The Place That Didn't Exist Read online

  ‘Still,’ said Tim’s boss, Stan, who tended to be optimistic about everything other than the impact of his young children on his marriage, ‘we’ve put credit in the bank with those guys.’

  There was always a lot of talk in their office about ‘credit’ – a word that could get you anything, from mobile call-time to a house, and more nebulous commodities like self-esteem. Sometimes it felt to Tim as if words like ‘credit’ and ‘market’ were nothing more than that, words: concrete nouns that had been beaten up into abstracts. But sometimes they became solid again. In April 2008, an email arrived saying that Tim’s name had been favourably mentioned – by whom it did not specify – and the Dubai-based charity WorldWise was inviting him to pitch for a TV ad soliciting online donations. ‘The inequalities of our planet are unbelievable,’ said the email. ‘Can it really be that by 2016, 1 per cent of the world’s population will own 99 per cent of its wealth? With a budget for a major star, and a wide range of distribution options, we are looking for an idea that uses humour to bring this extremely serious statistic to light.’

  ‘Good luck making that funny,’ remarked Tim’s flatmate Pete, absently reading the printout that Tim had left on their kitchen table. Pete had come back drunk from the pub, as he did almost every night; he had entered the teaching profession hoping to make a positive difference to the world, but instead the job had made a negative difference to him.

  ‘I’d like to get this,’ said Tim, staring for the tenth time at the promotional image at the foot of the email: Christian Roper with a shovel slung over his shoulder, a lean and brown Jo next to him, the pair seemingly inspecting a newly built well. At the bottom of the image were remarkable statistics about the total money raised by WorldWise, the number of people they’d supplied with housing or essential medicines, and so on. ‘It looks like it’ll be huge. Also,’ he added, ‘I mean, the poverty stuff. Ninety-nine per cent of the . . . it’s pretty astonishing, that.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Pete agreed. ‘I spilled some mayo on it, by the way.’

  Inspiration often struck Tim by stealth when he was bathing or getting his clothes ready for the following morning, but it was noticeably absent over the next couple of days. The more Tim tried to wrestle ideas into being, the more they squirmed away; but when he used reverse psychology and tried not to have an idea, his brain called his bluff by not having one.

  On his way to the Shoreditch office two days after the initial email, Tim walked past a man huddled in a doorway, a cardboard sign in front of him: I AM VERY HUNGRY! Commuters in their various forms went by: financiers in tailored suits, prematurely bearded young men on their way to serve shifts as baristas. There was no animosity in the way they glanced at the man, or in the way they disregarded his pleas for change; rather, it was as if he wasn’t there at all. Tim, as he handed over a pound, wondered whether the man did this every morning and it was only now, because of this charity campaign playing on his mind, that Tim had noticed him. He took the lift up to the open-plan office on the sixth floor, where an East End artist had arranged – with deliberate unevenness – the words VORTEX (NOUN): A PLACE WHERE NORMAL LAWS DO NOT APPLY in red fibreglass under the Vortex logo, and where espresso machines and football tables bore witness to the fact that Stan had been on a course about ‘Making Your Workplace Unique’. As Tim sat down at his Mac, Stan asked how the WorldWise pitch was going.

  ‘I’m nearly there,’ said Tim, waiting for Stan to move away before he opened the Word file in which he’d so far only written four words.

  That night he tried to explain to Pete why seeing the homeless man had struck him as significant. ‘It’s the sort of thing you see and just forget, or don’t even register, but there’s something awful about it. A guy who once had parents, and . . . and plans for the future, all that. And now his only plan is to sit there with a sign saying that he’s hungry. While people just ignore him. I mean, I gave him a quid, but I’m not going to do that every day.’

  ‘He’d only spend it on booze,’ Pete consoled him.

  ‘So would you.’

  Pete accepted this with two raised palms. ‘More to the point, when did you – as an advertiser – start getting a . . . what’s it called . . .?’

  ‘A social conscience?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tim reached for the bottle of wine, which was worryingly light after its evening with Pete. ‘Maybe it’s an early mid-life crisis.’

