The Ally Pally The Ally Pally In Abu Dhabi, I awoke late in the afternoon in the Fairmont Bab al Bahr. I was in the same clothes that I had been wearing for weeks in Beirut, and with a headache so severe that I had to lie there for some time and try to remember where I had been the night before. It is curious to wake up fully clothed, and my clothes were wet. I was in a suit with cufflinks attached, a tie askew, slip-ons with no socks. I was dressed, in other words, for a late-night party of moderate but not quite serious elegance. There was a bowl of fruit by the bed with a banana and a star anise and, next to them, a tray of handmade chocolates. Nothing had been touched.
I sat in my room on the eighth floor of the Bab al Bahr as the sun was declining. A thin moon had appeared over the waterway that separated the hotel’s artificial beach from the cranes and silos on the far side. There, in a fluctuating light, stood the world’s eighth-biggest mosque, eighty-two Mogul-inspired Bianco marble domes clustered together and framed by virtually every window in the largely glass-covered Fairmont. The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque can accommodate forty thousand worshippers and houses the world’s largest carpet as well as the world’s largest Swarovski chandelier. Being the Emirates, this quality of being the largest and tallest and grandest is important.
One is supposed to know these things and to apply them in one’s mind to the buildings themselves as one looks at them. Even from the futuristic lobby of the Fairmont, where the architecture is opulently immanent, the metal and glass columns changing color every few seconds, the boldness of the mosque was arresting as it was seen through the back windows. The piety of the Emirates’ capital is often underrated. Even in that lobby, surrounded by partying princes and Western girls in Pucci skirts, the fact that I was no longer in a city of wine and sea was obvious. The desert and its faith had replaced it.
The Fairmont bar was called Chameleon. Two guys shook the mixers like Mexican rattles, and by midnight le tout Abu Dhabi was at its counter shouting for things mostly made with vodka and various fruit juices. The drinking was intense, and it was an Arab crowd, if not necessarily an Emirati one. The bar glittered with Absolut and Grey Goose and Bong and Cape North and Stoli elit.
The most humbling thing about drinking is the instantaneous erosion of recent memory. As the mind reassembles itself after a poisoning, it is full of questions, but it finds no answers. The hangover burned on. I couldn’t remember how I had ended up.
I gazed down at an artificial beach, at a long pool surrounded by sun beds and dark blue towels. I had been at the opening of this very bar the night before, but I had been carried home by the staff—carried or hustled or encouraged, I couldn’t say—and laid to rest in my executive suite bed like a pensioner who has collapsed at a bus stop. A hangover is, moreover, a complex thing. It is slow, meditative; it inclines us to introspection and clarity. The aftereffect of a mild envenoming is cleansing mentally. It enables one to seize one’s mind anew, to build it up again and regain some kind of eccentric courage.
When I was a child, I remember being puzzled by the hangovers of adults, which I had many opportunities to observe close up. My parents staggered about silently, holding on to things to steady themselves, and their speech was unusually gentle. They seemed ghostlike in this state, and I preferred them that way. They had slowed down, and it made them seem like robots, or at least they reminded me that the human body is a machine after all and that it can be impaired easily.
Watching them, I could not help but be aware that if this was the effect of their drug of choice, this same drug could well end up being mine. Furthermore, it was curious that in a middle-class England that preached so much about the virtues of being sober, and therefore industrious, the adults who sustained this culture and bore such responsibility for it should spend so much time lumbering about completely stoned.
The telephone rang by the bath later that night. I was almost asleep, dreaming sadly about these matters, as we all do when the house of our parents has been destroyed and scattered to the winds, and I had trouble making words connect. It was long distance, which inevitably meant America. Chirpy tones, anxiety, and somebody wanting something.
“Hi, it’s Jen from the Faster Beast! Are you having breakfast? I wanted to catch you—”
“Before I got up?”
“If only. By the way, you are up early. That’s not like you. How’s the sun?”
“Shining.”
“They told me there’s a really cool view of the mosque. It’s an awesome hotel, isn’t it? Did you go to the opening of Chameleon last night? It would be great if you could file it by tonight your time. Or even this afternoon. Or even earlier.”
“Why not right now?”
“Could you? The editor wants to know what new cocktail trends are making waves in the Arab world. You know, cool bartenders, exciting new trends—ah—new formulas for the Arab Revolution, and that sort of thing. Like, where are the kids going for their sundowners after they’ve been protesting all day?”
“Liz, I have to go. There’s a large lizard in my bath.”
“Jen. It’s Jen.”
“I’ll file tonight, Jen. Thanks for getting me on the executive floor, by the way.”
“Oh, no problem.”
The irritation in the distant voice could hardly control itself.
“So what did you drink?” she asked testily.
“A thing called the Arabian Night.”
“Cool. Was it a girl drink? Was it postgender?”
“It was vermouth, Worcestershire sauce, vodka, sugar, crab-apple juice, lime, Angostura bitters, seltzer water, lemonade, champagne, a twist of grapefruit, and Coke.”
“I drank it with the sundown. It made me violent.”
