The Gulf Between Us Read online

  Karen was through customs now and beside me, complaining: ‘I told her not to wear that skirt. I told her people would stare.’

  Her fifteen‐year‐old daughter Andrea was wearing a denim mini skirt that exposed most of her thighs, which were not in any case unobtrusive. My dad was always saying worriedly, ‘She’s a very well‐developed young lady, Andrea.’ She kissed me and Matt, then stared at him, chewing gum speculatively and sexily.

  ‘Don’t do that, Andrea!’ Karen said sharply. ‘It looks horrible.’

  ‘Other boys not here?’ Chris asked, managing to imply that we hadn’t made enough effort.

  ‘Will had to be at Maddi’s, and Sam’s legs are so long now he takes up most of the car.’

  Actually, Sam hadn’t got back in time.

  ‘It’s not suitable, though, is it, this skirt?’ Karen persisted, pulling at her daughter’s clothing. ‘For Arabia?’

  ‘It’s OK. We’re going straight to the hotel. It’s only in the souk that you have to be really sensitive. And during Ramadan, but that’s not till next month.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s got any sensitive clothes. Christ, it’s hot!’

  We crossed the car park. The temperature had dropped in the last couple of weeks – the breeze no longer hit you like spurts of steam – but it had been a long, insufferable summer and the air was thick with humidity. If you weren’t used to it, it was like walking into a sponge. There was always a moment when you thought you might not be able to breathe.

  ‘Sensitive?’ Chris repeated, ‘is that what you call it? So, what, you just adopt their point of view, no questions asked?… I’d’ve thought you’d be all against it, making women cover up. If they want to cut off your hand for stealing, is that OK too? Do we have to be sensitive about that?’

  ‘They don’t cut off anyone’s hands,’ I said irritably. Why didn’t I have a normal brother, who’d be nice? Why did I get one who was so boringly obnoxious? ‘Shorts are fine on the compound,’ I explained to Karen, ‘and round the hotel pool, but probably not to the supermarket, at least not Al Jazira, the one in town – out where we live it’s mainly expats who use the supermarket, so it doesn’t matter so much…’ The rules, I realized, although never codified, were actually quite complicated. Andrea’s skirt wasn’t really suitable – it was making an issue of her sexuality in a place where everyone would already be tiresomely aware of it – but I didn’t want to be the one to point it out. Not right now, anyway, when she’d only just arrived.

  I put my arm around her, wondering what it would have been like to have a girl, to have to negotiate all those worries about where to put herself, and the morally compromising subtext of skirts.

  Matt and Chris loaded the bags into the Jeep and I took the family in the Toyota. We drove out of the airport, across the causeway over the shallows and on to the Corniche, the red tail lights of four lanes of traffic fizzing in the damp heat.

  ‘I don’t remember any of this,’ dad said worriedly.

  ‘The whole area would have been under water last time you came,’ Matt said; ‘right up to that shopping mall over there.’

  The city of Qalhat was the opposite of the lost city of Atlantis: it had been pulled out of the sea – the land reclaimed, the buildings thrown up – with an insistence on the power of people over nature.

  We drew up behind Matt in the Jeep at the bottom of the hotel drive, where a couple of Hawari Defence Force soldiers had sauntered out from their post and were looking in a cursory way at the luggage. They wore guns slung over their shoulders like style accessories. They asked me to open the boot, then waved us on.

  ‘Is that because of the terrorists?’ Karen asked.

  ‘Not really. Not Al Qaeda, anyway. The prime minister owns this hotel and there are quite a few people who’d happily blow it up.’

  ‘And you’ve put us here?’ Chris said.

  ‘There haven’t ever actually been any bombs. There was one small uprising in the village of Umm Wafra in – I think – 1987. But that only involved sticks and stones.’

  ‘What are they worried about, then?’

  ‘The Al Majid, the ruling family, are sunni, and so are most rich Hawaris. The shi’ite population isn’t that big, but the shi’a feel they haven’t done as well out of the last few decades…’ But I’d pulled up in front of the hotel now, and Chris had already climbed out of the car. He didn’t want to know about the high birth rate, the youth unemployment, the unrealistic expectations of young people, the disappointment that could turn to disaffection.

