The Place That Didn't Exist

by Mark Watson

  ‘There’s no way we’re going to be shooting again tomorrow,’ Miles continued with gloomy relish. ‘That camera is shafted. It’s fucked beyond repair. And we’re not going to be able to replace it without at least a couple of days’ notice. Yeah, make no mistake: that thing is shot to shit.’ He went on in this vein, making his point in yet more emphatic terms, although nobody was contradicting him. The rest of the team shuffled around the issue of car-space and Tim saw a chance to be useful – if only by absenting himself.

  ‘I don’t mind staying here, getting them to call me a cab.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ replied the Fixer instantly, as though he had made Tim say this with a conjuring trick. ‘That would be good. I can send one for you within the half-hour. You could have a drink here.’ He mustered a semblance of one of his grins. ‘Talk golf with some of the guys.’

  As he watched the car pull away – Ruth staring blankly out of the window, the Fixer already on the phone – Tim’s momentary alarm at being left alone quickly gave way to relief; he felt the net, the invisible trap, shrink away just a little. He had no appetite for the new round of loaded conversations, of glances and insinuations, that would come now; and he was best off away from Jo, and from anyone who might suspect them. He would be better off, perhaps, away from here altogether. Maybe I could go home, he told himself. I should go home to London. They don’t actually need me here, and it doesn’t feel safe.

  ‘What are you doing out here, man? Soaking up the rays?’

  It was Jason Streng, his agent following at a vigilant distance. He lowered his sunglasses and cocked his head at Tim.

  ‘Oh. Er. They couldn’t fit me in the car, so . . .’

  ‘You can ride with us, man,’ said Jason, in his strange cod-American accent. Or maybe it was the word ‘ride’ that seemed odd: as if they were planning a beachside cruise rather than leaving the scene of a near-fatality. As he slid into the back seat of an SUV not much smaller than a minibus, Tim was conscious of a quick exchange of looks and shrugs between Streng and Elaine, and suspected that she was questioning the wisdom of this move. To hell with her, thought Tim with a sort of tired defiance. I’ve got a right to be here. What does she think I’m going to do to him?

  ‘Just shove those out of the way if you want,’ said Streng from the front seat, indicating a collection of white laminated shopping bags decorated with single words like SOUL and SANCTUARY; words that in another context, Tim thought, would mean important things. There was no need to move them, though: the vehicle was bigger than the ones used to ferry the entire team about, and Tim was able to sit a comfortable distance from Elaine, whose nails tap-danced across the buttons of her phone as they carved through the traffic.

  They passed the Dubai Pearl billboard, THE FUTURE IS TODAY, and Tim – wanting to say something innocuous and witty – muttered: ‘That’s funny, I thought the future was further off than that.’

  ‘Sorry, what?’ said Jason. Elaine glanced momentarily at Tim as if, even by speaking this much, he was in some way imperilling her client.

  ‘Oh, just that billboard. For the new housing development. Seems a bit – a bit of a silly slogan.’

  Jason said nothing at all; it seemed, incredibly, that Tim had somehow managed to offend him, or maybe he was just too bored by the feebleness of the conversation even to enter into it. But just as Tim felt an outsider’s sorrow wrap itself around his shoulders once more, Streng swung around to look at him.

  ‘A mate of mine, Noel Shaw.’ He said the name as if Tim would inevitably know it; Tim nodded obligingly. ‘Great guy. Comes out here a few years ago, goes to one of these property sales. A sales guy tells him about the Palm. The dude says if he takes a villa there and then, he can get two more villas for half price.’

  Streng was enthused by his own tale, Tim was pleased to see: performance, after all, was what he did. He slipped between the voices of the two characters in his anecdote – Noel a sleazy-sounding American, the salesman breathy and wheedling – and Tim began to relax. ‘So of course Noel says, why the fuck would I want to buy three villas! The sales guy says: you can flip them.’

  ‘Flip them?’

  ‘Flip them. There’s a line outside to buy these properties. You come out of here and say you’ve got three, you can double your money. Straight away. And you know what he did?’

  ‘He bought them?’

