The Weightless World (4 page)

By the time we break free of the jam we’ve left behind the neon squiggles of the city centre and we’re speeding through a district of quiet residential streets – spruce greenery, high walls – then without warning the cab swerves out on to a spectacular coastal road, the Arabian Sea colossally massed on one side, corporate height and glitter arrayed on the other. ‘The Queen’s Necklace,’ Ess confides knowledgeably. ‘Marine Drive. Playground of India’s hyperrich.’ His breath smells thickly of alcohol. He must have had a drink or two – or three, or four – on the roof terrace after I left to Skype Alice.

We leave the cab at the edge of a complex approach system and Ess leads the way into the ethereal enormousness of the Oberoi, the wide spaces serving no visible purpose, a dish of flawless white pebbles here, a freestanding screen of trickling glass there. The place is so luxurious it seems impossible that we’re not going to get kicked out. But Ess goes recklessly striding on and somehow we pass unchecked to a dim bar high above the city, its windows encompassing the splintery sickle of the lighted district below.

‘Raymond! Steven!’ Harry lumbers towards us with open arms. He’s dressed more smartly than he was this morning, in a tweedy brown suit and a checked shirt and bootlace tie, but just the same he looks as if he’s been awake for about fifteen minutes. At least the specs he’s wearing are just specs, wire-rimmed, prescription-lensed.

‘Isn’t this place something?’ he says, once we’re seated at a table with our drinks – his beer, Ess’s whisky, my orange juice. ‘I love it, but it scares the hell out of me. I can only muster the courage to bring myself up here like once every six months. So I thought while you fine fellows were in town…’

‘Oh, it’s magnificent,’ Ess declares, somewhat boorishly, ‘but Harry, you and I must be mindful of my young associate.’ He presents me, with a flourish, as if I were a sideshow exhibit. ‘Remember, this is Mr Strauss’s first visit. His head must be spinning. If we keep swatting him from one extreme to another like this, he may end up feeling overwhelmed.’

Harry looks at me. ‘Are you feeling overwhelmed, Steven?’

I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I say anyway, ‘It’s a lot to take in.’

‘We don’t want him running away with the idea that’s all there is to the place, do we?’ Ess says. ‘Inequitable extremes. Filthy poor and filthy rich.’

‘What place are we talking about now?’ Harry asks, all wide-eyed innocence in his clunky prescription lenses. ‘Mumbai? Maharashtra? India?’

‘Mumbai. I would say Mumbai, certainly.’

‘Sure.’ Harry sips his beer. ‘Though I do think it’s kind of like that.’ He looks at Ess, then at me, then at Ess again. ‘Extremes. Rich and poor. I think that’s kind of the deal.’

‘Harry!’ Ess laughs. ‘We need to educate this young man. It’s our duty, is it not, as his elders and… well, as his elders at least.’ He veers across the table towards Harry in a way that makes me wonder just how many drinks he had while I was talking to Alice. ‘Today we took a stroll along the causeway, and for some time we were shadowed by the most adorable wee beggar girl. Nothing out of the ordinary, but you should have seen this young man’s face! Oh, the pain, the torment! So you see, Harry, it’s nothing less than our duty to
explain
to him…’

‘Yes, sir,’ Harry says, folding his arms. ‘Uh, what are we explaining?’

‘The complex reality at work here. Certainly to the naïve eye it may appear that the city shows intolerable economic extremes, but that’s only the surface. It is, let’s say, even a form of theatre.
The forlorn beggar girl trailing along the street makes for a heart-rending sight, and indeed the heart of many a tourist is rent, and many a guilty rupee ends up folded into that tear-stained little hand. But it’s theatre, is it not? The beggar girl is an actress. She lives in a perfectly decent home on the outskirts of Mumbai and she works for an entrepreneur who drives her to the causeway each day, fits her into her costume, daubs on her adorable smuts, even sources her props. Dozens of them, these wee actresses, walking round with babies in their arms which at the end of the day they hand back with their earnings. Which our canny entrepreneurial friend, let’s not doubt, eagerly adds to his Kalashnikov fund.’ Ess sits back, pleased with the comprehensiveness of his analysis. ‘It’s not poverty, not poverty
as such
. It’s a business. It’s a trick.’

