Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant Page 7

  You open your eyes in the shower and there is a figure in there in the bathroom with you, either standing in the shower or just standing in the room, reflected gauzily in the steamy mirror, and they are cloaked, the figure, and holding a knife of some sort—either a to-the-point sort of hunting blade or instead a curved hook or scythe—and they raise it, and for a brief second you wonder which part of your soft naked flesh they are going to slice into first, and sometimes that is a fear, irrational as it is, one that has me with my eyes tightly wound while I shower, afraid to open them and see, as if the figure there is lurking and waiting for me to recognize them before slashing my throat open, to death, that is a fear, I suppose.

  That one day my bank will phone me and in a stern voice tell me exactly how many consecutive days I have been in my overdraft.

  Adult Size Large

  I recently lost three and a half stone, fifty straight pounds, and in doing so went from an Adult Size Large down to an Adult Size Large. This pissed me off enormously: fat melted from the wattle around my neck, my torso leaned out and became slender, my entire waist melted down through two (two!) entire jeans sizes, and my top half inexplicably remained the exact same dimensions according to the T-shirts I was buying in every single store on earth. Reader: what the living fuck.

  My friend Sam is an Adult Size Large, and yet he is at least 60 percent leaner than I am through the torso, perfectly proportioned limbs and body, BMI so immaculate it could be holy, perfect example of health and beauty, capable easily of fitting into anything down to a size S and up to an XL. He is essentially a shop mannequin with kind human eyes. He wears the same size T-shirt as I do, and I feel like I am staring at a blackboard full of calculations that lead to an equals sign followed by a question mark. Here is my central thesis: How is this man the same size as me according to our tees? I am like twice as wide as him, torso to torso. It makes no sense.

  Or, so: my sister came to me recently. My sister, like yours, has got into exercise lately. Everyone’s sister eventually gets to this stage. Everyone has a healthy sister. Perhaps your sister is a brother or an aunt. It does not matter: they are running a half marathon this autumn and want your support. My sister, like yours, got into triathlons, then just cycling and swimming, and now just swimming. She went insane at a running store and bought a load of all-black exercise wear, now unused. Would I like it, she says, to sit around the house motionless and typing. “It is Adult Size Large,” she says, and offers me the pile. There is some good stuff in here, man. Nike and stuff. I take the running gear, which fits me like a glove.

  One night I came home drunk off the back of an exceptional Arsenal win and found my then-girlfriend like a tiny long-limbed creature in my bed. “Put this Arsenal shirt on,” I said, staggering into my wardrobe. “You know I have lingerie,” she said. “Like: loads of lingerie. You never get me to wear it.” It does not matter what lingerie you have: the single sexiest thing a naked woman can put on is 1. a man’s work shirt, with the half smell of the day still on it, rendered flower-like and fragile by soft moisturized skin and the everlasting dint of breasts or 2. an Arsenal soccer shirt with “ARSHAVIN #23” across the back, Adult Size Large.

  I do not understand this. If you are on a bus or a train, look around you. Many, many people wear clothes the wrong size for them. Men’s jeans are fantastic for this, because they have the exact size of them printed on a visible label on the back of them: I recently saw a man rocking thirty-six-inch-waist jeans with a (at a guess) thirty-inch-waist proper, so he had to cinch his belt blood-stoppingly tight around him so the jeans would fit properly. But on top: Adult Size Large. Or: men buy jeans that balloon out from the calves and somehow envelop their entire shoes. Men wear jeans, but do not understand them. They buy coats they can get their arms in, no more thought goes into it than that. And they all buy Adult Size Large, and they fit into them, and unless they are particularly unbroad or bird-chested, it fits them more or less fine.

  And I am screaming at the night sky now, outside, so my breath turns to fog on the cold of it: If we are all Adult Size Large, then why do we have so many differences? I feel that somewhere in the gray unknowable magic of this size, there’s something approaching peace: Adult Size Large transcends race, and sex, and gender, and age and height and weight. Adult Size Large is the T-shirt that more or less fits everyone. Can we not come together and appreciate that? Put down your guns, brothers. Unprime your bombs. Deep down, we are all the same. Come, unite with me, in the fields of peace. There is no need to fight anymore. We all have more or less the same-sized torso. I don’t understand how, but let’s try and work it out.

