Brilliant (6 page)

Madame had pressed 2,000 dirhams into Sami's hand as they were leaving. “Make sure it's something nice, nothing that looks cheap.”

The kid-size electric cars at Toys “R” Us — the most expensive thing in the store — cost a little more than this, so Sami had to throw in 120 dirhams of his own. He couldn't interest Rashid in anything other than the car for himself, not even the latest version of X-Box.

Rashid had stood at the counter shaking his head over and over, even after Sami explained that he didn't have the money to buy a second car. “We'll come back next week, even maybe tomorrow, and get you the car, okay?” Sami promised.

“Tonight,” Rashid said.

“How late are you open?” Sami asked the checker.

“Ten,” she said, and Rashid had given her the thumbs up.

But at the entrance to the hotel ballroom half an hour later, the boy's better mood evaporated. “I don't want to go,” he told Sami, who'd planned to duck into his favourite shawarma shop across the street, visit with an old friend who often went there after prayers on Friday afternoons. Sami had ferried the toy car in on a hotel dolly, no one offering to help. He was tired and sweaty. Oh, for a cup of Lipton's Yellow Label.

“But your friends are here,” said Sami, knowing this wasn't true.

“I go in if you stay,” said Rashid. “You are my friend, Sami.”

“Poor boy,” Sami said to Lilibeth the next day. They sometimes talk about Rashid, shrugging, shaking their heads. What are they to do? What
can
they do? “I tell Madame that boy is good boy, but needs special help,” says Lilibeth. “She doesn't want to hear.” Lilibeth is a tiny, plain woman, older than she first appears, and better educated than some of the other children's nannies. She has a good heart, Sami tells Mohsin often. But Sami didn't tell even Lilibeth that before the games and cake and gift-giving, before most of the other guests had arrived, Rashid had ripped the gift paper from the huge box and insisted on riding the car round and round the ballroom while the birthday boy and his parents watched.

“I was showing him,” Rashid protested when Sami told him on the way home that this was not polite, good-guest behaviour. He also didn't tell Lilibeth that Saeed Al Qubaisi, dropping in for coffee and a chat with his wife later that night, slipped him 3,000 dirhams to buy another electric car and that he had done just that, hurrying into Toys “R” Us minutes before they closed. (Lilibeth would see the car soon enough.) He didn't tell Mohsin about it. Any of it. Nor that the car had held Rashid's undivided attention for one day.

 

“Akhdar City,” Sami says to the back seat as he tries to follow the signs, “is an amazing place. No country has anything like Akhdar.” Sami doesn't know if this is exactly true. There must be other projects like Abu Dhabi's experimental green city. People were so worried about the environment nowadays. High-class problem, according to Mohsin. People starving, that's a problem, he says. People not believing in God, that's a problem. But if we run out of energy, Sami argues back — imagining Mohsin's emphatic head-shaking — then what? None of the rest will matter. Since when did you get so fatalistic, little brother? Mohsin says. You're not going to the mosque enough, are you?

Their faith, their practice, their bedrock. It had been the one place they could find each other in the past. But then Mohsin had made some new friends, younger fellows coming from home to the
UK
. They've got something, these guys. Clear as a bell, says Mohsin. Know where they're going. Mohsin is planning on making the
hajj
next year. What about you, Sami? Mohsin has begun to ask this in every phone conversation. Don't you think it's time to make the
haj
j
? None of us knows how long we have, he says.
Now
who's the fatalist? Sami retorts, but only in his head.

“I need food!” Rashid has come alive again and kicks the back of the front seat.

“Patience, Rashid, patience,” says Sami, knowing that the word means nothing to Rashid. It doesn't mean much to any of the Al Qubaisi children. Eiman, who turns twenty-one this year, still stamps and screams when she doesn't get what she wants in the very next minute. Patience, Sami and Mohsin's mother used to tell them, is the highest virtue. It is golden.

The mobile again: “Sami, where are you?” Asma, who has only contempt for her mother, would be mortified to know how much she sounds like her on the phone. “I need you to pick me up. Now.” Sami hears a crowded room behind her. Lately she's been summoning him at all hours. “Friends,” she always says. But the night before she had him come to a run-down villa in the industrial part of Musaffah. “Friends, who do you think?” Asma glared at him in the rear-view mirror when he asked.

