The Place That Didn't Exist

by Mark Watson

  ‘What’s a bidoon?’ Tim asked, breaking a silence which had felt full of relief, or at least of resignation.

  ‘It’s what they call someone who doesn’t have citizenship. Stateless people.’

  ‘The Fixer doesn’t have citizenship?’

  ‘No. He’ll be Iraqi or Kuwaiti. But part of a tribe which isn’t recognized as being, erm, officially human. So they aren’t able to work here, legally.’

  ‘I remember Ashraf saying that word when he left. Or trying to say it; I couldn’t work out what the word was.’

  ‘It’ll have come out, during the police investigation, that he was a non-citizen. A bidoon. And that’s why he was fired. They don’t have any rights, really. They just live on the run.’

  ‘So, the Fixer . . .’

  ‘He’ll disappear for a little bit and then come back with a different identity. That’s what people do here. Do you want a beer?’

  ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ was playing from speakers as they sat at a table. The waiter enquired as to the success of their stay so far. He asked the same question of a couple at the next table: a young Malaysian girl and a gentleman perhaps three times her age. When they reached out for their beers, Tim and Ruth’s fingers met across the table for a second.

  ‘So you’re going in the morning,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. In the early hours.’ The new song was ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’. Tim felt the too-familiar words drift through his brain without landing. ‘Will you go . . . what will you do? Go back to the States?’

  She nodded; it looked as if her mind was somewhere else. She drank a gulp of the beer and ran her hand over her mouth. ‘Back to the States, yes. What I’ll do, I don’t know. I’ll wait for another thing like this to come up.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about maybe reassessing,’ said Tim. ‘I’m not sure this is exactly what I should be doing.’

  ‘Well, this isn’t an illustrative case. I mean, you’re not normally going to deal with someone dying and the client plunging towards bankruptcy within three days of getting there.’

  ‘No,’ Tim acknowledged. ‘But just in some more fundamental way. I feel like I need to do something that isn’t just moving words around to try and convince people to buy stuff. In fact, it’s not even about buying stuff. It’s more the idea of telling stories, creating this whole world which . . .’

  ‘Which doesn’t actually exist.’

  ‘Yes. “A place where normal laws do not apply.” That’s Vortex’s thing. After being here I sort of feel that normal laws might not be such a bad idea.’

  ‘Is that what the word “vortex” even means?’

  ‘I’ve never really thought about it. I mean, I assume so.’

  ‘I don’t think it does, if you look it up. Doesn’t it mean a, like a, what’s the word . . .?’

  Tim grinned. ‘I’m not sure I’m up to one of these.’

  Ruth returned his smile. Her cheeks were a little pink, he noticed. ‘A whirlpool. That sort of thing. A whirlwind.’

  They ordered more beers, and time which had felt so thick and sludgy ever since Raf’s death, now seemed to be whisking Tim towards the finish line. There was, all of a sudden, no real pressure to do anything; no expectation. For the first time since the very start of the trip, Tim could appreciate how it felt to be here as a tourist, how gloriously free everyone was of all obligations but to find the maximum possible luxury. He looked across to the couple, who were holding hands across the table: the girl was filling out a satisfaction questionnaire, the man correcting her, the two of them breaking out in happy laughs. There was laughter from other tables too: not the threatening cackles of the golf club, but a soft sound, a sound that meant togetherness.

  Along the water, at the end of its walkway, the Burj Al Arab peered at them, a vertical line of little lights playing on-off-on-off; it reminded Tim more than ever of a recently arrived spacecraft. As they watched, a limousine crept down the walkway and passed the checkpoint, and two distant figures got out and were admitted to the hotel. The sight of them momentarily summoned in Tim a sense of adventures about to be had, strange and exciting things about to happen, and he experienced a sheepish plunge of regret that he would be getting on a plane in a handful of hours; that this pageant of leisure would all go on again and again without him.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘I was just thinking that it’s kind of a shame to be going,’ Tim confessed. ‘Which is stupid, because I’ve been desperate to leave.’

  ‘I think it’s kind of a shame you’re going, too,’ said Ruth, looking the other way.

