by David Szalay
The others, however, seem unaffected, except that Sandra looks even redder than usual.
The place has filled up a bit and a band has started playing.
Sandra and the waiter have some sort of dispute over the bill – the manager is summoned – and when that is finally sorted out, she pays and they leave.
Bérnard had tried to offer some money, and on the pavement outside, he tries again. He says, with his wallet once more in his hand, ‘So …?’
‘I think I’m just going to use the lav,’ Sandra says, apparently not having heard him, and leaves him there with Charmian.
He pockets his wallet.
Charmian isn’t looking at him. She is facing the other way, as if she does not want to be associated with him. He wonders whether he has offended her somehow.
He stands there, drunk, looking at her, the slabs of her arms protruding from the frilly sleeves of her blouse, the grotesque inflations of her jeans.
When Sandra rejoins them, he is still just standing there, and Charmian is still staring off down the street.
In the end, he is unable to find the hostess bar. They spend about half an hour looking for it, on the fringes of Protaras’s nightlife, in the streets where the neon stops. They drop into a snack bar for pizza slices, sit eating them in a plastic booth. Then a place with live music – some zithering ‘traditional’ band and older couples swaying under a turning glitter ball. Bérnard, badly drunk now, gives Sandra a spin on the dance floor, treading on her feet, feeling the immense swell of her side hot and damp under his hand. He offers to do the same for Charmian but she just shakes her head.
‘Oh, go on!’ Sandra says to her, sweating dangerously, her vast red cleavage shining as if with varnish.
Charmian shakes her head again.
‘You are sure?’ Bérnard asks, out of breath.
When Charmian just ignores him, Sandra says, ‘Don’t be so rude!’
She gives Bérnard an apologetic, exasperated look.
Then they sit down to finish the red wine.
Their final stop of the evening is Porkies, for a kebab. Bérnard does not have one. He just watches the others eat. In his state of extreme drunkenness, Charmian has taken on a strange, fascinating quality. Sitting opposite her, he watches her eating the kebab with what seem to be modest flickers of desire. They surprise him. Her face, admittedly, is nice enough and there is nothing wrong with the pale blue of her long-lashed eyes …
He looks away, wondering what to make of this. What, if anything, to do about it.
He is still wondering in the taxi that takes them back to the Hotel Poseidon. He is sitting in the front, next to the driver. The surprising question presses itself on him: Should he make some sort of move?
Awkward, with her mother there.
The taxi stops at the crumbling concrete steps of the Poseidon.
With difficulty, with Bérnard helping, heaving heavy flesh, the ladies extract themselves from its low seats.
And then they are in the lobby.
And he almost says to Charmian something about whether she wants to see his room.
And then it is too late.
Sandra has kissed him goodnight.
He is alone in his room, which starts to turn if he shuts his eyes.
He tries a wank, but he is too drunk.
6
In the morning he lies there on the single bed, imprisoned in his hangover, trying to piece together the fragments of the evening and feeling that he nearly did something very, very silly.
He opens his eyes.
The heat of the sun throbs from the closed curtains and the sounds of the street intrude into the painful stillness of the dim, narrow room. He lies there for most of the morning, instantly feeling sick if he moves at all.
At some point he falls asleep again, and when he wakes up he feels okay.
He is able to move.
To sit.
To stand.
To peel back the edge of the curtain and squint at the white, fiery day – the glare of the vacant lot next door.
The sky’s merciless scream of blue.
It is eleven fifty, nearly time for lunch, and he is hungry now.
He feels strange, as if in a dream, as he descends the cool stairs.
Descending the cool stairs, he really feels as if he is still in bed, and dreaming this.
The dining room.
Murmur of voices – Russian, Bulgarian.
The buffet of congealed brown food.
The microwave queue.
And there they are, Sandra and Charmian, at their usual table, which is where he sits now too.
As he approaches – feeling weightless, as if he is floating over the filthy carpet – Sandra says, ‘We didn’t see you at breakfast, Bernard.’