“I need to be picked up,” she says again.

“Where are you?” Sami asks, dreading rejoining the gridlock.

The girl's usual bravura seems to fail her. “I'm not sure.”

“I've got Rashid,” Sami starts to say.

“Never mind,” says Asma, composed and imperious again, and hangs up.

Alhamdulillah
! There's an Adnoc station right on the service road. Sami turns in, manoeuvring carefully past the long line-up for petrol, but calls Madame before parking. “Fine,” is all she says and hangs up before Sami can even tell her where they are or that Asma has just called, that she's out there somewhere.

Rashid orders three Big Macs, grabbing a dozen packets of ketchup for his three cartons of fries.

“Are you sure you can eat all that?” Sami asks and Rashid looks at him scornfully. But food, especially in large quantities, always perks Rashid up. In between open-mouth chewing, he quizzes Sami on soccer. Sami's up on the British teams, via Mohsin, but falls down on the Brazilians, Rashid's current obsession. “See, I'm smarter than you,” says Rashid.

Sami looks at his watch. He hopes Akhdar City is still open. He hopes Asma finds a cab.

“Right?” presses Rashid.

“Right,” says Sami.

And then, as if he's wearing ear buds and singing along to a pop song, Rashid suddenly chants, “Baba loves a lady, Baba loves a lady.”

“Your mother is a good woman,” says Sami. He doesn't really believe this after all these years of working for Madame, but it's sweet that Rashid appreciates his father's devotion.

“No,” says Rashid, shaking his whole body so adamantly that the wrappers from the Big Macs flutter to the ground. A Filipina is there in an instant, picking them up. She smiles nervously at Rashid.

“Your mother is a lady,” says Sami, starting to feel anxious.

“Different lady, Sami. Russian lady. Don't you understand? Are you stupid?”

Watch out, whispers Mohsin.

“Baba loves a different lady. Different.” Rashid shouts the word as it's written, all three syllables.

“We go,” says Sami, gathering up the sticky packets and used napkins. He hates leaving a mess behind for the workers. They are not as lucky as he's been. My life has been touched by…but he can't at that moment think what it's been touched by.

“She's a nudie,” says Rashid, slurping the last of his Coke. “I saw her. Big ones.”

“Where?” Sami asks, even as he hears Mohsin hiss: Back off.

Rashid looks at him as if he's an idiot. “On her head. Where do you think?”

“At Baba's villa?” Sami needs to leave this alone. He absolutely has to.

“Of course at Baba's villa. Where do you think?”

Sami gets up, takes Rashid's elbow and leads him out of McDonald's, back to the Land Rover. Rashid is many things — a troubled boy, a spoiled boy — but he is not a liar. The other children in the family are better at this. Sultan, Sami knows, cheated his way through university. He will never reveal how he knows this, but he does. Now he can't look at the eldest son, once his favourite, without feeling a cloud pass over his heart. Sometimes it's better not to know people too well.

So why does he have to know
this
? How is knowing this going to help anything? Because now the pieces are flying into places where they should have landed months, even years ago if he'd had half a brain and half the trust: the separate villa, the weeks away from home, the smell of perfume in Sir's bedroom, the trips to Hong Kong and New York without Madame. The poetry. And now Mohsin will never shut up. Those people, he says. Godless.

The Adnoc station is jumping as they leave, long lines for petrol, longer lines inside for fast food, for coffee and candy and cash from the bank machine. Cigarettes and
DVD
s and Tampax and condoms. You can buy anything over there, can't you? says Mohsin. Sami once saw bottles of special lubricant for exciting a woman, right next to the Panadol and mouthwash. He'd looked away fast, but he'd seen it.

