Brilliant (11 page)

Mathieu hadn't heard a car approach that Friday. No cars had passed their tight, short line for at least five minutes, as closely as he could remember. But he hadn't hit his cycling rhythm yet, was still warming up, which took more concentration than it would ten minutes later when his heart would begin pumping in time with his legs. He was still groggy, still stiff, still fighting his body, preoccupied with the Sunday meeting and wondering what he was going to do about the Russian girl who'd texted her mobile number to his the night before at the Captain's Arms. These things didn't usually work out too well, though a month without sex was beginning to wear on him. Not that sex was a given when Sandrine was around. She was only sometimes in the mood the past few years. She'd been so pliant in their early days; now it was a constant negotiation. That was how he'd explained the thing with Angie a year ago. Not to Sandrine — why inflict unnecessary hurt? — but to himself. Still, the girl in the bar seemed like the undemanding type. He remembered the way her breasts tested the tiny buttons on her filmy blouse, wondered if her nipples were pale or dark, if she liked them sucked or licked or nipped… If Talbot had been able to read his thoughts that morning, he wouldn't have been impressed. Scattered to here and beyond. So scattered that as he and Talbot turned off Khaleej al Arabi, heading down 19th toward the water, he failed to look back, failed to check on Victor.

Gillian had stopped again, had turned to face him, was looking into his face. She wanted to know: Did he think it was a local?

“It could have been anyone, Gillie,” he said, surprised by using the name Victor had called her and by putting his arm around her. She didn't pull away.

“I think it was a local,” she said. Her voice was flat, but tears had begun to gather in her eyes again. “Motherfucker.”

“Maybe we can get a coffee,” he said, surprised again and rapidly checking motivations and repercussions. Meeting to run on the Corniche was one thing. Coffee…he needed to be really careful here. She was in shock, deep grief, her heart run over. The last thing he should be doing was encouraging emotional dependence. Once, in university in the
UK
, Mathieu had comforted his flatmate's girlfriend after the flatmate dumped her. The girl had been near-suicidal and one thing led to another. The guy had a change of heart and everyone ended up feeling shitty.

Gillian looked at him, studied his eyes. “Okay,” she said.

At Dome, she ordered a flat white. “What's that?” he asked.

“They don't have these in France?”

“No,” he said. “What is it? Some kind of weird Aussie drink?” For a moment they were other people in another situation.

“Victor could drink four a day,” said Gillian and they were back to normal.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Cry for the rest of my life,” she said and smiled at him. She was young and lovely and all she deserved she could never have again. “You mean, what am I going to do next?”

“Can you keep your teaching job? Do you feel like going home?”

“I don't feel like doing anything,” she said. “I don't even want to be drinking this stupid coffee. For all I know the guy who killed my husband is the owner of this place.” She waved a hand at the counter where two Filipina waitresses stood giggling. The café was empty except for them; the mall crowd would drift in after the noon prayers. “You know, not the real, working, do-something owner, but the local guy who does nothing but make money off this place and drive around in his
SUV
, running people down if they get in his way.” She put her cup down. She was right. She was barely drinking it. “The doctor wouldn't even do a frigging autopsy. Can you believe that? ‘It's God's will,' he said. Can you believe that?”

Anger was a part of grief, he remembered reading, a necessary part. Well, he would be her punching bag and the friend-for-now she needed. He would protect her, even from himself. And sitting in the echoing plastic sameness of Al Wahda Mall at 8:00 a.m., the call to prayer beginning on the loudspeakers, he felt for the first time in a long while almost good about himself.

 

He'd told her gently when they first met, then more firmly several times after: Call me Dave. She stood before him now, tan and perfect in a white linen sundress, no moisture on her taut face though it was nearly 40 degrees. She blazed him a smile.

“Father,” she said.

“Please,” he said. “Dave.”

“Dave,” she said and he knew by the humouring way she said his name that they would be having this exchange again. Tina would never give in.

“We need to talk,” she said, shutting the smile off.

“Let's talk,” he said.