  By the time I’d parked and joined them in the lobby, they were already checked in.

  ‘You shouldn’t have,’ dad muttered: ‘it’s so luxurious…’ He looked around the atrium, taking in the lavishly upholstered sunken lounge, the rotating gold statue in the fountain, the stained‐glass windows, the indoor foliage, the glass lifts sliding up and down marble walls.

  ‘You’ve got to do your best to enjoy it,’ I told him. I knew what he was like: he’d spend the whole time worrying that he didn’t deserve it.

  ‘What’re you doing tonight, then?’ Chris asked Matthew as we glided up in one of the glass lifts.

  ‘Nothing,’ Matt admitted.

  ‘In London you said there was always stuff going on. You should show Andrea what life’s like for young people in Hawar.’

  ‘There’s a barbecue at the Franklins’ tomorrow,’ I said, ‘there’ll be loads of young people there.’

  I noticed that my father had been led down the corridor by the bellboy and went to find him. He was a few doors down, being shown how to operate the multimedia system from the bath. He wasn’t actually taking in any of the instructions; he was fumbling in his pockets for a tip. All his effort was concentrated on trying to get the money out discreetly, on working out the dirham exchange rate and how he was going to hand over the notes in a natural way, as if he did this all the time.

  Perhaps it was only the effect of the flight, but he seemed to have shrunk. He’d only ever been averagely tall – the boys had got their height from Dave – but now his skeleton seemed to have retreated, shifted inwards, leaving his flesh at a loss.

  I knew I hadn’t been able to rely on him for years – probably since my mum died, certainly since Dave had been killed. He couldn’t bear the thought of his daughter being on her own with three children, and it had left him helpless. But I’d assumed up till now that he could more or less look after himself.

  Matt came in from the other room, shaking his head. ‘What is it with Uncle Chris?’

  I smiled broadly at dad, who was following the bellboy out of the bathroom, being shown how to operate the curtains from the bed. ‘You know what he’s like,’ I whispered back.

  ‘No…’

  ‘I expect he finds the Arab world a bit intimidating.’

  ‘Why? He’s only got to sit on a beach and go to a wedding. Are you saying he’s racist, so we’ve got to make allowances…?’

  ‘Of course not. Only that we should try to be hospitable. They’re family and they’ve never been here before.’

  ‘Exactly. They never bothered to come. Even when dad died.’

  Karen put her head round the door. ‘Annie looking after you, Ted? When you’re ready, we thought we might go down and try this international buffet thing in the coffee shop. Andrea’s just doing her make‐up.’

  ‘I hope she means taking it off,’ Matt whispered, ‘because if she put on any more, she’d fall over.’

  ‘Matt!’

  ‘Well, she’s got huge. Don’t look at me like that – actually, she’s not unattractive – but you can’t deny she’s put on a few kilos. And it’s not sexist or sizeist or whatever you’re going to say. It’s true.’

  I started to protest, but Karen put her head back round the door. ‘Oh, by the way, Annie, I found a website, and it’s not true that you don’t need to take malaria tablets.’

  The following morning, a reply arrived from James Hartley, or rather, from someone w
ho signed herself ‘Fiona Eckhart, assistant to Mr Hartley’ – thanking me for the invitation, passing on James’s best wishes, and saying he very much hoped to join us at the wedding but wasn’t sure about his arrival time in Hawar. Fiona Eckhart, assistant to Mr Hartley, asked me to forward my phone number in case he needed to contact me.

  He appeared to be keeping his options open. I thought it was a very irritating kind of RSVP, but Katherine and Maddi were thrilled.

  ‘It sounds like he really wants to come!’ Maddi said.

  ‘He must want to see you again!’ Katherine added.

  ‘He asked for your phone number!’

  ‘It would have been more polite to give an answer one way or the other,’ I pointed out. But they were convinced that James Hartley’s non‐committal response meant he was desperate to rekindle his friendship with me. I hadn’t got time to argue, because I had to go to the Sheraton to collect the family for a tour of what would have been Hawar’s tourist attractions, if we’d had any tourists.

