Brilliant (10 page)

That was the party where Russ drank too much too fast and had to take a cab home. I'll be fine, I told him. Never mind about me. It was one of those half and half parties, half Brits and half the rest of us, a stir-fry of Germans and Aussies, South Africans and Yanks. Expat nation. With enough booze and enough time, national rivalries always broke down. “We are the world, we are the people…” At some blurry point a bunch of us ended up on the sand, ankle deep in it, the Gulf glittering just beyond, arms around strangers' shoulders, singing and swaying.

“God, I love this place,” Steve said. He'd taken me to a hidden spot on the beach. The others had gone back inside. We made love crouching against the outside wall of the neighbouring villa. It was so good, I cried.

 

And so we've become a country. The United Arab Emirates, a long name for a small place. With the British pulling out of the Trucial States at the end of '71, Sheikh Zayed rallied the tribes of the seven regions, a monumental task considering the old grudges, blood lines, feuds over land and resources. What a strain on Baba Zayed as he brokered a deal that would have broken any other man. He has been less among us this year, as he travelled from emirate to emirate, negotiating, listening, compromising.

With his mother, Sheikha Salama, gone since a year, he also comes less frequently to Oasis Hospital. He used to visit her nearly every day; his brother, Sheikh Shakhbut, less often. But one evening they were here together. The Sheikha was failing, but she was so happy to have her sons with her that she sat up straight as a young girl against the pillows of the low sofa. The
majlis
was flickering with candlelight, the incense especially pungent. It was from the Sheikha that I learned about Arabian perfumes —
oud
,
ambar,
zafran
, musk, sandalwood. I absorbed so much sitting with her during her stays in the hospital. She would sometimes laugh at my Arabic and correct my mistakes, though after ten years, I've become fluent enough to teach newcomers at the hospital. When I use some of her phrases now, Arab companions will ask, “Where did you learn to say
that
?”

Sheikha Salama would be so proud to see what her country has become. If she had lived just a year and a bit longer she might have stood by her son's side as he raised the new flag — stripes of red, green, white and black — on December 2, 1971. But even more, I think she would have been overjoyed that her sons were able to negotiate the change in leadership without bloodshed, so unlike the violence when her husband took the throne from
his
brother. The Sheikha even made her sons take an oath of fidelity that they would never resort to fratricide. If Zayed is now seen as the father of the country, it is in no small part due to their mother.

Shakhbut is a good man, but so tied to the old ways that he was nearly paralyzed when oil and fortune gushed from the sea beds. I've been told he even blocked the first attempts to build a hospital in Abu Dhabi back in '56. The year I arrived, crates and crates of medical equipment and construction material sent by the British were left unpacked on the beaches of Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, Shakhbut and his family were treated abroad, doctors even flown in from Britain when Sheikha Salama fell ill. God love her, but God bless her people too. They also deserve the best care.

In the end, Zayed, the family agreed, would be the stronger, more fearless leader. The Brits, too, were happy to leave their once-protectorate in such capable hands.

But that last evening, all that history was like water flowing through a
falaj
. It was just a mother and her sons, laughing, talking, drinking coffee. The men began to sing
qaseedas
, old Bedu ballads. I'd heard Sheikh Zayed sing before — he sings even when driving — but that night his voice was especially rich, deep as a well at day's end. No one enjoyed it more than their mother. Her sons were singing for her.

 

It's almost impossible to recognize the hospital now. The original palm branch and mud-brick buildings, plus the twenty cement-block rooms built in my second year, are still used, but we've added a labour and delivery suite, an X-ray building, and a cold-storage basement for medicines. Later this year, another ten patient rooms — with private baths and air conditioning, such luxury — will be built. And, despite my preference for sleeping outside, we will soon be getting new staff housing.

The town of Al Ain is growing too, with super-markets, banks and travel agents springing up. Still, the centre of social life is here in the hospital, with some folks coming in every day just to chat. They actively seek our help now. There is less
TB
, less malnutrition, less ignorance. And healthier babies. We're also seeing the kinds of emergencies one finds at home: car accidents, injuries from machinery. One night last week, a Volvo roared down a sand dune, injuring two members of a Bedu family sleeping below, the dune their shelter from blowing sand. When I arrived in Al Ain, you could count the number of cars on one hand. Now there are 8,000 cars in Abu Dhabi emirate alone.

The country is being swept into the modern world at last. But who could have dreamed it would happen so fast? No man sauntering along on camel from Al Ain to Abu Dhabi in 1960 could have imagined that in a decade he'd be driving a Mercedes on a highway and arriving in less than two hours. Or that he would no longer be living with extended family in a little
areesh
hut, but in a spacious villa with every convenience.

When I worry about what might get lost in the name of progress, I look at my friends, my patients, even at Sheikh Zayed himself. I look around me — at the palms and the dunes, at the Bedu men who greet each other by touching noses. I feel the biblical rhythm of life. The desert is still home, will always be home, despite asphalt and airplanes, oil rigs and steel girders. No amount of money will erase who these people are. The sky, the heat, the emptiness will keep us rooted.

 

They'd been heading out that Friday morning, the humidity a damp haze at 5:00 a.m., Victor in front of him, pedalling in his frenzied, unorthodox form, Talbot yelling back to them both, into the dimness: Switch! Mathieu surging forward, Victor slowing enough to be passed.

