The Weightless World (5 page)

All at once feeling sick, I fetch his briefcase and laptop and place them next to him on the duvet while he gulps his coffee and stirs up his dal and rice. I stand there feeling sick.

‘Going to do some work, are you?’ I ask.

‘I may have a wee potter. I’m sure I’m past the worst of it, the exhaustion, the jetlag, but best to play safe. I want to be in tip-top condition for Asha when she joins us.’

‘That’s if she’s not delayed again.’

‘Banish the thought from your mind.’ He snorts. ‘No, I’ll just have another couple of hours in bed. Take it a bit easy, have a poke about, see what’s new.’

‘Oh yeah? Anything in particular?’

‘Not really. Just check in, see what’s afoot in the world.’ With a fingernail he taps the edge of his laptop. He smiles broadly. ‘Is that all right with you?’

‘Hey? Oh, sure. That’s fine. That’s fine with me.’

‘He’ll look.’

‘He
won’t
look.’

This was Martin Cantor, a week ago, in the Playpen.

‘He may be mad,’ I said, ‘but he’s not
mental
. He’s high functioning. He’s not just going to forget about this place. He’ll
look
.’

‘I don’t think he will. I think once you’re out there he’s going to be so caught up, he simply won’t think of it.’ Cantor leaned forward. ‘And if he does, if he does look, if he sees what’s happening, fine. Put him on the phone. I’ll deal with it.’

Yeah, I thought, great: if Ess goes mooching online and sees what you’re doing to Resolute, you’re a voice on the phone. While I’m there, on the ground, in the flesh. Not quite the same… But I knew Cantor wasn’t really a bad bloke. He wasn’t malicious, didn’t mean Ess any harm. He genuinely believed that what he was doing was the right thing to do, the best thing for Ess, for Resolute, for everyone. He’d told himself this and told
himself this until he had no choice but to believe it. And he did. He genuinely did.

For weeks I’d been trying to play a similar trick on myself. So far I’d not managed it. At some point the story I kept telling myself always stalled, froze, or revealed itself as only one of many stories that could be woven out of the same set of facts. The fact of Ess, the fact of Ess’s illness, of his delusion, and his colleagues’ priorities…

‘Let me give you a number.’ Cantor now took my phone from me, slashed it open with a fingertip and started typing. ‘Anything makes you uneasy, you call me on this number straight away. I don’t want you imagining even for one second you’re on your own out there with him. Anything makes you less than a million per cent easy, you call this number.’

But I wasn’t listening. Something else had occurred to me. ‘How are we going to pay for stuff?’

‘What’s that?’ He tossed my phone back, making me fumble for it.

‘Well, you’re not giving him any money, are you? The code, the company account… it’s all bullshit, isn’t it?’

Cantor looked confused. Then he said, ‘Ray’s paying. Same as always. Didn’t you know about this?’ When it was clear I didn’t, he went on, ‘Ray always pays. For his trips and so on. He won’t claim expenses. Hasn’t done in years. I offered him a travel budget but he wouldn’t have it. He said to me, “Martin, there’s a reason why it’s called
petty
cash.” He’s covering the trip out of his own pocket, the flights, the hotel, this guide person you’re hiring, everything.’ Leaning forward again, Cantor invited me into a smirking confidence. ‘You know Ess doesn’t take a salary, don’t you? He just comes in and does whatever he does, basically, for free. Little arrangement he’s had for years. Going back to the Skycoach thing. The Skycoach fuck-up.’

Cantor seemed to expect me to be amused by this. But I wasn’t amused. I was appalled, aghast.

Seeing my expression, he went on, more coolly, ‘I wouldn’t worry about Ray. He’s done all right for himself over the years.’

Of course he had. It was well and widely known that at an early point in Resolute’s success Ess had, in what many understood as a gesture of flagrant corporate disloyalty, sold a significant number of his shares in the company. Well, he was a founder; the shares only existed because he – and three other guys – had caused them to exist; he could do what he wanted with them. The sale had anyway amassed him a stupendous profit, and it was well and widely known also that Ess had in short order speculated this profit into a still more stupendous personal fortune. Until the dark days of Skycoach, this profit, this fortune had been the thing about Ess that everyone at Resolute most enjoyed talking about. Round the coffee nooks and the copier cubbies you heard regular mumbles about ‘Raymond Ess’s millions’ or ‘Raymond Ess’s billions’ or ‘Raymond Ess’s gazillions’.