  ‘Such a shame Matt couldn’t come,’ Karen noted when I met them in the hotel lobby. ‘It’s lovely how he chats away. Unlike some teenagers I could mention.’ She looked over to where Andrea was sitting moodily beside the fountain with the giant rotating gold‐plated falcon.

  ‘Sam, for instance,’ I said, not wanting to join her in criticizing Andrea, whose slight air of awkwardness, of not knowing how to be herself, reminded me uncomfortably of myself at her age, and presumably wasn’t helped by the constant carping from her parents. ‘He doesn’t even do whole words.’

  Matt had always appealed to adults. Other parents at school had compared him favourably to their own children, remarking on how easy he was, how refreshingly prepared to speak to people over the age of twenty. Although I would have liked to believe this was the result of my exemplary parenting, it hadn’t worked with Sam so I had to accept that it was due to Matt’s essentially sweet nature. He pretended to be cynical and sarcastic, but everyone could see through that – his smile was always vulnerably threatening to erupt, his eyes were a blink away from laughter – and he was always gratifyingly happy to wander round the supermarket gossiping with me, or to sit on the veranda in the evening discussing some films he’d seen or lesson he’d had. He didn’t seem to mind me finding out about his life.

  I herded the family into the car and drove up the Jidda Road, through date groves thick with honeyed fruit. Herbs and vegetables grew in beds beside the road, in green beds hatched with irrigation canals that flung back the bright blue of the sky. We stopped at Bani Jamra, the weavers’ village, and bought bread from a conical outdoor oven.

  ‘Nice,’ Karen commented, ‘though I expect it goes a bit rubbery when it gets cold.’

  From there we went on to Beit Mukhanis, the potters’ village, where we drank little glasses of sweetened tea in a potter’s breeze‐block workshop as sand sifted over the road. Everyone agreed the tea was delicious, although Karen wondered aloud to dad where they did their washing up. Perhaps she thought because they looked foreign and did pottery, they had no education and didn’t speak English.

  As we headed back to the city, I talked to them about Qalhat’s rapid growth – from a sleepy fishing port ruled over by tribal sheikhs only around seventy years ago to the shiny capital of today – and tried to give them a sense of what life would have been like in earlier times.

  ‘The pearl divers were mostly slaves,’ I explained, ‘and they had to go down ten times a shift, four shifts a day, for four months – so by the end of a season, they’d have done a forty‐hour week without air.’ I knew I was lecturing them, but I wanted them to understand. ‘Even then, the entire region only picked up enough pearls in any season for two first‐class necklaces.’

  We passed roundabouts garish with petunias, oleanders and statues of coffee pots, and drove towards the souk, where I parked the car and the family picked their way along the dusty streets. Karen said what a good thing it was that the old houses and windtowers were being turned into restaurants and day spas. Andrea trailed along at the back, disconsolate and bored, and I wished then that Matt had come, because he loved the carved wooden doors and dilapidated overhanging balconies, and his enthusiasm might have been infectious.

  I tried to be infectious myself, but I could sense that my animated tourist guide spiel wasn’t really impressing them. They had their own ideas about my life here, rooted in a substrate of prejudices – about Arabs, the Middle East, people who flightily moved abroad, a long way from their families and then it served them right if their husbands were killed in car accidents, because everyone knew Arabs were terrible drivers. By the time I’d finished the tour, I was convinced that they’d never understand what it was that I loved about these last, fragile fragments of Hawari life, before the steel and glass and concrete. Not only would they have failed to appreciate the warmth of Hawari hospitality or grasped that it owed everything to the memory of having nothing, but they wouldn’t care.

  ‘So this is the compound,’ I said brightly, as we turned in through the gate.

  ‘There’s a guard,’ Chris observed, ‘is that to keep you in, or other people out?’

  ‘I’m not sure how good he’d be at either.’

  All the compounds had guards. Ours were often asleep. Not that there was any noticeable threat. For most of the time I’d lived in Hawar, the emirate had been a police state. There were no burglaries, because there were informers in all the villages and the penalties for petty crime were severe. Not as severe as the penalties for the crimes that really worried the authorities and required the presence of informers in the first place, but enough to make petty crime a terrible career choice.

