Brilliant

by Denise Roig

  “You’re not eating,” he said.

  “Nah,” she said. And he saw the tears falling again. Earlier, he’d been uncomfortable with how freely she wept. He was getting used to it.

  “Tell me again how he rode,” she said.

  It was what she’d wanted to know the first time they talked. She’d phoned back that same day, surprising him. She didn’t know him. He wasn’t family. He wasn’t Australian, not part of their circle. And there were all the arrangements to make, so much legal crap to work through as an expat. In this city where everything had to be redone two, three, four times under the best of circumstances, organizing a funeral would have to be a nightmare. Yet she’d called him and he found himself describing the way Victor hunched his shoulders over the handlebars, the way he rotated his neck three times to the right, three times to the left before heading off. She listened as if she had nothing else to do.

  “Thank you,” she said, when he’d told her everything he could remember, described as much as he could without sounding like he was burnishing it too much. He could never tell her that when they rode back to the corner of Khaleej and 19th to see why Victor was no longer with them, they found him lying on the side of the road, still on his bike, as if he’d just tipped over in the start of the curve. There wasn’t a scratch on him, except that the back of his head was pouring blood, his helmet caved into his skull.

  “May I call you again?” she’d asked.

  Gillian was suddenly jogging again. Not used to the starting and stopping, Mathieu’s hamstrings twinged, but he jogged too and caught up.

  “I only saw him do two races,” she said. “Vic was always up early, cycling or running while I was trying to get the kids sorted.” Gillian’s streaked hair, unbrushed, not quite clean, pulled into a high ponytail, swung a little as she ran. She was thirty-two? Thirty-four?

  “How old are they now, the boys?” he asked, aware again of how little he knew.

  “Cedric’s fourteen going on twenty-five. Jake turned thirteen while we were in Brisbane that week.” She turned to look at him whenever she spoke, not the way people usually talked to each other while running — heads straight ahead, eyes on the horizon. He worried she would crash into a cyclist or Rollerblader.

  “Wow,” he said. “Teenagers.”

  “Started young. Vic couldn’t wait,” she said, and Mathieu, running alongside her, was hit with such swift and sudden sorrow he nearly doubled over.

  He didn’t make too much of it with Sandrine, knowing she’d take it wrong. The night after his first run with Gillian, he didn’t mention it at all. “Ça va, mon amour?” Sandrine asked when the girls got bored and drifted away from the laptop. His wife’s hair was wet; even in the purple light he could see that. He was sad, he told her, just very sad. Pauvre p’tit, she said. What was Gillian going to do now? she wanted to know. Aucune idée, he said. And really, he had no idea what she would do next. It hadn’t come up.

  They’d had a memorial at St. Edmund’s the Wednesday after, the place only half full, mostly Victor’s male colleagues from the bank, just a few wives. Many, like Sandrine, had gone home for the summer. Two of the women were dressed in black, but sexy black. Even in church, Mathieu couldn’t help but appreciate the skimpy straps and open backs of their dresses. They were on home turf in the church, a little less careful. A few men in khandouras, probably seniors at the bank, stood at the back.

  “Victor was such a galvanizer,” one of the Australian wives told Mathieu as they stood in the rectory garden later, balancing tea cups and tea biscuits. It was all he could do not to make a swift, polite bolt.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, he was.”

  “Gill’s going to need all the support she can get,” she said. She and her husband, on home leave, had flown back from Melbourne for the service.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, she will.”

  “She’ll want to be getting home,” the woman said. “Nothing left to keep her here, is there?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I expect not.”

  He’d spoken to Gillian two more times after the first call. She’d wondered if either he or Talbot would like to give a eulogy at the service, but in the end Talbot had to fly back to Glasgow for the week — Molly wanted to finalize things with signatures and seals, not leave them vague — and Gillian’s brother had been able to make the trip from Tasmania. “I hope you don’t mind,” she told Mathieu in the second call. “He and Victor were very close. He’s going to try to speak.” Of course, he didn’t mind. It would have been an honour and sure, he had stories no one else could tell. He might have even been able to lighten things up with tales of Victor, gonzo biker, but he wouldn’t have felt completely right speaking in front of people who’d known Victor far better and longer.

