Brilliant (18 page)

“Let's ditch this joint,” a busty blonde stage-whispered from across the banquet table and Deborah found herself following the woman's large frame out of the Hilton. “All those stupid teacups and fakey smiles. Believe me, when you turn your back they'll be bad-mouthing your bloody handbag or whatever else they can feel superior about.” Davina was on her second cigarette by this time, the two having narrowly dodged speeding
SUV
s to cross the Corniche. It was mid-November, the temperature almost human again, the benches facing the water crowded.

“How did you know I was dying to get out of there?” Deborah asked.

“Your face, luv,” said Davina. “Everything about you, luv.”

“I tell myself every morning: Get out. Meet people.”

Davina nodded. “You miss Canada?” she asked.

“Not right this minute. I'd be getting out the snow tires.”

“Tell me about it,” said Davina. “Well, not snow. This time of year Glasgow's like a pig trough. Ruddy, muddy mess.”

They'd laughed so hard, Deborah had to wipe her eyes. Not that either of them had said anything
that funny. But at last, someone real. “Shawarma Hut, Khalifa & Airport. C U @ 11?” Davina texted the next morning. And so it went.

Davy, as she preferred to be called (“Davina is pit on the gentry”), was essentially childless in Abu Dhabi. Her son, Robbie, had learning problems the city's Canadian and American schools had dusted their hands of, and was now at a boarding school in the north of England. “Brits got hold of him. What are you going to do?” she sighed. And their husbands, they agreed, would have little in common, so it was just them, members only, shopping for Iranian pottery at Mina Zayed, trying
shisha
in a café, meeting up at Emirates Palace for an exhibition of Islamic embroidery or mediocre Emirati art. They spent hours in Magrudy's shopping for books — Davina scoping out the latest chick-lit titles, Deborah the cookbooks and historical fiction — once even successfully petitioning the removal of a stack of
Mein Kampf
, displayed prominently as if it was new on the bestseller list. “What is the matter with this country?” Davy fumed.

They did the touristy things too, like taking photos with the tired, dusty camel at Heritage Village, cracking up over the creative translations on plaques posted throughout the grounds: “The dominant desert start to disappear its place is in the utmost rear.” “Well, it rhymes,” said Davy. Mostly they laughed over what Harris now called Abu-surdities: Plumbing that was never quite fixed despite crews of solemn-faced workers tromping through your kitchen or bathroom, phones inexplicably disconnected for weeks, buildings with no addresses so that landing in the right place felt like an accident. The things that had made Deborah scream with frustration before were now, if not a hoot, material.

“You know those glasses of mine, the ones I keep taking back to the optometrist in Al Wahda, the ones with the loose screw they can never seem to fix?” Deborah told Davy over coffee one morning. “This time I insisted on taking them to their lab myself. You want to know what the adorable Filipino optometrist wrote on my referral? ‘Needs good screw.'” Davina's laugh — she had a raucous, head-turning one — made the stupid, sweaty three-hour errand almost worth it.

“Poor man, he'd be mortified if he knew what it meant,” said Deborah.

“So did they fix them?”

“Come on, Davy. Where do we live?”

“Hey,” said Davy another morning in another café, “how many Emiratis does it take to change a light bulb?”

“Wait a minute,” said Deborah, already laughing. “Three. One to call an Indian labourer to do the work, and two to brag that it was the brightest light bulb in the world.”

“Way too few,” said Davy. “How about one to heckle the Indian manager, who's supervising four unskilled labourers from Bangladesh; one to call the newspaper and report another milestone for Emirati ingenuity; one to shoot photos on his iPhone. How many does that make?”

Each version — it got so bad they were texting each other several times a day — bested the last: “Twelve. Six Indians and Pakistanis speaking different dialects: one to ring the doorbell, one to explain in a mix of Hindi and English why it took two weeks to come out; a third to carry the six-foot ladder to reach the bulb in the twelve-foot ceiling; three to watch and scratch their heads; two Western journalists to rhapsodize on how the changing of the light bulb reflected the vision of Sheikh Zayed; one editor to kill the anecdote about Sheikh Zayed's fifth wife; and one Emirati to explain how the changing of the light bulb fit in with Abu Dhabi's 2030 Plan.”