It was bollocks – obvious bollocks, as Ess was himself the first to point out. He didn’t have gazillions, and he didn’t have billions. There was, however, a real possibility that he had millions.

Cantor seemed to assume that I shared the general disdain for Ess’s wealth – where it came from, how he got it – and his eyes as he spoke to me seemed to contain a certain icy inflection. I shrugged, tried to smile. I don’t think I did a good job of any of this.

Later, as he was genially showing me out of his office, Cantor said, ‘Help me out. Did I just never notice it before, or did Ray come back from India with a thing for classical music? Whenever I see him now he’s humming classical music.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘yeah. He’s always liked his classical music.’

‘Can’t believe I never noticed that before.’

It wasn’t true. Cantor was right: since his return to work, Ess had been striding about the place humming bits of Mozart, bits of Wagner. However, he didn’t do this because he liked classical music; as far as I knew, Ess didn’t particularly like any kind of music. He did it to fill his own ears, to block out all sound, to make sure he couldn’t hear what people were saying about him as he passed them on the company corridors.

As soon as I can get away, I leave Ess’s room, stamp down the three flights of stairs to my own room and sit on the bed frantically thinking.

Let me give you a number
, Cantor said.
Anything makes you uneasy, you call me on this number straight away
. Am I uneasy? I am. But I’m not sure this is what he meant.

I open my tablet, try to get online. No luck. The hotel wifi connection, which behaved so beautifully while Alice and I Skyped last night, has vanished without a trace.

I leave my room, stamp down the three flights of stairs to the reception area and ask the man at the desk what’s going on with the wifi. The man assures me that nothing is going on with the wifi. I tell him I couldn’t find the connection, open my tablet to show him, open the wifi options pane, and sure enough there’s the connection.

‘That wasn’t there before,’ I say.

Lightly grizzled, middle-aged, the man asks if I’ve purchased today’s passcode. I tell him I don’t know what he’s talking about: the guy who was here yesterday just gave me the code. The man offers apologies on behalf of his colleague and explains that the passcode changes every day. And is purchasable, for a small fee.

I’d argue the toss, but I’m panicking too much. With a burning-at-the-neck sensation that says I’m being ripped off,
I pay the fee, get the code. The second I move away from the desk the connection drops out.

As I step round the reception area, tablet held high, a step sideways, a step forward, as if learning the sequence of a dance, I suppose that if I’m having this much trouble getting online, Ess surely won’t manage it at all. Then again, he’s been here before. He knows the hotel, the staff, everyone here is his friend. No doubt the wifi connection is his friend too.

I’m outside again, standing on the steps with the turbaned doorman and his gang, by the time the connection reappears. The wifi icon swells; I open the internet and with a surge it rushes up, photos, headlines, polls, live feeds.

I sit on the steps. I root through my pockets, find my cigarettes, light one with a trembling hand. Then I summon the search box, type in ‘Resolute Aviation’ and hit GO.

When I last made this search – not quite two days ago, in an unsuspected well of wifi at Doha airport, while Ess was off somewhere, befriending tourist or business traveller – there was nothing to see, or nothing out of the ordinary. Not so now. It seems that matters have moved on. Because now there’s all this:

RESOLUTE IN ADMINISTRATION.

RESOLUTE IN DISSOLUTION.

RESOLUTE GOES UNDER.

RESOLUTE GIVES WAY.

RESOLUTE BREATHES LAST.

RESOLUTE R.I.P.

I’m still sitting there when Harry comes by. Without looking up from the screen I watch him lumber towards the hotel, pause to check the nameplate on the gatepost, make to walk past me into the hotel then swerve back when he recognises me. For a few seconds we both pretend we haven’t seen each other; I stare at my screen with a probably overdone look of intentness while he looms on the pavement, frowning up at the hotel, hands in pockets. Then he says, ‘Steven! I didn’t see you there!’

