Sebastian
Henry Saunders looked weary. He had just flown into Gibraltar on a British Airways flight and come straight to the meeting in a taxi.
‘The Levante?’ he said, peering at Claudio Fontaneiro, the climatologist Sebastian had engaged whose specific area of expertise was wind-driven surface current analysis.
‘Correct!’ maintained Claudio, ‘The Levante is the wind that rises up in the central Mediterranean and blows westward. As this wind begins to funnel into the narrowing gap of Gibraltar strait, it gathers intensity and speed, creating a Venturi effect. Though it is an entirely natural phenomenon, it is a great problem for your works.’
‘A great problem? I don’t like the sound of that,’ said Saunders. ‘What does this mean exactly? Put it in layman’s terms.’
Sebastian sighed. Why did Claudio have to exaggerate so? He had been determined to sit back and let Claudio do the talking, not wanting to be held responsible for an unforeseen holdup which fell well outside of his own brief. But as usual, he found it impossible to keep his trap shut.
‘Henry, Claudio is saying we’ve got a bit of a challenge. We’d correctly estimated the strength of the tides, but not the Levante’s effect on surface currents. Though the brackets are calculated to withstand the hydrodynamic forces, as a precaution we should reduce the impact as much as possible.’
He let Claudio continue to explain the problem in rapid-fire delivery, and Saunders listened with a blank face, clearly not understanding his Portuguese accent. Lars Bengtson, a Swede who spoke a dozen languages, acted as occasional interpreter.
‘Can we move on?’ Sebastian interrupted, chewing his lip with impatience. ‘I’ve come up with a very elegant solution to the problem.’
Saunders hiked his shoulders in a tense shrug. ‘Which is?’
‘Simply, we elevate the entire structure by about two and a half metres.’
‘Two and a half metres?’ Saunders stared at him.
Sebastian was well aware that Saunders was purely a businessman with no engineering background. He had a sharp intelligence and great imagination but the technical minutiae was Chinese to him.
Saunders looked agitated. ‘With such an alteration in the design, the cantilevered platform would be projecting from the cliff into thin air. It won’t give the impression of being connected to the water. It would look precarious, unsafe. It’ll put investors off.’
Sebastian opened his laptop. ‘Look at this new image. Try and be open to it, Henry. I think it’s exciting. There is no actual change in the load-bearing elements, but visually, it’s just amazing. The brackets will barely be visible except from out at sea. What you have is a city projecting straight from the cliff out over the water. Why hide the fact that it’s a shelf?’ He paused to gauge Saunder’s expression. ‘I’ve already consulted with Goodbard and the other members of the design team and tried to work through the various structural options to produce the most cost-effective solution.’
‘Shit, Sebastian! You should have consulted me before talking to Goodbard.’
Sebastian ignored the admonition. ‘If you think it’s too futuristic in appearance, too far out for your investors, I’m working on a design for a system of pontoons that will inflate and deflate automatically with the water levels. It will be an aesthetic feature only, giving the whole development the appearance of sitting on re-claimed land. Large waves will just compress the pontoons and disappear underneath the platform, to dissipate against the cliff.’
‘Jesus… This is a whole new plan. How much will it cost? And how do you expect me to account for this to our people back in London?’
Sebastian breathed through a tide of impatience. ‘Don’t look at me, Henry. The climatological concerns aren’t my department.’ He gestured towards Matthew Davies and Lars Bengtson. ‘That’s what you’ve got your engineers for. I’m pioneering a whole new system of building on vertical terrain, and you know as well as I do that there’s always going to be an element of the unknown. We’ve simply got to work with this new data, and I’m showing you the solution.’
Despite the air-conditioned office in the cool dark lower ground floor of Eliott Hotel, the heat of the discussion was getting to everyone. Henry Saunders pulled at his collar and wiped a tissue over his forehead.
‘The Levante!’ he said with a sneer. ‘It must be a Spanish initiative.’
‘Yes, damned nuisance,’ said Sebastian, laughing. ‘They’d come up with any old thing to scupper Gibraltar.’
‘Ah, but the Levante is mostly benign,’ Claudio Fontaneiro exclaimed, not having understood the joke. ‘Sometimes it causes a strange spectacle along the ridge of the Rock. From the town it looks as if the length of the ridge is on fire. Swirling air currents dance wildly along the crest. Perhaps you get to see this phenomenon, Mr. Saunders. It will not disappoint. Am I not right, Sebastian?’
