Chapter 10: Come on Saudi, Let’s Go Party

I woke up around eight in the morning, an hour later than I’m used to. I walked to the other side of the house, to Asim’s bedroom, and heard snoring. That was good. I had a quick yet annoying shower and took some time to spruce myself up. I’m not one of those men who are completely hopeless when they’re single, but what with Mel being a professional make-up artist and hairstylist, amongst many other talents, I rarely needed to groom myself nowadays. But now I was spending time shaving around the beard, plucking hairs from where they didn’t belong (such as the tip of my ears, like I’m some damned Norwegian forest cat or something) and generally preening like a peacock. I unpacked another suitcase, just to find a better pair of socks and my bottle of Miracle Shoe Shine. The role of a butler seemed essential here. Butlers can go anywhere they like, because people don’t pay attention. Business advisors generally don’t hang around kitchens or bother finding out who sits where at dinner parties, but I was pretty sure I’d need to be able to move behind the scenes to find out what I was looking for. And so I went into the kitchen, prepared breakfast for Asim, put on my white gloves and knocked on his bedroom door.

I had to knock four times before he answered, in Arabic. I took that as permission to enter and stepped into the room. He was still in bed, clearly not entirely awake.

“Good morning, Your Royal Highness! I trust you slept well? I took it upon myself to prepare breakfast.”

He sat up and looked at me bleary-eyed.

“What? Whuh? What time is it?”

“It is ten minutes to nine, Your Royal Highness. And may I add: Eid Mubarak!”

“Carstairs ... Go away.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“GO AWAY! I don’t wake up before ten o’clock!”

“But surely you awoke for the Fajr prayer?”

I had briefly woken up because of it, as you’re never outside hearing distance of a mosque in Riyadh, but the call only took about five minutes and I was back asleep before the end of it.

“No! I have earplugs.”

He pointed at his bedside table. Two yellow, crumpled up plugs lay on a paper tissue.

“I see. Well, my apologies for this interruption, Your Royal Highness. Please call or text me if you require my services,” I said, backing out of the room with the tray. He sighed.

“I’m not going to fall asleep now. You can give me that. I’m sorry, it’s early for me.”

“Let me assist you, Your Royal Highness,” I said, and placed the tray on a narrow desk under one of the windows. Then I went to the bed and fluffed up a pillow, which I placed behind his back. He noticed the gloves.

“Did you do this for Mrs. Keller?” he asked, still somewhat stunned.

“Only rarely. It is pretty difficult to rise before she does. I would usually find her fully dressed and at work behind her laptop. Now, breakfast is as instructed, but I took the liberty of also providing some yoghurt.”

“Ungh ... You talk a lot, Carstairs. Not good. Not yet.”

“Understood, Your Royal Highness. Enjoy.”

He didn’t know it, but people have reached out to Keller & Fox to ask what I would charge to bring their favourite aunt/uncle/nephew/grandmother etc. breakfast in bed as Carstairs. I have always refused, but sometimes the request came with a financial proposal: ten thousand pounds under the table was the highest offer so far. I was filming in the Czech Republic at the time, but don’t think I didn’t consider it, at least for a minute or so. And this lucky bastard just got it for free and sent me away!

I had my own breakfast whilst listening to Radio 4 on my iPad in the kitchen. The cold fluorescent light was off and warm morning sunlight flooded the ... Okay, it was still an abattoir. Or maybe a dental surgery after the bailiffs had been in to collect all the equipment. Still, the smell of coffee helped a lot and I’d spruce up the place using tricks I learned from Mel. If this was to be my domain, it’d have to be a bit nicer. At least there was plenty of work space: the worktop ran all around the room. Maybe I’d bring in a kitchen table and some chairs. Fresh flowers. Start the day with a fresh loaf, more for myself than Asim. It would be fine. Maybe I could email a picture to Melody and ask for sugg ... Oh, wait. I couldn’t do that. Damn. And stop thinking about home, you imbecile.

I had a look at the hot water boiler, which was powered by electricity. There was a gas hob, but the house wasn’t connected to a gas line. Instead, a bottle of liquid gas stood in a narrow alley between the back of the house and the wall around the property. This is a common arrangement in many countries, but in The Netherlands all houses are on the gas grid. We found a huge deposit of gas in the fifties, you see. That’s why the sight of this bottle unnerved me. Who’d have a bomb under their kitchen window? What went on in that bottle when it reached forty-five degrees outside?

