Divas in Dubai Pt. 02

Chapter One

Trish took a moment or two to admire her latest suite. Hotel rooms in Dubai were supposedly the second most expensive in the world, she knew that. And she knew WWE wouldn't have skimped. As per usual they'd block-booked the topmost floors and here she was in the crème de la crème.

It was hard to believe, really. A month ago she'd headlined in Sacramento as the defending world champion. She'd got the best set of rooms there as well, but they hadn't been a patch on these.

'I should lose to Victoria more often,' she murmured, wryly.

Back in The Big Tomato she and Victoria had headed the WWE bill for the first time in history as female wrestlers. And, as supreme, reigning champion, her name had been written in the largest letters of all. It stood to reason she'd got the best room in town. Their coming fight had been the biggest thing since sliced bread. Who wanted to watch mere men when those stunning, beyond-beautiful babes were going head to head?

Although Trish hadn't properly smiled since the night of her defeat she was by no means beaten. Seeking solace in the bottom of a bottle wasn't her style. She'd partaken of the odd proper drink, but in strict moderation. Now she didn't even bother examine the contents of the licensed minibar. Instead she poured herself a glass of iced water and went out onto her top floor sundeck.

Down on the street conditions were harsh for tourists. Even folk from hot countries winced at the heat and humidity, not to mention the ever-present desert wind. But way up here conditions were much more favourable. It was still windy but the heat had abated and that terrible humidity wasn't really noticeable.

Up here was one step away from paradise. Or should that be Jannah?

Trish had been to Dubai before and was seriously in love with the place. She wasn't big on views but this one had a lulu by any standards. Looking north, through a vista of skyscrapers and lower yet still towering high-rise buildings, she could see the splendid marina and, not so far beyond it, the immaculately blue Persian Gulf. All around her she could see expanses of Arabian Desert. Closer in, off to her left, the sand was crushed shell and coral; fine, clean and brilliantly white. Off to her right the dunes were larger and tinged red with iron oxide.

Picture postcard scenery or what?

Perching on a convenient sun-lounger she sipped her water. By now, if she'd been anywhere else in the world, she'd have stripped off. Sunbathing topless or naked was a must for her; keeping up with the tan bordered on an obsession. Yet Dubai wasn't just anywhere, was it? Some people she knew considered the city to be a cultural backwater, somewhere where hands were routinely cut off for the slightest of offences.

Trish knew better. Her appreciation grew with every visit. So too did her knowledge, which added to the experience in all sorts of ways. This was by no stretch of the imagination a backwater; this was a tolerant, forward-looking society.

Despite a few hitches, it really was. Like most everywhere else, follow the rules and it was Utopia.

For goodness' sake, they even had a Minister for Happiness!

That never failed to crease her up, but not in a depreciating sort of way. No, even though the title seemed fresh out of The Mikado, it resonated with her.

Every country should have a Minister of Happiness!

The UK probably already did, located in Whitehall, not a million miles away from Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.

(Possibly the most sensible of all the UK's many ministries.)

Enough of such nonsense; Canada's many ministries were just as bad and the USA put the world to shame. And that was just the ones they admitted to.

Moving swiftly on . . .

Nowadays Dubai had become one of the richest cities in the world and was easily the best-off in the Middle East. Founded relatively recently as far as major global cities went, it'd been no more than a fishing village up until the early eighteenth century, becoming an absolute monarchy in the year 1833. Then the Brits had noticed it.

Being a loyal Canuck Trish had mixed emotions about the Brits, who had at one time taken world domination to new levels. She had once read somewhere that, at their peak, their dominance had stretched to almost a quarter of the globe's land area . . . and of course they'd had fingers in pies in most of the other three-quarters, too. Even without planting the flag, they'd interfered just about everywhere, west to east and north to south.

All coming from a relatively tiny group of islands, stuck nowhere in a relatively cold sea.

At heart the Brits were savages, only ever properly tamed by the Romans and the Normans, and even then not for long. And they'd been regularly visited by Vikings in-between.

No wonder the Brits had picked up aggressive habits; they'd had good teachers. The Normans had shown them how to carry out an invasion; the Vikings had shown them how to them to sack and pillage; and before all that the Romans had given them delusions of grandeur.