“Not here,” she said, looking around the empty church compound.

It was late; the sun had already moved from its blistering noon position. There'd been tea and cookies in the vicarage garden. Dave could hear the tea boys speaking loudly to each other in Hindi as they cleaned up. Even the Ethiopian women, who gathered every Friday in the courtyard to sing and pray, their gauze shawls the holiest shade of white he'd ever seen, had gone.

He led her, with what he hoped looked like ministerial willingness, through the compound to the apartment, seven awkwardly arranged rooms filled with sagging, beige furniture. Even Suzette and the kids called it The Vicarage, a public place where they happened to live. They were used to it. Six years in Kuwait, four in Oman, two in Bahrain and now, Abu Dhabi. “Where are you from?” one of the ancient thrift shop ladies had bent to ask eight-year-old Erik the week before and he'd answered, “The world, I guess.”

Arjun met them in the entryway. He was always there, discreetly there, never underfoot or hovering. Thirty years and seven ministers, a St. Edmund's fixture. How had he done it? His daughters in Cochin were grown now, his wife dead. Dave watched the man's lean back as he bent over yet another tea service, the thin cotton of his shirt damp at the base of his spine. After so many years in the Gulf, Dave was fine-tuned to the nuances of servitude. Secretly he worried he'd become too used to it: I tell. You do.

“Tea please, Arjun,” he said, needing the ritual of cups and spoons and Arjun's steady presence padding in and out. Tina Souaidy was going to require more than he had this afternoon. Why did she want to talk on Friday after the main service, after he'd talked and talked? “Shot your wad,” as Suzette delicately put it.

He gestured to the overstuffed Arabian loveseat rather than the larger sofa where he lowered himself, surprised by the heaviness in his body. He didn't want to sit side by side. “It's better like this,” Tina said, moving to join him on the sofa. She smelled like sunscreen and something fruity. Peach.

“We have to do something,” she said.

The Friday before, they'd visited the women's labour camp, a cluster of low buildings tucked inside the maze of the Musaffah camps. For several weeks, he'd announced the new outreach program from the pulpit, not encouraged by the looks on most of the faces:
Right, Dave, just how I want to spend a Friday afternoon
. It had been only the two of them meeting at the back of the chapel the previous week, plus a Scottish fellow who seemed to think they were going to Foodlands for the monthly post-service lunch. “Wrong group,” he said and scurried off.

Dave had met Tina several times before, both relative newcomers to a parish that had been the pillar of British Anglican life in Abu Dhabi for fifty years and fully intended to remain so for the next fifty. At first, eager to connect, Dave looked for her after Friday service. Sometimes she came with a young man, probably her son. Mostly she came alone. Her husband, she'd told him as they stood in the vicarage garden during the weekly, obligatory meet-and-greet, travelled a great deal. “Mo works for the ruling family,” she said. “He's Syrian Muslim, I'm Italian-American and Catholic. You can imagine how the folks back in Boston love that.” And Tina had smiled so widely, so winningly that he almost missed the darkness in her eyes, the tightness of her jaw.

“You're wondering why I'm not over there, right?” she'd said, waving behind her in the vicinity of St. Mary's Cathedral, where throngs of Indians and Filipinos gathered for sixty masses a week. It gave a whole new meaning to the word
mass
, Dave thought when he first saw the beige, curtained buses unloading and reloading every Friday morning, the drivers yelling out return destinations in shrill voices. If he had even one-tenth those numbers he'd be named Primate of All England. Dave had made a point of meeting the Catholic bishop his first week in Abu Dhabi. His Excellency George Mueller: German, elderly, prim, cold as a Munich winter.

“You're thinking maybe that I feel out of place in that sea of brown?” Tina had fixed him with another smile, harder at the edges. “No, I welcome diversity. I just can't abide the bishop. One of Ratzinger's guys probably. Perfect fourth-century mind.” She must have seen some recognition in his face, though Dave quickly tried to register only non-committal amusement. “Good line,” he said.