The boiler was set to ninety degrees Celsius, for some unfathomable reason. That would explain the intervals of scalding hot water, followed by relatively cold periods of about forty seconds. That was probably the safety kicking in, while the mixer tap tried to create a steady stream of thirty-seven degrees from hot water that was almost boiling and cold water that was still at least twenty degrees, if not more on warm days. I set it to fifty degrees. Half an hour later, a delighted Asim appeared in the kitchen, fully dressed.

“Were they here?”

“Were who here, Your Royal Highness?”

“The men! From Palace services! I called them three times already.”

“No men were here except you and I, Your Royal Highness.”

“But the shower! It works!”

“Ah. Yes, I may have had something to do with that. Would you like some more coffee?”

“YOU ARE A MAGICIAN, CARSTAIRS!”

After breakfast he insisted on taking me on a tour of Riyadh. That was actually quite enjoyable, even though he kept pointing out houses of friends and cousins to me, and completely ignored more significant or useful landmarks. This was the big tour of ‘here lives my cousin with the gold-plated Mercedes and that palace used to belong to my grandfather’s uncle who had six wives and sponsored the Burger King concession, but who isn’t in the Royal Family because his father once looked at a picture of a pig bla bla bla.’

By the way, none of the people he told me about seemed to have proper jobs. As with Qatari, Saudi’s jobs are mostly sinecures. They don’t invest in or even operate a Burger King, but foreigners aren’t allowed to start or own businesses and so they ‘sponsor’ it by signing for co-ownership. For this they get a kickback while someone else takes all the risks and does all the work. Saudis love being a sponsor. They also love owning land and real estate, even though I’ll eat my hat if there are more than ten Saudi men alive today who can lay a row of bricks to any kind of satisfactory standard, or install a toilet the way Hans Grohe would have wanted it.

Traditionally these people lived in tribes that roamed the desert and herded camels, or settled down near a source of water to grow dates or some other desert crop. For a while, Saudi Arabia managed to grow all its own wheat and even had some left for export. This was done to achieve self-sufficiency, but it relied heavily on desalinated water, foreign labour and imported fertilizer, so eventually the government decided that it was all a bit of a waste, even by Saudi standards.

But this simple, tribal lifestyle was still the case sixty, seventy years ago. Riyadh was a walled city above an aquifer long since depleted. People lived in tents, drank camel milk and stank, which explains their ingrained proclivity for liberally applying perfume in the morning. There was nothing, until there was oil. And even though since that time they have found some additional natural resources, such as iron ore, copper and even gold, Saudi has never produced anything that the rest of the world really needed. Sure, they weaved the odd carpet and their goldsmiths turned out some lovely trinkets, but that’s not really an economy. That’s a hobby, more than anything. Saudi Arabia does not produce anything worth a damn, with the possible exception of dairy. Yes, dairy! Free oil means that it’s cheap to run huge desalination plants, so they have cows in the regions where grass will grow. And so they produce their own milk, yoghurt and whatnot. It’s quite good stuff, actually, but it’s only enough to supply their own domestic market and some tiny countries such as Qatar and the U.A.E., so that’s not going to keep them in gold-plated sports cars when the oil runs out or, even worse, becomes cheap. And even the dairy farms and factories run on foreign labour, because like I say: they don’t like to do any actual work.

Education is free and of a high standard, but the country produces very few engineers or chemists. Saudi students mostly opt for the ‘soft’ sciences: history, communication studies, education or, if they’re real go-getters, the law. That’s all very well, but historians have traditionally been utterly crap at building overpasses and no teacher has ever started a factory that produced shower heads or laptops. Young Saudi men love going abroad to study, effortlessly changing into regular clothes and sampling every type of liquor known to man while they slowly get over the shock of seeing girls drive cars and being able to talk to them without anyone getting stoned to death, but it’s seen as a kind of ‘rumspringa’: when they come back, they complain about having to wear a thobe again, and how their country is utterly boring and obsessed with religion compared to the West, but then they get a cushy government job and call their friends’ sister a whore for standing in line next to them at a Subway and all is forgotten. If at all possible they take a foreign vacation each year to screw some white hookers, but that is the extent of their ambition.

