Hello Dubai

by Joe Bennett

  ‘Salaam aleekum,’ I say.

  The driver is Afghani and charming.

  20

  Choose Your Goat

  ‘Build me a school,’ said Sheikh Rashid in May 1978, ‘right here,’ and jabbed his finger at Plot B141, down by the sea. And they did. They built Dubai College.

  Plot B141 aggrandizes it a bit. In 1978 this area was just sand and a coastal track and a sprinkle of shacks. Now a six-lane highway, an irrigated lawn and an ornamental flower bed separate the school from the beach. And out from the beach stretches the Palm Jumeirah with David Beckham’s mum securely lodged amid its fronds.

  Only a few yards from the ceaseless traffic a bird is bearing down on a flower bed, an egret. It is as white as a medieval virgin and shaped like a stretched Chianti bottle.

  The egret seems unfazed by the roaring vehicles, but when it spots me, the sole pedestrian in vehicle land, it stands still. I stand still. A few seconds and it resumes its progress, picking its deliberate way on huge splayed feet, reaches the edge of the bed and studies the ranks of plants, peering under leaves and flower heads and swaying its head like a charmed cobra. It freezes momentarily, then strikes. In its beak a lizard, gripped across the belly. From only a few yards away I can make out the tiny reptilian claws, grasping at the nothingness of air. The bird tosses the lizard twice to align it with its gullet, then points its beak at the sky and lets gravity do the rest. What started as just another day for the lizard has come to a drastic end. I can see the slight bulge in the bird’s throat. The bird moves on and I cross the road. Perhaps five minutes later I’ve made it across all six lanes. I look back. The bird is hunting again.

  ‘Here’s something to read while you’re waiting,’ says the school secretary, and hands me the Dubai College yearbook. Having taught for too many years, I’ve seen school yearbooks. They don’t vary. The same upbeat glossiness. The same snaps of kids running, jumping, playing musical instruments, grinning and clowning, going on field trips – the officially sanctioned version of adolescence. No record of the moodiness, the sudden swings of love and dread. Every yearbook is advertising.

  Framed paintings by the kids line the walls. The names tell the story of the place: Finn Harceaga, Katy Hassall, Anisha Senaretne, Priyanka Patel, Alia al Ghussain, Sofia Vyas, Melissa McWhirter, Rafae Ali. Is there a more cosmopolitan school anywhere? Perhaps, but of the one hundred and ninety or so nationalities available on earth, Dubai College has representatives from more than a quarter of them.

  ‘If you can’t teach here,’ says Graham Penson, my twinkling guide around the school, ‘you can’t teach.’ We pass through an area where senior kids are supposed to be engaged in private study. Almost all of them are engaged in private study. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.

  ‘Six applicants for every place,’ says Graham. ‘And the kids want to get ahead.’

  He pushes open the door to the new performing arts block. A girl of sixteen or so is singing something classical. A pianist accompanies her. Her singing coach listens intently. A sound technician fiddles with a board. Three adults attending to the one child. The voice fills the conditioned air. We tiptoe past and Graham opens the door on an auditorium with an orchestra pit, a huge stage and seating that can be rearranged by laser.

  ‘Nice,’ I say, thinking of the cold school halls where I used to put on shows.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Graham, ‘not bad, is it?’ Originally from Birmingham, he’s been here many years and plans to stay a few more to see the last of his kids through school. After that, retirement somewhere, though probably in neither Dubai nor Brum.

  ‘You don’t sound Brummy,’ I say, and he smiles and launches beautifully into his native accent, though beautifully may not be the most apt of adverbs. That rising intonation. Those vowels that spring straight from the bridge of the nose. Though Birmingham is England’s second city, its accent rarely makes the national airwaves. Even as in Chaucer’s day, the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle still looks down its vowels at the rest of the country.

  ‘In Dubai,’ says Graham, ‘class is money. But the place grows on you, and I like to think it’s got a bit of integrity to it, a certain tolerance and courtesy.’

