by Adam Foulds
He could feel his pulse in his temples. This was too much. Curling up on the sofa he felt like a child. Illness always brought back the sensations of childhood. What came back was that exclusion from the active world, sealed inside his discomfort and slow time. He remembered the sound of the clock, the short nap of the cushion which his face could push one way, smooth, or the other way, a short, upright resilience. TV was not allowed. Books he was allowed but he rarely wanted to read. The quiet of the house occasionally disturbed by a car passing on the road outside, that brief rush of noise, brisk, adult, indifferent, fading quickly into the distance. He heard something like it now, one of the passenger boats that went to Greenwich pushing downriver with a steady churn of engine noise, a long V of wake rasping across the water. This was too much. He switched on the TV. When he was ill and his childhood came back, Henry was preyed on by a thought or a set of images that he didn’t like: that all of adulthood was a thin covering, a cheap electroplating, and when it flaked away it revealed what was always underneath, himself as a child. This was precisely what he didn’t want to think. No great revelations came with this notion, no key to his personality, no pure effulgence of a spiritual infancy, just the ordinary smallness and miserableness and these meaningless sensations—the feel of a cushion against his face, the sound of a car on a road in the late 1980s, the faint cloudy buzz of noise dislodged from the piano when a heavy lorry went past, the taste of butter on chewy white toast and the brief, unwarranted feeling that something exciting had happened when the streetlamp came on at dusk.
He didn’t keep the TV on for long. There were actors out there, many actors who received rewards and adulation for facile tricks that people mistook for good acting. He switched the TV off and became Mike for a moment, tightening his jaw, deadening his eyes. There was a nice crunching feeling when he went into character that was better than anything. It was like his bones turned to cartilage and his shape changed. He put the TV back on again and switched to the classic movie channel. Some cowboys saying aw shucksy things in black and white. He turned the news on and got up to smoke a cigarette.
*
Repetitive days, simple and austere and so bare of incident that they seemed structureless, the hours gaseous and expanding. Still, at any time he could step onto his balcony and see a runner chugging past, or a cormorant by the canal, drying its laundry of wet green wings. In a half-sleep one afternoon, when his thoughts swelled and slurred into dreams, he saw a cormorant very clearly, hunting underwater through the olive gloom, its fixed eye and featherless throat and witchy feathers.
At dusk, the flats around him were reinhabited. He heard muffled noises of other lives, kitchen noises, human and television voices.
During the days he haunted the empty building. He felt like a hallucination, a collective delusion the people in the other flats were having, a daydream while they sat at their desks or in meetings. That was what he was, he realized in a spate of rapid thoughts, standing in the middle of the room with his head full of Mike’s lines, that was his task, to be the dream of other people.
*
A wind blew up the river from the North Sea and plastered Henry’s coat against his back. A taste of winter when it was barely autumn. And yesterday had been warm with a drowsy, viscous heat. The weather was disordered these days. A mechanism in the sky had broken and bits of different seasons arrived unpredictably, fragmentary, unstable, quickly changing. Possibly he felt the cold more because of his weight. As he walked to the gym people looked at him and there was sometimes the moment of recognition followed by something else, fear or concern.
Henry was too tired to pull the levers of the cross-trainer or haul the stacks of weights. Over time, the hunger had distilled a kind of blackness inside Henry, not a blankness but a positive blackness that throbbed with its own wattage. It stayed behind or at the edge of his vision. It was and was not the same thing as the headaches he suffered. He went to the pool in the basement. Small, dimly lit, it was more of a spa facility than a pool for swimming lengths. The atmosphere was of exclusive calm. The rectangle of water looked plump, like a comfortable mattress, and when Henry got in it lisped over the sides and was recycled back in through some hidden channels. While he was alone he lay face down, listening to the thick silence. The crest of his spine touched the air above. His arms and legs hung down into the water. He thought that García’s yes had fallen like a sword across his life. Cut off from everything else and still with no filming date confirmed, Henry had nowhere to go but into himself. He felt his body rock upwards when somebody else got into the pool. Embarrassed, Henry started swimming but only towards the small silver ladder. He climbed out and walked back to the changing room.
*
Henry had been interviewed many times. The danger was to relax, to take the friendliness and keen interest personally. He’d learned that long ago, having said more than he wanted to on several occasions, but he felt himself at risk of doing the same today. A phone interview with an American industry magazine after the full cast had been announced had been sent his way by the production company PR. The journalist was called Patricia. Her American accent, the quietness of her voice, the occasional breath on the mouthpiece or loose rush of laughter felt very intimate in Henry’s ear. She sounded very impressed by him. “That’s great,” she kept saying after his answers. “That’s just great.”
“Did you know who your co-stars were going to be before this announcement?”
“I didn’t actually.”
“You must be pretty excited. Sofie Hadermann is such a wonderful actress. Just stunning.”
“It’s great news. I’m a very lucky actor.”
“This is a real breakthrough for you, a very different kind of thing. As I guess it is for anyone going into a García film.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Are you nervous about it? Nervous about taking on something like this?”
“Oh, no, no. I mean, yes, I’m terrified but not more than I should be. An appropriate level of terror at this point, I think. I can just put my trust in Miguel, you know?”
