The Sand Men

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘I’ll have it later,’ she yelled. ‘I’m trying to get the Wi-Fi set up.’

  ‘It’ll take you ten minutes to eat, honey. The internet will probably still be there when you finish. It’s our first dinner.’

  ‘Let me do this and I’ll set you up with a dock so that you can play your wailing opera women.’

  ‘Always with the bargains. Okay, just this once.’

  ‘So—the central tower of the Persiana is over 430 metres,’ Roy continued, seating himself and grabbing a fork, ‘which means it’ll be the tallest hotel on earth. There are three hotels, the Persiana, the Atlantica and the Arabiana. Dream World sticks way out into the sea and weighs over a million tons, plus it has to withstand everything from earthquakes and gulf storms to tidal waves, so they’ve got to get it right. Everything has to be ready in three months. Fifty years ago this place was a backwater used by pearl divers, camel traders and Bedouin. Everything changed when they struck oil, of course, but that’ll all be used up in a couple of years, so they’re future-proofing the country.’

  ‘By building resorts no-one else will be able to afford to visit?’

  ‘Come on, show some enthusiasm. The Russians and Chinese own the franchise but guess who gets most of the money? Two thirds of the investment returns to the UAE. This is the flagship resort that’ll prove the model can work. Then they can build others all around the world.’

  She pushed a bowl of rice at him. ‘I know it’s a really exciting opportunity for you, but don’t you think it’s kind of grotesque? I mean, all you need is another credit crunch and it’ll become the world’s most expensive slum.’

  ‘Darling, if we took that attitude, nothing would ever get built. I’m still a New Yorker at heart, I can still walk down 34th Street and marvel at the buildings. Manhattan took the lead a century ago. Okay, its skyscrapers aren’t as big as those in the East but they have more cohesion, more character.’

  ‘They also serve a practical purpose.’

  ‘So will Dream World. We’re all working harder and playing harder, Lea. And this is going be the best playground on the planet.’

  Lea had always loved her husband’s optimism. It seemed to be a quality bred into New Yorkers from birth. He’d just started working downtown in an architectural practice soon after the Twin Towers collapsed and, typically, had seen the 9/11 tragedy as a structural engineering problem. After that, the failure of his own company and the killing damp of London winters had encouraged him to seek opportunities overseas. Arab, American, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, what did such differences really matter? Everyone needed to construct; it was an instinct as natural as building families and friendships.

  ‘What?’ said Roy, not chewing. ‘You’re looking at me funny.’

  ‘I can look at my husband,’ she said. ‘You make me remember why I married you. Like a big kid with those eyes. Finish what you were saying.’

  He pushed his blond fringe back from his forehead. It was just starting to grey at the sides. ‘You know I appreciate your support, Lea. This is my only chance to get into the big time. I had to come here, the shit we went through.’

  ‘Shh, Cara might hear you.’

  Roy clapped his hands, dismissing the subject. ‘Anyway, it’s our life for the next two years, but the good news is that you won’t have to do any food preparation from tomorrow.’ Roy waved a fork across the meal. ‘They’re sending over an Indonesian maid. She won’t live in, she’ll just come and help you out during the day. You can become a lady of leisure.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to do that, Roy.’ Lea laid down her cutlery. ‘There’s not going to be much work. Do we really have to have her?’

  ‘She’s part of the package. All the senior executives have them. She’s fully paid for, so we might as well use her. Besides, I thought you wanted to concentrate on your magazine writing.’

  ‘I’ll have to find some freelance contacts first. The house is hardly going to be any trouble to look after. I was used to fixing broken pipes and clearing mud out of the hallway in Belmont Terrace every time it rained. I think I can manage a place like this and hold down a job at the same time.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that you won’t have to work if you don’t want to. Didn’t you do enough of that in London?’

  ‘But I want to work, Roy. I don’t think it’s going to be enough just being a housewife.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. You’ll have someone to do the boring chores. Anyway, I already agreed to take her on.’ Roy shrugged. ‘But if she doesn’t work out we’ll let her go, okay?’