  So saying, he leads me into a class of tolerant and courteous sixth form kids who have been corralled to listen to the visiting writer and who seem tolerantly and courteously unexcited by the prospect. I tell them about the egret and the lizard. I thought it would make a provocative opening. It doesn’t. The kids seem either puzzled or politely uninterested.

  I fire out questions about growing up in Dubai, whether it seems like home to them, whether they expect to spend their lives here, whether they think it’s a fair society, what they see as the future of the place, but I get only polite platitudes back. Perhaps what seems remarkable to me about the place is just to them the way things are.

  But as I sit on a bus heading downtown a while later I acknowledge the truth to myself. And that truth is that I’ve been too long out of the classroom. I’ve lost the knack. In the half hour I was in front of them I made no connection with them. So why should they give out? Ah well, I won’t be returning to teaching. But they were good kids.

  The bus drops me outside the Al Shindagha Carrefour hypermarket, huge and air-conditioned and selling everything from toasters to toasted sandwiches. It’s got a display of New Zealand lamb, its rich purple muscle fed on grass half a world away and butchered into neat chops, shoulders and legs. The Indian lamb in an adjacent chiller is half the price, less meaty and apparently butchered by the blind. The cleaver has just hacked through the bone in arbitrary places, and the resulting chunks of animal have been piled unsorted into a thick plastic bag.

  Near the shop entrance there’s a board of small ads like the ones in sweetshop windows when I was a kid. They are all for accommodation.

  ‘Bedspace available in villa for working ladies. Filipino only. 700 dirhams month.’

  ‘Bedspace available for Indian executive bachelor.’

  Executive here means anything other than a construction worker. Bedspace means access to a bed for certain hours of the day. The rest of the time someone else will have it.

  Al Shindagha is the spit of land that curls across the mouth of the creek and would close it were it not dredged. And it was on this spit that Sheikh Mohammed’s granddad was born. His palace has been duly restored for tourists and is as much a fort as a palace, built of coral blocks from the sea, with tall thick walls and low windowless rooms and wind towers designed to catch the slightest breeze off the Gulf and funnel it inside the building to relieve the heat of summer. One room holds a display of photos of Dubai in the mid-twentieth century. There’s a snap of a souk, all shade and heaped goods and men idling in the heat in rag-tag clothing, and another of Dubai under siege from locusts. A single anonymous long-dead insect is immortalized as it loomed against the lens seventy years ago, like an out of focus UFO. Behind it, its trillion brothers and sisters resemble a blizzard. Dibba is apparently the Arabic for locust, and possibly the origin of the name Dubai.

  But the photo that strikes me hardest is an aerial shot of Dubai. Just a cluster of white buildings clinging to the mouth of the Creek and giving way almost immediately to the bleaching desert behind.

  I fetch a juice and take a seat by the Creek. Where I sit I’d be in the middle of that photo. I face towards the Gulf with my back to the modern world and try to imagine how it was. The place would have been quiet, especially in the heat of summer. The little abras that ferried people from Deira to Bur Dubai and back would have had oarsmen rather than engines. The people passing by would have been dressed not in Chinese cotton casual or in suits, nor probably in dishdashes, but in the universal robe of Arabia. The vast yellow straddle cranes of Port Rashid would not have been there to stab the skyline. There would have been only the ancient horizon of the Gulf’s bright waters. And fishing boats. And heat.

  I swivel in my seat, and there’s the twenty-first century. The glass tower
of some money-shifting banking giant, a huge hotel, and tall electric letters spelling ROLEX in English and Arabic. I amble off and find an abattoir.

  ‘You want?’ says a Pakistani in loose blue pyjamas, sitting on the rail above a pen of goats.

  ‘Where are they from?’

  ‘Iran,’ he says. ‘Iran very good meat.’

  ‘I see,’ and I appraise his goats in a manner that I hope suggests carnivorous interest. White goats, brown goats, black goats, black brown and white goats, horned and hornless, floppy-eared, straight-eared, straight-haired, short-haired or hair in ringlets, and all of them doomed. If not today, then tomorrow or the day after. The kids pile all over each other to get at a bowl of food scraps. Their efforts, within yards of the eternal cleaver, seem just a little pointless. Though you could argue that the difference between them and us is merely span.