I glance up at him. ‘Hello, Harry. What are you up to?’

‘Wasn’t I invited for lunch?’

‘Were you?’

‘Wasn’t I?’ He waits for me to help, but I don’t. ‘Raymond was kind of hammered last night. Maybe he doesn’t remember.’

‘Maybe he didn’t invite you.’

Harry frowns at me. ‘That’s certainly another possibility.’ Then he nods, somewhat formally, and makes again to walk past me. ‘Is he inside?’

‘He’s in bed. He’s not well.’

‘That’s too bad.’ Harry stands with his hands in his pockets, frowning now down at the ground, now again up at the hotel. Then he brings his frown back level with me and says, ‘I guess that means you’re at a loose end? With Raymond indisposed.’

The reply that comes to mind is ‘I wouldn’t say that’, with some self-important hefting of my
cute
tablet, but now the opportunity is there I find I don’t actually want to brush Harry off. So what I say instead is, ‘Looseish. Why’d you ask?’

‘I thought I was invited for lunch. I’ve an empty belly and no one to eat with.’ He mimes dejection, despair, with alarming physical fluency. ‘Come on, soldier, quit your post. Join me for a bite.’ He tips his head towards the street. ‘What do you say?’

‘I should hang on here. He’s pretty ill.’

‘He can’t spare you for an hour?’

‘We’re expecting Asha…’

‘I solemnly promise I will take you someplace
quite
interesting.’

‘Why are we having this conversation? I’ve already eaten.’

‘Come watch me eat. You won’t be disappointed.’

‘By watching you eat?’

‘By where you’ll do it.’

I hesitate. As it happens I’ve a good reason to go with Harry, which is the fact that for several minutes everything I’ve read about Resolute has been making me want to flee, to run away from Ess and the hotel, anywhere, with anyone. But that’s not why I’m hesitating, not why I’m even thinking about doing this.

I’m still hesitating when it seems I’m also standing, shutting my tablet and slipping it into my bag, saying, ‘Why not? I’m hungry again anyway.’

Then we have an even more bizarre conversation.

As we reach the causeway Harry says, ‘So, Steven Strauss. What kind of man are you?’ I look at him and he’s grinning in a way that shows he knows exactly how bizarre this question is. I play along, sort of.

‘I’m not sure how to answer that. Can you be more specific?’

‘Are you married?’

‘Nope. I have someone, but… I’m not married.’

‘How about Raymond?’

‘Married? He used to be. Not any more.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. Does he “have someone” too?’

‘You’d have to ask him that.’ The truth is I don’t know. ‘What about you, Harry? Are you married? Do you have someone?’

‘Oh, no. No on both counts, sadly.’ He laughs. The grin of bizarreness has sunk into his face. He seems unable to form an expression that doesn’t contain some wicked trace of it. ‘You guys have different voices, accents…?’ he says.

‘We’re from different parts of the country. Uh, England.’ It’s true: Ess is from Yeovil, the rural south, while I’m from a large, ugly town in Lancashire, the urban north.

‘And your names… you won’t mind my saying you guys have some crazy names. I mean “Ess”. Raymond
Ess
. How does a person end up with a name like “Raymond Ess”?’

‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.’ At this point I decide I’m not above having a bit of fun with Harry. I say, ‘It could be some ancient, ancestral English name. He could be descended from an earl or something.’

‘Do you think so?’ Harry aims for a tone of polite interest, but in his lensed eyes it’s all there:
Magna Carta. Downton Abbey.

‘I wouldn’t put it past him.’ In fact I know it isn’t the case. Ess is not descended from an earl, or anything like one. ‘People have all sorts of crap in their background once you go looking for it. The question is: Why would you bother?’

‘You don’t think it’s important? The background, the history…?’

‘Why would I? What does it matter?’

‘Good for you.’ Harry nods vigorously. ‘Who needs it, right? History’s a pain in the ass. These days what even is it? It’s Nazis versus zombies, it’s cowboys versus aliens, it’s entertainment, it’s a movie.’ Warming to his theme, he shakes one hand out of its pocket and raises it rhetorically. ‘Not that I’m against that. Bring it on, I say. Let’s be a species that lives without history. Let’s put all that nonsense behind us, all those claims, those ties, those
burdens… Let’s be a species that watches movies and, you know, doesn’t
give
a shit.’