We ended up in a neighbourhood on the south side of town, which offered me a somewhat different perspective. It was a sea of identical, white houses that looked positively small by Saudi standards. Still rather nice, but without much space and almost completely devoid of greenery. As Suwaidi was where the city had expanded to meet the housing needs of the common Saudi, Mohammed Q. Public Execution so to speak: the people who had no connection at all to the Royal Family but who had decided to come in from the desert and live in real houses, without so much as a sheep or a goat. (Well, maybe just one. What’s a house without an ungulate, right?) These people had actual jobs, by which I mean they were expected to show up somewhere. Of course, none of these jobs were in any way physically demanding or ‘dirty’. No plumbers lived here, or truck drivers. These people did the jobs that required Saudi natives, but ones that actually needed a paycheck. Customs officers, translators, sales clerks, legal assistants and hospital administrators lived side by side, street by street, block by block. There were some mosques and shops, but no parks and very few amenities. Most houses were walled off, but that was simply so that the womenfolk could be adequately locked up. This was how the middle class lived.

Without a GPS you didn’t stand a ghost of a chance navigating the area. Only boys played in the hot, dusty streets and nobody seemed remotely interested in the effect of diesel fumes on the human respiratory system. Or in painting their houses after settling in, because everything was brownish and rusty. Except for the cars, because carwashes manned by TCNs were plentiful and cheap. Most households seemed to be able to afford a big 4x4 as well as a saloon car. One or the other would be parked outside the gate, often fitted with transparent plastic seat covers for added discomfort. Rear windows would always be darkened, because that is where the women sat.

“Maybe you can rent here, if you like,” suggested Asim. I could tell he was baiting me. I had fallen quiet after a few questions. The UK certainly has its share of working class neighbourhoods, with houses I wouldn’t want to be found dead in. Stoke-on-Trent is a good example of such a dreary, run-down hellhole, but at least it was green and people made an effort. Places like Wakefield, Carlisle, Leicester and Sunderland all had acres upon acres of similarly uninspiring houses, with fences and padlocks and cars on cinderblocks in concrete gardens, but those areas saw a lot of poverty. People who thought iced tea was a health drink for nobs. In As Suwaidi it was something else: everyone had their own little walled prison, and a shiny car to escape from it. But where to?

“Why are you showing me this?” I asked, after Asim turned onto one of the trunk roads lined with shops.

“Because I want you to learn about my country. Everything, not just the palaces and the diplomatic quarter. After the Eid celebration, I want to take you to the South. It’s green there, with beautiful mountains. We have some towns on the coast with amazing beaches, where you can dive in water that is as clear as glass. And maybe you will even like the desert. That is where these people go when they have some free time. They drive into the desert, pitch a tent and roast a goat.”

We stopped at a traffic light. People using the crosswalk noticed me and stared unashamedly. There were many whites in Saudi, but they rarely ventured into the outskirts of town. They, or perhaps I should say we, were common enough in the glamorous malls and in upscale neighbourhoods, but most lived in walled-off compounds, where they tried to recreate life in the West. Behind the barriers, women dressed normally and teenagers mingled. Only bachelors lived ‘in the wild’, amongst the locals. By the way, even married men with families back home were seen as bachelors: it was just the word used for men who didn’t have a wife in tow. Not so strange, perhaps, in a country where the cultural norm seems to be that all men immediately go on a rape spree as soon as they see a female ankle or a lock of hair.

“Perhaps we should get you some Saudi clothes,” muttered Asim, entering into a staring contest on my behalf with one particularly brazen gawker. It was an elderly man who made a hand gesture I find hard to describe, a rotation of the hand that clearly meant: ‘What’s up with you two?’

“What, a robe?”

“A thobe. Yes. And slippers and a guthra. You can try on mine for size. Your beard looks good, just like we wear it. Put on some sunglasses and nobody will see that you are an ‘ajnabi.”

“Foreigner,” I said, recognising the word. “But I’m white. Very white.”

“So? Some of us are also very white. It’s a matter of pride for some Saudi to be as white as they can be. It means we’re not out in the sun, working.”

