Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

Meanwhile, Ali has returned. I step out to talk to him and shut the door of the office so that he and I can talk beyond the earshot of the kid, who is inside my office.

‘Everything OK?’

‘Everything OK, boss,’ Ali says.

‘Listen, Ali, you can’t leave the boy here by himself. You have to wait until I come back.’

‘I went to the dry-cleaning,’ Ali says.

The evidence, as if it were needed, is next to his desk: a dozen hanging shirts.

I say, ‘Yes, that’s good. Thank you. But next time, do me a favour, wait until I get back. We have to look after Alain. If there’s a problem, you can always call me.’ I can’t understand why he has slipped up like this. It’s not like him at all. The man is straight as an arrow.

‘No problem, boss,’ he says. ‘What do you want me to do for this afternoon?’

‘Let me see,’ I say. ‘Has the Range Rover been serviced?’ He tells me he’s already taken care of it. ‘Very good,’ I say. I’m racking my brains. The office is shipshape and I can’t think of anything I might need from him in the way of errands or tasks. The truth is, I have the family office and my domestic arrangements in very good order; at this point, things pretty much run themselves. I can’t think of anything for Ali to do. This is a problem, because Ali’s raison d’être (in the work context; his other contexts are not visible to me) is the doing of things. I have toyed with the notion of a gentler, happier, less perplexing and more comic world in which Ali is not so much a factotum or office boy as a companionable sidekick, a world in which the infrastructure of injustice that supports the terms ‘valet’ and ‘manservant’ is marvellously absent or made harmless, and Ali unproblematically is a Jeeves or Passepartout to my Wooster or Fogg, and the two of us have adventures in which we extricate each other from amusing and diverting entanglements and difficulties, our solidarity sturdy and unstated, our needs always mild, and the evil of the day forever sufficient unto it. This ridiculous daydream is founded on Ali’s extraordinary real-life consistency of deportment. He is never out of character, and his character is that of the rock. In over three years, he has never been noticeably joyful or miserable, irritated or pleased, obtuse or over-clever, obsequious or big for his boots. He is free of nuance: no cloud passes across the sun when Ali is around. If he has a Binnenleben , I am not privy to it. Ali’s dignified two-dimensionality coheres in his garb, the shadowless white dishdash and white headscarf which I’ve never seen him out of, even in winter, when other Emirati men turn to blue and brown fabrics in order to mix things up a little. There’s a story, who knows if it’s true, that at some point, maybe in the Seventies, the then Ruler essentially took control of the national wardrobe and instituted the dress code we see today, a sartorial initiative that, if it indeed occurred, had the effect of transforming a dusty, scruffy, jumbled-looking male populace into the bespoke toothpaste-white strollers we see today, and whom we cannot help perceiving as emblematic substitutes for their homeland’s hygienic new orderliness and coolness. It’s a look that’s working out for them, you’d have to say. I would love to wear a dishdash and headscarf myself, albeit for reasons of crypsis.

I’ve thought of something Ali can do. I toss him the keys to the Autobiography and tell him to go down to Project X and see if, by any chance, he can find out what’s happening.

I’m still in a somewhat agitated state, however, and when I notice that there’s a good-sized FedEx box on my desk, I rip open the box as if tearing a foe limb from limb. The box contains more boxes; a moment goes by before I understand: my stamps have arrived! My stamps!

(When was the last time I felt such joy? Easy: Christmas 1980, when Santa Claus, descending the chimney for me for the last time, brought with him a sky-blue Tigra seven-speed racer. (In the spring, Dad and I bicycled together on the shore of the Zürichsee. With the aid of an illustrated map we picked out, in a multitude of white-hatted Alps, Chammliberg and Schärhorn and the Tödi. ( Et pauvre Maman nous a attendu à la maison et à notre retour m’a fait une petite bise alcoolisée .)))

Everything I ordered is present and correct. I’ll admit it, I splurged. I’ve got myself:

A metal high-quality date stamp (self-inking in black ink) with the custom text, BATROS FAMILY OFFICE (DUBAI) LTD.

