It was no surprise to whom this particular cabin had been allocated for the launch weekend.
Jackson Crane.
There are some people in the world so famous it is quite hard to imagine a time when you did not know who they were. The sort of man who stars in movies rather than acting in them. Jess had not even been born when Jackson Crane had started out, back in the eighties, playing the bad boy in all those teen comedies. Nor had she been old enough in the nineties to watch him in action movies like Max Velocity, or playing an eco-conscious superhero in Captain Aquatic. Even so, Jess would have been very hard pressed to recall a time in her life when Jackson Crane’s face – on a billboard, on TV, on the front of a magazine, on the side of a bus – would have not prompted a little jolt of recognition. Even in his Captain Aquatic mask or goggles, or whatever they were. Even with the dyed blond hair they’d given him in that movie – she could remember the posters for it everywhere, one of those films that somehow imprints itself on your consciousness as a kid without your ever having seen it. One of those faces.
She did wonder what it might feel like to be the owner of a face like that, global public property, to wander about on holiday and suddenly spot your own visage staring back at you from – say – the side of a bus in Istanbul, or a billboard in Dubai, or painted wonkily on the side of some fairground ride in Prague. Your actual face. To know that all around the world people were measuring their lives against yours, fantasizing about you, imagining what you or some character you played twenty years ago would think of a life decision they were considering making, asking: what would Jackson Crane do? To wander around the corridors of a hotel in Tokyo in search of your room and bump into yourself illuminated on the front of a machine selling little cans of iced coffee. To think about the number of times that a GIF of you shrugging in character had been tweeted in a single day. To smile good-naturedly on some – Irish? Belgian? Italian? – talk show as the host produced from behind the couch a boxed plastic toy figure of you in one of your action roles, and joked about the thickness of the neck, the absurdity of the torso they’d given you, your unremovable plastic pants, and then asked you what you thought the figure was going to say when they pressed the button on its back. To nod along, come-to-bed eyes crinkled in mirth, as you must have done at least a hundred times before, as someone like Freddie Hunter expressed their amusement at the fact that the character you played in Max Velocity was literally called Max Velocity.
Just the practicalities of being that famous, the impossibility of turning it off, all the normal everyday things – an uninterrupted meal in a restaurant, say; dropping off your dry cleaning or going to the dentist – you would never be able to do again. The fact that you could not get away with anything, ever, unless you were somewhere like Home. It must be quite the headfuck, she imagined, after a little while. Jackson Crane had been a star of that magnitude now for almost thirty years. He must feel a little like that boxed plastic toy at times.
That did not give him the right to behave however he liked.
An hour – that was how long her team had scheduled to clean up the occupied cabins, how long before the yacht where the guests were all currently sipping champagne would arrive at the jetty.
It would take an hour even to work out where to start with cabin ten.
The scatter cushions were in the shower, spewing their feathery contents all over the tiles. Every pane of the Crittall shower screen was cracked or shattered. The lid was off the toilet. The big TV on the wall over the fireplace in the sitting room of the cabin was hanging by one wire from its bracket. It looked as if somebody had jumped on the radio, then stomped on the TV remote, then kicked in the coffee machine. Wherever the wiring was accessible it had been pulled out, pulled down, left hanging. The iron chandelier was no longer attached to its overhead beam. You could see from a dent in the wall where the crystal bedside lamp had been thrown at it, and had shattered. Every glass in the drinks cabinet, every bottle, had been smashed on the floor. There were red wine stains, spatter marks, across the ceiling. At least she hoped it was red wine. It was as if Jackson Crane had come in the night before and set out, deliberately, systematically and presumably single-handedly, to dismantle his entire cabin.