The Place That Didn't Exist

by Mark Watson

  As soon as he was released from the interview, Tim felt he had to get out of the room. He wandered into the Village, where two different days were beginning. There was the crime scene, bizarre as it was inevitable: cops with buzzing walkie-talkies, yellow tape around the chalet Raf had returned to only twelve hours before. But a minute’s walk up towards the Centrepiece, or down to the beach, and everything was much as usual. The music of the bars swirled, ever-present and unnoticed, like oxygen. Guests with their towels and designer-watch catalogues glanced briefly at the policed enclosure and went on their way. In the Centrepiece, staff fielded enquiries about dhow rides and falconry displays as if these were matters of the utmost importance.

  What Tim wanted was to see someone else from the group, someone in this same, almost hallucinatory state. But it felt as if calling on Ruth, or Miles, or anyone might be seen as the act of someone looking to change a story. He felt as if anything he did, even now, might have some retrospectively incriminating aspect.

  With no better plan, he headed up to Catering Planet and sat in a corner booth, browsing the long menu without enthusiasm. At other tables, smiling staff were doling out satisfaction questionnaires and whisking trays away almost before they were done with. A waitress came over twice to ask if she could help; he ordered a Coke out of some sense of obligation to her, and sat cradling it, sipping it like a whisky. It seemed almost vulgar to think of eating ‘twice-glazed sticky ribs’ or ‘surf and turf’ when there had been a death. A death: the word was familiar like a game-show host, not dark or massy enough for what had actually happened, the destruction of a human.

  These thoughts were interrupted by a man in a neat black suit, who was waving a pack of cards at Tim.

  ‘You would like to see something, sir? Take one card, any card you choose.’

  Tim felt his reluctance struggle with the eagerness in the magician’s eyes, and perhaps with a growing sense that he was not fully in control of events and might as well go along with them. He took the six of diamonds, reinserted it into the pack, and watched as the magician fanned the cards out, tapped them with a forefinger and asked Tim to check his shorts. The six of diamonds was tucked into the right-hand pocket. Believe the unbelievable, thought Tim wryly.

  ‘You liked that close-up magic, sir?’

  ‘Very good.’

  Tim hoped he’d said this with enough finality that the magician would now move on to somebody else, but on the contrary, he seemed to take the praise as a commission and continued. He made the card appear under the tablecloth, behind his ear, behind the ear of a waitress. With each twist Tim wondered if he was meant to tip the man; whether he was paid by the restaurant or reliant on kindness. The conjuror ploughed on, regardless: he transported cards into wine-glasses, made them vanish altogether, sliced them up with a knife and repaired them by magic. He had Tim sign a card and it turned up beneath the sole of his shoe. Tim watched and applauded helplessly, reminded of a day at a fairground years ago when the carousel operator suffered a loss of consciousness and the whole group of riders was trapped in motion for more than forty minutes. As he was thinking that a similar fate awaited him here, Tim saw the Fixer appear in the doorway. The magician greeted him.

  ‘You like magic, sir?’

  ‘I do a little bit myself,’ said the Fixer.

  The magician gave a gnashing smile, which Tim recognized as a look of professional wariness: it was the same look his father’s friends at the model village had given to a Disney animator who’d visited once. He offered the cards to the Fixer, who directed Tim to take one. It was the eight of clubs. The Fixer invited him to replace the card, took the pack and, in a rapier motion, drew back his arm and whipped the cards at the wall. Tim saw them flutter through the air like ticker-tape; a solitary card remained stuck on the wall by some invisible force. The Fixer told Tim to peel off the outlying card. He didn’t need to check to know that it was the eight of clubs.

  ‘How did you . . .?’

  The Fixer flashed a luminous grin. ‘It’s practice.’

  Tim began to object that this wasn’t enough of an answer, that the thing he’d seen was impossible, but the Fixer was bringing news. ‘I have been sent by the Ropers to say that there is dinner at their place tonight, on the Palm. Cars will collect you at half past six.’

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ Tim couldn’t help asking, but with no expectation of an answer. The Fixer left. The magician was on his haunches, picking up cards from the floor.