Not that the Romans had ever truly tamed the Scots. They'd had to build the UK equivalent of the Great Wall of China for protection. Press farther north into Caledonia . . . Why should they want to do that? Keeping the murderous so-and-sos out of Britannia was the only sensible option.

It was bad enough when the Scots raided south. Who in their right mind wanted to raid north?

Unlike a lot of her fellow Canadians Trish had no French blood in her (at least as far as she was aware), but it did sometimes occur to her that the world was lucky the English, Scots and French had never truly got it together. Okay, so they had joined forces on occasion . . . mostly in world wars when situations were dire and it really mattered . . . but by and large they'd forever been at loggerheads.

It was crazy, really. Your average Brit and Frenchman would always stress the differences of two nations separated by just twenty-nine miles of sea . . . at best calling each other "Froggies" and "Rosbifs" when trying to be polite. None of them seemed to see the million-and-one similarities.

Perhaps it was best they'd always fought each other, swapping kings and insults for century after century. If they'd ever seen sense and made peace instead of war, there wouldn't be a USA.

And there wouldn't be many other places, either; at least not so many others that didn't argue the toss between Yorkshire puddings and foie gras.

Sipping water through rapidly-melting ice cubes, Trish diverted her thoughts back to Dubai. Lots of people believed the city/state thrived on extremism. She knew better. Yes, it was the capital of one of the seven emirates, with Islam as the official religion, but religion was by no means pushed down anyone's throat. Plenty of other creeds were tolerated; dozens of them, in fact. A Catholic preacher from the UK had once claimed it was easier to be a Christian in UAE than it was back in Europe.

If her research had been correct, just then the ever-growing city of Dubai had a population of up to a million. It was forecast to increase to two million by 2010 and three million by 2020. Leaving the future as an unknown, the current population had maybe eighty-five per cent ex-pats, most of them Indian but anything up to fifty thousand Brits . . . or maybe significantly more.

Those freaking Brits! Without even troubling themselves to invade the place they'd made Dubai a "protectorate" back in 1892. Little more than a fishing village as it then was, they had quickly seen its potential as a transport hub. And, persistent as always, they'd stuck it out, riding the discovery of oil around the time England won the World Cup, showing a presence ever since.

Guess the nationality of the company nowadays running both the lines of the Dubai Metro.

And guess the country's second "official" language, not so far behind Arabic.

Correct, and not spoken with a Bronx accent . . . Well okay, it was sometimes, but by no means always.

Modern Dubai was somewhat different to the old British protectorate. Not reliant on oil revenues (which were way inferior to their neighbours'), drawing in infinitely more from tourism, real estate, aviation and financial services, it was a modern city in every sense of the word, genuinely on the up, rivalling the global greats of Hong Kong, New York, London and Dublin.

(Dublin being of course, the biggest city in all of the world, because it's "Dublin" all the time!)

Dubai was a young place in other ways too. Apparently the median age was a mere twenty-seven and, possibly as a result, it was a lenient environment. That is to say, apart from that handful of relatively extreme regulations, it was. And, scary as some of the potential punishments sounded, much lesser sentences were usually imposed. Leastways they were for the only law she was ever likely to break.

As if she was likely to get chance!

Anyway rules were rules everywhere, weren't they? Wherever in the world Trish happened to be she took care to find out all of the local do's and don'ts and then stuck to them. And, viewed with an open mind, lots of Dubai's "extreme" expectancies were reasonable enough.

Zero tolerance for public drunkenness.

Even less tolerance for drinking and driving.

Zero tolerance for drug use.

Even less tolerance for drug distribution, attempted distribution or simply having the merest trace of drug use in one's blood-stream.

Technology that could catch a drug-user as he/she passed through the airport . . .

All told it was difficult to find fault with most of the restrictions, particularly when Trish conjured up images of the madness of Friday-night street life in downtown Toronto.

What a crazy world this was!

Still happily basking in the sunshine, she let her mind wander. It was, quite frankly, miraculous to be here in the best pad in the city. By all logic WWE should have relegated her after losing to Vic back in Sacramento. At best she should have been made to grovel to be right at the very bottom of this week's undercard.