For some time Harry has been nodding, as if in vigorous agreement. Then he says, ‘When I first came out here I thought that way. Now I just think, “Poor’s poor”. I think, “What the hell. Give money”.’

Ess is speechless. Then he says, ‘But that’s
ludicrous
.’

‘You’re right.’ Harry makes his open-armed surrender gesture again. ‘It’s a trick, an illusion. What did you say? It’s theatre. Last time I checked, people pay for that, right? For entertainment and all?’

For a moment Ess looks appalled. Then he throws back his whisky and starts to laugh. Harry starts to laugh too, so I start to laugh too.

Ess drinks two more glasses of whisky then teeters off to the bathroom. Harry takes out his phone. I’m happy to see that it’s a piece of shit: not quite the Neolithic axe head Ess makes do with, but a good five generations behind mine. Benignly reviewing its screen, he says, ‘Wow. Your boss is
bombed
, isn’t he?’

‘He’s on holiday.’

‘I thought the two of you were here on business.’

‘Bit of both. Some business, some pleasure.’

‘I’m not judging. I can only imagine the kind of pressure he’s under. You Resolute kids must be feeling it at the moment.’

‘It’s a bad time for us.’

‘But you’ll turn it around, right?’ He pats my arm without actually touching it. ‘You’ll weather the storm. Hold on for the safe waters and blue skies.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘We’re all going to lose our jobs.’

Ess flounders back to the table and starts telling a long, rambling story that no one listens to. Harry Altman in his wavery prescriptions is wearing a look that makes me nervous. Then, at the nearest thing to a natural break in Ess’s narrative, he strikes. Eyes wide, arms folded, he shifts fractionally forward in his chair and says quietly, ‘You know, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but the question that most interests me is why you gentlemen are out here at all.’

‘Is that so?’ Ess seems surprised.

‘I am really most interested in that.’

‘We told you,’ I say. ‘Some business…’

‘Some pleasure, sure. Though it’s the business part that I’m really interested in. You mentioned you were here to buy…’

‘Fervently so,’ Ess says. ‘
Perfervidly
here as buyers.’

‘If you don’t mind my asking, here to buy what?’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘oh…’ Suddenly I’m leaning over the table, pressing down on it with the palms of both hands. I’m trying to hide Ess, to cover him, shield him. ‘I’m not sure we…’

‘Now, Mr Strauss.’ Ess grips my shoulder. ‘This is Harry we’re talking to. I think we can deal plainly with our friend Harry, can we not?’

With a woozy hand on my shoulder he signals for me to sit back down in my chair. I sit back down in my chair. There’s
nothing I can do, nothing to prevent this from happening, to keep Ess from making a fool of himself, from revealing to this sanctimonious old bastard what a mad and broken soul he is. I cover the bottom half of my face with my hand. I want to cover the top half of it with my other hand, but manage not to do that.

Ess smiles, goggled with drunkenness. He looks as if he might slide out of his chair at any second. ‘We’re here, would you believe, to buy an antigravity machine.’

Now my free hand actually flies up to cover my eyes. At the last instant I redirect it and use the fingers to scratch, stroke, soothe my horribly burning temples.

Harry blinks. Then he says, ‘Okay.’

‘What say you to that, Harry? What say you… to that?’

‘Sure. Antigravity’s an interesting field. There are some great people working in it right now. There’s that Russian fellow, Podkletnov, right? Of course there’s always talk about NASA… And isn’t there an outfit in Switzerland that’s gotten close?’

‘Ah, yes,’ Ess says, swilling importantly in his chair, ‘plenty of people have got
close
to it. The difference is we
have
it.’

Slowly Harry smiles. Lost in the straggles of his beard, the smile is hard to make out. It’s nothing, hardly anything at all. But for some reason this smile ignites in me a brief flare of panic, as if the smile is not the only thing he is hiding, as if there is something else, something important, he is concealing about his sack-like person.

I became a builder
, he had said.
Among, ah, other things.

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he says mildly.

Some time after midnight Ess crashes into the backseat of another yellow-hooded cab at the edge of the Oberoi’s forbidding access system.

‘Well I think that was a
terrific
night, don’t you?’ he says.

‘No,’ I say, ‘I don’t.’

