The Place That Didn't Exist

by Mark Watson

  My expectations of cleanliness have been met:

  By my room or suite

  By the Centrepiece

  By the washrooms and changing facilities across the site

  How did you hear about the Village? Please grade each of these propositions from 1 to 10, where 1 is ‘this is utterly inaccurate’ and 10 is ‘this is absolutely accurate’.

  Regular visitor

  Internet travel site (please specify)

  Word of mouth e.g. recommendation from friend, family, colleague, business associate, religious leader

  Chance

  How likely are you to return to the Village in the next twelve months? Please rate the likelihood from 1 to 10, where 1 is ‘it is inconceivable, even under the most desperate circumstances, that I will ever come to the Village again’ and 10 is ‘I have already booked my next stay and have signed up for a VILLAGE GOLD™ card to maximize . . .

  When he woke up, Tim was upright and looking at nothing. He reached out for a wall, nearly toppling forwards in the effort, and shouted out in half-formed panic. Groping for the bedside panel, he got the TV on and, by its light, dug the card from his pocket. He walked to the door and slid the card into its slot and the room was flooded with light. There were dark smears of blood on his chest and arms.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Tim out loud, grasping that he’d had a nosebleed – fluctuations in temperature, in air pressure, often did this to him – and had sleepwalked part-way to the bathroom to clean himself up. He washed off the blood, smiling wanly at his sheepish reflection. As he went back into the bedroom and his mind came to life like a restarted computer, the conversation with Ruth returned. It seemed suddenly that he’d been mad to pursue a flirtation with Jo, in a place like this where he manifestly didn’t understand the rules. Then he thought of Ashraf disappearing into the night, discarded by the Village, again for reasons that were currently beyond Tim’s grip.

  He pressed the button to open the blinds, which ground across with a certain reluctance as if they too had been asleep. The stillness outside was glacial. Far below, the swimming pool lay a ghostly green, illuminated by floor-level spotlights. It was half past one in the morning. Tim thought of the cheap, sometimes alarmingly downtrodden hostels he’d visited in Australia, and then of the Callaghans’ French campsites. In the former there had always been someone crashing back drunk. Even in the latter, where it was dead quiet at night, there had been the sense of life: the rustling of canvas, the cry of a child, the tangible nearness of other humans. This, thought Tim, was not that sort of place.

  The memory of lying with Rod in the tent, trading whispered wisecracks over their parents’ snores, made him want to call the number his brother had sent. Why not? he thought. Who cared what it would cost, what Rod would think? That was what normally stopped him from trying to get in touch, he realized: the fear of looking foolish, or needy. The current surroundings, the loneliness of this night, were enough to mute those concerns, at least for the moment. He heard a distant-sounding ringtone several times, and then, muffled but unmistakable and thrilling, his brother’s voice.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Rod? It’s Tim.’

  The pause that followed was so drawn out, Tim thought he had been disconnected. He pressed on. ‘Are you in Cuba?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Rod’s voice was becoming steadily more real. ‘I was asleep.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I thought . . . I thought it’d be afternoon there, or something.’

  ‘It is,’ said Rod. ‘I usually sleep in the afternoon.’

  ‘Is that a Cuban thing? Like a siesta?’

  ‘No,’ Rod said, ‘it’s because I’m a lazy bastard.’

  Tim heard himself laugh a little over-eagerly, but the ice-breaking effect felt genuine. ‘What are you even doing in Cuba?’

  ‘Kind of living in a commune. Don’t worry,’ he added, ‘I’m fine. I’ll come back soon.’

  ‘To Britain?’

  ‘Yeah. I just needed some time. The City – the financial stuff – it was killing me. So much bluffing. I got out just in time as well, I reckon, looking at the shitstorm that’s coming.’ Tim’s spirits soared at the ease the conversation seemed to be acquiring. ‘Anyway, so are you actually out in Dubai? Are you there, where it happened?’

  ‘How did you know?’ Tim – while still excited that his brother had made contact – couldn’t avoid a flicker of anxiety at the idea that his name was somehow publicly connected with this death; so publicly that Rod could have happened upon the news.