‘Harry,’ I say, ‘you’re a nutty guy.’ In fact I’ve taken in barely a word he was saying.

‘Why thank you, kind sir.’ He laughs, a short, shrill sound, like a sneeze.

As we walk along I find I don’t mind Harry so much after all. His straggly, anoraky presence is both irritating and curiously lulling. His size makes you think he’s going to be clumsy but it turns out his movements are confident, almost graceful. Despite his age – he must be at least seventy – he’s full of stealth and speed; the lumbering walk and frowning, elderly pauses are a sort of act. But what sort of act?

The question engages me only briefly. If Harry is a problem, he’s not a major one.

‘So!’ he says. ‘You kids are buying an antigravity machine!’

‘You’d have to ask the boss about that.’

‘Did you mention something earlier about Asha…?’

I did. I recall the slip bitterly. But what the hell does any of it even matter?

(It does. It does matter. Obviously it matters.)

‘Great lady,’ he blusters on, ‘model employee, but not what you’d call on open book. Can you believe she hasn’t told me
one
thing
about you guys? About you or your business here? Not in all this time. And so, I think understandably, over our fascinating conversation last night, my interest is more than a little piqued.’

‘Again,’ I say. ‘You should take it up with the boss.’

‘Sure.’ Harry breathes loudly through his nose: more old-guy theatrics. Now I’ve noticed it I can’t stop. ‘You’re very loyal to Raymond, aren’t you, Steven?’

‘Am I?’

‘That’s what strikes me about you.’ The grin seems finally to have drained from his face. His mouth is serious, almost grim,
in the wild twists of his beard. ‘You are strikingly loyal to your boss. Why is that, do you think?’

‘Oh, well, you know,’ I say. ‘We’ve a lot of history.’

We do. Part of it is this.

One Saturday morning four years ago I woke up to find myself lying in a hospital bed. Ess was sitting in a chair next to me. I couldn’t get over the way he was dressed. More than anything else – the bed, the room, the medical clutter, monitors, breathing equipment – what astonished me was the sight of his jeans, his patterned jumper, his open-necked shirt. I’d never seen his weekend attire before, and it was incredibly exciting.

‘Mr Strauss!’ he said, seeing I was awake. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Not sure,’ I replied. Speaking was difficult. As if I were having to operate my lips and tongue by remote control.

‘That’s all right.’ He looked tired. His eyelids were red, his cheeks gritty, glittery with stubble. There was also something subtly wrong with his hair. ‘By any chance do you know what’s happened to you?’

I didn’t. My mind contained only images. Night sky, slumbrous cloud. Carious brick and haggard tarmac. A street of wheeling light, of scrambling levels of brilliance – takeaway neon, slot-machine spangle – suddenly rising, suddenly falling.

‘It seems you’ve had an accident,’ Ess said then, with an air of delirious forced jollity. ‘Actually there’s no
seems
about it, you’ve had an accident. You were struck by a car. Late last night. Do you remember that?’

Did I? There was something: a distant sensation of force, of massive displacement, glancing volume.

‘You were in town late last night. You were crossing a road, a side street… Not that there’s anything to worry about. I want to make that absolutely clear. Any minute now one of the quacks’ll
come in and say the same thing. You’re going to be rather sore, probably going to feel like you’ve been roughed up for a couple of days, headaches, bruises, that sort of caper. But nothing broken, thank goodness. Just a touch of, let’s say,
joggling about
. A modicum of joggling about to your back, to give it its technical name, but no cause for concern whatsoever. You’re going make what’s called “a full recovery”.’

I tried to nod, but this was difficult to do too. I wasn’t in any pain; for now my main sensation was one of lightness. My whole body felt light, insubstantial, its separate parts independently fluttering and flickering.

‘The important thing now is to get you well again. Take it from me, that’s priority one. Any minute now your mum and dad are going to waltz in here with some corroborative quack, and don’t worry, at that point I’ll give you some peace. I only want to make sure you know that whatever it takes, however long it takes, we’re all in this with you.’