  The abattoir has a viewing area. You select your beast, pay for it at the little window, and then toddle up the ramp at your leisure to watch the beast being butchered. One end of the viewing platform is reserved for ladies. At the other end, there’s a display of diseased bits of goat. Here’s a parasitic cyst, nicely preserved, and beside it a gall bladder that’s suffered a haemorrhage. But the glass is misty with condensation and the ink has run on the typed descriptions. There’s also a sign saying Suggestions Box but the box is missing.

  Inside the abattoir three fittingly swarthy men are sitting on a stainless steel table and chatting and waiting. Two men of Middle Eastern aspect arrive in a Toyota Ute. With them are four happy little boys who have clearly been here before. They rush to the pens and clamber on the metal fencing. The adults swiftly select a good-sized goat with curly hair the colour of milk chocolate.

  The herdsman seizes it by the horns, drags it from the pen, holds it for the customers’ final inspection, then wrestles it through a doorway in the back of the slaughterhouse. The boys run round to the viewing area while the adults light cigarettes.

  The goat appears in the killing shed, borne by a metal conveyor belt with sides that clamp against the animal’s flanks. It can move only its head and neck. I watch it striving to make sense of this new and alien place, its head swivelling, its eyes as wide as a goat’s eyes go. When it reaches the top of the belt, two men seize it by the legs and lay it on its side on a stainless steel table. The man at the front end draws a knife from a holster at his waist, says a prayer invoking the greatness of Allah and slashes the beast’s throat, once, twice. There is no noise. Blood spurts onto the killer’s plastic apron. The goat performs a few spasms of the legs then is goat no more. It merely twitches, involuntarily I presume – I hope – as the other man hitches it by the rear hooves to an overhead line, and the killer hoses the blood from his apron. The corpse’s head swings beneath the line at an angle no living goat could achieve, the wound across its throat is a ruby chasm, a hugeness.

  They cut off the horns with a circular saw and toss them into a bucket, then peel the skin from the animal’s head. The head now resembles a Hollywood alien. A man runs his knife up the scrotum and belly, then hauls the skin off the back end of the beast as if peeling a wetsuit off a child. He clamps the loose pelt to a swinging hydraulic device that stretches the carcass as if on a rack, until the whole pelt comes off with a rush. The chain moves the carcass on to be eviscerated. The beast has shrunk to a frame of bones and edible muscles.

  The stomach is tossed down a chute. Other organs are put aside. The chest cavity is hosed out. When the blanched and simplified carcass reaches the end of the chain it’s unslung, laid on the block, and the butcher asks the customers how they want it dealt with. A few deft cleaver hacks and the whole lot, which fifteen minutes ago was shaggy bleating goat, a goat that could see and hear and run, is tipped into a carrier bag and handed through the hatch. Two boys take a handle each and carry it to the Ute.

  I find the whole business gruesomely compelling. I watch half a dozen goats butchered. One is a white kid, little bigger than a spaniel. By the time it’s been finished with, it’s snack-sized.

  Another evening, another party in Arabian Ranches. Is this the residual effect of Christmas, or is the ex-pat life an endless round of such gatherings? The hostess is Iranian. ‘In Iran,’ she says, ‘we like things clean. We don’t like animals because they are dirty. This dog,’ and here she pats the family mongrel, a mute and docile creature, ‘is the first animal I ever touched. Except with a fork.’

  The dog looks up with the brown-eyed hope that we mistake so readily for love. I’ve watched the dog for a while. It’s been doing what dogs do at parties, which is to cruise for food. It hung around the kitchen until shooed out by one of the Filipina maids, since when it has sat patiently at the feet of anyone who is eating. It targets women. By sitting patiently it hopes to melt their hearts. And if the woman fails to notice the dog, there is always the chance that when she gets up she will trip over it and food will spill.

  I cycled here on a borrowed bike. I haven’t cycled in years. And I enjoyed it, despite the residual sensation that someone has gently but insistently taken a cabinet-maker’s hammer to a point just behind my scrotum. The route took me past a billion dollars of Arabian Ranches real estate, the houses all subtly different and effectively identical, and in the whole half-hour ride through the warm evening I saw nobody on foot, bar security guards and a single jogger.

