Brilliant (16 page)

“Don't get me started,” said Harriet.

“Chin up,” said Judith. “Everybody's on Skype. Now for the hors d'oeuvres, I'd suggest miniature spring rolls.”

By the end of an hour — Harriet taking down every word Judith said on a pad of flowery stationery — they'd got the buffet sorted. Chicken, it would be (“More economical,” pronounced Judith, making Edwina wonder how much she knew), a sideboard featuring roast beef, eight side dishes (three Indian, five Lebanese), a salad bar, some sort of stuffed pasta dish for the vegetarians (“more of those these days”) and for dessert a tiered cake to be executed by the Club's pastry chef, who, Judith said, had trained in France. “Now for the table decorations, I'd suggest vases of white roses for every table. Tied up with white tulle, maybe? Simple, elegant, and again, not outrageously expensive this time of year.”

“I'm not getting married,” said Edwina, and the three women looked at her, as if they'd forgotten she was there.

“Would you prefer red then?” said Judith. “With sprigs of baby's breath perhaps? Again, low in cost.”

“Oh, Judith, what would we do without you?” sighed Harriet. “Isn't that so, Edwina?”

But Edwina was thinking something she couldn't say, at least not in front of Judith: Couldn't we just hire a yacht?

 

They sold
Soulmate
after a year. It wasn't her decision, but then it wasn't her money. Gerald was the one working seventy hours a week, taking calls at midnight, hopping on planes with an hour's notice, the one bobbing and scraping. If only they'd kept that money. But Gerald was already in love. This time it was serious. Three million pounds serious. “She's worth at least four, you know,” said Gerald. Her name was
Cheeky Tiger
. She roared, she clawed. Sixty-six metres long, the boat placed them finally in the realm of super-yacht owners. Spanking new,
Cheeky Tiger
had been built for an American banker sucked down in the financial undertow. The new yacht had an expansive foyer (“A foyer?” blinked Harriet), three interior decks with spiral staircases connecting them, six bedrooms and a pool.

“It's too much, Dad,” Alec, their oldest son, said when he came with his fiancée for Christmas. “The world's going to hell in a hand basket. I'd be a little more prudent, if I were you.”

What did he know? Gerald asked Edwina after Alec had gone back to London. “Always was a conservative kid. Scared of risk. Good thing he's gone into academia.” Edwina hadn't told any of the kids they'd sold the villa in Spain and that the family home in Liverpool — without tenants for a year — had just been bought for quite a lot less than it was worth. But that was the market these days, wasn't it? The kids were grown now, married or engaged, with lives and homes of their own. Sara had two young children; Jewel was expecting her first. None of them had used the Spanish villa in recent years, Gerald pointed out. “We're downsizing, divesting, consolidating.” Every time he said this, Edwina felt a small flutter in the region of her stomach. The downsizing measured sixty-six metres long and three-million quid wide. Something the downsizing did not include was the
BMW
, the Mercedes and the villa in Marina Village. “We can't let it
all
go, can we?” Edwina said. “And I still need Pansy for the tidying up and laundry and cooking.” There were appearances to keep up, even though Gerald's company was no longer covering their rent. Times were tough. The $18,000
US
monthly rent was now theirs to pay.

And now for some reason, the parts weren't working so well. Gerald apologized, Edwina reassured. “It's the job, dear, is all.” But the fact was that Gerald couldn't seem to do it anymore. The glue had unstuck. What had usually put things right was now part of what was wrong. “There are drugs,” Edwina murmured. But Gerald didn't want drugs or help or sympathy. He didn't want to talk about it either. He now stayed up half the night — pottering around the villa — lest they turn back the bedcovers at the same moment. Weekends, he sailed
Cheeky Tiger
.

 

Why did they have to keep meeting about the party? It had all been settled days ago. “Judith wants to review the final details,” said Harriet. “She's so thorough.”

They were now at a new place, Judith's pick this time: Café Arabia. “I'd recommend the
fatteh
,” Judith told the three friends, sunk deep and a bit too snuggly in a brocade couch. Georgie and Harriet ordered as directed, but Edwina, feeling rebellion rise as the sweet-faced Filipina waitress turned to her, said, “Toast with butter, please.”

“You won't try the
fatteh
?” Judith pressed. “It's quite yummy.”

“I don't eat Arabic food for breakfast,” said Edwina.

