The Sand Men (39 page)

The patient’s paraphrenic state developed more sharply after she suffered a minor injury from an incendiary device planted within the DWG compound. Following this event she became increasingly delusional and was convinced that the DWG corporation was involved in various criminal pursuits. None of these fantasies need to be outlined here, but will be examined in subsequent documents.

Following an episode in which the patient became disoriented and confused, she was given a mild sedative and requested to attend a referral session for psychological assessment, to see whether the condition could be modified by a medication regime. She failed to attend the session, and subsequently left the city without providing any contact details. At present, her whereabouts are unknown. Once the patient is located, assessment and treatment can resume.

Copies to: Roy Brook, Leo Hardy

Dr Vance searched around his desk for something he could use to sign the page. He called out to the other room, ‘Who keeps taking my pens?’

L
EA DUG HER
heels into the warm saffron sand and leaned back, feeling the sun on her face, listening.

It was supernaturally quiet. For once, she could hear the sound of the waves breaking all along the shoreline. No trucks rumbled across the Dream World resort. No cranes turned; their arms were frozen like clock hands set at different times. No workers trooped across the heat-rippled concourses. All work had stopped for the grand opening. Soon there would be amplified music, Western pop songs blasting from the immense speakers placed at each corner of the Persiana hotel. Then the sky would be smeared with streaks of coloured fire. Strontium, lithium, titanium and magnesium would poison the atmosphere, detonating like diseased blossoms. The man-made starbursts would be seen from space.

Soon the assembled guests would be sitting down to steaks imported from Scotland, lobsters from Canada,
foie gras
from France, gulls’ eggs from England. Nothing came from the desert. How could it?

Back in the compound, the Dream World Grand Opening Gala Dinner would be under starters’ orders. Mrs Garfield would be alternately punishing and rewarding her troops, planning the arrival of each course with military precision, marshalling a fresh phalanx of compliant foreign waiters, a Dream World for the lower orders.

At the resort, a cast of obedient performers was awaiting its cue, preparing to smooth away international doubts and jitters with a spectacle of pre-recorded songs. Speeches of empty rhetoric would rise into the night like hot air balloons.

Lea regulated her breathing until she could feel her heart slow. For the next few hours she was under the protection of a clandestine amnesty, less important than an orchestrated eruption of gas-powered fire and chlorinated water, pulsing in time to a robotic medley of hits. After the officially sanctioned oratories, recited like witches’ confessions, the hunt would recommence.

She lit her last cigarette and savoured the taste, tossing the packet into the sand. She would give up after this. It was time for some changes.

The seabirds from the wildlife sanctuary were screaming overhead. On impulse, she tried Roy’s mobile and found it switched off. She knew he would be doing what he always did best, holding endless, interminable meetings.
Never leave men in a room together
, her mother had once told her,
there’s no telling what they might come up with.

The beach was almost deserted. The tourists always preferred the imported white sands of the hotels around the Jumeira Palm. The fine powdered coral was shipped in from the Far East. Small white birds ran along the water’s edge as if they had been deprived of the power of flight and were trying to outrun the tide. A lone camel, disdainful, inelegant and apparently without a driver, was slowly lolloping toward the dry grasses of the dunes.

She checked her watch and looked along the line of the beach.

The children couldn’t win, no matter how right they were to believe in their cause. Nobody could live off the grid forever. Geopolitical manoeuvring was about playing the long game. Vested interests always won in the end. And yet there was the illogicality of hope.
Wouldn’t be much of a world without that,
she thought.

The final result seemed unimportant now. It felt as if Dream World had only ever been a place of mirages and phantoms. For all of its thrill rides and spas and underwater restaurants, it wasn’t that special or even that interesting. There were other resorts coming, bigger and better ones, all along this coast and the coast of the next state—and the coast of the country beyond that.

Raising her sunglasses, she scanned the shore and saw the blurred figure walking toward her. She rose to her feet, dusting the sand from her shorts.

