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 a false name. The (Assamese? Nepalese?) parking valets have no real interest in who I might be. Not so the pair of jolly, extraordinarily tall, and splendidly robed Nubian greeters whom all visitors must pass on their way into the hotel. (By ‘Nubian’ I am not making an informed reference to the ancient or modern people of the Nile, about whom I am ignorant. I am thinking of the Nubian in Gladiator, a very black good giant gladiator who is Russell Crowe’s trusted friend in enslavement. Both greeters look like that Nubian.) I have never spoken to either of these gentlemen, and yet every time they see me they very loudly and gladly shout, ‘Good day, Mr Pardew!’ They have not gone mad. Mr G. Pardew is how, in a panic, I once identified myself to the front desk when presenting myself as a visitor of one of the female hotel guests.
I pulled into the hotel entranceway at the same time as a Maserati GranTurismo. I recognized the car. Its driver and his beautiful blonde female consort were paid to go from hotel to hotel in order to make an impression on tourists. I knew what would happen next: the Nubians would give their full attention to the performance of opening the doors of the Maserati GranTurismo. So it proved. I took the opportunity to sneak by unseen.
‘Good day, Mr Pardew!’ the Nubians called out.
I stormed past the front desk with a highly preoccupied air. ‘Good morning, Mr Godfrey,’ a receptionist said. I gave her an austere little bow of the head. This gesture was borrowed from and, I’d like to think, was a homage to the actual Godfrey Pardew, the octogenarian wills and trusts specialist who is my former mentor and remains the most senior partner at my old law firm and is the most correct, respectable, discreet and altogether old-school person I have ever met. In my assessment, he would rather disembowel himself than show his face at the Unique Luxury Resort and Hotel. I hasten to add that I would never try to pass myself off as Godfrey Pardew, Esq., of New York, New York, or any other actual G. Pardew. That would be wrong. G. Pardew is merely my Unique name.
I once tried to tell Ollie about this, but he raised a hand and said, ‘I know nothing about Pardew. Nothing.’ He knew, all right, but of course he didn’t know, because what G. Pardew gets up to at the Unique is formally illegal. Of course, everybody knows that the Dubai authorities give sexual contractors a nod and a nose-tap and a say-no-more.
I walked past the Fountain of Ishtar and into the Hanging Gardens. The Unique has a Babylonian theme. What this imports, I do not know. My familiarity with Babylonian matters pretty much begins and ends with the words ‘Ishtar’, ‘Hanging Gardens’ and ‘Nebuchadnezzar’, this last item coming to me thanks to the (indoor swimming) Pool of Nebuchadnezzar, which one passes on the way down to the Unique Spa & Hammam. Here the Mesopotamian fantasia relents somewhat, although it may well be that high-net-worth Babylonians had light-flooded soaking pools and twelve-foot-long towels and whispering attendants dressed in white nursing uniforms.
I walked in – and there, in conversation with a technician, was Ollie! Hooray! ‘Well, well, well,’ Ollie said. ‘Need a foot up?’ This question is his catchphrase, and I will never tire of hearing it. It invariably prefaces half an hour or more during which I’ll sit back and receive ministrations, and Ollie will tell me about his globetrotting adventures and fill me in on local excitements. He is extremely well informed, being the confidant of scores of Dubaian ladies. I am a little sick of tittle-tattle, and almost as sick of only-in-Dubai stories – the lion cub somebody spotted in a neighbour’s garden, the guy deported for flipping somebody the finger in traffic, the tipsy girl at the Oil Barons’ Golf Tournament who couldn’t get a taxi home and drove down Sheikh Zayed Road in a golf cart. But what else are we to talk about? Dubai is where we are.
I don’t feel too bad about imposing on Ollie. This is completely to his credit. He always makes me feel that my turning up and putting a large male foot on his lap is the greatest thing that could happen to him. He won’t accept a single dirham from me, which makes me uneasy until I remember that a sine qua non of real friendship is a happy freedom from cost-benefit considerations. That said, I don’t think I should completely banish from my mind the fact that I played a role in Ollie’s success, namely bringing him the corns and chronically ingrowing toenails of Sandro Batros. The introduction had such a triumphant outcome that Sandro would not stop boasting that he had discovered the world’s number-one foot guy, which led to Ollie being picked up by Fabulosity, which led to Ollie developing a worldwide client roster of luxurious multimillionaires. The rest is chiropodial history.
Sandro – I’m not one to attach importance to