They seemed to be talking around and above her. Georgie was going on about some future concert on the Corniche and Harriet started talking about their summer plans. They wanted to go somewhere cool this July. “Jack's thinking about Vancouver. Have you been to Canada, Judith?”

She hadn't and Harriet and Georgie seemed to forget that Jewel, Edwina's youngest, lived in Calgary now. But no one asked her.

“So what do you think about what's happening in Egypt?” asked Judith, pushing away her half-eaten bowl of
fatteh
. “Alarming, isn't it?”

“Scary,” said Georgie.

“Really, really scary,” said Harriet.

“And Syria and Yemen are rumoured to be next,” nodded Judith. “Jordan too. It's all gone pear-shaped. And here we were planning on doing that trip down the Nile in April. You know, from Cairo to Luxor.”

“Up,” said Edwina, the first thing she'd said since ordering toast.

“Excuse me?” Judith said.

“If you're going from Cairo to Luxor, you're going upriver.”

“Well, it doesn't matter. Now we may have to rethink our plans.”

“Those people have lived in poverty for a long, long time,” said Edwina. “They've been oppressed, you know. How would you like to live like that?”

Georgie and Harriet turned to look at her with matching expressions:
Do we know you
?

“But, Edwina, is any amount of oppression, as you call it, ever an excuse for looting and lawlessness?” asked Judith. “My dear, it's absolute chaos.”

Truth was, Edwina had only been vaguely following the news, reading the headlines mostly, catching sound bytes on the Beeb, while she packed crates, cancelled utilities and manoeuvred around Gerald's worrying mood.

“I suppose not,” she said, suddenly winded, and insisted on paying the entire bill, despite the worried looks between her two friends. “Well, it looks like all systems are go for Friday night,” she said as they hugged goodbye on the sidewalk outside. “Thank you,” she said to Judith, who actually smiled. “I love you guys,” she said to Georgie and Harriet, and then she was hurrying to her car.

 

Kevin Abbott's letter came by courier five months after mooring their lives to
Cheeky Tiger
. Gerald looked for something else, even got the usual thirty-day grace period for unemployment extended to three months. But he was fifty-eight now, close to sixty, when he would be required to leave anyway. Besides, hydraulic engineering wasn't what it had been. The world wasn't what it had been. Without a job, they couldn't stay. They sold
Cheeky Tiger
to the first buyer, losing almost a million pounds, the market favouring sellers even less than it had just a few months earlier. Remaining stock got divested — even the account offshore in Jersey. The last bit of Edwina's gold jewellery was sold off, as was the piece of land outside Manchester left to Gerald by his grandfather. Anything with any value was exchanged for not nearly enough. Gone.

 

“Did you call Sara? Give her the flight details?” asked Edwina. The movers had driven off an hour before — the chest from Pinky's propped precariously on its side — but Gerald was still standing at the window.

“I think I did,” said Gerald. “Yes, of course, I did.”

Edwina made a note to call their daughter that afternoon from Doha, where they were laying over. Just in case. She dreaded the conversation, the frosty disapproval in Sara's voice. When they'd first asked, their oldest daughter had been disbelieving. “But what happened to all that money? Where did it all go? What were you guys doing all those years?” And when Edwina had tried to explain — bad investments, no talent for saving, a love of beautiful things — Sara had responded, “That's just fucking brilliant.” Of course, Sara felt put upon, especially with two little ones. But where else were they supposed to go?

“I've got no maid, you know,” she'd said. “Don't expect me to pick up after you two.”

“Of course not,” said Edwina. It had hurt to tell Pansy she'd need to find a new sponsor.

They would put the remainder of their belongings — the things they hadn't been able to sell — in storage, keep just what they needed. Sara's guest room wouldn't hold much. Edwina hoped the Indian chest, reminder of an exotic life, would fit.

And she hoped Georgie and Harriet would forgive her. She'd been trying to persuade Gerald for weeks now. “I don't want to go. I can't, don't you understand?” he said, his voice sometimes breaking. But in the end it was she who changed her mind. She didn't want to go to the party either. Friends, roses, speeches. No. She booked their flight for the day before.

 

Twenty-three dirhams and twenty-five fils. That is all. And eighteen dirhams of it is in change. Coins saved one and two at a time by sacrificing a coffee on a late-night shift, mending pantyhose with nail polish instead of buying a new pair, texting Jimmy rather than calling. Her salary — 900 dirhams a month — doesn't go far. Three times Adella counts it. Twenty-three dirhams and twenty-five fils. And the next day will be Christmas.

