by Mark Watson
Tim felt Jo’s arm on his sleeve. ‘Come on,’ she whispered.
He stared at her. ‘What?’
‘Come on.’
Nobody glanced their way as he followed her, the two of them like fish skimming through a tank. Bradley Ford Richards’ voice went on in the background: ‘. . . awareness. Awareness is everything.’ With a dexterity Tim admired even through his general alarm, Jo picked up two cocktails from a tray and shoved open the door with her other hand.
They were out on a balcony in the thick air. Below was a muted drone of car horns. The moon looked as thin as a fingernail, the stars washed out by constellations of neon-lit windows.
‘I’m sorry.’ Jo took a generous mouthful of her cocktail and passed the other to Tim. ‘I’ve heard Christian beat the drum so many times.’
‘Do you not . . .?’ Tim wasn’t sure what he meant to ask. ‘I mean . . .’
‘I’m sorry. I sound like such a brat.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I haven’t had anyone to talk to for ages.’
‘You can talk to me. Obviously.’
‘It’s just,’ said Jo, ‘everyone in there claps Christian on the back, and I just get looked at like a Jumeirah Jane, and—’
‘Like a . . .?’
‘It’s what they call these wives here who are all, you know. Personal trainer, credit card, manicure, pedicure, the car, the rest of it. Everything but the husband; the husband’s out earning it, and then playing golf and going for drinks with Roger and the rest of the boys from work.’ She put an icy emphasis on these words. Tim coughed tactfully.
‘But you’re not like that . . . I mean, you two . . .’
‘No, I’m not like that,’ said Jo. ‘I’m the comms director; I basically run 80 per cent of WorldWise. I always have. When the kids were growing up, right from when I was twenty-three, twenty-four, Christian was never there. He was always in the Central African Republic or Bangladesh. I was changing nappies, watching my body fall to pieces, and organizing press events in the evenings.’ Her eyes were glittering. ‘But he was the famous face, so he was the hero. He got the OBE, was in Time magazine. And I was the “behind every great man” . . .’
She tailed off and drank down the rest of her cocktail.
‘So how do you two . . .?’
‘How’s the marriage?’ Jo smiled as if it was an old-fashioned question. ‘There’s actually nothing wrong with it. I mean, we love each other. But, I don’t know. That’s not always enough, is it?’
Applause was faintly audible from inside. Tim wondered if they really ought to be out here on their own. He started to say something, and at the same time Jo caught hold of his wrist and pulled him to her with calm efficiency, and the two of them were kissing, the taste of the drink and the utter assurance of her lips striking him in the same moment. ‘You smell so nice,’ she muttered. ‘I wanted you to stay, earlier. To come in the hot tub with me.’
‘I . . .’ said Tim.
She sighed and reached down for his belt, and then to Tim’s utter exhilaration and alarm her hand was on his cock, and something made him stagger away.
Jo looked questioningly at him. Tim felt red and confused; he removed his glasses as if that would help, rubbed them and put them back on.
‘Isn’t this a bit risky?’
‘We can go somewhere.’
‘Also . . .’ Tim stared at the ground. ‘Also, I don’t know that it’s right.’
‘You don’t think I should be the judge of that?’ Jo had folded her arms across her chest.
‘I mean . . .’ Tim backtracked. ‘I mean, I’m sorry, I . . .’
‘Fine,’ said Jo, and she walked past him to open the fire door. Tim made an impulsive reach for her hand. But she pulled away and he followed her at a distance of ten paces back into the room, where Jason Streng had just finished speaking and was being photographed, the camera-flashes bursting around him like fireworks.
The party didn’t go on long: filming would start early tomorrow. In the car, everyone chatted about how friendly Streng had been, how paranoid his agent was. Jo did not look at Tim as they all parted at the Centrepiece. Tim, Bradley and Ruth, whose chalets neighboured one another, walked back together.
‘What an asshole,’ said Bradley, out of nowhere, as they were on the point of exchanging goodnights.
‘Raf?’ said Ruth.
‘He is a grade-A asshole.’ Bradley rubbed the side of his face.
