A patch of flat, scorched earth wedged between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait turns east like a falcon’s head to shriek at the Gulf.
In those days, Fintas public beach was a kilometre strip of soft, bright sand, two miles north of the Al Ahmadi oil refinery.
Locals rarely came to frolic and bathe. Nick supposed it was the heat, or because they were Muslim. But sometimes, early evenings, Bedouin families came to picnic in their SUVs.
Nick watched from his window as they parked nose-down on the shoreline. When he looked again, there was only the tide, snarling through tyre tracks, gathering scraps and offerings for its insatiable mother.
Petroleum engineers, doctors and nurses from the English Hospital, fresh-faced teachers from the international schools, frequented private beach clubs on the corniche in Salmiya, north at Egaila, south at the Mangaf Hilton.
Fintas Beach was Nick’s own backyard.
Its diesel tang and briny cadence hushed his doubts and questions. In the early hours without the drone of AC, Nick strained to hear its moonlit sibilance. On the drive to work, in the chill of the office, the insolence of the classroom, he turned the modest sandbanks into towering dunes. The milky tide swelled into punishing waves, vaulting the seawall, rolling cars against minarets, sweeping through the aisles of the local Co-op. Sometimes, Nick allowed himself a role in these workday daydreams, performing heroic feats of rescue, washed up on an unmapped island with four grateful virgins from the local tribes.
An hour before work, six weeks into his contract, Nick stepped out in his running gear and crossed Salem Sabah Al Salem Al Sabah Street.
Sun flared overhead. Nick jogged his fifty metres from the boat ramp to the promontory. The wind singed his nostrils. Drivers beeped and flashed, never tiring of the spectacle. After thirty minutes, blinking sweat, Nick sat with his palms in the boiling sand. Low tide exposed the rump of the scabrous seabed. Squinting south, he watched the oil jetties, loading arms and glistening pipelines. Tankers vanished and appeared on the motion of his breathing. Left, on the slime-caked pier, a man like a brushstroke casting a fishing line. The wind whipped and snapped the folds of his dishdasha.
Things were looking up. Frank, a departing German, had sold Nick a bucket of home-made wine, his face mask and snorkel, and a pair of size 10 reef shoes. After work that afternoon, Nick would take his first swim, neck a glass or two of German Zuckerwasser, and eat joojeh kebabs from the Iranian. If he could stick out a year, he’d make enough tax-free to study Spanish at Havana University. If he decided to bail, there was always Girona. His pal had landed a gig teaching air hostesses. He had a flat overlooking the Onyar.
Nick had left his girlfriend, Inès, in Lille. As his French improved, she seemed less exotic. As a parting gift, she’d given him a copy of The Tartar Steppe and warned, “The desert does strange things to people.”
In his first week, Seamus Fitt, Head of English, had delivered Nick’s induction. A foul-mouthed Irishman with a whisky bloom, Seamus paid the young office chai wallahs to do his household chores and openly boasted of doing unspeakable things to them. Getting on, he told Nick, was fundamental to seeing out one’s contract. Young men like him needed time to bed in. Those willing to adapt generally did well. Some stayed a second year. Imagine how much tax-free he could bank? Getting on made life easier. His team all pulled together. Swallowing back petty discomforts.
Pausing as he spoke, the Head of English pinched a tissue from a box, rolled it into a ball and popped it in his mouth. After chomping it a while, he spat the wad into his hand, and made a stack on his desk.
The next day, his right-hand man, Hossain, an Egyptian wrestler with a Groucho Marx moustache, leaned over Nick’s desk, the fur on his hands swishing in the office AC.
“Class C4 students have complained, Mr Nick. Did you make them work?”
“Should I let them sleep and play?”
“We must adapt to their learning style.”
“And when Major Saad comes to inspect?”
“The cadets will post a lookout,” Hossain said.
“They’ll fail the end-of-course exams.”
“The pass rate is a hundred per cent!”
Two Bangladeshi wallahs in lilac overalls tilted a giant silver urn, pouring scalding tea into Nick’s mug, sweetened with condensed milk.
Hossain retreated.
Clive was next to approach.
Squeezing Nick’s shoulders, he whispered, “Don’t let the Gypo boss you around.”
Nick detached himself from Clive’s grip and fled the office.
Down the corridor, through idling youths in desert fatigues, out to the car park. Savouring the heat. Relieved he hadn’t sworn at Hossein or slammed Clive’s head off a desk. Keep Clive onside. Clive drives the Mazda. Without a car, it would mean taxis to work. Taxis to the bank and the supermarket. The cost was prohibitive. The drivers were lunatics.
