Secret Skin (7 page)

‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘A guy in a bar told me, so it must be.’

‘Oh my god. There’s always something going on here that we don’t know about.’ She smoked some more, ‘This is fun,’ she smiled.

‘I love it. I’m so relaxed.’

‘I love this shisha,’ she said, ‘I could just lie here and smoke it all night.’

We both sat back adding clouds to the sweet smelling haze around us, trying to find stars in the night sky against the reflected glow of the city, and listening to the sea as it lapped lazily against the shore.

I felt Yasmin’s foot brush mine. We touched tentatively at first, feeling that uncertain but enticing spark of attraction pass between us. Not sure where this could ever go. Without speaking we settled on entwining our feet together, stroking each other's legs with our toes. A happy jumble of limbs. That was enough for now.

As the desert cooled it pushed a refreshing breeze out over the sea. The air tickled our skin with the promise of respite from the unrelenting night time heat.

‘I needed this,’ she said. ‘David…’ she began, and then her phone vibrated.

She checked to see who the caller was and answered immediately. No pleasantries passed between them. ‘Yes,’ she said flatly. ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘No…on his own…I am not sure,’ she said, looking at me from under dark lashes and heavy lids. Then the caller hung up.

‘Faisal?’ I guessed.

‘He wanted to know whether you had paid already.’

She pulled back into herself and inhaled furiously on the pipe, lost in her own thoughts.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘I had forgotten why I was here David. I had forgotten that you are a client. I felt normal for once.’ She looked at me. ‘Do you know David I have forgotten how many hundreds of men I have slept with. I am 22 and I have never had a lover of my own. I was a virgin when I came here. I have never slept with a man because I wanted to. Imagine that.

‘If this life was my choice it would be different. It would be my money, my mistakes. But it is not. I am his. They are his clients. It is his apartment. It is his money. I can leave him one day when I pay my debt. Set up on my own, make some good money maybe, but by then my life will be half over and this, this place, this work will be all I have ever known.’

I left my shisha and moved next to her. I put my arm around her shoulders and she clung to me the way an exhausted child clings to a parent.

‘Take me home,’ she said.

‘Okay.’

‘Your home.’

‘Okay.’

Nothing happened that night. Nothing sexual. Emotions were rampant but very little else. We kissed, of course. We talked some more, but mainly we held each other, still and tender.

As the night grew old our boyfriend and girlfriend act seemed less and less like role play. In a city obsessed with status we didn’t pretend to be anything other than ourselves.

I resolved that nothing could ever happen while her time came at a price. Until she could get away from Faisal neither of us could be sure of our feelings.

The feelings didn’t stop though.

We fell asleep holding onto each other, still wearing our underwear, a nod to modesty and the boundaries of our relationship.

The dawn light seeped through the heavy white curtains and forced its way between my eyelids. The loud squawks of exotic migratory birds in conversation disguised the white noise of construction traffic rumbling along Sheikh Zayed Road. Like the rest of us Dubai was just somewhere for the birds to stop on their way to somewhere else.

Yasmin had already moved on. Her scent, like the first time I saw her, lingered on the white sheet she had cast off from her sleeping body.

The money I’d left her on the night stand had gone. Part of me hoped it would still be there.

Alone, I watched the early morning shadows of palm trees move against the curtains, nature’s puppet show. Wondering if I should indulge myself and sleep late.

I knew where that would lead though. I could make my own hours, but why waste the good ones feeling blue.

***

Martin responded to my text around six thirty, an hour after I sent it.

‘Why so early Bryson? Never made it to bed or couldn’t sleep?’

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I said.

‘Too bad.’

‘You got anything for me this morning? I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go.’

‘Hang on,’ he said groggily, I heard papers rustle. ‘Right, I need a monthly news roundup from Dubai. I want all the vice, murder and corruption you can give me. 1500 words all in. A dirham a word.’

‘C’mon Mart, that’s a scandalous rate. The free papers back home pay more than that.’

