Dubai, now
The airport in Dubai is very bright, even though it is the middle of the night. I wander through a shop where a woman wants to spray aftershave on me.
‘I’m all right, thanks,’ I say. But the woman doesn’t believe me. She sprays the scent –Sauvage– onto a thin and perfectly rectangular strip of card and hands it to me. She smiles so forcefully I find myself taking the piece of card and walking away with it. I smell the paper. I imagine all those plants where the scent comes from. Think of how detached we are from nature. How we have to do so much to it before we can bottle it and put the name ‘wild’ on it. The smell does nothing for my head. I walk on and find myself in the airport bookshop. Some of the books are in Arabic but most are in English.
I look for something to read but at first see nothing but business books. I stare at the cover of one of them. It has the author on the front. He is wearing a suit and an unnatural pseudo-presidential smile. His teeth have an Arctic glare. He is called Dave Sanderson. The book,The Wealth Within You, has a subtitle:How to Harness Your Inner Billionaire.
I stare at it for quite some time, in a kind of trance. It is a popular modern idea. That the inner us is something different to the outer us. That there is an authentic realer and better and richer version of ourselves which we can only tap into by buying a solution. This idea that we are separate from our nature, as separate as a bottle of Dior perfume is from the plants of a forest.
As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-firstcentury. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photo-shopped and filtered.
No one I knew in the 1600s wanted to find their inner billionaire. They just wanted to live to see adolescence and avoid body lice.
Ah.
I am, I realise, in a bad mood.
My eyes are dry from tiredness and from seven hours on an aeroplane. I don’t like flying. It isn’t so much the being in the air that bothers me. It is the arriving in a different country, with a wholly different culture and weather system, just a few hours after you have left Gatwick. Maybe it is because I still remember the size of things. No one understands that any more. People didn’t feel the enormity of the world or their own smallness within it. When I first travelled around the globe, it took over a year, on a boat full of men, who were lucky if they made it. Now, the world is justthere. All of it. In an hour I will be on a flight to Sydney, and by lunchtime I will have arrived. It makes me feel claustrophobic, as if the world is literally shrinking, like a balloon losing air.
I move to a different section in the bookshop. The section, mainly books in English or English translation, is titled ‘Thought’. It is a much smaller area than the one for business books. Confucius. The ancient Greeks. Then I see a book, face out, with a simple academic cover.
Michel de Montaigne’sEssays.
It nearly turns me to ash. I even say my daughter’s name out loud, to myself, as if I am close to her again, as if a part of us is contained in every book we’ve loved. I pick it up and turn to arandom page and read a sentence – ‘Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it’ – and I begin to feel the onset of potential tears.
My phone beeps. I hastily put the book down. I check my phone. A text message. It is from Omai: ‘Been too long. Can’t wait to catch up. Have booked us in for dinner at a place called the Fig Tree restaurant at 8. Should give you time to nap off your jetlag a bit.’
Jetlag.
It seems funny him writing the word. He belongs, in my mind, to a time when the idea of humans flying was as fantastical as, to us now, humans living on Neptune. Maybe even more so.
I text back: ‘See you there.’
I leave Montaigne and the airport bookshop and head over to a large window and wait for them to announce my flight. I lean my head against the glass and stare out beyond my reflection at the infinite darkness of the desert.
Plymouth, England, 1772
After our return I stayed around Plymouth. I liked it there. As with London, it was an easy place to disappear into. A town of seafarers, ragamuffins, criminals, runaways, drifters, musicians, artists, dreamers, loners, and I was, at various points, any and all of those things.
One morning I left my lodgings at the Minerva Inn and went to the new dockyard. There was a large naval warship sitting high on the water.
‘Impressive, ain’t she?’ said a man on the dockside, seeing my awe.
‘Yes. Yes, she is.’
‘Set to find new worlds.’
‘New worlds?’
‘Aye. That’s Cook’s ship.’
‘Cook?’
Then I heard footsteps behind me. A hand fell on my shoulder. I jumped.
‘My goodness, Mr Frears, you seem a little shaken.’
I turned to see a tall lean finely dressed gentleman, smiling kindly at me.
