The Place That Didn't Exist

by Mark Watson

  Tim closed the page and sat at the desk wondering what ‘questions’ this commenter had in mind. He went onto WorldWise’s site, but the content had been temporarily removed, replaced by a picture of Raf and a brief message outlining the tragic development. The first spatters of a surprise rainfall hit the windows, and although he had only recently got back, Tim felt a desire to be out.

  In the lift there were two leathery businessmen, each with a defiant arm around youthful Thai or Filipino companions. Tim looked away from the quartet, at a poster on the lift wall.

  TEX-MEX NIGHT! BUFFALO BILL’S!

  The authentic flavour of the Wild West.

  Every Wednesday in Catering Planet, Centrepiece.

  All food halal.

  Rain was falling in skewering bursts, reminding Tim of the shower in the chalet, although the shower had been meant to remind him of rain. Around the swimming pool people were submitting to the changed weather with ill grace, rolling up towels, stuffing magazines and sun-cream into bags. They glanced up at the sky and exchanged grimaces as if a deal had been reneged upon.

  In the Centrepiece – where he found himself heading, out of habit, out of some desire to ground himself – Tim saw Miles and Bradley; Miles in a heavy metal band’s T-shirt and unwisely skimpy pair of swimming trunks, and Bradley, as ever, in his baseball cap with notebook in hand. Without actively intending to spy on the two of them, Tim crept close enough to hear Miles’s usually benign voice raised in protest.

  ‘It’s taking the piss. It’s absolutely taking the piss.’

  ‘I agree,’ Bradley said, ‘but I don’t see what we can do.’

  ‘I didn’t come all this way,’ said Miles, ‘to be treated like this.’

  Treated like what? Tim wanted very much to ask. Who, or what, is taking the piss? But it was as if the questions externalized themselves without his permission: Miles and Bradley both swivelled at the same time and Tim was obliged to look as if he was surprised to see them.

  ‘Just been to the water park,’ said Miles, although Tim hadn’t asked for this information. ‘Checked it out.’

  ‘Getting on with some work,’ Bradley added, patting his notebook. ‘You?’

  ‘Oh, not doing anything really,’ said Tim. ‘Maybe see you later?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Bradley agreed, and the two of them departed, leaving Tim with an inescapable feeling of being left out. Both the overheard conversation, and their body language, had hinted strongly at something that Tim could not be privy to. He thought about the night he’d spent in odd proximity with Bradley, wondered briefly whether Miles and Bradley could be lovers, dismissed it as ludicrous, and then reinstated it because nothing, just now, was too strange to rule out.

  He stepped outside, hoping to catch sight of his colleagues, but they could have gone in any of several directions. The air was bracingly cool, at least in comparison with what he’d become used to; raindrops teased the back of his neck. Tim’s eye caught a familiar figure scampering out of sight. He followed around the back of the building. It was Ashraf, an ill-fitting suit jacket over his green T-shirt. His large, white eyes were full of something that looked like fear.

  ‘Mr Callaghan. How is your stay?’

  ‘Hello, Ashraf. Heading home?’

  Ashraf smiled faintly, as if unsure whether Tim was making fun of him.

  ‘Home?’

  ‘It’s just – it looks as if you’re on your way home.’

  Ashraf tweaked unhappily at his moustache, which, now that his face was so solemn, had an odd, unhappy quality to it, like a disguise he was being forced to wear. ‘I have been dismissed, Mr Callaghan.’

  ‘Dismissed?’

  ‘I am no longer working for the Village, taking effect immediately.’

  Ashraf looked away and Tim had a horrible feeling that he might be about to weep.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My services have not been considered satisfactory,’ said Ashraf.

  ‘Is it because of the . . . the death?’

  Ashraf looked at him in silence. It was obvious there was something he wanted to say. Tim felt desperate to pave over the gap in trust that made it impossible, but Ashraf was turning to go.

  ‘Please take care, Mr Callaghan. I must go and catch a bus.’

  Tim wondered how far beyond the Village, beyond the broad gate and the sentry-hut, Ashraf would have to go to find a bus stop. He wondered what would happen to him next. Every moment he spent wondering diminished his chances of ever finding out.

