by Liz Jensen
As Jan de Vries carries on moving his fleshy mouth and saying things in a vehement manner I am asking myself, as per Ashok’s angry instructions: what are your other lines of inquiry, the ones that don’t have something to do with ‘fucking little people’ who are menacing enough to make men resort to desperate measures after doing something against their will? Death by wood-pulping machine, death by oncoming vehicle after a failed attempt with aspirin, death by rat poison: I see no connection there. What about timber, finance and construction? Money links them all, but money is as vague and pervasive as oxygen. Taiwan, Sweden and Dubai: again they have nothing obvious in common except in my own mind, where they feature as recent additions to a list of places I will not rush to visit again.
Now we are up here, Jan de Vries is keen to show me the other Eastern Horizons sites. You can see four from here, he says. ‘I want you to see them in the context of the whole Dubai project.’
The land around the building site resembles a dusty, clogged tray of cat litter. I have read that many of the immigrant workers live in giant metal containers stacked like cages. I personally like confined spaces, but not everybody does. The air is far hotter than anything I have experienced beyond a sauna. Despite my sunglasses, my eyes hurt. I’m trying to block out de Vries, but his presence is insistent and I can’t concentrate on my little ozuru. His voice seems to be spiralling higher and higher in pitch until he’s almost screaming. Desalination and the future.
Fucking miracle, mun.
The world has so much to thank this company for. Proud to be here, proud to be part of Dubai’s future. Think of our grandchildren and their children, they’ll look at us like we look at the pharaohs, have you been to Egypt, mun, have you seen all that amazing shit over there? Magic.
Something is wrong. His voice is getting higher and higher. The pitch becomes unnaturally elevated. I’m too hot. I start to rock. I can’t think straight when people shout or screech at me in a high unnatural voice. I get overloaded. I am overloaded now. I rock harder and harder. There is something out of kilter. The noise de Vries is making does not sound normal. And now, suddenly, he is doing something as grotesque as it is incomprehensible.
He is licking his bare forearm.
He is still making the screeching noise, but it’s muffled by his lips meeting his own flesh. The gesture isn’t human: it reminds me of a dog gnawing at a bone and growling, or a parody of a kiss. But it is not a bone, or another mouth, it’s the hairy flesh of his own arm. It’s as if de Vries has a small motor inside, operated inexpertly by another person, or malfunctioning. I can’t be alone in getting the impression that something is awry with de Vries because just then one of the workers comes up with a hand raised, signalling at him to stop. The little figure is different from the other workers. No hard hat. And long hair that reaches beyond the shoulders. From this angle, which must be immensely distortive, it seems no bigger than a child.
I lift my sunglasses for a moment, but the glare of the sun scalds my eyes and I shove them back. I blink rapidly and look again.
It is a child. Dressed in rags.
Male, I thought at first—
But no.
Female.
A small girl. In filthy, torn clothing. Her dark round eyes stare at de Vries, unblinking.
When de Vries catches sight of the ragged child he stops licking his arm, he catches his breath and then spits out a word, or a repeated series of words, that sound Japanese – toko-loshi-toko-loshi-toko-loshi – and his face distorts like a chimpanzee under attack, with a terrible pleading grimace that reveals his teeth and gums.
‘You can’t come in!’ he screams. It’s not clear if he’s talking to her. Or if he is, what he means. ‘You are not coming in, you fucking creature!’
The child’s eyes narrow. Then, without moving her mouth, she starts to make a sound: a high insistent noise that has too much of an edge to be musical. A monotone humming.
Why would they allow a child up here? Is she the daughter of one of the workers?
Just then, still humming, she puts her fist next to her eye and opens it out in a sudden starburst, palm out.
This has a dramatic effect on de Vries: with a sharp, pained squeal he lurches his big body around so that his back is to me. A cry goes up from the group of workers on the other side of the building, then more urgent shouts.
Jan de Vries’ meaty hands grip the rail decisively.
He is still screaming as he lifts his entire body up – it looks effortless – and vaults over the protective railing.
