Secret Skin

by Frank Coles

  No problem apart from an impending deadline.

  Then she smiled at me, we were doing things together like a couple, and the deadline didn’t seem quite so important. Her lips still shone from our kiss and an unspoken question flickered in her eyes.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘David perhaps you are really a gay journalist, and your attraction to me is just part of your act,’ she said, daring me to prove her wrong.

  ‘You’re not getting me into bed that easily you Persian minx.’

  Although when she pulled me towards the more comfortable sofa I found her difficult to resist. We never even made it that far. Wrapping arms and legs around each other we kissed recklessly and slid to the floor, writhing, touching, nibbling and caressing, passionately, carelessly.

  ***

  Half an hour later, when ‘Should we?’ became ‘No we shouldn’t,’ I retreated back to my desk and began to knock out some boiler plate copy for the news items while Yasmin worked on a list of places and people in her world.

  I had enough information to cobble a few words together on each remaining story but nothing particularly dramatic or revelatory, not for Martin’s prices.

  Thankfully some timely emails had landed in my inbox. Responses to requests I’d sent out first thing that morning.

  A human rights report provided a background summary of available information. It confirmed that Dubai’s 80% expatriate population of migrant workers were routinely screwed over. Domestic staff it said endured rape, abuse and non-payment; and construction workers regularly labored in conditions where gruesome injuries and fatal accidents went un-reported or were covered up. Many lived 18 to a room in work camps that resembled POW barracks from WWII and worked outside in temperatures exceeding 500C.

  Just like trafficked prostitutes the passports of these low paid migrants were often illegally confiscated and they then had to work off enforced debts to get them back. They spent years in servitude living on money from loan sharks employed by the same companies that then wouldn’t pay them for months or years at a time.

  Was that slavery?

  They had no chains and no say in what happened to them. If they complained, took to the streets or went on strike, they faced jail and deportation – without pay of course.

  To me it sounded like apartheid with a get-out clause.

  Quotes from local officials proved hard to come by, seemed nobody wanted to take my call.

  From the hallway I heard the front door open and close. Yasmin disappearing quietly once again. I let her go. I had learned not to chase lovers a long time ago.

  I kept at it.

  As no one wanted to talk, I stole an unused and bitchy quote from a construction firm’s CEO I’d interviewed the previous week. The article had appeared in a property magazine, so the positive quotes I’d used were designed to appeal to the target market of the reader – those with money and looking to invest – no negative critiques allowed.

  Tailor the content for the publication’s audience, a lesson every fledgling journalist learns early on. Did readers even know how subtly manipulated they really were?

  The weekly piracy report from the International Chamber of Commerce’s Commercial Crime Service failed to provide a fear inducing headline for the piracy item.

  SAIL THE SEAS TROUBLE FREE may have been accurate, but it wouldn’t have sold any magazines. Instead I wrote up a ransom demand paid a month earlier by an anonymous sheikh to a group of Somalians for the return of a merchant vessel and its crew. These irregular ransoms were paid quietly, so as not to dull the image of Dubai’s ports as safe and profitable. Old news perhaps, but hell, pirates were always sexy.

  It was too soon to write up Sunset Heights for the money laundering item. So once again I topped and tailed something from the agency wires and the press releases of Transparency International – the global corruption index.

  Although each story deserved to be bigger and longer, most editors wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pay for the graft or resources needed to make these stories really happen. Of course you always probed for the genuinely new, but if nothing more sensational or profitable presented itself you went with what you had.

  Occasionally I took a hit financially for something more in-depth. Like Yasmin’s story, or the money laundering scam, and tried to make some money back through syndication and sales to different markets.

  The numbers rarely added up though. I broke even maybe half the time. But at least I could choose my hours, my jobs, and occasionally tell people who thought they were my boss to go fuck themselves.

  Bizarrely that often made me more money. Hearing that I wasn’t a walk over meant my other clients would pay on time and write briefs that didn’t change infinitely. For a while at least.

