by David Szalay
*
She leaves after dark – she was more eager, more humble than the younger woman – and he sleeps until eight in the morning, without waking once.
When he does wake, still lying on the mattress on the floor, the room is full of sunlight.
He walks to Porkies and has an egg roll, a Greek coffee.
And then, already in his trunks, and equipped with one of the Poseidon’s small, scratchy towels, he makes his way to the sea.
As he had the previous day, he woke with a desire to swim in the sea.
It is still too early for the beach to be full. The Russians are there, of course, with their pungent cigarettes, their Thermoses of peat-coloured tea.
He walks down to the low surf – it is quite far from the road, the tide is out – and takes off his shirt and shoes. He puts his wallet in one of the shoes, and puts his shirt on top of them, weighing it down with an empty bottle he finds. The sand feels cold between his toes. The wind is quite strong and also feels cold when it blows. The waves, flopping onto the shore, are greenish. He lets the foaming surf wash the powdery sand from his white feet.
He wades out into the waves until they wet his long trunks, lifting his arms as the cloudy water rises around him, and lowering them as it sinks away. His skin puckers in the water, the windy air. An oncoming wave pours over him. For a moment, pouring over him, it obliterates everything in noise and push of water.
He feels its strength, feels it move away, and then he is in the smoother water on the far side of the falling waves. He is lying on the shining surface, the sea holding him, sun on his face and whispering salt water filling his ears. With his eyes shut, it seems to him that he can hear every grain of sand moving on the sea floor.
The tumbling surf feels warm now. It slides up the shore, stretching as far as its energy will take it, laying a lace of popping foam on the smoothed, shining sand.
Further up the sand is hot.
Tingling, he lies on it, lungs filling and emptying.
Arm over eyes, mouth open. Heart working.
Mind empty.
He is aware of nothing except the heat of the sun. The heat of the sun. Life.
3
1
It is ten o’clock in the morning and the kitchen is full of standing smoke and the smell of stuffed cabbages. ‘So you’re off to London?’ Emma’s mother says. Though she is not an old woman, probably not even fifty, she has the sour demeanour of someone disappointedly older. She looks older too as she moves ponderously around the kitchen in a shapeless tracksuit, or leans heavily on the grim, antiquated gas cooker.
Gábor says, ‘We’ll bring you something back. What do you want?’
‘You don’t need to bring me anything,’ she says. Her hair is dyed a maximal black. White roots show. Outside the window, its sill crammed with dusty cacti, an arterial road growls. She lights a cigarette. ‘I don’t need anything,’ she says.
‘It’s not about needing,’ Gábor tells her. ‘What do you want?’ he asks.
She shrugs and lifts the cigarette to her seamed mouth, to rudimentary dentures. ‘What have they got in London?’
Gábor laughs. ‘What haven’t they got?’
She puts a plate with two slices of bread on it on the small, square table next to Balázs’s Michaelangelesque elbow. (His mouth working, he acknowledges it with a nod of his head.)
Gábor says, ‘We’ll find you something. Whatever.’
‘You’ve got business there, have you?’ the woman says.
‘That’s right.’
‘And your friend?’ she asks. (Balázs keeps on eating.) ‘Has he got business there too?’
‘He’s helping me.’
‘Is he?’ She is staring straight at him, at ‘Gábor’s friend’ – a sun-toughened lump of muscle in a tight T-shirt, skin tattooed, face lightly pockmarked.
‘Security,’ Gábor specifies.
‘How’s the cabbage?’ she asks, still staring at Balázs. ‘Okay?’
He looks up. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Thanks.’
She turns back to Gábor. ‘And what’s Emma going to do while you two take care of your business?’
‘What do you think?’ Gábor says. ‘Shopping.’