‘Take it or leave it. It’s the price you pay for the privilege of writing for Arabian Outlook.’

‘Oh is that what it is?’

‘A tough negotiator, hey? Go on, do it. You can have the syndication rights. You never know what these stories can lead to.’

‘You tired old hack. The syndication rights are mine anyway. Just give me the goddamn brief before I hang up on you.’

***

If they don’t fall into place quickly news briefs need plenty of unprofitable leg work to bash them into any kind of coherent shape. With six times 250 words on money laundering, child slavery, gold smuggling, ghost ships, piracy and human trafficking I would have to seriously manhandle my subjects.

Each story deserved far more than a just short news item.

In Dubai you also had to be careful of what you said. As a supposedly benign dictatorship you couldn’t openly criticize the government, or to be precise, the ruling family.

You could get away with asking the wrong questions, you just wouldn’t get any answers. Print the wrong thing and you could suddenly find it hard to pick up any new contracts, sidelined from even the most brainless jobs and eventually on a plane home because nobody would deal with you. If you were an employee you could be transferred, if you were a larger organization such as CNN or BBC then you might have to pay a few visits to the palace and more than a little penance.

Most media organizations heavily self censored, but direct censorship ensured nothing else slipped through. The government spliced films so frequently that even the latest Hollywood teen fluff became an experimental series of jump cut montages that Godard would have been proud of. Scenes of extreme violence, mashed eyeballs, torture and mutilation were of course left in and shown casually to young children. While sex scenes, unclothed torsos, breasts, buttocks, and entire films with powerful women or gay men tended to vanish without trace in case they warped the minds of impressionable Muslim youth.

In a country where the men held hands in public, kissed each other openly, shunned the company of women in favor of other men and wore the dishdash – a longer version of the white shapeless dress your grandmother would have worn in hospital – the irony was usually missed entirely.

If Arabian Outlook had been a lifestyle magazine a news roundup would have been a cinch, a copy and paste job from the morning’s press releases.

Simply top and tail a release with a few words of original material and there you had it. A celebrity news story, with only a few hours taken out of the day and barely any need for staff.

The algebra of personality made it easy.

Celebrity A + Celebrity B = New Relationship Shocker

Celebrity A – Celebrity B + Frowning = Celebrity Split

Celebrity X + New Hairstyle = How I Turned My Life Around

Celebrity (AB) + Fireplace = At Home With….

No calculator required. Repeat ad-nauseum across all media until everything sounded the same, even supposedly heavyweight subjects.

Rising Political Star + Baby + Kiss = Unmissable Photo Opportunity

Ultimately a politician’s currency was power and influence, fame merely the by-product. Scantily clad, Britney, Madonna or Brangalina pseudo scandals always outsold the men in grey suits.

Most editors and journalists avoided direct censorship by shunning controversy altogether. Anyone compelled to write a troublesome story had to include details of the government’s efforts to deal with the reported problem. The administration could never be portrayed as unaware, complacent or ineffective in anyway.

Take one of the stories that morning: a class action law suit by the families of children used against their will as featherweight camel jockeys in the UAE.

Foreign dignitaries had visited the races every year and diplomatically ignored what they saw. Only when journalists from Europe and America went undercover to report on children being starved, beaten, raped or killed while living in tin shacks in the desert did anything begin to change.

The government, ruling family, benign dictators or whatever they wanted to call themselves didn’t see it that way.

‘They are being sued for the good work they have done,’ said Jehad Ali, the local government representative.

‘What good work?’

‘David, isn’t it obvious? They are disappointed that after all their efforts to clean up this issue and deal with the problem in the emirate they are being sued for all the good work they have done.’

Repetitive key phrases limited the scope of what I could report. He was obviously reading from a script and pushing for a ‘good work’ quote.

‘But they are not being sued for all the good work they have done Jehad. Your ruler and several hundred others are being sued by the families of thousands of children who, allegedly, were kept as slaves.’