  That night he struggled to sleep. The image of the man in the doorway troubled him; in some way he stood for the vast ranks of unknown human suffering that WorldWise mentioned in their brief, and reminded Tim how little he engaged with that suffering. Of course, you could not help everyone, and that was why the majority of people walked heedlessly past the I AM VERY HUNGRY! man. Nobody’s windscreen left space for more than a sliver of scenery not related to their own existence; a laptop malfunction in one’s own life seemed as weighty as a bereavement in someone else’s. In many ways this was a matter of self-defence against the overwhelming range and intractability of problems. There was horror everywhere in the wider world, most of it beyond the ordinary person’s capacity to affect. There were countless political prisoners, refugees, people starving; and if it was impossible to change everything, which it was, it soon became the rational decision to change nothing.

  That doesn’t mean you don’t have a ‘social conscience’, Tim told himself. It just makes you normal. An ordinary person can’t possibly process the fact that the world is so full of misery. It’s – what had they said in the WorldWise brief? – unbelievable.

  He groped for his glasses on the bedside table, snapped on the light and reached for the printout. The inequalities of our planet are unbelievable. ‘There you go!’ he said out loud, hearing Pete’s groan from the other side of the wall: Pete was used to these occasional declamations when ideas struck.

  By the time he exited the station the next morning, in slanting rain, Tim had the concept. Believe the unbelievable. The star of the ad would walk down the street naked, or take flight and swoop over it. Bystanders would be seen gawping, and then adjusting to the situation: buying the star a pint as he landed, offering a coat to preserve his modesty. When we see the unbelievable with our own eyes – the ad would suggest – we are forced to accept it. Yet every day we see the inequalities of the world we live in. Why can’t we acknowledge those?

  Tim wrote three pages on this idea and gave them to Stan to send in. Where the tourism project had been pointlessly drawn out, this was unusually straightforward. Within a couple of days, Tim was given a Skype appointment with Christian Roper himself.

  When he appeared in his box on the screen, Roper was wearing a blue designer shirt. Sunlight streamed over his face, at times obscuring his features altogether. He sat in a glossy white kitchen with a row of pots and pans above his head: a style decision perhaps inspired by the Wiltshire farmhouse where Roper had grown up, but more likely inspired by other wealthy people with displays of rustic-looking kitchenware in their own homes.

  Christian Roper said that he loved the idea of the ad; he just needed to get the go-ahead from his funders.

  ‘But the main funder,’ said Roper with a wolfish smile, ‘is myself.’

  ‘Then I hope the conversation with yourself goes well,’ said Tim. Christian Roper threw his head back and laughed; Tim felt the rare exhilaration of a landed joke.

  He was used to dampening his expectations. If there was a rule by which you could survive in this job, it was that you should disregard everything anyone said, and the more encouraging or enthusiastic they were, the less you should trust them. All the same, Tim had a success-ticker which clicked into gear at times like this. It tick-tacked through the next few days, distracting him in the office, causing his ruffled mind to take him sleepwalking one night; he woke in the process of putting bread into the toaster. He said nothing further about it to Pete (who had problems of his own, to do with a pupil who’d brought a samurai sword into school) or
to his mum (because she worried about the sustainability of his career, and sometimes sent leaflets for law conversion courses in the post). This was advertising. Most things, as Stan liked to say, never happened.

  Almost a week after the Skype interview, Tim’s phone lit up during Sunday lunch with Pete and some other friends in a three-centuries-old pub in Clapham. The pub had been modernized in recent times with a brasserie menu and a big projector screen for sports events, but it was now undergoing a refurbishment to make it seem old again. The call was from Stan, who would never normally ring on a Sunday; Tim’s heart accelerated. He took the phone out to the toilets, where the re-exposed brickwork was covered in sepia pictures of industrialists who’d once lived in the area.

  ‘We got Dubai,’ said Stan.

  Tim punched the air and gave a brief yell, like a tennis player. A woman came out of the toilets and he tried to make it look as if the yell had been a sneeze.

