One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The cruise companies called their liners ‘floating hotels’, but the problem was that they were just that and nothing more. Gavin’s vision, Gavin’s truly, unprecedentedly horrible idea, was to build a whole floating resort. Or rather, more accurately, not floating – an entire, self-contained holiday destination built on what he called ‘a free-standing aquatic platform structure’.

  Also known as an oil rig.

  Hotels – plural – of differing size, design, standard and price range, set amid a vast, picturesque lido of interconnected swimming pools, waterways, sunken bars, jacuzzis, flumes and slides. There would be restaurants, pubs, shops, cinemas, bowling lanes, an ice rink, casinos, games arcades, bingo, a laser arena, a sports complex … every modern British urban leisure activity, but without the British urban clouds and rain. A resort where all the staff didn’t merely speak English, but spoke it in comfortingly familiar accents. A resort where you didn’t have to change money, because you could pay for everything in pounds, shillings and pence. A resort where there was no fear of being mugged or broken into by the local residents, because the only local residents had either wings or gills. And, crucially, a resort where you could be guaranteed never to see the front page of Bild staring back at you from your desired poolside spot.

  To Simone, it sounded like hell on earth, or at least hell on water. Unfortunately, in accordance with the Goldwyn Principle, Gavin was seldom wrong about the popularity of such abominable notions, and he had little doubt about the viability of this one, not even when Flyaway refused to back it. They had already committed to their Aegean and Black Sea strategies, and in any case saw this as too radical a departure for a company now reaping benefits yielded by previous years of patience, prudence and stealth. The advance outlays would be enormous, it could be years before the facility began paying for itself, and all the while their core revenues might well be gobbled up by servicing the debt. The words ‘eggs’ and ‘basket’ featured prominently on the Flyaway feasibility document.

  Gavin’s belief in his vision proved stronger than his belief in Flyaway. He resigned, cashing in all his share options and selling out his interest in the company to provide seed money. He went in search of backing elsewhere, and found it from an American firm called Delta Leisure. Delta had built a chain of plastic paradises in Mexico, eradicating all trace of local colour bar the tequila, in order that American tourists could escape American winters without forsaking Pizza Hut, Mickey-D’s or ESPN. Naturally, Delta and Gavin had a lot to say to each other.

  Delta’s CEO, Jack Mills, viewed the project as a trial run: they’d back Gavin to give it a shot, and if it proved a hit, then there’d be Floating Island Paradise Resorts sprouting all along the Gulf Coast and the Baja California a few years hence. As far as Gavin was concerned, there was no ‘if’ about it. He had seen the future of holiday-making. He had believed in his vision. Now time and money would realise it.

  A lot more time, as it happened, and a hell of a lot more money than he or anyone else imagined.

  The project got off to a promising start when Gavin was able to negotiate the purchase of a decommissioned oil platform from Norco for the nominal fee of one pound. He had stepped in with opportunistic timing when Norco found themselves facing a PR catastrophe of Brent Spar proportions over the undecided future of their disused facility, and sealed an agreement to take further rigs off their hands if – when – the resort was a success.

  However, it wasn’t long before he understood why Norco had been contemplating just sinking the thing, protests or not, as stripping all their crap off of it proved almost as costly as – and even slower than – building a new platform from scratch. By the time the thing was towed into Kilbokie Bay to begin the rebuilding and fitting operations, the budget was being revised upwards on a daily basis, and the projected completion date got further off rather than nearer as the months went on. The sheer size of the thing, for instance, meant that it had to remain half a mile out in the firth, rather than in the shallower waters within the Kilbokie yard perimeter. Out there it was attended constantly by liftings barges, as prefabricated sections were slotted into place and vast hoppers of materials were supplied to the small army of tradesmen who ferried out and back each day.