‘And isn’t Harry just… a
lovely
man?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘No, no, no he isn’t.’

Next morning there’s no sign of Ess at breakfast. On the roof terrace I eat a bowl of cereal, drink two cups of coffee, uncomfortably eye the hotel’s other guests, a largely European middle-aged crowd, airily muttering at their tables. I overhear talk of the Bangalore bombing – the perpetrators, the death toll – but I’m not really listening. Where’s Ess?

At nine, when most of the guests have already flip-flopped back across the tiles, I head down to Ess’s room on the sixth floor. It takes me a long time to find the room: I’ve seen it only once before, late on the night that we arrived. I tap lightly on the door; get no response; tap more heavily. I’m already starting to think I may have come to the wrong room when a cleaner comes by, grinning and nodding over his broom. Pointing at the door, he says, ‘Your friend? You look for your friend?’ I nod and the young cleaner shakes his head and leads me with elaborate courtesy to the other end of the floor and a door I immediately recognise as Ess’s. I knock and the cleaner waits with me, grinning, nodding. After a while the grin fades, the nod ceases. The cleaner continues to wait. Then he looks at me with very clear, very adult, scornful eyes – eyes that contain unimaginable pressures – and he turns and walks away, the brushes of his broom softly hissing over the tiled hallway.

Finally the door opens a crack. I glimpse a bushy eye, sense heavy breath. The eye vanishes but the sense of the breath remains as I push past into Ess’s room.

The curtains are shut but even so I can tell the room is a lot nicer than mine – bigger, sleeker, with a smartscreen on the wall and, I suppose, a shower that dispenses hot water. Ess is already back in the bed, the plush duvet pulled up round his neck.

‘Just thought I’d see how you are,’ I call across to him, not sure whether or not I want to approach the bed. ‘Just a bit concerned when you didn’t show at breakfast.’

‘Tired,’ he says eventually. ‘Jetlag. Catching up with me.’

A likely story. He’s hungover, pure and simple.

But what I say is, ‘It was bound to get you sooner or later.’

He breathes, moves under the duvet, coarsely coughs.

‘So, uh, do you think you’ll rest for a while?’

Another cough then a grunt yes.

‘That’s probably best. Should I pop back in, say, round lunchtime?’

A reedy sigh then another grunt yes.

‘Oh, yeah…’ I take a step towards the bed. ‘Something weird happened just now. There was this cleaner…’ But I dismiss the thought, retreat from the bed. ‘Doesn’t matter. See you at lunchtime.’

Outside on the hallway I carefully draw the door shut after me.

Jetlag! A likely story. I know a hangover when I see one.

I should be laughing my head off. But I’m not. For some reason I’m not.

I don’t know exactly when Ess became ill – I doubt anyone does, even Ess, even Ess’s doctors, of whom he ended up having a lot.

Things reached crisis point last July, but there had been warning signs for months before that. The first faint glimmers had appeared much earlier, even years earlier. I think I saw the start of it about the time of the Skycoach deal.

The Skycoach deal was a deal that went very badly wrong in October 2011. By then Resolute was already in serious trouble; still, dark murmurs of
the Skycoach imbroglio
or
the Skycoach fiasco
or
the Skycoach fuck-up
circulate the company corridors to this day. Ess never talks about it. The whole thing made a deep impression on him.

The worst part of it was that the Skycoach deal was Ess from start to finish: he came up with it, he sweet-talked everyone else into going with it, he hopped across the channel twice a month to exchange air-kisses with the French manufacturers and otherwise sell the idea that Resolute was the only company in the world that could build the wings their latest, greatest Skycoach iteration required and demanded – no,
deserved
.

Ess was extremely good at this sort of thing. From Resolute’s earliest days he’d been the charmer, the showbiz smoothie who tempted back more than one lost contract with his too-white teeth and his baby-blue eyes. Certainly his magic was strong at Resolute and while the Skycoach deal was entering its final draft he persuaded the board to invest heavily in machinery and personnel geared specifically to the construction of the Skycoach wings. After all, the new Skycoach was going to be a behemoth – the biggest, heaviest civil airliner in history, with a tip-to-tip wingspan exceeding 78 metres and requiring wing units far larger than any Resolute had ever made. In order to build units large enough and durable enough to withstand the stresses of the new megaliner, Ess argued for an entire new assembly line as well as a dedicated team of specialist engineers. His arguments succeeded, and the board gave him what he wanted. Resolute’s total investment in the still-unsigned Skycoach deal came to a little over eight million pounds.

