Chapter Twenty-Two

The Need

 

 

RAMADAN HAD BEGUN, and many of the local shops were now shuttered. Bars and cafés kept shorter hours, and were only frequented by tourists. The British Foreign Office had issued warning guidelines about morally correct behaviour.

The trucks crawled through the tarmac delta that led to the resort like dying beasts. It was too hot to pass between buildings into valleys of molten glass, too hot to breathe without scalding the throat and nostrils. At the shoreline, the dump-trucks emptied boulders into the sea until the land rose above the water-level. Every week the shore grew a little, human ingenuity providing what nature could not. The city slowed to an imperceptible crawl, its population becoming invisible, but in the icy offices of the business district, worlds turned.

Lea put a teabag into her ginger cat mug and stared at her notes. The air-conditioning unit was not yet set as high as it could go, an indicator that there was even worse heat to come. The words on her screen seemed indecipherable this afternoon, and reworking them brought no improvement.

Finally, she rose and went to the window.

Outside, the brown patch where the sprinkler was failing had grown larger. The grass was returning to the natural colour of the land. Everything would die here if left unattended. Thoughts desiccated in the heartless heat.

There was no point in waiting around for inspiration to strike. On the spur of the moment, she decided to drive out to the resort and see Roy. A little spontaneity might at least persuade him to take a beverage break.

She arrived at the Dream World sentry gates and waited while the guards examined her photo-pass. As one of them went to phone ahead, she realised that the heightened security around the resort forestalled any notion of a surprise visit. CCTV cameras glared down at her.

‘There’s no answer,’ said the guard, checking his watch. ‘What time is your appointment?’

‘I don’t have an appointment,’ she explained. ‘I’m his wife. I was in the area and thought I’d look in to see him.’

The guards seemed to think this odd and talked among themselves. One came forward. ‘I can get someone to take you as far as the Persiana,‘ he offered. ‘We think Mr Brook may be in the main hall.’

Lea waited while the other guard called ahead. They made the process unnecessarily laborious, glad to have something break the monotony of their day. They were in their late teens, but both carried some kind of squat black weapon in their belts.

A bright yellow electric buggy appeared, driven by James Davenport, who hopped out and shook her hand. He was wearing a blue woollen cardigan over his starched white shirt. The high temperatures had no effect on the energetic young Scotsman. ‘Lea, this is a surprise,’ he said. ‘You can leave your car here.’

She switched the Renault for the electric buggy, and they headed off. Beyond the gates was a white concrete path flanked by vast plots of dead brown earth. ‘You should have called first. You might have had a wasted journey.’

‘I thought Roy was just working on the Persiana?’ she asked.

‘They’ve got him troubleshooting between there and the Atlantica,’ Davenport explained. ‘Let’s see if we can find him.’

The grand portico of the Persiana appeared to be a cross between a church and a casino. In addition, the elaborately carved entrance of white marble was laid with red protective carpets, like the mosques that covered their floors for non-Muslims.

The centrepiece of the atrium was an opalescent chandelier over ten metres high, constructed in the shape of an ornate red and gold tulip, through which the light of a thousand stained-glass windows refracted in chromatic refrain, like a place of worship for Las Vegas showgirls.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ said Lea, marvelling at the expense more than the design. ‘I feel tiny.’

‘The chandelier was made in Venice.’

‘Will anyone be able to come here and visit?’

‘The foyer, you mean? Yes, but it will cost them around eighty US dollars to do so. To keep out gawkers. Ah, there he is.’ He pointed to a distant figure working beside a dry octagonal fountain of aquamarine quartz panels.

‘Lea, what are you doing here?’ Roy looked up as she approached, but did not come over to greet her. He didn’t seem too pleased to see her at all.

‘I was nearby,’ she said lamely.

‘But there’s nothing near here.’

She wasn’t about to argue. ‘Do you have time for a coffee?’

She caught him glance at Davenport in apology. ‘Oh honey, if you’d phoned ahead I could have cleared a space. I’m just about to go into a meeting.’

‘No problem, it was just on the off-chance.’ She turned to Davenport. ‘I’m sorry to have wasted your time, James.’

‘Let me drive you back to your car,’ Davenport offered.

She waved his offer aside. ‘Really, it’s no distance, and it’s shaded. I can walk. I’m learning to cope with the heat. I seem to drive everywhere these days, I could really use the exercise.’ She set off before Davenport could stop her. When she glanced back, she saw him calling someone on his mobile.

As she studied the three great hotels in their unfinished states, the cables of marble-polishing equipment snaking out of windows and doorways like the controls of some long-dead automaton, it seemed that the resort had already been abandoned and that she was wandering a future disaster area, as ruined as the remains of Baghdad or Xanadu.

She knew the resort layout by heart; Roy left maps lying all over the house, yet the sight of the buildings always caught her by surprise.