They aren’t actually friends. They know each other from the gym. Balázs is Gábor’s personal trainer, though Gábor’s attendance is uneven – he might turn up four or five times one week, then not for a whole month, thus undoing all the work they put in together on the machines and treadmills. He also eats and drinks too much of too many of the wrong things. When he does show up, Emma is sometimes with him, and sometimes she is there on her own. These days she is there more often than he is – Monday, Wednesday, Friday, every week. All the men who work at the gym want to fuck her, Balázs isn’t alone in that. He wants it more than the others though – or he wants something more than they do, something more from her. It’s starting to be an unhealthy, obsessive thing.
She doesn’t even acknowledge him when she comes into the kitchen. Without seeming to (he is lighting a Park Lane) he notices that she is wearing the cork-soled platform shoes that make him think of pornography. In fact, he has an idea that Gábor – like not a few of the members of the gym, with their BMWs parked outside – is somehow involved in the production of pornography. One of the BMW drivers even offered him a part in a film, offered him a month’s wages for one day’s ‘work’ – Balázs had the well-muscled, tattoo-festooned look the producer favoured. His lightly pockmarked face was apparently not a problem, though the man had intimated that his size might be. Balázs had turned him down; partly to leave no hint that he was worried he might be too small, he had told him, or implied, that his girlfriend wouldn’t let him do it. That wasn’t true. He has no girlfriend.
Nor was it that he didn’t need the money. He did. He needs whatever bits and pieces of extra work he can find. He has been employed by Gábor as a minder several times already – usually when he visits people at their offices, often in smart villas in the leafier parts of Budapest – though what Gábor does exactly, and what his business is in London, Balázs does not know.
The easyJet flight to Luton is four hours delayed. Gábor does not take this well. He seems especially concerned about Zoli, who for a while he is unable to reach on the phone. Zoli is evidently some associate of his in London, who will be meeting them at the airport, and Gábor is frantic at the idea that he might have to wait for them there for hours. When Gábor finally speaks to him, Zoli already knows about the delay.
They are by then installed at a table in the sun-dappled interior of the terminal. Gábor finishes apologising to Zoli and puts down his phone. ‘It’s alright,’ he says.
Balázs nods and takes a mouthful of lager. The two men each have a half-litre of Heineken.
Balázs wonders how it will be in London. He imagines meetings in soporific offices, himself standing near the door, or waiting outside. For Emma, though, this is a sort of holiday so she and Gábor will probably want to have some time to themselves.
It is extremely stressful, he finds, to be in her presence outside the safely purposeful space of the gym. It was the same in the car, in Gábor’s Audi Q3, when she was there. Sometimes Gábor would go in somewhere and leave them in the car together – she in the front, Balázs in the back – and he would be so intensely aware of her presence, of the minuscule squeaks when she moved on the leather seat, or flipped down the sun visor to tweak an eyebrow in the vanity mirror, that, just to hold himself together, he had to fix his eyes on some object outside the darkened window and keep them there, unable to think about anything except how he had masturbated to her, twice, the previous night, which did not seem like a promising starting point for conversation. They never spoke. Sometimes they would be alone in the car for twenty minutes – Gábor was always away for at least twice as long as he said he would be – and they never spoke.
What she is like ‘as a person’ he has no idea. There is something princessy about her. She seems to look d
own on the staff in the gym – she isn’t friendly with them anyway. The women who work there hate her, and it is assumed that she is with Gábor, who is slightly shorter than her, for his money. She always listens to music while she works out, possibly to stop people trying to talk to her. Balázs has never seen her smile.
He was surprised to see what her mother was like, where she lived. He had expected something smarter, something in Buda maybe, a house with roses in front and a well-preserved fifty-year old offering them coffee, not that wreck of a woman living in that smoky hole of a flat. The time-browned tower block, the odours and voices of the stairwell, the neglected pot plants by the yellow window where the stairs turned – those things were all familiar to him. Most of the people he knew emanated from places like that, himself included. That she did, however, was a surprise.
He finishes the Heineken and says something about stepping outside for a cigarette. Gábor, waggling his fingers at the screen of his phone, says, ‘Yeah, okay. We’ll just be here.’ She does not even look up from her magazine.
