by Mark Watson
Some days, I laughed and drank with colleagues after we wrapped for the night. You would take me for someone who was going back to a happy house, maybe with a strapping husband, sleeves rolled up, dishing up rich-smelling food to an army of eager kids. Planning a summer camping vacation or welcoming parents for Thanksgiving. I could even take myself for that person. The narrative in which everything went right made more sense than the one I found myself in. I told people I’d never had children: had chosen not to, for work. Or that I was married with three of them. I could tell people what I wanted, because I rarely spoke to anyone twice. I moved through life like a rumour.
When he’d been gone nearly a year, I worked on a shoot in Hong Kong. The film featured three boys about sixteen: the age he nearly was, the age he wouldn’t ever reach. It was a bad choice. In a hotel room designed to neutralize emotion, I found myself thumping on the window with my fists, trying to break it maybe, or just trying to express something that had no shape. The window didn’t break, but somebody complained. A staff member came up and I shouted at them that my son was dead. The film’s director was called to the room. He said maybe I should get therapy. He knew someone. I said, why not?
Six months of bereavement counselling. Where over a dozen years before I’d spent Thursdays with people who had young children, I now spent them with people whose children had been taken away. We sat in a circle and discussed our ‘stories’. One lady had had a son, about Owen’s age, who had been abducted and killed and eventually dragged from the Hudson River. ‘Every day,’ she told us, ‘I say: give him back. Give me back that brown-eyed boy.’ I cried, but not for her. We were all locked in our individual suffering. When I spoke about what had happened to Owen, I could see people nodding, tilting their heads, switching off. I’d done it to them, too. We were all victims’ mothers, like the caption on the newscast when I was interviewed. VICTIM’S MOTHER. It was the same thing in my individual counselling sessions. ‘People who’ve lost someone often find . . .’ she would say. ‘Mothers in your position feel . . .’
People were taking their kids swimming, having barbecues, tucking them up to sleep. I’d been one of them myself. If they heard what had happened to me, they’d say: how terrible. They would mean it, too – they weren’t lying. But nor were they really telling the truth. They were just doing what you do when you hear a story. Owen only existed now as a story. That poor woman, they all thought, before something else caught their attention.
A job came up in Dubai. It was 2003 and I had been on my own three years. The client was a charity called WorldWise. I flew over and met Christian Roper. He was bracingly attractive, full of confidence: he already knew my history. He put an arm round me and told me how awful it was. I stayed in their spare room and Jo cooked great meals and walked around looking incredible, and then got off her face and slept with people. I stayed with them for two weeks. Halfway through the trip, they took me on a tour of the city. Christian talked about how they’d bought ten properties, flipped them, put the profits into the charity. Jo took me round a mall where they got everything for free by mentioning they were the Ropers. We went to a private beach and ordered lobster and champagne. On the last night they took me to the restaurant at the bottom of the Burj, surrounded three-sixty degrees by fish tanks. When I got home, I saw it was generally described in tourist guides as an ‘underwater restaurant’. The Burj itself was only a ‘seven-star hotel’ because it had awarded itself seven stars and nobody could take them away. Here, you made stuff up, and it stuck.
Christian got me back to Dubai in 2005, to make one of a series of short films. The city was in an orgy of expansion: in every pause in conversation you heard the growling of construction vehicles. Everywhere were billboards about THE FUTURE. You could go from hotel to mall to cinema to party without seeing the sky. That sort of detachment from reality was what I needed. I went drinking with Christian and Jo. They often left separately. Once Christian tried his luck with me; he didn’t seem offended when I said it was probably not for the best.
Christian had begun from a healthy standpoint. Having become rich, he wanted to redistribute his wealth for good. He bankrolled an entire village’s modernization in Zambia: a new hospital, school, all the stuff pictured on WorldWise’s walls. Yet for every new vaccination he paid for, there was a child screaming somewhere else; every time he signed up to pay for something, details of an even more urgent cause arrived in the mail next day. He couldn’t mend the world all on his own, of course. But, Jo told me, he felt the world could heal itself. Could, and yet wouldn’t. ‘He started to rant on about why people were so indifferent to suffering. I said, well, make your own charity. And here we are.’
WorldWise was set up to exploit all the financial loopholes Dubai offered, as so many businesses had over the previous decade. The Ropers, like half the world’s financial institutions, were gambling with huge sums in a place where official gambling was illegal. Unlike all the others, they were giving the winnings to the poor. Even so, they were in the same danger as all the others: if the game ever changed, they would hit the ground hard. At this time, nobody in the world predicted such a change, and certainly no one in Dubai. Brits, Americans, Russians came over and looted it like prospectors. They had three-day parties in the desert. They played golf and bought apartments. Everything was on credit. Money was what you said it was.
It suited me, this bubble. New York meant nothing to me now. I stayed on the move. The only reality I engaged with was minute to minute. This actor needs transportation. These crew hotels need booking. This will do some sort of good. Someone, somewhere in the world, will benefit from this.
