The Gulf Between Us Read online

  ‘How? You’re not visible! No one even knows you’re gay.’

  Andrew hadn’t told his parents he was gay, or his school, or his superiors in the Church. He’d spent his whole life pretending to be something he wasn’t, so it was hardly surprising he hadn’t been able to help Will. He seemed to think marriage was like some giant institutional condom, a prophylactic against desire. He’d been preoccupied with his position (which wasn’t even that impressive: how many people really care about the Anglican chaplain to a shifting expatriate population in one of the smaller Gulf states?) and as a result, he’d been prepared to mess up not only his own life, but Will’s and Maddi’s as well.

  Despite all this, I was, very reluctantly, starting to feel sorry for him. He knew he’d made a terrible mistake, and he was confused, and lonely, and afraid. Will loved him in a way he’d never loved Maddi, which made me inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes you have no choice but to back your children. And, in his defence, Andrew had been hopelessly shackled by his upbringing. He’d been raised with an assumption that what worked once for people like him would work for ever, that the insular, assured world of public school, Oxbridge and the Church could be a guarantee of a sense of superiority, of easiness as one moved among others who had not benefited from their excellence. Andrew had found himself instead in a world that was physically shrunken but in most other ways expanded, of multiple possibilities, competing moralities, alternative ways of asserting yourself, of acquiring status, in which no one cared much about those other things any more.

  It was impossible for me not to have some sympathy about this, because I was acutely aware that if I’d had a different background myself, I might have made better decisions. If I’d had more, or better, education, or confidence, I might not have married so young; it might never have crossed my mind that I needed rescuing by a photocopier salesman who liked a few drinks. If I hadn’t left school at sixteen and gone to work in insurance, if my mother hadn’t died and my father and brother hadn’t wanted me to replace her, I might have trusted myself to turn into the competent, smart, not‐badly‐read person who knows quite a lot about indie music that I’ve since become and I might not have married without much faith in myself, without a sense of who I was and might become. But you can only have the background you do.

  ‘I know what you think of me,’ Andrew said at last, ‘and you’re entitled to. But I’d held it all together for so long, I thought I could go on. I was brought up in that stiff upper lip tradition of not noticing things you don’t want to acknowledge. Will proved too much for me.’

  I nodded. Neither of us had eaten anything. I got out my credit card but he insisted on paying, and I could see that this mattered to him, so I let him. I felt sad now, rather than angry, but I wasn’t sure there was anything more to say. He still had to decide if he wanted to be himself or the person everyone thought he was. I still thought it could go either way.

  I thought I’d probably have to wait for Will to get back from Saudi Arabia to find out whether there was any future for them. I couldn’t influence anything; I could only wait out the days and worry. I feared for Will if Andrew decided that, after all, being a priest and feeling respectable was more important to him. Will didn’t seem especially interested in being gay as an idea; I couldn’t see him trying to meet people in bars or clubs. For him, the gay thing seemed subordinate to the Andrew thing.

  I hoped very hard, in a way that probably wasn’t so different from what he’d have called praying, that Andrew would make the right decision, the one that would be good for all of us. Give him time, I thought, and some benign influence (i.e. Will) and he’d probably be OK. He was capable of turning into someone passionate and principled.

  Talking of which, I’d put Al Maraj’s card in my purse, in one of the flaps designed for credit cards, which meant I saw it at least a couple of times a day. I’d also added his number to my mobile phone, although I had not, yet, got round to ringing it. I kept putting it off. Perhaps, I thought hopefully, there would come a time in the not too distant future when my life wouldn’t be in a state of permanent upheaval and I could make the call in reasonable confidence of getting through the conversation without being interrupted by calamity.

  Sam had finished editing the newspaper. I persuaded him to let me read the interview with Alireza before it went to press and was relieved to see that he’d muted the internet mullah’s criticisms of the Al Majid. He said grudgingly that since his readership was mainly expat, he’d focused instead on what Alireza had to say about the west. ‘Saddam may be wrong but it is not America who should correct him,’ that sort of thing.

