Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

I turned up on the late side, at 2 p.m. Brett and his two English co-hosts had booked a huge banqueting table for thirty, and surrounding our table were other tables at which other champagne brunches were taking place, and there was a very happy, very loud, restaurant-wide brouhaha to which my table was contributing its fair share of laughing and yelling. A majority of heads wore pointy bright party hats. Not wanting to be a Buzz Killington, I put on a gleaming red fez.

Brett aside, I recognized only a few faces at my table, and only faintly. Brett seemed a little confused, or distracted, when I greeted him, and it took some rearranging of chairs to make room for me. I wandered Yalumba’s famous buffets. They were wasted on me: I don’t see anything great about crab displays or giant vats of macaroni and cheese, etc. Still, when in Dubai; and boiled potatoes, garlic mussels and a T-bone steak found their way onto my plate. At the table, I accepted red wine, and champagne from a salmanazar of Laurent-Perrier that happy aproned waiters wheeled around on a mobile ice-bed, courtesy of someone somewhere in the restaurant. Who was my benefactor? It seemed wrong to accept the drink without some sign of thanks (even though I was entirely satisfied by my red wine and had no selfish wish to drink champagne). In the end, I decided to raise my glass of bubbly to a table of generous-looking French dudes wearing berets, and they raised their glasses back, though it remained unclear if this was to acknowledge my gratitude or simply to return my friendly gesture.

The chief excitement in my section of the table was provided by the presence of a Scotsman named Jimmy. Jimmy was that very rare bird — the new arrival in Dubai. Here was a chink of economic light! Here might be the recovery’s first swallow! Our joy was lessened by his revelation that his was not an open-market hiring but, in point of fact, a UAE government job — a six-month contract to work on supplementary procurement issues connected to the Metro construction. Never mind, he was a fresh face, and he gave older Dubai hands the chance to once more indulge in what may be our most indestructible conversational trope, that is, tutoring the newcomer to the Emirates about the outlandish legal hazards he or she faces in the areas of buying and consuming alcohol, gambling, having sex, driving, drunk driving, using recreational drugs, incurring debt, and so on and so forth, with illustrative cautionary tales whose invariable moral is that, contrary to its accommodating and modern appearance, for the non-national the emirate is a vast booby-trap of medieval judicial perils, and Johnny Foreigner must especially take great care when interacting with local citizens (who constitute only 10 per cent or so of the population) because de facto there is one law for Abdul Emirati and another for Johnny Foreigner, so that, for example, if Johnny is involved in an automobile collision with Abdul, responsibility for damage caused will in practice not be determined in accordance with familiar qualitative assessments of the acts and omissions of the parties involved but in accordance with considerations of identity, the local concept (supposedly alien to the person accustomed to Romano-Judeo-Christian jurisprudence) being that the applicability of the duty of care (known to some as the neighbour principle) is subject to modification by the nationalitative interrelation of the involved parties. I.e., it’s not what you do , it’s who you are vis-à-vis the person who does unto you or unto whom you do.

Jimmy was asked about his first impressions. ‘I love the huge posters of the Sheikh you see everywhere,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind getting hold of one. I could make a fortune on eBay.’

A fork was waved in Jimmy’s direction. ‘That sort of hipster irony doesn’t go down very well here.’

‘Yeah,’ someone said. Making quotation fingers, this person added, ‘He’s not “The Ruler”, he’s the fucking Ruler.’

The fork-waver warned Jimmy, ‘You want to watch it. They don’t have a sense of humour about that sort of thing. Just so you know.’

‘They like to be ruled. It settles them down. I’m not against it, to be honest. Not in England, of course, but here.’

‘He’s a good bloke, Sheikh Mo. He’s done a lot of good for his people.’

Jimmy: ‘Is it true he’s got a private jet just for his falcons?’

‘Yes. So they say.’

‘And he’s got cheetahs, too.’

‘No, he doesn’t. That’s total rubbish.’

The cheetah guy threw his party hat at the rubbisher, who in turn threw his napkin at the cheetah guy. There was a brief storm of things being thrown. Bread rolls flew from one end of the table to the other, to shouts of approval.

When things calmed down, somebody said, ‘They say he’s after getting married again.’

‘That’s what I heard, too. Sheikha number four.’

‘Could be number five, for all we know.’

Jimmy: ‘Why’s it so hush-hush?’

Somebody began to air a theory (which I paraphrase and, to be honest, save from disjointedness) to the effect that the Ruler’s overt power depended on an inner zone of secrecy for secrecy’s sake, and this centrum of inexplicability (which deprived outsiders of data relating even to royal matrimonial and domestic arrangements) tacitly communicated the existence of broader political arrangements by which entitlement to significant information was made the subject of concentric separations, with the Ruler at the centre and the populace distributed more or less at the perimeter; etc., etc., with the inevitable reference to the Wizard of Oz.

To my left was a kind-looking blonde in her thirties. She must have been as restless as I was, because she said, ‘Hello, I’m Samantha. What’s your name?’ She was drinking a cocktail involving champagne and Rémy Martin. The neighbouring table gave a hilarious roar as I answered her, and we both smiled, because it was good to have so many relaxed and happy souls assembled in one room, and at that moment, in fact, the music came on and a kicking conga line instantly formed and people from every corner of Yalumba joined in, laying hands on shoulders and waists and shuffling along singing the olé song and tooting on party blowers. Samantha said, ‘Come on,’ and I added myself to the shambling human concatenation, and I had fun, obviously because I was well on my way to getting loaded. It was a full five minutes before the music stopped and we all returned to our tables in the best of spirits.

Samantha told me she was heading home to England, to get a divorce and ‘start all over again’.

‘That must be very painful,’ I said.

She suggested in a sensitive tone of voice that I might have gone through something similar, and I said, ‘Perhaps I have.’

‘Well, either you have or you haven’t,’ she said.

I laughed. Samantha seemed to be upset by this, which was the last thing I wanted, because I was really rooting for her, this spirited and good person, and I said, ‘Sorry. I was just remembering something. My ex objected to me using that word — “perhaps”.’

Samantha said, ‘What do you mean, she objected?’

‘She just didn’t like it. It got on her nerves.’

‘I suppose it depends on the context,’ Samantha said with great pensiveness.

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

The Perhapsburg Empire — that used to be my unspoken nickname for the Jenn-me realm.

I said, ‘And “henceforth”. “Henceforth” really, really irritated her.’

Samantha giggled.

My theory, kept from Samantha, was that Jenn objected to this fancy (in her mind) vocabulary because it was (as she saw it) the tip of an iceberg of European haughtiness. I suspect she equated my Swiss ancestry with being looked down on from an alp. It sounds crazy, but I don’t think she could quite accept, or understand, that an American could through no fault of his own know French (a language spoken by normal people all over the world), and that the whole thing wasn’t just some kind of trick of one-upmanship designed to knock her back down into the Lehigh Valley.