The Place That Didn't Exist Read online

  MARK WATSON

  THE

  PLACE

  THAT

  DIDN’T

  EXIST

  PICADOR

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1: WE ARE GOING TO CHANGE LIVES

  2: CREDIT

  3: SERVICE

  4: THE FUTURE IS TODAY

  5: OLD TOWN

  6: NOBODY

  PART TWO

  7: CLOSE-UP

  8: THE WORLD

  9: BLOCKS

  10: NOCTURNE

  11: THE GAME

  PART THREE

  12: A STORY

  13: NOW

  PROLOGUE

  ‘You know the riddle of the dollar?’ the Fixer asked, looking around the table.

  He laced his long fingers into a pyramid. ‘So. Three guests check in to a hotel, like we just checked in here. The guy behind the desk says it’s $30, so they each pay ten. Later the clerk realizes he overcharged them: it should have been $25. So he gives the bellboy five bucks to return to the guests. Obviously he can’t divide it equally. He keeps $2 for himself. Gives one dollar back to everyone. So they have all paid nine dollars now, yes?’

  Everyone agreed that this was true.

  ‘And the bellboy has two. So they’ve paid nine times three, twenty-seven. He has two. But we started with thirty. So where is the missing dollar?’

  The group’s attempts to wrestle with the problem began energetically. Someone remembered having heard the riddle before, but her patchy recollection of the solution meant that she ended up confusing everyone even further. Someone grumbled that he hated number puzzles, and it was bad enough that there were Sudokus wherever you looked. The director began to sketch out a solution on a napkin. One person told a story about his struggles with Maths at school; he’d panicked so much during an exam that all he could write was the number 33, over and over again. This led to a general exchange of schooldays mishaps, and before long focus had slipped from the dollar question altogether.

  This was understandable; it had been a long day of travelling, and Dubai, they could tell already, was a place of distractions. The air had a delicious hot-country smell which had surrounded them as soon as they’d got out of the airport a couple of hours ago: a juicy, spiced aroma which evoked holidays or adventures, even though they were there to work. A baby grand piano had been wheeled out onto the terrace in front of them, and an amplifier set up; a fifty-something woman in a red dress and a weaselly keyboard player had appeared. The woman said that it was time to grab a drink or three – she paused for the witticism to sink in – and get ready to enjoy some classics.

  Besides, they were all hungry, keen to eat before the welcome speech began, and the buffet was bewilderingly extensive. It spread over an archipelago of outdoor tables, and the aromas of different cuisines met and mingled in mouthwatering fashion. It was about twenty minutes before every member of the team had navigated this kingdom of food and loaded up a tray, and by that time the dollar riddle lay on the roadside of the conversation, with no chance of making a comeback.

  If the dollar riddle ever came to mind after that, it was as a comforting footnote, something to dwell on for a little while as an escape from the confusion we found ourselves in. Those of us who were left, that is.

  PART ONE

  1: WE ARE GOING TO CHANGE LIVES

  They had left Heathrow on a morning so gloomy it could have passed for dusk, and now ten hours later it was the opposite: a blue-purple night which felt like day. On the drive through Dubai, lights were everywhere, tracing the improbable outlines of the buildings Tim had seen on the internet, but was nonetheless startled by. One tower resembled a tulip, its head a wreath of steel petals; others had arrowed tops like open blades about to slash at the sky, or seemed to change shape altogether halfway up. The skyline was green, purple; colours no one expected. And now, here in the Village resort, there were festoon lights coiled around trees, as if the place existed in a permanent state of festivity. Lanterns marked out the paths.

  As he looked over the heads of those opposite, over the terrace, Tim could see in the distance the Burj Al Arab, Dubai’s most famous landmark, spaceship-like in appearance and picked out by pin-sharp lines of bulbs which alternated red and blue. He’d kept an image of the building on his computer desktop for weeks, as he looked forward to the trip; it was hard to make his brain understand that this was the real thing. Nothing, in fact, felt completely real. Tim found it astonishing to think that tomorrow he would wake up in a lilypad of a bed, in a sun-warmed chalet nestling among pools and swim-up bars, while his colleagues at home would be struggling onto buses and walking head down through spitting autumn rain. He looked around the table at his new teammates and could hardly stop a grin from stealing onto his face.