  The paper came out on Wednesday evening. Sam claimed the people who’d had time to look at it at school had commented favourably on the way he and Faisal had managed to spice up the usual stuff about students and teachers with a few articles of broader interest. According to him, his history of the Islamic world teacher had said: ‘It’s, like, offering a whole different International School perspective.’ Since she was a Hawari who wore an abaya in the classroom, it was unlikely she sounded this stoned, but her response had obviously been positive. Sam and Faisal celebrated with some beers in the Al Shargawis’ garden out at Jidda. When I went to pick him up, a slim girl with long blonde hair wearing white shorts and a halter‐necked top was leaving the house and getting into her mother’s Jeep. She looked as though she belonged in an American teen soap.

  ‘That’s Holly,’ Sam said.

  ‘She looks nice. You should invite her round. When I’m there, I mean.’

  ‘Yeah. Our house is a bit gay, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sam!’

  ‘Jokes!’ he said. ‘God!’

  In other words, I thought the newspaper crisis was all over. Then early the following afternoon I was filing some papers I’d been putting off since the start of term when my phone rang.

  ‘Mrs Lester?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Bob Koppel, from the International School.’

  There are times when a call from the school principal is almost guaranteed to be bad news. An hour before the weekend starts is one of them. I was so alarmed to receive a call from Mr Koppel that I dropped a whole folder of pupils’ dietary requirement forms on the floor.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ I asked, bending down to gather them up.

  ‘Not really.’ Mr Koppel was from Tennessee and enunciated every syllable of his rather formal sentences; his students claimed it took him three times longer than normal people to say anything. ‘Some officers from the Ministry of the Interior have been here at the school this afternoon.’ I was picking up the forms, but I froze. ‘I’m afraid that they have taken Sam in for questioning.’ When I didn’t say anything, he added, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lester.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Have you seen the newspaper he produced with Faisal Al Shargawi?’

  I sat back on my heels. ‘No, but I read the interview with Mohammed Alireza and it was OK, I thought, considering, and he said the English teacher – Ms Templeton, is it? – had approved it.’

  ‘Yes, it’s not the interview. Ms Templeton did vet the interview, in her role as overseer of the school newspaper. We don’t usually insist on seeing the newspaper copy before it’s printed, you understand, because it’s never been an issue before. But we had heard rumours about their… ambitions for this interview and Ms Templeton was nervous about it – we all were – but she said that in her opinion it was acceptable. At least once they had been persuaded to make some changes. No, it was the cartoon, which, unfortunately, she didn’t see.’

  ‘Cartoon?’ I said blankly.

  ‘Maybe they put it in at the last minute and forgot to show it to anyone. Maybe they thought, since it was a drawing, that they didn’t need to.’

  ‘A drawing of what?’ I asked suspiciously.

  ‘The prime minister. Of course, Sam is a very good caricaturist. He has drawn several likenesses of me that I wish I hadn’t ever s
een. So there’s no mistaking it.’

  ‘Oh no!’ How could Sam have been so stupid? ‘What is the prime minister doing in this cartoon?’

  ‘He’s speaking to an angry crowd of Hawaris. With a few of our more recognizable students mixed in. And he’s shouting “No to USA”. But written across his back is “Yes to USA”.’

  That was it, then. We had no chance. I might as well go home and pack.

  ‘What exactly have they got to question Sam about?’ I asked. How many avenues of inquiry did a piece of weak satire present?

  ‘Well, the other thing, I’m afraid, is that underneath the drawing Sam and Faisal urge our student body to demonstrate on February the fifteenth, when I believe there are anti‐war demonstrations planned in some other countries. They suggested meeting by the Qalhat Gate and marching through the souk. As you know, since the bombs last year, the authorities have been very sensitive about public demonstrations of any kind.’

  ‘And no one saw this cartoon before it was published?’ I asked, although I believe he’d already told me that. Perhaps I was trying to shift the blame.

