Jane drives to Umm Suqeim beach. Umm Suqeim: the mother of the sick. She has done the night shift all week at the American Hospital, willingly. And on Friday, the holy day in Dubai, she goes to the beach. She goes to Umm Suqeim beach because she thinks it’s funny being a nurse and taking the water cure at the mother-of-the-sick beach. It’s a quirky thing to do. Not that she is sick, not sick herself. As she steps from her dark-windowed car onto the bright street, she sheds the dim gentility of the working week and squints across the water at the pink, fairy-castle water park across the bay. Atlantis is its name. The sun sits high in the spotless sky. First she wanders past the magnolia mosque, a force for demure: She won’t swim there. Then she veers around the soap football, the beachvolleyball net and the canoes provided for free by the benevolent incumbent Sheikh. She imagines him looking through golden spyglasses at the cavorting weekend crowds from across the bay on his particular hummock of the World Islands. She has seen his poster a thousand times. He looks like a Thunderbirds character — something to do with the topiary precision of his beard, she thinks. Puppet rather than pinup, though most women think pinup. Anuptaphobes, all the girls she knows. Scared of being single. She has only just learned this word and likes the way it sounds. It doesn’t apply to Jane though. Jane is fine alone. The desert sun and the desert sand and the salty desert sea appeal to her antiseptic nature. Sterile, she’s here for the money. Nothing more. Finally, long past the kite surfers with their butterfly-colored profusion and past the last of the families who use the free parasols, she sits on a blue towel. Facing the sea, she crosses her legs and reads the paper, head bent to her chest, shading the print. The judge deems that the Ethiopian girl consented to sex. Consented. Consented to sex with her 56-year-old Lebanese boss. The Ethiopian girl gets a year in jail for sex outside marriage, though nothing for the false accusation of rape. Funny that, Jane thinks. She raises her eyes, though not her head, and looks through her lashes at the metallic blue. Feels the heat like an iron on her back. Finishes the page. Slowly, with one hand holding down the paper, she pulls off her T-shirt. She puts the T-shirt on top of the paper and wriggles out of her shorts. Pressure lifts off her along with the cloth. A different, pure, tendril–thin heat spreads through her. She arches her body, her chest, her heart over the paper now. A pool of shadow stretches over her knee. An Australian soldier gets six months for blasphemy. She doesn’t think she has ever met a rude Australian, though that beer advert and Crocodile Dundee have given them a reputation for coarseness. The Ethiopian girl and the Australian man will be deported after serving their sentences. Both were just passing through. Like her, here for the money. Waves. There are waves. Wind glues sand to her back. The metallic blue. She can’t hear the people on the beach. The odd muffled cry from a child, that’s all. She can only hear the gentle ebb and flow of the waves, a knife spreading butter on her morning toast, back and forth, back and forth. She folds the paper under her blue towel. Jane moves swiftly into the water. Made visible by moving, she hurries to the chaste coverlet of the sea. She swims in the glinting ink. From the wet and the cool she has a different view. She sees the cockroach claw of the Burj Al Arab and the sky-puncturing nib of the Burj Khalifa with the deaf beach in between. She floats, flotsam and jetsam, a little way out. She pushes her face into the water. The motion of the waves works on her like an analgesic. Underneath the sea-cloth, she smiles to herself. Funny. It’s like being deaf and dumb in the water. Different senses come into play. Watery, blurred, veiled senses. She thinks it would be okay to be a fish and be touched all over all the time. Clinging in the water. No deportation if you’re a fish, no blasphemy, no … rape? Is fish sex consensual? Always! She bursts up through the sea cloth, out into the air and laughs a laugh no one can hear. She decides fish life is altogether less incisive and turns her back on the open water, scanning the creatures on the beach. It’s windy. She thinks the wind drives sense away. Already the salt dries fast to her cheek — astringent, clean. She bobs around in front of the cleaver-cut shoreline, hypnotized in the swell, lightly slapped awake, slapped asleep, here not there, there not here, not here in her usual concrete, hard-edged sun-burning world. All movement, all swaying, all throwing, being thrown, giving in to the water, the sun, the sand and