SHAIKH-DOWN: Sodom and Gomorrah

Cass McBride has fled her faithless husband in London and gone to live with her brother Ernest on the island of Belaj. Ernest edits the local English-language newspaper. Cass is having an affair with Mike Howard, a civil engineer.

Eddy Lawrence has been sent to Belaj to introduce the National Bank's staff to computerization.

Helga is Ernest's Doberman. Sadie is a mongrel rescued from a date plantation. (I say at the beginning: "This is a novel. Only the dogs are real." This is true!)

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Helga was enjoying her master’s absence. Cass was taking her for increasingly long morning walks in the sand-dunes behind the Pakistani shantytown. With Helga bounding ahead of her Cass never felt uneasy on the edge of the desert. She hadn’t walked so much since her girlhood in the Highlands.

On Monday afternoon, bored and restless and not looking forward to another cheap date with Mike Howard, she went out again on her own and wandered through what was left of Old Belaj between Seven-Up and the seafront Corniche. Many of the shops and houses in the narrow streets of the old souk were boarded up, awaiting demolition. Cass would have liked there to be copper-beaters and carpet-dyers, such as Ernest had seen in the bazaars of Iran and Turkey and Egypt; in the air-conditioned Al-Khazi New Souk and the Bahzoomi Shopping Center you could buy pots and pans and carpets but you couldn’t see them being made.

Temperatures now, nearly mid-October, were lower than they’d been a month ago. Nevertheless she ended up at the airport roundabout on the Corniche feeling hot, tired and footsore. She decided to treat herself to a taxi home. She only had to pause and one tooted and slewed over to her corner of the roundabout. A large Arab grinned at her across the front seat.

‘Taxi, lady? You go to Bahzoomi New-New?’

‘You know where I live?’ she said, astonished.

‘I know your husband.’

Cass smiled. ‘I bet you don’t.’

‘I bet I do. Your husband English paper man.’

She took a moment to work this out. Smiling, she shook her head. ‘You lose the bet. That’s my brother.’

‘They tell me wrong,’ Suleiman said darkly. ‘Where husband?’

‘England.’

‘Not come Belaj?’

‘Not come,’ Cass confirmed, enjoying writing Aaron off in two words of pidgin English. She climbed into the rear of the taxi. During the short ride back to Brookside she pretended not to notice that the driver was grinning at her reflection in the windscreen mirror.

Outside Ernest’s he tried not to take any money for the fare. Cass insisted.

‘Please, I need hammam,’ Suleiman said, turning off the ignition.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Bathroom.’

‘Oh. Well - you’d better come in.’ She was aware that this might be unwise, with Ernest away, but she was also aware of Helga’s frightening presence.

Suleiman was not bothered by Helga. ‘Beautiful dog,’ he exclaimed. ‘Good for guarding.’ He knelt down awkwardly in the hall. Helga gave him a cautious sniff, licked his hand tentatively and promptly rolled over onto her back. ‘Very nice girl,’ he said, rubbing her chest. Helga rumbled.

Cass pointed him to the loo off the hall, went into her bedroom, peeled off her perspiration-stained dress and put on a billowing kaftan. She rinsed her face in her own bathroom and brushed her hair but did not re-do her make-up. Back in the hall Suleiman was again rubbing Helga’s compliant chest.

‘You Arab lady,’ he said, pointing at the kaftan.

Cass smiled. ‘Would you like something to drink?’ she heard herself say.

‘Please, only water.’

‘You don’t like beer? Whisky?’

‘I like but only after work is finished.’ He followed her into the kitchen, then back to the hall, then into the lounge. Helga sprawled below one of the air-conditioners.

‘Paper man not here?’ Suleiman asked.

Cass set the glasses down on the coffee table. ‘He’s gone to Abu Dhabi,’ she said, aware that this too was a reckless admission.

With an audible crack Suleiman fell onto his knees on the Iranian carpet and clasped one of her hands, like a suitor in a Victorian comedy. ‘Beautiful lady,’ he declaimed; ‘very nice girl.’

