by Adam Thorpe
The cheetah was in her office, as ever, and apparently hungry. It eyed Bob expectantly, just as Dinesh had done, but probably for more primal reasons. Filberta showed him what a sweetie it was by putting her face to its face and allowing herself to be licked on the nose, mouth, eyes. It really did have the most impressive fangs, just as the fit golden-tanned Filberta, when she crouched to her green-eyed double, revealed an impressive depth of cleavage.
The Drip was away in Switzerland – ‘client sourcing’, apparently: His Excellency’s private fleet included a Gulfstream V and a Dassault Falcon 7X which were available for charter – a sign, perhaps, more of his greed than any actual need. Bob had taken a spin in both when required (not often), which had made the overall job good fun. He emptied his bag of files, papers and sundry items like keys, sat down gingerly in a seat that sighed, and started on the business of departing from the princely empire. He was owed a month’s wages, as technically he should have received thirty days’ notice, as well as a refund for his flights home, and his unused holiday pay. Filberta found all this faintly amusing, clicking her tongue and shuffling papers and making American-style noises patented by TWA stewardesses on being asked to come up to a hotel bedroom during a stopover.
To get to her lair he’d had to pass down a long and gilded corridor crammed with so many priceless antiquities – lamps, brooches, jewel-studded swords, hammered-gold necklaces, Greek vases, Chinese horses, Florentine putti and so on, all set higgledy-piggledy behind glass or just scattered on tables, with life-size marble sculptures greeting him every so often (a missing hand or nose proving their credentials) – that he found this hesitation a touch distasteful. ‘I think that’s not only about 0.001 per cent of a billionth of his fortune,’ he said, ‘but those are my rights. He may be an affable chap, but he’d be acting wrongfully if you denied me my rights.’
Filberta suddenly looked like Filberta. She may have crammed a pair of honeydew melons down her silk front, yet there was an ice-forming austerity in her gaze. She cocked her head on one side and said, ‘It’s not up to me. But what I do know is that it was kinda urgent. An emergency.’
‘What was?’
‘Firing you.’
‘You mean, he was dangled over the side of his biggest yacht or something?’
She snorted disdainfully and folded her arms. Perhaps she had detected that Bob’s field of vision, although apparently aimed at her face, included her bust if he concentrated enough. It was a kind of trick: you peered through the perspex at the sky, but you saw the control panel and its winking lights.
‘OK, Bob. So long, and thanks for flying us around.’
‘I’ve just been dangled from my balcony,’ he said, spreading his arms, ‘but would you know?’
She chuckled a little uncertainly. ‘It’s been great,’ she added. Nothing more.
He patted the cheetah goodbye, and it instantly lifted itself and placed a paw on each of his shoulders, wreathing him in its low-tide breath.
‘Well, Princess Tiffany seems to like you, anyway. Sheena died, you know. Ate something bad.’
‘I’ll bet the prince was heart-broken, being such a sensitive soul.’
‘You bet.’
When he got home, there was a message on the landline. It was Ellen. She didn’t know what he had said, but Dinesh was a new man. It was a miracle. ‘You’re like … Jesus,’ she cried. Never in Bob’s life had he been likened to the Son of God. Then it occurred to him that maybe they had in fact thrown him over, and he had risen again. Up to a point.
Jesus went to the bar to see Leila. Say goodbye, no hard feelings. Leila, from Birmingham, was petite, half-Indian, with very thin wrists and long fingers. She was also busty, but that was only in relation to the rest of her, which was slender. She had large and perfectly dark-chocolate eyes, a straight, sharpish nose and lips that were always set in the smiling position. She existed to have a good time, but looked the opposite of blowsy. She had the prettiest feet he’d ever seen. A serious dancer once, she’d done something to her knee and, anyway, as she put it, ‘My boobs were getting in the way of my splits, yeah?’
