suggzy

Part Two

A bit more, then?

Possessed of food and functioning WiFi, I was well-set for my first day and a half of free time here, and in all fairness I didn’t do that much. Made some chilli, contacted a few loved ones, explored the televisual options (Al Jazeera good for news, BBC World good for off-beat, niche documentaries about basket-weaving by Ice Otters in Antarctica, in slavery to hot-air-balloon barons, or similar, and beIN sports showing a constant diet of football football football, including the oddity of Saturday 3.00pm GMT kick-offs from back home). The most diverting spell in front of the TV was spent watching an Arabic-speaking channel broadcasting camel racing.

It’s a split-screen job; a bit like the darts, but the sub-division of the screen is horizontal rather than vertical. Top half shows the leader, or pace-maker or whatever, and the bottom half shows the Bactrian peloton giving furious chase. Each quadraped is mounted with a robot, rather than a terrified jockey, and that’s sort of it. I didn’t see the race from commencement, so I don’t know if there are warm-ups or false starts, or Usain Bolt-styled mugging to the crowd. I didn’t see the finish either, so whether or not any of the chasers had a kick like Steve Cram, I couldn’t say. One hopes there was a tape broken, and then an elaborate trough of water and supply of well-deserved veg.

What I did observe, on an outer ring to the racecourse itself, was a group of 4×4 vehicles giving it six nowt driving alongside their nag, ululating fiercely in whatever language it is that your average Dromedary understands. Whether those commands were technical in some way, or simply just “fuck’s sake Daisy, come on!” I cannot say. Apologies – I am a poor correspondent on this subject – I’d Google, but I fear spoiling the mystery.

What I can say with confidence is that rattling ‘round after your animal is good preparation for the ill-disciplined and potentially expensive, and at worst lethal business of driving in Doha. It’s a lively affair, even if you’re just a strapped-in passenger, like me. You’re no-one in this City unless you drive a $70,000 Toyota Leviathan Off-Roader as if engaged in fairground dodgems. Lane discipline? Not for your average Qatari motorist. And not an activity I shall be getting involved in, although it might bear a spot more investigation as my sojourn continues. It makes my experiences of driving overseas, some already chronicled here, look quite light-hearted and gentle by comparison.

Where was I?

Ah yes. By Friday evening I thought it was probably time to go outside again for a bit. I’d no plans to go anywhere very far, in the first instance. The temperature was generally still pretty high, even of an evening. So, I thought I’d walk past our local mosque and take a turn ‘round the block’ and back again. See if I could walk up to the water’s edge, in between the Embassies the other side of the road from our building.

And so came my introduction to the streets of West Bay. From a distance, it’s a magnificent modern skyline. “An architect’s playground” one of my colleagues calls it, and she’s right. Except when it comes to the ground beneath your feet – or more precisely the lack of it. Trouble is with the place – if you look up, it’s amazing. One glorious towering edifice after another. Monuments to Progress; Many and Mighty. But in between them? The ground isn’t necessarily that well filled-in, yet. Essentially you can be bounding along a pavement outside one of the fabulous residences, then suddenly be met with rather a more lunar landscape to negotiate, with a building site behind, only to then be back on rather more terra firma a few yards further along, when the frontage of the next tower begins.

You do get used to it, but only just mere hours into my relocation, I was not, as yet. So, I surreptitiously took a couple of snaps of our multi-colour-lit mosque (snapping them isn’t really the done thing, and you see the odd sign saying so), which was looking particularly lovely that evening. I turned the corner, and spied just one of those signs, telling me what not to do, but kept walking all the while, as I slipped my camera back into my bag. The perfect photographic crime! I quietly congratulated myself on my cunning. Seconds later, I confidently pressed my left foot down onto fresh air, and the bottom three-quarters of my leg disappeared down.. well.. down a big hole.

I was left cutting a rather unusual figure. And glad that I had walked into the shadows before coming to grief. My right leg had bent into a sharp, kneeling V-shape, with my toes pressing onto the outer edge of the hole, keeping me sort of ‘airborne’ if you like? My left leg extended down to the bottom of some manner of footings-hole, foundation pile, or whatever you call it, and the toes barely scraped along the bottom. It was about as useful as one of those ‘grabbers’ you see in an arcade machine, where one can never successfully excise a cuddly toy. In full profile, had my whole body been visible, I suppose I would have looked rather like Ralph Macchio at the conclusive point of the action in The Karate Kid:

The only way out of the predicament, short of summoning help, whatever that might have meant, with a gentle scream, was to push myself up on my hands, like those chaps at the Olympics, on the Pommel Horse. I was in some pain, feeling the first real rush of exquisite agony that comes with a gravel rash, and was thus surprised that I could actually lever my way free. I’ve lost weight these last few weeks, but I was heavier then. Nevertheless, I popped back out of my underground predicament, and stood at the roadside, dusting myself, off, as I felt a little trickle of blood work its way down the inside of the leg of my jeans, to a pool in my sock. Come what may, I was not going to be deterred from my Nice Little Stroll. Oh no.

