‘Thank you very much,’ I say, and I close the door and watch him drive away. Not only was it the shortest lift of my life, it was also the only silent one. And I am proud to say that while his car remains in sight and it is possible that he might see me in the mirror, I do not laugh.
Once he’s out of sight and I have laughed, and stopped, and then laughed again – a laugh that arrives with an involuntary body-bending surge – I return to the highway where I find myself in a considerably worse position for hitching than where I was before. So I walk back to where I was before, hoping as I do so that the driver doesn’t come back the other way and see me.
The police have gone. An hour and a half later so has most of the morning and any hope of getting a ride. If I’m going to see Dibba today I’m going to have to drive. Sheepishly I return to the motel and pick up my car.
The mosque at Bidyah, a few miles up the coast, is the oldest in the UAE. According to an information board it was built in 1446AD, and it resembles nothing I’ve seen anywhere. Painted dazzling white, it’s a squarish building perhaps fifteen by fifteen feet and without windows. Its roof consists of what look like four circular meringues each with a little tip, like a nipple.
Although the building has been tarted up for us cultural tourists, there’s a tone of aggressive pride in the sign at the entrance: No Entry Except For Prayer it shouts at the cameras and leisure wear and immodest females of the West. I’m pleased to see it. ‘Dogs are not allowed’ says another sign, accompanied by a cartoon of a snarling dog head. The image smacks of hatred. In Islam dogs are unclean. I think of the retrievers and dalmatians trotting gently round Arabian Ranches. There is no mosque in Arabian Ranches.
/> Behind this mosque stand a couple of watchtower-forts which have been recently restored. A mud wall is already scored with graffiti. I note down names like Zachariah, Ikshal and Shehil, all of whom were here in 2004 and keen that I should know it. The wall reads like something from the Old Testament.
A fat African in a white robe stops me on the watchtower steps and offers me a soft handshake and Salaam aleekum. ‘Aleekum salaam,’ I say and move my hand to my heart as I have seen men do, but he doesn’t. Rather he holds his hands out with the palms facing down, as if laying them on the heads of invisible children. He closes his eyes and intones what I assume to be a prayer, then opens them again and looks pointedly at me. I’m unsure of the correct response.
‘Shukran,’ I say which I am reasonably confident is Arabic for ‘Thanks, mate.’
To which he replies, in the best religious tradition and in nicely accented English, ‘Money money.’ And in case I don’t understand English he backs the words up by rubbing thumb and middle finger together in what I am confident is the most universally understood gesture of our species.
I am timorous. I am unwilling to offend. I’m a soft touch. But this is too flagrant even for me. I walk away. He says something to my back that I am confident is uncharitable.
Up till now the bulky African and I have had the place to ourselves, but now a Bin Majid Safari Tours minibus draws up and exudes half a dozen hefty Scandinavians with tiny cameras and regrettable shorts. They lumber past the sign banning infidel dogs and the one forbidding entry to any but the prayerful, and enter the little old mosque. They’ll fill it wall to wall.
The further north I drive on the coastal highway the thinner the traffic. The view barely changes. To my left the stark mountains. To my right the ocean and its hazy armada of parked ships. Occasional beautiful inlets of rock and water have sprouted hotels in colours that are about as sympathetic to the landscape as the Scandinavians were to Islamic sensitivities. Apparently this region is the coming place for tourists who’ve done Dubai. The coral reefs are said to offer lovely diving.