  Christian Roper cleared his throat to begin his welcome address. Somehow, though it was almost inaudible, it had the same effect as somebody tapping on a glass, and the table went quiet. ‘So,’ he said, ‘just a little bit in the way of formalities. Firstly, welcome. Welcome one and all. Jo and I – and everyone at WorldWise – are excited you’re here. We have the chance to launch a great campaign here. In fact, not even a great one: a superb one. A superb one.’

  Roper had a politician’s staccato delivery, and the same way of making forced eye contact, but the effect – Tim thought – was much warmer than politicians generally achieved. He still had the gift for connecting with listeners that had made him a TV personality in the nineties, before the switch into activism and philanthropy that prompted Tim’s parents to complain that he had ‘gone a bit serious these days’ whenever he appeared on the news. He was not as tall as Tim had imagined, but he was the sort of person to grow in stature with an audience.

  ‘As you all know, tomorrow we have a big star arriving: the amazing Jason Streng. We have a very strong concept.’ Roper gestured at Tim, whose concept it was, and Tim allowed himself a quiet shiver of satisfaction. ‘And the stakes could not be higher. The world has never needed this charity more. There are children dying; people starving. We are going to change lives, ladies and gentlemen.’

  He paused for exactly the right length of time, so that the statement sounded weighty but not too bombastic. ‘So I was thinking that we could all introduce ourselves. Your name, your role on the project, and maybe just one interesting fact about yourself. Shall we go round? I’ll start: I’m Christian Roper, founder and CEO of WorldWise.’

  ‘Co-founder,’ Jo murmured, but Christian went on. ‘And my fact: I’m planning to run a marathon next year but a part of me fears I’m too old. Just too old. Don’t all rush to correct me at once!’ He laughed, and the people around the table made efforts of varying merit to laugh with him.

  ‘Jo. Communications director for WorldWise,’ said Christian’s wife, whom Tim also recognized from the website. Like Christian, she was as impressive in person as in the online images of the Ropers presiding over charitable ventures in the developing world: she had very dark eyes, which Tim felt were squarely on his face, and the sort of cheekbones associated with models. ‘Long-suffering wife. And my fact is that I’ve met two American presidents. That’s if Obama wins. Which he will.’

  Tim was beginning to feel alarmed by the request for ‘one interesting fact’. He had been in this position once before, when he’d rashly signed up for Drama Society at university. One girl had used the opportunity to discuss her history of anxiety and self-harm, another had spent her minute expressing support for the first girl, and by the time it got round to Tim, his claim to have captained the school’s chess team rang rather hollow.

  What were you meant to say in these situations, if your life had been without major i
ncident so far? Tim began to envy people who’d been born with an extra toe or revived from a coma. Silently he auditioned possible revelations. I have a brother who worked in the City and – well, we don’t see him much any more. My father curates a model village. I used to do orienteering; represented the county at under-16 level. None of it seemed substantial enough. At least, to his relief, they were going the opposite way around the circle, so he could listen to the other disclosures first.

  The head cameraman was next to speak. He was a burly, amiable-looking man with hair fashioned into a rockabilly quiff. He’d shown up at the airport already in khaki shorts, despite the cold, and wore a T-shirt referencing a sci-fi show Tim had half heard of.

  ‘Miles Aldridge: director of photography. My fact is, I can recite The Empire Strikes Back word for word. And I do mean word for word.’

  ‘Ruth Lingard: AP. Which of course stands for, erm, stands for assistant producer.’ This was a woman of about forty who had sat next to Tim in the airport car. He had noted, there, her habit of interrupting herself in the middle of sentences, and her mass of red hair. ‘I once caught a burglar busting into my nana’s place and got on top of him and pinned him down till the cops came.’