‘I need a drink,’ said Saunders and steered Sebastian to a table under the huge palm trees in the hotel’s court yard.
‘Pineapple juice with ice, please,’ Sebastian said to the waiter.
‘That’s not a drink,’ Saunders huffed. ‘Do me a pint of lager and a single malt.’
Once the drinks were before them, Saunders leaned forward with his elbows on the table.
‘Now look here, Luna. I want you to get this right, because,’ Saunders paused, looking surreptitiously left and right, ‘I’ve spread the word a bit and we’ve had several enquiries. A Japanese firm is hounding me, wanting an experimental tsunami-proof development. They mentioned you by name.’
‘Of course. I’m their man.’
Saunders smiled a small smile. ‘You’ll have to formally join our team. That’s the condition.’
As Sebastian didn’t respond, he continued. ‘Could you see yourself doing a stint in Japan?’
‘After Gibraltar, you mean?’
‘There is no reason we can’t get the skids under and get you out of here a bit sooner. I can send over a couple of our high flyers. You can get them up to speed, have them take the tedious stuff off your hands. You could in principle work from Japan and just fly back here every couple of weeks. I mean, you’re young, and by God, you’ve got an inhuman amount of energy.’
Sebastian had a sip of his juice and closed his eyes for a second. Luna’s Crossing flashed before his inner eye in all its majesty. He clenched his teeth but felt his resolve slacken. He knew he shouldn’t risk his credibility, but his excitement and the tension of the meeting had unarmed him. He thought of Dad and his voice warning him, loose cannon, but his mouth opened and he was speaking, his thoughts flowing uncensored into the air.
‘I’ll think about joining Sea-Change, but listen, Henry. I have a dream… I know it’s a bit much to throw at you right now, but you know the various ideas that have been flying around over the last few decades about a bridge?’
Saunders looked at him, squinting against the sunlight. ‘What bridge are we talking about?’
‘I am talking about the bridge.’ Sebastian moved forward in his chair. ‘The bridge that will join Europe with Africa.’
‘I haven’t heard anything new. Who’s proposing it?’
‘As far as I know, all initiatives have been scrapped, for the very reason we were talking about earlier. The surface currents in the strait and the massive pull of the tides would make building support structures near enough impossible.’ He paused for effect. ‘But we could do it.’
While speaking he’d whipped his laptop out of his briefcase. Within less than a minute he was showing Henry Saunders a rolling series of drawings, the concept he’d been playing with since he first set eyes on the Pillars of Hercules. The pinnacle of the Rock, and its Moroccan twin, Jebel Musa, acting as the buttresses for a gigantic suspension bridge.
‘Don’t freak on me now, Henry,’ he said defiantly. ‘This idea looks pretty wild, but the principles are the same as any garden-variety suspension bridge.’
Saunders was mute, staring at the screen. Finally he opened his mouth to murmur, ‘Incredible.’ He shook his head as if to clear it, and choked up a laugh. ‘How do you come up with this stuff?’
Sebastian smiled to himself and flicked through a further series of images. ‘I’m determined to do away with any supports on the actual seabed itself, but we have two mountains… The bridge would simply be suspended between the peaks. Because of the length of the span, it would clear the water by two hundred meters at its centre. Central cables suspended vertically into the sea would end in steel and fibreglass keels creating enough drag to prevent the span from being affected by high winds. It’s a hell of a span but I’ve done the calculations and it can be done.’
Saunders’ mouth stayed open and his almost catatonic stare told Sebastian what he already knew. No-one had ever seen anything like it.
‘Of course, we’d have to think of some kind of causeway around Gib to bring traffic from the rest of Europe. It will be big, Henry, a monument on a par with the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids of Giza, or for that matter, the Great Wall of China.’
He tapped the screen with his forefinger. ‘Why don’t you stay here in Gib for a couple of weeks, Henry? You can see that I’ve done quite a bit of the ground work, but perhaps bring some of your top guys over, then you can take it back to the board and introduce them to the concept.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding?’