  ‘Now, thing is,’ Stan added, ‘normally I’d go over. But you know how much I’m in the doghouse if I’m not back for bedtime. Louise nearly shot me for going to Chingford the other day; I don’t think I’m going to get away with the Middle East.’ Tim experienced a clutch of anxious excitement as he realized what was coming next. ‘Do you fancy it, mate?’

  Tim took a moment, after the call, to digest what he had just learned: not only that he’d earned Vortex a gigantic account, but that he himself was being offered a week-long trip to a destination he’d never imagined visiting before, and which all his research had suggested was sensational. It was one of his secret embarrassments that he hadn’t travelled anywhere near as much as most people he spoke to at parties, who traded stories of Cancún and Cambodia. His own globetrotting experience was limited to a summer in Australia with his older brother, a parade of cheap hotels and hung-over coach trips which seemed cruelly distant now he hardly ever heard from Rod; and, more recently, a romantic sojourn in New York which had ended the romance. His girlfriend Naomi had undergone a series of epiphanies in the Big Apple, the most crucial one being that she was going to stay there, specifically with a barman called Moses whom they’d met on the second night. That had been two years ago, and since then Tim had not ventured far, either in love or in geographical terms. But now, out of nowhere, there was this.

  The others were emphatic – or jealous – in their congratulations when he returned to the table. ‘You absolute bastard,’ said Pete’s friend Duncan. ‘Du-fucking-bai!’

  ‘It should be nice,’ Tim conceded.

  ‘Should be?’ Duncan shook his head. ‘Dubai is the business. Hot every day, place is clean as fuck, all the expats are getting plastered every night, they have an underwater restaurant, seven-star hotel, you name it, mate. You can literally do anything there.’

  And as Tim reviewed his first evening here, after they had retired from the terrace, this was already starting to seem true. Placing tomorrow’s clothes ready in a pile – a ritual that dated from his early schooldays, when he’d dreaded the moment of leaving the duvet’s warmth – Tim looked around his accommodation. Above the bed, which would have felt roomy for two people, hung a neon-drenched skyline print of the city, and monochrome pictures of a bygone Dubai: a wizened falconer, a group of men hauling a dhow into the water. A giant TV hovered like a moon orbiting a planet: THE VILLAGE WELCOMES MR CALLAGHAN! enthused the screen, with a smaller caption instructing him to call 234 for all his needs. There was a bathroom twice the size of the one he had at home, a separate lounge with a dining table and minibar, and a terrace with a deckchair outside.

  It was probably time for Tim to text Pete and admit that this was the biggest stroke of good fortune he could have had. But the bed already felt as if it had adapted to his bodyshape and would never let him go.

  3: SERVICE

  Someone was knocking. They knocked three times, and then a key was in the door. Tim, unused to such deep sleep, woke with no idea of what time it was – or, for a moment, where he was. He rolled out of bed and tried to open the blinds, but they would not budge; the bedside light wouldn’t even come on. He threw on a T-shirt. A small man was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, clearing his throat in practised apology.

  ‘Sir, am I disturbing?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Tim drowsily, though it was hard to say what ‘disturbing’ might mean if not this. ‘I was just . . .’

  ‘I am Ashraf, sir.’ The man wore a green T-shirt with the Village’s logo, and sported an eccentric curling moustache, the sort of thing people at Tim’s work occasionally cultivated as a sort of kitsch half-joke. ‘And how is your stay so far, Mr Callag . . . er, Callag. . .’

  ‘Callaghan,’ said Tim. ‘The G is a red herring.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir – if you would repeat . . .?’

  ‘The G . . . I just mean it’s a silent G.’