She seems more or less unaffected by the night’s drinking – her ruddiness only slightly attenuated, her voice only marginally hoarser than normal.
Charmian, sitting next to her, looks quite pale.
‘No, I, er …’ Bérnard mumbles, taking a seat. ‘I was sleeping.’
‘Last night too much for you, was it?’
Bérnard laughs weakly. Then there is a short pause. The thought of eating has lost most of its appeal. ‘It was good,’ he says finally.
‘It was, wasn’t it,’ Sandra says.
She has already eaten – the emptied plate is on the table in front of her. Charmian too is just finishing up.
Bérnard opens his can of Fanta and pours most of it into a greasy glass.
‘You not having anything?’ Sandra asks him, moving her faint blonde eyebrows in the direction of the buffet.
‘Later, maybe,’ Bérnard says. He is starting to think that this was a mistake, making an appearance here. He feels less normal than he thought he did. The taste of the Fanta – a tiny sip, the first thing to have passed his lips today – makes him feel slightly more grounded.
Charmian stands abruptly.
He finds it hard to believe, now, that he considered making some sort of move on her last night.
He is pretty sure he didn’t actually say anything, or do anything. Still, even just having had the idea embarrasses him.
She is off to the buffet for seconds. He watches, briefly, her cumbersome waddle as she passes among the tables. Others are watching her too, he sees.
Somewhere near him, Sandra’s voice says, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Charmian really likes you.’
Bérnard feels, again, that he is still in bed upstairs and just dreaming this.
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ Sandra says, when he turns to her, with a look of pale incomprehension on his face.
‘Have you?’ she asks.
He shakes his head.
Sandra looks away and a few seconds pass. Some Russians laugh at something.
Then Sandra says, ‘Do you like sex, Bernard?’
Bérnard tries to steady himself with another sip of Fanta. ‘Sex?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘Of course …’
Sandra chuckles. ‘Spoken like a true Frenchman.’
He is not sure what she means by this, or even if he heard her properly. ‘I’m sorry …?’ he asks.
‘Why don’t you ask Charmian up to your room after lunch?’ Sandra says. ‘I think she’d like that.’
Puzzled, Bérnard says, ‘To my room?’
‘Yes. I think she’d like that.’
He does not have time to ask any more questions – Charmian is there again, has taken her place at the table without a word, without looking at Bérnard, and is tucking into her next plate of microwaved lunch.
They are in the lobby afterwards when he says to her, ‘You would like to see my room?’
The words, flat and matter-of-fact, just seem to escape him. He had not planned to say them, or to say anything.
She looks at her mother.
Sandra says, ‘I’m going to have a little lie-down.’
She starts up the stairs on
her own.
After a few moments, without saying anything else, they follow her.
They follow her as far as the first floor. She is taking a breather where the stairs turn and just nods at them as they leave her there in the stairwell window’s soiled light and enter, with Bérnard one pace ahead, the shadows of the passageway.
They stop, in semi-darkness, at Bérnard’s door. He operates the key, and lets Charmian precede him into the room.
He is aware, following her into it, that the narrow room smells quite strongly. The curtains are drawn and his dirty clothes are all over the floor.
‘I am sorry about the mess,’ he says, shutting the door.
‘Our room’s just the same,’ she tells him.
‘Yes?’
They stand there, in the soupy air. He has that feeling, again, that he’s dreaming this. She is huge. Her hugeness makes the whole situation seem more dreamlike.
‘What do you want to do then?’ she asks, still taking the place in – looking at the open suitcase still half-full of stuff on the neatly made bed, the one he doesn’t sleep in, nearer the door.
He shrugs, as if he hasn’t any idea what he wants to do, as if he hasn’t even thought about it.
‘Do you want to have a shower?’ she asks without obvious enthusiasm, looking at him now.
‘The shower doesn’t work.’
‘Oh, yeah – you said.’
‘Yes.’