  ‘Someone sent me the link because they said it was your company. I Googled Vortex and it looks like you’re working on it right now.’

  ‘I came up with the . . . the concept for the ad, yes.’ Tim felt himself trying to sound important. ‘I came out here a couple of days ago. And out of nowhere this guy died.’

  ‘And they don’t know how?’

  ‘No. Maybe some sort of overdose. Or maybe . . . maybe . . .’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Tim was unsure how to maintain the momentum after this, and his brain reached for something more trivial. ‘Hey, you’d be able to sort this out. Do you know this riddle about guys who check into a hotel – it’s been bugging me – and they all pay—’

  ‘The missing dollar,’ said Rod. He sounded more and more like himself: the proud older brother, the arbiter; the person who had helped Tim arrange his books not alphabetically, but in ascending order of quality. ‘Yeah. It’s kind of a trick. They make you think everyone’s paid nine dollars to the hotel, because they all got one back from their ten. But they haven’t actually paid nine. Not really. It’s . . . I’d need to show you on paper, but basically the whole riddle is an illusion.’

  ‘When are you coming back? We’ll go through it then.’

  In the pause that followed, he wondered whether he had been too anxious to pin his brother down.

  ‘Rod?’

  The line had gone dead, this time. Tim redialled the number; it failed to produce a ringtone.

  His heart was still beating quickly; after all, it had been a breakthrough of sorts. They’d spoken for the first time in more than a year. Rod had even mentioned coming home.

  But as he climbed back into bed, with the bedside panel showing a time of two fifteen, qualms crept in alongside him once more. Their interaction already seemed implausible; the sudden cutting of the connection made it all the more so. Like the time he spent with Ruth, like the disturbing exchange with Ashraf, it seemed to have receded the instant it was over, replaced by the smooth nothingness of this room, high in a tower, in a complex where for the moment Tim felt like the only person alive. As sleep came hesitatingly once more, he tried to distract himself – as he had before – by thinking over the dollar riddle, but he wasn’t sure he quite followed what Rod had said. His only clear impression was that he’d been trying to solve a mystery that did not really exist.

  9: BLOCKS

  The sun was pouring in and Tim had woken late, which came as something of a relief. Ruth had mentioned breakfast, he recalled, as the shower battered him with water. The idea provided a certain quaint comfort, conjuring up English country hotels like the one in Saddlecombe, where cutlery was clinked and menus fussed over at identical times each day. More of that sense of the humdrum, of a hotel’s natural order, was what he needed. He didn’t have Ruth’s number, but perhaps he could get them to call her from the Centrepiece. He switched off the air-con, knowing it would somehow be on again when he returned.

  At the desk, Tim had to wait, and his confidence in the plan quickly began to waver: Ruth would already be in the office, surely. Other people’s days would be properly underway by now; he was out of joint with them. The cause of the delay was a man with a goatee and a shark-shaped inflatable under his arm, airing a grievance in Russian-patterned English.

  ‘I am here two days, first my wife is at the property expo yesterday and she doesn’t receive her free pass for shuttle, now I am wanting to go to Wild
Wadi Water Park and I again don’t have free pass.’ He thumped his fist against the inflatable. ‘I go all the way to Wild Wadi Water Park with shark and I am told I cannot come in, so I have spunked my time against the wall here.’

  At last Tim got his opportunity; the receptionist named Sophie called him forward. Her hair was tied up in a net; her brown eyes stood out in a pale face. ‘How may I help you in the Centrepiece today?’

  Tim asked for Ruth’s number, and Miles’s as well, for good measure. Sophie pursed her lips in professional regret.

  ‘Can you help me with some ID, sir?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘ID?’

  ‘ID is a short way of saying “identification”.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ said Tim. ‘But . . .?’

  ‘We cannot answer a query about a guest’s location unless it comes from another guest who is a legitimate guest,’ said Sophie.

  ‘I’ve got my room key.’

  ‘It needs to be legitimate ID, which includes a passport or driving licence,’ said Sophie.

  ‘I mean, I’m definitely a – a legitimate guest,’ Tim pointed out. ‘We spoke yesterday. About the mall.’