  Occasionally I was accused of being a primadonna, usually when a client mistook me for a temp rather than a businessman. Writing was the business; the written word the product.

  Friends who endured endless employee crap frequently encouraged me to do the same. Years of tonguing sphincter for an average pay check and a truly false sense of security? Thanks, but no.

  When they still didn’t get it I explained how I could find myself working from hot tubs on the Cote D’Azur; conducting interviews from submarines during war games; learning to fly or sail and being paid for it; how hotel rooms and flights regularly came free; and that if I really wanted to I could shave my hair off, paint my toe nails blue and work afternoons only in fancy dress, none of which affected my ability to make money.

  Of course I had to take responsibility for my own foolish mistakes and I’d made plenty of those. But usually my biggest problem amounted to nothing more than a misplaced apostrophe.

  My fingers froze at the sound of the front door opening.

  ‘It’s me!’ Yasmin called out and slammed the door behind her.

  ‘Hey,’ I hollered back. She hadn’t run off after all. I waited for her to say something. Uninterested in soothing my guilty conscience she clattered off in the direction of the kitchen instead.

  I switched my attention back to the last two items. An Indian professor was making noise about how Dubai had built its initial wealth by turning a blind eye to the Indian gold smuggling that went on in previous decades. He raged at Dubai because it had become a glittering skyscraper strewn destination for the moneyed hordes instead of his home country. This included some of Mumbai’s more notorious gangsters who had retired to Dubai’s penthouse suburbs to enjoy lives of unrepentant affluence.

  ‘Even Dubai’s currency was once based on the Rupee,’ he complained.

  Absorbed in my work I finished off the final item on ghost ships and the lazy owners who couldn’t be bothered to scrap their vessels or repatriate their crews and sensed something had changed.

  Yasmin stood silently beside me, watching. Her crotch level with my eyes once again. But no abaya this time, just snug jeans and a t-shirt. I hadn’t even heard her enter.

  ‘Come,’ she said and held out her hand.

  ***

  She had prepared a simple and delicious Middle Eastern spread of tabouleh – a parsley, bulgar wheat and lemon salad – stuffed vine leaves, falafel with all the trimmings, hummus, kibbeh and shish tawoukh.

  ‘I ordered it all myself,’ she joked.

  Seated on the balcony we ate and talked through the list she had made as the sun dropped from the sky behind us. This close to the equator when the sun made its daily dash for the horizon it took just moments to reach the crimson finish line and completely disappear from sight.

  The darkness enveloped us and the evening humidity began to condense on the windows. The air conditioning blasted out through the open doors keeping us and a small patch of desert cool and dry.

  Yasmin’s list was exhaustive. It detailed all the clubs, hotels, malls and streets she knew where sex was exchanged for money. She had included some of the girl’s stories and a list of all the countries they came from. More than enough background to leave her out of thing
s from then on.

  She also described how young girls were exploited for their virginal qualities. To simulate the breaking of the hymen, the bosses would insert blood capsules into the vaginas of toddlers and teenagers alike, so that when a man withdrew, the bloody evidence of virginity would be dripping from his cock. What else was in that blood or where it came from she didn’t know.

  She was happy to talk about what she knew, relieved to be finally telling someone. And we discussed us. How could we see each other now that there was no make-believe reason for us to see each other?

  Did we even want to?

  We spent the rest of the evening scheming and making plans that would probably never amount to anything.

  ***

  I awoke in my childhood bedroom, snuggled up under the covers. The cold grey light of winter seeped in beneath the curtains. I smiled. What a strange dream I’d been having. Living in a desert seemed a bizarre idea.

  ‘Time to get up,’ someone called. ‘Time for school.’

  I felt the bite of cold air outside the duvet and shivered.

  My mother’s voice, muffled, ‘David? David. Get up.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I complained. ‘It’s too cold.’

  ‘I’ll put the heating on,’ she yelled up the stairs.

