All That Man Is (11 page)

‘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

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, somehow, 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?'

*

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.

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 down 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.