“Did you go to a protest?”
I went downstairs at noon and sat in the buffet restaurant on the ground floor, which is quite an Abu Dhabi social scene. It is one of those buffets learned from the great hotels of the East. Multiethnic, sophisticated, generous in scope and quality. A manifestation of the new middle-class culture that girdles the world and that enjoys its lunches with little reference to any specific Western origin. The women were veiled but wore mall jewelry of the highest order. Their hands were heavily tattooed in the desert way, but the shoes were Forzieri. The men sat together in groups outside, their children darting among them, in an ambience of wealth and relaxation. A self-conscious participation in modern family hedonism.
The cuisines of the buffet were Gulf Arab, Lebanese, Japanese, Egyptian, Italian, and Indian, with a few dabs of English—baked beans and link sausages and squares of fat-drenched toast. There were counters of tropical fruits; juice bars that liquefied kiwis and mangoes on the spot. Dessert isles with dozens of handmade mousse fondants and îles flottantes and strawberry kulfi. One could discreetly order a glass of wine, but as one did so, there would be a subtle inspection by the server, an instantaneous assessment of one’s background religion.
If you were Muslim, you would be declined, I imagine. If you were Jewish, you would be thrown out, and if you were Christian, you would be allowed a drink. I am not saying this is the hotel’s policy, of course. Tall green cocktails indeed made the rounds, but what was in them? In any case, I ordered a Diet Coke to mix up my gourmet fuul and behind my sunglasses tried to eat and Coke my way out of the lingering brain fog, as I call my hangovers. The mists within began to part. I got up, finally, and walked through the glass doors out into the suffocating sunshine, my balance only slightly akilter, my ears ringing. I walked past the pool, where the chubby white girls lay sweating in oil like things slowly simmering in pan fat.
There were two breakwaters of piled stones and an artificial beach between them, and across the water the cranes shone in a pall of dust. I stood on a breakwater and watched the Coast Guard launches trawl by. The day was already way past ninety degrees, and the sky was beginning to haze. All the controlled, anal emptiness of Abu Dhabi was concentrated in this single view dominated by the world’s biggest mosque. I had suddenly forgotten, in some sense, who I was as I waved to the Coast Guard, and why I was. I should have remembered, but someone remembered for me, because as I dropped onto the beach and walked along it, a man from the deck chairs rose, dusted himself down, and came toward me. He raised his hand, called “John!” in an English voice, and came down onto the sand. He was, oddly, dressed for a business meeting, though he had been sunning himself by the pool with a jungle hat. I stopped. He came plodding down, saying “Oi, John!”
He was unknown, but he seemed to know me. In that light we both looked like ghosts, almost transparent, and I knew at once what was up; I had met this loser in the bar last night and had no recollection of him, but he had easily recognized me. John, that was me. I must have called myself “John” all evening. But who was John?
“Oi, John, I knew it was you. I see you’re up and about.”
“I’m sorry—”
“James. From the bar.”
“Yeah, James.”
“John, good to see you. I thought you were dead.”
Laughter.
“No, just out cold for the morning.”
“My wife said you should have been dead. Eleven mai tais. Blimey. We both thought you was dead.”
“Was it eleven?”
“More than that, cock. You’re a right fish.”
“Am I?”
“Dead right you are, mate. You passed out.”
“I did? Where?”
“In the pool. Don’t you remember passing out in the pool?”
A playful arm-punch and a wink. The hideous dyed hair glistened in the sun, and the oyster eyes contracted.
“Wait,” I said. “I don’t remember anything about a pool.”
“Come on, mate. You remember the pool. That was the funniest thing I saw all year.”
I was now sweating copiously, and we were walking.
“The pool? What did I do in the pool?”
“You don’t remember doing the jackknife?”
“The jackknife?”
“Yeah, you did a jackknife into the pool. The missus said it was the funniest thing she’s seen all year.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, mate. You’re kidding. We all pissed ourselves.”
Who are you? I wanted to ask.
“So I did a jackknife?” I said.
“Yeah, it was a good one. You didn’t come up for five minutes.”
Underwater, then. A memory of drowning bubbles, panic, and now it was coming back in little pieces. The wobbling diving plank, the sudden elevation toward the stars.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I always do a jackknife on rum.”
“I believe it.”
He seemed very pleased with me.
“Are you coming to the Ally Pally tonight?” he asked. “All the lads will be there. After your jackknife, I would say you have honorary admission to the Ally Pally.”
“What is the Ally Pally?”
“The best bar in Abu Dhabi. You’ve been to the Ally Pally, surely?”
We had now entered the high-design glass cage of the hotel and were standing by Marco Pierre White’s restaurant. He told me all about John, a contractor for hotel construction all over the Middle East. Married, three kids, ten years younger than me, and a decent shot at snooker. John was a sweet talker, mild mannered, and full of anecdotes about the construction business, but when he got drinking, he chased every lady in the bar. He went berserk in his quiet gentlemanly way, and there was no constraining him. He told me all this as if I needed to hear it from a third person, as if this real me were totally unknown to the person standing in front of him right then.
