The Gulf Between Us Read online

  He lay with his head on my lap one evening and told me how much he liked it that I took him seriously. ‘You listen when I talk about work,’ he said.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘You’re not looking for information you can use against me.’

  ‘You must have had some very funny relationships.’

  ‘I have.’

  I think he felt he could be honest with me. If he confessed to anxiety about the range of parts he might get, or insecurity about whether he could still open a movie, it didn’t diminish him in my eyes, because I didn’t care about the minute calibrations of fame that seemed to obsess him and his colleagues. I didn’t have any purchase on them: all the people he talked about as rivals, as lesser or greater stars, were to me unimaginably huge.

  ‘I may not be able to get action parts much longer,’ he said gloomily. ‘And the truth is, I’m not sure I can make the transition to something else.’

  I assured him that he was a fantastic actor and incredibly good‐looking, and pointed out that in any case, men seemed to be able to go on and on in movies, getting cast opposite women like Rosie.

  On his last night in Hawar, I lay awake for a long time, concentrating on the feeling of my forehead against his back, the distance my arms reached round him, the place my toes touched his calf. His flesh was firm, under control, seemed unmarked by the past, undamaged by food, drink, mistakes, the normally bruising business of living. Earlier that night, he’d said I was beautiful, not in spite of having had three children, but because of it. This was perhaps the best compliment he could have paid me – that experience, disappointment and struggle had made me lovely. It was like being told that you have a kind of moral beauty, which has to be better than having great cheekbones.

  In the morning we – he and his perfect body, me and my wonderful soul – scurfed up the sheets one last time, slowly, sadly, a little frantically, and then he was up and dressed and ready for the car that would take him out to the airport and the private jet to London for a couple of meetings before he flew on to LA. This is it, I thought, from the carved Hawari bed, watching him leave: no more lying on the white sofas with the French windows open, no more catching at me as I twisted away from him in the floodlit swimming pool, no more languorous evenings and long nights.

  I waited until he’d left, then showered and dressed and went to school, where I listened above the clatter of the air conditioning for planes above Qalhat, tearing away into the sky.

  Appropriately enough, Ramadan started the following day. The shops closed early, the streets were subdued. There were a few hours in the morning when things were more or less normal, but an air of lassitude settled over the emirate. Hawar has never been a place where people exactly rush, but, come Ramadan, inertia isn’t just a fact of life, it’s something to strive for actively. Or passively, I suppose. Hawar has adopted many American things, such as McDonalds and SUVs and big fridges, but an avid and show‐offy dedication to productivity isn’t one of them. During Ramadan, people are glad to have even more licence to hang back and procrastinate and generally take their time.

  Anwar came in to school on the third day of Ramadan. He looked pointedly around my office, probably checking for water bottles sticking out of my bag or coffee cups hidden behind the reference books. Then he lounged in his favourite place against the filing cabinet and launched into a string of complaints about the iftar tents at the hotels, where people could break their fast at sunset and party on into the night, possibly even away from their families, in places where alcohol was available – which, he claimed, were irreligious and meant that the true meaning of fasting was getting lost.

  Finally, he fixed me with a meaningful stare and said: ‘People are talking about your son.’

  Oh, I thought, here we go.

  ‘In Islam, we believe in family values.’

  ‘Yes, we do too.’

  I’ve noticed homophobic people are very fond of claiming that homosexuals undermine the family. But they never say how. And that’s because they don’t. Gay men are for example famously nice to their mums.

  ‘Homosexuality is a tumour on society,’ Anwar continued sententiously. ‘It must be cut out.’

  I looked at him directly. ‘Anwar, have you been asked to revoke my sponsorship? Because if you have, could you just get on with it?’

  ‘No, not yet,’ he admitted, but then continued: ‘Homosexuality is a reversal of the natural order of things. It is a crime against women.’

  I stared at him blankly, until it dawned on me what he was trying to say. Then I wanted to laugh. There are quite enough men around wanting to have sex with us without needing Matt to make up the numbers.

  Perhaps there aren’t that many with whom we want to have sex in return – the human race would have to be threatened with imminent extinction to interest me in Anwar, and even then obliteration of the species might well seem preferable – but that’s a whole other issue.

  ‘In your culture, you see, people are slaves to their lusts. Women are naked on advertising posters. They are nearly naked in the street. This creates chaos, and you have the sex crimes. And other crimes, for that matter. In our culture, women take responsibility for maintaining order.’

  I’d had enough of this. ‘In our culture we think men should make a bit of an effort too.’

  You can see why you might want to wear an abaya if you had to deal a lot with men like Anwar.

  ‘You misunderstand me,’ he said smoothly. ‘The homosexual removes himself from the good influence of women and so cannot be expected to have a decent manner of living.’

  ‘If you mean Matt, he lives with me. He hasn’t removed himself.’

  ‘Your son’s presence here reminds people of the sinful act. I won’t say makes it acceptable, or that it starts to seem normal, because it could never do that – but it loses its gravity in the hearts and minds of the people.’

