One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (12 page)

Simone slid open the door to the private terrace and walked outside. There were still remnants of transparent polythene where the edges of the sunken jacuzzi abutted the terrace’s tiles. A smattering of plasterdust betrayed that the tub had never been filled; nor was it likely to be until the whole monstrous hulk was ultimately towed somewhere a damn sight warmer. On either side, shallow channels cut in the floor optimistically awaited earth and pot‐
plants. Simone walked to the end of the balcony and swept the dust from its rail with a paper hanky from her pocket. She leaned forward on her elbow and sipped from her glass, looking down upon the absurd sprawl that was the Floating Island Paradise Resort.

Hutchison’s Folly.

It was the consummation of Gavin’s ambitions, and one rare thing they both agreed on was that there could be no more appropriate monument to the achievements of his career. Their perspectives upon said monument and said career were where they diverged.

The history of tourism was replete with horrible ideas, most of which had unfortunately been horrible enough to succeed. In his time, Gavin had implemented just about all of the established ones and contributed a few stinkers of his own. But now he had come up with possibly the most horrible idea yet conceived in an industry that had made a sacrament of vulgarity.

When the technology allowed, Simone believed, we would one day see rotund Glaswegians in garments bearing the legend: ‘My pal went to the second moon of Jupiter and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’ – these being gifts from their radiation‐
blistered neighbours, who will have at length regaled them of where to get the best full English breakfast on Neptune, while complaining that the Martians
still
haven’t learned to do a decent fish supper.

‘Make the world England’ had been the motto of imperialist ambition. Where invasion and colonisation had failed, tourism was rampantly succeeding. The poet Hugh McDiarmid once said that England destroyed nations not by conquest but by pretending they didn’t exist, words which went a long way towards explaining, for instance, why centuries of Spanish culinary heritage had been wiped off menus to make way for ‘bubble and squeak’.

Meanwhile Scotland had neither alibi nor mitigation for the charge of complicity. It might offer its usual excuse for absolutely everything – ‘a big boy done it and ran away’ – except that too many witnesses had seen it helping the aforementioned big boy, and not just on this occasion either. For every Balearic bar‐
pump dispensing Watney’s Red Barrel or Tetley Bitter, there was one spewing McEwan’s Lager or Tartan Special; nor were the locals going to flog the Jocks much paella until they’d sussed a way to batter and deep‐
fry the stuff.

Gavin appreciated this, although he’d phrased it differently: ‘People don’t like anything foreign at the best of times; they certainly don’t want to be bothered with it while they’re away their holidays.’ He had built a career on pandering to the great British sense of unadventure. The success of Flyaway Holidays was propelled by his uncompromising belief in giving people what they wanted when they travelled abroad, viz: exactly the same things they got at home, but with better weather.

While the major holiday firms attempted to improve their market share through price wars, brochure redesigns and expensive TV campaigns, the smaller Flyaway carved out a steadily increasing slice for itself through the widening cycle of customer satisfaction and word of mouth. People who don’t like anything different aren’t going to risk a different holiday firm if they trust yours to deliver what they want; and what’s more they’ll have lots of friends who think the same way.

Flyaway had been dawdling myopically towards bankruptcy before Gavin arrived, or at least that was how he liked to tell it. Certainly Simone remembered he’d been advised against taking the post – even though it was the first he’d been offered – because the company wasn’t expected to be around much longer. As it turned out, he wasn’t so much their new graduate recruit as their last roll of the dice, but he came up double‐
sixes. On Gavin’s advice, they pulled out of everywhere but Spain, and even there abandoned destinations deemed too small or ‘too ethnic’, with the rule of thumb being that if there was a fishing village still surviving in the vicinity, forget it. They concentrated activities on the big resorts, and further focused their market by booking up a larger number of rooms in a smaller number of hotels. There was no point, Gavin reasoned, in buying up a few slots in a complex where Thomsons had half the joint to themselves, because not only could they undercut you in the brochures, but they would always have bigger clout with the hotelier.