  ‘We certainly did, sir, and remember to call 234 if there is anything else I can help you with.’

  Tim took this as a sign that it was time to give up, and wandered away. Breakfast was still being served in Catering Planet. There were cereals, cold meats, fruits and yoghurts. Guests lined up, watching critically, as a lady in a green T-shirt cajoled batter into the shapes of pancakes and waffles; others went around the tables lifting silver lids and inspecting the insides of tureens as if suspicious the labels were lying to them. At one table, an attendant was doling out slices of toast as they emerged from the innards of a toaster so large and studded with slots and vents that it could have passed for a computer in an old sci-fi movie.

  ‘Would I be able to get – just some bread and butter?’ asked Tim.

  ‘Our bread comes as toast, sir,’ said the attendant.

  ‘But could you just give me a couple of slices of bread before they go in the toaster?’

  The attendant frowned. Tim had the sense of a great roadblock between himself and the normal process of getting breakfast, and knew how easily his brain could inflate this into a block of a more serious kind. There’s no need to over-analyse things, he told himself. He gathered up a bowl of mandarin slices, floating in juice, and was stopped by a hand on his shoulder. The Fixer was holding out a plate.

  ‘Bread.’

  Tim took it with a mumbled thank-you and began to weave through the tables, all laid out with white cloths and orchids, most unoccupied. Someone was on the stereo singing Madonna songs in a language other than English. There was no sign of Ruth. He walked on. No table was any different from any other, but somehow it seemed impossible to commit to one. He saw Bradley waving him over, with what seemed an unusually demonstrative energy. He was sitting with a tall glass of Coke crammed with ice cubes.

  ‘I was trying to call you in your room,’ said Bradley, ‘but it wouldn’t go through.’

  ‘They won’t even give me anyone’s room number,’ said Tim, intending it as the beginning of a humorous anecdote, but Bradley nodded rather sourly as if this only concerned some suspicion of his.

  ‘What’s up with that? I mean, what is up with that?’

  Before Tim could ask what he meant, Bradley had shoved an annotated script in front of him. ‘So, I have to talk to you about creative changes. You know, we are in kind of a difficult position here. There’s going to be scrutiny. This guy, this journalist . . .’

  ‘Adam?’

  ‘I think he got into my room last night.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Sweet-talking. Stealing a key. Who knows? I just see him skulking away and when I get back in my room, things have moved. I’m not a guy that likes things to move. I am not a guy that likes people to be in my room. Anyhow. My priority is to make sure we make the best commercial we can. That’s the only thing I’m focusing on right now.’

  Tim nodded. He wondered if this really was the only thing Bradley was focusing on: easier said than done, surely, to force out of your mind the unexplained death of a colleague and the logical prospect that anyone else could die just as suddenly. Tim studied Bradley’s face. His shiny head rested on one palm like a pool ball awaiting the strike of a cue.

  ‘OK,’ Tim prompted, ‘so . . .’

  ‘So . . .’ Bradley gestured at the first page of the script, marked with small, child-like handwriting. ‘Right now, we have “by donating, you can send money straight to where it makes a difference”. Christian’s asked if we can change it so that we don’t say “straight”. It’s a legal thing.’

  Their eyes met. Tim felt that Bradley was preventing himself from saying something else.

  ‘Some deep and meaningfuls going on over here!’

  As if summoned by the mention of his name, Adam had appeared at their table. He looked tired in an oddly self-satisfied way. His white shirt-sleeves were rolled up like the sleeves of an overworked hack in a Fifties movie. The bags under his eyes communicated that he had stayed up all night reporting, speculating; talking about them.

  ‘Not really. Just chatting about the script.’

  ‘Still going ahead, are they?’ asked the journalist.

  ‘We sure are,’ said Bradley.

  Adam raised his eyebrows. ‘Not easy for the Ropers. On top of everything.’

  It was infuriating, the little innuendo, the hint of some bombshell discussed by the news-pack in their bar. Bradley held the journalist’s stare with an amiable blankness. Adam said that he would love them and leave them.