  Three years ago, though, the emir had sacked his hated head of security, a red‐faced Englishman with acne scars, who’d started his career bloodily suppressing the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. A year later, we got (or rather they got; expats couldn’t vote) a parliament. The elected members, who had to organize through mosques, since they weren’t allowed to form political parties – which was a bit of an own‐goal in these Islamist times – were also forbidden to question the prime minister, Shaikh Jasim bin Talal Al Majid, who was appointed by the emir, Shaikh Hassan bin Talal Al Majid, who happened to be his brother.

  Modest as they were, these changes did mean that the atmosphere was now much less repressive. A degree of political dissent was tolerated and there was some room for the modern form of self‐expression that comes through theft, although property was still more respected than in most places in the world. As I pointed out to the family, I left the front door open and the car unlocked. All the same, the history of discrimination against the shi’ite population had left a resentment that could easily erupt at some point, should something happen to trigger it – and if so, it would probably be in a place like Ghafir, the village half a kilometre up the unmade road past our compound, where scruffy goats picked in the rubble, children played in the dust, and bits of tattered green material, rather than the blue and gold Hawari flag, stirred in the hot wind from the empty quarter.

  I pointed out the swimming pool, which Chris said was ‘a bit small’ (though this has never seemed the case to us) and the tennis court, to which they could find nothing to say because the compound is old, the gardens are mature, and though the houses are a bit tatty, it does mean the tennis court is one of the loveliest in the emirate, surrounded by oleander and tangelo trees, palms and hibiscus.

  ‘I suppose they’re all repressed,’ Chris said, when I enthused about the low levels of crime in an effort to impress them just a little bit. ‘We know where that leads.’ He paused for effect.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Those bombers were all sexually frustrated. It’s well known.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I’ve read articles.’

  How did Chris get from low crime rates to the supposed sexual frustration of the 9/11 bombers? It was like one of those games in which you have to link, say, Britney Spears to Mahatma Gandh
i in three moves. September 11th had ploughed a hole in our understanding of ourselves, I sometimes thought, which people – and I don’t want to seem sexist about this, but it seemed to be mainly men – seemed to want to fill up with all their personal neuroses.

  ‘Actually, things are a lot less repressed than they were,’ I said. ‘Al Jazeera’s made a big difference.’

  ‘That TV station? It’s just propaganda, though, isn’t it? Tapes of Osama bin Laden.’

  ‘No, the talk shows, I mean. Sam says it’s amazing, what gets discussed. How much disagreement there is.’

  Even listening without being able to understand the meaning, you could tell there was a geyser of debate bubbling away under the solidified mud of the conservative regimes all across the Middle East. In Hawar, though, it had to be said that the main manifestation of the slight easing of the previous stifling consensus was that these days you could hardly go into the souk or get in a taxi without hearing cassette tapes of sermons by Mohammed Alireza, a charismatic young shi’ite cleric, popularly known as the electronic mullah. Only five years ago, Alireza had been serving the early part of what was meant to be a fifteen‐year prison sentence for sedition. Now he was out of prison and preaching at his own mosque and anywhere else with access to a tape machine. He was thirty years old, slim and handsome, a former Communist, said to be a politician at least as much as a religious figure, but he’d refused to stand for election to parliament on the grounds that it wasn’t going to have any power. He preferred to post his thoughts on the internet and make audio tapes. He had to be careful – anything too political and even now he could find himself back in jail – but the beauty of Islamist politics is that it doesn’t have to sound too political, at least not on the surface.

  Alireza didn’t talk about how much of the country’s oil money had gone into private banks in Switzerland, particularly those held by the prime minister, Shaikh Jasim. He didn’t ask why Hawaris had been bought off with welfare payments and job creation schemes – the guards on the compound gates or non‐jobs in the bloated ministries – or point out that this was, like bribing children with sweets, ultimately self‐defeating. He didn’t ask why there wasn’t more investment in industries that might stand a chance when the oil ran out or the world started to take global warming seriously. He confined himself to such topics as the need to be a better Muslim, the likely American invasion of Iraq, or this new (or at least rediscovered from the sixth century or thereabouts) idea that foreigners in the holy lands of Arabia were an insult to the faith. But those other things were why people listened. And with repeated hearings, his followers might in time come to believe that they were part of some sort of inspiringly cosmic struggle.