But she wasn't. No, instead she was higher profile than ever.

Laughing to herself, she remembered the recent sequence of ultimately favourable events.

Chapter Two

However she looked at it Sacramento had been a disaster. It had set off okay, though. Thanks to the strict training she'd put in ahead of the night, she'd never been in better shape in her life. And that was saying something, considering her penchant for personal fitness.

Coming up against Victoria she'd had to be on the top of her game, naturally. Victoria's presence in the ring could be animal-like but her build and stamina was beyond question. As was her ability and strength and determination. Physically larger than Trish, she was capable of beating anyone, anywhere. And that was just women. Her fighting skills would defeat most regular, untrained guys and, although they'd never admit it, many male wrestlers would have had second thoughts before getting into a ring with her.

On the night Trish had been oh-so close to her best. Yes, in an unscripted battle she'd needed to be close to her very best, but everything had been going well. Getting into Victoria's face from the get-go, she'd put the raven-haired Amazon on her back foot and kept her there. Drawing blood in the early minutes, she'd pushed and pushed, hitting out repeatedly with jabs, continuously being reminded that acting was not involved by her opponent's involuntarily yelps.

Mighty Victoria yelping! Was that a first or what!!

Then everything came off the rails.

In her years as a WWE diva Trish had given and taken hundreds if not thousands of postings. As a spectacle it was invariably spectacular and always looked excruciatingly painful. In reality those posts were exceptionally well-padded and the wrestlers were used to bumps and bangs. Most of the agonized reactions were feigned and not a true reflection of the impact at all.

Except get it wrong and it hurt like crazy.

Veteran as she was, accepting she'd got herself into a position where she was obliged to take a relatively routine battering, Trish had screwed up. Even now she didn't know how, but she twisted at the wrong moment and disaster struck.

At the time she'd been smitten more by her lack of professionalism than the collision.

Omigod no, her brain had screamed.

Then the real pain had gripped her; the pain and the sudden awareness that her left leg no longer worked the way it was supposed to.

The damage was relatively short-lasting but was severely bad news. She'd been incapacitated for maybe five minutes. Five very short minutes of disability and that leg was almost as good as new again. Sadly, Victoria didn't need anything remotely approaching five whole minutes to overcome a stricken opponent.

Given her athleticism and ruthless determination, what followed had been inevitable.

No, make that inevitable, embarrassing and very, very quick.

Perhaps sixty seconds after being debilitated, Trish was pinned in an unladylike position on her back on the canvas, almost suffocating as her own tits were pressed hard into her face.

'One . . .' the referee bawled, slapping down his hand in emphasis.

'Two . . .'

Three and it was all over. Humiliated beyond belief, she'd stayed on her back, plotting vengeance in no uncertain terms, hearing the fawning crowd incessantly yelling 'Vic-tor-i-a, Vic-tor-i-a.'

All the early cries for Trish had miraculously dried.

And, as if that hadn't been bad enough, the roof of their world had then caved in.

Turned out neither of them had considered losing . . . unlike several of the other divas. Known for his "listening ear", the Commissioner had clearly been petitioned by girls who weren't ready to sit back and let the championship belt be passed backward and forwards between Trish and Vic, Ali and Frazier-like.

No, plenty of others wanted to be involved.

The fact that Victoria wanted a rematch as much as Trish mattered not one whit. At least it didn't to the great powers above. Secret bargains had already been arrived at. Deals had been done.

Not that the Commissioner had sold anyone out. He never did. And he liked Vic almost as much as he liked Trish. His idea of a sell-out was to give Molly first crack at the new title-holder (agreed before he actually knew if or who the new title-holder would be). And to insist the "old title-holder", should there be one, had next crack.

To be even fairer, most of the subsequent fights would be without scripts or too many rules. That is to say certain eliminators would be scripted but the two forthcoming championship fights would be free-for-alls.

Distraught as she was, Trish couldn't argue with that. Tragically title-less, she would have fought anyone anywhere to recover her due. Never mind Vic or Molly, she really would have gone in with anybody, anywhere (apart from maybe The Undertaker in the depths of Hell) to get back her title.