  ‘Well, that’s half true,’ Tim muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Love us and leave us. Only half true.’

  ‘I don’t think I get your meaning,’ said Bradley.

  Tim took a deep breath.

  ‘If you could just think a little about that change,’ said Bradley, ‘I just have to . . . uh, to visit my room.’

  Even this banal statement seemed to carry some undertone Tim could not quite get at. Bradley folded up his script and tucked it inside his notebook with that meticulous slowness. They were all meeting in the WorldWise office, he added, at 1 p.m. for a briefing, before heading to the location.

  Tim went back to Maritime Tower to gather his things before the briefing. As usual, there was almost nobody to be seen. He tried to make progress with the odd task Bradley had left him, of mulling over the ‘creative change’. What am I meant to do with the request to drop the word ‘straight’, he asked himself, and why had this suddenly become important?

  In the short time he’d been away, the room had undergone another comprehensive clean-up. The blinds had been closed, a kiwi fruit (Fruit of the Day) sliced in the fruit bowl, a laundry bag left in readiness. The invisible hands had left a fresh satisfaction questionnaire on the bed, stacked neatly on top of the one Tim had fallen asleep with last night.

  Who were all these people who peered impassively into Tim’s toilet bowl and removed stray foliage from his path? Did they get some sort of satisfaction from the work, or resent it? It was best not to think about it: that was how you managed in a place like this, and really – given the way the world was – how you got through anything.

  Besides, Tim reminded himself: this is why we’re here, isn’t it? To tackle, in some way, the problem of inequality. That was the point of WorldWise and of Tim coming to Dubai to help them make this ad. He would try to keep that thought close to hand, today; it was easy, in the heat of all this, to forget that something real and important was happening.

  Before going to the office, he thought he should call home: there had been several more texts from his mum, among the large number generated by the events. Like the one from the other night, they were laid out and capitalized with an unevenness Mrs Callaghan would never allow in her written correspondence, bespeaking a patient battle with the technology. He stood outside the
Centrepiece. His mother answered, as always, on the third ring: efficient, but not so keen that people would think she had nothing better to do.

  ‘Oh, Tim! I’ve been worrying about you so much!’

  Her voice conjured not just their house, with its overwarm living room and the utilities humming contentedly in the kitchen, but the whole village. There was the old cinema with a screen only just bigger than the TV in Tim’s room here, the ivy-conquered church whose graveyard contained the bones of the adulterous vicar. A clock mounted above the altar of the church said ‘IT IS TIME TO SEEK THE LORD’, but its hands had stopped moving years ago, giving the accidental impression that there were only two moments a day when the Lord was worth hunting for. There was a pair of better-than-nothing pubs where Mr Callaghan used to take Tim and Rod on Christmas Eve, to Tim’s great pride and Rod’s eventual disdain.

  ‘I spoke to Rod.’

  His mother caught her breath. He heard – across thousands of miles – her overwhelming relief at the proof of Rod’s ongoing existence, and the almost immediate counterpunch of misery that she herself, who doted on him like no one else alive, had not received a call. ‘Where . . .?’

  ‘He’s in Cuba.’

  ‘Cuba,’ repeated Linda Callaghan. ‘Goodness me. What’s he doing there?’

  Tim tried to assess whether the word ‘commune’ would reassure her, or the opposite. ‘He’s just taking some time out. I’m going to speak to him again soon, so I’ll get him to call you.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you, Tim.’ She cleared her throat. ‘So, how long are you going to be out there? It’s been in all the papers here, the . . . you know, the death. It was in the Telegraph.’ Although this was not the way she’d dreamed of it happening, Mrs Callaghan couldn’t suppress a note of triumph at the milestone: ‘I’ve been telling everyone: Tim’s working on that show!’

  ‘Well, ad. It’s an ad. It—’

  ‘I feel so sorry for the parents.’

  ‘It’s awful,’ Tim agreed, irritation building inside him. It had to do with the tone of dinner-party gossip. He could imagine his mother talking like this at the book club. There would be people everywhere back home taking up the story like this, playing with it, putting it down: the discussion of the tragedy of no more significance in their day than a cup of coffee.