He does it like men in old films leap over gates in the English countryside, in a single smooth and gymnastic movement.
And then he is gone.
Later, when I am being interrogated by Detective Mazoor, I will call his suicide leap ‘surprisingly elegant’.
His vanishing is clean and complete. I am too far from the edge to see him fall. Not that I would wish to.
I stand where I am, rocking.
There is more shouting among the men. Then one of them – I recognise the foreman – yells an order. They cluster together, arguing and gesticulating. Above their cries I can hear the hum of traffic thirty-one storeys below.
There are sections of my brain that are stupid. By which I mean slow and sometimes quite incapable of spotting the obvious. Belatedly, it strikes me that if de Vries jumped over the railing then – ergo – he must now be dead. Jan de Vries is dead, Jan de Vries is dead, Jan de Vries is dead.
I sink to a crouching position and hold my head. I’d like to crawl into a confined space, but there’s nowhere to go in this place of ferocious light and heat and soft cruel breezes. So I stay where I am and rock.
I don’t know how much time passes. I construct three ozuru in my head and send them fluttering up into the searing hot air. I rock. My mind is blank. I rock harder. After a while I become aware of the foreman shouting at me and pointing downward.
Jan de Vries is dead.
‘I didn’t push him,’ I say. ‘I didn’t push him. I didn’t push him.’ I say it again and again and again. I can’t seem to stop. I’m very overloaded.
‘I know,’ he says, approaching. ‘Calm down, sir. Take deep breaths.’ It’s a good suggestion. ‘I saw it happen. I saw him go over. You were nowhere near, sir. I called the site boss. He’s called the police.’ His phone rings. ‘Excuse me.’
While he talks I think about Tom and Jerry. Freddy and I are fans of this cartoon. When an animal hits the ground, in Tom and Jerry, its body is flattened by the impact. But in real life, this doesn’t happen. When an object drops vertically from the sky, the speed of its descent will be slowed to some extent by air resistance. I wonder if a height of thirty-one storeys is enough for a falling object to achieve terminal velocity. I imagine de Vries’ skull will be split open like a coconut, with the brains exposed and perhaps a quantity of blood pooling beneath. Blood would dry fast in this heat: a skin would form, like a membrane. Its colours would travel through the chart: Gala Day, Postbox, Shepherd’s Delight, Mombasa, Heritage Maroon. Will de Vries’ body break open likewise, or will it remain intact? Death at the moment of impact would be instantaneous. They use the carcasses of pigs to determine exactly what happens in violent accidents. Or sometimes real human bodies. So be aware that if you donate your corpse to science it may be dropped from a great height, to test what happens to it. It won’t matter as you’ll be dead. But some people object to the idea out of squeamishness.
Or on aesthetic grounds.
The foreman has finished his call.
‘What happened to the little girl?’ I ask. ‘I don’t see her.’
He takes a step back. ‘What?’
‘There was a child. Half your height or less. She scared Jan de Vries. He told her she couldn’t come in.’
He looks at me, but I can’t work out what his face means. ‘Sir. It’s just you and me and the workmen over there.’ He nods at them.
I start counting. They’re in a large cluster, and enga
ged in energetic argument. This involves much pointing downward at the street below, and at the rail de Vries sprang over. Others are kneeling on their haunches, their heads down, apparently praying. One stands alone, sobbing and wailing. When I arrived there were twenty-seven, including the foreman. Plus me and de Vries. That makes twenty-nine. The girl arrived and de Vries jumped so we should still total twenty-nine. But we are twenty-eight.
‘You see?’ says the foreman.
‘But I know what I saw.’ I count again. Still twenty-eight. ‘She was right in front of me. She made a noise. A kind of humming. And she gestured at de Vries. You must have seen her too.’ He licks his lips, but he doesn’t speak. He’s sweating heavily. ‘Good Muslims don’t lie. Now did you or did you not see her?’ I seem to be shouting.
I don’t usually shout. I also want to shake him.
I grab him: he blinks rapidly, then puts a hand on top of mine. It’s gentle.