Sebastian frowned. ‘No. I’m not kidding. Sure, something on this scale will take a few years to hammer out, even a decade or two, but SeaChange is a big outfit and needs big challenges. The first joining of Africa with Europe. How will the board be able to resist it?
‘Stop, Luna. Just stop,’ Henry Saunders bellowed, holding up both hands as if trying to halt a runaway train. ‘Are you barking mad?’
Sebastian stared at him. Did Saunders just call him barking mad? ‘What the hell do you mean? You just called the concept incredible.’
Saunders sank into his chair and rubbed his forehead as though he were trying to eradicate what he’d just seen and heard. After a moment, he looked up to meet Sebastian’s insistent gaze.
‘Yes, it is incredible, just like a bridge to the moon itself… You do scare me sometimes, you know.’ He grabbed his whisky glass then put it down again. ‘I know you have a brilliant mind, Sebastian, but can’t you see how outlandish your proposal is? A bridge like that is unfeasible for so many reasons. I don’t need to count them out. You’re in Cloud Cuckoo Land, you’re decades into the future. No, not decades, centuries.’
Sebastian was speechless. Was he that far off the radar? Saunders was staring at him with a deep frown. And there he’d been thinking that Saunders was a man with vision. The vision was all his. He stood alone.
He knew he should have asked Saunders home for dinner, but after their distressing interaction and Saunders’ complete rejection of his life’s ambition, he simply couldn’t face it. Leaving him – with the excuse that he was giving birth to a migraine – to a comfortable room and the rooftop dining at the Eliott, Sebastian quickly walked down Canon Lane, past the quaint eponymous hotel and the cafes frequented by elderly Moroccans, until he emerged into the throng on Main Street. It was a very hot afternoon. He felt stunned by disappointment, and he’d not told a lie. His head was pounding and the beginnings of that telltale nausea washed over him in waves, shooting red stars distorting his vision. ‘Barking mad’? Saunders’ insult had escaped before he’d been able to restrain it.
To get away from the crowds, the tourists and the street performers, he nipped across the Piazza into Irish Town, a narrow pedestrian thoroughfare lined with pubs. He felt he needed to walk, to physically discharge the strain of the meeting, although he knew he ought to go straight home and lie down in a darkened room. His lovely Eva would plant featherlight kisses on his eyelids, whisper soothing things he didn’t have to answer. Mimi was good in a head crisis too, fetching his pills and icepacks.
No sooner had he thought of his sister than he recognised her walking ahead of him. At first – not being entirely certain – he just observed her back. When he saw, or rather heard, the bag she was carrying, he knew for sure it was Mimi. He’d bought it for her on a weekend trip to Oman, an intricate leather creation bedecked with tiny silver bells that chimed as she walked. She was still too slender in body, somewhat short in stature but clearly no longer an adolescent. Her walk seemed more confident, surprisingly womanly. Her hips swayed in the tight black jeans and she held herself erect. Despite the heat, she’d covered her crazy hair with a French beret.
Suddenly something happened which he could not at once assimilate. She walked closer to a tall man who had till now seemed unconnected to her, and said something, making him laugh. Sebastian stared at them in bewilderment.
Was this man someone she knew, or was she trying to pick him up, just like that, off the street? It wouldn’t be the first time.
He was at once in his apartment in Dubai, in the grip of desperate anxiety. Mimi had not come back from the gym. The gym in the building closed at 23.30, and now there was no-one left there to open the door or answer the phone. He tried calling her mobile every fifteen minutes, but got no answer. At last there was a message: I am staying over with friends. See you in the morning. xxx. What friends? She had just come for a two-week holiday and he’d not yet introduced her to a soul.
It was six in the morning when he heard the apartment door open and quietly click shut. He shot up from the sofa and marched to meet her in the hall before she disappeared into her bedroom.
She looked dishevelled, her eyes hollow with fatigue. All his dread and worry surged up in one unstoppable wave, and he slapped her. Her cheek reddened instantly and she covered it with her hand as though to protect it from further blows.
The act instantly deflated his anger, his own cheeks reddening to match hers.
‘I… I am so sorry,’ he said, hiding his face in his hands. ‘I was just…so worried.’
‘You don’t own me,’ she said coldly, ‘and you’re not my father.’
‘But where have you been? Why didn’t you let me know?’