  Now they assembled around an oak dining table. When they entered, there’d been a general milling around and inspection of the open-plan space, with its arsenal of gleaming white fittings at one end, and floor-to-ceiling windows offering a chunk of the ocean over a spacious balcony. The décor was sparse: blurry fashion prints of New York and London on wet nights, streaky tail-lights and lovers arm in arm. From the ceiling in the kitchen area dangled the cooking implements, all in a row like washing on a line, which Tim remembered from the Skype chat many weeks ago.

  Christian brought in a series of heavy silver pots and a criss-cross of delicious cooking fumes invaded the air. Tim realized with a little guilt how hungry he was, and how much he wanted a glass of wine.

  ‘Obviously,’ said Christian, ‘this is a terrible day. It’s a terrible day. We didn’t know what to do. We brought you here because it felt like we should all be together.’

  ‘We wanted you to know you’re not alone,’ Jo added. The Ropers’ eyes flitted momentarily onto one another. Christian Roper’s hand crept across the table to meet his wife’s. The shadow of stubble did a favour to his face; there was something impressive about him. About all of them, in fact, as Tim looked around. Ruth had pinned her hair back efficiently; Miles had washed his, and it was slicked back from his forehead in neat comb-strokes. Bradley was in a polo-neck cashmere sweater and had left the baseball cap behind. Their efforts to rise to events had painted them all with a certain small-scale nobility.

  ‘No one is alone in this,’ Christian Roper echoed. ‘We have all had a horrendous shock. I know you’ll be wanting to talk and to think and . . . whatever you need, this place is at your disposal. That’s all I wanted to say.’

  ‘It’s not quite all,’ said the Fixer.

  ‘No, it’s not quite all.’ Christian glanced down into his drink and back at the group again: either he was struggling with the effort of addressing them, or else he was a good actor. Of course, thought Tim, both could be true. ‘There is the question of what will happen now. With the ad. I know that it seems in bad taste to talk about it. But it would be weird not to.’

  Tim found himself leaning forward in his seat.

  ‘We obviously don’t know what has happened,’ said Christian. ‘We only know one thing.’ He seemed to scoop up the eyes of each individual listener as his gaze circled the table. ‘We set out to do good. The good we can do is not changed by what happened today. But nobody has to stay here. You might want to go home and forget all this. We will respect that. We will totally respect that.’

  In the quiet, Tim glanced around the table. Everyone was looking at their cutlery, or at their fingernails. It felt like he should want to go home, but that was not the same as wanting it for real. To leave now, quite apart from possibly bringing suspicion on himself, would mean wresting himself out of a drama he had only just been flung into, back to a prosaic normality. He imagined the approach to the Shoreditch offices, the rain, the quiet mechanical transactions of people and computers.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ said Ruth, quietly.

  ‘I’m easy,’ said Miles Aldridge, hungrily eyeing one of the pots, which contained a whole chicken bathing in a cream-coloured jus. It struck Tim as a rather casual response, but then, it was hard to know what the form was at a moment like this.

  ‘I’m not a guy who walks away from anything,’ said Bradley, drawing himself up very straight in his chair, like a seal stretching towards a proffered fish. He folded his short, neat arms across his chest. ‘We came he
re to do a job. That job is to raise awareness. And that is what Raf would want right now.’

  As Tim looked diagonally across the table he could see Jo’s fist driven hard against her mouth as if she were trying to force herself away from tears. He confronted the idea that this death was an awful thing, a great and impoverishing disaster, rather than just an unsettling event. He could imagine Raf’s mother, perhaps a mother very much like his own, in a medium-sized house in Oxfordshire, going brightly to answer the phone and hearing ten seconds’ worth of words which shattered everything around her.

  ‘I agree,’ Tim heard himself say. ‘We should stay.’

  Almost everyone ate with an initial diffidence giving way quickly to vigour. Only Jo pushed and picked at her food. When Christian opened a new bottle of wine, Tim put out his glass without more than a momentary consideration of the echoes produced by the sound: last night’s drinking session, before the unthinkable happened.