  He wasn’t sleeping well, was forgetting to eat. He found himself staring into space, even at work, even as the Al Nafs thing was steaming along. He’d wanted to cancel the Sunday meeting, didn’t think he could stomach the usual dithering and double-talk. Yes, we go with the plan. Next week: what plan? But he’d shown up with his PowerPoint and his best Italian suit and somehow the parking project he and six planners had been working on for the past ten months got approved.

  “We understand there is a problem,” Sheikh Ali bin Rashid, head of the municipality’s transport board, had said. No kidding, Mathieu had thought. It had taken him twenty minutes to find a spot for one of the two space-and-gas guzzlers Sandrine had insisted they buy when they moved here.

  The Friday before had been spent at the hospital and then the police station, Talbot sitting next to him, saying almost nothing, though they’d both had to answer question after question, some from people whose accents made their answers just guesses. Talbot, though, was the one who’d called Gillian from the hospital. “I’m the coach,” was all he said as he slipped into a stairwell with his mobile. The face of the surgeon had just told them what they already knew.

  The who, the how? A mystery. Talbot and Mathieu, three years into this life, knew it might stay that way. Ugly facts were neatly tucked into a head scarf. And if it had been an Emirati who’d hit Victor, then that was truly the end of it.

  “Do you think it was a local?” They were jog-walking again. A week deeper into July, it was so hot they’d met at a quarter to seven, promising each other a half-hour tops. Gillian seemed thinner even than the Friday before, her shoulder bones little knobs under tan, smooth skin. Still, her eyes were less bloodshot, her blonde hair washed. “I just keep picturing a guy in full Emirati regalia driving a Hummer at 160 klicks an hour, you know?”

  He’d run over the possibilities so many times. Maybe it had been a taxi speeding to the airport or an expat pulling a runner, fleeing debts and bad memories. Maybe it had been one of those badly balanced beige buses, full of men on their way back to the Musaffah labour camps, Indians and Pakistanis who’d worked all night on cranes at the port or the towers in front of Emirates Palace. The city was a riot of construction and swarming crews in blue coveralls and orange vests. At night all the major streets were lined with dusty, spent men, sitting on curbs or cross-legged on patches of dry grass. Sometimes he saw them waiting at dusk on Hamdan Street, the most perfect, still, straight lines he’d ever seen. Perhaps that morning a driver had closed his eyes for a moment, letting the bus drift to the shoulder, then startled back to wakefulness by the wheels catching on sand. Perhaps the driver sensed movement, something brushing against the side of the bus, but then it was gone and he’d sped on because the men needed to be back in time for early-morning prayers and a few hours’ sleep.

  Mathieu hadn’t heard a car approach that Friday. No cars had passed their tight, short line for at least five minutes, as closely as he could remember. But he hadn’t hit his cycling rhythm yet, was still warming up, which took more concentration than it would ten minutes later when his heart would begin pumping in time with his legs. He was still groggy, still stiff,
still fighting his body, preoccupied with the Sunday meeting and wondering what he was going to do about the Russian girl who’d texted her mobile number to his the night before at the Captain’s Arms. These things didn’t usually work out too well, though a month without sex was beginning to wear on him. Not that sex was a given when Sandrine was around. She was only sometimes in the mood the past few years. She’d been so pliant in their early days; now it was a constant negotiation. That was how he’d explained the thing with Angie a year ago. Not to Sandrine — why inflict unnecessary hurt? — but to himself. Still, the girl in the bar seemed like the undemanding type. He remembered the way her breasts tested the tiny buttons on her filmy blouse, wondered if her nipples were pale or dark, if she liked them sucked or licked or nipped… If Talbot had been able to read his thoughts that morning, he wouldn’t have been impressed. Scattered to here and beyond. So scattered that as he and Talbot turned off Khaleej al Arabi, heading down 19th toward the water, he failed to look back, failed to check on Victor.

  Gillian had stopped again, had turned to face him, was looking into his face. She wanted to know: Did he think it was a local?