From the back seat, Rashid sets up the chant: “Akhdar! Akhdar! Akhdar!” Once out of the station with its fever of bright lights and big cars, it's dim and silent. Sami follows the signs through long stretches of sand and scruff. The sky is darkening quickly, the road narrowing from four lanes to two. They pass no other cars, not a good sign. The endless landscape can still take Sami by surprise, still makes him vaguely uneasy, even after all these years. Of course, Abu Dhabi is dense and developed compared to thirty years before, when this highway didn't even exist, when there were only a few petrol stations in the entire city. But he finds the desert distances somehow more unsettling now, as if all the new high-rises — the giant, tilted sausage of the Gateway building, the massive obelisk of the Mubadala headquarters — make the spaces in between yawn wider. The city is spreading wildly out here: Khalifa City A, Khalifa City B. But each isolated development looks lonelier than the next, pretty sand-coloured villas surrounded by nothing. Sami prays they reach something soon.

And then, as if he's been supplicating himself before ever-present Allah, the lanes widen to four and they're curving around a grand, circular driveway. Akhdar City, the sign reads: Welcome to the Future. Not many other people seem interested in that future this evening: Three cars sit in the parking lot. Sami gets out of the
SUV
, opens the back door, leans over to undo Rashid's seat belt.

Rashid looks up from his mobile. “Home?”

“Akhdar,” says Sami. “They have interesting little cars here.”

“I like
big
cars,” says Rashid.

“I know,” says Sami. “I do too. But these cars drive
themselves
.”

“No!” says Rashid.

Sami nods, waits.

With a sigh, Rashid heaves himself from the back seat. He seems to have grown wider and taller since Sami picked him up two hours ago. They walk to what could be an entrance. Now that they're inside Akhdar City, now that they're past the impressive driveway, it all looks smaller, rougher. Sami sees that they're actually in a building site, one that hasn't seen a lot of recent action, judging by the dirt-encrusted Caterpillars standing abandoned like hulking sandcastles. A laminated plaque hangs near what he hopes is a garage for the tiny cars.
PRT
s, Sami remembers from a newspaper story. Personal Rapid Transport. In the photos they looked like white pods on invisible wheels and barely tall enough for a boy.

“Akhdar City is a modern Arabian city that, like its forerunners, is in tune with its surroundings,” Sami reads aloud from the plaque. “As such, it is a model for sustainable urban development regionally and globally, seeking to be a commercially viable development that delivers the highest quality living and working environment with the lowest possible ecological footprint.” Who do they think they are? scoffs Mohsin.

But Rashid is looking up at Sami with questions all over his face. “What is forerunners? People who run for something? And footprint? Is that like what the
salukis
leave in the gardens and what makes Baba so mad? And what is eco…you know.”

Sami doesn't know. It's all high talk and big ideas. You're right there, says Mohsin.

“Let's go see the cars,” Sami says. He needs to keep them moving, not just because of Rashid's flickering attention, but because he needs to rub out the thing he now knows. How is he going to look Sir in the eye again?

A man in a uniform steps out of the shadows. He speaks in rapid Arabic with a heavy Jordanian accent. Rashid grunts. “What?” says Sami, who missed the last bit. “Can we ride in the cars?”

“No,” says Rashid. “Broke.” And he kicks a stone out of his way with such force Sami winces.

“Sir, sir,” Sami calls to the man, who's walking away. “Could we just look at one of the cars?”

The man shrugs and points to something off in the distance.

PRT
s, a dozen of them, sit in a row in a glass station. The glass is also covered with sand, though Sami — after three decades as a driver here — knows it could have been washed off only that morning. Sand moves fast. It beats you every time.

Before Sami can stop him, Rashid makes for the cars. Miraculously, both the door to the station and the door to the first car in line open for him. “Sami!” he waves, and Sami, looking around for the guard, runs over and climbs in. Compact isn't the word for these things. His knees are in his chest. Rashid, mesmerized, presses a button and the door closes. Without any warning, without any reason, the car beeps and begins to glide out of the station. Gaining speed, it zips across the empty lot, across sand and tumbleweeds, across the land that someday will be home to a city the world has not yet seen. A global hub for renewable energy. A model of sustainable technologies for all nations. That place you live, says Mohsin. It's not a model for anything.

Sami is nervous, swivelling back to front. What if the guard realizes they've taken the car? What if they hit something, a rock, a tree, a person out here? The sky is starry, but with no streetlights, no real road, they're rushing into blackness. Madame, he suddenly thinks. My job.