  After dinner they settled in the lounge, which was dominated by a framed print of Grand Central Station in the twenties, light slanting in thick diagonal stalks through the windows. There was a trio of leather sofas, a vast TV screen and a fireplace. At last the conversation went the way it had to.

  ‘Have they said anything about, erm?’ Ruth had picked up a glass paperweight and was eyeing it as if it might contain a clue. ‘I mean, do they know . . .?’

  ‘It’ll be a few days for an autopsy result, obviously,’ said Christian. ‘But the preliminary signs are, he’d definitely taken something.’

  ‘Well, we know he’d taken something. When had he not?’ Jo scratched her nose. Tim resented the implied intimacy, and he felt stupid for having thought that something unique had happened between Jo and himself. Then he pulled himself up with a silent shame that he was thinking that way at a time like this.

  ‘So they don’t think anyone . . . that anyone . . .?’ Bradley began.

  ‘That someone killed him,’ Ruth said, in a mock-helpful tone.

  ‘There’s no way they could possibly say, at this point,’ said Christian.

  ‘There’ll be reporters here,’ Jo began. ‘There’ll obviously be talk about—’

  ‘They won’t find anything,’ Christian cut her off. ‘What are they going to find? They’ll just show up and stick their bloody noses in.’

  ‘I mean, there’s no way anyone would have wanted to kill him,’ said Tim, as usual a little surprised to be speaking out loud, ‘even though, even though he was . . .’

  ‘An aerosol,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Aerosol?’

  ‘Asshole,’ Ruth clarified, with an effort.

  There was a little nervous laughter, and a pause before Jo spoke, inching forward on the sofa where she sat next to her husband. ‘Pretty bad taste that, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Speaking ill of the dead,’ muttered Miles.

  ‘I’m just saying what everyone thought,’ said Ruth. Tim admired, and was a little appalled by, her courage. ‘None of us liked him. If it was about someone not liking him, we . . . anyone could have killed him.’

  ‘Sure, but people don’t . . . you don’t murder a guy because he’s a pain in the ass on set,’ Bradley objected. ‘I’m not a guy that likes people to be rude, but you don’t murder someone for being rude.’

  ‘That’s my point,’ said Ruth. ‘You don’t. There has to be more to it than some grudge.’

  ‘No one here would have, clearly,’ said Christian, ‘and everything that can be done is being done. So I don’t know that we should be torturing ourselves over it. Who wants coffee?’

  Over coffee and then an expensive-looking bottle of port, the conversation veered away from the death. It was extremely odd, Tim thought at first, that this could keep happening: that for long minutes at a time, the group was capable of not discussing an event whose importance overpowered any other possible topic. But perhaps this was the result of an inevitable circuit-breaking mechanism: perhaps the subject was too heavy to be kept in the air all the time. Also – and again it was strange how quickly the brain accepted this – there was still a job to be done. There would be no filming tomorrow, Christian said, because of the amount of paperwork that needed doing.

  ‘And because it wouldn’t be appropriate, of course,’ Jo said, her voice tight. ‘It wouldn’t be right to go straight back to it.’

  ‘Of course,’ Christian conceded; but he did not seem to feel it was inappropriate to resume talking about the mechanics of restarting the project. ‘Seriously, back home, we’d be screwed now for two weeks. In Dubai, things just happen faster. When I first came over, I couldn’t get used to it, the pace of it. Without Ali – I was phoning him ten times a day at first, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Dubai is a good place to win,’ said the Fixer. ‘That’s what I told Mr Roper. A bad place to lose. A really, really bad place to lose.’

  He gave one of his brilliant smiles, dusted with a certain grisliness. Tim asked himself what game it was that Raf had lost, and to such a calamitous extent that he lost his life in the process. He felt the others must all be thinking versions of the same thought, though it was hard to say: Jo’s face seemed deliberately angled away from his, and Miles was respectfully inspecting the aged port bottle from which Christian now poured himself an over-generous measure.

  ‘And I said, OK, we’ll win.’ Christian swigged the port as if it were blackcurrant juice. ‘We’ll make kids the winners. Which we are.’

