Short Stories (single Author)
from "Fridays by the Pool in Khalidiyah"
Once, in the first year after she and Firaj moved to Abu Dhabi, to a compound in Al Mushrif, she'd heard screams coming from the villa next door, then an hour later an ambulance pulling into the shared drive. They had only a passing acquaintance with the neighbours, a couple from Belgium (a bit stuffy, but pleasant enough) and the two Filipinas who worked for them.
"I don't understand," she'd told Firaj. "What could they possibly need two maids for? They don't even have kids." And Firaj had explained that most likely one did the shopping and cooking, the other took care of the house. "Polishing the silver, who knows?" he'd said. "You'll never get this, will you? When money is no object, people don't have to do anything they don't feel inclined to do." His own mother in a suburb of Amman still employed a live-in maid, though she was a widow with no grandchildren.
Angie didn't know the maids' names, just raised her hand in greeting when she saw them. One had a sweet smile; the other only bobbed her head. The smiley maid seemed to be gone, Angie noticed about a week after the ambulance. She'd been the one who usually went out with the Belgian woman to help with the shopping. Now it was the other one who unloaded the plastic bags from the back of the SUV.
One afternoon when Angie was leaving to pick up their mail at the post office, she found the maid standing next to her car. "Please," she said, looking around. "Please." The woman looked so desperate, Angie coaxed her into the car.
"I need phone," said the woman. She wasn't especially young, Angie saw now. "I am Inez." The other maid was in the hospital, she said. The man had thrown her against a wall, then knocked her to the kitchen floor when she'd refused to give him a massage. There was blood. The man had finally called an ambulance. But now there were other problems, said Inez. The couple had taken away her mobile phone, afraid she might tell someone what had happened. Madame was yelling all the time and the man was now looking at her. "You know?" She kept turning around to look down the street as she spoke. Madame was due home any minute from a luncheon, she told Angie. "Today I wait for you. You always wave."
If the phone got traced back to Angie, she'd have to deal with the couple. There could be legalities, complications. She might get Firaj into trouble. Then she noticed Inez's hands, chapped, scabbed, scarlet. It hurt to look at them. She opened her purse, rummaged for her phone, handed it over. But the charger. She'd have to run inside for the charger. A bronze Land Rover appeared in the rearview mirror.
When the Belgian woman climbed down from her SUV a minute later, head bent into her mobile, she waved to Angie, who watched as Inez, standing on the curb as if she'd been waiting all this time for Madame to return, took the Paris Gallery bag she was handed. Inez did not look back, but Angie had seen her slip the phone into her uniform pocket as she sprang from the car.
For the next few days, Angie called her mobile. No one answered, no one returned the calls. She told Firaj, in minimal detail, what had happened. He wasn't impressed. "You've got to be more discreet. Who knows who these people are connected to? Remember that we are guests in this country. And even though we are the majority and Emiratis amount to...what? barely 15 percent of the population...it's their party."
I know what Phil means, Gran ventures. "There's just something about it..." She explains that it wasn't until she realised just how much enjoyment Cecil got from planning and keeping busy that she was able to give the go-ahead on her place.
There's something about this little speech of hers, the helpless flutter of her hands, that reminds Phil of when they first arrived, his mother's lapse into embarrassment when enumerating all the changes. She hadn't wanted such an extensive overhaul, he would bet on it. Cecil had had his way. There's no question the man has money and skills, but it seems to Phil that this self-proclaimed man of action is about as adrift as anyone could be.
Vera -- enunciating each word carefully -- tells Cecil that she thinks it's just marvellous that some men are so productive. She describes her house, the crazy layout, ramshackle porch, the outdated plumbing, tells him the place could sure use some TLC. "But couldn't we all?" she giggles, whisking her hair back from her flushed and glowing face. It's hard to believe she's the same person Phil brought to Gran's.
Cecil asks her if the wall between the dining room and living room is a load-bearing wall, and when she shrugs he says, "Phil, is the wall..."
"Oh, he wouldn't know," she tells him, laughing.
Phil studies Gran's ceiling, the broad swirls in the plaster that, he supposes, his wife and daughter will want on their own living room ceiling. "None of this is for sure yet," he says, but Vera's enthusiasm isn't at all deflated, such is her faith in Cecil.
"You'll have to excuse me for a bit," Gran says rising. "I'm just going to go and get a head start on dinner."
Behind closed eyes, Phil climbs the tree of his childhood, looks across to the far shore, the real world where he's lived all these many years. Along the bank, alligators bask in the sun. One of them smiles at him and slides into the shadows. He lets his mind drift south to Cecil's wife in Vermont, a woman dead to her husband's whereabouts -- unless she's lying there fully conscious of the wreckage that is her life. From the woman's bedside, Phil hears Vera drumming her nails on the sofa arm. "This is what he does," she says to Cecil. "Even with things really looking up for a change, he sleeps. ...Phil, Phil, are you with us? See what I mean? He's drifted off to fantasy land again. My god, the ideas he comes up with for employment! An animal bed and breakfast, for Christsake. All of them just...castles in the air."