  Lea picked up a fork and toyed with her food. She imagined it would be easy to become trapped within the compound, only seeing other wives and venturing out with her family at weekends. In London she had worked at a women’s magazine called Eva for five years. It never achieved a huge circulation but had prided itself on a certain level of literary merit. She had suggested sending pieces from Dubai, but her boss had implied that she needed to be based in London to maintain her edge. There wasn’t going to be much chance of finding similar work here.

  I won’t argue with him, she thought. We did enough of that in London. This is a fresh start for all of us.

  Chapter Four

  The Resort

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, Roy drove Lea and Cara out to Dream World.

  They parked on a white stone peninsula that jutted into the cobalt gulf waters, at the entrance to the private marina. In the distance, hundreds of brown figures toiled with keffiyehs tied around their heads, protecting them from the relentless sun. An infinite ant-march moved across the isthmus as crews shifted locations. Behind them a line of red trucks, as neat and orderly as toys on a track, rumbled over the tamped-earth highways.

  Three glittering obelisks rose from the scrubland, connected by arabesques of white concrete that swept in streamlined fractals through the sand. Arabic designers shared the geomancer’s dislike of hard lines and sharp angles. The immense hotels owed more in design to the calligrapher’s plume than the technician’s grid. Two were finished and the third, the Persiana, was almost complete. They rose in the early morning haze like jewelled artefacts from a lost civilisation.

  James Davenport, Dream World’s public relations officer, gave them a tour of the development. He was as awkward as an ostrich, and had peppery hair and white freckled arms, as if his body could not settle to one colour. Lea wondered how he managed to keep his skin from getting burnt, considering he was on site all day and wore short-sleeved shirts. Already the temperature was in the high thirties and he didn’t even look warm.

  Lea wiped droplets of sweat from her eyes and tried to concentrate. Her cream linen suit felt damp and crumpled. Everyone else appeared to have stepped out of a dry-cleaning advertisement. She wondered how much starch the local businessmen used in their white cotton thobes to get their creases so sharp. At least Cara had dressed for comfort in three-quarter length baggies and a yellow cotton top.

  ‘You’ll hear people saying that Dream World is the future,’ Davenport told them, his broad Glaswegian accent sounding out of place in such an exotic setting. ‘And they’re right. It’s a truly international project, financed by the Russians, engineered by Americans, designed by Europeans, built by Indians, raised on Arab land. If you ever want to find a way towards world peace, I’d suggest getting a dozen different faiths and ideologies together and making them construct something like this.’ He laughed, exposing a frightening array of strong yellow teeth.

  ‘How do you build out into the sea?’ Cara asked.

  ‘See over there?’ Davenport pointed to the furthest outcrop of white stone in the water. ‘The base of the resort is made from cement blocks that stand just seven metres above sea level, but they’re designed to hold up against freak waves. They get abnormal tides in the Arabian Gulf once every century, so we had to test all kinds of scale models and be ready for any kind of extreme weather.’

  He led the way to an etched steel site map built into a stone stand, a visua
l orientation point for any visitor entering the resort.

  ‘We had to demolish all the old hotels that were put up during the oil boom, then level the shoreline and start from scratch. Many of the older hotels were trapped in the shadows of the new skyscrapers surrounding them, so it wasn’t difficult to buy up the land. People come here for sunshine and luxury, and that’s what they’ll get. There are over a hundred and sixty separate fountains in the resort and they all work at different pressures. There’s a canal flowing through the Persiana, and the world’s largest resistance pool. Then there are the “atmosphere environments”, in semi-submerged domes around the three hotels. For Snow World we’ve artificially created snowflakes without spurs on their surfaces, so that they don’t appear fluffy. Our model is more crystalline and flat, which meant it packs down harder and is perfect for skiing in our biodome. Sea World has a huge aquarium, but has yet to be fully stocked. We had a problem with rare breeds of fish cannibalising one another.’