  ‘Come back. Ashraf.’ He was almost shouting. ‘Let me give you money for a cab or something.’

  ‘No, thank you, Mr Callaghan.’

  ‘Ashraf . . .’

  The small man seemed to weigh up some proposition hanging in the air between them. He mouthed a single word. There was a plosive, a B or a P. The fragment of sound died in the air.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Ashraf did not look back or stop walking.

  ‘Ashraf? What did you say?’

  Tim watched him disappear, the too-big jacket over bony shoulders, head down. It came as a nasty relief when his figure vanished into the nothingness that lay beyond the lantern-lit paths.

  What was the word? It might have been ‘balloon’. Or ‘bidding’. It had been a punch to thin air. It was gone, and the man who spoke it was gone. Tim had the sensation that he was standing on the edge of a great dark something; that just beyond the solidity of the hotel was a void, a zero that could swallow a person.

  He would have liked to call home – or call someone who wasn’t here, at least – but it felt as if nothing he could say would make sense to them. He walked back down towards the beach, passing the bars and restaurants, where business was going on as usual. Tim had the thought that the resort was an organism, one that hardly needed its guests: if no one ever stayed there again, it would still start up again each morning.

  He was almost at the beach – and still with no specific plan in mind – when he saw Ruth, deep in conversation with a bespectacled man. Tim had half decided not to disturb them when Ruth noticed him; it was a relief when she called his name.

  ‘You look like you’ve seen, erm, seen a ghost.’

  ‘I sort of have,’ said Tim, and he described the encounter with Ashraf. The stranger, who had still not been introduced, called a waiter over and paid the bill; but when Tim finished the story, it turned out he had been listening.

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ said the man, glancing down at his phone as if he planned to pick it up and tell someone straight away.

  ‘This is Adam,’ said Ruth. ‘He’s a journalist.’

  ‘It would be good to catch up sometime,’ said Adam, as if theirs was a well-established relationship. ‘That’s interesting, about the lackey getting sacked.’

  ‘He wasn’t a—’ Tim began.

  ‘He was the one who found the body, wasn’t he?’

  Tim already regretted having said anything in front of this man, who had clearly been pumping Ruth for information: perhaps with some success, judging by the number of beer bottles on the table.

  ‘We’re in the “Executive Compound”, as it’s enticingly called,’ said Adam, touching Ruth on the shoulder with a surprising familiarity, ‘but we’ll mostly be in whichever bar stays open longest.’

  ‘We?’ asked Tim, as the reporter walked away, consulting his phone again. ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘The journalists.’ Ruth finished her beer and rapped the empty bottle down. ‘Do you want . . .?’

  ‘Yes. Definitely. Please.’

  ‘We’ll get two more of these, please. Or four, let’s just say four.’ Someone behind Tim went to execute the order. ‘There’s a whole load of them. Sky, CNN, the whole pack. This is what they do.’

  ‘I suppose so. It’s just weird to be . . . it doesn’t feel quite real.’

  ‘They’re like a little gang,’ said Ruth. ‘There’s the ones who go to war zones and are there drinking in Baghdad, their own little bars, the corresponde
nts’ club. “See you in Gaza in a couple of weeks.” And then there’s the ones like him, who just follow murders around.’

  ‘Is it a murder? Did he talk about it being a murder?’

  Ruth hesitated.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Tim. ‘I’m feeling . . . I don’t know what I’m meant to feel.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I’ve been the same. I wanted to get a haircut but I feel like if I change my appearance, it’s going to look like I’m hiding something. It’s ridiculous.’

  The beers were placed in front of them by a man who moved away so quickly that it was as if the transaction had something covert about it. Tim took a greedy chug from his, and was pleased to see Ruth do the same.

  ‘But surely . . .’ Tim began. ‘I mean, surely it’s more likely that it wasn’t a – that there was nothing suspicious about the death.’