Nature had been brought to heel. The benign Gulf waters looked like sheet steel, bordered on one side by the promenade and on the other by passing container ships. Dream World was almost ready to open, but she could see dead flowerbeds, dried-out fountains, cracking cement walkways. It was possible to imagine that one day it might exist only as a distant memory as the rocky coastline reasserted itself.

There was a building out of place. She backed up and frowned into the light. Right at the far edge of the resort stood an unadorned hexagon, low and unassuming, like a chapel for religious workers. Everything else was so obviously for a commercial purpose that it stuck out. What was the point of it? She was sure she had seen it before somewhere, but could not remember where.

Then it came to her. In photographs. Milo’s torn-up pictures, taken inside and out.

Davenport would be watching her. There was no time to investigate further, and it was probably nothing special. But as she left she couldn’t help glancing back. It was a decidedly odd structure.

Her Renault was no longer in the shade. The sun had moved, and as she opened the car door the interior proved so unbearably hot that she suddenly felt ill. As she waited for the dizziness to pass, a gang of workmen in blue headscarves and heavy brown overalls trudged past like transferring prisoners. They seemed oblivious to the luxurious hostility of their surroundings, as if they existed in a parallel dimension.

She wished she hadn’t decided to come here. Roy was obviously annoyed with her. Perhaps she had caught him doing something he shouldn’t. There was something wrong, and she couldn’t understand—the heat made it so hard to think. Her head swam as she tried to concentrate.

Roy was wearing different clothes. That was it. He had left the house in tan cargo pants and a blue shirt, and now he was wearing a white shirt and navy trousers. It made no sense. He used the gym on the compound, he didn’t carry extra clothes with him to work. Why would he have changed?

As she left the resort and the car’s air-conditioning unit restored the interior temperature, she began to focus once more. She came off the highway and passed the line where the sprinklers ended. The blossoming dragon-green land returned to ochre moon-rock.

As the turnoff for the compound approached there was an odd noise from the Renault’s engine, and she realised she had forgotten to fill the gas tank. The gauge sometimes gave false readings in the heat. The vehicle coasted the next curve and slowed, its engine knocking. The road had just enough camber to allow her to coast it onto the hard shoulder.

There was a gas station a few hundred metres off the highway, just inside the compound, but to reach it she saw that she would have to go through the underpass that connected the workers’ barracks to the compound. The only alternative was to walk for ages in the pounding heat.

You can do this, she told herself, it’s no big deal. If there’s anyone down there, they’re liable to be as nervous of you as you are of them. They threw earth at the car, they didn’t intend to hurt you.

But beyond the sunlight, at the edge of the bridge’s precipitous shadow, her heart started beating a little faster.

A rectangle of fire at the far end told her that the passageway was no more than a hundred metres, but her eyes had not adjusted to the gloom, and she could not tell if anyone was standing against the walls.

She removed her dark glasses and kept up her pace. As she walked, she heard a shuffle and cough in the shadows. The tip of a cigarette glowed. Another, then a third. There was a muttered phrase in Hindustani. A harder cough. They can’t see me against the light, she thought, they can’t tell who I am. Then she was out of the other side, heading toward the garage.

As she filled her gas canister she looked for someone who might give her a lift back, but the cars all had their windows tightly sealed, the drivers remaining in shadow as the pump attendants ran around their vehicles. She no longer saw into people’s eyes; the high summer sun meant that everyone remained impassively shielded behind mirrored aviator lenses or rhinestone-encrusted designer eyewear.

After filling the can she looked for a way back that would avoid the underpass, but the grassy slopes that led up to the highway were too steep to climb, and typically, there were no verges to walk along. She could have been in Brazil or California, an insignificant figure casting a long black shadow across the featureless road in late afternoon sunlight. Steeling herself, she headed back to the mouth of the tunnel.

She tried to think about the men in the underpass, to humanise them, to understand why they needed to gather in communal solitude. She wondered whether they had dreams of something better, only to find that an accident of geography had reduced them to this hidden world. They were building a paradise they would never be allowed inside, for people of unimaginable wealth. They were here for one purpose only, to send money back to loved ones they might not see for years, to receive training in skills they might never use again. They were tolerated, controlled, ignored. And if they failed, more would silently appear to take their place.

She thought they might try to rape her.

Checking her rising nervousness, she remembered EM Forster’s A Passage To India and decided she would never behave like Adela in the Marabar Caves. Giving your fear a human face, she decided, was the best way to defuse it. She walked on into the dark with a surer step. The men were intent on something. An atmosphere of order and concentration seemed to fill the tunnel. Nobody was watching her, even though she could tell there were many others hidden in the dark recesses.