‘David, cultural misunderstandings are common in this part of the world. With all the work that has happened with international and non-governmental organizations it is impossible for anyone to accuse us of not wishing to eradicate this problem.’

‘It’s still going on though isn’t it?’

‘Have you seen any evidence to suggest this?’

‘Not personally no, but everyone knows....’

‘Well then. If it existed surely there would be some evidence.’

‘There’s plenty of documentary evidence out there. C’mon, how about this law suit Jehad? It hasn’t been reported anywhere in Dubai even though the ruling families own all of the race tracks where this has been going on. Is this law suit why you suddenly forced every newspaper to agree not to publish anything critical about Arab leaders last month?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know David. Now, I really must go, if I can answer any more of your questions please contact my assistant.’

The line went dead. I knew from experience that if I did want to speak to him again his assistant would only deflect my calls to a random underling or send me copies of last year’s press releases.

His whining denials and obfuscation combined with a statement from a member of one of the law suit families painted a clear picture in 250 words and that was all I needed.

The second story, money laundering, was considered just another business service in liberal Dubai. There were apocryphal stories of Russians buying entire skyscrapers with suitcases loaded with cash and Ukrainians hiring passenger planes to transport the goods from their shopping sprees back home.

I checked out some of these tales to see if I could get something from the source rather than the flies at the bar. This proved easier than anticipated. Everyone I called had a story to tell. Sensibly none of them allowed me to use their real names or positions.

One of the client managers at a European corporate bank told me, ‘At least once a day I have someone call and ask something like, “I have $40 million I need to put into an account today. Can you help me?” With that kind of figure I’m obligated to see if I can’t find somewhere to place it. But if they’re jumpy by the time I’ve asked them a couple of basic questions like who they are and where they are based, I usually advise them to take their money to Bank Emarati instead.’

‘Why that bank?’ I asked.

‘Well, you know, they do have a track record and a reputation,’ she said. ‘They were one of the only banks to continue operating after the money laundering and arms trafficking scandals of the 70s, 80s and 90s. There was trouble at the top, family members were implicated, as were the CIA who used it to channel funds to the Mujahedeen.’

It took a moment for this to sink in. ‘And this happens every day?’

‘Oh at least once a day. There is so much money we could be making here, but we can’t be seen to. We’re presenting ourselves as the honest option in a dishonest market, that’s our market niche.’

***

‘The only reason I got this job was because I speak Russian,’ said my next interviewee.

‘Well employing people for their language abilities isn’t so unusual. You sell motorized super yachts. Since the Saudi billionaire Prince Al Waleed publicized that he does most of his business from his super yacht, every self respecting Arab multi-millionaire wants one.’

‘Yes, but I deal only with Russians or CIS countries.’

‘Okay.’

‘These super yachts start a $4.5 million.’

‘Yes.’

I heard a sigh.

‘They only employed me because so many Russian speaking men kept walking in off the street with bags full of hard cash. It’s the bulk of our business.’

‘Ah.’

My next source would only speak face to face. He was a jumpy British bank manager working at a new offshore start up in the Arabian Business Park. He had just moved from an Asian offshore bank with a worldwide presence to his new role.

‘The things I could tell you about that last place,’ he said fiddling with a Mont Blanc pen, at pains to accidentally show me its expensive moniker.

‘Go on then, tell me.’

‘I can’t. It might get me in trouble.’

‘Nobody has to know it was you.’

‘Yes, but….’ he said raising his hands as if to say what can I do.

‘Which football team did you say you supported again?’

‘Spurs!’ he blurted out.

‘Tottenham Hotspur. Yeah. Good team. Remember Ossie Ardiles back in the old days?’

‘The good old days,’ he said, pointing the pen at me, the little boy on the terraces looking out through his adult eyes.

‘They haven’t had it so good lately have they?’

‘Well no, but….’

‘But they are plucky, and brave, they’ve got courage, you’ve got to give them that.’ I said prodding his pride gently.