Meet and greet. It had been the thing to do in those early weeks. There was the St. Edmund's old guard — ushers, readers, the thrift shop ladies — to have in for lunch at the Vicarage. They'd welcomed him with mild interest, talking among themselves through the cucumber sandwiches; even in this transient city-state they would probably outlast him. There were the religious leaders of the other churches in the block-square compound — the Bible Belt, Suzette called it — from the Syrian Orthodox priest to the Oklahoma-folksy minister at the evangelical church. Ed Woods had the hungry look of a proselytizer and wanted to get together every week. “Make it a regular thing, Dave. Talk about matters close to both our hearts.”

There was someone he did want to meet. Sheikh Maktoum bin Zayed, a half-brother of the crown prince, was officially the deputy minister of cultural affairs, but he had a special interest in Christianity, having studied comparative religion at Oxford. “How did they ever allow him to do that?” Suzette had asked. The “Him” had changed with their postings, from Emir to Sultan to simply, Supreme Ruler. There was always a Him in these countries, as well as a They, the surrounding ruling circle, and you were wise never to forget that.

It was Bishop Mueller who finessed an audience with Sheikh Maktoum in Dave's third month. What those two had in common, Dave couldn't begin to fathom after the first minutes of conversation. The bishop sat stiff as a crosier on the least cushy of the couches in Maktoum's
majlis
, one of many such rooms, no doubt. Dave had expected to be dazzled — not that the elegant space, with its Italian marble floors and air of supreme privilege, was a disappointment. But it was a modest dazzle, as if Maktoum had wanted to minimize the space between them.

“How is your family?” murmured the bishop after three gracious maids had passed before them with trays large as sundials piled with chocolates, dates, chocolate-covered dates, date-filled chocolates. Dave felt full by the second round, but watched his host as to when he could gracefully decline, grateful for all those socially trying years in the Gulf. He was not an innocent. “Thank you,” he said on round three, hand on heart, head bowed, after Maktoum waved off the women. The sheikh was older than he'd expected, a trim man in his early fifties with an impeccable, greying goatee, amused, inquiring eyes and an ease in his body that slowed one's own breathing. Dave felt himself exhale for the first time in months.

“My mother is doing as well as can be expected. You are kind to inquire, Your Grace,” he said.

“Alzheimer's,” he said, turning to Dave. “Such a terrible way to go. And what makes it even more painful is that there's such an effort to pretend it's something else. We need to know about Alzheimer's, not shut our eyes to it.” Maktoum sighed and adjusted his
ghutra
slightly. “My country…” and he was speaking now just to Dave…“needs to take the blinkers off, put pride aside and get on with the twenty-first century. Read, study; open ourselves to other ways of thinking and being.”

Bishop Mueller cleared his throat. “Your Highness, I do hope you will excuse me. There is a family coming to baptize their new baby…”

“Of course! So many people depend on you, Your Grace. Duty calls. Of course,” and Maktoum stood. Lifting himself from the low couch, the bishop shot Dave a look, which made him also get to his feet.

“But you're not going too, Father?” The sheikh sounded crushed. “There is much to talk about.”

The bishop left, looking a bit miffed, but it didn't seem to have an effect on Maktoum, who ordered in more food. The afternoon opened around them. He wanted to know about Dave's religious training (“your blessed calling”), his family (“one son, two daughters…lucky man!”), listened intently to Dave's experiences as an Anglican pastor in Bahrain. “What a bloody mess. Just give the Shia some rights and be done with it,” said the sheikh, tapping a cigarette on the gilt side table before lighting up. “But tell me what you think of our funny little country. Don't worry, I won't deport you if you start quoting the last Human Rights Watch report.”

Dave told Maktoum about the warmth of people — “especially my parishioners from Kerala” — about discovering the beauty of the Liwa desert, about the sense of being “part of the build,” a line he'd used in other postings. “And when I hear the
muezzin
from the mosque next door it really does feel as if the call to prayer is for all of us.” This wasn't a stretch. In Kuwait and Oman, it had sometimes bothered him when the call to prayer drowned out the Anglican hymns. Here the call felt almost paternal.