“I think that's only ten,” Deborah texted back.

Actually, they decided one afternoon after too many coffees, the correct answer was zero. Emiratis didn't do manual labour and they didn't make house calls. “And in my building, which, as you know, is brand new, once a light bulb burns out, that's it. Never changed,” Davy added. “This joke doesn't really work here.”

“They can build the world's tallest building, but they can't change a light bulb,” said Deborah. “Ironic, eh?”

“Irony doesn't work here either,” Davy reminded her.

By now Deborah had grown skeptical about the country's dreams of meteoric, painless success, painless to locals because it was built on the backs of migrant workers, paid abysmally and treated worse. She'd grown weary of We Are the Biggest, We Are the Best. The 2030 Plan — she longed to tell that silver-haired man of long ago — was going to sink like The World, Dubai's man-made islands, which were rapidly going under. Dust to dust, water to water. Even in more fiscally solvent Abu Dhabi, construction projects were being scuttled as global markets tightened and choked. We Are the World had never been truer or more unfortunate.

Sometimes they still hit one of their old coffee mornings. They were good for gossip, good for a laugh. Davy was a terrific mimic — could duplicate the Texas purr of oil wives so well she might have been from the Big D herself, though she could also nail the disdainful, disappointed tones of a Brahmin Brit. “I think we're turning into bigots,” Deborah said over falafels one morning. Davy had just impersonated a Japanese woman who'd come to speak to “the laddies” about feng shui. “Well, it was almost English,” said Davy. “Didn't stop her from going on like a peppermill. Racist? This place does it to you.”

In late March, Davina's husband, Jack, got laid off by the construction company that had brought them there. A huge project — two towers of 100 offices each — got the thumbs down four days before building was to start. “Postponed, they're saying,” shrugged Davy. “Meantime, they've cancelled everyone's visas. We've got thirty days to find something else, but other companies are laying off too. Even the Guggenheim and the Louvre are being stalled. Just like that, in a crack.” She'd teared up, something Deborah would do for months afterward when she drove past Davina's building. “There's nothing back home, nothing.”

They'd stayed in loose touch in the two years since, Deborah writing missives every few months, Davina replying with funny, cryptic notes. Letter-writing wasn't her thing, she admitted. And she was working two jobs in a suburb of Glasgow — secretary in one school, nurse in another, so time was tight. Robbie, too, was back home and in a regular school, and Jack's employment was hit and miss since their return. “Wanna meet somewhere for a shawarma?” Davy wrote every now and then.

 

Crazy the things she was craving, Deborah thought as she plugged in the
GPS
. She was venturing out again, though sky and air threatened snow, though the sight of a disembowelled raccoon on Walker's Line, outside Burlington, had nearly made her turn back. She'd almost forgotten the sensations — bitter wind penetrating everything not padded, nose hairs tingling. But shawarma! In the morning-cold of the car, she could almost smell the meat, see it falling onto a platter as it was sliced from the spit. She'd had her pick of three shawarma places within walking distance of their first Abu Dhabi flat: Al Sultan Good Foods, Just Falafel and her favourite at the end of the block, Lebanese Flower, where the slick-haired Palestinian waiters greeted you formally, respectfully, but like family, especially if you threw in a few Arabic phrases.

Deborah unplugged the
GPS
, cutting off Fiona mid-“recalculating,” pulled over and took the stick-it from the dash. Harris's get-a-hobby comment of the night before had done some damage, but it was galvanizing too. She had to find a job, volunteer work, something. She plugged the
GPS
back in, programmed the address — somewhere in Brantford, wherever that was from there. People assumed that if you came from Ontario, everything from Ajax to Windsor must feel familiar. But Burlington was nothing like Ottawa, nothing like home. The condo compounds and cookie-cutter developments separated by farmland and green spaces was a foreign landscape peopled by no one she knew. It wasn't Abu Dhabi either.

“Please drive to highlighted route,” said Fiona.