Mathieu had seen it so many times, though once had been enough: their shifting line as they drafted into Talbot's slipstream, their controlled zig-zag down Khaleej al Arabi, the July sky lightening over mosques and tall cranes. It was a drill he'd known since the lycée in Lyon, since crazy coach Gervais took a riding switch to their sweaty legs. He'd been amazed that his calves could sweat like that, amazed that pumping his legs up and down a million trillion times could carry him so far. And not just down the road, Gervais would tell the panting, doubled-over boys. He'd been a philosopher, that Gervais.

Sandrine and the girls were in France when it happened. These were their summers now: his wife and twin daughters walking into the Languedoc village for croissants each morning, Mathieu grabbing a black coffee at Starbucks on his way into the Khalifa Street office. They talked every night by webcam, Mathieu leaning back in the office chair, watching the fuchsia faces of his family. The technology still hadn't been perfected. Sometimes the girls were just voices out of the darkness. “
Qu'avez-vous fait aujourd'hui
?” he asked every night. There were markets in Pézenas and Sète and old friends and day trips to
la
plage
. It was hard not to be envious. He had his all-consuming job, Victor and the bikers, sometimes a flirtation in a bar on a Thursday night that slid into Friday morning.
C'est tout
.

He hadn't wanted to go out that morning. A big meeting with the Al Nafs people was scheduled for Sunday morning and he didn't have all the numbers he needed. Even if he worked all weekend, there still might not be enough time to fill in the holes. Two years of dealing with Abu Dhabi's investment body had shown him how fatal this could prove. Weeks of work down the toilet. He didn't like riding when he was this edgy, although Talbot was always saying this was the best time to get out there and pump your ass off. “Who isn't on edge in this place?” he asked. “Name me one person you know who isn't totally stressed out, especially in our world.”

Talbot was a corporate lawyer for Amaal, the real-estate Godzilla in town. He and his wife had just split, Molly going back to Scotland with the girls. “For the best,” he kept saying, but Mathieu had seen the terror behind the brave drinking and pedalling. Victor, mad Victor, was a cheery Aussie with a gorgeous wife and two boys he couldn't stop talking about. Even with the market slump he was upbeat. “Yeah, investment banking's in the sewer,” he'd said to Mathieu the week before, as if he'd said, yeah, it's hot. The three usually went to Forty Fruity on the Corniche after biking. Victor always ordered the tallest triple-layer drink, noisily slurping the avocado purée at the bottom: “Put back the calories, mates.”

But Victor was a demon on a bike, competitive as hell. Even with his irregular form — pitched slightly more forward than Talbot advised — he was the fastest among them. He'd confided to Mathieu that he wanted to tackle a triathlon next year. “I'd like that just once.” And it was looking good, Victor surpassing his times each week, Talbot, even Talbot, looking impressed.

The week before he was hit, Victor told Mathieu he was thinking of going to Amman in April. “Heard it's one of the best triathlons in the region. You know…organized!” And they'd laughed, both of them having lived in the
UAE
long enough to appreciate that.

The place had you by the balls. So much money you could barely believe it. Kids happy as clams, carefree in their private schools, golf and piano lessons, wives relieved to have someone else take over the laundry, the cooking, the toilets, the daily nit and grit. Sandrine had slipped into the life as if she'd been born to it. And if it got too hot or too boring, if the nanny quit and you had to go through the maze of finding another, if the clogged streets and wacko drivers made you scream with helplessness, there were summers in France to set you right.

 

They'd stopped running, were walking now. Whatever Gillian did, he did. “My friends at the school tell me this is normal, that if I wasn't crying every second they'd be worried. ‘She is,' as the papers said, ‘inconsolable.' She is — thank God! — completely out of her mind.” He thought she might laugh — she had a great, surprising laugh — but her voice caught. “What kills me as much as the stupid tank that cut him down and kept going is that I wasn't even here. Dad had a second small stroke and Mum thought it'd be a good idea to come home a week earlier than planned for summer hols. ‘Were you afraid Dad might die, was that what you were thinking?' I asked her that on the phone last night. She calls every night, more worried about me now than she is about Dad. It was harsh of me, I guess. Like if she hadn't been her overly concerned self, always dramatizing Dad's health, I would have been here, instead of shopping with her that afternoon in Brisbane. I would have made it not happen.” Gillian reached for the bottle of water Mathieu had extended to her and let out a shaky breath. “Don't tell anyone I said that last thing, okay?”

He'd called the day after the accident, left a message with her sister, who'd flown back with her and the boys. “Hello, this is a message for Gillian. It's Mathieu. I rode with Victor. I cannot tell you how terribly sorry I am. For you and for…”
Merde
, he couldn't remember the kids' names. Aaron? Cedric? He didn't know them, didn't know her. She'd been Victor's backstory, probably the reason he seemed so happy all the time. They'd only met Victor's family twice, running into the four of them at the Carrefour check-out one Friday evening, chatting longer than they might have because the lines snaked back into the aisles of chips and chocolates. An Emirati woman, hugely, modestly pregnant under her
abaya
, stood between the two families. Her eyes, bright, curious even, watched them above the
shayla
that covered the rest of her face. Amazing, the eyes of some of the women here.

Unloading the bags into the back of the Volvo later, Sandrine had commented on how beautiful Victor's wife was. She wouldn't say that now. Gillian looked like a woman who hadn't stood in front of a mirror for a while, had lost track of herself. She was tall, nearly as tall as Mathieu, and as she bent over to retie the laces of her trainer, foot high on the Corniche railing, he could see the outline of her back ribs against the jersey.

“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.