by David Szalay
Her mother is talking about something else now, about some Bulgarians in the next room. ‘Keep us up half the night, shouting and God knows what,’ she says. ‘The walls are like paper. We can hear everything – and I do mean everything. We call them the vulgar Bulgars, don’t we?’ she says to her daughter. ‘You know what we saw them doing? We saw them stealing food from the dining room.’
Bérnard laughs.
‘Why they would want to steal that food I don’t know. It’s awful. Well, you experienced it last night. You ask if they’ve any fish – I mean we are next to the sea, aren’t we – they bring you a tin of tuna. It’s unbelievable. And the flies, especially at lunchtime. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not fit for human consumption. We were both down with the squits for a few days last week,’ she says, and Bérnard, unwilling to dwell on that idea, lets his thoughts drift again to Iveta – her thin tanned thighs, her pretty feet in the jewelly sandals – while the fat Englishwoman keeps talking.
They are English, these two, he has worked that out now.
‘One day we thought, enough’s enough, we’re going to eat somewhere else,’ the older woman says. ‘So we asked our rep about good places to eat and he suggested this place the Aphrodite … Do you know it?’
Bérnard shakes his head.
‘Well, we went there on Saturday,’ she says, ‘and after spending over fifty euros on drinks and dinner, I went to the toilet and was told I had to pay a euro to use it. Well, I wasn’t happy and I told the woman I was a customer. And she said that doesn’t matter, you still have to pay. And I said well, I’m not paying, and when I tried to go into the toilet anyway, she pushed me away. She physically pushed me away. Wouldn’t let me use it. So I asked to speak to the manager, and after about fifteen minutes this man appears – Nick, he says his name is – and when I explain to him what happened, he just laughs, laughs in my face. And when that happened … Well, I got so angry. He just laughed in my face. Can you imagine. The Aphrodite,’ she says. ‘Stay away from it.’
‘I will,’ Bérnard tells her.
‘We love Cyprus,’ she says, moving on her stool. ‘Every year we come here. Don’t we? I’m Sandra, by the way. And this is Charmian.’
‘Bérnard,’ says Bérnard.
They stay there drinking for two hours, until the hotel’s shadow starts to move over them. They get quite drunk. And then Bérnard, whose thoughts have never been far from Iveta and what will happen that evening, notices the time and says he has to leave.
The two women have just ordered another pair of Magners – their fourth or fifth – and Sandra says, ‘We’ll see you at supper then.’
Bérnard is wading away. ‘Okay,’ he says.
Showering in the locker room a few minutes later, he has already forgotten about them.
*
When he wakes up it is dark. He is in his room in the Hotel Poseidon. The narrow room is very hot and music thuds from the place nearby.
It was about six when he got back from the Hotel Vangelis, and having a slight headache, he thought he would lie down for a while before supper. He must have fallen into a deep sleep. Sitting up suddenly, he looks at his watch, fearful that it might be too late to find Iveta at Jesters. It is only ten, though, and he lies down again. He is sweating in the close heat of the room. Last night he tried the air conditioning, and it didn’t work.
He washes, as best he can, at the sink.
The light in the bathroom is so dim he can barely see his face in the mirror.
Then he tidies up a bit. It is his assumption that Iveta will be in this room later, and he does not want it littered with his dirty stuff.
He spends quite a lot of time deciding what to wear, finally opting for the dressier look of the plain white shirt, and leaving the horizontally striped polo for another night. He leaves the top three buttons of the shirt undone, so that it is open down to the tuft of hair on his sternum, and digs in his suitcase for the tiny sample of Ermenegildo Zegna Uomo that was once stuck to a magazine in his uncle’s office. He squirts about half of it on himself, and then, after inquisitively sniffing his wrists, squirts the other half on as well.
Satisfied, he turns his attention to his hair, combing back the habitual mop to the line of his skull – thereby disclosing, unusually, his low forehead – and holding the combed hair in place with a generous scoop of scented gel.
In the buzzing light of the bathroom he inspects himself.