They stand there for a while longer, and then she says, ‘Do you want to see my tits?’
After hesitating for a second, he says, ‘Okay.’
In the dim light she takes her top off – a frilly-edged shirt like the one she was wearing last night – and extricates herself from the colossal bra. The tits hang down. Doughy, blue-veined, they sit on the shelf of the next tier of her, each one equivalent, more or less, to Bérnard’s head. The nipples are pale pink, very pale, and the size of saucers – they occupy meaningful territory.
It is a strange moment – him just standing there, looking, while she waits.
He notices, eventually, that he has an erection.
She notices too, and with slow movements, she kneels in front of him and slides down the zip of his jeans.
Her mouth is soft and warm.
‘You have done this before,’ he says after a while, sincerely impressed.
She just shrugs. She wipes her mouth and moves back a bit. With a fair amount of shoving and tugging she gets herself out of her jeans.
Her legs do not quite have the overwhelmingly vertical quality of a normal leg – they have a definite and assertive horizontal dimension too. And not much in the way of knees. When she drags down her lace-edged pants, he sees, for a moment, somewhere among all the whitish flesh, a soft tuft of hair the colour of peanut butter.
She takes his hand and pulls him towards the bed where he sleeps, its sweaty mess of sheets.
While she stands there waiting, he sits on the edge of the bed and pulls his own jeans over his feet, his horizontally striped polo shirt over his head.
They are both naked now, and his hard-on is almost embarrassingly fervent. It almost hurts. She tries to lie back on the bed and open her legs. She needs to open her legs as wide as they will go or the flesh, pouring in from every direction, will obstruct him. The single bed, however, in its position flush to the wall, is simply too narrow for her to do that. She hardly fits onto it with her legs held parallel. After a few moments of frustration, Bérnard says, ‘I know. We put the mattress on the floor, okay?’
They stand up and start to move the mattress onto the floor.
Bérnard’s aching erection knocks against his stomach as he struggles with his end of the mattress.
They put it down on the brown tiles.
For a moment she stands there, in the veiled light, naked, looking like a huge melted candle, all drips and slumps of round-shaped waxy flesh. Pendulous surrenders. Those pale pink nipples the size of his face. There is just so much of her, it seems to him, standing at his end, stunned by how much he wants her now, so much of her, a quantity of woman nearly equal, if that were possible, to his need to possess it, physically, in every way imaginable. Though in fact at this moment that need seems infinite. His member nodding, his lungs pulling at the air, it seems that there is nothing else to him, that that is all he is.
She takes her place on the mattress.
And then it starts.
*
It lasts all afternoon, and into the evening. The light softens in the folds of the curtains. Finally they sleep for a while, and when he opens his eyes, she is dressing herself. Though she is wearing her shirt, she seems to be naked from the waist down.
‘What time is it?’ he asks.
‘Seven,’ she says. ‘You coming to supper?’
She pulls one of the curtains open and admits a wedge of light in which she immediately finds her enormous knickers. Sitting heavily on the second bed, she manoeuvres them on.
‘I don’t think so,’ Bérnard says. He is lying naked on the mattress on the floor, supine. Worn out by orgasms – at least five of them, he isn’t sure exactly how many – he feels sleepy and immobile. The idea of dressing, of dragging himself down to the dining room, seems impossible.
‘Fair enough,’ Charmian says, working her jeans on now.
‘I’ll see you later then?’ she says, when she is dressed, and standing at the door.
‘Yes, see you,’ Bérnard says.
When she has left, he lies there still, the air warm on his skin, his eyes fixed on the soiled paintwork of the ceiling as darkness slowly hides it.
Sounds arrive at the window
a moped’s noisy whirr
a snatch of music
very distant shouts
7
At lunch the next day he is shy and embarrassed. The women are normal, the same as always. Charmian, focusing on the food, hardly says anything, hardly looks at him. Sandra talks. She says, ‘You weren’t at the pool this morning, Bernard.’
He says he went to the beach.