Their employer granted Clive a monthly stipend, enough to hire an SUV, on the condition that he transported colleagues to and from the base. Clive, a chain-smoker, hired a Mazda 626 and spent the difference on Gitanes.
A short, wiry fifty-year-old with matted grey hair and yellow eyeballs, Clive twitched like a predator and laughed like a jackal. In week five, he took Nick to see Mr Hadid.
Salaries were late. Rumours swirled among the teaching staff. Clive swore and shouted at the Lebanese accountant. Mr Hadid grinned through clenched teeth, assuring them, with many inshallahs, they would be paid on Tuesday the following week. The sixth full week of Nick’s contract.
Tuesday came. Nick hopped the crumbling wall after his morning run, crossing to his apartment block. Pink stucco, owned by Stavros, the maudlin Greek with the botched hair transplant.
The Greek’s illusions bled into his marketing. The ‘ground floor pool’ turned out to be a baize table with six pockets. The ‘rooftop cinema’ was a DVD player in the pump room.
Nick showered and went down to wait with the others. The base was a 40-minute drive. Nick was part of a team of British expats hired to teach English to Kuwaiti military cadets. Six hours a day, Sunday to Thursday.
Just a few miles north, seven years before the Second Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was still in power. These gallant cadets formed Kuwait’s first line of defence. Right behind the US Army.
Every morning, Nick greeted his empty classroom with As-salam Aleikum, then sat to read a paperback tucked inside his register.
The cadets swarmed in like locusts on a desert shamal – from their Land Cruisers, Patrols, Tahoes, Mercedes, Corvettes, and Cadillacs.
A sergeant corralled them into classrooms. Teachers called registers. Cadets made pillows of their books, stirring only to check their pagers, to scribble and receive little notes, flip through comics or car magazines, draw crude symbols in their notebooks, or engage in erotic wrestling matches.
Major Saad, the base commander, dropped by Nick’s classroom twice a week. Saad, overlooked for promotion due to some tribal infraction, barked out commands in Arabic and English. Bursting through the door, he’d crack the nearest desk with his brass-tipped swagger stick. Forewarned of his arrival, Nick’s students would snap to attention.
“Any problems, Mr Nick?”
“All good here, Major Saad.”
On this particular Tuesday, halfway through the afternoon lesson, Nick heard shouts and car horns through the open window.
The parking lot was a rainbow of overalls. Cleaners and maintenance men, cooks, mechanics and Egyptians. Hossain, among them, hitching up his pants.
In the corner by the gate, his face streaming with sweat, Mr Hadid, the accountant, stood in the back of a pickup, slinging out envelopes.
Nick crawled between legs to rescue his paycheck.
After work, Clive drove them to the bank.
His snake eyes found Nick in the rear-view.
“Are you busy this afternoon?”
“I’m going for a swim.”
“I thought we could drive to see the dunes in Al-Liyah.”
“I’m trying out my snorkel.”
Clive chewed on his toothpick.
Jake ranted in the passenger seat. “That thing with our pay was a fucking disgrace!”
Jake had a squashed ruddy face and a taste for underage girls.
“Anyone up for doing a runner? Nick? Derek?”
Derek sobbed into his hands.
4:15 p.m. Asr prayer screamed from the minaret. Nick carried his beach bag across Salem Sabah Al Salem Al Sabah Street.
The Gulf glistened like molten lead. The temperature had dropped to 43 degrees. Nick didn’t strip. He’d been warned about that. He inhaled the air like powdered glass. Dredging saliva around his mouth, he caught a waft of Gitanes.
Descending from the boulders of the promontory, Clive joined the beach on his afternoon stroll.
Shirt opened to his paunch, round like a beachball. Tiny turquoise skin-tight shorts. Dodging shoreline sludge in cheap espadrilles.
Nick pulled on the reef shoes he’d bought from the German. Rubbing spit around the glass, he rinsed his mask and snorkel and waded quickly over the calloused seabed, rocks toothless beneath his rubber soles.
Beyond the tip of the broken pier, the seabed dropped. Treading water, Nick fitted his mask and bit the mouthpiece. Launching soft, lazy strokes, his head crested the waves. Plunging into silence. A fishless desert. Sun savaging his neck. Bright pools of light dancing on the seabed.
Surfacing, Nick slipped back the mask and looked towards the shore. Clive was standing by his things.
Nick burst into a crawl. His arms smacked the water.
Clive was a speck. Nick slowed to a breaststroke.
A small round pebble bobbed just ahead. He lifted his chin. Two more, then two dozen. Sea-sculpted turds, dancing by his face. The surrounding sea a green-grey slick.
Nick yelled, kicking back. He choked and flailed, losing his snorkel. Thrashing for the shore, plunging then wading, he clawed wet sand.
Clive’s white knees sank into the foam.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
