by Joe Bennett
The remains of parties are more telling than the parties themselves. The dance floor matting is ruched and furrowed and about a third of it has been swallowed by the sand. The mirror ball hangs, inane and defunct, catching flashes of the low sun. Beads of moisture have collected like silvered button mushrooms on the sleek black top of the sound system. Shoes litter the place, and half-buried wine glasses.
The zip of a house-sized tent opens and one of the meaty young men emerges in t-shirt and boxer shorts. He staggers round the side of the tent, hunches over a little bush of spinifex, retches, and then vomits. He sinks to his knees, his whole frame drained by the gagging reflex. A pause, then the second rush of vomit, accompanied by bestial groans. He stays there a while, recovering a part of his strength, then lumbers back to his tent to collapse. Happy New Year.
As I step gently past another tent, acutely aware of guy ropes, I catch ragged sleeper mumbles and a bout of snoring. It’s good to have the scene to myself. On the knot of dining tables the stiff white napery has been drenched to silver. Heel ends of wine in beaded bottles: Groenekloof, Edelrood, Niederberg, and an Oyster Bay sauvignon blanc. And here’s my second bottle of Domaine Jordan Valley, opened but almost untouched. I sniff it. What seemed fine last night repels me now.
My shoe scrunches on a broken glass. Plates are piled on the trestle tables awaiting the return of hired labour to make things good again. Only about thirty of us were here last night but how much mess we’ve generated. The sordid detritus of pleasure.
A tiny digital camera lies on a wet table, its sleek metal case keeping the moisture from its delicate innards and the snaps of booze-fuelled bonhomie. Surrounded by tentsful of sleeping party-goers, I feel that everything is charged with poignancy, that now, here, are images more deserving of being photographed than any of the planned revelry of last night. There’s an underbelly honesty to the scene, the flipside of human order. Puddles have formed in the sagging canvas chairs around the fire. The fire smoulders, blackened at the edge but still emitting heat. Stumps of great logs lie around it like spokes, their unburnt ends pointing away to the desert, their near ends charred like casualties of war. The terrier emerges from whatever tent he forsook mine for, shows little interest in me and noses round the tables for sandy scraps. From time to time he rises like a meerkat on his back legs and thrusts his nose towards a table top that he’s too short to reach.
I find a half-full bottle of Vichy water and take it up the dune to drink. The sun has burned off every hint of mist but for a sullied fringe of stuff on the horizon above the city. The sky has deepened to a rich pure blue. Several hundred yards away a yellow 4WD lumbers silently over the dunes heading I can’t guess where. I sit a while. A tiny fly, buzzless and quick, lands repeatedly on my ankle. Each time it returns I know it from the tiny tickle of the hair it perches on. I feel abnormally alive and pleased to be here.
Down below, the electrical engineer emerges from his tent. He is no longer Batman. Inside the tent he has put on ironed jeans and a t-shirt. He stretches in the sun, looks around but doesn’t see me on the dune top, goes back into the tent and comes out again with a big black professional-looking camera. I don’t remember him using it last night. He photographs with care and in detail the wreckage of the party, meticulous close-ups of the strewn and sodden tables, the tipsy bottles, the discarded shoes. Good man.
6
Let’s Go Shopping
It’s a pyramid. The top floor is occupied by the owner, a minor sheikh. The rest of the pyramid is the Raffles Hotel. What Raffles has to do with a pyramid is anyone’s guess. What either a pyramid or Raffles has to do with Dubai is also anybody’s guess. And the correct guess is nothing. But if you are seeking cultural coherence, don’t come to Dubai. It has all the consistency and profundity of Las Vegas. Indeed it has many similarities with Las Vegas. Like Vegas, Dubai sprouted in a desert, and grew fast from effectively nothing. Like Vegas it was free to create its own identity, and like Vegas it has become fixed in the popular mind as the epitome of something. Vegas is gambling. Dubai is shopping. In Dubai, the phrase ‘born to shop’ carries no freight of irony. Dubai even hosts a massive annual Festival of Shopping, and no one dares call it an oxymoron. Perhaps no one even thinks it.