“And did I say anything untoward to the ladies?” I asked as we took the escalator up to the dazzling Barbarella lobby, where a few sheikhs in ghutrahs and rope agal sat on the sofas with their overdecorated wives.
“Not at all, John. You was politeness itself. But the staff had a hard time getting you out of the pool.”
I must have been on a roll, I thought grimly. It happens sometimes, some switch is thrown inside me and all the controls cease to function. My Jewish male friends in New York say it never happens to them.
By now I was curious as to why he had walked up with me into the lobby, and I supposed it was because I was now an interesting specimen. The English are very indulgent to episodes of alcoholic insanity. They strike them as sympathetic, understandable, and a sign of being a real human being, however inconsequential such episodes might be.
“You come down to the Ally Pally at eight,” he said in comradely fashion. “It’s not as bad as they say. The Chinese hookers don’t arrive till ten at the earliest. We’ll have shots with the lads.”
“All right,” I said. “It can’t be any worse than Chameleon.”
“Oh, it’s way above Chameleon, John. There’s no darts at Chameleon, for one thing. No hookers neither.”
“True enough,” I agreed, shaking my head. “They wouldn’t allow darts and hookers at Chameleon.”
“And what’s a bar without darts and tarts?”
That afternoon I walked around downtown Abu Dhabi looking for the Ain Palace Hotel. I walked along the Corniche, with a taste of cement dust on the tongue, along Hamdan Bin Mohammed Street, and past the Capital Garden. Here and there were the pockets of small traditional streets I was looking for, wedged between the skyscrapers and the malls, and here were fashion shops with names like Swish and White Angel with completely curtained display windows where nothing, therefore, was on display. Alongside these were an inordinate number of laundries and long walls with scraps of halfhearted graffiti: I Love Pakistan.
The desert and nomad life feel close here, despite the thick veneer of internationalism. The long, obscure history of an economy based on pearling, horses, falconry, ships, and then finally oil. These were the Trucial States ruled by Britain until 1971. First paved road: 1961. National dress: the dishdasha. The state was opened to oil exploration in 1966 by its then ruler, Zayed bin Al Nahyan Sultan. Since then it has become one of the richest, and healthiest, nations on earth. It is legal for non-Muslims to drink, but not in the street. Liquor can be purchased only in special government outlets, use of which requires a permit issued by the Ministry of the Interior. There is a quiet asceticism here, but not the tranquillity of an old Islamic city. The lines of the streets have been destroyed to accommodate all those Western towers; glass and steel soothe nobody. The asceticism is moral, not material, and it is the puritanism of the desert peoples who seem to have wandered into a world where other people’s tastes have to be accommodated for the higher purpose of making money. Therefore there are bars.
The Ain Palace Hotel lies right behind the Corniche Cricket Club and the Sheikh Khalifa Energy Complex. It’s an older hotel, once luxurious but now decidedly dejected, cramped and claustrophobic and filled with traveling Indian men attracted by its insalubrious reputation—insalubrious, that is, for those who have no need to go there in the first place. The hotel bar lies to one side of the lobby, safely invisible behind heavy doors, and the lobby after seven at night is shaped by the flow of these men and the occasional Chinese freelancers who make their way in and out of what exiles call the Ally Pally. But at eight that night, for some reason, there was almost no one there. The black-and-white floral wallpaper and glass wall lamps seemed to contain myself and three Chinese girls playing mah-jongg in a corner. Where were the lads? The barman said something about horse races that night. The girls looked bitter and very Harbin, but one of them came up anyway to try her luck. An ancient Western guy sat at the bar, listing sideways, a cigarette burning in the blue Foster’s ashtray.
It’s a British pub. Empires always leave behind places like this. It was a bar of global brands, of Smirnoff, Jim Beam, Magners Irish cider, Cutty Sark and Pernod, and then of generic premium gin and standard cognac served in multiples of 30ls for twenty to twenty-five dirhams a shot. In places like the Trucial States, it would have been the officers’ mess that was the model for such pubs. A male space by definition and not ashamed of the fact. A half-pint of beer was about twelve dirhams. You could come here and drink Steinlager Edge and Breezer and Gaymers beer. The vast corporate alcohol industry that networks across the world was showcased in a single bar, offering to the Englishman a taste of home (or Singapore) and to the local who might happen to be here to drink a soda, a vision of industrialized uncleanness and temptation. They might both watch the rugby on the plasma TV, and they might both like the gold-sprayed chandeliers. But the scent of distilled liquor and spilled beer that defines a bar of this kind cannot be avoided. A Muslim friend in Dhofar once told me that, for him at least, it was like the smell of roasting pig: appalling and beckoning, and irresistible on the level not of appetites or mental desire but on the level of dopamine and the hormonal mysteries. “And therefore more dangerous,” he said with the utmost gravity, “than you can possibly imagine.”
And sitting there in the Ally Pally, I was suddenly overcome with nostalgia. England, my England: did you make me an inconsiderate drinker?