The Uninvited (13 page)

It must be heading for fifty degrees.

De Vries waves at a man who is standing apart from the others, consulting a chart. ‘Foreman,’ he says. ‘Pakistani.’  The foreman waves back. ‘So, Hesketh. Take a look.’ De Vries points towards the edge.

‘I can’t. I get vertigo.’

‘That’s too bad. It’s quite something.’ He strides over to the edge, leans his meaty bulk against the security rail and gazes out at the panorama. I shift a little closer, near enough to catch what he says, but not so close to the drop that I can see what’s below. The rail is made of aluminium so it must be burning hot, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He hasn’t stopped talking since we met.

‘Ahmed was a goddam diamond, I tell you,’ he calls to me, continuing the theme he began in the lift. ‘This just was not Ahmed. Not one single element of this bloody mess was him, mun. I mean, he wasn’t a saboteur, no way. Plus, bloody rat poison, what kind of shit is that, mun? If he had to do it what’s wrong with Valium or paracetamol?’ De Vries is one of those men who become aggressive when they are upset. He sweeps out his big muscled arm to show me ‘the world’s most fantastic city. It’s just gonna keep on expanding and expanding. Why not, eh? D’you realise we have the most advanced desalination technology in the whole goddam world?’

No, I tell him. But it comes as no surprise.

De Vries speaks very fast, so I have to concentrate. His eyes are hidden behind very dark sunglasses that cling tightly to the bridge of his nose, making the flesh bulge to either side. I find myself almost lip-reading him, focusing on the rapid movements of his fleshy mouth. Above it, the moustache pours from his nostrils like blond lava. I am faint-headed from jetlag.

‘Sure, we had a bit of a dip in the economy, and we were reeling for a while there, I mean truly reeling. But look at it now, it’s all happening. This is a happening place, a vibrant place. Ahmed was part of that big vision, mun. I just love this city, mun. Lived here twenty years. I mean how can you not be crazy about this place?’

He says this is just one of fifty-seven construction projects managed by Eastern Horizons. Farooq was personally in charge of it. As De Vries grips the scaffold-rail and expounds on Dubai – ‘This city. It’s what the future looks like, mun’ – I begin to feel thirsty. The sun is unbearably hot. ‘I don’t know what bloody Farooq got into his head. I just don’t know. So much to live for, mun. The world was his oyster. And his wife, how d’you think she’s feeling, mun? Gorgeous lady, Halla. Very traditional. Can you imagine what it was like breaking the news to her? It tore me apart, mun.’

I want to tell him: Halla Farooq thought her husband was possessed by a small beggar-djinn. She believed that the djinn didn’t wish her husband well, just as Sunny Chen believed the ancestors stamped their curse on him with a tiny dirt smear and Jonas Svensson believed that small creatures – ‘kiddie trolls’ – had used him as a puppet. And I have a baffling set of bruises on my arm.

There is a pattern, you see, Mr Jan de Vries.

The problem is, it’s so outlandish that it makes no sense to any logical, rational, scientifically inclined mind. I am thinking specifically of my own.

As Jan de Vries carries on moving his fleshy mouth and saying things in a vehement manner I am asking myself, as per Ashok’s angry instructions: what are your other lines of inquiry, the ones that don’t have something to do with ‘fucking little people’ who are menacing enough to make men resort to desperate measures after doing something against their will? Death by wood-pulping machine, death by oncoming vehicle after a failed attempt with aspirin, death by rat poison: I see no connection there. What about timber, finance and construction? Money links them all, but money is as vague and pervasive as oxygen. Taiwan, Sweden and Dubai: again they have nothing obvious in common except in my own mind, where they feature as recent additions to a list of places I will not rush to visit again.

Now we are up here, Jan de Vries is keen to show me the other Eastern Horizons sites. You can see four from here, he says. ‘I want you to see them in the context of the whole Dubai project.’