‘Take a deep breath, sir. Easy. Calm down.’ He lowers his voice. ‘OK. I will level with you. There appeared to be a girl. But the heat often makes people see things.’ He nods his head in the direction of the construction workers. All are small compared to me, but none is child-sized. The crying man is being comforted by another. The child has gone and so has the perspective from which I saw her. Or did not see her.
I am confused. This is confusing.
I say, ‘She was here. She must have jumped.’
‘No. I just talked on the phone to the boss down there. Just one body. Mr de Vries’.’
He jerks a thumb towards the security rail. Far below, there will be people clustering around that big, beefy shape by now. The site boss he mentioned. The police. From here they’d all look like ants around a big crumb.
‘So where is she?’
His jaw fights before he speaks. ‘Sir. Like I said. We must have all made a mistake.’ He blurts it. ‘There was no child. Let us go down now, sir. The police will want you and me down there first. For statements. The men will wait here. They’ll get statements from them too. Come this way.’
The breeze wafts through the bars of the construction elevator. Its slow shaking progress down the side of the building soothes me. It is a limbo I could happily stay in.
‘If we didn’t see a child, then what did we see?’ I ask the foreman.
He looks at his shoes. They’re leather, and coated with a fine film of cement dust. ‘The men say it was an evil spirit. I don’t know.’
‘There’s no such thing as an evil spirit.’
‘I know, sir. But the men, they believe in them.’
‘You saw her too.’
‘I thought I did. But the light and the heat, they play tricks. Create false impressions. Very common here in Dubai. A lot of people imagine things that are not there.’ He shrugs. ‘Fifty degrees plus does that to you.’
‘But I never imagine things that aren’t there. Not even when I have a fever. What else did they think they saw?’
‘Some of them saw the child jump or fly.’
‘Jump or fly where? Over the edge?’ He is still looking at his dusty shoes. ‘Where? Where, where, where, answer me!’
He wipes sweat off his face. ‘Into him.’
Jonas Svensson said, I must’ve swallowed one.
‘That’s not possible.’
‘I know. And it can’t have happened. I am just reporting what they said. But there is no evidence.’ He is speaking very fast. ‘I will be very honest with you now, sir. I don’t like to tell lies. As you say, it’s against my faith. And it’s not in my nature either. But I will not mention this little girl in my statement to police. The others will do the same. Nobody wants to be called crazy and lose his job. It looks bad for us to say we have seen something we cannot prove. Understand this, sir? That’s where we stand. You will have to do what you like and follow your own conscience.’
‘Did you see her or not?’
‘I saw her. But I am sorry, sir. If you tell the police this, I will deny it. Please. Understand me here. My men think this skyscraper is haunted. This is going to be a big problem for me.’
‘Did you see Mr de Vries lick his arm?’
He nods. He looks very distressed. ‘Yes I did, sir.’
‘Why do you think he did that?’
‘I cannot understand. He was behaving in a very strange way sir. I do not know why a man would lick his own arm. An urge must have come upon him.’
‘Just before he jumped he said, You can’t come in, and then he said some foreign words. They sounded Japanese. Did you hear that?’
‘No. I didn’t hear anything. I was far away.’
He said toko and he said loshi. I am sure of it. ‘And what about Ahmed Farooq. Did he behave oddly, last time you saw him?’
He looks at his feet again. ‘Yes. He did. Very oddly, sir.’
‘How?’
‘He asked one of the workers for some water. The man gave him his own bottle and he crumbled something into it. He had it in a plastic bag in his pocket. Then he drank it down. I asked him what it was, and he said medicine.’
‘Did it look like medicine?’
He makes a face. Disgust, distaste, something like that. ‘No. I recognised it. The desalination plants produce it like that. In blocks. It was salt.’
At the police headquarters I call Ashok but he is in a meeting, so I leave a message with Belinda Yates explaining what has happened. She expresses shock and sympathy.
‘My God, poor you, Hesketh! Look, shall I get one of our psych people to call you?’
‘No.’
‘Stephanie Mulligan! She’s specialised in workplace suicides.’
