The Sand Men (8 page)

One of the uniformed guards came out to her car. ‘You are in an unauthorized area,’ he said, peering in to see if she was travelling with anyone.

Lowering her window was like opening an oven door, and she did so reluctantly. ‘I took the wrong exit from the highway,’ she explained. ‘What is this place?’

He ignored her question. ‘Where are you trying to get to, Ma’am?’

‘The Dream Ranches Estate. I could see it from the road, I just couldn’t—’

‘You need to turn around here, go back and take the third road on the right.’

‘Turn around at the first available opportunity,’ said the sat-nav, as if in corroboration.

‘Thank you, but what—’

The guard had already turned smartly on his polished heel and was heading back for the white wooden box.

Lea did as she was instructed. When she glanced in her rear view mirror, she saw the sentries in their shadowed huts, as immobile as nutcracker soldiers, boles of beige dust blustering around them.

As she followed the road beside the barracks she realised how close they were to her compound, and was surprised that she hadn’t noticed them before. But through the acacia bushes at the end of her street she realised she could now glimpse them, even if she could only see the tips of the roofs.

On an impulse, she drove past her front door in the direction of the perimeter wall. The houses soon petered out. The central reservation’s sprinklers were spread further apart and the grass withered to scrub. The estate housed over a thousand residences, but most were gathered around the golf club at its centre.

On the outskirts the lawns turned to empty lots. The sun shone dully, baking the dead earth into rock. A few wild dogs scratched at the dirt. The Renault coasted quietly along the back roads, mapping the topography of the compound. Drifts of wind-carved sand shimmered between a handful of maroon and yellow desert hyacinths. Most of the stems had been strangled by tough parasitic plants. Little else grew in the salt-heavy soil.

The first three streets proved to be dead ends. The furthest point of the fourth dipped beneath a wide, noisy highway. It appeared to be an unmanned exit from the compound. The sat-nav failed to recognise it, and told her to continue straight on.

She slowly drove toward the embankment, trying to see into the deep shadows of the underpass, but her eyes had trouble adjusting. Something had caught her attention, a faint wavering movement in the darkness.

By the time she realised her mistake, it was too late.

Braking sharply, she narrowly avoided a young man. Gathered in the gloom of the underpass were at least thirty people, who grew agitated as soon as they saw her car steadily approaching. She attempted to make a U-turn, but realised that the road was too narrow. If she left the tarmac, there was a danger that her tyres would slip in the loose sand.

Suddenly the crowd surged forward. There was a dull thud behind her. Someone had thrown a chunk of sunbaked earth at the car. It bounced and broke on the trunk, to be followed by a second and a third, this last one skittering across the roof.

Panicking, she ground the gears and frog-hopped the Renault, trying to reverse it. A hubbub of complaint rose around her. Forced onto the waste ground at the side of the road, she slammed the accelerator and fantailed gravel, pulling away as the crowd retreated back into the penumbral harbour of the tunnel.

She found another exit and drove for a while, passing beneath a vast poster that read:
Visit the largest shopping mall in the world.
She was heading in the direction of the Dubai Mall.

Later, standing in the icy blue light of the outsized aquarium, where sharks drifted behind magnifying crystal, shrinking observers to the size of children, she practiced breathing exercises and lowered her pulse. The mall’s bright anonymity removed any sense of time and place, calming her more effectively than any pharmaceutical prescription.

She took tea beneath a dizzying man-made waterfall through which a dozen sculpted steel divers burst in inverse cruciform. Many of the stores she had left behind were replicated by the same English brands here. There was even a Patisserie Valerie. It was odd to think that a tiny cake shop that had first opened in a bohemian part of Soho could now be found in an Arabic country, its louche clientele replaced with severe Muslim wives.

Outside, she smoked a cigarette and stared up at the dazzling gilded towers of the Burj Khalifa, a series of transcendent repetitions that formed a hallucinatory futuristic Babel. There was a soaring grandiloquence to those slender spires that mitigated suspicions of vulgarity and doubts about economic sense, as if it was man’s purpose to grasp at the heavens whatever the human cost. The crowds of shoppers seated at its base appeared to share a communality that was missing at Dream Ranches, or perhaps it was just the illusory effect of so many people gathered together in one place. No alcohol, no litter, no spontaneity; it was almost appealing, like being gently medicated.

