They had expected someone would turn up to negotiate or kick the doors down and try to throw them out. Theirs was the last building on the street whose residents had not stepped aside for some office block or hotel or new bank. They were mainly middle-class families, those branches that drooped from affluence until they brushed the dirt. Their apartments had been inherited from respectable parents and bourgeois grandparents, along with the fixed rent, to whose modest demands their lives were so habituated that they were no longer able to sell up and move. When construction began on the hotel, they’d said, “Our chance has come. They’ll try to tempt us with a payoff. Maybe even upgrade the building. It’s happened before!”

Neither one nor the other.

They were ringed by enormous machinery, bulldozers and cranes, the engineers in white helmets, the laborers in yellow, smashing the street to pieces and blocking traffic, and then there was the construction work itself: endless shifts through day and night to raise up “The Largest Hotel in the Middle East.” Elevators full of workmen floated up and down past their apartments; there was the sense that the men inside might step onto their balconies and join them for breakfast if they left their windows ajar. It felt, in fact, as though the few meters which separated their building from the hotel’s wall had been erased; like they were now at the heart of things. At night, beams from great floodlights cut through the tinted glass and blackout curtains in their bedrooms. Cranes shook their walls. Sleep became impossible. Even conversation was a burden.

And no one acknowledged their complaints. Next to the billionaire funders of this colossal undertaking they were ants.