I hobbled, shuffled and bled my way to the end of the street, and made my way through gaps in the traffic over to the far side of the road. It was a bit lacking by way of illumination, and my heart leapt a beat when a litter of half-a-dozen or so kittens jumped out of a wheelie bin, but after a time I was making progress, and thought that a moonlight saunter to the waterfront could only be moments away. I could hear the lapping waves, after all.

Nope. I came alongside the Sudanese Embassy, and just as I was passing a small sentry box, an enormous man appeared out of the pitch dark, silhouetted with a machine gun slung across his chest. I nearly had an accident of a different, more organic, kind.

“I er..” I confidently failed to assert myself.

“Good evening Sah”, my chap came back, and broke into the most glorious grin, picked out by the construction lights from the tower across the road. ‘Not going to need the AK for this one’, he must have thought.

“Is it, er, is it; is it okay to, er, walk along here?” I thrust back, with all the bravura of a newborn foal on an ice rink. I think I might have even mimed ‘walking with two fingers. Like the idiot I am.

“Of course Sah. But no swimmin’ or photographin’, okay?”

“Perish the thought” said I. “Thanks ever so much”. I scuttled off into the traffic, and safely back to my quarters to reach for the Dettol. It transpires you can’t go for a paddle near our gaff. And if you tried, someone would take your camera off you and, with pristine politeness and good humour, shoot you.

Two further events, from my first week, to conclude this latest overlong postcard.

The first came at work.

Getting underway with things here is odd. All the normal difficulties of starting a new job – new people, new systems, working out what the priorities are; all of that. But, all the while, you have the separate process going on that is the search for the Holy Grail that is one’s Residency Permit. The document, to be carried at all times, that asserts your right to be here, work here, and even drink beer here (if that’s your thing).

There ae three steps to this:

• Go to a clinic and have your Blood Group tested;
• Go to the Medical Immigration Centre and have X-Rays taken of your chest, and your blood tested for Bad Things; and
• Have your fingerprints taken for the record, and to allow various biometrical things to function adequately

On the face of it, quite simple. In my case, typically, a little less simple than would be considered idea.

The first bit was a little odd – my chum Z turned up in his car and we fired off in the direction of one of the many Mall’s here. We sat patiently in his car in the afternoon sun, talking about cricket (he’s a Sri Lankan cricket fan) and waiting for the clinic he had taken me to, to open.

Once bade inside, I strode to the counter, explained myself, and was told to wait in the Men’s Waiting Area (none of your Unisex Modern Nonsense in the Arabic world). No amount of indicating that I had a NHS Blood Donor’s Card that said I have A+ claret got me anywhere at all. I suppose they might have thought I was making it up? Nothing medical is taken on trust, I have discovered, as we shall see again a little later.

After a time, a chap in a mask plonked me in a seat next door, and announced he would be taking a slide of my blood and testing it for the group.

“Yes, I know” I said. “But to be honest, I really don’t OWW!”

Needlecraft over here has not developed well. Folks are most impolite and inconsiderate when wielding one. Tendency just to have at you without any sense of the patient’s consent. Chap might just as well have thrown it at me from across the room, treating my fingertip as if it were a treble-twenty.

Having pierced me, he then squeezed the digit so that the contents disgorged onto the slide. He then mixed in a few sundry herbs and spices and, guess what? Declared me A Positive. I was minded to declare him a positive something else, as I pressed gauze into the chasm in my aching finger, but thought better of it. I sat, I waited, and a letter proving everything was produced. I dropped them a fiver, and toddled off.

Phase one complete. Now it got rather trickier.

Wednesday of my first week – and the directive came through that I was to go for my medical tests. See 2) above. On the face of it a well-organised affair, we were to be bussed over to the seemingly remote location, and squired through it all by Mr Ali (our on-the-ground fixer) before being safely deposited back at Trade.

Arrived at the pick-up point well in advance, but no one, including my fellow lab rats from other Campuses here, had any idea where Mr Ali was, or what was about to happen. So, we sweltered in the sun until an enormous car drew into view, and out stepped a fellow in traditional dress.

“You will with me be coming please.”

“Are you Mr Ali, then?”

“No. Driver.”