Ess paused. While I waited I seemed to rise towards the ceiling, which was covered with thousands of shiny dark specks. But were the specks on the ceiling or inside my eyes?

‘Naturally I’m referring to this, to the accident. But also to the other matter.’

I looked at him, his clenched and priestly face, his streaked eyelids, his sandpapery cheeks. An agonising thought occurred to me. Had he been sitting there
all night
?

‘We’re going to do everything we can. Resolute, the board, the entire company. Because we care about you, because we love you, and from now until you don’t need us any more, this is priority one.’

I’m about to ask Harry if we’re far from this interesting lunch venue he’s promised me when he steps off the pavement and waves for me to follow him along a narrow, stone-walled alleyway. I hesitate, my feet teetering on broken stones, then follow.

After several worrying turns the alleyway opens out on to a large, surprisingly quiet and leafy square enclosed by high walls and dominated on one side by a construction site. The rest of it is scorched earth, bright clay, a dazzlingly complicated tree. At first the eerie hush of the place makes me think Harry and I must be here alone. Then I see we are not.

‘What do you think?’ he asks, with a sweep of his hand at the construction site. It’s not immediately clear whether something is being put up or taken down, built or unbuilt.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘My pride and joy, my labour of love, my pet project and old-man’s folly. Otherwise known as The Harry Altman School for Wayward Girls.’ He laughs, then adds with a startled look, ‘That’s a joke. I mean it’s going to be a school. The wayward girls thing, that’s a joke. Let’s have a look around.’

As we approach the site we pass groups of young men sitting quietly in the square, to whom Harry calls with a raised hand of greeting. The men look up at him, nod then look away. Harry stops to talk to one man in particular, the site foreman, or ‘the redoubtable Rajeev’. Harry introduces us, and Rajeev nods and smiles to me pleasantly enough, and we shake hands, me stooping while he continues to sit with his friends. Harry asks Rajeev if he could be prevailed upon to find us some lunch, and Rajeev nods easily.

Harry and I pass on to the site. Up close, there’s not a lot more to see than vague depths of foundations, bags of cement, piles of tubing. Still, Harry insists on directing my attention to various blocks of unoccupied air while saying stuff like, ‘Here’s the kitchen’ and ‘There’s the nursery’ and ‘Over yonder, note the
sanctuary of the staff room’ until I have no choice but to take a step back, breathing noisily through my lips.

‘Sorry, Harry. Don’t know you’re talking about. I can’t see it.’

‘Ah!’ He is triumphant. ‘Because it’s not there! And what on earth can we do about that?’ He rubs his face eagerly. ‘I’ll show you what.’

Harry now leads me to one of three prefabricated offices on the edge of the site. The office contains a couple of garden chairs and a card table with a laptop on it. The laptop is connected to an unfamiliar chunk of hardware – a sort of steely microscope.

‘You know what this is?’

‘No idea what that is.’

‘Then allow me to show you.’ He fiddles with the laptop then turns back to me grinning. ‘Sit, sit. You’ll want to see this.’

We sit in the garden chairs. For a while there’s nothing to see. Then with an abrupt bony click the barrel of the microscope-looking thing descends and its tip starts darting about on its platform – extruding, fusing, hectically welding.

Twenty minutes later Harry goes to the microscope, which has retracted its barrel with a series of further bony clicks, and he takes something from the platform. The something is bright green, plastic, about the size of a paperback book. It is a slightly warm, stunningly detailed model of an American-suburb style junior school.

‘3D printout.’ Harry smiles. ‘The architect, old pal of mine, Belgian guy, he sends an email. He sits in his office in Brussels and he sends like
a zip file.
And we hit a button here and we just print it right out. A sketch, a model, a working design in three dimensions.’

‘It’s fantastic,’ I say, turning the model between my hands. It is.

‘Soon it won’t be just models we’re getting this way. In a couple more years, it’ll be the buildings. We’ll hit a button and we’ll print out the whole building. The whole street. The whole
city.’ He takes the model from me and examines it, his smile as he admires the thing obscurely melancholy, as if his own thought has unexpectedly saddened him. I feel I should comfort him, console him, though I don’t do this.