Saudi white and my white aren’t the same, though: mine is slightly pinkish, but Arabs have more of an olive tinge. Green olive, not black. Although I had seen quite a few shades of black between the thobe and the tea towel, but those people had their ancestry in Africa. And their tribes hadn’t exactly made it to the top of the food chain.

I learned a lot about Asim that day. Most of it he had already told me the night we were out on the dhow in Qatar, but I hadn’t really been paying attention: I was mostly trying to deflect his questions and enjoying my trip on a boat, and the view of Doha at sunset. Still, he was quite happy to tell it to me all over again. I had remembered the fact he had studied in Boston, but I’d forgotten his subject. It turned out to have been English. This struck me as odd, because even though his English was fine, it was hardly fluent. He had a thick, almost cartoonish Arabic accent and took weird shortcuts. I’m learning new things about English all the time, but then again I haven’t got a degree in it.

He told me about the cold Boston winters, and how shocked he had been when it snowed on the day he arrived. He picked America because he thought the weather would be better than in England, but since most of what he had seen of the US had been exterior shots from shows such as Full House and Knight Rider, he thought everywhere had the same weather as California.

“So you have a degree?” I asked, to keep the conversation going.

“Yah,” he said, focussed on traffic.

“I have a degree in Business Studies, so I’m a Bachelor of Economics. So what’s an English major? Bachelor? Or Ph. D?”

“Yah. This house, this was famous. There was a woman from Alemania, after she took showers she stood in front of the window. Everyone came to watch her. It was very funny.”

“What, everyone came to watch a naked lady?”

“No! Not naked. But she would wear a towel on her head. It was very funny.”

“Wait ... Just ... a towel. To dry her hair?”

“Yes. The police went to her house to say she should wear a hijab. Not towel. They said she could go to jail.”

I didn’t press him on more details, but I can’t help but think some poor German woman was told by the police not to wear a towel on her head inside her own house, and that passed for scandalous entertainment in Riyadh, a cautionary tale about strangers, passed on to new generations. Those German women, standing around in their own houses, wearing towels on their heads ... Tsssk.

We popped back home for lunch, it being the last day of Ramabloodydan, and then we went out to visit a nearby mall, where Asim made me buy sunglasses. I was going to do that anyway, because I’d misplaced mine, but I don’t think I’d have gotten a 200 dollar pair. Actually, I’m pretty fucking sure. He wanted to pay for them but I declined. I have to admit they were pretty good! I only ever get cheap ones and those don’t have transition lenses that get darker in the sun. The frame was surprisingly sturdy, too. Besides, I was now used to wearing glasses non-stop.

As we returned to the car, the white Land Rover assigned to me for now, Asim told me what to expect for the rest of the evening.

“We are going to the palace. Everyone will be there. It will be a great party. I want you to come.”

“I’d love to,” I lied. He sounded hesitant when he asked:

“So ... You are my ... assistant. Yes? Not ... We don’t tell them you are a businessman. Right?”

“I see. Yes, that’s fine. Just tell them I’m your butler. I’d prefer that, actually. I’m not really very good at parties, and that’s back in England. I know how parties work in England. Here, I have no idea. I imagine it involves a lot of sitting on the ground, but I may be wrong.”

Two dozen people turned their heads when Asim laughed.

“Yes! That’s true! Maybe it’s a bit much for you. And I want to make a good impression. So it’s agreed. You are Carstairs, I am Your Royal Highness.”

“Excellent, Your Royal Highness.”

“No, don’t start now. Asim is fine. Do you have ... black suit?”

“I’m sure I do. But do you really mean a black suit, or something more butler-esque? Because I have that, too.”

“Yes! Okay, then let’s go. We have to prepare.”

I knew what I had to do to prepare, but I’ll be buggered if I know what kept him busy for two hours. I had to unpack the other two suitcases to find the tailcoat and white formal shirt, and my black dress shoes. Then I had to pack them again, because I just didn’t have the space to hang it all up. And then I fixed dinner, because I was pretty sure that either I wouldn’t get fed at all, or I’d be extremely unhappy with what was on offer. Asim found that amusing, but he didn’t mind a helping of my chicken and broccoli with rice. Nobody does. My secret is a splash of almond oil, which I added even though I shouldn’t go anywhere near the smell of almonds when Kate is not around. It upsets me immensely. I braced myself when I added it to the marinade, but the ventilation system in the kitchen was so ridiculously powerful (and noisy) that I barely caught a whiff of it. So I was only sad and upset for a minute or so.