‘Was that nice?’ Sandra asks.
He says it was.
‘We don’t really like the sea, do we?’
Charmian says, trying to force some last strings of meat from a scrawny, bleeding chicken leg, ‘It’s okay.’
‘I’m scared of sharks,’ Sandra says.
‘That is not a problem here, I think,’ Bérnard tells her.
Sandra is adamant – ‘Oh, there are sharks here. And anyway I always end up with my knickers full of sand. Sand everywhere. You know what I mean? Still finding it when we get home. Still finding it weeks later.’
‘Okay,’ Bérnard says.
‘They sorted out your shower yet?’ she asks him.
‘No.’
‘No? It’s just disgraceful. You need to be more assertive, Bernard.’
‘Yes,’ he agrees, ‘I think so …’
‘You’ve been here nearly a week now and they still haven’t sorted it out. It’s just not acceptable.’
‘No.’
Bérnard looks shyly at Charmian again. She seems to be avoiding his eye.
‘We’re going horse-riding this afternoon,’ Sandra announces, improbably.
‘Horse-riding?’
‘Yes. Our rep sorted it out for us.’
‘There is horse-riding?’ Bérnard asks.
‘Apparently.’
After lunch, while they wait in the lobby, Bérnard says to Charmian, ‘I will see you later? You will come to my room?’
Despite the exhaustiveness of yesterday’s session he finds, slightly to his own surprise, that he wants more.
She is eating a pack of toffee popcorn, the sort of thing she always has on her, in her handbag. She looks at him for a moment as if she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Then she says, ‘Yeah, okay.’
‘Okay,’ Bérnard says, feeling pleased with himself. ‘I will see you later.’
He looks quickly at Sandra – it was awkward, som
ehow, to speak out with her there. She doesn’t seem to have heard, though. She is just fanning herself with a brochure, and looking towards the brown glass door.
The afternoon passes slowly. Bérnard sprawls on the pummelled, stained mattress on the floor of his room. He looks out the window. Nothing interests him. The only thing he is able to think about is what will happen later, when Charmian shows up.
Finally, at about five there is a knock on the door.
He opens it, wearing only his pants.
It is not Charmian.
It is her mother – feathery blonde pudding-bowl, red face, even redder cleavage.
‘Hello, Bernard,’ she says.
He swings the door mostly shut, leaving only his shocked face visible to her. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t even manage hello.
‘Can I come in then?’ Sandra asks.
‘I need … I need to get dressed.’
‘Don’t bother about that,’ Sandra says authoritatively. ‘Come on – let me in.’
He opens the door and stands aside and Sandra advances, with obvious interest, into the narrow stale-smelling room.
The thin sundress drapes her distended physique.
Her face is papery, parched, especially around the eyes.
‘Our room’s just like this,’ she says.
Bérnard is standing there in his pants.
‘You look worried, Bernard,’ she says. She looks at the mattress in its odd position on the floor. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about.’ Her eyes stay on the mattress for a few seconds, as if inspecting it, and then she says, ‘I’ve heard good things about you, Bernard.’
He looks puzzled.
‘Oh, yes, very good things.’
‘What things?’ he asks worriedly.
She laughs at the expression on his face. ‘Well, what d’you think? You know why I’m here, don’t you?’ she says, looking him in the eye.
It takes him a few seconds.
Then he understands.
‘That’s more like it,’ she says, immediately noticing. She smiles, showing her small yellow teeth. ‘She said you were insatiable, and you are as well.’ She puts her hand on his smooth chest and says, ‘Charmian’ll be back tomorrow, don’t worry. She’s a bit sore today. Didn’t think she was up to it. So I asked her if it was alright if I had a go. I’ve never had a Frenchman before,’ she says, almost tremulously. ‘I want you to show me what all the fuss is about – alright?’ She is looking up at him, her hand on his face now. ‘Will you do that for me, Bernard?’ Her sea-green eyes are full of imploration. ‘Will you?’