In October 2011, after almost two years of negotiations, Skycoach invited Ess to visit its head offices in Toulouse to sign the contract and toast the beginning of a new Anglo-French
partnership. In celebratory mood, he asked me to go along with him. Until then I’d never accompanied him abroad; I’d carried his folders on one- and two-day jaunts across England, but in fact the majority of my work as his PA was managing his phones and email while he was off in Saudi Arabia or somewhere, schmoozing a sheik. So the trip to Toulouse was the first, and the only other, time Ess and I went abroad together.

I am not well travelled. My family didn’t take foreign holidays while I was growing up, and until I was twenty the most exotic journey I’d made had been a ten-day walking tour of the Lake District that I undertook with four friends the summer after I left school. While I was at university I went to Greece for three days with a girlfriend. That’s pretty much it. Late last year I went to New York with Alice, but when Ess and I flew out to Toulouse in 2011 I had spent less than a week of my twenty-odd years anywhere that wasn’t England.

It was, therefore, a fairly incredible eight days (I don’t count the ninth). No doubt my inexperience of foreign parts came into it, and no doubt the Skycoach people put on a good show, but still my enduring memory is of Ess and I drifting from one sunny pleasure dome to another, drinking strong coffee, tasting strong cheese, and never paying for anything. Each day we were escorted by an elegant company representative who spoke romantically about her own dream of one day owning a vineyard in the region. In similarly romantic terms Ess praised her employers for their commitment to working with small, detail-led outfits such as Resolute, for their eschewal of the growing corporate tendency to work only with megalithic consortia, the multinational monsters crowding everyone else out of the field.

On the evening of the eighth day, reclining on the balcony of his executive suite, Ess grew especially sombre and Caesar-like. In heroic silence he sat absorbing the city. He whirled
the brandy in his glass, pursed his lips. Later, maybe somewhat drunk, he began to speak in the loose philosophical vein that always betokened his deepest contentment.

On the morning of the ninth day, the day of the signing, Ess and I met for breakfast in the hotel restaurant. We were still waiting for our eggs when Ess received a call. The news came at nightmarish speed. The signing was off. The deal was off. Skycoach had decided to go another way. To give the wing contract to a well-known Anglo-Australian-American consortium. To one of the monsters.

I took the scheduled flight back to Bristol that afternoon. For two further days Ess held on in Toulouse. I don’t know what he did in that time, but I imagine he did everything he could think of to persuade the Skycoach high command to reconsider, to tempt back the lost contract, as he’d done so many times before. Well, this time he didn’t do it. His magic failed him and he came back to Resolute with a calm, sculpted, gradual manner that said he would now take whatever he was required to take.

Which he did. The fallout from the collapsed deal was dreadful – the company lost its millions, defaulted on several major loans and had to sack another 500 people on top of the 300 new hires who were at once redirected to the job centre – but he took it, every day, for what must have been the worst year of his life. Predictably there were calls for his resignation. But Ess wouldn’t resign. If he resigned he wouldn’t be able to make everything all right again. Even then there was a touch of that mania.

And yes, the deal was madness, and yes, it was Ess’s fault. But the board played its part too. It shouldn’t have given him what he wanted. But the board had always given him what he wanted. Because until the Skycoach deal Ess had always been right.

And anyway, like I said, Resolute was already in trouble.

What I remember most strongly from that time was the look on Ess’s face in the hotel restaurant in Toulouse, when he got
the call saying that the deal was off. I remember how his eyes steadied and seemed to stare right into it: Resolute’s lost millions, the scrapheap of new machinery, the vanished jobs, scuttled lives. Abruptly he did his nose-twitch thing – a scurrying bob of the tip. Then he did it again. Then again, then again. After he hung up he couldn’t speak to me for several seconds while the mask of his face kept sucking down into his mouth, scraping and dragging helplessly over his upper teeth. Then it decelerated and stopped and I didn’t see it again, the twitch, not like that, for another two years.