  But I did see an accident. It was lovely. A woman emerged from her front door and spoke a few brisk words to her maid. The woman was dressed to go out in a tight white dress. She lowered herself into a black Audi, reversed out of her drive, swung across the road and ran smack into the side of a parked Mini Cooper.

  Because it happened at low speed I heard every expensive detail: the crack and tinkle of the rear lights shattering and the deep graunch of sheet metal buckling. Apart from the maid, whom I imagine could be relied on to keep schtum, I was the only witness.

  The woman got out of the car, inspected the damage, looked around and saw me on my bike. Her already tight features tightened further. She went into the house and I rode on. I didn’t have an exact address for the party but it wasn’t hard to find. A whole fleet of 4WDs was drawn up outside it like piglets on a sow.

  There’s food and drink in abundance, and the real-estate cliché of indoor–outdoor flow is actually happening, all the doors being wide open and there being no temperature difference between in and out. The garden is lush with forced vegetation. The pool sparkles under lights. The bar’s a thatched hut, round which the men have gathered to laugh heartily. The women stand in knots. Children frolic in the pool or play games of electronic murder in the television room. And as usual, there are no old people to cater to.

  A man who refuses politely to tell me what sort of business it is that he runs is less reticent on the subject of race. ‘Indians are OK,’ he says, ‘but don’t give them authority. They immediately establish a caste system. Pakistanis have a chip on their shoulder. Filipinos start well then slowly decline. It’s hard to get Africans to do any work at all. Egyptians are fucking hopeless. But the Nepalese, now, I just can’t get enough of them. Great workers. Great people.’

  ‘And Kiwis?’ I ask. ‘Ever had any of them work for you?’

  ‘A dozen or so,’ he says, to my surprise. ‘And I’ve sacked the lot. They get bolshy.’

  There’s a table football machine on the patio, its ranks of players impaled on rods, like kebabs. I tell the host about a bar in my home town that was owned by a laid-back German. He turned the table football machine in his bar into a game between Jews and Nazis. His action caused a furore and was condemned in newspaper editorials. And in direct consequence business boomed. The host laughs and disappears into the house to re-emerge with the Victor annual. He opens it to show me line drawings of square-headed Boche shouting ‘Achtung, hande hoch und Britische schweinhund.’ The year of the annual is 1973, twenty-eight years after the war ended.

  Kids who think 1973 is ancient history are playing with a Wii machine. I’v
e heard the name and puzzled at it, but never seen the beast itself. The kids remarkably, and I suspect atypically, are engaged in some interactive fitness programme. Seeing me watching they urge me to have a go. I have to stand on a box like bathroom scales. ‘Hi,’ says the machine in a voice that it would be hard to imagine anything worse than, ‘let’s get fit together, shall we?’

  I am with children so I say nothing. The machine requires me to establish an on-screen identity. I prove incompetent with the remote, so the kids take over. They create a dumpy figure called Joe, then to universal laughter they make him bald.

  The machine ingests my vital statistics, then informs me that I am ‘rather overweight’. Again I say nothing. The screen leads me through some balancing exercises on the little box, at the end of which it summarizes my fitness. And it transpires that as a fifty-one-year-old who still plays a fair game of squash or cricket and who walks miles on the hills with his dog every day, I have the athletic capacity of a sixty-three-year-old. ‘Would you like to set some fitness goals, now?’ asks the machine.

  ‘Yes,’ I say to myself. ‘I would, after a fashion.’

  The first of them would be to throw this intrusive and patronizing irrelevance of a machine through the window. The second is to fly to Silicon Valley and find the pot-bellied Coca-Cola-drinking slob who programmed it, thrash him at squash, drink him under the table, and while he is unconscious debag him and strap him to the ground in some region of the world that is known to be popular with soldier ants. ‘Thanks, kids,’ I say, ‘I think that’ll do me,’ and I retire to the lavatory where there is a cage of entertainingly active hamsters.