Her face lit up across the bar when he appeared: the place in question, called Wushu, was very twilight, very trance and vaguely Japanese, with the occasional live band in the corner who always seemed to be about to start, their glittering instruments looking lonely under the spots. Tonight was no exception, but it meant he could talk across the bar’s alabaster sheen. Leila had never looked lovelier, Bob reckoned, probably because she was unreachable, hard at work, like a stewardess in flight. She was certainly busy: on the stools there was a row of fat bottoms belonging to assorted consultant-types, loud and chatty, almost permanently on their mobiles. He insisted on buying her a flash cocktail, and they managed a few sentences before she had to serve up at the other end. The youthful but plump customer next to him, in a white linen suit with the store’s folds still visible, used her absence to start chatting: he was from Bristol, over as a solar-panelling advisor, the next big idea being to turn the desert into a massive generator. As if Bob didn’t know.
‘Pity about the desert,’ he said.
The man laughed, pushing up black retro specs. ‘And you? You seem to know the local talent well.’
‘I’m a pilot.’
His manner changed instantly, but Bob was used to that, ‘Big planes? Proper ones?’
‘Mine have wings, yeah.’
The man laughed again. ‘Wow. That’s a real job. And you’re keeping us in business.’
‘How?’
‘Greenhouse gases?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Bob smiled, chewing his vodka-sodden cherry.
Then the usual line, so common Bob could almost mouth it: ‘I fancied being a pilot myself, as a kid. Hitting above my weight, I think they call it. So you live here, then? Great place to do business in.’
‘For the moment.’
‘Which airline?’
‘Oh, a private outfit.’
‘Of course. Here, this is my card. Call me Craig. Actually, I can’t believe the amounts still swilling around here. It’s almost kind of wrong. But it does keep our particular ball rolling. In the UK it’s like they’ve got three responses: no, no and sorry, great concept but. Even before the bottom fell out. Chicken soup in a basket, these days.’ Craig laughed again. His hair was shaved to the roots, but the premature balding had a giveaway mirror-finish.
Bob told him that in the Burj Al Arab hotel, a glass of Macallan single malt would set him back around 27,000 dirhams.
‘What’s that in sterling?’
‘Around 4,500 quid?’
‘That’s about 500 quid a bloody sip!’ he cried.
‘Little sips, yup.’
Craig was now pursuing the financial crisis, how he’d noticed the empty towers, the stalled building sites.
‘Plenty going up,’ Bob pointed out. He was feeling cross with the prince suddenly. Murderous, even.
‘And still great for doing business in,’ Craig agreed, pulling his tie down, undoing his top button. ‘To be honest, this whole banker business is what I call a—’ He made a noise rather than a word, like a kid’s imitation of a bullet zipping past.
‘What’s that?’
‘The sound of something going way over my head,’ he chuckled.
‘Oh, right.’
He’s on the edge, Bob thought. Things are not going well. He asked Craig what he did before, just for something to say.
‘Oh,’ he laughed, ‘jobbing electrician.’
‘Good for you,’ Bob nodded, not really concentrating. The drink was soothing him, the music was soporific, and Leila was wearing a dress cut so low at the back it all but touched her coccyx. She was busy, busy with orders, her shoulder muscles darting about under the soft skin.
‘Yeah, well, I saw the opportunity,’ the man said, hitching up his white trousers. ‘Growth area. Climate change and that. And you’ve got a bit of the old sunshine here.’
‘On the side of t
he angels, eh?’
‘Well, not on the side of the devils, anyway,’ he chortled, looking at Bob as if unsure whether to take it further, to rib him for leaving his dirty contrails behind. He decided not to, it seemed, and asked Bob what he was having. ‘Yeah, we actually specialise in the copper solar panel: doesn’t stress or pinhole, doesn’t UV-degrade. Natural product. Long track history, you might say. Beautiful stuff.’
Bob nodded slowly. ‘Ever been to the Zambian copper belt? Say, to the town of Mufulira?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Thought not, Craig.’
Maria came the next morning to clean. Fortunately, Leila had left by then. She’d agreed to eat something after her shift, which ended at midnight, by which time Bob was full up on odd-coloured Japanese nibbles and somewhat bored by the ins and outs of solar panelling, Asperger’s (the man’s brother), the best pubs in Avon and Craig’s final tearful admission to his sexual confusion: married to Christine, but gay. The trouble with bars abroad is expats and their tendency to drunken release. By the time Leila was free, Bob felt he had known Craig all his life, and even before.