‘Are you OK, Tim?’ Ruth asked. ‘You’re quiet.’
He longed to tell her about Jo, but the tale did him little credit, and could get back to Christian. Besides, he suspected that Bradley had seen him leave during the speech, and that this had contributed to Bradley’s mood. All in all Tim felt he had made enough of a mess of things for one night, and it was better to quit here than risk some new mishap.
In his chalet the air-conditioning felt maliciously cold. He was getting used to the fact that it was seemingly able to override his commands. He got quickly into bed, pressing the button to draw the drapes across and leaving a pile of clothes folded in their usual place. After lying there for a few minutes he decided to get a bottle of Chardonnay from the minibar, and after two glasses he accepted it was inevitable he would think about Jo, about the brief moments she touched him. Then things felt a little better; he began to develop the sense that the slate might be wiped clean by morning, when the infallible sun came up again. He tried to usher himself to sleep by thinking about the riddle of the dollar, but he was not even sure he could remember the question correctly.
5: OLD TOWN
The chalets all had horsehair welcome mats, and sturdy locks on the doors even though they were opened by electronic card. Presumably this was to encourage the feeling of cosy domesticity, of the ‘village’. And indeed Tim did already feel at home, despite the unmissable foreignness of the setting that was waiting outside, emphasized by the call to prayer that came wafting along the beach. It was hard to tell whether the muezzin’s mournful cry was a recording or not; it had a slightly distorted quality, but that might just be the distance. The man drew out each breath over a fistful of alternating high and low notes. Distracted by this, Tim jumped as Ashraf made his way in. He was wheeling a trolley topped with a huge ice bucket, in which bottles bumped gently together like limbs in a pool.
‘Good morning, Mr Callaghan.’ The pronunciation was perfect now; he must have practised it. ‘It looks as if you are leaving the chalet. May I go ahead and service it?’
‘Yes . . . yes, of course,’ said Tim, who had been about to use the bathroom but felt this was now inappropriate.
‘Thank you, sir.’ Ashraf went on to solicit permission to re-stock the minibar; then his eyes took on a watery, almost sentimental look. ‘I also wanted to say thank you for giving me such a great report on the questionnaire.’
‘Oh. You’re welcome.’
‘This is very good news for me. My superiors keep a record. In March I was the most overrated employee.’
‘Sorry? Oh – the highest-rated employee.’
‘Yes, sir.’
As he wove along the signposted paths, past crouching maintenance men and the early-shift holidaymakers – mostly the very young and very old – Tim found himself wondering how Ashraf could know about the result of the satisfaction questionnaire. Surely these things were anonymous? What if he had been critical?
He turned his thoughts instead to the day’s filming. He’d seen the fruits of his work committed to camera before, but never with such a large production team, nor with a major star involved. All the same, as he looked at the day’s shooting schedule, the main thing that jumped out was the absence of Jo’s name. She and Christian were not on set today; they wanted to focus on the publicity and allow everyone some ‘creative space’. Tim thought of the kiss with an uneasy sense that it could not really have happened, or that more should have happened; in any case, the way it had played out felt like the worst outcome. He wondered briefly how Jo remem
bered it – what was on her mind at that moment – and then made a half-hearted vow not to think of it again.
In today’s filming plan Jason would walk down a street naked, in a location downtown, though any actual nudity would be supplied by a body double. Tomorrow they were heading to a golf club to capture him ‘flying’. On the remaining three days they would then return to either or both locations depending on what else needed to be ‘covered off’. It seemed a fairly forgiving schedule to Tim, but as he joined the group waiting outside the Centrepiece, Raf was already irate about the fact that their transport had yet to arrive.
‘As soon as you start dealing with fucking locals,’ he muttered, hooking his Aviator shades irritably onto his shirt so that he could make out the screen of his phone.
Tim took a long slug from a bottle of water. He had read on Google that it was advisable to drink more than you thought necessary, since dehydration happened quickly and was hard to detect. Ruth was tying back her chaotic hair in a number of ways, none of them very successful. She swiped the water bottle playfully from Tim. ‘It’s too hot already.’