  ‘The paper came out late yesterday afternoon. And no, no one spotted it beforehand. Or indeed, until today.’

  ‘Surely, though, you can just tell the students not to demonstrate?’ Didn’t he have any authority over these kids?

  ‘Yes, yes, we can be firm about that. I don’t think, to be frank, that the police are that bothered about the threat of a demonstration. Not by a bunch of foreign students anyway. I think the cartoon is much more of a problem. All the officers have told me is that they were taking Sam to the police fort. The central one,’ he added, as if this information might help.

  ‘Have they arrested Faisal as well?’

  ‘I’m not sure that they would claim to have arrested Sam, exactly. Helping with inquiries was their formulation, I believe,’ Mr Koppel drawled. ‘But no. They seemed to think after questioning them here that Sam was primarily responsible. Is there anyone who might help you?’

  ‘You mean, like the British ambassador?’

  Mr Koppel coughed. ‘No, I was referring to… Matthew’s… He has – well, connections – with the ruling family, I believe?’

  The idea that Matthew’s connections might be helpful was funny.

  ‘Are you all right, Mrs Lester?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said exhaustedly. All I’d asked of my children was that they behave with a degree of decorum, stay out of trouble long enough to get Sam through school. It hadn’t been so much to ask, surely? – don’t sleep with the crown prince, don’t publish cartoons of the prime minister showing he’s a hypocrite. ‘Did they say how long they were going to keep him there?’

  ‘No, they didn’t… A mother’s pleas can be effective in this sort of situation, I believe.’ I think this was his way of saying he hadn’t got the faintest idea how to get Sam out of police custody and didn’t even want to try, because the school was already in enough trouble. ‘The officer in charge of the case is an Assistant Superintendent Abdulrahman.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right, I see.’

  The police fort was a long, two‐storey, whitewashed building in a compound by the Hafeet Roundabout, on Abu Dhabi Highway. It was surrounded by crenellated walls and punctuated by towers; you approached under a double arch and entered a large compound which housed the headquarters of the police, public security and the traffic and licensing directorate.

  ‘I have to see Assistant Superintendent Abdulrahman,’ I told the guards under the arches when I walked in at about five o’clock that afternoon.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘Not exactly, but I think he’ll see me.’ I had no idea whether he would or not. ‘My name’s Mrs Lester. It’s about my son, Sam.’

  The guard looked sceptical and made a phone call. This did not elicit a reply one way or another. ‘They will ring back,’ he said dismissively. ‘Please wait.’

  Sometimes Hawar drives me mad. Everyone’s so bloody polite.

  I waited, and waited, and waited. I wasn’t the only person standing in the guard room: several other people were also hoping to be informed whether they could enter the compound. They all looked a bit scruffy and desperate.

  After about ten minutes of tapping my foot and sighing irritably through my teeth and generally making noises to remind them I was not a person to be left hanging around and that I had better things to do than wait all day, I went back to the desk and asked if they could call again.

  ‘The office said someone would call back,’ the guard said in a bored voice.

  ‘It’s important. Please could you try again?’

  The guard picked up the phone and dialled. ‘Engaged.’

  Ten minutes later, I asked him to try once more. This time, as he put down the phone, he said someone would come and get me.

  It took her fifteen minutes to arrive. She was a female officer in uniform and a headscarf and she didn’t seem to speak very good English. She handed me a guest pass, which I attached to my handbag, and led me across the compound to the building on the other side. I had my bag checked, went through a security turnstile and followed her up to the first floor, where I was shown into an anteroom with chairs arranged around the walls and a coffee table in the middle.

  And there I waited again. The room had two doors, one through which we’d come, and another, into an office. I knew this because every so often the headscarf woman, or another police officer, or a civilian in a thobe, would pass me in the ante‐room and go inside. Each time, I caught a glimpse of a large uniformed man behind a desk. Whenever the door opened, I would half get up from my seat and move about hopefully to show I was there. If he noticed, he ignored me.