Cara’s forehead was sunburnt, her blond hair hacked short and thickly crusted with salt. She was dressed in grey linen trousers and a baggy brown T-shirt, and glowed like a lantern. There was little trace of the child left in her.

‘What did you decide?’ Lea asked.

‘You make it sound like I had a choice,’ said Cara, keeping her distance. ‘Look at the sun. We’re out in it now.’

The wavering molten orb was starting to sink toward the sea, but its heat was undiminished. The sifting radiation transformed them into golden statues. She understood what Cara meant. There was no need to hide from its light any more. It was time to leave the shadows and step from the moon-pale air-conditioned rooms. They had been sheltered for too long, playing at rebellion but hedging their bets, just to be on the safe side. Well, now there was no safe side for either of them. She felt the solar energy tingling her skin, replenishing her. Soon she would become like her daughter, unrecognisable to others, unrecognisable to herself.

‘I guess we have to go,’ said Cara, taking a last look at Dream World. A faint pink-tinged mist has settled around its base, as if it was a mirage preparing to evaporate. ‘Do you want to say anything?’

Lea looked back at the silver spires, unmoored from gravity, no longer susceptible to the laws of physics. From this distance the resort seemed like a drawing from a book of Arabian fairy tales. Seams of gold glinted from the neat rows of Mercedes saloons in the Persiana’s car park, carriages drawn up against a castle of wonders.

‘Why did you change your mind?’ she asked.

Cara scuffed at her hair, thinking. ‘I guess I’m more like you.’

‘They didn’t come after you?’

‘I’m not a virgin. I thought you’d realise.’

She hadn’t thought of that. ‘I suppose I should have. We need to leave.’ Lea shifted her backpack higher on her shoulders.

‘So, what’s your plan?’

‘Who said I had a plan?’ She fell into step beside her daughter, heading back from the water’s edge, walking away from the computer-calibrated celebrations, toward the weeds and broken pavements where the highway ended, and the edges of the night unfurled to the darkening sea.

Chapter Fifty

The Ghost Town

F
ROM A DISTANCE
, the grocery supermarket looked much as it had always been, but as they approached, Lea saw that it was abandoned. The yellow plastic fascia was split and caked with dust, but some of the outside fruit trays still contained the remains of dried-out pomegranates, prickly pears, figs and apples. The building had been compulsorily purchased by the government when they had planned to build a junction leading away from the East Highway, but with the scrapping of the extension it had been left derelict. A single streetlamp lent it a melancholy air of neglect.

‘Wait here,’ said Cara. ‘I’ll go and talk to them.’

Lea knew the others were waiting inside the deserted store, and wondered if they would receive her with hostility. Cara picked her way across a waste ground filled with detritus, an ocean of discarded blue plastic water bottles, rusty cables, washing machines, shelving units, coffee pots, broken crockery, baskets, glassware and old tyres.

She needed a cigarette. Pacing back and forth at the edge of the lot, she watched the distant roads for signs of the police. After fifteen minutes, Cara emerged and beckoned.

Lea entered the dusty supermarket, walking between shelves of sand-crusted cereal boxes, cloudy bottles of balsamic vinegar, packets of couscous and luxury shower gels with peeling price stickers. It was as if the owners had fled a regime change, fearing for their lives, leaving the store just as it always looked in opening hours.

There was no electricity. She walked slowly forward, trying to see into the shadows. Dean appeared before her, flanked by a sullen-faced blond boy she did not recognise. In their khaki camouflage jeans, beige string vests and dirty white T-shirts, they looked more like freedom fighters than English schoolchildren.

‘We couldn’t find Norah,’ said Dean.

‘What happened to her?’

‘I don’t know. We found her bag on the walkway near the beach house,’ said the sullen boy.

‘That’s Arendt,’ Cara said. ‘We have to move.’

‘How are we going to get around?’ asked Lea. ‘The highways will have checkpoints, and he’s blond. He’ll stick out like a sore thumb.’

‘We’re going to take the backroads, but we’ll need your help.’

‘I don’t see how I can do that. The police are looking for me too.’