  Fortunately for Gavin, Delta still retained faith in the eventual success of his idea, and eschewing accepted wisdom about throwing good money after bad, they reasoned instead that further outlay was the only way of recouping what they had already shelled out. Such logic, however, can generate a very costly spiral, and there were soon an awful lot of zeroes on the figure under ‘Unforeseen Logistical Expenses’. Worsening matters still, the delays meant that the resort was going to miss its first summer, and although its planned site – the Gambia – enjoyed sun and high temperatures all year round, most people didn’t enjoy time off all year round. The most optimistic projection said the place wasn’t going to be open for business until November, so not only did this mean a delay in generating any revenue, but it set the crucial word-of-mouth effect back a year at least.

  The pressure mounting on Gavin was not eased by grumbling disquiet Stateside regarding how exposed the project was rendering his backers. Delta’s ever-increasing investment had left them over-leveraged and there was much concern that the company would be vulnerable to corporate predators as a result. The news that there would be no revenues that summer was therefore hardly music to their ears, and Gavin’s constant assurances that time would vindicate their belief started to ring a little hollow, as seeing their project succeed five years down the line wouldn’t be much reward if they didn’t own it anymore.

  It became imperative that the resort start providing a return – any kind of return – as soon as possible. Gavin had consequently been panicked into rechannelling much of the marketing budget into a summer advertising and PR offensive, pitching the facility’s year-round sun credentials in an attempt to maximise winter bookings and thus at least get the ball rolling. Problem was, visually they were still heavily reliant on virtual reality graphics and artists’ impressions of what they were offering. Even once the Lido was complete, the Cromarty Firth hadn’t cooperated with much in the way of blue sky for taking photographs, and neither was it easy to find an angle that didn’t also include cranes, scaffolding and bum-cleavage.

  Interest was proving slow to develop, and actual bookings were worryingly thin on the ground. Gavin blamed this on the frustrating inability to fully convey what kind of holiday experience the resort had to offer. Simone wasn’t so sure, reckoning the failure to fully convey what people would be letting themselves in for might be the only reason anyone had been daft enough to book at all. And despite his continued profession that time and bloody-word-of-fucking-mouth would ultimately prove the resort ‘a money-rig’, Simone suspected Gavin had begun to suffer his own pangs of doubt, most clearly manifest in this school-reunion nonsense. Admittedly, it was something he’d often talked of organising, but in Simone’s opinion, the reason he’d never actually done so before was the on-going thought that if he waited another few years, he’d be even more impressively successful. Far more than the hosting opportunity afforded by this unique and available venue, she guessed the reason he’d bitten the bullet now was the secret fear that this might be the last time he could play king of the castle.

  One angry dwarf right enough.

  Gavin had, as the Americans might say, ‘some issues’ regarding his schooldays.

  Simone had known him since pre-nursery age, their mothers being sufficiently close friends for each other’s children to call them ‘auntie’. So although Gavin wasn’t literally the boy next door, the pair of them did have that ambiguous childhood pseudo-cousin status, which diminishes through the primary-school years but can kick back in when mid-teen awkwardness renders everyone else of the opposite sex an unapproachable alien.

  No-one would say Gavin was bullied at school; at St Michael’s, all but a select few behemoths were subject to violence and ridicule on a rotating and fair
ly equal basis. He didn’t find himself singled out for doings, like the unfortunately effeminate Martin Clark or the loathsome and suicidally obnoxious Kenny Collins. Neither did he suffer more than the average volume of verbal abuse, such as was levelled at Tommy Milligan for his academic prowess or Paddy Greig for his apparent aversion to modern toiletries. In fact, Gavin didn’t stand out for any reason, and that was the root of the problem.

  He wasn’t a hard-man like Davie Murdoch; he wasn’t a great footballer like Charlie O’Neill; he wasn’t trendy and good-looking like Barry Cassidy; he wasn’t funny like Ally McQuade; he wasn’t a brainbox like Tommy Milligan. He was just Gavin Hutchison, skint in the currencies that purchased popularity, notoriety or even merely distinction. An unremarkable wee guy to whom nobody paid over-much attention.