  Tim cleared his throat. ‘I . . . I mean, obviously we’ll stay in touch.’

  Ruth smiled rather sadly: it wasn’t exactly that she was humouring him, Tim felt, but all the same, she knew better. If he thought about it, he too could probably foresee the gradual process over which they would vow to stay in touch, do so for a while in increasingly widely spaced emails, and end up floating impotently in each other’s contact lists, now and again trading group invites to events the other could never attend.

  ‘I suppose you’ve had this conversation with a lot of people before,’ he pre-empted her, ‘and it doesn’t generally work out that way.’

  ‘It’s partly my own fault,’ said Ruth. ‘I tend to keep a low profile. I’m not big on, erm, on maintaining contact. I move around a lot.’

  ‘Have you always?’

  ‘Pretty much. We moved from Ireland to Brooklyn when I was eight, so I’ve always kind of felt that was just what you do. I thought my parents were crazy. I said: I’m not going to America. I’ve all my friends here.’ She sounded very Irish, Tim thought, as the memory surfaced. ‘To teach me a lesson, they drove off and left me standing there and for two minutes I believed I was going to be left living on my own. I started crying and the taxi came round the bend and scooped me up.’

  ‘God,’ said Tim, ‘I don’t think my parents would ever have done something like that. My mum didn’t even like us going down the road without an escort.’

  ‘My dad worked for a haulage company. He wasn’t what you’d call the sentimental kind.’

  He was enjoying the sound of her voice, and, when it was his turn to speak, the seriousness of her narrowed eyes as she listened. Ruth ordered cocktails while Tim was in the toilet; then, when she went, he reciprocated. They played another couple of rounds of this game, deliberately choosing the most luridly coloured, the most crassly named drinks. Music painted the air from all corners now; they heard the singer from the first night starting up ‘The Greatest Love of All’, the forced emoting, the trickle of applause from those in earshot. Tim wondered briefly what had happened to the others, but the question did not feel like an urgent one. It was ten o’clock; he’d be gone in six hours, and, if all went well, on a plane in another two.

  Their chat now was of a loose, unstructured kind, subjects superseding each other rather than following naturally. Ruth talked a little more about her family. Tim told her about Rod, then about the night he woke up with the nosebleed, the dream of killing Raf. It was the first time either of them had mentioned the tragedy, or even thought about it, for hours. Before too long it would be possible to go a day without thinking about it, impossible as it might have seemed at first; then it would be a week, and those gaps would stretch more and more over time.

  ‘Well, it’s a hell of a theory,’ said Ruth, ‘but how would you have gotten into Raf’s chalet?’

  ‘True. Maybe it is as simple as an overdose, after all.’

  They discussed other aspects of the situation that might, or might not, be connected. It was true about Streng’s inability to read, Ruth said. ‘I knew you’d worked it out, but by yesterday I was too paranoid to say anything to anyone.’

  ‘You could have trusted me,’ said Tim, aware at last of being drunk, enjoyably so. ‘I always thought we got on.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Ruth. ‘But then I thought, you’re just one of those guys; you�
�re like that with everyone.’

  ‘You mean, with Jo?’

  Ruth shrugged. Tim fidgeted, wondering what to say.

  ‘No offence, but you were wasting your time thinking you had something special with her. That woman will do anything to break up the boredom.’

  There was a pause; Ruth seemed to regret saying it, although Tim felt it was reasonable enough.

  ‘I don’t really know what I’m doing,’ he said, ‘when it comes to this kind of thing.’ He told her about Naomi and the unceremonious way things had ended.

  ‘It’s too bad,’ said Ruth. ‘Now you’ll think of NYC as the city of romantic failures. Although maybe that’s accurate.’

  ‘You don’t like New York? I thought you were looking forward to getting back there.’ Tim realized he didn’t want the present moment to end, and he was reluctant to hasten the next stage, the bitty sleep and airport trip and attempt to board a plane he was still not booked on.