  ‘He bought them.’ Streng laughed, and Tim laughed with him. ‘He drops, like, a million bucks there and then. He goes outside. It’s just like the guy said. He sells two of the villas, literally right there. And you know what the buyers will have done?’

  ‘Sold them on again?’

  ‘Exactly. Flipped them straight on. Probably to people in the same line, ten minutes later. And so on. And I tell you the really fucking mad thing. None of these places existed yet. This was all off-plan. So they get bought and sold, bought and sold ten times before a brick’s been laid.’

  ‘And what exactly do you do, Tim?’ asked Elaine, cutting in, in a cold voice which stalled Tim’s confidence surge. He swallowed.

  ‘I, I’m a creative.’

  ‘But what does that actually mean?’

  ‘I’ve done a few campaigns for Vortex. Coming up with ideas; selling them to the client.’

  ‘Anything I would have heard of?’

  Even before the prize-nominated Yorkshire campaign, Tim had had some notable successes. There was ‘SOMETIMES YOU’VE GOT NO CHOICE’ for a chocolate company – a series of ads in which people desperate for the product were shown lying in wait with baseball bats, ripping snack bars away from children. There’d been a handful of complaints, enough for the campaign to go down as a winner. Then there was a series of print ads for a hotel group involving a long-faced, post-coital couple: the slogan said ‘WELL, OUR BEDS AREN’T THE PROBLEM’. After the ad the models had allegedly embarked on a real-life affair. It was only a story, but it got into a trade journal, so it was better than if it had been true.

  He started trying to describe the latter campaign to Elaine, whose face not only betrayed a lack of recognition, but barely changed at all. By the time they got out of the car, what mileage Tim had felt he’d gained was lost again. He said goodbye to Streng and his agent with the odd feeling that it was possible he wouldn’t see them again. Tomorrow there would be, quite likely, no more filming; and beyond tomorrow, he was beginning to feel, he would have left Dubai.

  Late afternoon was giving way to evening, but the heat had only dropped a little; reggae and samba music floated from pools where bathers still lay, slumped like toy animals, and children called shrilly and splashed one another.

  Unsure whether to eat at one of the beachside places or go back to Maritime Tower, Tim scanned a couple of menus, unable to summon any real appetite even when managers emerged and boasted of various ‘very special’ dinner deals, which sounded a lot like the ones they’d advertised every other time he had passed. A couple of places were already doing a good trade: waiters moved busily like ants. He sat eventually on a terrace and tried to collect his thoughts.

  He wondered how he could have fielded Elaine’s blunt enquiry – what exactly do you do? – in a manner that would have sounded more convincing. Clearly, he’d done well for somebody not even out of his twenties. It was just that everything here was so far from the parameters within which he normally measured his life. In this warren of eating-places, amid these palaces of luxury goods and tableaux of pure leisure upon which even a death made no more than a momentary scratch, he was unmoored from the sort of reality that made his achievements seem real. Mentioning his award nomination here, or indeed his whole showreel, would mean about as much as getting out his school swimming certificates.

  A waitress was standing a little way away, studiously not looking at him, arms folded, an internationally recognized waiting-for-an-order stance. Tim asked for a Coke. His brain registered the taste before it was in his mouth; Coke was so familiar that there was hardly any difference between
drinking it and not drinking it. Perhaps that was part of the problem with the Village, he thought: everything was so well managed, so perfect, that nothing really mattered at all.

  As Tim finished the drink and joined the central path marked out by the mock-weathered signposts, this unreal feeling began to take hold of him more firmly. The tear-shaped swimming pool, childishly blue; the magazines and airport thrillers, the waiters and lifeguards. None of this is really happening, he thought, with a sensation like dizziness or sickness. Inside the lift in Maritime Tower he took a deep breath, exhaling as the doors shut. He pressed the button and then ran his hands slowly over the lift wall, and the moment of intense dissociation seemed to pass. It’s fine, he said to himself. You are in Dubai. Things are a little strange, that’s all.

  He decided to focus purely on the normal, the minute-by-minute; not on Raf’s death and the mysteries and uncertainties multiplying by the hour. He’d allowed his brain to overfill.