  People might remember him as quiet, probably because they didn’t recall much of what he said. They might also assume he was shy, and maybe he had been a little, but just because Gavin was never in the limelight didn’t mean he wasn’t jealous of those who were. In truth, Simone now knew Gavin had craved the limelight – he just hadn’t had any means of attracting it.

  He’d made a bid for cred at primary school by trying to get himself nicknamed ‘Hutch’, in the days when David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser reigned supreme over the Saturday night viewing schedule. None of his classmates cooperated. Kids grasp every stick they can to beat each other, so an irretrievably uncool handle like ‘Gavin’ was not a handicap they were prepared to relieve him of. Paul Stark got to be ‘Starsky’, but Paul Stark was in the school team and he had a Raleigh Grifter.

  Brainbox, hard case, beauty, athlete, psycho, slut … in every school there would always be those who achieved prominence for certain remarkable properties, good or bad, but only within that limited context: both of circumstance and of age. For that reason, social microcosm that it might be, school was no reliable predictor for later life, not even simply on a physical level. Simone’s now head-turning friend Alison had once been a fifth-year ugly duckling like herself, while conversely (and with not a little schadenfreude), she had seen the adolescent faces, bodies and dress-sense of certain others fail to realise the early-teen promise that had once granted them unassailable in-crowd credentials. And, of course, there were those who found success – even fame – in the real world following comparative anonymity at school (Matthew Black, she remembered, had always been well behind Ally McQuade in the class-comedian stakes). This was often due to late development, but sometimes it was because school had offered no vehicle for these people’s talents. Gavin, clearly, fell into this latter category, ‘travel industry visionary’ not having been one of the archetypes in The Breakfast Club. However, the difference between him and everyone else who made their mark later in life was that they never looked back.

  He hadn’t always been that way: his pursuit of success was not driven by a crusade in search of self-vindication. Rather, it was his success that indirectly drove him to start looking back in, if not exactly anger, then at least ill-concealed indignation. Simone didn’t remember Gavin as being a particularly egotistical teenager, adolescent or even ‘young man’, but when the money and the status began to accumulate in his mid-twenties, his sense of self-importance started growing in proportion. Then out of proportion.

  It was as though his late-blooming ego had back-dated itself, expanding to claim his past because there wasn’t enough room left for it in the present. Grown used to people taking him dreadfully seriously, he became retrospectively outraged at the indignity, disrespect and – worst of all – lack of recognition endured by the younger Gavin. Consequently, he began to harbour a resentment towards all the people who had, back then, failed to appreciate what a remarkable person Gavin Hutchison was. And this number included – perhaps not as bizarrely as it might seem – himself: the self who’d put up with all that crap, the self who’d so under-represented his potential, and, most loathed of all, the self who’d been content to land Simone Draper when he could have done a lot better than that.

  She and Gavin had started dating over that summer between when she finished fifth year at St Mick’s and started at uni. The remnants of that one-time pesudo-cousin status had probably made it easier for him to ask her out, and certainly easier for her to accept: the whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing seemed very daunting at that age, so the fact that they were pals made being stumbling beginners that bit less awkward. In fact, it was quite exciting really, as well as pleasantly flattering. She hadn’t imagined anyone was crying himself to sleep at night over Simone Draper, certainly not the guys she’d had her own curious thoughts about, such as Andrew Reilly (already driving, already seeing the very gorgeous Laura Heaton from Auchenlea High) or Matthew Black (far too wittily cerebral to take any interest in a dweeb like her). Gavin wasn’t the man of her dreams, but she knew she could do a sight worse too. She realised that having never previously been made to think of him that way, she did actually find him quite attractive, but more importantly she enjoyed his company and he clearly liked her, which was what truly made her feel good.

  No thunderbolts, though. No shooting stars.