  ‘My real name is Ali,’ declared the Fixer. ‘My job is less clearly defined than any of yours; to be brief, I do whatever is necessary for the project. I have ridden a zebra. Which is said to be impossible. I have also eaten zebra. Not the same one.’ The Fixer grinned and adjusted his Panama hat. Since collecting them from the airport he had done a lot of grinning, as if this whole ad campaign were a practical joke whose pay-off he expected to see any time soon.

  ‘Raf Kavanagh: producer. I slept with a very famous actress before she got famous. I won’t name names. Except to say her name’s Kate and the surname rhymes with Dinslet.’

  There was laughter at this. Raf had spent the flight in first class, rather than business like the rest of them, having argued his way up at check-in by wielding a nexus of frequent flyer points. He had gel-sculpted hair and a shirt of obvious expensiveness. On the approach to the hotel, along the car-choked Sheikh Zayed Road, his mobile had gone off, the ringtone a song which had only been released that week. ‘I’m in Dubai,’ he’d shouted, while the other passengers made a faux-pretence of not noticing, or minding. ‘I know: fucking Dubai!’

  Tim felt increasingly uncomfortable as the baton passed to the small man on his right, Bradley. He had sat next to Tim on the flight, drinking can after can of Coke Zero and reading a book on silent movies, never once removing the baseball cap which covered his bald head. Tim did not like to break a silence, and the same was clearly true of Bradley, so for the entire seven hours the two men did not exchange a word: an arrangement they’d both been happy with.

  ‘Bradley Ford Richards: director. I’ve worked in commercial production for more than fifteen years. In that time I’ve worked for Budweiser, CNN, Sony. I—’

  ‘We just need a fact, not a CV,’ said Raf Kavanagh, breaking in.

  ‘Excuse me?’ The American blinked, surprised.

  ‘A résumé,’ Ruth explained. ‘He means we don’t need a résumé.’

  ‘Oh.’ Bradley ran his tongue slowly over his lips. ‘OK.’

  He did not offer another fact, and there was a brief, edgy silence, which suited Tim well: it meant that everyone was relieved when he took his turn. ‘I’m Tim Callaghan,’ he said, very aware of his own voice; by misfortune the musical backdrop had fallen away, as the middle-aged singer had announced a break after a laboured ‘Girl From Ipanema’.

  ‘I work for Vortex – for the ad agency. Anyway. My fact is that I sleepwalk, and also get quite heavy nosebleeds. Not connected.’

  This made little obvious impact, even with the almost-quirky final line, and he wondered whether he should have gone for the orienteering. Still, it was done, and Tim reached for the bottle of wine in front of him. He sloshed out a glassful as the momentary pressure of the situation fluttered away from his shoulders. For a second, his foot brushed against Jo’s under the table. He looked up into the sky, which was extravagantly dotted with stars, and heard or imagined the gentle swish of the sea on the private beach just below their terrace. I am incredibly lucky, he thought for the second time in half an hour.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t luck. Stan, Tim’s boss, had always said that their job was about telling stories, and that if you were good enough at it, they became reality. This seemed pompous or just plain silly to the many people who looked down on the advertising industry: Tim’s brother Rod had described it as ‘money for nothing’ even though he himself, as a City trader, had once earned £50,000 with three clicks of the mouse button. Still, however merited it might look to an outsider, Tim had a right to the pride, or at least the sense of accomplishment, which he felt building slowly inside him. His vision had helped to assemble the experienced team that sat around this table. He’d told a story in which he was flown to Dubai to oversee a glamorous project, and now here he was in the middle of it. It was as much as he could do to avoid beaming again, like a simpleton, at his new workmates.

  When Tim remembered these moments, months and years later, it would be as one might look back on a family gathering just before a life-changing drama: with wonderment at how little he and everyone knew at the time, and perhaps a yearning for that ignorance.

  2: CREDIT

  It had all begun the previous year, in 2007, when Tim’s boss Stan told him that Visit Dubai were coming in for a meeting. They had a startling budget and a simple brief: appropriately, it was to make people visit Dubai. Really, every brief ought to be that simple, but clients were sometimes squeamish about the idea that they were hiring an ad agency to make them money. They talked instead of ‘building the brand’, of ‘narratives’ and ‘deliverables’. By filling meetings with this sort of jargon they successfully shielded everyone from the embarrassment of saying what the meeting was actually about.