He buttons the third button of his shirt.
Then he unbuttons it again.
Then he buttons it again.
His forehead, paler than the rest of his face, looks weird, he thinks.
Working with the comb he tries to hide it, but that just makes it look even weirder.
Finally, impatient with himself, he tries to put the hair back the way it was before.
There is still something weird about it, and he worries as he hurries down the stairs to the lobby and, in a travelling zone of Uomo, out into the warm night.
It is nearly eleven now, and he has not eaten anything. It’s not that he is hungry – far from it – it’s just that he feels he ought to ‘line’ his stomach.
He stops at Porkies and eats part of a kebab, forcing a few mouthfuls down. He is almost shaking with excitement, with anticipation. He tries to still his nerves with a vodka-Red Bull, and with the memories of how easily they talked in the morning, of how eagerly she had told him how to find Jesters – she practically drew him a map. The memories help.
He abandons the kebab and starts for Jesters, through the heaving streets.
He finds it easily, following a pack of shirtless singing youths to its shed-like facade, outlined in hellish neon tubes. The looming neon cap-and-bells, the drunken queue.
Five euros, he hands over.
Inside, he looks for her.
Moving through strobe light, through a wall of throbbing sound, he looks for her.
The place is solid flesh. Limbs flickering in darkness. He could search all night, he thinks, and not find her.
Holding his expensive Beck’s, he scans the place with increasing desperation. For the first time it occurs to him that she might not actually be there.
He has a nervous pull of the lager and pushes his way through a hedge of partying anonymity.
Some girls, on heat, are flaunting on a platform.
At their feet, a pool of staring lads in sweat-wet T-shirts. He watches for a moment, up-skirting with the other males, and then, with a shock of adrenalin, he sees someone, a face he sort of knows – one of her friends from this morning, he thinks it is, moving away from him.
He follows her. His eyes stuck to the skin of her exposed back, its dull shine of perspiration, he tears a path through interlacing limbs.
And she leads him to Iveta. She leads him to Iveta. He sees her in a pop of light as the music winds up. She does not see him. Her eyes are shut. She is in a man’s hands, mouths melting together.
And then the hit crashes into its chorus.
5
The Hotel Vangelis, the next afternoon. Waist deep in water he is at the in-pool bar, drinking Cypriot lager and absorbing sunburn. He still smells of Ermenegildo Zegna Uomo. He had welcomed the arrival, about an hour before, of Sandra and Charmian. They are stationed next to him now, huge on their submerged stools, and Sandra is talking. She is telling him how the man she always refers to as ‘Charmian’s father’ died horrifically after falling into a vat of molten zinc – he worked in an industrial installation of some sort – and how heartbroken she was after that. Tasting his Keo, Bérnard appreciates the parity she seems to accord that event and his finding a girl he had only just met snogging someone else in a nightclub.
Already quite drunk, and exhausted by a night spent wandering the litter-strewn streets of Protaras, he had told them about that. He found he wanted to talk about it. And when he had finished his story, Sandra sighed and said she knew how he felt, and told him the story of her husband’s death.
> It was awful enough to be on the news – she is telling him how upsetting it was to see strangers talking about it on the local TV news.
‘And the worst thing,’ she says, ‘is they think he was alive for up to twenty seconds after he fell in.’
‘When did it happen?’ Bérnard asks her morosely.
‘Nine years ago,’ Sandra says, sighing again. ‘And I miss him every single day.’
Bérnard finishes his Keo and hands the empty plastic pot to the barman.
‘What do you do, Bernard?’ Sandra asks him, pronouncing his name the English way.
He tells her he was working for his uncle, until he was sacked.
‘Why’d he sack you then?’ she asks.
‘He sounds like a tosser,’ she says, when he has told her what happened.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘What is it, a tosser?’
‘A tosser?’ Sandra laughs, and looks at Charmian. ‘How would you explain?’
‘Sort of like an idiot?’ Charmian suggests.
‘But what’s it mean literally?’
‘Literally?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it’s like wanker, isn’t it?’