Cass struggled to keep a straight face, thinking that she and Helga would be able to compare notes on him afterwards. However, she was not about to lie down and gurgle with delight while he rubbed her chest.

And yet this is precisely what she did!

Somehow - the early stages passed in a blur - he got her out of the kaftan and her panties and himself out of his dishdasha and the comical cotton long-johns that constituted his only undergarment. Although his robe had acquired stains from a day’s driving, his body was clean and smelt, faintly, of an expensive cologne. He was very hairy and not so much fat as hefty, with a barrel chest as well as a big stomach and tree-trunk thighs. Mike Howard had led Cass to think that Aaron was exceptionally well endowed, but what soared from a veritable thicket of hair at the top of Suleiman’s thighs made her realise that this was not the case. He was circumcised and an intimidating sight, naked and hairy. Cass trembled.

As a lover Suleiman was as good as Aaron had been (better even) in the days before he started concentrating his expertise on his girlfriends. Where Mike Howard pawed at her breasts with his takeaway-stained hands, Suleiman used his mouth, as delicately as an insect’s wings, then a sudden exquisite bite here - and here - before the insect wings returned. Where Mike Howard forced her legs apart with his knees, Suleiman caressed her with his hands until she fell open to him of her own accord.

He was careful to keep his weight from crushing her but he knew just how - and where - to press so that her first shuddering orgasm since she couldn’t remember when provided the lubrication needed to accommodate him, and he brought her slowly and almost effortlessly to a second and then a third climax before attempting to consider his own pleasure.

After he left she put off bathing and returned with a glass of lemonade to lie on her bed, which smelt of sex and of Suleiman’s cologne. An Arab taxi-driver, she said to herself and tried to sound disapproving. What am I coming to? And, after 27 years with one man, her second lover in less than a month!

Belaj was beginning to feel like Sodom and Gomorrah.

* * *

Eddy’s fourth night in Lulu Road yawned emptily. If Belaj was starting to feel like home, it was also beginning to feel very frustrating. Perhaps Ahmed could be prevailed on to put one of his catamite ladies Eddy’s way. In desperation he even thought of phoning the taxi-driver Suleiman and taking him up on one or other of his offers.

After an evening of fitful reading and listening to music while he drank his way through a bottle of Bulgarian red Eddy opted for an early night. He took Sadie for a last ‘walkies’ along Lulu Road. She disgraced him by squatting to pee on a corner of the blanket that sheltered a sleeping Asian on the sandy pavement beneath a shop awning; fortunately he did not wake up.

Having fallen quickly asleep, Eddy awoke an unknown time later in a lather of perspiration. The sheets felt like used bath towels. Had he started a fever? Except for Sadie, slithering around after a shoe or a cockroach under the bed, there was silence.

Something was wrong: what? He reached out to turn on the light and look at the time. No light. The silence - and his night-sweat - was from the shutting-down of the air-conditioner.

A power cut.

He lay there for a few minutes. After the accustomed bacground roar of the a/c the quiet was disconcerting. Perspiration began to sting his eyes. Cursing his lack of foresight - no candles, no torch - he got up and groped his way to the living room and, naked, onto the verandah. Sadie padded softly along behind him.

The humidity outside was the same as inside. There was starlight but no moon. Lulu Road was dark and deserted, although street lights shimmered on the Outer Ring Road three short blocks away.

He blundered into the bathroom. The shower emitted a few drops, then gurgled to a stop; the roof tanks, fed by an electric pump, must be empty. He made his way back to the bedroom, opened the curtains to let in a glimmer of starlight and located a pair of shorts, sandals and his glasses.

The car keys were on the telephone table in the hall but he couldn’t find Sadie’s lead. He carried her and a bath towel down to the car where they basked in air-conditioning. The dashboard clock showed that it was almost one o’clock.

After ten minutes the street was still in darkness and the temperature gauge threatened overheating. He drove off. The Ring Road, fully lit, was not teeming with fugitives from the power cut, so presumably not many areas were affected.