  The sudden heat drenched me in sweat and blurred my vision. I threw off the covers and sat up. Everything in my boyhood room seemed smaller; an adult’s perspective of an old world, the past had shrunk.

  The childishly decorated walls began to dissolve away like time in an hour glass to reveal a black sky filled with pulsing stars and dusty wisps of the Milky Way. Towering figures in dishdashes leaned into view over my bed, inspecting me, pretending to be friendly.

  ‘Day-vid,’ they said, a sing song Arabic version of my mother’s voice. Their damp breath settled on my face and a desperate need to find something I thought I’d lost gripped me. I scrabbled away from the voices and down between the sheets. Rough cotton turned to sand and streamed between my fingers. Somewhere a switch flipped. I looked up to find myself alone in the cold empty cavern of a desert night.

  ‘DAVID!’ a man shouted into my ear, but no matter which way I turned, I couldn’t see him. I heard his spiteful cackle and felt an overwhelming rush of guilty humiliation as a finger rubbed against my hand. ‘David?’ he said again and then his grotesque mouth snapped out of the darkness and closed over me.

  I awoke tentatively, uncertain whether the dream had ended.

  Something tapped against the balcony window. I cracked open my eyes and saw early morning shadows stretch across the room. The tapping came again. One shadow broke away from the others and moved silently towards me, its indistinct form becoming something more recognizable, something human.

  I launched myself in the direction of the intruder hoping my weight would unbalance the anonymous assailant. As I crashed from the bed to the floor a loud screeching erupted outside the window. The sound of rushing wings surrounded me and panicked silhouettes fluttered against the off white curtains.

  I stood in a semi-squat panting at the shadows, trying to understand what had just happened. There was no intruder, only semi-conscious hallucinations and tricks of the mind.

  With a sheet half wrapped around my legs, sweating, breathless, and with sleepy fear still coursing through me I looked to where Yasmin slept hoping she wouldn’t think less of me.

  My bed and the night stand were empty.

  But this time I knew I would see her again.

  I also knew that if I wanted anything to change for us I had to start telling some serious tales about this dirty little town.

  Chapter Twelve

  My mother always said that telling tales would get me in trouble. 24 hours later as I listened to Martin’s voice thunder in the police station’s front office, I figured researching them in a censored state could get me in a whole lot more.

  ‘Why?’ I heard him say. It sounded like a shout, but it was just his normal speaking voice.

  A quieter Arabic voice mumbled a response.

  ‘What do you mean you don’t fucking know?’

  Another mumble.

  ‘Ask who?

  Mumble.

  ‘Captain Khadim? Well go on then I will. Where the fuck is he?’

  Mumble.

  ‘Not here? Well where then?’

  Two voices mumbled together as the policeman conferred with his colleague. This went on for a while. Eventually Martin’s patience wore thin.

  ‘Well are you going to tell me or not?’

  Mumble.

  ‘How can you not fucking know?’

  The mumbles continued. The other men in the holding cell had been roused from various stages of sleep and drunkenness by Martin’s voice, all apart from one other western man, who reeked of alcohol and snored grotesquely while dribbling onto the bench. The men, virtually all Indian apart from one Filipino, had been understandably tense and depressed by their prospects in a Middle Eastern jail. Martin’s voice all but rattled the bars on the door of our cramped little holding cell. There were smiles and amused faces as Martin let loose.

  I almost felt sorry for the cops next door. Almost.

  ‘Are you a complete fucking idiot man?’ he shouted. ‘Do you even know what he’s in here for?’

  Mumble.

  ‘Show me,’ he commanded, a pause. ‘It’s in Arabic you bloody fool, I can’t read that. What does it say?’

  Mumble.

  ‘You don’t know? Can’t you read man?

  Mumble.

  ‘You can’t read his writing? Well how the hell do you expect me to read his writing when I can’t even speak Arabic?’