There is irony, however, in the Vegas comparison. Dubai has no casinos because Islam forbids gambling, but there is money to be made from casinos and Dubai is fond of money. So Dubai World, a conglomerate owned by the Dubai government, has bought ten per cent of MGM Mirage, the world’s largest casino operator. It cost them five billion dollars. Dubai World has also gone halves with MGM on a project to build a nine billion-dollar hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip that will be every bit as tacky as you’d expect. But at the time of writing the gamble of this investment looks like succumbing to the recession. Currently Dubai World is suing MGM. Which, as the prophet would no doubt point out, is what can happen when you gamble.
The pyramid has a mall attached, of course. Dubai’s got malls like measles, but they make sense here. For half the year the local climate is uncomfortably hot. For a third of the year it’s intolerably hot. So most of what happens in Dubai happens indoors in conditioned air. And that’s especially true of shopping. You can’t expect tourists to dedicate themselves to the task of spending more than they can afford if they’re larded in sweat.
Malls are easy to despise, but they are merely covered markets and markets are as old as agriculture. But what a mall offers is far more than agricultural surplus. It offers the ideal fantasy world as seen on television and in magazines. And nothing is permitted to disrupt the fantasy: no weather, no thugs, no traffic, no dirt, no distress. There are security guards, piped music, and cooled synthetic air. Malls are the apex of the consumer society that Dubai has come to represent. And of all societies in history the consumer society is the least social. It emerges from Fortress Home only to make raids on stuff, to take that stuff home in a sealed car, haul up the drawbridge, drop the portcullis and then watch television in order to learn what to get next.
It is so easy to forget how constantly we in the West are bombarded with a single lie. It is the notion that the things we buy – the cheese spread, the duvet inner, the all-in-one barbecue tool – will make us happier than we were before we bought them. The lie is bellowed from the radio, the television, the newsprint, the roadside billboards. Experience tells us that the lie is a lie. Yet some instinct continues to respond to its siren call, and the balloon of hope keeps re-inflating.
In our world the call of advertising is as constant as the call of the muezzin. Commerce and religion use identical marketing strategies. The mall is effectively our mosque and, like a mosque, it is built to impress. Like a mosque it is a focal point, the place where people gather to do a culturally important thing. Like a mosque it confirms a belief and gratifies a need. And if Dubai had to choose between mosques and malls, it would choose malls. Indeed, though it would never admit it, it already has. Just as we have chosen them over cathedrals.
I have come to this mall, Wafi Mall, because with its Egyptian theming it is aimed at the locals, the Emiratis of whom I’ve managed to see little so far. In addition to the pyramid, there’s a colossal frieze that is immediately recognizable as a mummy of the Tutankhamun variety. The stylized face, the mermaidish body, are done very nicely in concrete. Beside it are hieroglyphs whose authenticity – an exquisite word in the context – has been vouched for by a top professor from Cairo flown in expressly to do the vouching.
The parking spaces closest to the door are reserved for the best spenders. Here are Lexuses, Rollers and Porsches, all with far lower numbers on the registration plates than on their price tags. Each has a driver lounging while his employer shops. The doors that grant entrance to the mall are inevitably automatic, the sort that see you coming and politely slide back. I remember seeing such doors on Star Trek forty years ago and being impressed by them. Now if a glass door doesn’t open automatically I walk into it.
Pass throug
h the deferential doors, enter the main atrium, and you are confronted with, well, what would you expect in this ‘Egyptian’ mall just after the start of Islamic New Year? Exactly, a Christmas tree. An enormous bloody Christmas tree, a real living conifer flown in from Allah knows where and stretching from floor to distant ceiling, its branches draped with kilometres of tinsel and weighed down by three dimensional golden stars, each looking heavy enough, if it fell, to kill a shopper.
Christmas is the world’s premier retail experience situation, when the West does a third of its annual shopping, so Dubai can’t afford to ignore it. Up the escalator beyond the Christmas tree there are signs to a branch of Marks and Spencer, the famous Jewish names writ large on the wall in both English and Arabic.
A window nearby displays astonishing jewellery. The gems are chunky, their settings chunkier. The price tags water the eyes. They’re a sort of financial porn. And just round the corner is a shop the like of which I’ve never seen. It sells interior decorations, beginning with a brace of stuffed peacocks by the door. The peacocks have no price tag. Nor has the reproduction oil painting of an Elizabethan woman in a ruff.