Every few minutes the crowds thickened, gathering to watch the dancing fountain show, a matrix of circuitry that switched thousands of water jets back and forth in a preprogramed display of technical wizardry, and always earned a burst of noisy appreciation. Its audience might have been applauding a television set, she thought, or a computer.

It comforted her to stroll through the anonymous, orderly throng. She feared she might soon come to dread the thought of returning to the anarchy of London. London was like the underpass, unpredictable and threatening. Here life was as predictable as the robotic fountains. It could deliver the thing she most wanted right now, the return of her daughter and husband. She decided not to report what she had seen. Chaos was best left in the shadows.

Chapter Ten

The Welcoming Party

L
EA HAD BEEN
expecting to see plastic chairs and a barbecue appear in the Larvins’ back garden around lunchtime, but at 8:00am a team of Indian workers began to erect a large red and white marquee, which they filled with bunting-trimmed trestle tables and a silver-painted bandstand.

‘Have you seen this?’ she called from the bedroom.

Roy poked his head around the door, goateed in shaving cream. ‘They always put marquees up for parties,’ he explained. ‘It’s too hot otherwise.’

‘But it looks like they’re going to have live music and everything. I hope it’s not just for us.’

‘Why not? The company’s paying for it.’

‘It’s just so extravagant. I don’t like all this fuss.’

‘Enjoy it while you can, honey, we’re all only here for two years.’

‘Not according to Colette,’ said Lea, following him back to the bathroom. ‘Her husband is contracted indefinitely.’

‘Did I tell you I met Ben?’ Roy wiped foam from his chin. ‘I’ve never seen a more worried-looking man in my life. He has satchels under his eyes.’

‘That’s what Colette says. She thinks the project will overrun and they’ll have to stay on.’

‘That won’t happen. The board of directors has everything in hand.’

‘So why is Ben so stressed?’’

‘He’s a director now too, he has more responsibility. They’re—’

‘Darling, are you really going to wear those?’ Lea stifled a laugh. Roy had donned a pair of shorts with purple stripes that made his legs look like candles.

‘I picked these up at the mall on the way home last night. I thought they were kind of hip.’

‘Hang on.’ She went to Cara’s room and knocked. ‘Cara, would you come out here for a minute?’

Cara emerged looking dishevelled and tired. ‘What’s up?’

‘Your father needs to know what you think of his shorts.’

Cara studied them for a moment. ‘Utterly gross.’

‘Thank you my sweet, you may return to cyberspace.’ Lea grinned back at Roy. ‘If you kept the receipt you could take them back.’

‘No, it’s small acts of defiance like this that keep me sane. What time are we going over?’

‘Colette said noon but I think that’s a little early.’

‘I guess we’ll hear when the other neighbours start to turn up. Then add twenty minutes before we leave. My old man gave me two pieces of life advice; he said
Never arrive early for a party
and
Never turn right on a plane
.’

‘It’s that where you get your ambition from? At least it means I still have time to write my speech.’

‘You’re not—’

‘No, honey, it was a joke. Remember those?’

Roy was right. By 12:30pm the garden was crowded. ‘I can’t believe I’m actually nervous,’ Lea said, smoothing out her floral shirt in the mirror. She caught Roy looking at her. ‘What? It’s just that you work with all their husbands. I want to make a good impression. Oh God, look at them, all so perfect. I’m the only one in jeans. Aren’t there any working women at the resort at all?’

‘Apart from Irina I haven’t seen any others.’

‘Who’s Irina?’

‘She handles the architects’ correspondence and appointments, but she’s based off-site. Apparently there are some women in accounts and on the PR side. Come on, I’ll introduce you to the guys I’ve met so far.’

As they reached the front door of the Larvins’ house they spotted a banner across the garden entrance that read:
Welcome Brook Family!

‘Oh my God. Do you think she gets these specially made every time someone moves into the neighbourhood?’ Lea asked from the side of her mouth.

Roy leaned in. ‘Give ’em a smile, honey. And remember, you’re the prettiest woman here.’