And I think: was it Skycoach that broke him, or was it the way he’d always been right – the way, until he took that call in Toulouse, he had never failed?

I walk down three flights of stairs – still unable to face the lift attendant, grinning on his stool – return to my room and for an hour or so try to make sense of the document Ess and I were working on yesterday morning, the Product Development Plan, or PDP. But it’s hopeless. Whatever I may have said, the PDP isn’t good – isn’t good at all. It doesn’t help that Ess won’t give me any proper numbers; but really numbers are the least of our problems. Our greatest problem is that the whole thing’s gibberish. Page after page of flinty babble, like a survivalist manifesto. Not that it matters. Ess thinks that on our triumphal return to Resolute we will be expected to present the PDP to the board. Well, we won’t. The board won’t be expecting to see a document of any kind.

I leave the hotel, moving quickly, determined not to encounter the cleaner who gave me that weird look outside Ess’s room. On the stairs I pass a pair of hotel employees, young men in overalls, carrying armloads of sheets, leaning against the wall,
talking. As I take the turn onto the next set of stairs they break out simultaneously in soft laughter.

Thinking I may as well have another go at finding a present for Alice, I head to the street bazaar Ess and I explored yesterday (
the causeway
, is it called?) and stumble along between the veiled stalls, pausing now and then to let the slow, dense drifts of tourists in front of me break up and twirl apart like ice floes. I realise the only way to look at the stuff for sale is to scan the contents of each stall while more or less continuing to move past it; pause for even a second and the handsome trader jolts to his feet, spreads his arms, and then there’s an awkward interval while he beckons to you and you nod and smile and wave a hand no, no, and edge your way horribly out of his orbit.

I can’t see anything I want to buy, anything I want to give Alice. Is there anything here she would like me to give her? I don’t know. All I know is, for Alice, objects are never just objects. She takes things in terms of their aura, their affect, their invisible, unguessable halo. In the end it doesn’t matter whether I give her a diamond ring or a lump of coal; it’ll still be all:
How did you feel when you bought this?
And:
But what does it mean?

Then I have a brilliant idea. I stumble to the nearest stall and buy the first thing I see – a piece of wood about the size of a matchbox, carved into the shape of an elephant. I ask the trader what price he wants and I pay it – I don’t haggle. The trader doesn’t seem to be offended. He just takes my money, folds my purchase into a brown paper bag ands hands it to me. And I stumble on my way, well satisfied.

Obviously the elephant isn’t a present for Alice. It’s a present for Daniel, her brother. And it doesn’t matter what I give Daniel, because he’s seventeen and male and whatever I give him he’ll examine disdainfully before chucking it into a corner of his room and saying, ‘Cheers,’ then making some comment
about my hair loss. So no, it doesn’t matter what I give Daniel. Because the present for Daniel is really a present for Alice.

I’m still feeling fairly pleased with myself – thinking what a bizarre thing it is anyway, buying presents: you buy an object from one person, with money, then you give it to another person, for
nothing
– when a kid I’ve never seen before comes padding along next to me with the hot murmur, ‘Hash, hash, hash…’ When this happened yesterday, I freaked out somewhat. Today I smile, straighten my back, declare calmly and loudly, ‘No thank you,’ and stride away from the kid with blithe insouciance.

I feel so great about this that on my way back to the hotel I stop at a roadside cabin and buy a packet of cigarettes. Nodding to the doorman, who appears not to notice me but goes on talking with the group of men who stand round him at all times, more hotel employees or not, who can tell, I sit on the steps and smoke a celebratory cigarette. Arriving on the roof terrace for lunch, after nine flights of stairs, I smoke another one.

A little after twelve I take a cup of coffee and a plate of dal and rice down to Ess’s room. My cautious knock is met with his smart: ‘Come!’

Inside Ess is a different man. He’s sitting up in bed, smiling broadly in his reading glasses, a book in his lap. When he sees the cup and the plate, he puts his book aside and rubs his hands together.

‘Fabulous! Just what the doctor ordered. Do you think you could possibly open the curtains? I’ve been delaying the inevitable, but I think my poor peepers may finally be back up to snuff… Ah! That wasn’t so bad. And could you fetch my briefcase? It’s there. Yes, there. And my laptop, possibly? Just next to it. Yes, there.’