  24 Stories from the Middle of the Desert

  I’m staring at a poster in the camel museum. At the center of the poster: a large cartoon impression of a camel. Out from the camel, in little squiggling offshoots, photos of camels pulling various different-but-extremely-similar camel faces. Gaze into the eyes of a camel and you will see nothing but glassy tranquility staring back. Gaze into the eyes of a camel and it will calmly blink and chew cud. But no, this poster says. Camels contain multitudes. “APPEAL OF CAMEL PERSONALITY,” it reads. “Family Bond,” “Sensitive,” “Loyal,” “Smart,” “Defending.” The next attribute is portmanteaued into one with a slash: “Bossy/Leaders.” And there, hovering up around the original cartoon camel’s ear area, a single word, in rigid black: “Fear.”

  Everything is camels and camels are everything here at…

  …the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, Saudi Arabia!

  CALL: Why were you at a camel festival in Saudi Arabia?

  RESPONSE: Because it was there, and when something is there, it is human nature to go and look at it.

  CALL: What is a camel festival like? What is a camel festival?

  RESPONSE: I don’t know exactly because the camel festival I went to started being constructed in March 2017, i.e., six weeks exactly before I arrived in Saudi Arabia to come and look at it, so necessarily was entirely incomplete, and actually on balance I saw far fewer camels than you might have expected me to, on the whole, seeing as I flew all the way to Saudi Arabia to go and see camels.

  CALL: What actually was it, then?

  RESPONSE: It was basically just a big parking lot with a load of camels in it. I flew seven hours and drove two. That’s what it was. It was a parking lot full of camels, in Saudi Arabia.

  CALL: Would you highly recommend the camel festival as a fun continental tourist retreat?

  RESPONSE: No, I wouldn’t go so far as to say the word “highly,” no.

  * * *

  —

  So I am in a tent, later now, trying to understand the appeal of camels. At my feet: a discarded tray of grilled chicken, Gulf Sea prawns, rice, fruit, om ali, a pudding that is essentially cornflakes soaked in milk and warmed up with some cashews in it; to my right, a small cushion plinth on which is resting two (two.) disposable paper cups of Arabian coffee and a larger plastic cup of sweet chai. The sun is blurrily setting and the sky turns dark from blue. There is a boy whose job in the tent is seemingly to bring me tea and coffee whenever I hold up a hand to say “tea” or “coffee.” When he is not bringing me tea and coffee, he just stands on the balls of his feet, staring covertly at the TV. There is something singularly unusual about seeing a huge, brand-new HD TV plugged into a tent: in amongst rugs lining walls to deflect the searing heat of the sun, one perfect clear window, a slash of tech amongst the sand. On the television is an old BBC Two show where modern-day families live life for a day as either a slave or a lord in a Downton Abbey–style home, dubbed in Arabic. Earlier: a British nature documentary, where for some reason the monkeys in it were dubbed to have voices, and somehow, despite speaking Arabic, here the monkeys have British accents. The refreshments boy brings me some more chai. I have been in the sun for ten hours and I am delirious. The monkeys are British and the camels are beautiful.

  “It’s l
ike,” the translator, Ali, is telling me. “It’s like…young men, you know? To show off they have some money…it’s like: a camel.”

  I say: “Right.”

  “So it’s like…horses. Or: falcons. You have falcons?”

  “No, we do not.”

  He is incredulous.

  “You don’t have falcons?”

  “We don’t have falcons.”

  “Ahhhh: that’s why you liked the falcons.”

  Earlier we saw some falcons and yeah, all right, I’ll be honest: I lost my shit about the falcons. I liked the falcons.

  “Huh.”

  For a moment we both pause in the heavy, heavy heat, trying to think of a British equivalent to camels that aren’t horses or falcons. “I guess,” I say, and I am thinking of Instagram, and how the people I follow who are in a good place in their life use it, and what they show off about, and how they might mark the occasion of their good fortune and express it through ownership of an animal. “I guess…dogs? Pedigree dogs? Like a bulldog?”

  Ali thinks for a moment, strokes his beard.

  “Yeah, I mean I guess,” he says. “Yeah. I suppose.”