  The Dubai delegation had no such inhibitions. They sent graphs to show how many people currently holidayed in Dubai (already a surprising number) and what they would like the figure to be in five years (considerably higher). Their key message – what Stan called the ‘take-home’ – was that Dubai was easy to get to, suitable for families, and above all hot: hotter than the Canaries or even Barbados, hot with a clinical reliability, insuring tourists against what they most feared: disappointment. There was a note that ‘approaches with humour’ would be preferred. Vortex, Tim’s agency, was given a week to think about this and then invited to pitch ideas over lunch at the Ivy Club.

  Although his title was still Junior Creative, Tim was getting more and more of these briefs to work on, having recently masterminded a campaign for Yorkshire Tourism. The ad was thirty seconds long: it featured a bored-out-of-their-minds couple sitting wordlessly in a modern, very white lounge. One received a text, answered it; the other did the same. The silence continued. The camera cut to a magnificent Dales vista and the caption GO OUTSIDE INSTEAD. The client loved it, Tim was nominated at the Tourism and Travel Viral Campaign Awards, and nobody ever found out that the shot they’d used was actually of the Peak District.

  With this credit behind him, Tim was given the Dubai brief to work on. He’d heard about the place, of course. Household names, looked up after ‘where are they now?’ debates, often proved to have retired there; it was favoured as a holiday destination by super-rich, semi-mythical figures like the Beckhams; pictures of its skyline, the seven-star Burj Al Arab, were used in broadsheet supplements to support stories about the shifting world economy. Still, it was only in the course of his research for this job that Tim learned just how rich the city was – and not just rich but self-consciously and competitively so. Alongside the predictable sun-and-beach shots brought up by Google Images, the skyscraper-dwarfing towers, the living spaces full of crystalline polygons and peopled by happy humans of differing ethnicities, there was a lot of what he recognized as PR-speak. ‘Dubai’s rise and rise is one of the great modern
success stories,’ one website remarked. ‘In Dubai, desire and reality are the same thing,’ claimed another. There was a lot of talk of ‘iconic’ buildings, and at least four developments were described as ‘once-in-a-generation’. Fortunately for Tim, this building of a mythology was not his business for now. He just had to get across that it was sunny.

  He searched ‘sunshine holidays’ on the internet and happened upon a travel anecdotes site where someone described squirting suntan lotion onto their food on a self-catering trip, believing it was salad cream. The lady confessed that she’d tried eating a bit of it because she was ‘too hot to bother cooking anything else’. This gave him the idea for a Dubai strapline: IT’S TOO HOT TO WORRY! The ads Tim proposed would show holidaymakers so pleasurably addled by the climate that they grabbed an ice-cream by the wrong end, wore shorts back to front, tried to drive their car in the sea like a pedalo. After submitting this idea, Vortex were put on the shortlist, and summoned to a meeting with a bright-eyed Arab man in a spotless Armani suit.

  ‘I like the idea very much,’ said the client, as soon as the discussion began. Tim’s heart sank.

  ‘There is just one reservation,’ the man went on, as Tim had known he would. ‘Too hot to worry. I wonder if people are seeing that and thinking: it will be too hot.’

  Tim knew the trick in these situations was to agree with the client’s idiotic point of view while continuing to argue with it. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said, ‘but we’re not saying it’s “too hot” per se. We’re just . . . just using a bit of humour.’

  He was sent away to rework the idea and came up with WHEN IT’S THIS HOT, YOU CAN LOSE TRACK! The feedback was that ‘losing track’ might be a worrying idea, suggesting misplaced passports and forgotten flight details. He changed tack and went for THESE THINGS HAPPEN IN THE SUN. The client emailed that he was ‘still concerned about this emphasis on sun’, even though the original brief had mentioned little else. Tim suggested a couple of blander, non-meteorological lines. Vortex heard nothing for a while, then an email arrived regretting that Visit Dubai had ‘chosen another partner for this journey’. He eventually saw the winning design splashed across the wall of an underground station; the slogan they’d picked was FLY TO DUBAI.