Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

‘His songs are so bad.’

That doesn’t accord with my assessment of Bryan Adams, but hey. And I’m biased. Bryan Adams took on the Batros gig on a week’s notice and at a considerable discount on his advertised minimum fee of one million USD. (Bryan Ferry’s people were unhappy, understandably, but that was mediated by Fabulosity to everyone’s relative satisfaction.) I wasn’t at the Adams concert (not invited), but Sandro and Mireille are very pleased about how it went, I’ve heard (not from them).

Hi Sandro — You’re welcome. De rien . No trouble. Nichts zu danken . Any time.

‘What’s so bad about them?’ In an ideal world, Alain would have more complex critical skills.

‘I don’t know. Everything.’

(His don’t know comes out as døn’t knøw . For all his devotion to mumbling and drawling, the kid has this fancy English-Norwegian accent that must be, I guess, a payoff of his expensive schooling in England. (I like it just fine. (That said, I have a real soft spot for the habitual accent of Arab speakers of good English, in whose mouths the language, imbued with grave trills, can seem weighted with the sagacity of the East. (See Alec Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia .))))

I tilt my head respectfully. ‘So who’s good? Who should I be listening to?’

He shrugs. ‘Slayer. Or maybe Dying Humanity.’

I decide against saying something that I would find funny but Alain wouldn’t. ‘Maybe I’ll check them out,’ I say. The kid’s still hanging around, and I feel the touch of opportunity and duty. This outburst of musical opinion is the first sign of any knowledge on the boy’s part. I know he’s only just turned fifteen, but in the course of my minimal involvement in his summer assignments (as per Sandro’s instructions), I’ve been astonished and re-astonished by just what a know-nothing he is. He can’t point to Rome on the map. Somehow he has never heard of St Paul. He thinks ‘the present tense’ may have something to do with ‘feeling worried’. I am giddily reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labour of pedagogy, everything would go to hell.

I ask the kid to tell me more about Dying Humanity. He tells me they’re from Germany.

‘Where in Germany?’ I say. He doesn’t know. ‘Let’s look it up,’ I say. ‘Pull up a chair.’ I figure this is without the ambit of the prohibition against the kid using a computer in the office.

Unfortunately, only German Wikipedia offers details of the band. Fortunately, I still have my childhood German. ‘See this? It says they’re from Annaberg-Buchholz.’ He doesn’t seem to care very much. ‘Let’s see where that is,’ I say. Interesting: Annaberg-Buchholz is in the Erzgebirge — in English, the Ore Mountains, in the southeast of the country, by the Czech border. ‘Wow, no wonder their music is so tough. These guys are from a tough area.’

‘Tough how?’

‘One thing at a time,’ I say. I get him to look up ‘ore’; then ‘heavy industry’; then the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, which is as remote to him as the civilization of the Incas was to me; and this is how we continue for a full hour and a quarter, chancily hopping from one link to another until we end up, anticlimax, on the topic of Dallas, Texas. ‘I’ve been to Dallas,’ I tell Alain. ‘Don’t go there. Not unless they’re paying you well.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Why?’ I’m closing the files we opened. ‘Because life’s too short. Avoid D-Town like the plague.’

As Alain takes his leave — he looks worn out, poor guy, and I have to say I’m pretty worn out myself — it occurs to me to say, ‘Hold on there, Al.’ I say, ‘You know about the plague? About the Black Death?’ He shakes his head. ‘That’s your homework. Find out about the Black Death and write down ten interesting things about it. No, let’s make that five things. We’ll take a look at it tomorrow. You OK with that?’

He seems to be. He goes back to his desk. He knows as well as I do that it’s noon, and at noon he must be weighed. To avoid the weighing is one reason I pop out, back to The Situation, for a couple of hours. Another reason is that I like to take a shit around midday, and I’ve made the executive decision that the round trip is well worth it. (It’s definitely not the case that I’m snubbing the facilities available to all in my office building, which are first-rate.) I may be wrong, but I seem to do more shitting than ever. Certainly I often find myself thinking, when I take a seat: Again? Still, I’m not complaining. In there, in the bathroom, everything is out of your hands. Time out. Pax. And am I the only one to appreciate the sweet egality of it all? For a little while, you’re no better or worse than anyone else. You’re shooting par.

Or are you? Among the more embarrassing criticisms of the emirate is that it cannot deal, on a municipal level, with the huge and booming volume of digestive waste produced by its population. Much of the sewage is collected in septic tanks whose contents are moved to the treatment plant in fleets of trucks. Apparently the lines of trucks waiting to enter the plant are so long, and the waiting is so unendurable and/or cost-ineffective, that some truckers have resorted to illegally dumping their loads behind sand dunes and in the city’s storm drains, the latter practice resulting in unfortunate incidents of faecal stuff turning up in Dubai’s otherwise tiptop swimming waters. I believe the situation is now under control, though incorrigible naysayers continue to attach a negative symbolic meaning to the issue. There’s nothing I can do about it, in any case. The call of nature must be answered.

Today, as ever, it’s a relief to withdraw to the privy and lock the door, even though the front door is locked and there’s no one else around.

Or is there? By a startling olfactory or digestive coincidence, the smell I make is exactly the smell made by my father.

Done. But the midday intermission is not complete without a look-see at Project X.

Still nothing. The structure of mystery is unchanged. Is that pile of dirt fresh? How come nobody ever uses the portable toilet? Curiouser and curiouser.

It is reassuring to look over to my left, where, just beyond Privilege Bay, a construction project is indubitably in progress. Today, I see, prettily green truck-mounted cranes are on site and, taken together with the abundance of yellow hard hats and primrose-blue overalls, grant the scene a vernal air. Incredible, how they manage to work in that heat. Almost thirty floors have gone up of what will clearly be a nondescript residential proposition. Although situated across the water channel and so belonging to a discrete niche of the market, this tower will be our visual neighbour and, I fear, put at risk the distinctive silhouette of Privilege Bay. This is another reason, as if we needed one, why it is vital that Project X develops quickly into a top-dog building. As matters stand, we are in danger of suffering the fate of downtown Manhattan, whose skyline, as I recall, seems these days to be situated in Jersey City.

Which reminds me: the other day I received a nasty report. Apparently people have started to refer to The Situation and The Statement and The Aspiration as ‘Tampax Towers’, on account of the allegedly high number of female flight attendants who are said to live among us in shared accommodation, an arrangement seen by some as running counter to the Uncompromising Few and Pioneers of Luxury and Dreamers of New Dreams narratives. I don’t share this perception. I have nothing but respect for the flight crews of Emirates, who can be rightly proud of their indispensable role in the great success of their corporation and specifically of the Emirates Experience for which the airline is uniquely and rightly world-famous. Any residential community would and should proudly welcome them. Willkommen , I therefore say. Soyez les bienvenues. Добро пожаловать!