He smokes on the observation terrace, from where, through a barrier of hardened glass, you can watch the planes taxiing to the end of the runway and taking off at intervals of a few minutes. Standing there and watching them through the feeble heat haze, the sound of the engines coming to him across several hundred metres of warm air, makes him think of the days he spent at Balad Air Base, with the rest of the Hungarian unit, waiting for the flight home. He now looks back on that year with something like nostalgia. He should have stayed in the army – it was safe there, and there were things to do. Since then he has just been treading water, waiting for something to happen … What was going to happen, though?
Gábor is standing there.
He lights a cigarette, a more expensive one than the Park Lanes Balázs smokes. ‘Sorry about the delay,’ he says.
In moulded plastic wrap-around shades, Balázs nods tolerantly.
Gábor seems nervous. It is as if he has something to say but isn’t sure how to say it.
Balázs has started to think that maybe he doesn’t have anything to say after all, when Gábor says, ‘I should tell you what we’ll be doing in London.’
There follow a few seconds during which they stare together at the scene in front of them – the open space of the airport in the sun, the smooth-skinned planes waiting in the shade near the terminal.
‘Emma,’ Gábor says, as if she were there and he were addressing her.
Balázs half-turns his head.
She isn’t there.
Gábor says, ‘Emma’s going to be doing some work in London.’
They watch as a narrow-bodied Lufthansa turboprop starts its take-off. After a few hundred metres it leaps into the air with a steepness of ascent that is quite startling, as if it were being jerked into the sky on a string. They watch it dwindle to a point in the sky’s hazy dazzle, and then, at some indefinite moment, disappear.
Gábor says, ‘And your job …’ He finds a more satisfactory pronoun. ‘Our job is to look after her. Okay?’
Balázs simply nods.
‘Okay,’ Gábor says, with finality, having performed what was obviously an embarrassing task. ‘Just thought I’d tell you.’ He drops his cigarette and extinguishes it under the toe of his trainer. ‘See you inside.’
Mimicking his employer, Balázs toes out his own cigarette. Then he lights another, and squints out at the shimmer standing on the tarmac.
The flight is uneventful. The plane is full, but Gábor has paid for priority boarding and they have seats together – Balázs squashed into the window seat, Gábor stretching his legs in the aisle, and Emma in the middle, listening to music and staring at the plastic seat-back a few inches from the tip of her nose.
Balázs concentrates on the window. There is nothing to see, except a section of wing and fierce light on the endless expanse of white fluffiness far below. You would fall straight through it, he thinks, solid as it looks. He isn’t sure, now, that he understood what Gábor meant when he said that Emma would be ‘doing some work’ in London. Had he even heard him properly? The light hurts his eyes and he half-lowers the plastic shutter. He folds his swollen hands in his lap and sits there, listening to the serrated whisper of her headphones, only just perceptible over the massive white noise of the labouring engines.
*
Zoli meets them at Luton airport in a long silver Mercedes.
Zoli is tall, and not unhandsome, and manages a moustache without looking silly. He has an air of slightly savage intelligence about him – he is in fact a doctor, a gynaecologist, though not currently practising. It is true that there is an unhealthy puffiness to his face, a swollenness, his eyes protruding more than is ideal, but Balázs does not notice these things until he sees them, intermittently, in the rear-view mirror – he is sitting in the back of the Mercedes with Emma, the lowered leather armrest emphatically separating them – as they make their way towards London.
They do so with single-minded speed, Zoli pushing the powerful car through holes in the traffic on the motorway. Holding onto the spring-hinged handle over the window, Balázs sees fleeting past a landscape somehow more thoroughly filled than any in his own country. It seems more orderly. It is very obviously more monied. It is early June and everything looks plump and fresh.
Gábor lights a cigarette. He is sitting in the front with Zoli, who immediately tells him to put it out.
Gábor apologises and presses it into the ashtray.
Still forcing the Mercedes forward, Zoli explains that he has borrowed it from a friend of his who has a luxury limousine hire service. He promised he wouldn’t smoke in it.
‘Sorry,’ Gábor says again. Then he says, ‘This is the new S-Class, yeah? Very nice.’