In for a penny, and all that, we got into his car, with one of us pretty much pressed into the boot, via a curious sliding door down one side. It was a car we would not leave for the next 100 minutes. ‘Driver’ got utterly, bewildering, unfathomably and very nearly irretrievably lost. We went up and down the same stretches of highway; we skirted the desert; we drove accidentally (I assume) into a construction site; and generally got no closer to our destination. I sensed the chap was getting a bit harried after a while. His Arabic, whilst clearly on the phone to his mates, trying to work out where he was, became more lively by every quarter hour. It started off at sort of “Alright Dave, give us a hand, will you? Is it second or third left, after the Camel Dealership?” but by time he (apparently at random) swept into the car park it was more of a shrill “WHERETHEFUCKAREWE?!”

It became immediately clear that Mr Ali (dressed in the manner of a Liverpudlian pimp, c. 1998) had been waiting some considerable time. He waved his paperwork (including my passport) at ‘Driver’, and generally barked out a few choice comments on the inconvenience he and we had been put to. The object of his fury could, it was quite clear, not give two hoots about this. He nodded, and gave a sort of “someone’s got to drive ‘em back” shrug, and sloped off for a ciggie.

We were, at least, there, but matters were far from concluded.

Mr Ali marched us ‘round the building and into the fray. There were people everywhere. So much of Qatar is still being built, with the World Cup 2022 in view, that the migrant labour population is huge. Every night I look out of my window at a neighbouring skyscraper being built and, even at 3.00am, I could count 100 guys slaving (I use the word advisedly) away. Each and every one of us has to satisfy the same criteria to work here, so we drew into the place, in a meek and humble short crocodile of ex-pats, and Mr Ali confidently ushered us up to the counter, ahead of what I comfortably considered to be the rather large queue that was already in place and waiting. This was confirmed, when a rather substantial fellow sitting in it got to his feet and faced Mr Ali down. They proceeded to have the matter out, at great volume, and with considerable energy, given the heat. Indeed the argument was taken outside, for a while. I don’t believe blows were exchanged, but few of us in that moment were unhappy.

I was a bit unhappy, because, unshielded by the shell-suited confidence of Mr Ali, I had meanwhile been ordered into a seat, well back in the throng, by a security guard. And not in a nice, p’s and q’s, British, cup-of-tea type way. In fact he had taken me by the shoulder and pressed me earthwards, with the loud command to “sit there”.

So I sat there. He looked like a man who wouldn’t relish an exchange on how things were being run. After a while, the ladies from behind the counter returned from afternoon prayers, and began to start stamping paperwork and getting the machinery of the medical centre moving. I zoned out for a bit, but came roughly back into the afternoon, when my security man followed up on my seating arrangements.

“Move there now!” he commanded.

I moved there.

This went on for a while, until suddenly someone pulled my paperwork from my sweaty fingers and shouted, as if they had just won a game of bingo..

“Online!”

“Online?” came an answering call.

“ONLINE!” came a strong affirmative.

“Come here”, said my new Master, and placed me at the front of the queue, where my firm was stamped, and I was waved away.

At which point Mr Ali reappeared, like Mr Benn’s Shopkeeper, and gently took my hand. Slightly disarming move, the truth be told, but it had a calming effect on me. We promenaded down a corridor or two together, arm in arm, like Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke in the park, and came to a room with a C above it.

“First C, then back to B, then out and done” he said.

I wondered dimly where B had actually been, but he had vanished from my life again before I had chance to enquire, so in I went…

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

At the time of writing, a considerable amount of time has expired. I am typing, slowly, from my apartment building. I returned to Blighty at Christmas, via a low-cost airline (which I shall write about in due course – they will not be escaping a bit-part in this ramblesome tale) and returned into the country, armed with the Residency Permit I have been on about (spoiler – I get it in the end), but also with the commencement of some manner of magnificent Influenza, cooked to perfection in airline airflow. Three days in, I went to yet another medical facility, in a state of light delirium, and reprised some of the procedures I am as yet to enlighten you on. This, too, will be covered. I sense my opening salvo will come to be a stand-alone quadrilogy, in the final reckoning, and I will get to it all eventually. Right now I am delighted to find that my brain and my fingers are back in a position to harmonise and generate 12 lines of roughly coherent output.

So, in Part Three (maybe at the weekend, once the drugs have done their thing):

Pegasus Peril, X-Rays, Deafness, Burning Salads and the Road to Residency. And, no doubt, various other stuff that will come back to me eventually. With every apology for this staccato re-telling, but in delight at health-to-return and a belated Happy New Year to anyone still picking through this guff.

Cox of Arabia x