  Outside, it was beginning to get dark, and the sight was comforting. For a few moments, as the orange sun plunged into the sea, Tim felt a certain awe for Dubai again, even an affection, as if it were a still-attractive person about whom he’d discovered something disappointing. The Burj Al Arab gazed across the water at him, the panels of its body lit in seductive gradations of blue, and Tim had the fleeting fantasy that someone in the higher reaches of the tower was looking out towards him, like they were two turret prisoners in a fairytale.

  As usual, the dark that succeeded the dusk fixed a fluttering alarm somewhere in Tim’s stomach. He ran a bath and ordered room service, which was brought by a sadly smiling Filipino. Then he switched on his laptop, glancing at the screensaver’s two-dimensional Burj.

  There was an email from Stan to the whole company about new business, a campaign for a male perfume called Utopia ‘created’ by a pop star who was barely aware of its existence. There was nothing from Rod, as Tim had hoped there might be, to explain the curtailment of their call. And once the inbox was exhausted, there was the inevitability of his next Google search. Reading about anything other than Raf’s death felt like being one of the people who, minutes after it was announced, went back to smiling and tending the swimming pools. Within an hour of vowing to disengage from the theme, Tim was reading a blog by one of Raf’s friends.

  The friend took up the theme that there was a conspiracy. Dubai, claimed the writer, was a Wild West in which money could solve any problem, ‘including the problem of someone being alive whom you want to be dead’. Tim clicked a link to another blog and felt his hands freeze on the keyboard.

  I’ve got a certain amount of interest in this case, not just because I spent three years working in Dubai – as regular readers will know – but because, believe it or not, I vaguely know one of the people involved in the case, the guy from the Vortex agency.

  Tim read these lines several times before scrolling down to the bottom of the page to discover the identity of the writer. His name was Marcus Carless. A memory-bell rang in a vault of his brain. It was a boy from his class at school. It was a stretch to say they ‘vaguely’ knew each other, after all this time. Tim couldn’t even picture his face: his memories were all of the name itself, with its peculiar half-rhyme. Carless was now apparently some sort of financial analyst, one of the many people who’d popped into Dubai for the gold rush.

  However many times Tim read the sentence, he could not make the words mean what they claimed to mean: that he, Tim, was one of a handful of people who could legitimately be accused of committing a murder. Of course, there was absolutely no evidence there had even been a murder, but Carless seemed in little doubt. The ‘drink and drugs cocktail’ found in Raf’s bloodstream was nothing more than a convenient phrase, he wrote, absolving all but the victim. Everyone knew that illicit behaviour went on in Dubai, and the authorities turning a blind eye was part of the deal by which the whole city maintained its survival. But this was still the United Arab Emirates, and now and again they liked a salutary example. Westerners have sex on the beach: they get thrown into prison. A guy takes the partying too far: he dies in his hotel suite. The moral: Dubai can be tough if it has to be. More and more Westerners arrive on the promise of sex and parties; they stay just on the right side of the law; everyone is happy. But there’d be another autopsy, Carless predicted: that was the least Raf and his family deserved.

  Besides, added the writer casually, it was hardly as if WorldWise was completely above board; how’s Dubai Pearl going? he asked, rhetorically, adding a whimsical sort of winking smile constructed from a bracket and a semi-colon.

  Even accounting for the fact that this man had lived in Dubai, it was dizzying and unpleasant how blasé he was about the supposed facts of the situation; the breezy way he predicted a ‘second autopsy’, when Tim could not even find reference, on the internet, to the results of the first one. And Carless was only one of a gathering mass of people mystery-solving from a distance in this recreational way, while Tim and his colleagues flailed about, fielding the suggestive looks of strangers. They, the people closest to the situation, were the only ones unable to see it: it was as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

  Tim slammed the lid of the laptop shut and pushed it away.

  He remembered the Facebook post he’d read before, the ominous cliché: ‘Some1 knows something’. The internet was rapidly making him feel that too many people knew too many things. So many opinions were laid out as facts. Each pieced-together version of the last moments of Raf Kavanagh’s life was real to the person who thought it. Tim had the weird and not entirely articulated feeling that there might not be a real story: that the reality of what had happened to Raf might sink beneath the weight of all the versions which were not true, yet still existed.

