Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

‘Yeah, but get this,’ he says. ‘The results show up in India. There’s a computer in India watched by Indian guys. They see something, they call New York. I mean, what the WTF? Indian guys? I’m putting my life in the hands of Indian guys in India?’

‘I’m sure they’re highly qualified.’

‘Yeah? I’m sure they’re highly fucking minimum wage.’

I make a big show of getting out a piece of paper and taking a note.

Sandro sighs and heavily swivels. ‘So …?’ He bobs his head towards the door, in the direction of his son. ‘How’s it going?’

‘OK, I guess,’ I say. I decide to try my luck, carefully. ‘I have to tell you, Sandro, I’m not sure this is the most productive set-up. And this thing with weighing him …’

Sandro says, ‘Tell me this: you got kids?’ Another swivel, a big roomy one that surely puts my chair under huge strain. ‘I didn’t think so. However … Point taken. We’ve got to make this work. I think the answer is, you should take him under your wing.’

I am very, very silent. I am William the Silent and Harpo Marx and Justice Thomas.

He is saying, ‘You’re telling me it’s not super-productive. OK — so make it productive. You’re a smart guy — teach him something. He’s a got a bunch of summer homework he needs to do. Help him with that. His mother isn’t exactly the professor of brain surgery type.’

I’m not going to get sidetracked into a consideration of Mireille Batros, an exceedingly complicated person. ‘Sandro —’

‘You’re going to teach him some values,’ Sandro says. ‘What’s right and what’s wrong. This is going to be your top priority.’

‘Sandro, there’s no way I —’

He begins to weep. ‘I can’t do this by myself any more.’

Here we go again. Krokodilstränen. Les larmes de crocodile. The human tear, once a great currency, is now worthless everywhere.

He says, ‘You know our ATM machine?’

I do know. At Fort Batros, the family has an HSBC ATM for its exclusive use.

Sandro tells me that Alain underhandedly borrowed his ATM card, somehow figured out the PIN, and attempted to withdraw money. They caught him red-handed, the numbskull, because he couldn’t quickly work out which way to insert the card.

‘Oh dear,’ I say. ‘That’s unfortunate.’

Sandro relates that he and Mireille cross-examined their son for an hour, made various threats, inflicted various penalties, and still he refused to say how he’d got hold of the card or the PIN, or how much he was planning to withdraw and for what purpose. Mireille’s participation in this questioning is ironic, because Mireille’s own debit and credit cards have been taken away from her on account of her alleged inability to control her spending.

‘We got nothing out of him,’ Sandro says. ‘Not a word.’

I’m impressed with the kid. He didn’t crack.

‘I want you to find out what’s going on,’ Sandro says.

‘How am I supposed to do that?’

Sandro points a thumb at himself. ‘Bad cop.’ He points an index finger at me. ‘Good cop. Make friends with him. Make him feel like it’s safe to talk to you.’

The demand is so absurd and unenforceable that it doesn’t occur to me to object.

‘You’ll make it work,’ Sandro says. He somehow raises himself out of my chair. ‘We all set with Bryan Adams?’

‘You mean Bryan Ferry,’ I say. ‘Yes, we —’

‘I mean Bryan Adams. What am I going to do with Bryan Ferry? Mireille loves Bryan Adams.’

‘You asked me to book Bryan Ferry. You didn’t ask me to book Bryan Adams.’

‘Bryan Adams. I told you to book fucking Bryan Adams. You booked Bryan Ferry?’

‘I booked who you asked me to book.’

Sandro points at me again. He’s always pointing. ‘Now you’re fucking with my sex life.’ He goes to the door, where, in a cheesy move, he turns to face me darkly. ‘Do not fuck with me on this. You got nine days to get Bryan Adams.’

Exeunt Sandro and all of his bullshit. Re-enter the kid and all of his.

I’m so angry, I can’t even mental-mail.

‘I’m stepping out,’ I announce to Ali and Alain and, for all I know, Allah.

There is still a problem, however: where to go once I have stepped out. It is an old problem: the problem of the exit. If it is a difficult thing to leave a room, it is still more difficult to find the room’s alternative.

My office is in the DIFC, which I consider to be a beautiful place to do business and to be human in Dubai. The semi-autonomous Dubai International Financial Centre, with its regulatory structures that remove it from the emirate’s archaic justice system, is not just a financial free zone. It is also an architecturally free-floating environment. In contrast to almost any other place in Dubai, substantial amenities are offered to the person who wishes to be an outdoor pedestrian. Here are broad grey plazas and pools with charcoal or dove grey water. There are green lawns, and blue-grey-brown footbridges, and cafés with silver chairs, and cool grey-brown breezeways and charcoal-grey sculptures. The beautiful office buildings are grey and grey-blue and silver-grey. Grey-brown doves go about near the dove grey pools and beautiful women go coolly across the plazas in dark jackets over white or blue shirts, and the men on the plazas have charcoal or silver hair and blue shirts and dark suits or beautiful white robes. These harmonies and consistencies of tone and demeanour are nothing other than indicia of an agreement in feeling between all of us who partake in and of this polity, namely that, in essence and in potential, ours is a zone of win-win-win flows of money and ideas and humans, and that somewhere in our processes and practices, as we sense in our bones and sometimes almost sniff in the air, are the omens of that future community of cooperative productivity, that financial nationhood, of which all of us here more or less unconsciously dream.

My difficulty, at this moment, is that I cannot feel at one with the people who coolly go across the plazas, who after all have the intention of going into the interiors of the grey buildings, i.e., into rooms, whereas I am going out of my building with no intention of going into another building. I would even say that the harmoniousness of these people and their surroundings depends on the viability of the indoors as a place for those outdoors to go to, because after all there isn’t much that can be accomplished by walking between buildings. In other words, I feel anomalous as I go across the plaza, and very hot; also, it is unsustainable to keep going across plazas. I must go back indoors, into a room. And here is a room: The Empty Quarter, one of our DIFC art galleries. I go in.

The exhibition is titled:

The Worst Journey in the World

Captain Scott’s Antarctic Expedition 1910–1913

The Photographs of Herbert Ponting

I’m not a big art fan. Even so, I would have to be a very strange person to be uninterested in these photographs.

Because I’m broadly familiar with the story of Captain Scott and know that gloom and doom lies ahead, I start with An Emperor Penguin . Upright haughty bird! Good chap! The resemblance to the Ruler is startling. (If another expat were present, I might share this impression with him/her, sotto voce, and we’d have a nice little laugh. However, I have The Empty Quarter to myself.)

The Terra Nova held up in the Pack, Dec. 13th, 1910.

The good ship runs afoul of the ice. Yes, I can see how that would happen. To judge from Mr Ponting’s astounding black-and-white images, this sphere of land-ice and sea-ice and air-ice, so-called Antarctica, is barely a place at all but, rather, an enormous and enormously weird natural activity, so that the spectacle of this doughty, three-masted silhouette trying to get somewhere seems multiply fallacious, as if an attempt were being made to sail a shadow into a hubbub, audible only in the form of coldness, emanating from sources that are not a whereabouts.