A chrome desktop embosser with a circular plate for embossing a mark of the Entreprises Batros logo (in which the curlicued E and B are entangled as if in a bathrobe monogram) and the circumscription BATROS FAMILY OFFICE (DUBAI) LTD.

A gold desktop embosser with a rectangular plate. The EB logo comes with the custom text GENERAL EXPENDITURE TRUSTEE BATROS TRUST CO. LTD.

A small circular wood-and-rubber stamp (text: FAMILY OFFICER, BATROS FAMILY OFFICE (DUBAI) LTD) with a stamp pad and a bottle of blue ink.

A small triangular wood-and-rubber stamp (GENERAL EXPENDITURE TRUSTEE BATROS TRUST CO. LTD) with a stamp pad and a bottle of green ink.

A large square wood-and-rubber stamp with a stamp pad and a bottle of red ink and the text SIGNED SUBJECT AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS SET OUT AT WWW.BATROSFAMILYOFFICER.COM.

A large rectangular wood-and-rubber stamp with a stamp pad with orange ink. Text: SIGNED SUBJECT AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS SET OUT AT WWW.BATROSGEATRUST.COM.

A ‘rocker’ ink blotter.

A green leather desk pad (38″ x 24″).

I remove the leather desk pad from its wrapping. I put it on my desk in front of me. I place the embossers to my west, the stamp pads to the north, and the stamps to the east. I keep the ink bottles at hand: slowly, carefully, and not without alchemy, I imbue each stamp pad with its colour. Done.

I put away the ink bottles in my filing cabinet, which is always locked and which only I have the key to. The stamps and embossers will in due course also ‘live’ in the filing cabinet, in which the embossers will be kept in a further lockbox (again, only I have the key) and will be doubly under lock and key and doubly secure. Now I’m ready to start stamping and embossing. One thing at a time, however. Let’s first of all give these guys a workout.

Before I shut the partition door, I want to make sure the kid is at his desk, doing Sudoku or something. He is.

I place a sheet of white typing paper on the leather pad. I get out the date stamp. I adjust the band by turning the oversize wheel: now it’s set to today’s date: 01 AUG 2011. OK, here we go. Ke-thunk . That sounded good and that felt good and that looks good: the black tattoo is very professional and very sharp. I am repelled by, and untrusting of, smudged or blurred documents. They are indistinct enough as it is, as it were.

I successively tint and then bang on paper the blue, the green, the red and the orange stamps. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb . Very good.

The (superfluous, because the imprints are superb) handheld seesaw blotter? It is as fun as I suspected a handheld seesaw would be.

Last, and most, the big guys — the embossers. I have to stand up to grip the lever steadily. Cramp , the chrome one says. Cramp , repeats the gold one. Wow. OMG. O. M. G.

To be clear: centrally, my happiness isn’t aesthetic or recreational. To be perhaps less clear: these two modes of pleasure are but the flowering branches of practicality’s tree. What I’m saying is, my new office items are not bureaucratic toys. The point of the embossing is not to make a pretty design on paper but to make life harder for any scoundrels who might want to forge my signature. They will not be thrilled that there has been added, on top of my John Hancock, a further stratum of identification and authentication personal to me, i.e., my boss. The two smaller stamps add a third baffling stratum, and will be useful in various administrative situations. Most important of all, though, are the big bright stamps, which are not big and bright by accident. The red/orange texts they impress on a document serve to vividly qualify, I’d like to say helpfully elucidate, the scope and effect of the act constituted in the putting by me of my name to the document. The mechanism of qualification and elucidation is one that’s now common in the world of legal dealings in writing: the reader is referred to a website that functions as an addendum or rider to the document in question, alternatively as a collateral contract between the referrer and the referee or, in the further alternative, in some way that I haven’t yet figured out, as something that otherwise gives to the reference the legal effect I want, i.e., an effect protective of me. A nitpicking technical analysis isn’t my priority. This is real-world stuff. I’m not going to get hung up on niceties.