A shop assistant is attending to a man in a dishdash. In the concealed pocket at his hip I can make out the bulge of his wallet and cell phone. His wife and two daughters accompany him, all in long black robes but without veils. The two daughters are sloe-eyed and beautiful. The family is studying a chandelier.
This chandelier has the standard glass elements but with additions that include dripping plastic candles, a couple of snarling bats on wire and some foot-long dangles of taffeta in the form of shuttlecocks or perhaps jellyfish. It’s frankly hideous. The man asks the price, in English.
‘Twenty-two thousand dirhams,’ whispers the shop assistant.
That’s about four thousand pounds.
Deeper inside this underlit warren of a shop the walls are hung with reproduction Dutch still lifes, mock Gainsborough portraits, medieval pastoral scenes with castles bigger than the hills they stand on, and a framed sepia photograph of an Edwardian grandfather. He is bearded like Abraham Lincoln. As you pass he suddenly grins at you, his hologrammed lips furling back to reveal a vampire’s smile. Another pace and he reverts to his stiff forefather look. On the chair below him, a plaster skull wears a monk’s cowl.
Here’s a swivelling wall, one side all heavy Victorian wallpaper, the other a set of bookshelves holding voodoo fetishes, more skulls, a whip, a pair of riding boots and several volumes of Dickens (Bleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit) made from plaster. Another alcove holds a hologram of a bat on the wing, with the same vampire teeth as Abe Lincoln. It’s flapping above a porcelain urn, vast in size, neo-classical in design, royal purple in colour and brocaded with gold. And everywhere there are chandeliers, each more kitsch or macabre than the last. It’s Bram Stoker meets Miss Havisham meets Antiques Roadshow, all in reproduction, a mish-mash of cultural references severed from any attachment to meaning
At every corner stands a shop assistant, hands behind back, attentive, and dressed in a parody of formal nineteenth-century European costume – a frock coat that brushes the floor, a pinstriped morning suit, a heavyweight dress that a princess might have been crammed and strapped into for an Edwardian state banquet. These assistants are mostly young Filipinos, good-looking, English-speaking and cheap.
And all in all, I just don’t get it. But then again, perhaps there’s nothing to get. This is Dubai. This is what the locals like. And de gustibus, as the wise man said, non est disputandum.
Upstairs is a modern simulacrum of a souk, a maze of individual shops, most of them devoted to clothing. Here you can buy abayas, the black cloaks that women traditionally wear in public. Some have subtle decorations that defy tradition. Also on sale is the ornamental gear the women wear in private.
I don’t think there’s any mistaking that I’m white, but several shop assistants urge me to buy Arab dress. One Chinese girl, pale as porcelain and with wrists like twigs, is especially insistent. She holds a dishdash against me, fetches an embroidered pillbox that she nestles on my skull, folds a head cloth, wraps it around the pillbox, secures the arrangement with a plaited leather thong (which derives, she tells me, though it takes a few attempts to get the information across, from a camel halter) and leads me to a mirror. Whoa, there’s T.E. Lawrence, enigmatic, heroic, strider through deserts and foe of the Turks. I love it. I’m sold.
‘How much,’ I say, ‘the lot?’
She does a little calculation and shows me the five digit answer and I thank her very much and tell her it’s been such fun and I leave in the clothes I arrived in to try another mall: the only mall in the world where you can ski on snow.
‘Bill Gates is the antichrist,’ says Matthew the taxi driver. ‘He is killing the languages. If there is a supernatural virus in the computer system, how the people will be communicating?’
‘How indeed?’ I say.
‘I am coming from Kerala. Kerala is my mother. I shall return. Every man wants to sit in the lap of his mother. Do you know that Doubting Thomas is visiting Kerala? I meet people from one hundred and thirty-eight countries. I am keeping a list, you see.’
Matthew is infectiously exuberant. Indeed he transmits that exuberance to the wheel, which renders a trip along Sheikh Zayed Road even more fraught with visions of imminent death than usual.
He considers the ban on New Year celebrations to have been silly, and the Palestinians even sillier. They would be wise, he suggests, to stop niggling the Israelis. ‘Why tickle with a feather the ear of a sleeping lion?’
I ask if he minds if I write that down.