The land around the building site resembles a dusty, clogged tray of cat litter. I have read that many of the immigrant workers live in giant metal containers stacked like cages. I personally like confined spaces, but not everybody does. The air is far hotter than anything I have experienced beyond a sauna. Despite my sunglasses, my eyes hurt. I’m trying to block out de Vries, but his presence is insistent and I can’t concentrate on my little
ozuru
. His voice seems to be spiralling higher and higher in pitch until he’s almost screaming. Desalination and the future.

Fucking miracle, mun.

The world has so much to thank this company for. Proud to be here, proud to be part of Dubai’s future. Think of our grandchildren and their children, they’ll look at us like we look at the pharaohs, have you been to Egypt, mun, have you seen all that amazing shit over there? Magic.

Something is wrong. His voice is getting higher and higher. The pitch becomes unnaturally elevated. I’m too hot. I start to rock. I can’t think straight when people shout or screech at me in a high unnatural voice. I get overloaded. I am overloaded now. I rock harder and harder. There is something out of kilter. The noise de Vries is making does not sound normal. And now, suddenly, he is doing something as grotesque as it is incomprehensible.

He is licking his bare forearm.

He is still making the screeching noise, but it’s muffled by his lips meeting his own flesh. The gesture isn’t human: it reminds me of a dog gnawing at a bone and growling, or a parody of a kiss. But it is not a bone, or another mouth, it’s the hairy flesh of his own arm. It’s as if de Vries has a small motor inside, operated inexpertly by another person, or malfunctioning. I can’t be alone in getting the impression that something is awry with de Vries because just then one of the workers comes up with a hand raised, signalling at him to stop. The little figure is different from the other workers. No hard hat. And long hair that reaches beyond the shoulders. From this angle, which must be immensely distortive, it seems no bigger than a child.

I lift my sunglasses for a moment, but the glare of the sun scalds my eyes and I shove them back. I blink rapidly and look again.

It is a child. Dressed in rags.

Male, I thought at first—

But no.

Female.

A small girl. In filthy, torn clothing. Her dark round eyes stare at de Vries, unblinking.

When de Vries catches sight of the ragged child he stops licking his arm, he catches his breath and then spits out a word, or a repeated series of words, that sound Japanese –
toko-loshi-toko-loshi-toko-loshi
– and his face distorts like a chimpanzee under attack, with a terrible pleading grimace that reveals his teeth and gums.

‘You can’t come in!’ he screams. It’s not clear if he’s talking to her. Or if he is, what he means. ‘You are not coming in, you fucking creature!’

The child’s eyes narrow. Then, without moving her mouth, she starts to make a sound: a high insistent noise that has too much of an edge to be musical. A monotone humming.

Why would they allow a child up here? Is she the daughter of one of the workers?

Just then, still humming, she puts her fist next to her eye and opens it out in a sudden starburst, palm out.

This has a dramatic effect on de Vries: with a sharp, pained squeal he lurches his big body around so that his back is to me. A cry goes up from the group of workers on the other side of the building, then more urgent shouts.

Jan de Vries’ meaty hands grip the rail decisively.

He is still screaming as he lifts his entire body up – it looks effortless – and vaults over the protective railing.

He does it like men in old films leap over gates in the English countryside, in a single smooth and gymnastic movement.

And then he is gone.

Later, when I am being interrogated by Detective Mazoor, I will call his suicide leap ‘surprisingly elegant’.

His vanishing is clean and complete. I am too far from the edge to see him fall. Not that I would wish to.

I stand where I am, rocking.

There is more shouting among the men. Then one of them – I recognise the foreman – yells an order. They cluster together, arguing and gesticulating. Above their cries I can hear the hum of traffic thirty-one storeys below.

There are sections of my brain that are stupid. By which I mean slow and sometimes quite incapable of spotting the obvious. Belatedly, it strikes me that if de Vries jumped over the railing then –
ergo
– he must now be dead.
Jan de Vries is dead, Jan de Vries is dead, Jan de Vries is dead.

I sink to a crouching position and hold my head. I’d like to crawl into a confined space, but there’s nowhere to go in this place of ferocious light and heat and soft cruel breezes. So I stay where I am and rock.