  They were doing this deliberately. Making a point. It wasn’t as if it had never happened to me before. The Hawaris like to take things at their own pace. In any meeting, it is important to pass the time of day, to inquire after the family and everyone’s health. The human aspects of an encounter are more important than the technical ones, such as a start and finish time. How can you do business if you don’t understand the person you’re dealing with and their current state of mind?

  As the minutes passed and I became more and more anxious about Sam, and more and more despairing about the future, I wanted to stand on the chair and shout through that it didn’t matter about anyone’s cousin’s wedding or the expansion of the family business: could someone just see me NOW? If they were trying to ground me down it was working: I felt humiliated.

  My phone rang. I started guiltily, thinking I should have switched it off. Perhaps Superintendent Abdulrahman would think I wasn’t that keen to see him if I could sit here chatting on the phone. I should be focusing all my energy on willing him to put me at the front of the queue, on beaming thoughts through his half‐open door to impress him with the urgency of my suit. I was about to reject the call and switch off the phone, when I saw that it was from Nezar Al Maraj. I changed my mind.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘This time really is the last. I’m back in Hawar, which I didn’t expect…’

  ‘Oh, thank God!’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s a better reception than last time.’

  ‘Something awful’s happened…’

  ‘Something else? What now?’ And he didn’t even know about Will.

  ‘It’s Sam this time.’ I told him about the cartoon. ‘I’m at the police fort. I think they’ll have to deport us this time.’

  ‘Have you seen this Superintendent Abdulrahman?’

  ‘He’s actually only an assistant superintendent. And no, I’m still waiting.’

  ‘Well, hang on, I’m coming over. Just don’t agree to anything, OK?’

  He rang off. I was putting my phone back in my bag when the female officer appeared again and told me the assistant superintendent would see me.

  I went through and he stood up behind his desk. He was in his forties, heavily built for a policeman. His expression was friendly and he shook hand
s with me.

  ‘Salaam aleikum.’

  ‘Waleikum as salaam.’

  We sat down and he smiled gravely at me.

  ‘How long have you lived in Hawar?’

  ‘Twenty‐five years.’ Which is obviously long enough to know how unwise it is to let family members draw insulting cartoons of the prime minister.

  ‘Your son was born here?’ he continued pleasantly.

  ‘All three sons.’

  A man in a thobe came in with a coffee pot and two tiny bowls.

  ‘You like our Arabic coffee?’

  ‘Very much.’

  I took the cup, knocked back the cardamom flavoured liquid and held it out for a refill, drank this slightly more slowly, then shook it to show I’d finished.

  ‘So, three sons!’ said the superintendent, when this ritual was over. ‘That must be a cause of great happiness.’

  I wondered how much he knew about Matthew.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I also have three sons.’ He told me about them. One was at Hawar university. The other two were in high school. ‘But they can also be difficult sometimes,’ he sighed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your son Sam, for instance. Even though he has done this foolish thing with the drawing, and he has incited his fellow students to demonstrate, he doesn’t seem very sorry.’

  ‘Ah. Perhaps if I could see him?’

  ‘We don’t really demonstrate here in Hawar,’ he added blandly, which was untrue. There had been several demonstrations in recent years, and some of them had been more like riots. ‘We don’t find we have the need.’

  ‘I’m sure the demonstration can be stopped very easily. It was just a couple of kids suggesting a protest to their friends. It’s not anything organized.’

  ‘Interesting, that it came in the same issue of the newspaper as an interview with Mohammed Alireza, who is a well‐known agitator.’

  ‘I don’t think I understand?’

  ‘Your son promotes the cause of Alireza; perhaps he is acting on his behalf ?’

  So that was their line. ‘Definitely not. Sam doesn’t need anyone to put ideas into his head.’ After I’d said it, this didn’t seem such a clever remark. I was trying to ingratiate myself, parent to parent, but Abdulrahman was probably hearing that Sam was a revolutionary with a head full of seditious thoughts.