Christian and I had come to a similar place by different routes: we both cared more about our projects, the abstracts, than about the people around us or even ourselves. I worked on small promotional shoots for him in East Africa and Brazil and then, in 2008, Dubai came round again. I went first to London to meet Raf Kavanagh. He’d been hired as producer and I as AP; this was an inversion of the way things should have been, looking at our respective levels of experience, but I was passive about status and even money these days. They had long since ceased to mean anything. ‘I normally get on well with the people under me,’ he said. He enquired after my age and grimaced in pity when it turned out I was forty. ‘No husband?’ he asked. No, I said. Again, the look of pity.
He took a phone call from a girl in the middle of our meeting and continued to text her after they’d hung up; he didn’t make eye contact for the final twenty minutes. ‘See you at the airport,’ he said as a parting shot, and described some of the free things he’d been able to get on flights in the past.
A few days later we – and Tim, Miles and Bradley – all assembled on that grubby grey day at Heathrow, to make a commercial that would cost at least a million dollars. I was already aware that, unfortunately, WorldWise didn’t have a million dollars any more. It had a bunch of properties that were theoretically worth far more than that. But the theory was coming to an end.
By the time Tim got the contract for the commercial, I’d picked up enough to know that Christian was in trouble. Dubai was still marketing itself as aggressively as ever, but the property expos were quiet, the resorts were half empty, and business owners were beginning to panic, while repeating loudly and desperately that they were not panicking and nobody else should either. The Fixer remarked in an email, a couple of weeks before we flew, that this new commercial was ‘extremely inadvisable’. He was cheerful about it. We agreed that it was best to get on with it.
The signs of Christian’s decline were the same as the signs of Dubai’s: everything was going on like before, too much like before. He talked incessantly about ‘a chance to make a difference’, about how ‘pumped’ he was for the project. He had become a walking set of slogans. Jo, I noticed over the next couple of days, was more detached than when I had last been there, numbing everything with her strange combination of narcotics and the gym. She was ambling through life in Dubai like someo
ne under anaesthetic, as a lot of people were. On top of this, there was the secrecy surrounding Jason Streng. There was low-level chaos to do with locations and ground staff because rumours were spreading that nobody would get paid. I decided to put my fingers in my ears. It would be a week and I’d move on to something else.
But working with Raf was enough to make that sort of indifference impossible; within a day or so, something about him had begun to shift the fog that had separated me from feeling for so long. He was astonishingly mannered and arrogant, all of it concealed by that untouchable quality that comes with good looks. Lighten up! I’m just having a laugh! He had come to Dubai to enjoy himself, the same way he might go to Vegas; the ‘charity thing’ was a detail so incidental he was capable of forgetting it altogether. During his couple of nights contributing to the fight against Western excess and injustice, he drank heavily and gobbled up drugs supplied by Jo. He was rude to everyone and treated me, in particular, like a maidservant. None of this alone would make anyone kill him, surely. But – as everyone knows – people murder for reasons they couldn’t anticipate, even for reasons they aren’t aware of themselves.
And there were certain triggers. There was the moment I dropped my bag on the first day and my stuff fell all over the floor, and out came a picture of Owen which I’d almost forgotten was in there: flushed and freckled, bright-eyed, running in a race at school sports day. Tim saw it briefly and I was filled with a longing to tell him everything, a longing that couldn’t be indulged. He could only react one way to the story: my God, I’m so sorry. What was the use of collecting another set of condolences? But as I was trying to compose myself, in came Raf with one of his attacks on my work. It reminded me of the peremptory way he’d spoken to me on that first meeting; something hardened inside me.
Then on the way back to the hotel, the clincher, if there was a clincher: the discussion about the boy who choked to death because the ambulance couldn’t find him. Raf whistling ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’. Like the success of a single joke trumped the entirety of what came with a boy’s death. It was so obscene, so outlandish, that a whole life could be cancelled out in this way by a one-liner from someone more fortunate. The obscenity made me feel, over the course of that evening, more and more rash – almost panicky, as if I had to do something to change it. As we all sat down in the restaurant, I looked up at the stars, painted in that beautiful, unreal way across the Dubai horizon. The injustice filled up my throat, threatening to make me gag, in a way I’d thought I was now immune to. Owen was not here with me, he would not be back in the chalet to cuddle up to. I would never see him again. And yet Raf was so far away from being affected by death that he could make that joke, and nobody really minded.
I heard him lead the conversation, as I lay on Tim’s bed in the chalet, amid the jokes and chatter and drinking. I heard him tell the assembled team that charity was essentially pointless. A ‘bottomless pit’, he called it. His thesis: things were so fucked up that it was beyond our ability to improve them, and so we shouldn’t even try. He had a point, of course. A lot of things weren’t fair, and maybe the only answer was to hope you stayed on the right side of the universe’s whims. But there are things we can alter. As I lay on that bed, I felt the culmination of this mental, or quasi-mental, process which had gathered up all the evidence and was imploring me to act, to alter just one thing.
The process had worked away in the core of me, silent and stealthy as poison entering the bloodstream. Dubai shows that nothing is real, it said. Everything is a story. The charity itself is a story, so is the whole of this city; nothing is more substantial than a series of words, and words can mean anything. Owen dying in your arms is nothing more than an anecdote to Raf Kavanagh. Raf Kavanagh dying in your arms would be an anecdote to someone else.
