Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

I didn’t come here to argue and bargain and transact.

‘How much?’ I say. The evening has now been spoiled.

‘Two hundred American,’ she says. ‘This is what Mila promise.’

Two hundred? Out of five hundred? Mila gets to keep three hundred bucks plus tip? I’ve never heard of a booking agent taking 60 per cent plus. It’s unconscionable. I cannot be party to such an arrangement. The Mila connection can no longer be.

I’m carrying cash. I pay two hundred dollars and make an announcement. ‘I’m sorry, but I have a headache. I will go home now.’

Her eyes narrow even more; one glimpses the steppe, wild horses, the Great Khan. ‘You are angry? You make problem for me?’

‘No problem,’ I say. ‘I’m happy, really. I just have a headache.’ I smile. ‘It was nice meeting you.’

I see myself to the door. It’s bye-bye, my Black Belt, and it’s farewell and adieu, Godfrey Pardew.

Another solo celibate night in The Situation it is.

I get in, or on, the Pasha for a twenty-minute session. After three hundred seconds, I can’t take one more rub of the roller. Off, or out, I get.

Night has fallen, and it’s safe for me to approach the windows and look out. When I try this in daylight, I keep re-seeing that shadow, or bird, or dropping thing, out of the corner of my eye, and I find myself jerking my head leftwards time and again, always too late to catch sight of it. It’s uncontrollable. It does no good to remind myself that in all probability I saw nothing in the first place and my post-traumatic flashbacks, if that’s what we’re talking about, are founded on a trauma that never occurred. The falling shadow nonetheless appears; my head nonetheless jerks over my shoulder. This has been going on for a few days, and it’s not getting any better, i.e., it’s getting worse. It’s got to the point where I can’t take in the view from my apartment until the sun has set and all is dark. Is this what I’ve come to? Nocturnality? I have to keep a vampire’s hours?

What with the moonlight and the lunar/man-made glow of the Marina, I have no problem discerning the pale X of Project X — the ‘mah-kp’.

I permutate the vowels: ‘make-up’; ‘muck-up’; ‘mock-up’.

Mockup. Let’s consult the sum of all human knowledge. Let’s Wiki it.

In manufacturing and design, a mockup, or mock-up, is a scale or full-size model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, design evaluation, promotion, and other purposes.

No mention of the construction of buildings. I Google ‘mockup + building’. Here we go: a ‘pre-construction mockup’ is not uncommon, it seems. It seems that ‘scale representations’ of ‘exterior wall systems’ and ‘other structures’ may be useful to builders, engineers and architects, for a variety of purposes.

It follows that Project X is a scale representation of part of another building. It is, if I correctly recall what Ali told me, a representation of part of the ‘very big tower’ they’re building ‘somewhere else’.

So Project X isn’t a project at all. It’s a dummy run. It’s a mockup. There’s no actual residential proposition going up down there. The action has moved somewhere else. Privilege Bay is toast and The Situation is fucked. The Uncompromising Few and the Pioneers of Luxury™ and the Dreamers of New Dreams must be re-named.

I’m going to bed.

And in the morning, immediately on waking up, I am jolted by gladness as I see blue sky through the window, and spontaneously I get out of bed and empty my bladder. The joy of this routine — invariably, the happiest time of my day — is, unfortunately, a simple matter of oblivious recurrence: in the drowsiness of renewed consciousness, the current blue morning is indistinguishable from the blue mornings of yore. I forget where I am and where things stand and what lies ahead. Then I remember.

It’s the kid’s last day. I’ll get through it. Then Ali and I will regroup.

There’s no sign of Alain at the office, though. His driver usually deposits him at 11 a.m. sharp. It’s not till an hour later that a Batros shows — and it’s Sandro. He makes straight for my chair.

‘OK, so who is this guy — Ali,’ he says.

‘What do you mean, who is he?’

‘That’s what I mean: who is he? Why’s he here?’

‘He’s my assistant. He’s worked in this office for a long time. You’ve seen him a million times.’

Sandro says, ‘What are his qualifications? Where’d he go to college? Where’re his references?’

What is he talking about? ‘Sandro, he’s an office boy. He gets paid peanuts. I don’t need references. He’s a superb worker. I trust him totally.’

Sandro nods. ‘You trust him. Right.’

‘Yeah, I do. He’s one hundred per cent honest.’

‘More honest than my son?’

‘What?’

‘You’re saying he’s more honest than my son?’

‘I don’t understand the question,’ I say, even though I do understand that this is big trouble.

He smiles at me like a mafioso. ‘Alain says he didn’t shake your guy down. He says your guy is making it up.’

‘Why would he make it up?’

‘You tell me,’ Sandro says. Oh no — he’s spotted my rubber stamps. He takes one and bangs it on my blotter. ‘Why would my son lie?’

I say, ‘Alain’s a terrific kid, but he’s a kid. Kids are always making stuff up, saying stuff that’s not accurate, denying stuff. They’re kids. They screw up.’

‘These things are really great,’ Sandro says. He’s trying out another stamp, pressing it into the wrong inkpad. Bang . ‘You made Alain go with this guy to the bathroom?’ Bang.

Very carefully, like a lawyer, I say, ‘You requested that Alain be weighed. Alain wished to be weighed in the bathroom, which was entirely appropriate. I asked Ali to accompany Alain to the bathroom to take note of the weight readings. He did not accompany Alain into the stall. Alain was in the stall by himself. When Alain stood on the scale, Ali could see the reading through the gap at the bottom of the stall. All he ever saw of Alain was his feet. If you recall, you oversaw the procedure the first day it happened.’

‘Don’t tell me what I recall and what I don’t recall,’ Sandro says. Bang. ‘You let this guy, this stranger, take my son to the bathroom and be alone with him there.’

I’m trained for these situations. You have to push back, firmly and calmly. ‘I put in place, with your approval, an appropriate procedure for carrying out your instructions.’

He grabs another stamp. Bang. Bang. ‘I asked Alain if he was comfortable with the arrangement. He told me he wasn’t. I said, Why not? No answer. I asked him did this guy, Ali, did this guy try anything funny. You know what he said? Nothing. I’m like, Did he or didn’t he? He didn’t want to talk about it.’

He’s building a case out of a non-answer to a leading question? Has he gone mad?

‘He told me something else,’ Sandro says. Now he’s handling one of my embossers. ‘Your friend is an illegal. That right?’

‘He’s a bidoon. I e-mailed you about it a long time ago. What about it?’

‘You know what? I’ll be the judge of what you e-mailed me, OK?’

‘I’ll send you a copy, to refresh your memory,’ I say.

‘Don’t worry about it, he’s fired,’ Sandro says. ‘I don’t want to see his face again.’ He says, ‘How does this thing work?’ He’s put a sheet of paper in the embosser’s jaws. ‘Do I just …?’ Crump. ‘That’s neat.’

‘If you fire Ali, I’m quitting.’ I say this serenely, because I’ve thought through and fantasized this scenario many times. I am ninety-nine per cent sure Eddie will be in my corner. He’s not going to lose a high-value asset (me) on account of his crazy brother’s whims.