All That Man Is (7 page)

‘You seen this?' he asks, after drinking at length from a bottle of Evian.

‘What is it?'

‘
Iron Man Three
.'

‘No.'

‘It's got Gwyneth Paltrow in it,' Baudouin says.

‘Yeah, I know.'

They watch it in English, which they both speak well enough for the dialogue to present no major problems.

Whenever Gwyneth Paltrow is on screen Baudouin stops talking and starts devotedly ogling. He has, as they say, a ‘thing' about her. It is not a ‘thing' his friend understands, particularly – not the full hormonal, worshipping intensity of it.

‘She's alright,' Bérnard says.

‘You, my friend, are working class.'

‘She's got no tits,' Bérnard says.

‘That you should say that,' Baudouin tells him, ‘does sort of prove my point.'

Then he says, in a scholarly tone, ‘In
Shakespeare in Love
you see her tits. They're not as small as you might think.'

Willing to be proven wrong, Bérnard makes a mental note to torrent the film when he gets home.

Which he does, and discovers that his friend has a point – there is indeed something there, something appreciable. And, hunched over himself, a hand-picked frame on the screen, he does appreciate it.

At four o'clock on Monday morning, on the bus to Charleroi airport, he feels sad, loserish, very lonely. Dawn arrives on the empty motorway. The sun, smacking him in the face. Shadows everywhere. He stares, through smarting eyes, at the landscape as it passes – its flatness, its shimmer. There is an exhilarating whisper of freedom, then, that lasts until he sees a plane hanging low in the sky, and again finds himself facing the affront to his ego of having to holiday alone.

From Larnaca airport – newer and shinier than Charleroi – a minibus operated by the holiday firm takes him, and about twelve other people, to Protaras. A dusty, unpleasant landscape. No sign of the sea. He is, on that air-conditioned bus, with little blue curtains that can be closed against the midday sun, the only person travelling on his own.

The drop-offs start.

He is the last to be dropped off.

Most of the others are set down at newish white hotels next to the sea, which did eventually appear, hotels that look like the top halves of cruise ships.

Then, when he is alone on the bus, it leaves the shore and starts inland, taking him first through some semi-pedestrianised streets full of lurid impermanent-looking pubs and then, the townscape thinning out, past a sizeable Lidl and into an arid half-made hinterland, without much happening, where the Hotel Poseidon is.

The Hotel Poseidon.

Three storeys of white-painted concrete, studded with identical small balconies. Broken concrete steps leading up to a brown glass door.

It is now the heat of the day – the streets around the hotel are empty and shadowless as the sun drops straight down on them. In the lobby the air is hot and humid. At first he thinks there is no one there. Then he sees the two women lurking in the warm semi-darkness behind the desk.

He explains, in English, who he is.

They listen, unimpressed.

Having taken his passport, one of them then leads him up some dim stairs to the floor above, and into a narrow space with a single window at one end and two low single beds placed end to end against one wall.

A sinister door is pointed to. ‘The bathroom,' she says.

And then he is alone again.

He is able to hear, indistinctly, voices, from several directions. From somewhere above him, footsteps. From somewhere else, a well-defined sneeze.

He stands at the window: there are some trees, some scrubby derelict land, some walls.

Far away, a horizontal blue line hints at the presence of the sea.

He is standing there feeling sorry for himself when there is a knock on the door.

It is a short man in an ill-fitting suit. Unlike the two women in the lobby, he is smiling. ‘Hello, sir,' he says, still smiling.

‘Hello,' Bérnard says.

‘I hope you are enjoying your stay,' the man says. ‘I just wanted to have a word with you please about the shower.'

‘Yes?'

‘Please don't use the shower.'

After a short pause, Bérnard says, ‘Okay.' And then, feeling obscurely that he should ask, ‘Why not?'

The man is still smiling. ‘It leaks, you see,' he says. ‘It leaks into the lobby. So please don't use it. I hope you understand.'

Bérnard nods and says, ‘Sure. Okay.'