When they'd bought the
GPS
their first week back in Canada, they found it amusing that they could choose between an American voice or a British one. “You'd think we've heard enough of both,” said Harris. In the end, out of something close to affection, they went for the plummy Oxford accent. “We'll just have to call her Fiona,” Harris said. Half the time they argued with her; the other half, they ignored her. She was their guide and as lost as they were.

 

“They're pretending, you know,” Harris said at the end of their third Abu Dhabi year. “They don't really care about teaching or learning.” He'd been a lecturer in the English department the first semester, downgraded by the Irish provost, new that year, the third in as many. McGuinness had refused to call it a demotion, more a strategic move to capitalize on Harris's real strengths. “We're moving from strength to strength here at Al Nahyan University, meeting the challenges of a dynamic twenty-first-century world,” he'd said every time he got the chance, and
The National
and
Gulf News
had dutifully quoted him each time.

He hadn't lasted. McGuinness's curriculum vitae was less résumé than blarney, apparently, and the administration sent him packing mid-year. The resulting cabinet shuffle saw Harris made dean of student services, though he was still expected to teach his full course load. Befitting his new status, they moved into a stunning, paid-for villa in Khalidayah: four bedrooms, huge kitchen, tiled pool just steps from their door. Even the maid's room — a space so minute in their first flat, they'd used it as a storage closet — was big enough to hold a single bed. The boys loved it, especially the pool. Even Deborah felt something shift. They were lucky to have what they had. Harris wasn't around enough to notice.

“Who knows what they're going to want next year,” said Harris. “Full accreditation? Harvard profs begging to get hired?” They were having supper at India Palace, a last alone-meal before Deborah and the boys left again for the summer. This time Thom would be staying in Ottawa to start university. She loved the summers with old friends and old routines. And she dreaded them, the pain of reconnecting and disconnecting again, the packing and unpacking — their Ottawa house was rented — as they went from friends to relatives to friends: a week here, four days there, the missing of Harris, who would be enduring 50-degree days and an empty flat back in Abu Dhabi. He would join them for the last two weeks of August, a marathon of family gatherings, lunch with one set of friends, dinner with another. Wonderful and insane.

And as the Ottawa summers went on, something neither of them cared to admit had begun to show. They didn't live there anymore. Their friends were interested in their travels and adventures, but to a point. “You really don't have to cover?” some still asked Deborah. “But you can't drive, right? I mean, it
is
a Muslim country.” It didn't seem to matter how they answered — “Of course, I drive!” — the questions felt stuck in 9/11. Even the boys felt it: “Why does Uncle Ron keep asking me if I feel safe there?” “How come Gran doesn't believe there are real churches there?” And truth be told, it wasn't that thrilling to keep talking about Canadian politics, issues they weren't following so closely any more, events that paled next to those now closer to home. Would the new Indian president defend the rights of migrant workers in the
UAE
? Would the Saudi Al Gosaibi family come clean about its dealings with the Saad Group? What would happen to Nakheel and Dubai World now that the bottom had fallen out? Would the Federal National Council start holding real elections?

But if they no longer lived in Ottawa, where did they live? Abu Dhabi wasn't home; it could never be. “Listen,” she'd had to say to Thom, who was now as sad to leave Abu Dhabi as he'd been about leaving Ottawa three years before. “I know you like your life here. It's a great little life. But we all have to leave at some point. Even if we were to stay here until Dad retires, we'd have to leave thirty days later. No job, no visa.” Thom, not a crier, not a hugger, had cried and let himself be hugged.

She understood; of course, she understood. During those cooler, greener summers she found herself missing Lebanese Flower and Carrefour, the call to prayer filtering through windows, the Indian friends who brought over roti and kebabs, the whoosh of relief when you stepped from impossible heat into air conditioning, the Sudanese guard in their building who put his hand over his heart when she greeted him. Small things, really, in the face of what she often hated and railed against. But missed things.

Deborah had watched Harris as he'd reached for the last onion bhaji, an India Palace specialty. He hadn't seemed to notice she'd had only one. He'd bulked up in that third year: too much stress, too many meals out. “Did I tell you about the Emirati student I have this term who comes in and talks on his mobile the whole time? He sits there, right in front of me. Can I fail him? We both know the answer to that.”