School portraits / One spring, from a closed list to a found folder
The Asset in the Facilities Cupboard
A Dutch mother, a closed waiting list, and the corporate debenture nobody at her husband’s company could find.
Saskia Brouwer wanted JESS for her son Lucas, and the waiting list for his year was closed. Those were the two facts she had on the Tuesday. On the Wednesday she acquired a third, from a woman at a toddler group in Arabian Ranches who said it very casually, the way people say things that will cost you a month: “Doesn’t Pieter’s company have a corporate debenture?”
Saskia had read the guides. The personal debenture, twenty thousand dirhams and refundable, bought you nothing on the list. A corporate one, held by an employer, could get an application looked at when the list was otherwise shut. The guides were clear that you should ask your employer. The guides had never met Pieter’s employer, a logistics firm with four hundred staff in Jebel Ali and an HR department that answered emails in the order it felt like.
Pieter asked HR. HR asked him what a debenture was. Pieter, a man who could route a container through three ports in his head, was unable to explain a school debenture to a woman called Reem without using the words “sort of a bond thing,” and Reem, reasonably, said she would look into it. Saskia gave this one week, then asked Pieter for Reem’s number and took over, which Pieter described to his colleagues as a hostile acquisition.
Reem was lovely and had no record of anything. Finance had no record of anything. The regional director, who had been in Dubai since 2009 and remembered the company’s founder sending his own children to “the Jumeirah school,” thought there had been something, once, and that it had been handled by “Facilities.” Facilities turned out to be one man called Darren, who had a cupboard. Saskia drove to Jebel Ali on a Thursday afternoon and stood in that cupboard while Darren went through lever-arch files from a decade in which nobody had scanned anything.
He found it in a folder labelled Assets, Other. The company’s fixed-asset register, printed, with the debenture certificate clipped to the back. Saskia read the line above it and the line below it before she read the line itself. Her son’s school place was an asset, and it was listed between a forklift and a fridge.
The application went in with the certificate number on it. Lucas was observed at play, as the school does with small people, and was offered a place at the Jumeirah primary campus in Al Safa, which Saskia accepted before the email had finished loading. Pieter took the credit at work, because he had technically asked HR. Reem sent a card.
Saskia keeps a photocopy of that register page in the kitchen drawer with the takeaway menus. Lucas is seven now, and when he does something that makes her wonder what she is paying for, she gets it out and reminds herself that, on paper at least, he was a better investment than the fridge. The forklift she is less sure about.