  But no. What I am learning is in Arabia, camel-liking is some curious mix of soccer fandom, dog show, Max Power magazine masculinity, and hump acknowledgment. That camels aren’t like dogs, or horses, or falcons. What I am learning out here, in the heat and the sand and the flies and the dates, what I’m learning is this: There is nothing. There is nothing Quite Like a Camel.

  * * *

  —

  There are two types of camels in Saudi Arabia, black camels and white camels. It is, if you go deeper, more nuanced than that. (There is an oft-repeated, never-fact-checked Eskimos-and-snow-type factoid about camels: “In Arabic,” people say, “they have over a thousand words for camel!” which no, they don’t, but it’s certainly true that there are up to forty types and subtypes of camel, and there are words for that, same way we have words like “pug” and “Labrador,” but in Saudi Arabia they don’t go around yelling, “The British people! Those lardy fools. Those pastry pigs have over a million and a half words for dogs!”) But for now—knowing in advance the onslaught of camel information I am about to hit you with—it is easier if we just divide into the black camel from the south (majaheem) and the white camel from the north (maghateer).

  Camels have two stomachs. Camels walk like this: right front leg and right back leg, then left front leg and left back leg. Get on all fours and try and do that now. You can’t. No other animal on earth walks like a camel. Camels: camels can consume thirty gallons of water in thirteen minutes, then not drink again for several weeks. When camels exhale, their nostrils are designed to capture tiny droplets of moisture from their breath and recycle them back into their bodies. There are 1.7 million camels in Saudi Arabia, so 3.4 million stomachs. There are 7.1 million camels in Somalia. Camel hair can be woven into a rough fabric that is useful for making rugs and desert tents. Camel meat can be consumed. Camel milk is thick, frothy, and warm from the teat. Look into a gawping camel mouth if you want to see a brief glimmer of hell. Camel feet are just two fat toes with hard nails and a thick wad of skin like a shoe beneath it. Camels are designed to experience extreme heat variations—both hot and cold, as the day turns into the cool night—and are barely ever sweaty. A camel can spit enough in one go to entirely cover the top half of you—you, a puny human in a T-shirt—the entire top half of you and your body. This is all by way of saying that camels are freaks, basically, absolutely irregular boys, and not as you thought before just lumpy horses, and that, in a way, is why they are celebrated and revered, and that is why I am in Saudi Arabia to look at them.

  The King Abdulaziz Camel Festival takes place eighty-five miles northeast of Riyadh, and is known colloquially as the “Miss Camel” beauty pageant. This isn’t exactly true: the camels paraded here are judged on a variety of factors, which we will get into, which all together can be added together to make some vague approximation of “beauty,” but calling it “Miss Camel” suggests camels in thick rouge and red lipstick, stiltedly walking on stilettos, turning on the spot at the end of a catwalk and shuffling back behind a glittering curtain while a Donald Trump type, half hard and glimmering beneath the stage lights, whoops and hollers in horny delight. But instead it’s just a racetrack in the middle of the desert (there is literally one stand; the rest of the track opens out into an expanse of nothing, as deep as the sea) with a load of camels racing in a pack over it, chunter-chunter-chunter, and four men with clipboards nodding at them appreciatively. You know when you go to a party and it’s just, like, popping? Something intangible and electric in the air. An unsynthesized form of excitement you can’t emulate or explain. A vibe. So, right, you know that feeling? Now imagine the exact opposite of it. With camels.

  It’s like this where, for three small hours in the morning, camels rove forward and back, while a sort-of-full-but-not-actually-very-full set of newly erected bleachers rumbles with the stomping of a few hundred men in desert attire. I am allowed onto the track for a bit to take photos—camel herders with plastic neon sticks gallop to the front, making high ya-ya-ya-ya! whistling sounds as the camel pack moves calmly behind them, parading in front of a handful of distant judges, sweeping past them once, twice, three times maybe, then hurdling off into the distance, all while a crowd of a few hundred men hold their hands up to their eyes to squint and watch them in silence. And that’s it, 11 a.m. and it’s done. Everyone files out to the camel festival village, to look at pictures of camels instead of actual ones. Some people just file back on a coach and go home. That’s it. That’s the camel festival. Also this goes on for six weeks. What is anyone getting from this?