  “It could have been anyone, Gillie,” he said, surprised by using the name Victor had called her and by putting his arm around her. She didn’t pull away.

  “I think it was a local,” she said. Her voice was flat, but tears had begun to gather in her eyes again. “Motherfucker.”

  “Maybe we can get a coffee,” he said, surprised again and rapidly checking motivations and repercussions. Meeting to run on the Corniche was one thing. Coffee…he needed to be really careful here. She was in shock, deep grief, her heart run over. The last thing he should be doing was encouraging emotional dependence. Once, in university in the UK, Mathieu had comforted his flatmate’s girlfriend after the flatmate dumped her. The girl had been near-suicidal and one thing led to another. The guy had a change of heart and everyone ended up feeling shitty.

  Gillian looked at him, studied his eyes. “Okay,” she said.

  At Dome, she ordered a flat white. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “They don’t have these in France?”

  “No,” he said. “What is it? Some kind of weird Aussie drink?” For a moment they were other people in another situation.

  “Victor could drink four a day,” said Gillian and they were back to normal.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Cry for the rest of my life,” she said and smiled at him. She was young and lovely and all she deserved she could never have again. “You mean, what am I going to do next?”

  “Can you keep your teaching job? Do you feel like going home?”

  “I don’t feel like doing anything,” she said. “I don’t even want to be drinking this stupid coffee. For all I know the guy who killed my husband is the owner of this place.” She waved a hand at the counter where two Filipina waitresses stood giggling. The café was empty except for them; the mall crowd would drift in after the noon prayers. “You know, not the real, working, do-something owner, but the local guy who does nothing but make money off this place and drive around in his SUV, running people down if they get in his way.” She put her cup down. She was right. She was barely drinking it. “The doctor wouldn’t even do a frigging autopsy. Can you believe that? ‘It’s God’s will,’ he said. Can you believe that?”

  Anger was a part of grief, he remembered reading, a necessary part. Well, he would be her punching bag and the friend-for-now she needed. He would protect her, even from himself. And sitting in the echoing plastic sameness of Al Wahda Mall at 8:00 a.m., the call to prayer beginning on the loudspeakers, he felt for the first time in a long while almost good about himself.

  Vicarage

  He’d told her gently when they first met, then more firmly several times after: Call me Dave. She stood before him now, tan and perfect in a white linen sundress, no moisture on her taut face though it was nearly 40 degrees. She blazed him a smile.

  “Father,” she said.

  “Please,” he said. “Dave.”

  “Dave,” she said and he knew by the humouring way she said his name that they would be having this exchange again. Tina would never give in.

  “We need to talk,” she said, shutting the smile off.

  “Let’s talk,” he said.

  “Not here,” she said, looking around the empty church compound.

  It was late; the sun had already moved from its blistering noon position. There’d been tea and cookies in the vicarage garden. Dave could hear the tea boys speaking loudly to each other in Hindi as they cleaned up. Even the Ethiopian women, who gathered every Friday in the courtyard to sing and pray, their gauze shawls the holiest shade of white he’d ever seen, had gone.

  He led her, with what he hoped looked like ministerial willingness, through the compound to the apartment, seven awkwardly arranged rooms filled with sagging, beige furniture. Even Suzette and the kids called it The Vicarage, a public place where they happened to live. They were used to it. Six years in Kuwait, four in Oman, two in Bahrain and now, Abu Dhabi. “Where are you from?” one of the ancient thrift shop ladies had bent to ask eight-year-old Erik the week before and he’d answered, “The world, I guess.”

  Arjun met them in the entryway. He was always there, discreetly there, never underfoot or hovering. Thirty years and seven ministers, a St. Edmund’s fixture. How had he done it? His daughters in Cochin were grown now, his wife dead. Dave watched the man’s lean back as he bent over yet another tea service, the thin cotton of his shirt damp at the base of his spine. After so many years in the Gulf, Dave was fine-tuned to the nuances of servitude. Secretly he worried he’d become too used to it: I tell. You do.

  “Tea please, Arjun,” he said, needing the ritual of cups and spoons and Arjun’s steady presence padding in and out. Tina Souaidy was going to require more than he had this afternoon. Why did she want to talk on Friday after the main service, after he’d talked and talked? “Shot your wad,” as Suzette delicately put it.