Asim must have spent at least a few minutes wiping down one of his sports cars, because even though it was parked inside, opening the garage doors introduced a fine layer of dust each and every time. He had opted for the blue BMW, which I got to drive. It sparkled like a gay diamond. Upon reflection we decided against the tail coat. If the party was outside, and there was every chance it would be, that thing would kill me. It was way too heavy for this climate. And so I changed into a black suit, which made me look like one of those agents who jog along with presidential motorcades. Asim seemed a bit disappointed, but he didn’t make me change into yet another suit. I made sure I had my medallion and my passport on me and off we went, at about half past eight. The last fast of Ramadamadingdong had ended, ooh eeh ooh ah ah!

Asim directed me to the correct palace. It was pretty obvious this was the main one: the grounds alone were vast. The first checkpoint was unmanned, but had cameras pointed at the entrance and exit. If anything, it looked as if we were driving onto the grounds of an expensive golf club. A pristine road meandered through trimmed topiary and rows of palm trees, past fountains and ornamental gardens lined with garden furniture that looked as if it cost more than my indoor furniture had. If anyone ever wonders what has happened to the rain forest, I think I can point them in the right direction.

All this landscaping served a second purpose: to hide the palace proper from view. At first glance it looked like a hotel: I counted five floors. Each floor had at least twenty deep set windows with arches shaped like minaret towers, if that makes any sense. Intricately carved lattice screens kept out the sun, but some were open. The facade wasn’t a solid square, because in two places the third floor was the roof of a small terrace, thus creating little towers for floors four and five. On the inside walls of those shafts I saw mashrabiyas, the Arabic version of oriel windows. They also had beautifully carved woodwork, with stained glass. Yellow light shone behind them. And this was just the main building: the entire palace had a Y-shape and we were looking at the bottom side of the Y, as I’d come to learn.

In front of the building, men in military uniforms walked up to anyone who emerged from a car, to find out who they were. Now there’s a job where you can piss people off in a hurry: fail to spot the 87^th cousin of the 12^th nephew of the crown prince and there is hell to pay. He’s easy to spot, though: hook nose, white thobe, slippers, goatee, sunglasses and expensive watch. Can’t miss him.

Servants wearing white jackets with gold lamé stripes along the length of the arm would drive the cars away. An elderly man in a black cape, also lined with gold lamé, greeted everyone before they went through a revolving door or had a proper door opened for them. There were two cars ahead of us and another appeared behind us.

“It’s showtime,” I muttered, calmly getting out of the BMW so as not to upset any of the armed guards. They all looked at me with confused expressions and one moved in to interrogate me, but I gingerly walked around the car and opened the door for Asim. He, too, wore a black cape with gold trim. That’s how royalty dresses, at least for formal occasions.

One of the soldiers, who wore a fluorescent yellow safety vest over his uniform jacket, addressed me in Arabic. I had no bloody idea what he wanted, so I just smiled and let Asim do the talking. Likewise, I had no idea what he said, but a servant got into our car and slowly drove off after handing me a plastic chip with a number. An Arabic number, but at least I could read those: 38. And it felt as if we were here early ... Bugger!

It was an absolute sausage fest. This is what these people call a party? All the women were gone! As soon as they emerged from their cars, they were taken to another part of the palace, never to be heard from again! ‘Well, DUH!’ I can hear you thinking, but come on! How is that a party?! The only parties without women I will ever attend willingly are LAN-parties.

We were taken into a huge room, which turned out to be a tent pitched between the legs of the Y. The floor was covered by one gigantic woven carpet. It must have been at least fifty by fifty metres, and if there was a seam I never found it. Groups of men milled about, either dressed as servants or royalty. I stood out a little, although I did spot one or two men in regular summer suits in the crowd.

Everyone drank tea or fruit juice. I may have mentioned I’m not a heavy drinker and can go for weeks without a beer, but rarely have I wanted a tall frosty one more than in that bloody tent. There were musicians strumming traditional instruments, which was unfortunate because Arabic music doesn’t half get on my tits.