I don’t know how much time passes. I construct three
ozuru
in my head and send them fluttering up into the searing hot air. I rock. My mind is blank. I rock harder. After a while I become aware of the foreman shouting at me and pointing downward.

Jan de Vries is dead.

‘I didn’t push him,’ I say. ‘I didn’t push him. I didn’t push him.’ I say it again and again and again. I can’t seem to stop. I’m very overloaded.

‘I know,’ he says, approaching. ‘Calm down, sir. Take deep breaths.’ It’s a good suggestion. ‘I saw it happen. I saw him go over. You were nowhere near, sir. I called the site boss. He’s called the police.’ His phone rings. ‘Excuse me.’

While he talks I think about Tom and Jerry. Freddy and I are fans of this cartoon. When an animal hits the ground, in Tom and Jerry, its body is flattened by the impact. But in real life, this doesn’t happen. When an object drops vertically from the sky, the speed of its descent will be slowed to some extent by air resistance. I wonder if a height of thirty-one storeys is enough for a falling object to achieve terminal velocity. I imagine de Vries’ skull will be split open like a coconut, with the brains exposed and perhaps a quantity of blood pooling beneath. Blood would dry fast in this heat: a skin would form, like a membrane. Its colours would travel through the chart: Gala Day, Postbox, Shepherd’s Delight, Mombasa, Heritage Maroon. Will de Vries’ body break open likewise, or will it remain intact? Death at the moment of impact would be instantaneous. They use the carcasses of pigs to determine exactly what happens in violent accidents. Or sometimes real human bodies. So be aware that if you donate your corpse to science it may be dropped from a great height, to test what happens to it. It won’t matter as you’ll be dead. But some people object to the idea out of squeamishness.

Or on aesthetic grounds.

The foreman has finished his call.

‘What happened to the little girl?’ I ask. ‘I don’t see her.’

He takes a step back. ‘What?’

‘There was a child. Half your height or less. She scared Jan de Vries. He told her she couldn’t come in.’

He looks at me, but I can’t work out what his face means. ‘Sir. It’s just you and me and the workmen over there.’ He nods at them.

I start counting. They’re in a large cluster, and engaged in energetic argument. This involves much pointing downward at the street below, and at the rail de Vries sprang over. Others are kneeling on their haunches, their heads down, apparently praying. One stands alone, sobbing and wailing. When I arrived there were twenty-seven, including the foreman. Plus me and de Vries. That makes twenty-nine. The girl arrived and de Vries jumped so we should still total twenty-nine. But we are twenty-eight.

‘You see?’ says the foreman.

‘But I know what I saw.’ I count again. Still twenty-eight. ‘She was right in front of me. She made a noise. A kind of humming. And she gestured at de Vries. You must have seen her too.’ He licks his lips, but he doesn’t speak. He’s sweating heavily. ‘Good Muslims don’t lie. Now did you or did you not see her?’ I seem to be shouting.

I don’t usually shout. I also want to shake him.

I grab him: he blinks rapidly, then puts a hand on top of mine. It’s gentle.

‘Take a deep breath, sir. Easy. Calm down.’ He lowers his voice. ‘OK. I will level with you. There appeared to be a girl. But the heat often makes people see things.’ He nods his head in the direction of the construction workers. All are small compared to me, but none is child-sized. The crying man is being comforted by another. The child has gone and so has the perspective from which I saw her. Or did not see her.

I am confused. This is confusing.

I say, ‘She was here. She must have jumped.’

‘No. I just talked on the phone to the boss down there. Just one body. Mr de Vries’.’

He jerks a thumb towards the security rail. Far below, there will be people clustering around that big, beefy shape by now. The site boss he mentioned. The police. From here they’d all look like ants around a big crumb.

‘So where is she?’

His jaw fights before he speaks. ‘Sir. Like I said. We must have all made a mistake.’ He blurts it. ‘There was no child. Let us go down now, sir. The police will want you and me down there first. For statements. The men will wait here. They’ll get statements from them too. Come this way.’