There's nothing to do but lock herself in the shared bathroom, bury her face in a towel and cry. But she's due downstairs in the lobby washrooms in five minutes. Floors to mop, toilets to scrub. Adella pats cool water on her eyes, slips back into the darkened hotel room. When she first came to work in Abu Dhabi a year ago, returning to this room each night had made her heart sink. It doesn't much resemble the other guest rooms in the Yas Island hotel. With no tourists or businessmen to impress, it's just three single beds, a suitcase tucked under each. Adella has tried to make her corner personal: a framed picture of Jimmy and little Eddie on her nightstand taken the summer before, a nosegay of roses — petals crisp and yellow — left behind by guests at a wedding, a small cross carved from olive wood. “Remember who you are and where you come from,” Mom said when she gave it to her. Adella tries hard to do this, but this place is so far from the Philippines, so far from the family home with its breezy porch, the kitchen with its uneven floor and heavenly smell of frying plantains, the abundant garden always in need of pruning. A work in progress, Jimmy laughingly calls it. But home.

Adella moves to the window, careful not to brush against Haydee's bed. Her roommate has just come off a sixteen-hour shift, hasn't bothered to take off the beige blouse that's part of their uniform. She stirs as Adella tiptoes by, murmuring something in her sleep. It's not quite 5:00 p.m., but already the light is going. At least there is something to look at now: Ferrari World stretches like a scarlet amoeba across the road. Before it had been just sand and scruff, a no-man's-land that made her feel even further from Jimmy than the twenty kilometres that separate them. A housekeeping job in Jimmy's hotel had been promised by the agency back home, but like so many other promises…She can't think about this now. It's Christmas. From six storeys above, Adella watches a couple push a pram around the fountain. Wind lifts the edge of the woman's white headscarf and the man catches it in his hand.

> <

 

Everything depends on tonight's tips. Jimmy plunges his hand again into the front pocket of his uniform trousers, fingering the coins, willing them to be more. He'd always thought the holidays made people more generous. Of course, business is down even in Abu Dhabi this year, especially in the Tourist Club area, where construction on Al Salaam Street has limited access to the hotel. For a Christmas Eve, the lobby is echoingly quiet — only a few private parties in the restaurants tonight and one banquet. “Please,” he'd begged Aziz, his boss, a week ago. “Please let me work the large party.” Tips from a banquet, especially one expertly, graciously served, could more than triple what he'd managed to save so far. Aziz said he'd think about it, but this morning assigned five other waiters to the event. “Lobby café, noon to ten,” he told Jimmy and walked away before Jimmy could ask him to reconsider. The lobby café is a cluster of low ebony tables and bright-orange banquettes set back from the hotel's front doors. The menu is minimal: coffee, sandwiches, biscotti. Ladies talking too long over lattes, kids parked with nannies. Low tippers, non-tippers.

He's been plotting their Christmas Day for weeks. It takes plotting to even arrange the same day off. Although he's been working at the hotel for nearly four years, it barely amounts to seniority. Some of the older waiters, like Raj and Manuel, have been here twelve or fifteen. It was Raj who traded his day off with Jimmy. “You have wife here,” he said. Raj has two daughters in college back home in Bangalore. The last time he could afford to go home was three years ago. “What to do?” he says.

The last time Jimmy and Adella saw each other was in September, the humidity making their joined hands moist as they walked around the yard at St. Mary's Cathedral. Adella had been almost shy at first. “Your hair,” she finally said. “Too short?” he asked, an old bit of married business. Adella adores Jimmy's thick hair, the way it falls into his eyes, moves when he walks. Years ago, she cried when he came home with a buzz cut. “No,” she said, looking up at him. “It's perfect.” They walked around the church compound many times that afternoon, talking about Eddie and his school, about Jimmy's mother, who hadn't been well, about his job and her job and how much it would cost to put a new roof on the house back in Cebu. Over dinner at Chow King later, he felt his chest rise and fall. He was breathing, really breathing, as if he'd been holding his breath, waiting to exhale, since the last time he'd seen her.

Tomorrow morning, Christmas morning, they will meet at church for the Tagalog mass. It will be crowded and they will probably have to stand, but they will not mind. They will see friends, maybe some cousins from home. But they will not linger long in how's-it-going conversation. Jimmy will bring sandwiches from the hotel, Adella some fruit and they'll make their way by bus to the Corniche. Once settled on the sand —
bring blanket
, Jimmy makes a mental note — he'll pull a small packet from his pocket and place it in her lap.