  She’d thought about that the night before their wedding. No thunderbolts, no shooting stars. She’d never been swept off her feet, never met that tall, dark and handsome stranger, never been consumed by some passion that meant the world made no sense without him. But then who did any of that really happen to? What she did have was a good man, someone who loved her, someone who’d been a faithful companion on the road they’d travelled so far, and would be on the longer one ahead.

  They’d known each other since they were toddlers – perhaps they were always meant to be together. Perhaps all that passion and pyrotechnics stuff was just people getting a concentrated dose of the sense of togetherness she and Gavin had built over years.

  Yeah, right. Shame no-one told him that.

  The affairs started soon after the twins were born. Golly, what a surprise. He’d hit that ‘Oh Christ’ realisation so many new fathers go through when they see living, binding proof that this marriage business is now for real. But what made it worse for Gavin was that this realisation dawned at the same time as his financial success. The moment at which he found himself with the money, the respect and the kudos to attract all kinds of women was also the one at which he found himself tied down to dull wee Simone, plain of face and sagging round the middle following her recent dual tummy-tenancy.

  It was always the glamorous types he went for. Simone would think of them as bimbos but they usually weren’t. They tended to be career women he met through work: attractive, intelligent and single. After the initial hurt of finding out he was cheating, that was what made it easier to feign ignorance, hide the pain and think of the twins. He wasn’t going to run away with any of them: he wasn’t fucking them because he loved them, he was fucking them because he wanted to feel like a guy who could bed attractive, intelligent single women.

  He didn’t love her either, though: that was increasingly clear. He even stopped buying her flowers, once the guilt-tinged giveaway that he’d been a naughty boy on his latest foreign trip. Not, of course, that there weren’t plenty of other giveaways. Discretion wasn’t something Gavin had ever mastered, or if he had he’d evidently thought Simone too stupid for it to be worth the effort, a misapprehension she’d admittedly worsened through pretending not to notice. In truth she’d thought she could get used to it, even that in time he’d get over it, his childhood inadequacies one day finally compensated. She knew that sounded dippy and pathetic, but when you’ve given up your job and there are two toddlers at your feet, it’s hard to see yourself as spoiled for options.

  Nonetheless, it still was dippy and pathetic. The twins were nearly school-age, and with such emancipation at hand, her vision was cleared enough for her to see the single-most salient fact that she’d been missing: she didn’t love him.

  If she needed proof of this, then it came in spades when she discovered the identity of his la
test concubine: Catherine O’Rourke, the face that filled a thousand hankies once upon a time in Auchenlea. She felt amused by this rather than hurt. Put together with the school reunion, there was just something so embarrassingly desperate about it.

  Gavin had crossed paths with Catherine after all these years because she was working at the PR firm handling publicity for the resort project. She was still quite the clotheshorse, but if truth be told she was no longer the knock-out Simone remembered. However, that wouldn’t have proven any deterrent to Gavin. Poor Catherine – he wasn’t screwing her, he was screwing a memory. Screwing what she represented, and no doubt frustrated that everyone in their fifth-year Chemistry class couldn’t be there to see it.

  But soon enough they would be.

  Simone knew that was why Gavin had tried so hard to put her off attending the reunion. He wanted all his ex-classmates gathered here on this marvellous creation of his, where they would see how much more successful than they he had been, and where they would see also that Catherine O’Rourke, who the boys had all fancied and the girls had all envied, only had eyes for him. It would slightly spoil the effect if wee Simone Draper was hanging around, pointing out that she was the one he was actually married to, but that was something Gavin had been forced to get grudgingly used to.

  Little did he know that there would be a couple more things spoiling the effect, too. Such as the fact that she’d secretly added David Murdoch and Matthew Black to the list of individuals Gavin had instructed the PR firm to track down and invite. How very odd, she’d thought, that their names should slip his mind, considering they were the two people from Gavin’s yeargroup who had, in their different ways, gone on to achieve the most renown.

  And, of course, there would be one further upstaging that evening.