‘Thank you, sir,' the man says.

When he has left, Bérnard has a look at the bathroom. It is a windowless shaft with a toilet, a sink, a metal nozzle in the wall over the toilet and what seems to be an associated tap – which is presumably the unusable shower – a flaky drain in the middle of the floor, and a sign in Greek, and also in Russian, Bérnard thinks, of which the only thing he can understand are the numerous exclamation marks. He switches off the light.

Sitting on one of the single beds, he starts to feel that it is probably unacceptable for him not to have access to a shower, and decides to speak to someone about it.

There is no one in the lobby, though, so after waiting for ten minutes, he leaves the hotel and starts to walk in what he thinks is the direction of the sea.

In addition to the shower, there is something else he feels might be unsatisfactory: he was sure the hotel was supposed to have a pool. Baudouin had talked about afternoons spent ‘vegging next to the pool', had even sent him a link to a picture of it – the picture had shown what appeared to be some sort of aqua park, with a number of different pools and water slides, populated by smiling people. The whole thing had seemed, from the picture, to be more or less next to the sea.

And that was another thing.

The hotel was advertised as five minutes' walk from the sea, yet he has been trudging for at least double that through the desolate heat and is only just passing the Lidl.

In fact, to walk to the sea takes half an hour.

Once there he hangs about for a while – stands at the landward margin of a brown beach, thick with sun umbrellas down to the listless flop of the surf.

He has a pint in a pub hung with Union Jacks and England flags, and advertising English football matches, and then walks slowly back to his hotel. The Lidl is easy to find: there are signs for it throughout the town. And from the Lidl he is able, with only one or two wrong turnings, to find the Hotel Poseidon.

In the hot lobby he walks up to the desk, where there is now someone on duty, intending to talk about the shower situation and the lack of a swimming pool on the premises.

It is the smiling man, who says, ‘Good afternoon, sir. There is a message for you.'

‘For me?'

‘For you, sir.' The smiling man – middle-aged, with a lean, tanned face – pushes a slip of paper across the desk.

It is a handwritten note:

Dropped by – you weren't in. I'll be in Waves from 5 if you wanna meet up and talk things through. Leif

Bérnard looks up at the smiling man's kind, avuncular face.

‘Are you sure this is for me?' he asks.

Still smiling kindly, the man nods.

Looking at the note again, Bérnard asks him if he knows where Waves is.

It is near the sea, the man tells him, and explains how to get there. ‘It's a popular place with
young
people,' he says.

Bérnard thanks him. It is already five, and he is about to set off again when he remembers the shower, and turns back. He does not know exactly how to put it, how to express his dissatisfaction. He says, uncertainly, ‘Listen, um. The shower …'

Immediately, as soon as the word
shower
has been spoken, the smiling man says, ‘The problem will be sorted out tomorrow.' For the first time, he is not smiling. He looks very serious. His eyes are full of apology. ‘I'm very sorry, sir.'

‘Okay,' Bérnard says. ‘Thank you.'

‘I'm sorry, sir,' the man says again, this time with a small deferential smile.

‘There is one other thing,' Bérnard says, emboldened.

‘Yes, sir?'

‘There is a swimming pool?'

The man's expression turns sad, almost mournful. ‘At the moment, no, sir, there is not,' he says. He starts to explain the situation – something about a legal dispute with the apartments next door – until Bérnard interrupts him, protesting mildly that the hotel had been sold to him as having a pool, so it seems wrong that there isn't one.

The smiling man says, ‘We have an arrangement with the Hotel Vangelis, sir.'

There is a moment of silence in the oppressive damp heat of the lobby.

‘An arrangement?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘What sort of arrangement?'

The arrangement turns out to be that for ten euros a day inmates of the Poseidon can use the pool facilities of the Hotel Vangelis, which are extensive – the aqua park pictured on the Poseidon's website, and also in the leaflet which the smiling man is now pressing into Bérnard's hand.

The smiling man has a moustache, Bérnard notices at that point. ‘Okay,' he says. ‘Thank you. What time is supper?'

