​

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias"

​

‘What a country,’ Gavin said. ‘I’m telling you, what a country.’

There are two kinds of people: those that would never dream of boring a complete stranger with tales of their recent holiday, and arseholes. Gavin, who asked to perch on the end of my table in the Dog & Duck while he waited for his girlfriend, is an arsehole. My blessed solitude, enjoying my pint, reading my book, is a memory from a dim and distant land. I was in Gavinland now, and it’s all-inclusive.

‘It’s hot. But it’s cold inside the hotel. And you’re always in the hotel. Apart from the pool. That’s still in the hotel but outside. Well, actually it connects the two towers of the hotel and you can see right through the floor of the pool. You can see people on the ground. They’re like ants. Rachel wouldn’t go in it, said it made her gip. There are other pools. There’s a pool for every fifty guests which doesn’t sound like that much but a lot of people don’t use the ones outside because they’re outside. And it’s hot.’

I missed the bit where he told me where he’d been, geographically, but I realised quickly that Gavin wouldn’t be able to place it on a map. He entered a tube at one end and it dropped him out at the other end. Holidaymakers are flushed turds, if you look at it that way: Gavin forced the comparison. Anyway, what Gavin was describing to me wasn’t a country so much as a location.

‘If it’s that hot,’ I said, despite myself, ‘why do people go there?’

‘Well it’s fucking cold here isn’t it? Not a long flight. The same blokes that own the hotel own the airport and own the airline, so it’s seamless. They own the whole country, come to think of it. End-to-end. We could do with that here.’

‘I bet the trains run on time too.’

‘They don’t have trains. Desert isn’t it. Although it’s very flat. We did a quad bike excursion. You can get them going pretty fast. Faster that you can here, although I’ve never quad biked here. But they don’t restrict you there.’

Here, there, here, there. Gavin spent a good five minutes detailing all the ways in which one is not restricted over there, and I struggled to find an example of any freedom that you couldn’t also exercise here – their PR is just better. We talk too much here about what we can’t do. I don’t think they talk over there about what you can’t do. You just know not to do it. I couldn’t lean over and kiss Gavin on his mouth, over there. But then I wouldn’t want to.

He went on. Gavin’s face was round and shiny like a child’s and he detailed, with innocent wonder, this kind of stuff: the fleets of black SUVs ferrying guests from airport to hotel and between different outposts of the hotel and the marble rainwater shower suites and the gold plateware in the McDonald’s off the lobby and the twenty-four-hour sports-betting mancave that’s more like a man-hangar and the generous portion sizes in all the restaurants and the way a sultry electronic voice welcomes you by name to your room whenever you enter it and the uncanny predictive powers of the staff who know what you need before you do and provide it with a smile and the scent pumped through the AC that mists the communal areas and smells indescribable… This innocent wonder was endearing in its delivery, until you remembered what the wonder was aimed at. It was like my nephew telling me about his Christmas presents. It’s cute for a minute but after a while you want to slap him. This was just stuff. This was just a list of stuff. 

‘They’ve got every TV channel in the room,’ he said. ‘Every channel.’

‘HGTV.’

‘Got it.’

‘PBS.’

‘Got it.’

‘Congreso.’

‘Got it.’

‘You’re bullshitting.’

‘They’ve got it.’

‘I struggle to believe they’ve got a Peruvian political news channel but I refuse to believe you remember if they do or not.’

‘I watched it. Peruvian, Bangladeshi. Aussie. I watched it all.’

He went to the bar and I deliberated whether to leave before he got back. But no – this was my table, I was here first. Gavin was only on the table thanks to my generosity. And where was this girlfriend of his?

‘Really though, it’s not about all that,’ he said, spilling his pint as he put it down. ‘All that is just stuff, isn’t it? It’s the people. The people are fantastic. They can’t do enough for you. They’re proud of their country, you can tell. They want to show it off. On our first morning we were taken on a tour of the hotel by the Head Concierge, Hamza. Hassan. Hamza was a different one. Anyway, Hassan was taking us round and you could just tell how proud he was. The golf course, mate… they’ll have their own major there soon. Hassan doesn’t play himself, he said, but you could tell how proud he was. A major golf tournament. They’ve got the F1, the Champion’s League, the tennis. The World Cup. They just want people to come to the country and see how great it is. It’s great.’

‘Did you see much of the country?’ I still didn’t know what country, mind you.

‘Well the hotel. And when we went quad-biking.’ He waved to a woman shrink-wrapped in cream leisurewear coming through the door. She waved back and stopped at the bar. ‘And the drive from the airport you see stuff. We made a detour to these old ruins. Just two massive pairs of legs and this massive old head in the sand. And the driver, can’t remember his name, he said there used to be a civilisation there that rivalled the Romans… but I dunno, they fucked it. Really makes you think.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘About what?’