  ‘Oh, it’s a great city. I just think people sentimentalize it. All the skating-on-the-Hudson. Carriage through Central Park. Movie stuff. It’s just a place. It doesn’t care about you any more than – well, than here. It just tricks people into thinking it’s “their city”, somehow. The same way Dubai is trying to.’

  ‘I don’t know if Dubai will ever be quite like New York,’ said Tim.

  ‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘It won’t ever be quite like anywhere.’

  It felt like a good final word, and without consultation they both stood up.

  ‘I should start packing,’ said Tim, and whether he meant it or not, it sounded like an invitation.

  They walked away from the bar, up towards the Maritime Tower. At the top of the slope Tim turned for a last look at the Burj, the columns of lights like jewels along a suit of armour. He looked along the water at the vast wave of the Jumeirah Beach Hotel, every lighted window a life he knew nothing of. They walked past what had been their base, Ocean Chalets, the last place Raf Kavanagh had been alive. The feeling was stronger than ever that the whole of Dubai had been a mirage.

  As they walked down the corridor Tim imagined Adam in the room a couple of doors down, writing up the story that would finish WorldWise off: DRUNK ROPER SQUARES UP TO REPORTER.

  The green light blinked at them. Tim put the kettle on; he went into the en-suite. When he came back, Ruth had got under the covers and fired up the flat-screen TV.

  ‘This is the second time I’ve gotten into your bed,’ said Ruth. ‘I hope you don’t start to get any ideas.’

  On the TV, a handsome dark-complexioned man in a skinny tie like those worn by lead singers was talking about the financial markets. ‘There’s no doubt this could be as serious as the Wall Street Crash,’ he was saying, with the same barely concealed excitement the reporter had used to talk about Raf’s death the other day. ‘There’s no doubt this could be absolutely catastrophic.’

  ‘But how exactly did we get into this mess?’ asked the host, in a smooth BBC voice.

  The financial expert gave a practised smile. He began to talk about sub-prime mortgages and about equity and trust funds. Tim got into the bed next to Ruth.

  ‘Do you understand any of this?’

  Ruth shut her eyes. ‘I think,’ she murmured, ‘I think the point is, erm, nothing makes any sense, nothing means anything. Is that basically what they’re saying?’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’

  It was hard to tell who started it. Ruth felt very warm next to Tim. He rested his head on her chest, between her soft breasts. Thoughts had clogged up his brain over the past week, like a computer desktop slowed to trundling speed. Now as they moved together, he visualized the windows closing one at a time, disappearing. Raf’s death, the crisis of the charity, the botched kiss with Jo, the mystery of the falling camera, the way things did not match up with their names, the way reality had fuzzed. There would be no revelation, no Poirot dénouement. He would go to the airport in a few hours and the game would be over. Until then, there was this; this was all that mattered.

  PART THREE

  12: A STORY

  After we made love and before he shut his eyes, Tim made sure to set an alarm for the flight. Then he folded his clothes neatly and put them in his suitcase, and set out the ones he’d wear when he woke. He pulled on a pair of underpants, as if it was suddenly awkward to be naked with me. He went to sleep on his back. The past few days had been, as he Britishly put it, ‘hard going’. In a few hours he would get up and go to the airport and we would never see each other again. So I lay there looking at him a little while.

  Tim was right to suspect that the truth of Raf’s death might disappear, be choked by all the phantom truths that grew over it like poison ivy. In Dubai, it can feel impossible to tell the difference between truth and replica; the next step from there is feeling like there isn’t any difference. That everything fabricated is real, or the other way round.

  One person can only see so much. Tim was an outsider. I had been here longer, I knew the protagonists much better. And in the years since it all occurred I’ve been able to find out more. The people are as vivid to me now as when I was actually with them. Christian, the misfiring ideologue, outstripped by his own ambitions, clinging to money and property that weren’t real, at a time when the world took a sudden and brutal audit of these things. Jo, frustrated and twitchy, sick of fundraisers, sick of being the trophy at yacht receptions and ambassadors’ dinners, up to her ears in affairs, pinballing wildly between fitness regimes and drug habits. The Fixer, living in the margins, a man who could arrange anything except a legal existence for himself. Bradley, work-obsessed, perhaps in denial about his sexuality. Miles, a cameraman both strong and smart enough to push a camera off a gantry in such a way as to avoid killing anyone. A star terrified of his secret getting out, and an agent infected by that terror.