They ate in an expensive Italian bistro in the Venetian quarter; she was bubbly after her work, he’d had four White Russians and was now lowering the level of a fruity Grignolino rosé. They sat outside but it was still hot, or felt it, and there was a whiff of ripe drains from the waterworks. His head felt tender from his recent adventure: Leila leaned over the little table and stroked it at one point and he winced.
‘S’up?’
‘I knocked it on something.’
She touched it tenderly and then kissed him.
‘I like your shirt.’
‘It’s what’s in it that counts.’
‘No, just the shirt,’ she giggled.
‘Leila, I’m going to miss you.’
‘It’s the soppy music.’
‘Are you going to miss me?’
‘I reckon I’m gunna.’ She kissed him again, tongue slipping over his, the sound of her breath making it past decades of jet-turbine abuse. Couples were glancing over. Maybe they reckon she’s my escort, Bob thought. Old enough to be her dad. One morning he’d woken up and was no longer young.
‘Let’s skip pudding,’ he said, holding her small and perfect chin.
‘But there’s zabaglione. Or lychee pannacotta with mango jelly. Luscious. I love lychees.’
Bob told her that she was his pudding.
‘I preferred it when you said bird, Captain Robert. You’re my little bird. How much does a little bird weigh?’
‘What did I tell you?’
She put her hands together and thought. A glisten of sweat on her upper lip caught the light that was busy turning the nearby twenty-foot fountain mauve, orange, mauve. They virtually had to shout over it. ‘A few ounces, you said. It wouldn’t be pounds, would it?’
‘Ounces. An ounce, probably.’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Depends on the bird, I guess. I like your dress. It’s so low I can see your birthmark thingy.’
‘Gerraway,’ she said, glancing down. ‘That’s just under me nipple.’
‘Is it? Oh. It’s many years since I’ve seen it.’
‘Ten days.’
‘That’s years, in my book.’
An hour later and he was checking it out. She insisted on undressing in the living room, with the sliding doors open to let in the warmer night air because she said the flat was ‘parky’. She walked around on the cool tiled floor in nothing but a sheen of Dubai’s lights, spread beyond the balcony so like a cockpit’s night-time avionics that he kept wanting to check the readings. He sat on the sofa equally naked and watched with his legs wide, as strictly ordered. George Benson was crooning on the hi-fi (which came with the flat), and she swayed to it softly, rampant with her own future that seemed right now so much richer and further than his. It was a game that she and her fun-loving friends in Dubai played, and he went along with it because he was feeling careless and sad: her favourite pilot had to keep his ‘jumbo on the runway’ for ten minutes – if it took off there would be no sex. He wasn’t allowed to close his eyes or look away.
How could he look away? The lack of correlation between Leila’s breasts and the rest of her, slim and slippery, was always a marvel to Bob.
Cause angel we can fly you and I
She eyed him from under her loosened black hair, so long it touched the dimple in each hip. But then she was small, about five foot two, so the hair didn’t have far to fall. Her arms swinging loosely with the ease of a trained dancer, the narrow supple waist, the twinkles of moisture on her straight back as she swivelled, paced, faced him and then giggled and moved off again … Oh, Leila. Dubai’s midnight seethe was oblivious. He didn’t want to leave here. He could marry Leila, once the divorce was through. The big fridge coughed and began to purr through the open kitchen door. Faint tootings, the whine of crane machinery. He could nestle into her every night, she into him. She said something and he didn’t catch it. She stood there against the window, hands demure behind her back, so she was rimmed by the blue glow and white points of dazzle, an hourglass silhouette, each curve lightly downed – he’d never noticed that.
‘I think you’ve won, Mr Pan American,’ she said. ‘That’s either amazing self-control or you’re going off of me.’
‘It’s sadness,’ he said. ‘I might never see you again. My altimeter’s gone.’
She placed one hand on a smudge of breast, the other over her groin, which was reduced to a neat, dark strip; he could just about see her fingers moving there, up and down, as if striking a safety match against it.
‘Vroom,’ she said, swinging her hips a little. ‘Vroom. Look!’
