by Mark Watson
Maybe in time I’ll reply to Tim, without giving details of where I am. I am all right, I’ll tell him. I still produce commercials, almost all of them for charities. I live quietly; see few people. Nothing much to report. Of course, there is a little more to the story than that. But it stays with me. I live alongside it, with the knowledge that it’s mine.
13: NOW
They left Heathrow on a murky afternoon. Now it is morning again and the city, far below, dazzles as it did seven years ago. When Tim last saw the Burj Dubai – renamed the Burj Khalifa – it was a spindly half-skeleton next to their filming location, hemmed in by humans and diggers and scaffolding. Now it is, as it set out to be, the world’s highest building.
Before he came up here Tim stood for a while at the base, trying unsuccessfully to process its extraordinary height, and then made his way around an exhibition which described its design and construction. They built a hexagonal core and then a trio of buttresses in a sort of Y shape, he learned. This allows the building to support itself laterally: to be taller than it was ever thought a building could be. The copy, as usual, suggests it’s something more than a building. It is a ‘city in the sky’. It’s ‘iconic’, ‘legendary’, ‘Dubai’s famous triumph’.
Tim has snapped the view comprehensively, but not very effectively, he feels: his iPhone camera doesn’t cope well with the thick layers of architectural glass which separate tourists from the half-mile of empty space between here and the ground. Also, the view is somehow less moving than it ought to be. To be so far above skyscrapers – to see that they’re not really scraping the sky, but slouching sullenly in the heat – denudes them of their power. All the billions of dirhams’ worth of steel and glass and chrome could be, from here, a model village like Mr Callaghan’s in Devon – which, after a financial scare, is in rude health thanks to a recent Lottery grant.
He tries to think how he’ll describe the experience to his fiancée Gaby, and to Rod. Although Tim left Facebook a couple of years ago, he still has the reflex – almost ubiquitous in his generation – of experiencing life as a series of status updates, imagining how events will be reported and showcased even while they’re still in progress. I’ll say it was really impressive, he thinks, even magnificent, but rather impersonal. Perhaps that’s what ‘iconic’ means.
Still, if not emotionally gripping, the view does the job. He can see it all, the city he first gazed on from a much lower vantage point in 2008. There’s the glittering coastline, the Burj Al Arab still its inscrutable self. Along from that, he can just about discern the white huts that make up the Village, the Centrepiece – like a child’s building block – standing out among them. It did occur to him to stay at the Village, whose website now describes it as ‘one of Dubai’s most loved institutions’ and displays a revised version of the Service Pledge with ‘we will bid a fond farewell’ tweaked to ‘we will say au revoir and look forward to the next time!’
In Googling the place, he found very few references to Raf Kavanagh. A documentary was pitched to the BBC by an independent filmmaker, but couldn’t get funding as there were so many disputed facts. Raf’s family is still active in trying to get a new inquest opened. A benefit fund was set up years ago to ‘seek justice’ and now has about £30,000 to its name.
In the end, Tim decided against staying there. He went for a second-rate American chain hotel near the Creek. In his time off he has strolled around this area, where the city was born. There are satisfyingly dowdy restaurants, grocers with lurid jars of spices piled high. Old men potter about in dhows, ferrying tourists between points of interest. There is a Metro now, driverless, urged back and forth across the city by unseen hands. That was how he reached the Burj Khalifa this morning. There was an ad in the carriage for Dubai Pearl; a brief investigation satisfied Tim that it was still ‘the future of residential Dubai’, still ‘at the cutting-edge of the world’s fastest-growing city’, still – like The World – nowhere near finished, let alone sold, or populated.
Google has kept Tim at least loosely abreast of the old team, even though the whole story is in the past. He knows Bradley and Miles are still working in the business; Miles sends a group email each Christmas, an image of Santa Claus adjusted to show him doing something untoward. Everyone can do this sort of thing these days: image-doctoring skills, which were highly prized when Tim was at Vortex, are almost second nature to the people graduating now. Nobody is surprised if a picture turns out not to reflect reality.
The Ropers live in Hong Kong now: maybe together, maybe separately, or perhaps in a combination of those states, as they did when Tim worked with them. He wrote to them for advice when he and Rod were setting up the NGO, and Christian wrote back with a greatest hits of his favourite rhetorical pieces: there was so much to be done, it was everyone’s duty to care. It was not really advice, but in a way it was more valuable; you can never have too many reminders, as Tim likes to tell junior staff, of what is at stake. Besides, it wasn’t as if they needed business advice. Rod spends two days a week in the office, and can execute the financial operations with ease. The brothers appeared together only last month in a Guardian feature headed ‘Keeping It in the Family’; although not Mrs Callaghan’s usual newspaper, she bought three copies, and has the article framed next to Tim’s wedding invitation, ready to be mounted next time Mr Callaghan has a Sunday away from the model village.
It’s only Ruth that Tim has lost track of – Ruth and the Fixer, whom one could never have expected to keep track of, Tim thinks, even when in the same room. It occurs to him that he should try Ruth’s old email address; the sight of the Centrepiece, however distant, has stirred something, some almost-buried instinct. The lift bustles down the oesophagus of the building, an ear-popping 163 floors in a couple of minutes. The cityscape rushes towards them, becoming bigger and more solid, and he remembers with faint amusement the atmosphere on that last night, seven years ago: the rumbles of financial disaster, the atmosphere of transience as if the place might evaporate, which made it even easier to succumb to the drunken temptation of a tryst that was over almost as soon as it began.