It's the perfect gift for Adella — small, beautiful, yet practical. He's been eyeing it since forever in one of the ground-floor shops at Hamdan Centre: a pink suede mobile-phone case studded with heart-shaped rhinestones. Adella's mobile is her prized possession — not because it boasts any special features, but because it connects her to home and to him. “My lifeline,” she said the last time they were together and kissed it, laughing. He'd checked last week; two pink cases were still left. But it wasn't the availability of the case that worried him tonight. The case costs one hundred dirhams. He has forty-seven. Two weeks ago it had looked promising, his tips surely accumulating in the days leading up to the holiday. But customers seem distracted this year, oblivious even. Last week a party of eight in the hotel's steakhouse ate and drank up a bill of 4,000 dirhams, then drifted out three hours later, leaving nothing at all. “Maybe forget,” said Raj.

And now this: an empty café, “Joy to the World” playing discreetly through the lobby's speakers, untended boys circling the massive, gold-flecked Christmas tree on roller shoes.
Adella
. What to do?

> <

 

She knew the moment she saw the case that it was made for Jimmy. Certain things just belong to certain people. She imagines Jimmy pulling his mobile from his back pocket, people turning, stopping to admire the sleek black leather. His phone is a few years old, the face scratched, but Jimmy sees no point in buying a new one. “Each thing we buy slows us down,” he tells her. Jimmy has a plan: three more years for Adella, six for him. Then, God willing, they will have enough to buy a taxi service back home and send Eddie to a better school. He's a smart boy.

But every time Adella vacuums the hotel gift shop, she admires the mobile case displayed in the window. Doesn't Jimmy deserve this? The shop manager, another Filipina, has promised Adella a 20-percent discount. She could offer 75 percent; it would still be more than Adella can cobble together by tomorrow.

And then as she's emptying the trash in the ladies' washroom, something comes. On a five-minute break she takes the elevator up to the room. Haydee is awake now, watching
TV
, still in her uniform. Fatigue weighs on her pretty face.

“Del.” She pats the bed for Adella to join her. “You still on?”

“Till three,” says Adella.

“We must be crazy,” says Haydee.

“Haydee,” says Adella, sitting down. “You know my mobile…?”

And it is decided. Haydee's phone has been acting up for weeks. Adella returns downstairs, eighty dirhams richer.

> <

 

Jimmy is grateful the stores downtown stay open so late. At home on Christmas Eve, everything closes by six, everyone rushing home to cook, eat and dress for midnight mass. Here it is and it isn't Christmas. He remembers — hurrying himself now to Hamdan Centre — his confusion that first December, seeing the red, green, white and black decorations at Lulu for National Day and mistakenly thinking they were for Christmas. It seems pretty funny to him now. Still, he's grateful for the tolerance here. St. Mary's is testament to that.

Though it's nearly eleven, the shop is still open. The deal is struck, the little package slipped into his trousers' pocket.

> <

 

Christmas morning comes, balmy and glorious. But Jimmy has to work after all — Aziz shrugs, can't be helped — and when Adella tries to call him from St. Mary's, borrowing a mobile from a friend, there is no answer. She's waited through two masses, scanning the crowds for her husband, walking countless times past the giant Christmas tree decorated with white paper petals. But Jimmy's mobile sits in a Hamdan Centre shop, battery and
SIM
card removed, for resale. Sixty dirhams. Cheap.

Jimmy calls Adella many times that day, borrowing Raj's mobile. If only he could reach her. The message says the same thing over and over:
The mobile you are trying to reach has been switched off
. Haydee is sleeping before her next shift.

That night, Christmas night, Adella finds herself at the window again. The gift for Jimmy now sits on the nightstand with her cross and photo. She looks across the island to the lights of the city and she feels him there.

 

The magi, as you know, were wise men — wonderfully wise men from Arabia, Persia and India — who brought gifts to the babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were, no doubt, wise ones. Wiser perhaps than those of a couple in Abu Dhabi who most unwisely sacrificed for each other their greatest treasures, their lifelines to one another. But perhaps of all who give gifts, these two were the wisest. O, all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the wisest. Everywhere they are the wisest. They are the magi.

 

__________________

The last lines of this Abu Dhabi retelling of “The Gift of the Magi” belong to William Sydney Porter, otherwise known as O. Henry. They cannot be improved upon.