‘Yup, it’s making an important life decision.’ No taxiing: take-off had been a Hawker Harrier’s – vertical, instantaneous. All angle and thrust. The tubular weight defying gravity in the unlikeliness of flight. ‘Will you marry me, Leila?’
She laughed, said he was barmy, knelt down in front of him, her eyes slightly cross-eyed as she inspected her triumph. ‘Oh, you’ve got sand on it.’
He stroked her hair, wanting to cry; its silkiness smelt faintly of almonds.
‘The sand gets everywhere,’ he said. ‘We’ll all be desert soon.’
‘Between my toes, on your dick. Do you know, lychees with the skin on really do feel quite like a bloke’s knackers.’
She licked the grains off, little cat-licks sparkling on the tip.
He took a deep breath. ‘I mean it, by the way. Will you marry me, Leila?’
Her fingers held his; she leaned her cheek on his thigh, looking up into his eyes. Her cheek was burning hot.
‘W for wow, but not right now, Bob. I’m too happy.’
‘Are you always happy?’
She pulled a face, still smiling, white teeth undaunted. ‘Gerroff, it’s only a mask.’
‘But you make other people happy, just by smiling.’
‘Do I?’
Bob drew her up over him and against him so she was kneeling either side of his legs. She straightened up and rested her belly on his face, her hands spread on the sofa back. He planted a kiss on her navel, in which luckier grains of sand nestled. ‘I’ll bet a lot of people are glad you were born,’ he said. He was tired.
‘And you? Do you make people happy?’
‘I could make you happy,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come back with me, Leila?’
She laughed, her smooth belly skin vibrating against his ear. She lowered herself a little, poised and just making contact, teasing him with the open secret behind. ‘Back to England? You gotta be joking.’
‘OK.’
They lay down on the white leather sofa that up to now he hadn’t liked, her softness under him. His own buttocks were slightly cold, his coccyx ached, he was worn out, he felt vulnerable to an attack from the room’s darkness. He kissed her on the crease beneath each breast, on their rounded underparts that were moist and harbou
red a saltiness when lifted, wondering why this might not have been enough, bothered by her instant refusal. ‘It was worth a try,’ he added.
She stroked his shoulders – she liked their hardness, the idea of him keeping them taut in his fifties – and he kissed her on the mouth. He was all but asleep; her lips enveloped him in pulpy comfort and then there was a sudden clawing or scraping sound, close. His mobile, which he’d deprived earlier of its ringtone, was in the process of nudging itself across the glass top of the coffee table, a tiny underwater glow moving through the darkness. He groaned and reluctantly stretched across and picked it up as Leila wriggled under him. ‘You don’t have to answer,’ she said, ‘not this late.’
‘I won’t.’ He was knackered. It was a text, in caps. He checked the number, one he didn’t recognise: not an Emirati code, anyway. A distant siren floated up from twenty-five floors down.
‘Bob …’
‘Just a sec, honey.’
‘ONE SWALLOW IT DOES NOT MAKE A SUMMER, CAPTAIN’
Now what the hell did that mean?
‘Bob?’
He was on one elbow and looking up at the ceiling, at the fixtures, the grilles where the cold air would swirl in silently, the dark fisheye in the smoke detector. That he’d always assumed was a smoke detector. Gold Teeth was fond of such expressions. He must have a little dictionary of them. Suitable for any occasion.
‘I don’t care,’ he said, dropping the mobile on the table and summoning himself back to Leila. He felt alert again, at least – prodded into alertness. ‘I don’t care.’
‘Was it from your wife?’
‘Trust is everything,’ he whispered into her softly beating neck. ‘Trust me, we’re going to be fine.’
Maria was shocked to see no pictures on the walls, except for the large one of pink clotted palm trees he’d long hidden in the wardrobe and which had come with the flat. There were no hidden cams, after all – or not that he could see. The smoke detector had worked, emitting a shrill pulse when he held a smouldering roll of paper up to it the next morning. He gave Maria the chocolates and her diminutive frame gave him a big hug in return. She was in her forties and rather keen on Bob, pressing him to her multi-pocketed apron so firmly that its various contents – brushes, bottles of cleaning fluid, a scourer, the Hoover’s head for awkward corners – impressed themselves a little painfully on tender parts.