  Then there was Raf, and me. Before we go any further, there are a few things you should know.

  When I was seventeen I went to prom. It wasn’t our year yet; someone knew someone and we got a group invite. The condition of entry was that you had to dress up and flirt. I wore red lipstick and a ballgown made for a Barbie doll which barely came down to my knees. There was a boy called Ryan with very green eyes. ‘Your hair is fucking amazing,’ he said. He told me his family came from Ireland; people were always claiming that. We went back to a house party; had rum and Coke. I wasn’t used to drinking, but I acted as if I was. I lost my friends. He took me up to his room and I remember thinking: well, this is what you hear about. We had sex three times and a few weeks later I threw up in the shower.

  Not having the baby was so far out of the question, there wasn’t even a question. Abortion was legal where we lived, but it was illegal in Ireland, and our house was still emotionally part of Ireland. The only thing worse than having the baby, from my parents’ perspective, would be getting rid of it. I would look at my body, lying in the bath, and wishful thinking would convince me that I couldn’t feel the thing in there. There’d been a mistake. Or something had happened to it. It had disappeared the same baffling way it showed up. Then I’d feel guilty knowing how many people were desperate for a child and couldn’t have one.

  The weeks went by. At night I lay on my side, trying to get comfortable. I would hear the people in the next apartment having parties. The Ramones came through the wall, corks popped, college kids screamed with laughter. I was eighteen and all I could make out, in the long murk of those nights, was that I had signed away my life before it had begun.

  He was born on a hot day. There was a black woman on the next bed who was having her sixth. ‘What else am I gonna do w’ my life?’ she asked me. ‘Be a goddam baseball player?’ She was calling this one Texas; they were all named after states. In the delivery ward I could hear car horns blaring on the street below and feel the close, dirty heat of the air outside. They whisked him away before I even saw his face. They were measuring and weighing him for half an hour and I could hear him wailing. I begged them to bring him ba
ck.

  ‘Don’t worry, honey,’ said one of the midwives, ‘you’ll be seeing him plenty.’

  I called him Owen. Mam took him with a thin smile. Da patted him on the head and asked if he could smoke in the hospital.

  He cried at night, he cried in the morning. He wouldn’t feed properly but he was outraged if I took the breast away. I worked in a 7-Eleven and a RadioShack, I worked at a fried chicken place and came home stinking of grease. Mam looked after him; I spent all my time wondering if he was calling out for me. If I came home to the sound of him crying, it felt as if he must have been crying all the time I was away. I would argue with Mam while Da smoked out of the window.

  The parties carried on next door. I went round in my nightie to ask them to be quiet, and people looked at me like I was fifty years old. Sometimes I couldn’t raise the energy to take my clothes off before crawling into bed; some mornings I couldn’t get into the shower. I got fired from RadioShack for falling asleep at the cash register. I got fired from the 7-Eleven for calling a customer a cocksucker.

  It didn’t matter. There were more jobs. It wasn’t like I wanted any specific job more than any other.

  Owen started to smile. He learned to laugh and hold a little soft ball and reach out for his best toy, a panda called Lloyd. He started to crawl and make noises that could be ‘mama’. Every milestone like this, even the stupid ones, felt like an achievement. That’s why people are so boring about their kids. If you see a two-year-old say ‘I have a stick’ and the mother coos like it’s the Bolshoi Ballet, you think parenting must have turned her brain to mush. But if you are that mother, that ‘I have a stick’ is the end of a timeline that started with something the size of a seed growing inside you, and went through a thousand diapers, a hundred hours of mashing up carrot, wiping juice off a chin, mopping up vomit, springing out of bed ten minutes after you got in, blanking the fuck-you looks of strangers on the plane. You don’t get any praise for all that, and you don’t expect it. ‘I have a stick’ is all you get. So it looks a lot bigger from where you’re standing.