“Sure, sure. That’s great.”
“Please don’t go with ‘Banks Terrified Of Challenge Ahead.’”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” She laughed, a soft blur of sound, her breath beating on the tiny microphone in the mouthpiece of a phone in Los Angeles. “That’s pretty good.”
“Do you ever do voiceover work, Patricia?”
“Say again?”
“Do you ever work as a voice artist? You have a nice voice. It’s easy money, I tell you.”
“Oh. Well, that’s another story. Me and acting. Didn’t end well. But you know the voice work is actually something my mother has been saying to me for years. It’s like a bee in her bonnet she has about it.”
“You should listen to your mother.”
“Oh, that’s cute. Can I ask a personal question?” She lowered her voice. Henry felt a stirring of desire. He had Googled her while they spoke and she was attractive, smart and serious in her by-line photo. In other photos she smiled in the Californian sun. He had her full attention.
“Sure, I suppose. I can always not answer.”
“It’s just like a biography question. How did you get started? Were you a child actor?”
“I’m disappointed. I was hoping for something more personal than that. I wasn’t a child actor but I did discover it then. My parents were both into amateur dramatics for a while. I think you call it community theatre. Like Waiting for Guffman–type stuff. So I was involved when I was a kid. I remember loving it immediately, the darkness, the smell of the wings, and then walking out into the light of the stage and straightaway feeling fully, you know, alive out there.”
“I do know. I know exactly what you mean.”
“I felt it in my spine. I felt I’d found my place in the world.”
“Yep.”
<
br /> “One very specific memory from the first time is that someone had spilt some sequins in the wings. This is a bit camp, I guess. I remember spotting them, finding as many as I could, little pieces of light shining in the darkness. It was magical. So that’s how it started. I’ve never actually told anybody that before. You’re the first.”
“That’s sweet. That’s more than I need, really.”
“Nothing else I can help you with?”
“No, that’s it. I’ve got everything I need now. Have a great day.”
“Okay. You, too.”
Henry was returned to the silence of the flat. He took his hand from his groin. He looked at his phone for any messages. An email from Carol. A filming schedule, finally? No. Qatar. He’d forgotten about Qatar.
*
As soon as he saw the desert, Henry knew that he was in the right place. It was like no landscape Henry had ever seen before. It was absolute. A place before civilization or after civilization. It was made of sky and nothing, sun and horizon. Henry had seen it as the plane came in to land and glimpsed it now in the car from the airport but very quickly they were facing the skyscrapers of Doha, clustered together in a shimmering group, intricate gold and silver and sheet glass. Like home but a thousand times stranger, like Docklands on acid. Faisal, the guy from the festival who had met him at the airport, explained that Qatar’s wealth came from gas. That was the stuff, the vast dinosaur riches, the planetary money that could make a sudden appearance anywhere. Faisal had held Henry’s name on a card and a smartphone in his free hand. Narrow-hipped, in black trousers and a white shirt, he smiled eagerly and juggled his objects to shake Henry’s hand. His shoes, Henry noticed, were made of some reptile’s skin that divided into the rounded squares where scales had been. Faisal smelt fragrantly of aftershave. Seated beside him in the back of the car, he answered Henry’s questions. Many of the world’s great architects had been brought here to design skyscrapers, attracted by the total creative freedom that had been offered them. The same with the stadiums for the World Cup. Your Lord Norman Foster, for example.
“Is this what Dubai looks like, too?”
“No. It’s, well, similar. You haven’t been to the Gulf before?”
“Nope.”
“Dubai has a different feel. In Qatar they invest in culture a lot, in museums and an orchestra. That sort of thing. And the film festival, the reason you’re here.”
“I’m culture.”
“You are culture.”
“And you’re not Qatari yourself?”
“Me? No, I’m Egyptian. You won’t meet many Qataris, or maybe some with the festival. But they tend to mix with other Qataris. You see that?”
Henry leaned over and looked up at a huge billboard with a sweep of dunes on it and a handsome, moustachioed man wearing the traditional white headcloth thing. Under him, in a flowing font that alluded to Arabic script, ran the title The Singing Dunes. Inset on the desert horizon was a silhouette of presumably the same man on horseback.
“This is for your festival.”
This was unreal, too real, this emphatic sense of a new place and confirmation of a culture that Henry knew about but did not know. It was always amazing, this failure of the imagination to grasp that things seen on TV and in the papers were actual places a journey away, connected horizontally to where you stand. You had to go there to see. Henry, light-headed from the hours of travel, felt like he was dreaming. After all that time alone, he was avid for these new sensations. He was enthralled when the car swept off the motorway onto a curving drive and into the forecourt of a hotel where uniformed men rushed forward to open the car door and collect his suitcase. Again, for a brief moment, the unmediated air, its heat and stillness. Henry had felt it walking down the staircase from the plane and then again in the moments before he got into the car with Faisal. Again he stepped into a chill downrush of processed air as Faisal led him into the international decor of a five-star hotel lobby and deposited him at reception with his festival information pack. “You don’t have to worry about anything,” he said while Henry looked around. “I will call you or somebody else from the festival will call you to collect you when you’re needed.” The place was vast, the central space as high as a shopping mall. Chandeliers hung down over groups of sofas and tables. It took Henry a moment to process how large they were, what a tonnage of crystal was in the air. At one of the tables sat a presumably Qatari couple, the man in a pristine white shirt that hung down to his shining shoes. The checkered cloth on his head was rolled into crested shapes. The woman wore a black dress as dark as her husband’s clothes were light. Her face, framed by her headscarf, was perfectly made up. On top of her headscarf rested a pair of Chanel sunglasses. “And all your schedule is in here. All the numbers in case you need anything.”