I could have gone to sleep, and perhaps these thoughts would have dispersed by the morning. But I didn’t go to sleep, as Tim did. I went quietly out, avoiding Miles on the floor. I left the door on the latch. The air was only just losing its warmth now; it had that spiciness to it, an invitation. I knocked on the door and heard him come shuffling. He was wearing only underpants, semi-sentient.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ Raf slurred.
I felt nothing as coherent as avenging fury, or rightfulness; I felt as if I were following a set of instructions. I got onto the bed with him. ‘Wow,’ he said, indistinctly. ‘I knew the bitch thing was a front. I knew you wanted it as soon as we met that first time.’
‘And you . . .?’ I said.
‘I’m open to persuasion,’ he mumbled.
I got on top of him. He shut his eyes. I slung him onto his front. He whispered something through sleep. I was straddling him, and I turned him and held his head and shoved it into the pillow. He started to struggle, but weakly. I was stronger than him, even without the drugs. He was wriggling a little. I held him down harder. It was incredible how easy it was. I felt his body go limp, by degrees; he was making a high-pitched whine like a guinea pig. There was a spreading warmth below us as he lost control of his bladder. No retreat from here.
I held him down until it was done. Then I dragged him, like a crash-test dummy, off the bed, across the floor, into the bathroom. Pushed him into the hot tub. Left his chalet and walked back across the compound. My heart was beating fast, but it was like the buzz from strenuous exercise, nothing more. Less than half an hour after leaving it, I was back in Tim’s bed, in the exact same position. I could not sleep, but I was calm. Tim woke up and went to the bathroom and believed he’d disturbed me. I patted the bed: why didn’t he come in? I wanted to feel another person close at hand. He mumbled something and went back to the couch, and I lay there, and in the end I was asleep, too, like any other night.
I was aware that I had murdered a man. I was a murderer. It was just that the word, the idea, didn’t mean any more than if I remembered I was a woman, or an Irish-American.
That’s why it was easy to be composed during the investigation. I had no real fear of being found out. The easy ones to catch – the ones the TV detective pounces on – are the ones who walk around with guilt. You assume all killers are like that, to some extent. The truth will out. The trouble with that statement is that, by definition, you can never know how many truths did not come out.
Also, everyone else was panicking more than me, because they all had secrets that might now emerge: not secrets as big as mine, not in real terms, but just as big to the people hiding them. Jo was scrambling to conceal her drug habit; it might be mild by Dubai standards, but it was still enough to get her locked up if they decided to victimize her. Christian was juggling their financial secrets, more and more precariously. The Fixer, without a passport, wasn’t meant to be working there at all. Streng couldn’t read. Each one of these elements muddied things. On top of this, as the bloggers all pointed out, the authorities didn’t want to see it as a murder. A suicide, or an accidental death-by-excess, was much more convenient for the Dubai story, the story of a utopia where only your own folly could stop you having the time of your life. That was what it became. I knew there’d be another autopsy back in Britain. But I would be long gone by then.
Events worked in my favour. At the golf club, the camera fell so close that it looked like an attempt to silence me. I think Miles pushed it because he knew the WorldWise insurance would pay for a much better replacement camera, and it might be the only way he could get paid. All of us knew by that time that there was no money; except maybe Tim, who hadn’t been in the office, who was new to this shambles.
Tim was my alibi, and will be again in the unlikely event that the case ever resurfaces. Knowing already that he was a sleepwalker, I persuaded him that he’d gotten up several times on the night of the murder, and talked to me at around the time Raf was killed. In fact Tim only wandered in once, to use the bathroom, and he barely woke up: he perched on my bed and we exchanged a few words, that was it. I had killed Raf an hour before. The times didn’t match at all. But he was
drunk enough that he didn’t have a clear story in his head, so the story became what I wanted it to be: that some unknown villain had committed the murder, while we, oblivious, slept. It was a bonus that he came to think, in a couple of overwrought intervals, that he might even have been that villain himself. I don’t imagine he still thinks that, even though a complete solution has never come out.
Not even I have a complete solution. I will probably never know who was kissing outside the chalet, though I guess it was Jo and Raf. I’m not certain Miles did push that camera. I don’t know why Bradley acted right from the start as if he had something terrible to hide in his room, other than a natural evasiveness. Even the death: I can only tell you why I think I did it. Because my boy got taken, and so many other things happen, and we all go on as if they don’t matter, and Raf was especially proud of not caring about anyone, and we were in a place so good at fiction that even a death didn’t feel like a big fact.
If I had to say that to his mother? If I ever had to defend myself, explain why I brought sadness into someone else’s life as a reaction to my own? I wouldn’t be able to justify it. I haven’t written this to justify anything.
Last week, after some years with no contact at all, as expected – as planned by me in fact – I happened to get an email from Tim. He and his brother help to run an NGO now, he told me; he’s just been to Dubai for a conference. His first time back there. He just felt he ought to get in touch, somehow. Hoped I was all right. He gave me a lot of detail about the company, the conference, his fiancée, about everything. It made me think about all this for the first time; it made me want to write it all down.