  Even Cara looked awed, if only by the publicist’s enthusiasm.

  ‘We work around the clock, 24/7, 365 days a year,’ said Davenport. ‘We’ve got Indonesians, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Somalians, Filipinos, Egyptians, Koreans, just about every part of the world represented on the construction payroll. We live, sleep and breathe the resort. When it’s finished, the top suites are going to cost around $35,000 a night. There are celebrity chefs opening signature restaurants in the marina, and we’re hoping to host world-class competitive events in the sports complex. The whole thing will be ecologically independent within two years and computerised by a unique digital management program.’ He noticed that Lea and Cara were starting to suffer in the heat. ‘Sorry, but when you see what we’re trying to achieve here, it kind of gets to you. Let’s go inside.’

  Davenport led the way to the hotel’s chilled staff canteen. The huge shed-like steel structure was divided into sections so that the architects, technicians and engineers did not have to eat with the labourers. A vast buffet of salads, chicken, fish, eggs, beef, curries and shawarmas had barely been touched by the few other staff members in the restaurant.

  ‘What happens to the food they don’t eat?’ Cara whispered. ‘Does it get offered to the workmen?’

  Davenport joined them at the table. ‘We’re very pleased to have your father here with us,’ he told Cara. ‘He’s going to help us solve some of the problems we still have in the main atrium.’

  ‘What kind of problems?’ Cara asked.

  ‘Things we couldn’t take into account in the modelling process. CAD allowed us to deal with windshear and sand particles, corrosion from sun and salt air, but you have to imagine this place with thousands of people in it. In July and August the temperature is often above forty-five degrees. Getting the guests around without frying them is a trick in itself, especially as the seasonal movement of the sun constantly changes the shaded areas, so we’re installing motion-sensor shades and water sprays along the walkways. We’re using over twelve billion litres of water on the site.’

  ‘In the sea air the exposed parts of the jets have a tendency to clog and corrode,’ Roy added, ‘so the valves have to be made of rubber, but rubber contains oil that dries out in the heat. Many solutions cause problems of their own.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Davenport agreed. ‘Every day presents a different challenge. There’s no natural tide movement around the reclaimed land, which means that the seawater becomes stagnant. We’ve fixed that, but it’s a learning curve. What we’re attempting is unprecedented. It’s kind of like terraforming a new planet. You saw Star Trek, Cara, right?’

  Cara had overfilled her mouth with chicken, and didn’t respond. She looked past Davenport to the horizon. The PR officer was clearly thrilled to be part of such a project, and was seized by the excitement of rising to the challenge. But they were doing the manual labour, those hordes of stripped brown figures out there in the sun. They were carrying out the really punishing work with drills and jackhammers, like slaves building pyramids.

  Davenport finished describing the technicalities of geothermal cooling structures, then sensed that he should change the subject. ‘Have you met many of the other residents yet?’ he asked Lea.

  ‘We haven’t seen a soul, except at the school.’

  ‘Ah—you’re enrolled at Albion, aren’t you? How was your induction day?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Cara. The Albion was attended by nearly four hundred English-speaking pupils from all over the world. The place was as quiet and orderly as a private hospital. Some of the other kids had led interesting lives in different countries, unlike Cara’s classmates back in Chiswick, who had only ever gone to Provence and the Algarve with their parents, or had stayed shut in their bedrooms on spliffs and Playstations.

  ‘We work late during the week,’ Davenport warned. ‘Hopefully Milo will come to the residents’ party. He’s on the welcoming committee. He lives just across the road from you. He’s a real character, the last of the original architects.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen him at the window,’ said Lea, recalling the glowering old man who watched her unapologetically when she went to the carport on their first day.

  ‘Milo doesn’t like the heat so you won’t see him outside much.’ Davenport dabbed at his mouth with a linen napkin, then pushed back his chair. ‘I must get on. I know it must seem strange to you, Mrs Brook. But most of our regular staff do this for a living.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They go from one construction project to the next in different countries on two-to-five year contracts. I came here from Cambodia, and before that, Korea. But I gather you’ve always been in London. This is an odd place at first, not quite Arabic, not quite Western.’