the lull, the lull, the lull, the nothingness of she. Two women come onto the beach, both in chador. Flapping black water birds. The wind is up, and their abayas swirl about them like flailing black wings. They come right up to the water’s edge and stare at the sea. Jane fancies she can see their breathing slow. The wind flaps the folds of their abayas about their legs. The women contain a sculpted stillness: statues on a beach. Funny that, she thinks, beach statues. Jane treads the water like she’s walking up a hill. One of the women lifts a hand up to her neck and pulls the edge of her abaya from her shoulder. In one slow, superb, expansive gesture, like a serving girl gesturing to the buffet, she opens wide the cloth and stands holding her body out for the sea to see. Underneath her abaya, she is wearing blue jeans and a sparkly purple top. Her friend remains still, lost in her own sea dream. The woman stands receiving the sea breeze, the surging sun and the silvery blue like the gods they are, like love. Jane holds her breath all the while, thinking, Am I under the sea; am I in Atlantis? Should I breathe? The beach is a public space that people treat as private. Even here, she thinks. The seashore makes people think everyone else is blind, that no one can see, or if they can see that they are watching TV, watching tales that have nothing to do with them, that are irrelevant, unreal. The screen of the sea and the blanking sun shut everyone out. In the open, shut. Intimate. Something catches Jane’s eye. To the right, farther around the sand slice approaching the Burj Al Arab, a dark man, a Dravidian, a Sri Lankan maybe, wades through to the top of the dry sand, atop the minute precipice carved out by each repeating wave. He is wearing white cotton trousers and a beige button-up shirt, and she can see even from there the shiny dark curls of his hair. He too has a remote look on his face and appears to be staring over at Atlantis … or into the secret undersea city from which it steals its name. He stands feet apart, chest out, head high, eyes half-closed. She thinks the pose is universal, the abaya woman and him standing in the same way, a mix of pride and entreaty, protest even. Deserts, just deserts. Want. She can see even from the water that he is darkly lovely, which is why she is surprised to see his long hand slip inside his trouser top and his right leg start to jiggle. They are not usually the bold and the beautiful, the onanists. She has to ditch the cliché, though, the sad, ugly loser image of the public-indecency crew. This one has a desperate, brave beauty about him, unexpected and extreme. Abashed, Jane turns her head back toward the abaya women, wondering whether the man is aware of her out there in the sea, seeing. The women have not moved, the one holding her abaya wide and the other averting her gaze, like permission. And then they come, the white wives, springing suddenly into action. She sees them as they run bending low in the sinking sand, lurching along behind the abaya statues. They come upon him like the two mountain woman in the Picasso beach paintings. They come upon him apace. At first he does not respond, as if he does not understand that they can have seen him. How strange it must be for him to have these all-but-naked leguminous women of a certain age (an age at which they should finally dispense with the two-piece) running toward him, cursing him and sending him away. The white wives point to the back of the beach to the road, showing him how to go away, as if they think him an idiot as well. Criticism is so often theatrical, Jane thinks. Their gestures make the private public, make the fat white women distinct from him, the freak. Jane looks away as the man turns to leave, and she sees the abaya woman slowly folding herself away. Jane stands a moment to catch her breath before turning back toward the mosque, and in that moment, she thinks a true, sure thought for a change, with all the pain that thought restrains. She wishes there was someone she could tell. She thinks that where the sand meets the sea, there is a cleaver cut of freedom, a fissure of transgression in the cloistered desert world; that in the desert, all the crushing weight of space is what takes our breath away. But, she thinks, that cleaver cut of freedom, running thin between the sandy shore and the salted sea, that tear in the closet world, just keeps on repeating with each successive wave, “I will not be contained; I will not be shut in; I will not, no; I will spill over; I will enjoy; I will receive; I will; I will; I will.”
[Set at Umm Suqeim Beach, Jumeirah, Dubai]
Water Cure was originally published by A Tale of Four Cities in October 2011.