They Do the Same Things Different There (15 page)

You’re not quite sure what to expect from an Egyptian house. You were half expecting it to be some sort of shed, or a wigwam even. But it looks from the outside just as modern as any normal house might be. Bricks, windows, a large garage. The taxi driver jabbers something. He shows you the fare. You don’t know if you’re supposed to haggle or not, isn’t haggling part of what goes on here? And the fare does seem to have a lot of noughts. So you make a half-hearted attempt to haggle, and the driver scowls angrily, and you give him what he asked for in the first place and add a tip. He takes your suitcases out of the boot and bumps them onto the pavement hard, and then drives away. Your sister asks you for the taxi fare that brought her to the airport to pick you up; she borrowed the money, she’ll have to pay it back. So you offer her the same amount. “No, more than that,” she says.

And you go into her new home. “We’ll have to be quiet,” she says. “It’s family time.” She explains that her fiancé is owned by a man called Ali, who rents out camel rides to tourists. Ali has very kindly allowed Emma to stay in a spare room on condition that she does the housework—cleaning, cooking, general chores. In fact, she’d better get back to work: she was given permission to meet you at the airport, but only if she made up the time when she got back, and now she’s running a few hours behind.

You stand in the doorway of the sitting room and peer in. Three teenage children are watching television; one of them is listening to an iPod as he does so, so loud that you can identify the song from where you’re standing, it’s something by Britney Spears. Their mother is watching television too. It looks like a game show, but every so often the children laugh at it uproariously, so maybe it’s something entirely different. The mother never laughs, never smiles. “Hello,” you say. They ignore you. Neither the mother nor the little girl, you notice, are wearing burqas. Your sister pulls her own burqa down smart, and fetches a vacuum cleaner out of the cupboard. She plugs it in, turns it on, and the cleaner isn’t new, it coughs and rasps. Without a word the mother levels the remote control at the television, presses a button, and turns the volume up loud over it. The noise of vacuum cleaner and widescreen high definition
TV
compete for a moment, but the
TV
wins—it’s very loud, and you wonder whether the neighbours might complain. Your sister cleans the carpet around the sofa, around the coffee table; the little boys lift their feet so she can clean underneath, and the little girl doesn’t bother—and every thirty seconds or so they burst into laughter at the antics of the game show host, they laugh and laugh.

“Would you mind doing the dishes?” your sister asks.

So you go into the kitchen, you rinse all the plates and the cutlery, then you stack them all in the dishwasher. You don’t turn the dishwasher on. You don’t think that should be your job.

And at last the vacuum cleaner is turned off and your sister comes to join you. “Thanks for that!” she says. “Phew!” The television volume stays just as loud, she has to talk quite loudly herself just so you can hear her. The game show ends and segues into something that might be a cop show—whatever it is, there are lots of sirens.

“Emma,” you say, “this is all very nice, but I’m very tired, I should be getting to my hotel. . . .”

“No, no,” she says, “no, I need you to meet Abdul. He’ll be getting home from work soon, you’ll see.”

And sure enough, very soon the door opens. And Emma looks nervous—she adjusts her burqa once more, and she leaves the kitchen to greet the master of the house. This, I take it, must be Ali; his wife and children wear modern clothes, but he has a grey sheet wrapped around his head, he looks like something out of the history books, frankly, he looks like a camel driver, a
peasant
. He pulls his headscarf off and you see that underneath he looks just as western and civilized as anyone else, the costume was a bit of a fraud. The children turn the
TV
off at last, and they hug him, all smiles. He hugs them back, but he’s too tired for smiling. His wife gives him a single nod, and he nods back.

Emma steps forward, and offers him the money you gave her earlier. He counts it slowly, carefully. Then gives her too a nod. “Hello,” you say, and he looks at you for the first time, and then
you
get the nod, nod number three—it’s not a friendly nod, and again it’s without a smile, but it’s at least respectful, and it feels like the first proper acknowledgement you’ve had since you arrived in the country.

“May I?” asks Emma, and Ali says, “Yes.” And Emma takes your hand, excited, and Ali frowns at that. And Emma doesn’t care, she’s already pulling you out of the door, out of the house.

“Where are you taking me?” you say.

“To meet my husband.”

She pulls up the garage door. Inside there’s a family car, nicely polished, new. And to its side, on a bed of straw, a camel rests, kneeling.

“This is Abdul,” Emma says, at last lifting her burqa, and you can see how her face is glowing with pride.

Abdul is very definitely a camel. Now that you’re there, face to face, confronted with the full camel bulk of it, there’s really no escaping the fact. It isn’t a donkey, or some strange humpy shaped horse, this is your actual bona fide ship of the desert—and he’s big, and he’s hairy, and he looks at you with clear disdain.

“So,” says Emma. “Here we all are!”

“Nice to meet you,” you say to the camel, but your new brother has already turned away.

“Isn’t he wonderful?” enthuses Emma. “Just look at his eyes!” But you can’t, Abdul is demonstrating only his arse, it’s clear he has eyes only for your sister. “So deep and, and soulful. Oh, I could drown in them. And these long eyelashes, wouldn’t you just
die
for eyelashes like that? And he has, you know, three eyelids.” She kisses the side of his face, and the camel’s breathy groan turns into a harrumph. “Camels are the most beautiful creatures in the world, and Abdul is the most beautiful camel, so.”

“That’s great,” you say, and “How long do camels live for?”

“About forty years.”

“Right.”