Henry unlocked his door with a swipe of his key and chuckled when he went inside. The room was huge, too. Nice to be in a line of work where you were suddenly picked up by these updrafts of travel and luxury. The bathroom shone with stainless steel and marble. A large shower, big enough for two, provoked the obvious thought of sex. What else were travel and luxury for? He stripped off and used it alone. The pressure was so high it felt like it was sanding the dirt from his body. The shower gel was strongly perfumed, a similar smell to Faisal’s aftershave. He had a realization—all the perfumes of Arabia. They must actually be into perfume here. Droplets scattered against the glass glittered in the bathroom’s subtle lighting. The water scrubbed at Henry’s scalp. He moaned. He dried himself and put on the robe. The television was already on, tuned to an English-language business news channel. A crawl strip of acronyms and numbers moved beneath an African-American man and a beautiful Asian woman speaking with loud informative friendliness. Outside the air had thickened with dusk. A gritty pink dimness now hung between this building and the others and the traffic circulating below with headlights on. Henry climbed onto his bed with the book he’d been reading on the plane, a memoir by a recent American soldier. He didn’t open it, though. He lay back with his head propped on the crisp pillows, the TV remote in his right hand, the book resting on his chest. He had that Arabia perfume now. The pillows were very deep. He felt the hours, the distance draining out of his body.
*
Breakfast was banks and islands of food in a large buffet that needed to be walked around and surveyed before a choice could be made. Some of the food was sculpted. Fruits were sliced and fanned out. Cold meats were folded. Various shapes of bread and pastry, colours of fruit juices and salads, silver barrels of porridge and congee and dhal. There were chefs at a special station for preparing eggs. It would be reasonable just to eat, Henry thought, given that filming still hadn’t been announced and he was there for only a couple of days. How much damage could he do? A healthy breakfast could easily be worked off later in the hotel gym. He ladled red berries over yoghurt. He took butter in small fluted curls and a pot of honey to spread over bread rolls. Pastries he still wouldn’t allow himself. He took a mango juice and wandered back among the tables.
Henry recognized the back of Philip Townsend’s head, the combed sandy schoolboyish hair above the long neck. Philip had played the disgraced politician in A Paper Fortune, the film that had long ago written a clause into a contract that demanded Henry’s presence at this festival. Tall, weary, ironic, continuously employed playing character roles now that he’d hit his casting in later middle age, Philip was amusing company. “May I?” Henry asked him.
“By all means, old thing.”
“And that, my friend, is ridiculous.” Henry nodded towards Philip’s plate.
“That’s a very aggressive start to a conversation.”
“Out of all the choices over there, to come away with that.”
Philip had in front of him a single as yet unbroached boiled egg in an eggcup.
“I don’t have to justify my lifestyle to you. And, really, look at your f
ace. You don’t appear to have been gorging yourself.”
“Quite the reverse. It’s for a role.”
“As what? A pencil? A corpse?”
“It’s the new Miguel García movie. I’m sort of the lead.”
“Don’t ‘sort of’ me. Well, then.” Philip weathered this bit of good news with the stoicism of someone who’d been in the business a long time. “That’s exciting for you. A biopic about Keira Knightley’s body double. It’s unusual but then he is the experimental sort.” Philip rapped on the top of his egg with his spoon.
“Speaking of which, is Laura here yet?”
“Speaking of what?”
“Attractive women.”
“Speaking of which I did a job with your ex Hayley the other day.”
“Or let’s not speak about it.”
“Sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“It’s fine.”
Philip absorbed a teaspoon of boiled egg. All his movements were cultured and soft. Henry always felt so macho, so hefty and heavy-handed in his company, and was almost persuaded that he was going about things all wrong. Philip made languid seem the only sensible way to be. In his stillness, his camp, dry Englishness, he gave the impression that the world was performing to amuse specifically him and wasn’t doing it terribly well.
“She is here,” he said after a moment. “Tweeting away, I expect, or writing some op-ed piece for the Guardian.”
“I have to say I find feminism very attractive in a woman.”
“I think you mean you find Laura Harris very attractive. I may be wrong. Perhaps your hard drive is full of photographs of Andrea Dworkin.”
“I don’t know who that is but I do have a lot of photos in there so maybe.”
“Think a beefier Miriam Margolyes. Important thinker. Your ignorance is shameful.”
“But I’m serious. I do like it. It takes guts. Confidence. And what she says is completely reasonable. Equal pay. Equal representation. And the misogyny she gets on social media. It’s filthy stuff.”