‘You are very welcome,’ he says, ‘but I am already writing it down. I am writing a book. It is about my experiences. I am calling it The Gospel According to St Matthew.’
‘I’d like to read it,’ I say, and I half would. Like most taxi drivers, Matthew has no doubt rehearsed these lines a thousand times, but they’re a lot more fun than a London cabbie’s views on matters moral and political, which can normally be boiled down to shooting the whole fucking lot of ’em.
‘So you’re a saint.’
‘Oh no no no no,’ says Matthew, bubbling over with laughter and patting me on the arm to relieve the pressure. ‘Oh goodness me no. I am a taxi driver.’
We move somehow on to India and Pakistan. I ask if there will be war.
Again that torrent of delighted laughter.
‘My friend, India is very big. If all the men of India are standing on the border and urinating, Pakistan will be sweeping away in the torrent. In the inundation. Sweeping away, are you hearing me?’
‘I am,’ I say. ‘Loud and clear.’
He sees his work as a mission.
‘God and the devil are Korchnoi and Kasparov. We are the pawns. I am giving lifts to many prostitutes. There is Gigi. She is making the money so she can go home to Ethiopia to be married. I am blessing her. I say, Gigi, in my head you are still a virgin. And she is kissing me.’
The laugh roars out again through the dense beard. When he drops me at the Mall of the Emirates I have decided that he is both borderline psychotic and a thoroughly good guy. ‘God’s people,’ he tells me in parting, ‘are the people with the positive thinkings. You have the positive thinkings, Joe.’
‘It’s been lovely to meet you,’ I say.
‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost I bless you.’
You can see the ski slope from a mile away. Its enclosed form protrudes from the roof of the mall at forty-five degrees like a giant spectacle-case.
The mall itself is unremarkable, with uniform temperature and vast domed concourses and Debenhams and Carrefour. There’s Pumpkin Patch for dressing your toddler fashionably, and Christian Dior for dressing yourself to compete with your toddler. There are women with pushchairs and girls with cell phones and boys in hoodies, though with no sense of threat about them. Poor people swab and polish floors, their faces minimum-wage lugubrious – not that there’s a legal
minimum wage in Dubai.
But it’s the skiing that lures the punters. Skiing is decadent. Technology takes you uphill in a chair. Then gravity takes you down grinning. But to do this indoors within fifty metres of coffee bars and clothes shops seems even more self-indulgent, even more spendthrift than usual. And to do it indoors in Dubai, where the desert can swell a man’s tongue and turn it black in a week, feels like the weird apotheosis of capitalism’s quest for fun. Wheee and whoosh, and all on a credit card.
And yet, on reflection, a ski slope in Dubai is no more bizarre, no more artificial than, say, a lion enclosure at London Zoo or an ice-rink in Sydney. It’s just a bit more show-off expensive.
One side of the main atrium is flanked with a glass wall that rises for ever and on the other side of the glass is the frozen north. It looks like the inside of a paperweight. This is a ‘winter wonderland’ although that single pair of inverted commas seems inadequate. The place deserves inverted comma confetti.
At ground floor level it’s got big fake rocks which, for all I know, may be big real rocks, arranged to form a snowy grotto for clambering through. And there’s a grove of little Christmas trees. The nearest one to me is sponsored by Virgin Megastore.
And there are people inside this paperweight disporting themselves. Children predominate, of course, all togged up in blue and red quilted boiler suits. Most of the children are of Indian origins and they seem happy as kids in snow anywhere, romping and squealing inaudibly behind the glass. A smattering of parents in the same blue and red boiler suits are more inhibited.
A single portly Emirati dad is shuffling through the snow holding hands with his little son. Son is boiler-suited but dad has been given a quilted anorak. The hem of his dishdash brushes the snow in a manner that whoever invented the dish-dash would never have conceived. Son breaks free from his father and runs behind a rock, gathers some snow and biffs it weakly. The snow ball collapses into disappointing powder, but is unmistakably an invitation to war, and dad proves truly male. With obvious effort because of his portliness he bends and gathers a snowball. The action reveals a pair of furry UGG boots. His ball is better compacted than his son’s but worse aimed. Through the glass I can see the son’s mouth open in a hoot of silent delight.
