The Sand Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

broken pipes and clearing mud out of the hallway in Belmont Terrace every time it rained. I think I can manage a place like this and hold down a job at the same time.’
    ‘All I’m saying is that you won’t have to work if you don’t want to. Didn’t you do enough of that in London?’
    ‘But I want to work, Roy. I don’t think it’s going to be enough just being a housewife.’
    ‘That’s what I mean. You’ll have someone to do the boring chores. Anyway, I already agreed to take her on.’ Roy shrugged. ‘But if she doesn’t work out we’ll let her go, okay?’
    Lea picked up a fork and toyed with her food. She imagined it would be easy to become trapped within the compound, only seeing other wives and venturing out with her family at weekends. In London she had worked at a women’s magazine called Eva for five years. It never achieved a huge circulation but had prided itself on a certain level of literary merit. She had suggested sending pieces from Dubai, but her boss had implied that she needed to be based in London to maintain her edge. There wasn’t going to be much chance of finding similar work here.
    I won’t argue with him , she thought. We did enough of that in London. This is a fresh start for all of us.

 
     
    Chapter Four
    The Resort
     
     
    O N S ATURDAY MORNING , Roy drove Lea and Cara out to Dream World.
    They parked on a white stone peninsula that jutted into the cobalt gulf waters, at the entrance to the private marina. In the distance, hundreds of brown figures toiled with keffiyehs tied around their heads, protecting them from the relentless sun. An infinite ant-march moved across the isthmus as crews shifted locations. Behind them a line of red trucks, as neat and orderly as toys on a track, rumbled over the tamped-earth highways.
    Three glittering obelisks rose from the scrubland, connected by arabesques of white concrete that swept in streamlined fractals through the sand. Arabic designers shared the geomancer’s dislike of hard lines and sharp angles. The immense hotels owed more in design to the calligrapher’s plume than the technician’s grid. Two were finished and the third, the Persiana, was almost complete. They rose in the early morning haze like jewelled artefacts from a lost civilisation.
    James Davenport, Dream World’s public relations officer, gave them a tour of the development. He was as awkward as an ostrich, and had peppery hair and white freckled arms, as if his body could not settle to one colour. Lea wondered how he managed to keep his skin from getting burnt, considering he was on site all day and wore short-sleeved shirts. Already the temperature was in the high thirties and he didn’t even look warm.
    Lea wiped droplets of sweat from her eyes and tried to concentrate. Her cream linen suit felt damp and crumpled. Everyone else appeared to have stepped out of a dry-cleaning advertisement. She wondered how much starch the local businessmen used in their white cotton thobes to get their creases so sharp. At least Cara had dressed for comfort in three-quarter length baggies and a yellow cotton top.
    ‘You’ll hear people saying that Dream World is the future,’ Davenport told them, his broad Glaswegian accent sounding out of place in such an exotic setting. ‘And they’re right. It’s a truly international project, financed by the Russians, engineered by Americans, designed by Europeans, built by Indians, raised on Arab land. If you ever want to find a way towards world peace, I’d suggest getting a dozen different faiths and ideologies together and making them construct something like this.’ He laughed, exposing a frightening array of strong yellow teeth.
    ‘How do you build out into the sea?’ Cara asked.
    ‘See over there?’ Davenport pointed to the furthest outcrop of white stone in the water. ‘The base of the resort is made from cement blocks that stand just seven metres above sea level, but they’re designed to hold up against freak