Gavin’s strategy was to monopolise the premises Flyaway booked into, so that they could then tell the locals exactly how they wanted the place run: no point endeavouring to make the punters feel at home if some dago’s going to offer them
huevos con chorizo
when they wanted sausage and eggs. The Flyaway brochure consequently became the first to offer ‘guaranteed British menus’ in its hotels, but it was perhaps some of the smaller touches that cemented the firm’s reputation, such as always supplying sachets of Nescafe (or even better, Mellow Birds) at breakfast as an alternative to freshly brewed coffee, which everyone knew the continentals couldn’t get right.

It wasn’t a recipe for overnight success. Gavin’s scaling‐
down and focusing policies kept the company afloat that first sticky summer; growing back up again was going to take a while, but this time they were building on stronger foundations. Within five years Flyaway were setting new records for repeat visits to the same hotels, and their customer‐
loyalty figures were becoming the envy of the industry.

They expanded slowly but successfully in Spain, then had an initially cautious go at repeating the formula elsewhere. Cyprus was first, an obvious choice given its established British connections and the helpful fact that most of the natives spoke English. Malta followed, for similar obvious reasons. Then they had taken a leap of faith in having a crack at the more developed Greek islands. This had necessarily seen the company invest in its first purpose‐
built ‘resort hotels’, the extant local accommodation having proven unsuitable. There had been a great deal of nervousness at Flyaway about broaching this more developmental aspect of the industry, but it wasn’t shared by Gavin, who saw it as a natural progression. They had been knocking hotels into shape all along, so building them from scratch presented nothing but opportunity. His own reservations were about the destination, as despite all the bars, discos and reinforced concrete that had sprung up on Aegean shores, he feared the Greek islands might have too many connotations of rusticity in the minds of his target market. Even on Corfu, the fishing‐
village factor was still worryingly high.

As it turned out, he had nothing to worry about. The company name carried enough trust to fill the first hotels on their debut summer, then the crucial second‐
year figures bore out that word‐
of‐
mouth had been good and the Flyaway formula had prevailed even in Greece. With confidence soaring, a larger‐
scale strategy was planned, with the Black Sea outlined as the next area of expansion.

However, in Gavin’s view there was still one major obstacle to providing the perfect foreign holiday: foreigners. Flyaway’s brochures might be able to guarantee British food, but one thing they couldn’t guarantee was that when you went down to the beach after eating it, there wouldn’t be German towels draped imperialistically over all the sun‐
loungers.

Wasn’t it possible, he’d wondered aloud, to somehow harness the benefits of a foreign climate without the inconvenience of foreign living? Cruise liners had always aspired to this, but in Gavin’s experience they’d never quite managed it, as they traded the inconveniences of foreign living for the inconveniences of maritime living. No matter how big they built them, however many casinos and restaurants they incorporated, the whole affair tended to have an inescapable ‘indoors’ feel to it, like one big building that happened to have a swimming pool on the roof.

The cruise companies called their liners ‘floating hotels’, but the problem was that they were just that and nothing more. Gavin’s vision, Gavin’s truly, unprecedentedly horrible idea, was to build a whole floating resort. Or rather, more accurately,
not
floating – an entire, self‐
contained holiday destination built on what he called ‘a free‐
standing aquatic platform structure’.

Also known as an oil rig.

Hotels – plural – of differing size, design, standard and price range, set amid a vast, picturesque lido of interconnected swimming pools, waterways, sunken bars, jacuzzis, flumes and slides. There would be restaurants, pubs, shops, cinemas, bowling lanes, an ice rink, casinos, games arcades, bingo, a laser arena, a sports complex … every modern British urban leisure activity, but without the British urban clouds and rain. A resort where all the staff didn’t merely speak English, but spoke it in comfortingly familiar accents. A resort where you didn’t have to change money, because you could pay for everything in pounds, shillings and pence. A resort where there was no fear of being mugged or broken into by the local residents, because the only local residents had either wings or gills. And, crucially, a resort where you
could
be guaranteed never to see the front page of
Bild
staring back at you from your desired poolside spot.

