I had to give up the customary expectation of politeness. I said, ‘Do you think you know me well enough to say that?’
‘I know you well enough,’ she said, motioning at my apartment significantly and, I must admit, infuriatingly. ‘Ted told me about his diving buddy – you’re some kind of New York attorney. And you still haven’t answered my question.’
I understood her mania for enlightenment very well. Her life had become a riddle. I also suspect that she misidentified me as her husband, who was no longer available for questioning. It is fair to say that maybe I took Mrs Ted Wilson to be none other than Jenn, who was no longer available for answering. For a cracked, treacherous moment, I actually had the notion to tell this woman my story – to have my say at long last.
‘I don’t have to answer your questions,’ I said – without hostility, to be clear.
There was that laugh again.
‘Is something funny?’ I said.
‘You should see yourself. You’re shaking. What is it? What are you hiding?’
‘I’m not hiding anything. I don’t have anything to hide.’
‘I think you do,’ she said, wagging the index finger of the hand that held the glass containing my wine. ‘I think you have everything to hide.’
I said, ‘You wag your finger at me? You come here uninvited, you throw yourself on my hospitality, and you wag your finger at me?’
She jumped up. ‘How dare you. You pretended to be a friend of Ted. You deceived me. You lied. You lied to get me in here. Shame on you.’
I looked around for something to throw. To repeat, everything was spick-and-span. The only objects to hand were a copy of Dwell magazine and a plastic jar of Umbrian lentils. I picked up the jar, turned away from Mrs Ted Wilson, and hurled it against the wall. There was an unusual brown explosion as the jar burst.
‘Get away from me,’ she screamed.
‘No, you get away from me,’ I said. I was panting. I could hardly breathe. ‘This is my apartment. If I want to throw stuff around in my apartment’ – here I picked up the Dwell and flung it across the room – ‘I get to throw stuff, understand? You don’t like it, you’re free to leave.’
She left, as was her right.
I swept up. Even so, for weeks afterwards I occasionally sensed a lentil underfoot.
It has to be said, my feet were in magnificent shape.
All credit for this goes to my old scuba buddy from Oz. One day, on the boat ride back to the shore, he, Ollie, said, ‘You can’t go around like that.’ He was referring to my long, uneven, grey-and-yellow toenails and, especially, to my horribly fissured heels. Ollie said, ‘I want you to drop by the spa, mate. We’ll take care of you. My treat.’
Although a little jumpy at the prospect, I took Ollie up on his offer. Why not, after all? I wasn’t to know (and would surely have been scared off if I had known) that he would personally handle the job, which is to say, handle me – wash my feet, trim my toenails, clip my cuticles, patiently carve slivers of skin off my heels with what looked like a miniature cheese-slicer, rub a pumice stone over the carved heels until they were pink and new-born. (Afterwards, his assistant manipulated my insteps and ankles, and, last but far from least, applied lotions to my feet, shins and calves.) Ollie was not even slightly queasy about any of this, not even about the flakes of dead skin accumulating like muesli on the towel on his lap. He spoke only in order to utter a kind of podiatric poetry about what action he was performing and which part of the foot was the planum, which the tarsus, and which the dorsum, consistently impressing upon me the enormous importance of feet, those great unsung workhorses whose sensitivity and quasi-magical neural properties had been insufficiently examined and remained wrongly undervalued. What can I say? It was my happiest hour in Dubai.
Things have gone amazingly well for Ollie, I am very pleased to say. In a somewhat unreal turn, he has become an important and fashionable pedicurist who flies around the world to meet high-net-worth individuals who want important and fashionable pedicures: to this day he sends me gleeful, can-you-believe-this-shit texts from St Petersburg and London and New York. There is a downside, of course: Ollie got so busy he was forced to quit diving; and so I quit diving.
(I tried out another buddy but the guy was full of hot air and even underwater would clown around and bug me with pointless OK signs and make me feel unsafe. He boxed me in, somehow, even in the unpartitioned ocean. When Ollie and I dived, we stayed close; we accepted a severe duty of mutual care; but all the while we enjoyed the feeling of privacy that being underwater offers. This was fundamental to the undertaking, though of course there are those who understand privacy as a business of personal smells and locked bathroom doors.)
Ollie and I still have our jaunts, however. Sometimes, to blow off steam, we James-Bond-drive, as Ollie terms it, on the Gulf side of the Musandam peninsula. After we cross the Oman border and hit the new and almost empty highway, we notionally race to Khasab. It is no contest. I’m in my Range Rover Autobiography (2007 model, with a Terrain Response™ system designed for rough ground), and Ollie drives the bright-red Porsche Cayenne S that is his idea of a concession to family life. He zooms away almost immediately; from time to time, I catch sight of a pepper on a mountainside. Good luck to him. It is a joy merely to motor on this wonderfully engineered road, which curves between bare brown headlands and a blue bareness of open water, and whose rolled asphalt concrete is a kind of lushness. The road follows a dynamited zone of coastal mountain rock, and yet, as it has struck me again and again, my understanding never profiting from the repetition, this destroyed portion seems hardly different from the rest of the mountain, which itself seems to have been subjected to a vast natural blowing up. It is hard not to feel at one with the car advertisements as your vehicle adheres at speed to the surface of the earth, rushing through and over immense geophysical obstacles, then cresting at the pass, and then twisting down to a fjord so blue it seems technological. Who, a century ago, would even have dreamed of such transportation? We are practically in the realm of the incredible. Ollie sometimes urges me to rent something fast for the day – ideally another Porsche Cayenne S, to make a match of it – but I’ve never done that, chiefly because I don’t want to be in an actual race, which would be frightening and dangerous and reckless. So as not to spoil his fun, I maintain that my choice of vehicle is strategic. I tell him, Remember the tortoise and the hare.
More usually, Ollie and I meet up when my feet feel dry. When that happens, I drive over to his salon at the Unique Luxury Resort and Hotel on the off chance that he or one of his helpers will be able to fit me in. It would feel wrong to make an appointment.
The morning after the run-in with Mrs Ted Wilson, my feet felt very dry.
There’s more than one Unique. Ollie is based at the Unique on the Palm, and not the other, older Unique, which is in Jumeira. Driving along the Palm’s main thoroughfare, the Trunk, always makes me think of Ceauşescu’s Bucharest boulevards: visually coercive concrete apartment buildings that speak of broken Haussmannian dreams. A different gloom descends once I have passed through the tunnel and come to the west crescent, at the tip of which, near Logo Island, the Unique is situated. The west crescent consists mainly of the semi-abandoned construction sites of the Kingdom of Sheba and other failed waterside developments. One or two of the resorts give the appearance of functioning, but there is no getting around it: the drive is a downer. I cannot avoid recalling the automatic plenty of childhood, when a pail and a patch of beach sand are enough to summon us into life’s spell.
There is an important drawback to the Unique: I am known there by