  There were footsteps outside, approaching along the corridor. The footsteps stopped and there was a startling knock at the door.

  ‘Hello?’ Tim called.

  But nobody spoke. The air-conditioning’s hum went on, neutral as ever, one unending breath. Tim called out again; once more there was no reply. Then, two more knocks. For a second he experienced fear of a strain purer than any he had ever known. It began in his crotch, like an erection would, but it was the opposite of that feeling – a creeping cold, spreading upwards and downwards simultaneously. He imagined himself opening the door and looking into the eyes of someone who had committed murder, knowing that he was next. Don’t be an idiot, he thought. Nobody can get in. Also, there’s a peephole on the door. You can just go and look through the peephole.

  But he stayed where he was; it felt as if some greater force than himself was pinning him down. His thoughts went back to what he’d read, to the remark about Raf ‘deserving’ a second autopsy. He pictured Raf’s family waiting at the airport: some windswept stretch of tarmac, staff in hi-vis jackets standing indifferently by.

  After fifteen or twenty minutes which seemed considerably longer, Tim at last felt the tension begin to recede. If someone was listening, they would have realized there was nothing much to hear. Tim allowed himself to get up and go about what business he could find. He put on the spotlights at either side of the bed; he switched on the TV and listened with relief to the foreign-language jabber of a football commentator.

  He peeled his shorts off and set the shower to London Rain, which proved a successful adaptation of the real thing: it was cold, low-to-medium intense, steady and plodding. He felt the cleansing touch of it on his back and shoulders. There’d never been anyone at the door, he told himself. Or if there had, it was room service, housekeeping; one of the army of staff who had worked out they were not wanted. The water rushed over him. Soon, very soon, he could be back in London.

  When he came out of the shower, a Poirot was on TV: the coincidence brought the ghost of a smile to Tim’s lips. He opened the laptop and the screen sprang obediently to life once more. There had been too many hints about WorldWise; it was clear he should have been more diligent in researching the charity before he came here.
Did Raf find out something they didn’t want him to know? There was little chance of discovering anything on the internet other than another mountain of conjecture, but he would look it up, even so. On the screen, Poirot – brow furiously furrowed beneath that eggshell cranium – lamented that he had been an idiot, twenty-three times an idiot; his wingman Hastings gaped in trademark incomprehension.

  When Tim turned his eyes back to the laptop, he was confronted with a row of black text in Arabic, topped by an exclamation mark. He tried again to get onto it; once more he received the message, polite but non-negotiable, like the red light rejecting his room card. He tried Facebook, then the BBC site: the same thing happened.

  He called down to the Centrepiece and was asked if he minded going on hold, then was instantly placed on hold anyway. A recorded voice reminded him that the Village had a range of world-class leisure facilities. Tim reached into the minibar and opened a bottle of white wine.

  From the moment you step into the Village, the voice was saying, you will feel at home. It’s a place where business can be a pleasure, and where pleasure is our business. With executive accommodation across a range of luxurious blocks . . .

  Tim looked back at the screen. Why was he blocked from the web, and why was the message not in English, in this resort so tailored to foreign custom that its native language had virtually been obliterated? He stared in frustration at the dance of symbols across the screen, symbols which a different person could convert into words and ideas.

  Go online to find out more, he was now being entreated by the recorded message – a suggestion which seemed ironic in the current circumstances – and to discover our partner companies, which include Dubai Pearl, where the future . . .

  Where the future is now, thought Tim with a tiresome sense of déjà vu. Then something happened in his brain, or several things all at once. He remembered reading those words on the hoarding, commenting sarcastically; Jason’s complete blankness. He thought of the momentary panic in Elaine’s eyes every time somebody approached Jason, her insistence on filtering all requests; about the secret they were nursing together, referred to in the trailer. He sloshed a glass of wine out of the bottle. What if Jason had been nonplussed by the billboard because he didn’t know what it said, just as Tim couldn’t make out the words on his laptop screen? What if Jason could not read?