‘It’s going to be proper warm, as the Geordies say,’ observed the Fixer.
‘How do you know about Geordies?’ Tim couldn’t resist asking.
‘Family in South Shields,’ said the Fixer. He was not able to elaborate on this surprising statement, because Raf intervened with an ill-tempered enquiry about speeding up the transport company. Like a Disney character summoning a magical protector, the Fixer appeared to click his fingers and whistle; almost immediately a large people-carrier rolled up in front of the Centrepiece, and the team piled in. Raf seemed about to ask why the Fixer couldn’t have done this all along, but then thought better of it.
Tim was sandwiched between Ruth and Bradley, who was consulting a tiny notebook. As far as Tim could make out, he was reading the same few sentences again and again, occasionally mouthing a word. Raf took a phone call and once more loudly notified someone, whom he addressed as ‘babe’, that he was in Dubai. Almost as soon as they had set off, the driver apparently went the wrong way; the Fixer addressed him sharply in Arabic and the man, muttering, swung the car around on a dual carriageway, into a chorus of horns. Tim felt everything inside him tense with the certainty of a crash, and caught his breath again when the driver stopped abruptly at the next lights, having given every impression of intending to go right through them.
‘This guy’s a bit . . .’ Tim murmured to Ruth.
‘Not by Dubai standards. The whole place is like bumper cars.’
‘Have you been before?’
‘I worked here on, erm, on another thing for WorldWise, a few years back. Even stayed in the same place. It’s changed a lot, though. Like, a thousand new buildings. That kind of thing.’
There were construction sites everywhere as they came down the Sheikh Zayed Road. Men in orange jumpsuits sat in neat rows, like children in a school assembly, while others swarmed around diggers.
‘It’d be quicker if they all worked at the same time,’ Raf suggested.
‘They are on a break,’ the Fixer explained. ‘But there’s nowhere really to go, so they just sit down.’
At the merging of lanes they got caught in a knot of traffic, and for several minutes crawled along beneath advertising hoardings for the new resort Atlantis. Tim wondered why they would name it after a place that had famously sunk, but this was displaced from his thoughts by a pressing need to urinate.
‘Is it far?’ he asked.
‘Not far at all,’ said the Fixer, ‘but in Dubai you don’t measure distance by distance. You measure it by cars.’
They pulled up eventually at the end of a pedestrianized boulevard with a hamlet of construction vehicles, where dozens of men in overalls swarmed over walkways of scaffolding. As he looked up, Tim could see what all the work was in aid of: a thin building was poking from a sheath of scaffolding, like a present halfway out of its wrapping paper. The sun bounced fiercely off its glass exterior and cranes stood around like bodyguards.
‘This is Burj Dubai,’ said the Fixer, ‘or will be. The world’s tallest building by far.’
‘What are they going to use it for?’
The Fixer wrinkled his nose. ‘They haven’t worked that out yet.’
Tim consulted his call-sheet. ‘Aren’t we meant to be in the Old Town?’
The Fixer removed his Panama hat and used it for a sweeping gesture. ‘Old Town is the name of this entire development: the Burj Dubai, Dubai Mall and all these apartments. They’re doing the apartments in the style of ancient Arabian architecture and that new mall over there is going to be done out like a souk.’ Sitar music, from invisible speakers, was playing from the direction the Fixer indicated; the mall looked finished, though there was nobody about.
‘But is there actually an old town? There must be.’
‘There’s the creek. That’s the real old area. But it’s not what you’d call a town. What they’re recreating here didn’t really exist in the first place.’ The Fixer beckoned them along with him. ‘Anyway. It’s getting older the longer we stay here. Let’s go.’
There was a large WorldWise trailer at one corner of the boulevard, where the mismatched-looking team of Miles and Bradley began to set up cameras. Tim made straight for the trailer, where there was the familiar purr of air-con and a table had been set out with snacks and drinks. The hiss of water pipes invited him through a side-door. A sticker on the cistern asked HOW ARE THESE FACILITIES? Tim had just started to piss, with a warming sense of deferred gratification, when from another room there came the clack of heels and a pair of voices he recognized: Jason Streng and his agent.