There was a period, certainly, when it appeared that this could all vanish. Chastened money-makers fled the Emirates, dumping cars on waste ground next to the airport, selling real estate at a tenth of its supposed value. Journalists wrote pieces implying that Dubai was a sort of new Roman Empire, impaled on its own ambition. The city was a go-to for the many commentators trying to prove that greed had paralysed civilization. The Ropers were not the only luminaries to sell their Palm mansions.
But a few years on, in 2015, and you would never know there had been a meltdown. The malls and resorts still attract humans doing what humans do: spending money on things they want. ‘Financial crisis’ is a phrase you hear, like ‘civil war’: an idea, not a reality. The world, after all, is a very robust construct.
Tim is speaking at a hotel adjacent to the Old Town where they spent a single day filming seven years ago. The mocked-up souk is well established now, though only a smattering of consumers are browsing the stuffed animals in Camel Central or the trinkets in Modern Antiques. There’s a collection of restaurants looking out over a large water feature at the foot of the Burj, and he sits at a table, watching the construction vehicles as they jostle lazily. He orders a Coke Life – the newest addition to the Coca-Cola family, containing fewer calories and less sugar than its predecessors, but with a decidedly less nihilistic name than Zero, which they were promoting last time Tim was here. A friend from advertising, working on the account, told him it was more or less the exact same drink re-packaged. A few years ago Tim might have sidestepped it, out of some sense that he was above the tricks of marketing; now those tricks simply don’t interest him either way.
He gets out his notes and consults them, like poor old Bradley before the campaign launch that night. It’s his first speech at a conference, but he’s used to doing presentations; it’s a lot easier when you care what you’re talking about. The key
to tackling inequality, he’ll tell the hundred or so people, is convincing the public that small-scale acts are worthwhile. The perception that charities are a ‘bottomless pit’ comes from the lack of effective communication. (Tim’s got a good joke about the ‘bottomless drinks’ offered in some chain restaurants, which he might slip in here if things are starting to feel a little dry.)
If people hear that a charity has spent a billion pounds, he will say, and then they learn that the relevant area is still rife with poverty or disease, of course they lose faith in the notion that their £10 will help anybody. Good charities make people see the importance of the £10; they make it clear that that money connects individual with individual, across thousands of miles, and that each one of us with a comfortable life has the opportunity – or even the duty – to do good. The duty to care about everybody else. That’s the one line Tim has kept from what used to be Christian’s spiel.
Our NGO, he’ll conclude, provides a free service to help charities articulate the good they are doing. In the last decade it was thought that image, ‘brand’, was almost more important than the work itself. It didn’t just stand for the work. It practically replaced it. Now we realize that—
‘How is your stay in Dubai, sir?’ asks a diminutive man sidling up beside Tim’s table. For a heart-fluttering second it could be Ashraf, but of course, it isn’t.
‘It’s been good, thank you,’ says Tim.
It is essential to ‘tell a story’, but there has to be something beyond the story. And that ‘something’ has to be real, real in a way that is not just end-of-year reports, or a fancy website: in short, not just words. It has to be something you can reach out and touch.
Tim was thinking of illustrating this by ‘reaching out and touching’ some sort of prop, maybe the little foam globe he’s brought along with him for illustration, but he decides, as he sets out for the hotel, that that would be too tacky. Too style-over-substance. Substance is the whole point. Besides, Rod would never stop taking the piss when he watched the video back.
At the foot of the Burj is an enormous fountain. It cost 800 million dirhams to build. There was a competition to name it: it was won by someone who suggested Dubai Fountain. Every half an hour or so, day and night, it shoots a long series of water-jets into the air, the water dancing through different colours supplied by a few hundred projectors. There is a soundtrack of opera classics which booms out across the plaza, harmonizing with the dance of the water. Hardly anyone looks at it, except during special events; most of the time, it just continues. Tim stops now and watches the fountain spewing out its water. He feels the swell of the music, written by a nineteenth-century composer in honour of a dead friend, on the back of his neck. For a moment he thinks that the centuries-old melody is connecting him with some sort of reality beyond his immediate circumstances; he thinks of Raf’s death, two miles from here, with a quick flicker of something like grief, or pity. Then the moment is gone, into the big blue sky, and everything carries on.
MARK WATSON is the acclaimed author of five previous novels, including Eleven, The Knot and Hotel Alpha, which have been published in twelve languages. He is also a stand-up comedian and has won numerous awards in Britain and Australia. He regularly appears on TV, has had his own cult Radio 4 series and was named the Edinburgh Festival’s highest achiever of the decade by The Times. He lives in north London.
Also by Mark Watson
Dan and Sam (with Oliver Harud)
Hotel Alpha
The Knot
Eleven
First published 2016 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2016 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-4472-4336-6
Copyright © Mark Watson, 2016
Cover illustration: Stuart Wilson, Pan Macmillan Art Department
Author photo © Patrick Balls
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