Moments later they were surrounded and everyone was talking at once. The Larvins’ home had the same layout as Lea’s, but their furniture was more extravagant. Norah targeted Cara and pulled her aside. Her sister Abbi was a doll-like eleven year-old, curled and painted in an uncomfortably adult style, dressed in bows and flounces as if she was auditioning for a children’s beauty pageant.

Colette hauled Lea through the families to the marquee, piling on introductions. Roy had been stolen away by Ben, probably so that they could discuss drainage.

A band consisting of four middle-aged European men in red-striped blazers and straw hats struck up, playing soft jazz. The quartet’s lead singer was the compound’s medic, Dr Vance, twinkly, avuncular, perfectly suited to the bandstand. From the corner of her eye, Lea saw James Davenport with a heavy red-haired woman, presumably his wife. Children scampered around the rear of the garden, chasing a young fox terrier. Maids served sickly purple punch from a silver tureen the size of a paddling pool.

Although she heard a great many accents as she passed through the guests, Lea couldn’t help feeling that she was at a party somewhere in the Thames valley, Teddington or Twickenham perhaps. The guests sheltered from the sun’s unforgiving gaze at the shadowed edges of the tent, darting through the unprotected areas as if avoiding rain, as they would have done at home.

Introductions were made. They met an absurdly handsome tennis pro and his wife who looked like characters from an old soap opera, a Swedish couple who were in charge of the stables, several American engineers, a mural painter from Estonia, a Spanish interior designer and her artist partner, one of the few women working at Dream World. Lea tried to remember who they all were, but found herself forgetting them moments after each pair had moved on, as if their names had been written in sand.

Mr Mansour visited early on in the proceedings and stayed for the minimum time he thought propriety allowed. Everyone was connected to the resort’s construction in some way. The air felt dead and sullen, as if a storm was approaching, but the sky revealed nothing more than a high, pale sliver of moon. Lea had not seen a cloud since their arrival in the country.

Fat blue lobsters were split, brushed with butter and set upon a gas-fired barbecue grill. Immense red steaks were turned until they resembled sunburnt flesh. Vast lurid salads were drizzled in yellow oil. Roy had gone off somewhere. Lea felt someone tapping her shoulder and turned around, spilling white wine.

‘Oh God, I’m so sorry!’ She looked at the spreading stain on the shirt before her.

‘My fault entirely. I made you jump. I remember the first time I attended one of these little shindigs. I felt exactly the same way. This is the whitest crowd I’ve ever seen, and we lived in Ohio.’ The speaker raised a pair of gigantic sunglasses to the brim of her hat and squinted at her with tiny blue eyes that she had accentuated with thick false lashes. She was tall and underweight, frail-looking, like a flower-child who had become unmoored from her era. She wore brightly-striped slacks and a pair of gaudy silver trainers. ‘I’m Rachel, Ben Larvin’s mother. I only go to the pool before dawn and after dusk, but I’ve seen you heading down there.’

‘Hi, I’m Lea. Colette told me you don’t like the sun.’

‘I break out in blisters unless I factor up to 50. Really, it’s quite the worst place on earth I could have come to, but Ben and Colette needed help with the children and I couldn’t refuse them.’

Lea saw now how pale Rachel was. She looked to be in her early seventies, but had good posture and a model’s figure. Her white hair was tied back with a cluster of tiny blue flowers. Her arms rattled with heavy silver bangles.

‘It’s an awful lot of fuss, isn’t it?’ said Rachel. ‘I’m sure it’s the last thing you wanted.’ She dabbed vaguely at her blouse with a tissue, unbothered by the stain. ‘You’ll be relieved to know it’s not just for you. At the start of every summer there are always parties to welcome the fresh influx of talent. Do you need a guide?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘To know who you should be speaking to. You have to figure out who’s important and who to avoid.’ Lea must have looked surprised, because Rachel added, ‘Darling, I’m a New Yorker, we take our parties very seriously.’

‘Oh, so is my husband.’

‘Thank God. This place needs a healthy injection of East Coast cynicism. I heard you playing
Addio del passato
from
La Traviata
yesterday. God, I miss the Met. I used to go to the New York Opera every season as a child. There’s nothing here like that, not yet anyway.’