‘I shouldn’t be in that situation,’ Streng was saying. ‘Yeah? It’s too dangerous.’
‘I know, I know,’ said the agent, and Tim had the terrible realization that he was in the star’s trailer, not one for general use as he’d assumed. ‘It won’t happen again.’
‘It can’t happen again,’ Streng insisted. His accent was of the kind that evolved in British stars after time spent in Hollywood: London-polished vowels, a lazy West Coast drag. ‘There’s too much at stake, Elaine.’
Tim tried to imagine what he’d do if someone tried the door. There would be little option but to admit he’d overheard a conversation that was clearly private and in some way volatile. His heart had speeded up. He lowered the toilet lid soundlessly and sat down, trying to steady his breath. A few moments passed like this; Streng insisted that ‘it should be written into the fucking contract’ and his agent promised that it had been, her voice pleading for his trust. Then the two of them went out, Elaine’s heels sounding on the steps. Tim experienced a gratitude so strong it almost made him light-headed. He waited thirty seconds, slipped out, and immediately ducked around the back of the trailer for fear of being spotted.
But nobody was looking. Miles and Bradley were having an animated discussion about exactly where the main camera would be positioned. Miles gestured up at the sun and shook his head; Bradley looked through the lens, deliberating. Raf was glancing peevishly at his watch. Tim wandered over to the set, puzzling over what Jason and his agent could possibly have been talking about.
Tim’s time on previous ads had taught him that things always took longer than expected, and that the more people were on hand to help, the slower things were. Even so, he was surprised that on the first morning of the million-pound shoot, absolutely nothing was committed to film.
The crew were in constant motion, especially Ruth. Under orders from Raf she fetched bottle after bottle of Welsh mineral water; she placated Elaine the agent, who asked repeatedly for a parasol in case Jason needed to stand in the sun. Ruth was also the main conduit between Raf and the surprising number of extra staff who materialized as the morning went on: a make-up lady with fingernails as pink as cake icing, a continuity advisor, and a fashionably stubbled photographer in a khaki jacket. But none of this effort added up to any tangible result, at least as far as Tim coul
d tell. The time was spent in moving cameras, marking and re-marking spots for people to stand in, and then changing the plan and doing it all over again. Bradley in his baseball cap gestured expansively and gave nasal instructions; Miles, his quiff drooping in the heat, hefted cameras like an overgrown boy moving model cars. Jason occasionally appeared, watched for a moment – inscrutable behind his dark glasses – and then retired to his trailer again. This phoney war continued from half past nine until well after noon.
At around twelve thirty Jason was brought out of his trailer and put into position. Six extras were lined up by Bradley, ready to walk past in the background. Miles peeked through his lens and gave a thumbs-up.
‘Are we good to go?’ asked Bradley.
But Ruth was surveying the parade of extras with hands clasped to her sides. ‘How old are you?’ she asked a youth in a grubby football shirt with large, melancholy brown eyes.
‘Sixteen, miss.’
‘We can’t have . . . he can’t be here.’ Ruth appealed to Raf. ‘We don’t have insurance for under-eighteens.’
‘Please, miss,’ said the extra, taking a step towards Ruth; he was half a foot taller than her. ‘I want to work very much. My family needs it.’
Ruth gnawed her fingers. ‘I’m sure. Look. The thing is, we’re not allowed to . . .’
‘Please, miss,’ began the young man again. ‘I am the only one in the family who can find work. I—’
‘I can’t do it!’ Ruth said in a voice that came vulnerably close to a yell. The Fixer intervened, placing a firm hand on the would-be extra’s wrist and leading him away, responding as the boy protested in a language Tim did not understand.
At five to one, they were finally ready for the first shot. Jason was brought out once more, Ruth holding a parasol over him. Bradley peered for a final time through the lens and then retreated to a spot of shade. Miles, looking as hot as a joint of meat on a barbecue, lifted the viewfinder to his eye and gave a nod.
‘OK,’ said Bradley. ‘Speed. Camera. And—’
‘Hang on,’ said Jason, ‘what am I saying?’