  He saw Ashraf decide not to grapple any further with this issue; instead, he launched into a speech. ‘Sir, because of the late hours of your arrival, it has not been possible yesterday to conduct your Village initiation. Is this a suitable time instead?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Tim, glancing down at his underwear, ‘although I’m not actually—’

  ‘Thank you very much, sir.’ Ashraf was already standing next to the bed, toying with an LCD panel flat against the wall. ‘You have seen that this panel is for the operation of the blind and lights, and also illuminates the DO NOT DISTURB sign outside if you are wishing to do activities in private.’ Tim, crouching by his suitcase for a pair of shorts, had barely registered any of this when Ashraf was on to his next demonstration, featuring another panel – this time built into the wall of the lounge. ‘Here is how we control mood lighting and music, if music is necessary.’ A couple of button-presses effected a swoop of ceiling spotlights and three seconds of a Dido song, both of which were gone again before Tim had seen how they were created. Ashraf went on to show how air-conditioning was controlled – he left it on, at what seemed an uncomfortably high level to Tim – and proceeded to the bathroom, still speaking in manicured but fractionally inaccurate English, like an instruction manual.

  ‘Here is where we are leaving towels, if towels are wishing to be changed, but we are considering the environment.’

  The shower was the finale of the tour: it featured ten settings, including Tropical Storm and London Rain. Tim watched politely as Ashraf showed off the former, pressing a button to unleash a series of synthesized rumbles and a dramatic increase in water-pressure.

  Back in the lounge, Ashraf laid a printed sheet on the coffee table.

  ‘This is a satisfaction questionnaire, sir, in which you can explain everything that was good and not so good about this initiation.’

  There was something plaintive about the request, and Tim promised that he would.

  ‘And wishing you a very great stay at the Village and please call 234 if there are any needs.’

  Feeling a little punch-drunk from the extent of his welcome, Tim consulted his itinerary. It was half past ten. They were all meeting at the WorldWise office at five, to go to an event at which the ad’s star, Jason Streng – and, unnervingly, Tim’s concept – would be unveiled to ‘investors and media’. That meant he had most of the day to get his bearings and enjoy being here. He opened the door of his chalet and stepped out into air so warm it was like getting into a bath.

  The sky was a digital-looking blue, and the sun had a stolid appearance like a veteran employee midway through a shift. Tim sank down into a deckchair on his terrace to fill out the questionnaire and surveyed the resort. The team working on the ad were in their own enclosure called Ocean Chalets. To the left, a gentle slope led down to the beach and the clump of bars and restaurants where they had been the previous night. The other way led to a tall chrome tower called the Centrepiece, the hub of the Village, where the Fixer had checked them all in, scooping up each individual’s paperwork and seemingly dismissing it all with a single word and the wave of a hand.

  Tim left Ocean Chalets
and stood in front of a plan of the Village. He always liked to get the measure of a new place. His orienteering days had given him an appreciation of cartography, of the body’s need to understand its physical surroundings. In New York, his insistence on a long study of the Manhattan Lonely Planet, clashing as it did with Naomi’s eagerness to charge straight out for spontaneous adventures, had caused an uncharacteristically big row on their first night – the night before she decided to replace him.

  The Village had been built a decade ago: by Dubai’s standards it was old. People bustled past with towels draped over their arms, and Tim glanced at them with the respect of a newcomer for the old guard. Green-shirted staff circulated, arranging sprinklers on lawns, delivering cocktails to women with cucumber slices over their eyes. Buggies pootled up and down, ferrying elderly or lazy guests. There were palm trees everywhere. All this was much as Tim had expected, although it was rather different from a ‘village’ like the one he was brought up in, Saddlecombe in Devon, where you couldn’t get fish and chips after eight o’clock at night, and an affair conducted by the vicar in 1965 was still widely discussed.

  Yet in a way, this place was like a village: it aspired to be a community of humans, a place people really lived in, rather than visited. The numerous signs were made of stone and designed to look hand-engraved, as if they were beside a country road in England. Tim stood on the beach, enjoying the unlikeliness of it: sand beneath his shoes and the great expanse of sea, where twenty-four hours ago he’d been in London with the waterproofed charity collectors and pigeons and polite ill-will. A man was tending to the sand with a long, four-pronged rake. Sun-loungers followed the line of the water, but only a few people were here, shielded by parasols, motionless. In a small marina, thirty sparkly white boats sat like abandoned bath-toys. Perched on its own, custom-made island was the Burj Al Arab, chunky but somehow lithe, excitingly alien even by day. He wondered what unimaginable extravagances had won its sixth and seventh stars, and were being unleashed even as he watched from afar.