“Abdul’s only seven now, so the chances are we’ll die about the same time. That’s what I’m counting on, I don’t want to outlive Abdul. Only seven, he’s my toyboy, really!” And she laughs.

“Right.”

She nuzzles at his face. He harrumphs again.

“Right. Well, look, I best be getting to bed. . . .”

“You can’t go yet,” says Emma. “Please.”

“I’m really very tired.”

“You don’t understand. This is a Muslim wedding. I’m not allowed to see the groom beforehand unless I’m chaperoned. No one wants to chaperone me. I haven’t seen Abdul in
ages.
”

And it occurs to you that your sister barely even
knows
this camel she’s getting hitched to. And then something else.

“Wait a moment,” you say. “Are you telling me you haven’t yet . . . you know . . . ?”

“We can’t have sex until we’re married. Obviously.”

“But . . . for God’s sake . . . I mean, how can you tell if . . . ?” Before you married Kirsten, she insisted she tried you out in all manner of positions. When she found one you were good at, she allowed you to propose.

“The anticipation,” whispers Emma, “is
wonderful
,” and she licks her lips.

Abdul harrumphs, but it’s a very different sort of harrumph this time, it’s directed at you.

“Oh, hello,” you say. And you back away a bit.

“Don’t worry, he’s just wanting to know you better.” Abdul gets to his feet, those spindly legs straighten, you think they’ll never carry such a bulky lump, but no, he’s upright and tall and without so much as a stagger he’s bearing down on you. “Keep still,” says Emma, so you keep still, and the camel sticks his pointed head right at you, he opens his mouth, out of it pops a red sac that bulges at you querulously. He harrumphs louder, and it’s clearly not a happy harrumph, he’s agitated now, he’s shaking from side to side and that red sac seems to be
pulsating
, “Oh dear,” says Emma, and he hawks a sea of spit into your face.

“Quick!” your sister says. “Take off your jacket!”

“But it’s my best jacket. . . .”

“Take it off!”

And you do, and you hold it out to Abdul, and now he’s ripped it from your hand, he’s tearing into it, he chews it and spits out patches from it onto the ground, he’s jumping on it and destroying that jacket as if it were his mortal enemy.

“I don’t think he entirely trusts you,” says Emma. “But he’ll come to understand in time how much you mean to me.”

“I want to go to the hotel now.”

The taxi arrives. You don’t think it’s the same driver, but really, they all look much the same. “Thanks for coming all this way,” Emma tells you through the car window as she sees you off.

“You bet.”

And she can’t help it, she can’t keep in the giggle. “I’m getting married! Me! Just think!”

But it isn’t marriage, not really. The technical term for it is civil partnership. And yet that still isn’t enough for some people, it’d seem—they say that their relationships are not given proper respect by society, that they demand equal rights. They’re always going on some demonstration march or another, they’ll be asking that their animal spouses get the vote next!—and when you go to work each morning some creaturehugger with a placard is always soliciting for your signature outside the train station at Flinders Square.

You consider yourself a tolerant and open-minded sort of man, but you do wish they’d stop making a fuss. Because they’re bloody lucky, really, haven’t they got enough? A hundred years ago they’d have been locked up for what they’re now allowed to do in public. They ask that their animal loving be treated as something natural and normal—but it isn’t natural, it’s not normal, you can’t say it is, if God had wanted humans to fall in love with animals then the union would be able to produce children. Not that you’re religious, but the religious groups are correct on that, at least, surely—and you’re not arguing about the
ethics
of bestial relations here, as you say, you’re a tolerant and open-minded person, but there’s no arguing that it makes any kind of biological sense. And yet when you try to say this in the office you’re shouted down as being bestiophobic. It really makes you sick.

But the law now states that sexual relations are permitted between a human and a consenting animal. For a while it was hard to determine what actually proved the animal was consenting—after all, it wasn’t as if they could tell us whether they were up for it or not, and if we simply all waited until they were eighteen years of age the vast majority of them would be dead. At last it was agreed that an animal’s suitability should be judged on body mass, and that the four-legged bride or groom in question must weigh at least one and a half times the amount of its human counterpart. The theory being that if you try to make love to a horse or a rhino or an elephant, and it’s not too happy about the arrangement, it will have the strength to resist—but try to shag a reluctant gerbil, say, and there’s really precious little the gerbil can do about it. One and a half times the body weight guarantees a beast’s complicity in any carnal act you might share—and if you try it on with a gerbil, no matter how much she might seem up for it, or how flirtatiously she twitched her whiskers, then it’s statutory rape, clear and simple.

You suppose your sister is now one of those people who would go on marches. Which is funny, because you can’t picture her being the sort who’d want to march about anything.

You’ve got nothing against creaturehugging per se (so long as it’s within the privacy of their own homes, so long as you haven’t got to see it, so long as it’s not shoved down your throat), you say live and let live, you say they’re not hurting anybody (except themselves), you’re not a bigot, you’re not a bestiophobe, you’re tolerant, and you’re open minded, and. . . And you’re just lucky you’re normal, and in a normal relationship, one that is healthy and clean and childbearing. But coming face to face with your sister’s fiancé has made you upset, and you don’t like that, it’s annoying to discover you’re just a little bit prejudiced after all. It wouldn’t be so bad, you reflect, if she’d found an ordinary animal, something close to home; you can imagine you’d be very accepting if your brother-in-law were a horse of good Anglo Saxon stock. But no—she had to go and find something exotic, some zoo creature—she had to go and fall for some fucking Arab.