  One of the older Indian men translated for our cell mates who burst out laughing. They joked and bantered amongst themselves. Their chatter almost woke the sleeping drunk; he sucked a strand of slowly escaping drool back into his mouth in response.

  ‘The cops here are idiots,’ the older man said to me. ‘Like children.’

  I agreed but didn’t get a chance to say so. The metal cover over the door’s barred window opened to reveal a rotund, whiskery policeman with an angry pout. He stood with his face against the bars eyeing up anyone who dared to laugh. He pointed his night stick through the opening at the most easy to deport. The room quickly became quiet.

  Then the drunk farted. The policeman looked utterly helpless. Uncontrollable titters quickly turned to giggles. The policeman shouted at us in Arabic. We had no idea what he said but the more he shouted the louder we laughed. It had been a tense night for us all. Laughter eased our anxieties.

  I told the older man that our friendly copper looked like a walrus, he translated. More laughter and even some finger pointing, the drunk finally woke up and joined in.

  The furious policeman slammed the cover back over the grill.

  ***

  The walrus had his revenge though. 12 men in a box room made for half that number, no air conditioning, no fan, no water.

  Hours shuffled by. I could still hear Martin but from another room further away. Presumably they’d moved him to stop us laughing again. Occasional angry bursts broke through.

  I heard him holler ‘How much?’ That stuck in my mind.

  Several hours after our early morning laugh in they released me into the relative cool of the shaded courtyard outside.

  Martin stomped out through the tinted glass door of the main office. He slammed it so hard behind him that I thought the glass would shatter. So did one of the officers who opened the door after him and shouted, ‘Hey you, stop that.’

  ‘No! Why should I?’ He yelled back at him. ‘I’ve just paid for twenty of these doors, so I’ll break it if I bloody well want to.’

  ‘You must stop,’ the junior officer said, unsure what to do when someone answered back.

  ‘No! I will not stop, if you speak English why didn’t you open your bloody mouth the whole time I was in there? Your friends have been extorting money from me for the last six hours.�
��

  ‘Your friend was soliciting prostitutes sir,’ he said pointing at me, his young hand shaking.

  ‘Like hell he was,’ Martin said. He pointed his key fob to an expensive Dodge Viper on the other side of the courtyard. ‘Get in the car David.’ Smoke grey with distinctive twin racing stripes the car looked factory fresh.

  ‘Okay, but you should probably get in as well, this guy is probably family. Look at his rank, look how young he is. Don’t lose your cool.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed reluctantly, eyeing the young officer’s epaulets, ‘Daddy got you this job did he sunshine?’

  The kid didn’t answer.

  ‘I thought as much,’ said Martin and turned his back on him.

  ***

  ‘Nice wheels,’ I said as we pulled away. ‘Smells like a new car.’

  ‘It’s a promotion. The deal is….’ he said, pausing as we leaned into a long curve at speed. ‘The deal is, I give them a good write up with a positive Middle East slant and they give me a flash motor for a month.’

  ‘Sweet. Journalistic objectivity at its best.’

  ‘You bet. Objectively anyone can see that I’m laughing my arse off.’

  ‘The devil must be very happy with your soul Martin.’

  ‘Oh he is. He told me as much when he dropped the car off.’

  At that he gunned the engine, we straightened up, and fired out of the slip road towards the endless conveyor belt of Sheikh Zayed Road. The other cars refused to let us in. Martin accelerated along the hard shoulder passing the near lane column of cars and swerved out to lane three with room to spare. Our speed already made the other cars look like they were standing still.

  ‘Tee hee.’ Martin said. Out loud. I gave him a funny look but he was engrossed in his new toy, his cherubic cheeks crimson with excitement.

  I indulged him. He had just spent six hours getting me out of jail.

  He swung out in front of a slow moving car in the middle lane which by necessity had become the city’s crawler lane, reserved for Sunday drivers. Every other lane was just too dangerous. Martin weaved neatly in and out between the cars, each vehicle a safe distance apart like stunt cars in a Hollywood movie.