  Ruth made a grab for a clump of her hair and sat there with a fistful of it. ‘I’m the main producer now. Obviously. I’ve been trying to make sense of Raf’s files. I can’t understand half of it. But I do get the impression a lot of stuff went on in the days before it happened.’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  In a gesture fuelled either by the beer or by his craving for humanity, for something to share, Tim reached out and put his hand on hers. Ruth’s eyes changed, becoming wary.

  ‘Sorry. I just wanted to say: I’m not going to tell anyone a word you say to me. I’m trustworthy.’

  Ruth seemed to weigh this up, and nodded. ‘Sure. Well, I know you didn’t kill him, anyhow.’

  He was halfway to savouring what seemed a compliment when he realized it wasn’t meant that way: it was a statement of fact. ‘Because you’d have heard me?’

  ‘Right,’ said Ruth. ‘I did hear you. You got up in the night, like, ninety-two times, remember?’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  ‘You went to the bathroom and we had a whole conversation,’ Ruth went on. Tim felt colour scatter across his face and settle there as she continued, smiling at him with a trace of indulgence. ‘At the time of death they’re giving – about three fifteen, three thirty – you were standing by my bed, kind of muttering and fumbling for the door handle or something. That’s my main alibi. That’s what I told Adam just then. And the cops.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I guess you didn’t give them the same story.’

  ‘I already don’t know what I said to them,’ Tim muttered. ‘Just by talking to them, I started to feel like I had secrets.’

  ‘Sure, and everyone does have secrets. I have secrets. You have.’ Tim nodded, wishing for a moment that he did have a life as complex as the one she was crediting him with. ‘Most of the time you can live for years like that. And then you get caught up in something and it all comes out. That’s what happens in murder mysteries, isn’t it? And the reason it’s in murder mysteries is because it’s what genuinely does happen. Do you find it funny I say “genuine” like that?’

  ‘Sorry. No. Was I smiling?’

  ‘I accept my accent is a little weird. It’s the part-Irish, part-American thing.’

  ‘I like it.’

  They smiled at each other. ‘I’m glad you said that,’ Tim admitted. ‘It’s stupid, but my only reference for all this is murder mysteries.’

  ‘Well, they’re everywhere,’ Ruth said. ‘Books in the airport. Every other TV show. Murder feels like, erm, it feels like fiction. You don’t imagine – it’s a cliché, but you don’t imagine it happens, as a real thing, to people like yourself.’

  Tim was onto his second beer; he felt emboldened. ‘You know – just on the subject of secrets – I heard Jason Streng having a strange conversation with his agent.’

  Ruth listened as he described what had happened in the trailer. ‘Right. See, that kind of thing is what I mean. Before the – the death, something already wasn’t right.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ As Ruth shook her head, her hair fell about like foliage teased by wind. ‘I don’t want to know. I suspect Raf knew, and I am now in the post he previously held.’ She finished off her beer, sucking the final drops with a practised pitilessness. ‘It’s – what’s the phrase?’

  ‘Er . . . A poisoned chalice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘An unenviable position?’

  ‘No. Keep them coming.’

  ‘You want me just to list all the phrases that exist in English?’

  ‘Well, do you have anything better to do? Are you going to solve the case?’

  It was pleasant talking about the death this way, as if it was incidental to the business of them both sitting here; and it was good to feel the connection of a joke. ‘All right. A headache? A nightmare?’

  ‘No, no. Like, a more extreme phrase for something difficult.’

  Tim rustled through his memory for phrases his mother might use on the phone, describing the dispute over the Faulkners painting their house a different shade from the rest of the street, or the book club’s endless Tuesday-Wednesday-Tuesday fluctuations. There were no such whimsical expressions when she discussed Rod. There were just the slightly shrill assurances that he was ‘up to all sorts of things’, and, with each phone call that turned out not to be him, the half-hopeful octave rise of the voice followed by the return to earth. ‘Oh, hello, Wendy. No, just . . . expecting someone else.’ All of this made Tim realize he still hadn’t called his parents since the news broke.

  ‘Hell in a handcart?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘One of those things like the devil and the deep blue sea, or a rock and a—’

  ‘Shit sandwich.’ Ruth snapped her fingers. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Ah, it’s obvious. I should have got it.’

