i n D U B A I
One
day I received a telephone call from the Dubai Art Society.
'There's an important local businessman who wants a mural. Are
you interested?'
It turned out that he had a very large office, and the poster
of a lake in Canada that he had enjoyed looking at
for some years was now too far away to for him to see clearly.
Could I make it fill the whole wall?
Painting
in oils, in the evenings after work, it took about three weeks
to complete.
One evening when I was alone in the building, in the chairman's
office on about the fifth floor,
the peace was disturbed by a noise that grew louder and louder
as it travelled along the road from Sharjah.
The wall under my brush began to shake, and I backed away.
There was a loud crash as the central airconditioning unit fell
from the roof down the well of the building,
and another when the window of the office next door blew in and
broke over the desk.
The
storm soon passed, but left behind hundreds of new cars pitted
by hailstones the size of golfballs.
Over the next few days a little rust-spot grew in the middle of
each dent.