  It’s always other people who need to be protected from sex. Anwar could know about Matt and remain as pompous and self‐righteous as ever, but apparently if other people so much as got to hear about him, whole ethical systems could collapse.

  Sue came in from her office with some papers for filing and saw immediately what was happening. She ushered Anwar away on the pretext of needing his advice.

  At the door he turned back. ‘It is good that your son is leaving,’ he said and then, with more effort, ‘and good that you are staying. You have powerful friends.’

  I wasn’t sure who he meant. Al Buraidi? It seemed unlikely. Anwar probably assumed we had powerful friends because in his mind Matt had committed such a huge transgression that it was inconceivable that the authorities would let any of us stay.

  Anwar had no power – I doubted he even had any real say over my sponsorship – so I knew I shouldn’t let him rattle me. All the same, it was difficult not to feel vulnerable. It had never seemed to matter before, not having any say in the politics of Hawar, but I could see now that I’d been bought off with luxury housing and swimming pools and wearing‐shorts‐to‐the‐supermarket. Like the shi’ite villagers who’d been rehoused in Hassan Town with flushing toilets, I was part of the price the Al Majid paid for their houses in Switzerland and Monaco and their secret bank accounts. You could drift along for years thinking it was a fair exchange, no harm done, because, after all, Hawar was only a little backwater of a backwater. But you only had to do something that didn’t suit, didn’t conform to their ideas of how you ought to behave, and then you discovered that there was politics here after all and you were tangled up in it even though you had no rights. Your irrelevance had always been part of the deal. You were a mercenary. And who cared about mercenaries? Richard Crossley‐Tennant at the British embassy? Not really. Not half as much anyway as he cared about oil and arms deals and regional relationships.

  An affair with the crown prince would have been awkward at any time. This, though, was a particular time, when the mostly benign dictatorships of the Gulf were suddenly e
xposed as never before, with Iran on one side and Saudi Arabia on the other, flexing their muscles, looking for regional dominance; when American troops were massing to the west and there was an idea going around that somewhere quite close to here the world could be saved. The whole geopolitical machine had turned its cumbersome workings in our direction, was aware of our existence and anxious about our vast resources and political precariousness.

  To make matters worse, the Al Majid were meanwhile busily fending off unrest from below. Mohammed Alireza had marked the start of Ramadan with another one of his internet sermons, claiming Saudi Arabia was a puppet regime of the United States and urging all good Muslims to fight for democracy and sweep corrupt regimes from power.

  I often felt during those weeks that I had no one to talk to. The boys communicated with me if and when it suited them, but they were often busy with other, more pressing things. Matt was unhappy and monosyllabic. Sam and Faisal claimed to be planning the first edition of their newspaper, although when they were at our house, this seemed mostly to involve listening to loud music. I hoped the readers of the International were prepared for a shift in news values in favour of previously unheard‐of bands.

  The expat urge to build a community, however tenuous, however approximate, no longer seemed quite to include me. I wasn’t an outcast, exactly, but I’d come to the notice of the authorities; I was known to be trouble. When I was dealing with other people I often felt they were hanging on a little more tightly to that part of themselves that they kept in reserve, remembering that it was important not to need one another too much, not to become too interdependent, because living here was only a temporary arrangement, even if it happened to end up lasting decades.

  James had listened to me when he was here – and it had been this, as much as the frequent and rewarding sex, that had been so exhilarating. There had been long parts of the day when I didn’t have to be as tense and watchful, because James was there, and he was on my side. But his dyslexia meant he ‘didn’t do email’ – so all his correspondence, including on the internet, including to and from me, went through Fiona. I explained about spell check but I think his fear of words was too deep‐seated. He assured me I could still write to him, but I didn’t like the idea of having to pass through his personal spam filter. I wouldn’t put it past her to file me straight in trash. He hated reading nearly as much as writing, so it was likely that she’d have to relay my messages out loud. I couldn’t imagine her doing it in anything but a sarcastic voice.

  The only way to reach him was by phone, but it quickly became apparent that the telephone was as much of an obstacle as an aid to communication. When we’d been together, legs entwined on the sofa, sitting on the edge of the pool in the dark, I’d had no difficulty talking to James about what was bothering me – whether it was Anwar or Matt, Sam, Maddi, or something more distant like Mohammed Alireza’s latest sermon. He listened, and he was sympathetic, and he made me feel better. He might not have a view about whether it was reasonable of Alireza to call for democracy in pursuit of the worldwide imamate, but if I cared, that was enough: he claimed he did too. Now we were at opposite ends of the day. I was busy with the morning when he was shattered after a day’s shooting, and it was difficult to get the mood right.

  Sam had reacted to the news about Matt and Shaikh Rashid with his usual spaciness.

  ‘So, like, someone outed him?’ he said slowly.

  ‘Someone who doesn’t want what he wants for Hawar, I suppose.’

  ‘I bet it was the prime minister. What a shit.’ Sam chewed on a piece of toast; he was on a flying visit to the kitchen to stoke up with food. ‘Still, dunno why we’re surprised.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘S’what they’re like, innit?’

  ‘Who? Is this racist again?… because I’m not having it…’

  ‘Can’t I be just a tiny bit racist?’