‘I did,’ she hissed. ‘I told you I was with friends. I don’t have to account for who they are.’
‘You’re only a kid,’ he shouted back. ‘Dubai is a fucking dangerous place for any woman, let alone a teenage girl in skimpy clothes.’
‘It’s your girlfriend you should worry about,’ she sneered. ‘Men stare at her like hungry dogs.’
‘Eva’s thirty-eight, not seventeen and she knows how to look after herself, you dingbat.’
He went to her and put his arms around her. She let him, but didn’t return the hug.
‘I love you, kid. Don’t be jealous. You come first, always.’
She didn’t answer, but after a moment encircled his back with a limp arm.
‘I am so so sorry, sweetheart,’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘I can’t believe I actually hit you. It’s unforgivable. Tell me how I can make it up to you.’
‘You didn’t,’ she said, looking up into his face with a frown. ‘You didn’t hit me.’
Looking at her now, her womanly form next to this tall mature-looking man, he knew he was powerless to shield her from predators. The way she chatted easily to him, she seemed so trusting, so naïve. It soon became obvious that he was not a stranger to her. Mimi laughed at something and punched him lightly on the arm. Sebastian quickened his step, trying to ignore the nausea washing over him in waves.
‘Mimi,’ he called out, trying to sound cheerful.
She turned, then frowned. ‘Hey, Sebastian.’
‘Where’re you off to?’
The man had slowed and now he too turned. Sebastian glared at him in recognition. ‘You?’
‘How’s it going?’ said Carlo Montegriffo. ‘Not expanding our territories today then?’
‘Working, you mean?’ he answered, more aggressively than he’d intended. ‘Of course I am. What about you? Aren’t you employed?’
‘I am indeed.’
‘Oh, yes? Where?’
Mimi stepped between them to say something, but Carlo stopped her with a slight gesture of his hand. ‘With the Ministry of Defence.’
‘Are you really?’ Sebastian cast an eye over his civilian clothing. ‘In what capacity?’
‘I have a number of responsibilities, too many to list,’ Carlo said with a cool smile.‘Is that so?’ Sebastian turned away from him to address Mimi. ‘So, what are you up to?’
‘We’ve been on a tour of the cathedral.’ Mimi said. ‘And now Carlo is going to show me one of the MOD tunnels.’
‘They’re out of bounds to the public,’ said Sebastian.
‘We’re not the public,’ Carlo interjected. ‘I’m the foremost authority on the Gibraltar tunnel system. It’s one of my jobs, giving tours of the military installations. Imogen told me how interested you are in the tunnels. Perhaps you’d like to come along.’
‘Really! I don’t need a chaperone.’ Mimi said lightheartedly, giving Sebastian a stern nod, a warning not to humiliate her.
‘You’re taking my sister in the wrong direction.’
‘We’re picking up a young friend of mine first,’ Carlo said.
‘Oh, yes? Who is that?’
‘You’re embarrassing me,’ whispered Mimi, a clear note of anger in her voice.
‘Imogen is in perfectly safe hands,’ Carlo said calmly, then to Mimi, ‘But look, your brother is not comfortable with this excursion. Perhaps we should postpone it.’
Mimi’s face clouded over and she stomped her foot on the pavement. ‘Stop organising me, the pair of you!’
Her outburst caused an awkward silence. She looked progressively deflated as if she weren’t sure with whom to go. She turned to Sebastian. ‘Trust me, bro. Just go home. Anyway, you don’t look well.’
Multicoloured darts pierced his vision as the migraine gathered strength. It was impossible to deal with this situation when he knew he could be sick without warning. Involuntarily he pressed his hands over his mouth for a second, then mumbled. ‘Don’t be long, Mimi. I’d rather not have to phone the MOD to go looking for you.’
He turned to walk away. Still, right through the pain, he could not bear to let her go and glanced behind him. The pair of them strolled languidly down the road, chatting as if they’d never had that disturbing confrontation. Mimi turned around and their eyes met. Sebastian read a thousand things in the look she gave him, but perhaps all her glance said, I’m not the one with a problem.
Pain stabbed at his left temple and splintered. He stopped and stood still, breathing deeply to compose himself. He’d once projectile vomited in the street and he didn’t ever want it to happen again. Once more he looked back and saw his little sister slip down an alley.