  Each laugh left a little warm residue in the air, and soon more beer arrived. The impression intensified for Tim that all he had to do was stay in this seat, in the corner of this nearly empty restaurant replicating in roughly equal measures the cuisines of Italy and Vietnam, and everything would retain a comforting shape.

  ‘It’s been a weird day,’ he said, trying to describe the mall: the rows of luxury items undisturbed by customers; the Toy Story figures, who were real-life versions of fictitious toys; the ski slope, and the world of cut-outs meant to represent The World, which itself was a model of the actual world they were sitting in. ‘By the end of it, I started to feel like I was walking around in a sealed bubble.’

  ‘Dubai can be like that. You feel like you’re on a different planet from everyone. Then, when you want privacy, you can’t get it.’

  Tim thought he heard the flicker of a rebuke in this. ‘Were you . . . did I interrupt anything, with that guy?’

  Ruth looked straight at him. ‘We were just talking.’ The way she said it, he felt immediately that he ought not to have asked about it. ‘How about you? Are you with anyone?’

  ‘Me? No.’

  Wanting to recapture the warmth of the conversation before he’d made what seemed like a faux pas, wanting to shed the burden of secrecy, Tim decided on a revelation. ‘But there was – kind of an incident with Jo.’

  This time the coolness of Ruth’s stare was inescapable, and Tim’s heart plunged. ‘I don’t want to hear this,’ she said.

  ‘It was nothing. Not really. Just a couple of moments, which—’

  She was shaking her head. ‘I don’t think you should have done that. And I don’t think you should be telling me.’

  Tim felt heat rage through his face. ‘Sorry.’

  Ruth gestured helplessly at the heavens. ‘Raf was messing around with her, you know that? Now he’s dead. Jesus, Tim.’

  ‘You think Raf was killed because . . .?’

  ‘I don’t think anything. I just think this isn’t a good time to be talking about screwing the boss’s wife.’

  ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘OK. But even so.’

  Ruth requested and paid the bill while Tim protested ineffectually. All at once they were getting to their feet and the bar itself was bei
ng cleared up, as if everyone had merely been waiting for the two of them to leave. A waiter thanked Tim for choosing them, and expressed the hope that they were having a good stay in Dubai.

  They passed the occasional couple returning from one of the bars: a low laugh, a shared moment, hands meeting. Tim felt the returning gloom of non-intimacy, the sensation that other people there had bonds with one another, had a solid connection to this time and place which made less and less sense to him.

  ‘I’m sorry I went for you,’ said Ruth. ‘I’m just . . . there’s a little pressure on me right now.’

  ‘I know,’ said Tim, without feeling that he really did know.

  ‘It was fun. See you at breakfast?’

  He stood in the lobby of the Maritime Tower, wondering where Ruth was staying; he’d assumed that they were all staying in this building now. As the lift display went through a complicated light show – almost here, then vanished, then almost here again – he tried to reconstruct the conversation of the past hour. It felt oddly distant, already, and part of him wished he hadn’t gone over to Ruth and the journalist at all.

  The walls of the building were given over to a mock fresco of Neptune, rising angry-eyed from blue waters with his trident brandished. The painting rose all the way from ground level to the arched ceiling. It was at odds with the cloud-white lobby fittings, the don’t-mind-me music which tinkled away on a forty-minute loop; the indifference to style was almost impressive. The cool air, humming through fans and filters, had come to seem like a natural element. There was nobody around as he slid his card into the door.

  Tim’s room, as usual, had been cleaned and tidied with an annihilating thoroughness. His discarded clothes were folded on the made-up bed, where there was also a satisfaction questionnaire. The blinds were closed; the TV was broadcasting to the empty room. Some drama set in a British vicarage, something his parents would watch, was on, subtitled in Arabic. A Home Counties churchman said that he could feel ‘pure evil creeping through the parish’. Tim fished out a mini-bottle of wine, switched off the TV and curled up on the bed with the questionnaire.

  Out of 10 – where 1 is ‘disagree exceptionally strongly’ and 10 is ‘agree exceptionally strongly’ – how would you respond to these statements?