Sandra laughs again. ‘How do we explain that to Bernard?’
‘I don’t know.’
Sandra says, turning to Bérnard, ‘Literally, it means someone who plays with himself.’
‘Okay.’
‘You know what I mean?’ Sandra is smirking.
Charmian seems embarrassed – her face has turned all pink, and she is urgently sucking up cider and looking the other way.
‘I think so,’ Bérnard says, smiling slightly embarrassedly himself.
‘But really it just means an idiot, someone we don’t like.’
‘Then he is a tosser, my uncle.’
‘He sounds like it.’ She turns to Charmian again. ‘Imagine sacking your own nephew, just because he wants to go on holiday!’
Charmian nods. She looks quickly at Bérnard.
Warming to the subject, Bérnard starts to tell them more about his uncle – how he lives in Belgium to pay less tax, how he …
‘Where you from then, Bernard?’ Sandra asks him.
‘Lille.’
‘Where’s that then?’
‘It’s sort of near Belgium, isn’t it?’ Charmian ventures shyly.
Bérnard nods.
‘How’d you know that then?’ Sandra asks her, impressed.
Charmian says, ‘The Eurostar goes through there sometimes, doesn’t it?’ The question is addressed, somewhat awkwardly, to Bérnard.
Who just says, ‘Yeah,’ and turns his head towards the sparkle of the pool.
‘We’re from Northampton,’ Sandra tells him. ‘It’s famous for shoes.’
They swim together, later. The ladies, still in their billowing dresses, letting the water lift them, and Bérnard moving more vigorously, doing little displays of front crawl, and then lolling on his back in the water, letting the sun dazzle his chlorine-stung eyes. Sandra encourages him to do a handstand in the shallow end. Not totally sober, he obliges her. He surfaces to ask how it was, and she shouts at him to keep his legs straight next time, while Charmian, still bobbing about nearby, staying where she can find the cool blue tiles with her toes, looks on. He does another handstand, unsteady in his long wet trunks. The ladies applaud. Triumphant, he dives again, into watery silence, blue world, losing all vertical aplomb as his big hands strive for the tiles. His legs thrash to drive him down. His lungs keep lifting his splayed hands from the tiles. His face feels full of blood. Streams of bubbles pass over him, upwards from his nostrils. And then he is in air again, squatting shoulder deep in the tepid water, the water sharp and bright with chemicals streaming from orange slicks of hair that hang over his eyes. He feels queasy for a moment. All those Keo lagers … He fears, just for a moment, that he is going to throw up.
Then he notices a lifeguard looming over them, his shadow on the water. He is talking to Sandra. He has just finished saying something, and he moves away, and takes his seat again, up a sloping ladder, like a tennis umpire.
‘We’ve been told off,’ Sandra says, hanging languidly in the water, only her sunburnt head, with its mannish jawline and feathery blonde pudding-bowl, above the surface.
Bérnard isn’t sure what’s going on. He still feels light-headed, vaguely unwell. ‘What?’
‘We’ve been told off,’ Sandra says again.
Bérnard, from his crouch in the water, which feels chilly now that he has stopped moving, just stares at her. His body is bony. Individual vertebrae show on his white back. Sandra is still saying something to him. Her voice sounds muffled. ‘… told to stop being so immature …’ he hears it say.
She has started to swim away from him – her head moving away on a very slow, lazy breaststroke.
The surface of the pool, which had been all discomposed by his antics, is smoothing itself out again, is slapping the sides with diminishing vigour.
After the horseplay they lie on the side, on sunloungers. Sandra just about fits onto one. Charmian, however, needs to push two together. Bérnard helps her. Then, without saying anything, he takes his place on his own lounger and shuts his eyes. It is late afternoon. The sun has a dull heat. In their dripping dresses, Sandra and Charmian are smoking cigarettes and talking about food. Bérnard isn’t really listening.
Then Sandra’s voice says, ‘Bernard,’ and he opens his eyes.
They are both looking at him.
Charmian, however, quickly looks away.