“Come now, Father,” said Maktoum. “What do you really think?” And Dave, feeling both nervous and relieved, told him about visiting the labour camps where he'd entered squalid, humid rooms, twelve men to a bunk, about the Ethiopian nannies fleeing employers who starved, beat and refused to pay them (he didn't say most of their bosses were Emirati). Some of these women now slept on the grounds of St. Edmund's, their slender legs curled inside the holy-white of their shawls.

There was no Ethiopian embassy in Abu Dhabi, Dave explained, and the consulate in Dubai had no money to help in any way. “I've tried.” It had been his first mission at St. Edmund's, one he literally tripped over some mornings. But no one on the church council had wanted to commit the 18,000 dirhams a month to rent the empty villa across the street for the women. And even if they had consented, there would be no embassy on site to protect the runaways physically or legally. Any of their employers could come and drag them away in the night.

“I am ashamed,” said Maktoum. He said nothing more for a long moment, eyes closed, before opening them and smiling. “We will do something. I promise you we will do something.” And then just as Dave was beginning to feel the discomfort he'd often felt when speaking to Gulf Arabs about the places they called home, Maktoum wanted to know Dave's thoughts about the ideological tug of war within the Church of England, what he
really
thought of Rowan Williams. “I'm just fascinated,” said Maktoum, settling back among the
majlis
pillows. “Your archbishop is quite the maverick.”

It was wonderful, rare and wonderful, Dave thought later, as he followed a palace driver to a waiting Mercedes, to talk ideas with a deeply intelligent person. It was rare enough back home, but here in the oil lands, where consumption and piety had replaced ideas, where intellectual life was as hard to come by as a temperate day, it almost never happened. It was even rarer, if that was possible, to be listened to with such unwavering attention, as if every word, every inflection, was being taken in. It was only later still, going over their conversation as he tried to gather points for the coming week's sermon, that he heard that word:
some
. Give them some rights and be done with it.

 

Tina Souaidy hadn't touched her tea. She talked, referring to typed notes, looking up over her reading glasses to hammer in a point. She'd written a thesis. He should have seen this coming after last week.

It had been sweltering when they'd driven out to the Musaffah camps. Tina, who always looked like she'd just stepped from an air-conditioned shop, had even fashioned a fan out of the church bulletin. “Lord,” she said, when they got out of the van. She'd brought two LuLu bags packed with board games, Bingo chips, playing cards. “The girls need some amusement, don't they, poor things?” After several visits to the camps, wandering through the neglected buildings of bunk beds, communal kitchens and too many bodies, Dave wasn't sure what was needed. Tickets home? Then what?

As a man, he'd been able to go only as far as the front courtyard of the women's compound. Most people didn't even know there was a camp for women out here. Surrounded on all sides by the crumbling sprawl of the men's buildings, it housed up to 100 women, Filipinas and Bangladeshis employed by the city's large industrial cleaning companies, women who mopped floors and scrubbed toilets at Adnoc or
HSBC
headquarters at 3:00 a.m. You worked like a slave and then you came home to this. Dave had to steel himself to come here every week, to enter the shantytown that most expats sped by on their way somewhere else, to Tarif or Liwa. The camps were so
here
, but so invisible.

While Tina visited with the female residents, he planned to drop into some of the men's rooms in the camp down the road. The week before he'd played chess with a red-bearded Pakistani fellow, a labourer on the ten-year engineering joke known as the Sheikh Zayed Bridge. The man had beaten him soundly at the game, grinning all the while. When Dave pressed him as to what he needed (sheets, food, pen and paper?), the man shook his head. “Good,” he said.

Dave had dropped Tina quickly at the entrance, trying not to look at her face, which had frozen into a mask of anxious good will. “Just be yourself,” he said, patting her arm before getting back into the van, knowing this advice sounded as lame as the buck-up he'd given Rachel, his oldest daughter, on the first day in her new high school. She'd looked at him with adolescent pity.