  Nobody knew what to say to this. There was something impressive, even inspiring, in the sustained energy of the man; but also something odd or incongruous about the rhetoric, like watching a hyperactive TV show after a sombre news story.

  In time, Jo spoke up to bring the evening to a close.

  ‘We were thinking that if you wanted to stay here, anyone, all the rooms are made up. In case you didn’t want to go back there, with everything.’

  This had not occurred to Tim until now, but as soon as it was suggested he did indeed think how little he wanted to return to the Village, with its orderly lattice of pathways, its unctuous staff, the looming knowledge of Raf’s death and the quiet way it was already becoming a non-fact.

  ‘I’d like to stay,’ he said.

  ‘I bet you would!’ Christian replied, looking across the room at Tim with a grin that triggered something momentary but unpleasant in Tim’s innards, as if an ulcer had been brushed against. There was something in the way Christian looked between Tim and Jo that stirred dread inside him. Christian knew what had happened. Of course he did. Tim had done something inexcusable, and now this dramatic turn of events would flush the secret out.

  All this jingled through him in the space of a few seconds, then Christian was patting him on the arm and showing him to a bedroom with such a complete lack of hostility that Tim could only think he had misread the moment. He was conscious that other members of the group were taking up the invitation to stay; as he crashed down gratefully on the double bed, he could hear them shuttling through the hall, doors opening and closing.

  Glancing at his phone, he found a handful of replies had arrived to the various text bulletins he’d sent out during the afternoon. You OK? they asked. Jesus, you OK? Thank you for LETTING ME KNOW, wrote his mother, who had not mastered text messages, and please Stay Safe. There was an illicit pleasure in being in the middle of this exotic storm: assuming a certain survivor’s status in the eyes of people back home. As he curled up in the bed, having folded his clothes into a pile, he clung on to this semi-comfort. It was better than thinking of what used to be Raf Kavanagh, a couple of miles away, stiff and lifeless in a steel locker, awaiting transportation to the heartbroken people whose son he had been.

  When Tim opened his eyes, he had the familiar feeling that only a little time had gone by. He writhed onto one side and another, trying to make anything out in the pure dark.

  The door swung open; he felt it rather than hearing it, felt the presence of somebody trying not to be heard. There were footsteps by the bed, and br
eathing. Someone might have been in Raf’s room just like this. A bolt of terror went through Tim like electrical current and he heard his voice come out with unnatural harshness.

  ‘What the fuck . . .?’

  ‘Can I put the light on?’

  It was Bradley. Tim exhaled slowly as a band of light fell onto the bed. Bradley raised his hands in apology.

  ‘I’ve been sitting up. Suddenly everyone’s in bed.’

  Tim’s composure was returning in uneven stabs. He shuffled to make room. ‘You can sleep on the other side of this.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Bradley eased himself onto the bed. ‘I guess I didn’t really want to sleep alone tonight.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Tim, and it sounded true as he said it, though he was now struck by the slight strangeness of this new arrangement. ‘When you came in, I freaked out for a second.’

  ‘It’s horrible to think about it,’ said Bradley. ‘That someone could have been in there waiting.’

  It was a relief to discuss it so openly, but beyond Tim’s imagination – or perhaps his will – to picture it. ‘I don’t understand who would have been. Or why. I mean, it would have had to be one of us. No one else has a smart card to get into Ocean Chalets.’

  ‘This is a strange place,’ said Bradley. Tim had the impression that Bradley was turned towards him, though the light was off again now. ‘They can say we’re welcome as many times as they like. In the Village, I mean. But not everyone wants us here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, Dubai is – this is still the Arab world.’ Bradley’s voice sounded slightly high-pitched without the accompanying graphic of his hairless face. ‘They don’t like our way of life. Americans, me and Ruth, are not popular here. We don’t know this world. We don’t really know what the rules are.’

  Tim took a moment to digest this. ‘But Raf isn’t even American. Wasn’t American.’

  ‘No. I’m just saying. This kind of, uh, pleasuredome. The drinking, the parties. All the excess. It’s going to have consequences, right?’