  He gestured to the overstuffed Arabian loveseat rather than the larger sofa where he lowered himself, surprised by the heaviness in his body. He didn’t want to sit side by side. “It’s better like this,” Tina said, moving to join him on the sofa. She smelled like sunscreen and something fruity. Peach.

  “We have to do something,” she said.

  The Friday before, they’d visited the women’s labour camp, a cluster of low buildings tucked inside the maze of the Musaffah camps. For several weeks, he’d announced the new outreach program from the pulpit, not encouraged by the looks on most of the faces: Right, Dave, just how I want to spend a Friday afternoon. It had been only the two of them meeting at the back of the chapel the previous week, plus a Scottish fellow who seemed to think they were going to Foodlands for the monthly post-service lunch. “Wrong group,” he said and scurried off.

  Dave had met Tina several times before, both relative newcomers to a parish that had been the pillar of British Anglican life in Abu Dhabi for fifty years and fully intended to remain so for the next fifty. At first, eager to connect, Dave looked for her after Friday service. Sometimes she came with a young man, probably her son. Mostly she came alone. Her husband, she’d told him as they stood in the vicarage garden during the weekly, obligatory meet-and-greet, travelled a great deal. “Mo works for the ruling family,” she said. “He’s Syrian Muslim, I’m Italian-American and Catholic. You can imagine how the folks back in Boston love that.” And Tina had smiled so widely, so winningly that he almost missed the darkness in her eyes, the tightness of her jaw.

  “You’re wondering why I’m not over there, right?” she’d said, waving behind her in the vicinity of St. Mary’s Cathedral, where throngs of Indians and Filipinos gathered for sixty masses a week. It gave a whole new meaning to the word mass, Dave thought when he first saw the beige, curtained buses unloading and reloading every Friday morn
ing, the drivers yelling out return destinations in shrill voices. If he had even one-tenth those numbers he’d be named Primate of All England. Dave had made a point of meeting the Catholic bishop his first week in Abu Dhabi. His Excellency George Mueller: German, elderly, prim, cold as a Munich winter.

  “You’re thinking maybe that I feel out of place in that sea of brown?” Tina had fixed him with another smile, harder at the edges. “No, I welcome diversity. I just can’t abide the bishop. One of Ratzinger’s guys probably. Perfect fourth-century mind.” She must have seen some recognition in his face, though Dave quickly tried to register only non-committal amusement. “Good line,” he said.

  Meet and greet. It had been the thing to do in those early weeks. There was the St. Edmund’s old guard — ushers, readers, the thrift shop ladies — to have in for lunch at the Vicarage. They’d welcomed him with mild interest, talking among themselves through the cucumber sandwiches; even in this transient city-state they would probably outlast him. There were the religious leaders of the other churches in the block-square compound — the Bible Belt, Suzette called it — from the Syrian Orthodox priest to the Oklahoma-folksy minister at the evangelical church. Ed Woods had the hungry look of a proselytizer and wanted to get together every week. “Make it a regular thing, Dave. Talk about matters close to both our hearts.”

  There was someone he did want to meet. Sheikh Maktoum bin Zayed, a half-brother of the crown prince, was officially the deputy minister of cultural affairs, but he had a special interest in Christianity, having studied comparative religion at Oxford. “How did they ever allow him to do that?” Suzette had asked. The “Him” had changed with their postings, from Emir to Sultan to simply, Supreme Ruler. There was always a Him in these countries, as well as a They, the surrounding ruling circle, and you were wise never to forget that.

  It was Bishop Mueller who finessed an audience with Sheikh Maktoum in Dave’s third month. What those two had in common, Dave couldn’t begin to fathom after the first minutes of conversation. The bishop sat stiff as a crosier on the least cushy of the couches in Maktoum’s majlis, one of many such rooms, no doubt. Dave had expected to be dazzled — not that the elegant space, with its Italian marble floors and air of supreme privilege, was a disappointment. But it was a modest dazzle, as if Maktoum had wanted to minimize the space between them.