‘We’re going out for a meal tonight,’ Sandra says. ‘Want to come?’
*
They meet in the lobby of the hotel. Bérnard is talking to the smiling man – who is telling him that his shower will definitely be fixed tomorrow – when the ladies appear. There is an awkwardness. Unlike the previous night, Bérnard has made absolutely no effort at all with his preparations. The ladies, on the other hand, have to some extent dressed up. He sees that immediately. They have make-up on – quite a lot of make-up – and though Sandra is wearing a dress similar to the one she swims in, hanging from flimsy shoulder straps, its green-and-white floral pattern straining to hold the enormities of her figure, Charmian, extraordinarily, is in a pair of jeans and a blouse with delicate lacy details.
‘All set then?’ Sandra says, as Bérnard turns to them.
The smiling man watches tactfully as they leave.
They proceed in silence, initially, through the plain half-made streets near the hotel. The evening is no more than pleasantly warm – the nights are still mild sometimes, this early in the season. Even so, and in spite of the fact that they are walking downhill, Charmian, in particular, is soon shedding sheets of watery sweat.
‘It’s not far,’ Sandra says, panting.
‘What … what sort of place is it?’ Bérnard asks.
‘Typical Greek,’ Sandra tells him.
It turns out to be a long single-storey construction on an arid stretch of road, painted deep red, and covered with signage.
In the huge air-conditioned interior they are shown to a table. Music is playing, the latest international hits, and on screens attached to the walls men are playing golf in America. It is still too early for the place to be very full. The waitress brings big laminated menus, which they study in silence. There are pictures of each item – unappealingly documentary images like police evidence photos.
Things loosen up once the wine starts to take effect – a large jug of it that Sandra orders, which tastes faintly of pine trees.
‘I love this stuff,’ she says.
A stainless-steel plate of stuffed vine leaves also appears, leaking olive oil, and dishes of taramasalata and hummus, and a plate of warm pitta bread.
Bérnard pours himself some more of the weird wine, and then tops the others up as well. He is telling them about his experience in the hostess bar, his first night there, when he was intimidated into emptying his wallet on overpriced drinks fo
r a pair of haughty, painted ladies. Sandra had told him how the taxi driver had tried to overcharge them on the way home from the Hotel Vangelis that afternoon, and he is offering his own tale of unscrupulous piracy. Mopping up the last of the tarama with the last piece of pitta, Sandra says, ‘You don’t need to take that, Bernard.’
‘It’s okay,’ Bérnard says mellowly. ‘Shit happens.’ He drinks some more wine.
‘You shouldn’t take it,’ she says. ‘A hundred euros?’
‘Yes.’
‘I tell you what we’re going to do,’ she says, looking around for the waiter. ‘When we’ve finished here, we’re going to go over there and get your money back.’
Bérnard laughs quietly.
‘I’m not joking,’ Sandra says. ‘We’re going to go over there and get your money back. You can’t let them get away with that, Bernard.’
Bérnard sighs. ‘They won’t give it back,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ Sandra says, ‘they will. When we tell them we’re going to the police they’ll give it back. Remember what happened to us that time in Turkey?’ she asks Charmian, who nods. Charmian has hardly said a word all evening, has only eaten half-heartedly four or five stuffed vine leaves. She seems out of sorts. Turning to Bérnard again, Sandra starts on the Turkish story. ‘This man tried to rip us off changing money in the street. Well, he shouldn’t have picked on us, should he …’
Then the main course arrives.
There is enough food, Bérnard thinks, for eight or ten people.
Platters of grilled lamb, chicken, fish. A huge dish of rice. Portions of fries for everyone and a heap of Greek salad which would on its own have fed a whole family. Also another jug of the wine, even though the first one is still half-full.
With some help from Bérnard the ladies obliterate the spread in under half an hour.
Sandra pours out the last of the wine.
Bérnard is drunk. Quite how drunk, he didn’t understand until he went to the toilet – his shiny face in the mirror stared back at him with eerie impassivity, then suddenly put out its tongue.