Then the press had got involved. Content with the prospect of a warm-up fight and a shoo-in title eliminator, Trish had attended a staged conference. Victoria had been there, sexy as fuck without even trying, and some asshole reporter from LA had gone off on one.

Dumb bastard had suggested out of nowhere that she and Vic weren't dire enemies after all. He'd even gone so far as to make intimations.

As per always, Trish had attended the conference alone. She handled her own affairs if and when she could and, although she had a manager and agents, did her best to keep them out of the way as much as possible.

On that occasion . . . Well, oops!

Staring at the LA hack she'd felt an almost irresistible urge to knock his teeth out. California thing or not, he had an awful lot of bright white teeth. It had been a while since she'd been to a zoo but she was sure he had more toothy-pegs than your average crocodile.

She was sure crocodiles looked nicer, too, yellowing toothy-pegs or not.

Without putting a fine point on it, the reporter had alleged Trish had recently been living in a hotel suite with Victoria as "woman and wife".

Trish hadn't previously heard the term "woman and wife" and did quite like it. As far as she and Victoria were concerned, however, it was merely rumour.

She'd laughed off the accusation.

The reporter had reiterated it, saying he had CCTV evidence, albeit fuzzy and unreliable.

Aware she had been living as "woman and wife" but not with Vic, of the belief her hotel floor had been CCTV-free, Trish had dismissed him out of hand as "having some sort of lesbian hang-up".

Visibly seething, the bastard had backed down . . . But not for long.

*****

During their exchange Trish had struggled to remember the LA reporter's name. She'd also quite smugly assumed that, as he'd mistakenly cited Victoria, he didn't know that in reality she'd been co-habiting with Erin Brook.

Co-habiting! How old-fashioned was that!!

"Living as woman and wife" sounded infinitely better, particularly as she'd been doing it with a so-sexy, elfin, ballsy and brash reporter from New York.

Not that it really mattered what Erin did or where she was from; as far as Trish was concerned the important bits were all sexy, elfin, ballsy and brash.

Back in the press conference, when she had denied Victoria, Trish had had no reservations about her own sexuality. She never thrust it down other's throats, but had always been more than happy with the way she was. If asked, she would have answered honestly.

I'm a woman who likes guys. But I'm also a woman who has sex with women. It's fun either, way, so why not?

Strangely, considering she'd never drawn wagons in circles, hardly anyone had ever asked.

As a consequence, she'd hardly ever prevaricated and never lied.

Ask the right question, get the right answer . . .

So, at the time, armed with right on her side, never once mentioning Erin, Trish had gladly blown Croc Teeth out of the water.

And next morning he'd hit back in style.

WWE floors of hotels were supposed to be guaranteed CCTV-free. But next day the front page of the California Star featured a still of a lady furtively arriving at Trish's door.

The headline roared: EVERYMAN'S DREAM SHATTERED?

Underneath in smaller print it said: WWE diva's new lover . . . and it's a she!!

The quality of the still was poor (thank God), but it was only too apparent that the furtive arrival at Trish's door was someone half the size of Victoria. Without naming names or speculating, Croc Teeth admitted as much in his article. "Witnesses could not formally identify her," he said, as if he had been investigating a murder, "but she made many, many repeat visits".

To a discerning eye the unidentified woman was Erin without a doubt. Trish suspected Croc-baby knew very well who she was and that he was perhaps a bit afraid of her (like everyone else was afraid of her). Whatever the reason, he only described her as "a hot and obviously horny female" and stressed that "all of the witnesses - and there are an abundance of them - are adamant about the repeat visits. Additionally, reliable staff members from Room Service confirmed that the meals and snacks ordered were always for two."

Then, hammering home his point, he used pages two-through-five to display over a dozen other images of said "hot and obviously horny female" arriving and leaving, often beside Trish (who was far easier to identify). The digital dateline on the photos proved the liaison had lasted days rather than hours.

No way could Trish have argued the toss. The "supposedly" CCTV-free corridor was clearly the one containing all the best rooms on the hotel's top floor. The door depicted was clearly the one into the suite she'd been occupying on the dates in question. And more to the point, the footage wasn't remotely faked; it was dead-on.