  ‘So how would you describe it?’ Lea asked.

  ‘International. The way all cities will be one day.’

  ‘But it’s not, is it?’ said Cara. ‘The Arabs are at home, the Europeans are in offices and the Indians are out there in the sun. How can it be truly international if they don’t socialise with each other?’

  Lea looked at her daughter in surprise. It was unlike her to ask a virtual stranger such a question.

  ‘Oh, that’ll come in time, I’m sure,’ said Davenport good-naturedly. ‘It’s a balancing act, and has to be recalibrated all the time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. I’m sure you’ll get to like the life here. We’re a testing ground for the future. And who doesn’t want to be part of the future, eh?’ He glanced over at Roy. ‘You must excuse me, I’ve got the senior directors’ team coming in for an update.’

  ‘Well, he seems happy in his work,’ said Lea, watching Davenport stride out of the canteen.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’ asked Roy defensively. ‘It’s one of the most advanced construction projects in the world.’

  ‘You think it’s sustainable? I mean, something like this relies on continuous growth. Look what happened after 9/11. Tourists stopped visiting Muslim territories overnight. Most of those places were perfectly safe. The locals abandoned their traditional skills to cater to tourism and ended up suffering. Whole towns were obliterated. It could happen again if the global downturn deepens.’

  ‘The credit crunch doesn’t affect the super-rich half as much as it affects us,’ said Roy. ‘There are over seven billion people on the planet, Lea. Do you think some of those will be wealthy enough to pay $35,000 a night for a suite at the Persiana? Of course we have to make the most of it. The next generation may not have so much money.’

  ‘Talk to your daughter about it,’ said Lea. ‘She’s always complaining that we spent her future.’

  ‘We could still be back in Belmont Terrace trying to make next month’s mortgage payment, with me stuck out of work.’

  ‘Are you guys going to have another row in public?’ Cara asked, ‘Because if you are I’ll go outside and wait.’

  ‘We weren’t arguing, it’s called a conversation.’ Lea laid a hand on Cara’s arm. ‘And you gave Mr Davenport a pretty hard time.�
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  ‘Get off me, I’m not a child.’ Cara shook away her hand and rose.

  ‘Hey!’ Roy watched as his daughter headed outside to sit and sulk against the shaded patio wall. ‘You have to let her form her own opinions, Lea.’

  ‘Me?’ Lea repeated in surprise. ‘If she doesn’t make friends here she’ll just become an outsider again, you know that. She’s at an awkward age.’

  ‘She’s smart enough to have an open mind.’

  ‘I hope so.’ They watched Cara as she sat texting, one leg folded under the other in the kind of awkward position teenagers seemed to find comfortable. ‘Actually she says she’s already hooked up with a couple of girls from the school. Remember how long it usually takes her to make friends?’

  ‘Good, I’m glad about that. I want you to be happy while you’re here too.’

  ‘I know you do,’ Lea assured him. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I‘m looking forward to it. It’s a very different world to the one I’m used to, that’s all.’

  They finished their coffee in comfortable silence as Filipino waiters collected the plates.

  Chapter Five

  The Housewives of The Future

  THE INDONESIAN MAID’S name was Lastri. She was nineteen, slender, silent and serious, with an unnervingly still gaze, and her size belied her strength. Each morning she changed into a pink and white nylon outfit supplied by the compound’s store, and quietly set about her duties. She seemed fluent in English, but went blank whenever Lea moved away from the day’s agenda to ask about her family.

  Lea soon realised that her second language was confined to a narrow path of subjects mainly involving the kitchen and cleaning materials. She tried to shorten Lastri’s hours just so that the house would sometimes be empty, but failed to make her understand. With the beds made, the floors polished to a lethal gleam and the kitchen scoured to operating-theatre sterility there was nothing else to do.