Surprised to find the entrance gates open, he turned into Zam-Zam Gardens, a landscaped oasis named after the sacred well within the precincts of the Grand Mosque at Mecca; Cass had brought him here to exercise Helga and practice his reversing in the car park. A few cars were parked around the spring-water pool at the centre of the oasis, dimly illuminated by overhead globes clouded with flying insects; Eddy stopped beside a yellow Pontiac. Sadie scampered across the concrete surround and tried unsuccessfully to reach the water with her tongue.

The pool was circular, about sixty feet in diameter, ten or twelve feet deep and crystal clear. The sediment at the bottom stirred sluggishly where the spring was fed from an underground source that originated in the mainland mountains. A parapet-less bridge crossed the run-off which became the stream irrigating the rest of the oasis.

Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour a dozen or so young Arabs were in and around the pool. The only European, Eddy felt self-conscious but although the air was less humid here, the water was irresistible; he laid his glasses on the bonnet of the car and lowered himself slowly into the pool. The cold was shocking but delicious. After a single dunking he hung on the side. Sadie approached cautiously and licked the water off his face.

Most of the Belajis were giving him - or Sadie - a wide berth but one youth of seventeen or eighteen swam over and clung to the wall near Eddy. He had a mop of Afro-styled black hair and the usual array of large white teeth. He held out a hand to Sadie and laughed when she licked the moisture off it.

‘What name this?’

‘Sadie.’

‘Say-dee.’ His teeth gleamed as he spoke. ‘He swim?’

‘She. I don’t know. Maybe. Insh’Allah.’

He smiled at Eddy’s ‘insh’Allah’, picked Sadie up and let her gently down into the water. She tried vainly to scramble up the rim, then turned and doggy-paddled not to Eddy but to the Belaji youth and started to climb onto his shoulders.

Laughing, he sank into the water until he was submerged to eye level. A bubble burst in his face as if he was laughing underwater. Sadie scrabbled into the great bush of his hair and held on grimly as he slowly swam out to the middle. Some younger boys who had swum nearer to investigate rapidly retreated.

He swam back. Eddy decided Sadie had had enough excitement, plucked her out of the boy’s hair and deposited her on terra firma. She shook herself vigorously and then lapped at the puddle she had made. Mimicking her, the boy shook his head, showering Eddy. For a moment, as his hair, releasing water, sprang out again, his head was encircled with glittering rainbow drops.

He gave Eddy another big grin, checked that the other boys had lost interest in them, then suddenly dived down and pulled Eddy’s shorts off. Holding them underwater out of sight he swam to the middle of the pool again where he lay on his back facing Eddy, legs apart, grinning broadly.

Treading water to keep his buoyancy, back to the wall, Eddy watched him. His body was lithe and muscular, olive-skinned, not quite hairless; his scarlet trunks bulged. He turned over, sank like a stone and swam back underwater.

As he approached Eddy could see that his eyes were open. He breathed out through his mouth, revealing again the great white predator’s teeth; a bubble of air rippled up Eddy’s body.

Holding on to Eddy’s waist, he did something Eddy had never realised to be possible underwater; the sensation was exquisite, Eddy’s release almost instantaneous. Deftly the boy slipped Eddy’s shorts back on and surfaced beside him. Despite the time he had spent submerged he was not breathless. There was no reaction from the boys in the water or on the poolside; evidently they had seen nothing. He shook his head. More rainbows.

He gestured at the Honda. ‘This your car?’

‘Yes.’

He pointed to the car beyond the yellow Pontiac, a black BMW with smoked windows. ‘This mine,’ he said. Eddy nodded.

‘I see you before,’ the boy said. ‘You buy car my friend. He gone now. Him name David.’

‘My name Eddy.’

Under the water he took Eddy’s hand and guided it to the scarlet trunks. ‘Eddy,’ he said, his eyes on Eddy’s: ‘Say-dee and Ed-dee,’ drawing out both names. The big brown eyes widened and he gave a quick gasp.

‘Your name?’ But Eddy knew it before he spoke.

Felix ffrench had been at least half right. Pronounced by its owner, it sounded like ‘Rashid Fuck-Me’.

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David Gee