To Simone, it sounded like hell on earth, or at least hell on water. Unfortunately, in accordance with the Goldwyn Principle, Gavin was seldom wrong about the popularity of such abominable notions, and he had little doubt about the viability of this one, not even when Flyaway refused to back it. They had already committed to their Aegean and Black Sea strategies, and in any case saw this as too radical a departure for a company now reaping benefits yielded by previous years of patience, prudence and stealth. The advance outlays would be enormous, it could be years before the facility began paying for itself, and all the while their core revenues might well be gobbled up by servicing the debt. The words ‘eggs’ and ‘basket’ featured prominently on the Flyaway feasibility document.

Gavin’s belief in his vision proved stronger than his belief in Flyaway. He resigned, cashing in all his share options and selling out his interest in the company to provide seed money. He went in search of backing elsewhere, and found it from an American firm called Delta Leisure. Delta had built a chain of plastic paradises in Mexico, eradicating all trace of local colour bar the tequila, in order that American tourists could escape American winters without forsaking Pizza Hut, Mickey‐
D’s or ESPN. Naturally, Delta and Gavin had a lot to say to each other.

Delta’s CEO, Jack Mills, viewed the project as a trial run: they’d back Gavin to give it a shot, and if it proved a hit, then there’d be Floating Island Paradise Resorts sprouting all along the Gulf Coast and the Baja California a few years hence. As far as Gavin was concerned, there was no ‘if’ about it. He had seen the future of holiday‐
making. He had believed in his vision. Now time and money would realise it.

A lot more time, as it happened, and a hell of a lot more money than he or anyone else imagined.

The project got off to a promising start when Gavin was able to negotiate the purchase of a decommissioned oil platform from Norco for the nominal fee of one pound. He had stepped in with opportunisfic timing when Norco found themselves facing a PR catastrophe of Brent Spar proportions over the undecided future of their disused facility, and sealed an agreement to take further rigs off their hands if – when – the resort was a success.

However, it wasn’t long before he understood why Norco had been contemplating just sinking the thing, protests or not, as stripping all their crap off of it proved almost as costly as – and even slower than – building a new platform from scratch. By the time the thing was towed into Kilbokie Bay to begin the rebuilding and fitting operations, the budget was being revised upwards on a daily basis, and the projected completion date got further off rather than nearer as the months went on. The sheer size of the thing, for instance, meant that it had to remain half a mile out in the firth, rather than in the shallower waters within the Kilbokie yard perimeter. Out there it was attended constantly by liftings barges, as prefabricated sections were slotted into place and vast hoppers of materials were supplied to the small army of tradesmen who ferried out and back each day.

Fortunately for Gavin, Delta still retained faith in the eventual success of his idea, and eschewing accepted wisdom about throwing good money after bad, they reasoned instead that further outlay was the only way of recouping what they had already shelled out. Such logic, however, can generate a very costly spiral, and there were soon an awful lot of zeroes on the figure under ‘Unforeseen Logistical Expenses’. Worsening matters still, the delays meant that the resort was going to miss its first summer, and although its planned site – the Gambia – enjoyed sun and high temperatures all year round, most people didn’t enjoy time off all year round. The most optimistic projection said the place wasn’t going to be open for business until November, so not only did this mean a delay in generating any revenue, but it set the crucial word‐
of‐
mouth effect back a year at least.

The pressure mounting on Gavin was not eased by grumbling disquiet Stateside regarding how exposed the project was rendering his backers. Delta’s ever‐
increasing investment had left them over‐
leveraged and there was much concern that the company would be vulnerable to corporate predators as a result. The news that there would be no revenues that summer was therefore hardly music to their ears, and Gavin’s constant assurances that time would vindicate their belief started to ring a little hollow, as seeing their project succeed five years down the line wouldn’t be much reward if they didn’t own it anymore.

It became imperative that the resort start providing a return – any kind of return – as soon as possible. Gavin had consequently been panicked into rechannelling much of the marketing budget into a summer advertising and PR offensive, pitching the facility’s year‐
round sun credentials in an attempt to maximise winter bookings and thus at least get the ball rolling. Problem was, visually they were still heavily reliant on virtual reality graphics and artists’ impressions of what they were offering. Even once the Lido was complete, the Cromarty Firth hadn’t cooperated with much in the way of blue sky for taking photographs, and neither was it easy to find an angle that didn’t also include cranes, scaffolding and bum‐
cleavage.