Wednesday, April 08, 2015

How did a British girl die after visiting a cheesy Qatar nightclub?

For much of the last few hours of her life, Lauren Patterson was at Club 7 in Doha's La Cigale Hotel. It's a rotten place to have spent your final night on Earth – it looks how a 90s teen sitcom might have imagined a nightclub, with futuristic pod chairs clustered around white lacquered tables and watchful men in dark poplin going out-out shirts leering at the action on a sunken dancefloor. It was the night of October 11, 2013, and the 24-year-old Patterson – who hailed from the southeast London suburb of Chislehurst – had just returned to Qatar from the UK, where she'd attended her grandmother's funeral.

She met up with friends that night at the hotel because that's where you go if you are British and live in Doha – to one five-star hotel or another, to drink and to pretend for a few hours that you're not in the middle of a Potemkin village in the gullet of the Persian Gulf.

Patterson was a member of the Facebook group "the Doha Clubbing Authority" and in her pictures, she always seems to be with friends, looking a bit like a tanner version of Snow White. She had jet-black hair and rimmed her green eyes with dark liner so they'd pop. The thought that she might have carefully lined them that way the night she died reminds me of a picture of myself, also at 24, in the middle of a crowd at that same hotel, wearing liquid-liner-flicked cat eyes and red lipstick and drinking a vodka-something. In the picture, the backlit cityscape is blurred like the Northern Lights and no one is really looking at the camera, except for one startled girl whose name I barely remember, cigarette in hand, flimsy Union Jack sweater on her back.

 That's how I remember nights in Doha. Inconsequential, British and boozy. Full story...

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