They were waiting. The cigarette stubs glowed orange in an unwavering row, forming a patient line against the tunnel wall. From the far end she could hear a muffled sound, somewhere between a sob and a sigh.

There was something pale and rectangular on the floor, lying among the discarded boxes and litter of the tunnel’s deepest point. She realised now that it was a mattress. As her eyes adjusted further, she saw a frail Chinese girl, her thin brown arms splayed at her sides. It was hard to tell, but in the penumbral gloom she looked extremely young, little more than a child. Her head was turned to one side, almost as if she was asleep. She wore a dirty white T-shirt, and was naked from the waist down.

One of the workers was lowering himself into the crevice between her legs. He began shoving himself at her, bucking and ramming with such determination that he pushed her away in the process. Another men knelt down behind her, holding her shoulders still until his friend had finished.

Lea tried to turn her attention away, but she could hear the fold and brush of loosened clothing, smell the vivid spice of sweat and sex. The girl did not look perturbed, merely dulled with acceptance. There was nothing especially repellent about the process. Its mechanics had been blunted with necessity and repetition.

Lea looked straight ahead and kept moving toward the sunlit slope at the far end of the underpass, praying that she could slip past unnoticed. She wondered if they had got together to pay for her, or if the girl was being kept there against her will.

Despite herself, she looked back.

The man who had been holding her shoulders released her now, and the girl raised herself on one elbow, staring blankly at the wall as the next one came forward and unbuttoned his overalls. Some dirham notes fell beside her. She quickly gathered them up and dropped back onto the mattress, and the man behind her resumed his duties once more, preparing to grip her shoulders. The others crowded around, mercifully blocking Lea’s view.

And then she was at the tunnel exit. The sun on her neck felt like a torch of absolution. Having been repeatedly warned away from the area, she knew she dared not interfere with what went on there. It would be easy to believe that sin could only breed in darkness.

Glancing back down the slope, she saw two figures caught in the edge of the light. One was a Chinese workman, bony and ill-looking, dressed in company dungarees. The other was Betty’s son Dean. They both had their heads lowered, and were intent on something that occupied their attention. She glimpsed an exchange, some small object passing from one set of hands to the other.

This unnerved her more than the sight of the thin, impassive girl. Whatever transpired here had crossed over into the compound. She walked faster and did not look back until she reached the stalled car.

Back inside the vehicle, thoughts swirled in her head.

Mandhatri Sahonta, freezing to death on the beach.

Deng Antonio with his arm torn off.

Garcia Rodriguez, falling from the tower.

Tom Chalmers suffering a heart attack.

All of them mourning lost girls.

And Milo, believing there were old gods living in the ancient rocks.

They were pieces of an absurd idea and nothing made any sense, but once that the thought was planted it would not go away. Lea suddenly knew that she could not keep ignoring it anymore.

When she reached home, she immediately went upstairs and dug out the family’s DWG induction pack. Sifting through the documents from Roy’s information folder, she found a slip of paper bearing a login code for the DWG website address, and accessed it. The Excel spreadsheet of accident statistics dated back to the ground-breaking ceremony on the site, four years earlier.

A log had been kept of all mishaps that had occurred at the resort since the inception date. Calculating a norm by multiplying the total of workers involved, she saw that the number of deaths and injuries was only slightly higher than the national average. Dream World had issued regular press releases championing their safety record.

How many accidents had befallen other fathers who had lost their daughters? Just the ones on Milo’s list, it transpired. One might as well count the number of accident victims with ginger beards.

Googling related topics, she found an online interview with a construction safety trainer who admitted that over nine hundred workers had fallen to their deaths in 2008 throughout the UAE. He said that more than half the accidents happened in spite of them wearing safety harnesses. The workers were expendable. They came from villages where they had only been used to raising goats and growing rice. Many more died from kidney failure because they did not drink enough water while they were on the skyscrapers. The workers’ toilets were often situated on the ground floor, and those on the upper stories could not afford to lose time going down to the latrines.

There was no discernable pattern. Bar graphs and cloud charts scrolled before her eyes until they were meaningless. Logging out of the site, she slipped Roy’s access details back in his document pack, none the wiser for what she had read.

There was one last thing to do. Instead of running the names through search engines, she looked them up on local social networks, using translation tools. This time a trace appeared in the ether, a faintly luminous thread that led through the miasma of misinformation.

Sahonta, Sakari

Antonio, Maria

Chalmers, Joia

No mention of Rodriguez’s daughter because she had been found dead in the creek. The other three were mentioned on the website of a local parents’ group, OurMissingChildren.org, which covered Dubai and Abu Dabi.

There were forty-six other missing girls listed on the Dubai page.

She was sweating in the air-conditioned bedroom. When she clicked on the drop-down menu, it failed to open. It took her a while to realise that the site had been closed down. Only the holding page remained, and there were no contact details listed on it.