Zoli agrees vaguely.
He is in his early thirties, only a few years older than the others. Even so, Gábor is having trouble relating to him as an equal, something he normally manages quite easily with older and more important-seeming men. They had made some small talk as they drove out of the airport – though even that came to an abrupt end (Gábor was in the middle of saying something) when Zoli had to pay for the parking – and, as they head into London, Gábor’s usual effortless friendliness seems to have faltered. Whether that is because he is simply intimidated by Zoli, or for some other reason, Balázs does not know. Seeing them shake hands in the arrivals lounge the situation had seemed to him to be this – they had met before but did not know each other well. Zoli and Emma, on the other hand, seemed never to have met. Gábor introduced them, with a strange sort of formality, and Zoli was very friendly to her – a wide smile, a pair of kisses. To Balázs – obviously the minder, with his shit clothes and his muscles – he had offered only a peremptory handshake. Then he had hurried them to short-term parking. They were in a hurry because, as Zoli said, ‘There’s one tonight’ and what with the delay they were pressed for time, as they had first to go to the flat. Zoli, it seemed, had sorted out a flat for them to stay in while they were in London.
They spend some time stuck in traffic, the flow of the motorway silting up as it enters the metropolis. They are slowed by traffic lights. (The air conditioning is on – outside the tinted windows London, what they are able to see of it, swelters.) Then there are smaller thoroughfares, a more local look to things. There are neighbourhoods, parks, high streets, overflowing pubs. Smudged impressions of urban life on an early summer evening. All that goes on for much longer than Balázs imagined it would.
Finally they arrive. The flat is on a quiet street with a few trees in it. Small two-storey houses, all exactly the same. They wait with their luggage and Duty Free while Zoli opens the front door of one of them, swearing to himself as he struggles with the unfamiliar keys. They walk up some narrow stairs to the upper floor, where there is another struggle with the keys, and then they go in. One bedroom, white and sparsely furnished. For Balázs, the sofa in the living room, which overlooks the quiet road. On the other side of the landing, lu
rking mustily, is a windowless bathroom, into which Emma disappears with her washbag as soon as they arrive.
The men wait in the living room, Gábor on the sofa, Zoli pacing slowly and taking in the view from the uncurtained window, and Balázs just standing there staring at the old lion-coloured carpet and its mass of cigarette burns and other blemishes. Gábor wonders out loud where they might get something to eat. Zoli offers only an uninterested shrug. He says he doesn’t know the area well – he lives in another part of London. Turning to the window again, he says the high street is nearby – there will be something there.
‘D’you mind popping out,’ Gábor says to Balázs, ‘and getting some kebabs or something?’
Balázs looks up from the carpet. ‘Okay.’
‘Do you want something?’ Gábor says.
The question is addressed to Zoli. He is still staring out the window and doesn’t answer.
‘Zoli?’ Gábor says, tentatively. ‘D’you want something?’
‘No,’ he says, without turning.
‘Okay. So, yeah, just get some kebabs,’ Gábor says.
Balázs nods. Then he asks, ‘How many should I get?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll have one. Do you want one?’
‘Uh … Yeah.’
‘And Emma might want one. Four?’ Gábor suggests.
The stairs are almost too narrow for his shoulders, he almost has to make his way down sideways. The downstairs hall is dark, despite the frosted square pane in the front door, which opens as he nears the foot of the stairs and admits a youngish woman in a charcoal trouser suit. She leaves the door open for him. Otherwise they ignore each other.
It is very warm and light out in the street, a nice soft evening light that flatters the parked Merc. He lights a Park Lane, and then sets off through the little mazy streets of pinched, identical houses in the direction Zoli had indicated. It takes him twenty minutes to find the high street, and when he does there seems to be nowhere selling specifically kebabs. He walks up and down, sweating now in the summer evening, his orange T-shirt stuck to his skin. He notices a Polish supermarket, and the number of non-white people in the street. Then he phones Gábor. ‘Is chicken okay?’ he says.