  * * *

  —

  So early morning at this camel festival, that’s when the actual camel festivaling happens. This is before the sun comes up and sears the ground beneath it: though camels can cope in extremes of heat and dryness, humans can’t, so if you want to watch some camels on parade, you take an early breakfast and get out there between 9 a.m. and 11. The thing is, I’m still getting my head around the logistics of this: as a guest of the camel festival, I’m sleeping here at what’s known as a barracks, a sort of grim gray prefabricated building a short drive from the central camel village. The rest of the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival stretches off around me: a small central hub, the aforementioned village, a tarmacked space that can be walked from one end to the other in about three minutes flat, home to a bustling trinket market, a camel museum, an observatory (???). Then, up beyond that, you have the parade grounds: an arching racecourse-type structure, with a gray-white stand and spaced railings that lead out into the desert, where paddocks await the prizest camels, and then…and then I mean there is just a massive, massive Disneyland-sized parking lot, which is almost entirely empty. And that’s it.

  So what I don’t understand is this: Did this crowd of camel-liking men, here at 8 a.m. in the morning, did they drive here from Riyadh today? Did they get in a jeep or on a coach at 6 actual a.m. and drive here to look at camels today? Or did they sleep here, in tents and barracks unseen, and wake up still quite early to whoop and cheer at camels? And where did they go again after they had looked? A few piled onto a coach—I saw them. A few milled around the village section before the heat of the sun made being outside unbearable for more than a few minutes. Who. Has. Come. Here. To. Look. At. The. Camels. Apart. From. Me.

  Where. Are. They. Going.

  Where. Are. They. From.

  Does. Anyone. Actually. Like. Camels. That. Fucking. Much.

  * * *

  —

  “Yeah, so I’ve been learning about camels. I’ve only seen, like, six camels, though. I saw the camel museum, I saw some facilities at the village. I drank some camel milk. But I didn’t see a whole lot of camels. So I’m trying to understand the appeal, and I think I’m getting there, but I wa
nt to see some actual camels tomorrow. Are you into camels?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  / INTERVIEW ENDS

  * * *

  —

  Saudi Arabia is banking on people liking camels that much, for not just the Saudi people (though it is for them “tradition,” a financial officer tells me, “it’s not just for foreign people, it’s for us. The younger generation. We don’t care about those kinds of things. Others, they, you know, they’re city guys, they don’t care about camels. If you forget your past, then you don’t have one.”) but also the camel-liking nations that surround Saudi—Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, UAE, Bahrain, Iraq—to come and gaze. The King Abdulaziz is part of Saudi’s “Vision 2030” project, a sort of countrywide civil-service-led scheme to start the engine of tourism in the country by pouring gallons and gallons of petrol into the tank of it (money—in this analogy, that means money) and yank wildly at the rip cord, hoping some errant spark will judder the whole thing to life.

  They probably need to sort the visa thing out before that becomes a reality, though. Traditionally, entry to Saudi Arabia has been a case of getting on an airplane and riding it through a series of loopholes: a visa is required for every visitor, nonnative female travelers must be met by a sponsor at the airport, anyone who has ever been to Israel before is going to have a really rough time at check-in, &c. &c. &c. Theory dictates that these notoriously strict guidelines have been loosened recently, to reflect the friendly new face of Saudi Arabia, but in reality nobody at the airport seems to have ever seen a visa-confirmation message in their life and seem intent on holding me—tired and crumpled from a seven-hour flight, body melting in that way bodies only melt when you take them from the skin-tightening air-conditioning of an aircraft cabin and put them in the pregnant dry heat of an Arab country at night—and long story short, I have to wait for two hours on a sterile hospital-waiting-room-style seat while three lads in a back office hold on to my passport, occasionally scrolling through WhatsApp on one iPhone before dipping into a pocket to retrieve another, slightly more cracked iPhone, then scrolling through WhatsApp on that, and then deciding finally I can leave and begrudgingly stamping the paperwork—which was there on the desk next to them all along—to allow me to do that. It is five o’clock in the morning and my taxi glides across new tarmac like it is ice, and the sunrise here is gorgeous, inky blue night ceding to orange hazy day, like someone took a big thumb and smudged the two colors together, and the air is crisp and cool before the day has started enough to heat it. Sunrise here is astounding: it makes you pensive, reflective, sad, and quiet. It makes you want to take every visa worker in the airport and bury them where they’ll never find them, out there in the sand.