‘There’s nothing she can help me with,’ I say. ‘Do you have Svensson’s autopsy report yet?’
‘It’s just come in.’
‘Good. Send it. And I’ll need you to get hold of Jan de Vries’ too.’ And I hang up.
Salt is born of the purest parents, wrote Pythagoras. The sun and the sea. It’s the only kind of rock we consume, the thing we cannot do without. Salt deprivation, as well as a salt excess, can cause medical conditions. ‘Sodic soil’ or ‘dry-land salinity’ is on the increase, due to salt in the water table being drawn to the surface by the sun’s heat. Shakespeare based King Lear on an Italian folk tale about a king with three daughters. One said she loved her father bright as sunshine, the second said she loved him wide as the sea, but when the third said she loved him as meat loves salt, he banished her. But she returned in disguise and gave the king a banquet in which the food contained not a single grain of salt. When he complained about the taste, she revealed herself. ‘Just as meat is tasteless without salt,’ she told him, ‘so is life without my father’s love.’ And they were tenderly reunited. Atmospheric change over the last fifty years has caused chemical imbalances in the world’s oceans, causing both increased acidity and ‘a large-scale, rapid rise in salinity, particularly in tropical regions’. Some marine species are reported to be adapting. Most are not. In India, a gift of salt brings good luck because it is solid when dry, but invisible when dissolved. Jesus called his disciples ‘the salt of the earth’.
The purest parents.
It has a melodious cadence to it.
I spend the afternoon with Detective Mazoor, who questions me gently, mercilessly, sympathetically, aggressively and in many other styles. Arab men are often very masculine-looking, with a great deal of hair on their wrists. I focus on his Rolex watch as he speaks, and observe the tiny second hand tick through the revolutions. His professional life must be lacking in excitement, because he wants me to confess to murder, which I presume would afford him kudos. If I had pushed de Vries then Mazoor could solve the case, and get the glory for it. And I would go to jail or even be executed. This would be a big ‘feather in his cap’.
One of the studies Professor Whybray generated – it linked into what he affectionately called ‘the Paranoia Index’ – mapped the stress levels of innocent detainees according to time held in custody and faith in
the justice system. Predictably, there were impressive variations according to culture. Thanks to this study, and news reports I have read, I know enough about the Dubai justice system to have cause for alarm. Yet I do not feel nervous under Mazoor’s interrogation. The mesmeric second hand of his watch has a role to play here. So do the facts. I did not push de Vries, and if Mazoor has not already heard corroboration of this from the other witnesses, he soon will. Because of the detective’s intense focus on my hypothetical guilt, it is very easy for me to omit any mention of the ragged girl who signalled to de Vries and scared him into vaulting into the blue sky. When the foreman told me that he and the workmen would not mention her in their statements, I did not doubt him. Those men would have families back home. Losing their jobs would have catastrophic repercussions.
But I saw the child. She was probably no higher than my waist, and she was dressed in rags. The sight of her made the workmen agitated and she scared de Vries so badly that he killed himself. That’s how it seemed. And I heard her too. She generated a high, tuneless humming that grated on my ears.
Her presence didn’t frighten me.
But the impossibility of it did. I have no strategy to deal with something that so adamantly defies categorisation, quantification and logic; something that so stubbornly refuses to fit into any of the diagrams I’ve been constructing in my head.
As Mazoor interrogates me, I rock in my seat as gently as I can, so that he doesn’t notice. I keep calm and I do not get overloaded. There is a plastic water bottle in front of me. I reach for it and unscrew the top.
‘You have children,’ he says suddenly, changing tack. This throws me.
‘A stepson.’
‘Hmm. A violent little boy.’
‘What?’
‘Like you maybe.’
‘No. I’m not violent. Nor’s Freddy. Freddy’s a great kid.’
‘Oh, but I think he is violent.’
‘What do you mean?’ He reaches across and shoves my shirt sleeve a little higher to reveal the bruise on my arm. I regret not wearing long sleeves. ‘That wasn’t Freddy.’