  ‘It’s not funny. And we don’t know it was Shaikh Jasim.’

  ‘It’s the way they do politics, though, innit – the Al Majid? Pulling strings. Getting people removed.’

  ‘Shaikh Rashid was trying to change that.’

  ‘Yeah, well, exactly. So it’s only Alireza left now.’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s worth investing much hope in him.’

  He dropped the crust in the bin. ‘Gotta go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just out.’

  ‘No, Sam, where?’

  ‘Wiv Faisal.’

  He imagined this was ghetto and would annoy me. Lots of things about him annoyed me, but not him feebly pretending to talk ghetto.

  ‘You’re not getting into trouble?’

  ‘Does that mean drugs?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘But you never tell me anything.’

  ‘Mohammed Alireza’s really smart, you know. If you read what he says, it’s clever.’

  ‘Surely he’s not why you keep making racist comments?’

  In reality, though, I knew why that was. In his mind, Dave’s death was the fault of some above‐the‐law Saudi prince. I’d got myself into a mess here. I needed to tell him the truth. Ever since his outburst at the Franklins’ I’d been waking up in the night in a cold sweat, knowing the time had come to talk to him, that I couldn’t dodge it any longer. I’d lie restlessly, shifting in the sheets, unable to get comfortable, while my mind circled and pecked unsatisfactorily at the question of how to raise the subject, what to say. But, in the mornings, one or other of us was always dashing off somewhere and, later in the day, he was with Faisal or we were exhausted, preoccupied, or in my case, lacking the required emotional energy. I still hadn’t got round to it, and it was nagging at me, like an injury or an illness I was trying to ignore but that kept forcing itself on my attention. When he and Faisal returned this particular afternoon, for example, they’d found a new band called Trope, and they offered to play me some of their tunes and I was so pleased they were talking to me that I didn’t want to spoil it. Too often with Sam I felt inadequate – like the duff second‐string goalkeeper no one thinks will ever have to play and then he does and everyone can see why he was on the bench. So in the brief moments when it was going well, I wanted to enjoy it.

  I thought long and hard about whether to tell Chris, Karen and my dad about the picture in the Sunday Times. They hadn’t seen it, or Karen would have called. They read different Sunday papers and obviously it was hardly a proper story, so no one else took it up.

  In the end I figured Matt hadn’t done anything wrong and I should be honest. Otherwise the bigots would have gained a bit more ground.

  ‘So he’s been in the papers?’ dad said excitedly. ‘Is it a nice picture?’

  He went to the library to look it up in their back copies section and reported back that it was a very nice picture. He didn’t quite seem to have got the point.

  He told me he’d called the lady whose name he’d been given by Gay Switchboard. She was called Maureen and she ran an organization for people who have gay family members – mostly parents, but they were welcoming of grandparents too. Apparently, she’d been making cakes when he rang and he’d had to hold on for a minute while she took them out of the oven. ‘I mean, she had a gay son and she was doing that! So she must be doing well!’

  Was this a jibe at me? Had I not made enough cakes since Matt came out? It was too hot for cakes in Hawar. I’d made quite a lot of salad. By the time I’d thought this far, I realized I was being ridiculous.

  Anyway, she’d been really nice, this Maureen, he said, and she’d persuaded him to go to a meeting in South Croydon, and he’d had nothing on that day so he had, and all the people had been very friendly and some of them were much younger and really struggling with their homosexual relations.

  ‘Relatives?’ I suggested, ‘homosexual relatives?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ They’d had a couple of speakers, he explained, from an organization that helps gay runaways and kids who have been thrown out by their parents. ‘There’s
a lot of that goes on, apparently.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then they end up living on the streets. This boy came along, he told us his dad had told him he never wanted to see him again after he came out so he’d run away and lived rough in the West End and done things he didn’t want to talk about – you can only imagine…’

  ‘Yes.’

  For a long time now, my father’s life seemed to have been shrinking, until it was more or less contained by a corridor with the kettle at one end and Countdown on the telly at the other. He saw very few people: most of his old friends and acquaintances had moved away from the neighbourhood. My mum had been the sociable one, who’d known what was going on with the various families in the street, who’d hardly ever come home from the butcher’s without some snippet of gossip. He would have liked to have conversations at the butcher’s himself, but it had become a halal butcher’s now and he bought his meat shrink‐wrapped in Tesco’s. He would have joined in if someone else had started talking in the queue for the checkout, but perhaps there was something too reserved about him, because they never did. He had no idea how you got going with people. So he saw fewer of his old acquaintances and the routines that had stopped him collapsing when my mum died, that had made him get dressed in the mornings and eat his food at the table rather than out of the saucepan, had hardened into habits of mind; the rituals had become an end in themselves. They gave him the illusion of control. He needed to hang on tightly to them, because the outside world – about which it was hard to have much perspective when you viewed it entirely from an armchair in front of Countdown – was forever threatening to throw him off course. I only had to make a stray remark about some man I’d sat next to at a dinner party and it became a doomed love affair, or to complain I was feeling tired for him to decide I had cancer.