‘We’ll feed them new information,’ said Arendt, crouching down to grab a handful of dirt. He sounded Danish. ‘We can tell them that your body has been spotted in the sea at the resort.’ He rubbed the earth in his hair, but it didn’t make much difference.

‘Do you think they’ll fall for it?’ Lea asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Cara as the others gathered up their laptop cases and knapsacks. ‘It’ll buy some time.’

‘We have to hit the road,’ Dean said. ‘We’ve got to get out tonight.’

Cara led the way to a sleek black Mercedes that Lea recognised as Dean’s father’s car. ‘You managed to get away with driving this?

‘I look old enough,’ said Dean, getting behind the wheel. ‘We‘ll have to take the desert road to the Oman border and cross at a quiet outpost. Then head East to a port, the obvious choice would be Muscat.’

They loaded the Mercedes and headed out.

I
T HAD NO
name now, and few were left who remembered what it had once been called. The town had filled the valley of date palms at the foot of the great hill, its rock striations sweeping through the pale stone in amber arabesques.

The farmers below had made a good living there for centuries, but when the oil money arrived they had left their homes for bigger profits and grander residences with cool cement rooms. Dates still provided incomes, but the ancient mud villages where they were harvested had been outgrown. The residents had taken little more than they could carry in a single trip, piling furniture and possessions onto handcarts in the rush to abandon their past. Jeeps, trucks and horses had been loaded with crockery, televisions and clothes.

The empty red clay houses still stood, their intricately carved doors and window frames waiting to be stripped and converted into coffee tables by French antique dealers looking for the next ethnic trend. The streets twisted and doubled back on themselves, a maze that afforded protection against marauders, but they were also defeating Cara and the others.

The group walked along the line of palms through dry river beds, into the dusty, deserted alleys, following the wadis, the emerald pools that formed as rivers made their way from the mountains to the sea.

Lea stopped to catch her breath. Although they had plenty of water, their backpacks were heavy with laptops and bundles of technical equipment. They were passing an overgrown graveyard with odd headstones—two for a man, three for a woman. Lea watched as a family of lizards scuttled from a dried-out burial site. ‘They say you plant an extra one to make sure your wife does not come back,’ said Arendt with a laugh.

‘What about going into the desert?’ asked Cara. ‘The Bedouin have camps where we could stay until things calm down.’

‘Bedouin movement is regularly checked by the police,’ said Lea. ‘They’re not as cut off as you think. The old days when they used to keep three or four wives are over. One of them told me there was a time when you could have bought another wife with a good camel. Now you need a plasma TV, a bigger house and a pool to amuse her.’

Cara smiled. Lea looked at her daughter and could no longer recognise her as the Chiswick schoolgirl who spent every weekend in her room. The transformation was complete.

They halted at a further dead end, this one created by a dense thicket of date palms that had broken through the earthen road, nature reclaiming the town as its own.

‘It has to be right around here,’ said Dean. ‘The signal showed it at the far end of the gulley.’

They were looking for a new car that had been left for them by some sympathetic Omani teenagers. Dean’s phone signal had cut out before he had time to enlarge the map of the area.

The separation between the two countries was porous here, the region’s immense outcrops of rock forcing a staggered borderline around the landscape that sometimes disappeared altogether.

‘There,’ said Lea, ‘under the fig trees.’ She pointed ahead to a dust-greyed Subaru van listing to one side of the cambered red roadway. Dean had refused to allow her to lead the group, but she was determined to stay near Cara.

Inside the vehicle they found a box of provisions, a map and several cell phones. The Subaru had a full tank of gas. While Dean drove, Cara and Arendt studied the map.

‘It can’t be far from here,’ said Arendt. ‘We may even be over the border already. Some of these ghost towns lie right on the dividing line, and their streets are impassable.’

It was hard to imagine the shadowed, crumbling houses filled with families, the streets bustling with life. Tough, spiky date-shoots pierced through the clay roads, cracking and raising them like overbaked pie-crusts. Branches had forced their way through walls and ceilings. In several places dried-out timbers from the buildings had fallen across the street and had to be hauled out of the way.