Some men where dressed in white thobes, but with white rather than checkered cloth on their heads. Their beards were more intense, bushier, than with the others. Asim pointed out to me that these men were clerics, members of the Council of Senior Scholars. This ‘ulema’ is the reason king Salman and those before him are in power: the Saudi Royal Family has always kowtowed to the religious leaders in exchange for their support, which is why Saudi Arabia is by far the most conservative country in the Middle East. No king has had the balls to say: ‘Okay, I’m in charge now: how about we kick out these hate-filled geriatric fuckers and get some bitches up in here?’

Saudi Arabia had just had a change in leadership, after King Abdullah died of pneumonia at age 90. Salman was only a spritely 79 year old, and took over as King and Prime Minister. In Saudi Arabia, the line of succession is pretty complicated. In Europe, where things are as they should be, the oldest child of the monarch is the crown prince or princess. For the Netherlands that meant we had a succession of queens, until Willem-Alexander, eldest son of Beatrix, became king after his mother abdicated. Unlike Queen Elizabeth, who seems to want to hold on to the job until her dying breath even though Prince Charles is well into his sixties (in 2015, at least) and could be said to have had ample time to prepare for the job, Beatrix stayed put just long enough for her son to get his family started. He has three daughters, so it looks like we’ll have a queen in another thirty years or so. Nice guy, by the way, our King. Remind me to tell you about him one day. Doesn’t like to pay his taxes, but other than that he’s solid. I don’t pay all of my taxes, either, so who am I to judge?

But in Saudi it’s a whole different kettle of slightly inbred fish. Succession passes from brother to brother, but being the eldest doesn’t guarantee the job is yours. And because brothers tend to be in the same age bracket, Saudi’s kings aren’t getting any younger until the last one is dead and the crown drops to the next generation by necessity.

Also, unlike monarchs such as Willem-Alexander, Elizabeth, Felipe (Spain) and Philippe (Belgium), Saudi Arabia’s king isn’t just there to cut ribbons and go on trade missions. He wields actual power and people come to petition him for anything from a new hospital to clemency for their son. The ulema was there to make sure the unwashed masses were thoroughly brainwashed by religion, because if there’s one thing religion does well it is equating piety with patriotism. Americans, unclench. I’m letting this one slide.

What happened inside that tent was part of a complex social landscape I couldn’t begin to understand. All these men looked more or less the same to me, and I would want absolutely none of them as my neighbour or even on the same airplane as me. (Yes, I do remember my last journal, thank you. I’m describing my emotional response, not my rational one.) Asim made me shake a few hands, but after some curious glances people caught on to my status as his servant and lost interest. In fact, one pushed an empty glass in my hand. I took it away, smiling. I’d much rather be a busboy here tonight than a guest.

One of the other Europeans, or at least Westerners, came up to me as I stood a few metres behind Asim, smiling at nobody in particular while he worked the room like a Las Vegas table magician. I could learn a thing or two from him when it came to social graces. You probably think of me as a debonair man, who moves easily in all social circles from prince to pauper. That’s because I am well aware of my own social anxieties and I have learned to cope with them. But I hate making my entrance at a party just as much as anyone, trust me. And I have learned over time that the rather timid economist inside me happens to live in a body with the outward appearance of a slightly handsome, broad-shouldered Dutchman who appears to have his shit together, and who has a voice that inspires confidence and trust. That’s not an achievement on my part, that’s the luck of the draw. It comes in handy when you’re forced into an acting career, I’ll admit. But just like there is a distinct and proven correlation between your height and your assumed leadership abilities, which also has an effect on your life-time income, being white with blue eyes, a dimpled chin, a firm cheek and shoulders like a battering ram also makes people respond to you in certain ways. If we were all born in bodies that suited our personalities, I’d be a four foot weasel of a man with a skull the size of a baby elephant and hands like a five year old girl. Conversely, Steve Buscemi looks like a particularly unpleasant mob informer, but he’s an absolute sweetheart and a firefighter. Looks say less than nothing about a person. In fact, they often deceive. And I was continuously reminding myself of that in this palace full of hijackers and highwaymen.

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Carstairs of Arabia

Ron Dudderie

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