‘Seven o'clock, sir.'

‘And where?'

‘In the dining room.' The smiling man points to a glass door on the other side of the lobby. Dirty yellow curtains hang on either side of the door. Next to the door there is an empty lectern. The room on the other side of the door is dark.

‘You wanna party, yeah?' Leif asks, smiling lazily, as Bérnard, with a perspiring Keo, the local industrial lager, takes a seat opposite him.

Bérnard nods. ‘Of course,' he says, fairly seriously.

A tall, tanned Icelander, only a few years older than Bérnard, Leif turned out to be the company rep.

Now he is telling Bérnard about the night life of Protaras. He is talking about some nightclub – Jesters – and the details of a happy-hour offer there. ‘And then three cocktails for the price of two from seven till eight,' he says. ‘Take advantage of it. Like I told the others, it's one of the best offers in the resort.'

‘Okay,' Bérnard says.

Leif is drinking a huge smoothie. He keeps talking about ‘the others', and Bérnard wonders whether he missed some prearranged meeting that no one told him about.

Who were these ‘others'?

‘Kebabs,' Leif says, as if it were a section heading. ‘The best place is Porkies, okay? It's just over there.' He takes his large splayed hand from the back of his shaved head and points up the street. Bérnard looks and sees an orange sign:
Porkies
.

‘Okay,' he says.

They are sitting on the terrace of Waves, he and Leif. Inside, music thumps. Although it is only just six, there are already plenty of drunk people about. A drinking game is in progress somewhere, with lots of excitable shouting.

‘It's open twenty-four hours,' Leif says, still talking about Porkies.

‘Okay.'

‘And be careful – the hot sauce
is
hot.'

He says this so seriously that Bérnard thinks he must be joking and laughs.

Just as seriously, though, Leif says, ‘It is a really fucking hot sauce.' He tips the last of his smoothie into his mouth. There is a sort of very faint disdain in the way he speaks to Bérnard. His attention always seems vaguely elsewhere; he keeps slowly turning his head to look up and down the street, which is just starting to acquire its evening hum, though the sun is still shining, long-shadowedly.

‘So that's about it,' he says. He has the air of a man who gets laid effortlessly and often. Indeed, there is something post-coital about his exaggeratedly laid-back manner. Bérnard is intimidated by him. He nods and has a sip of his beer.

‘You here with some mates?' Leif asks him.

‘No, uh …'

‘On your own?'

Bérnard tries to explain. ‘I was supposed to be with a friend …' He stops. Leif, obviously, is not interested.

‘Okay,' Leif says, looking in the direction of Porkies as if he is expecting someone.

Then he turns to Bérnard again and says, ‘I'll leave you to it. You have any questions just let me know, yeah.'

He is already standing up.

Bérnard says, ‘Okay. Thanks.'

‘See you round,' Leif says.

He doesn't seem to hear Bérnard saying, ‘Yeah, see you.'

As he walks away the golden hair on his arms and legs glows in the low sun.

Bérnard finishes his drink quickly. Then he leaves Waves – where the music is now at full nightclub volume – and starts to walk, again, towards the Hotel Poseidon.

He feels slightly worse, slightly more isolated, after the meeting with Leif. He had somehow assumed, when he first sat down, that Leif would show him an evening of hedonism, or at least provide
some
sort of entrée into the native depravity of the place. That he did not, that he just left him on the terrace of Waves to finish his drink alone, leaves Bérnard feeling that he has failed a test – perhaps a fundamental one.

This feeling widening slowly into something like depression, he walks into the dead hinterland where the Hotel Poseidon is.

It is just after seven when he arrives at the hotel. The lobby is sultry and unlit. The dining room, on the other hand, is lit like a hospital A&E department. It doesn't seem to have any windows, the dining room. The walls are hung with dirty drapes. He sits down at a table. He seems to be the last to arrive – most of the other tables are occupied, people lowering their faces towards the grey soup, spooning it into their mouths. It is eerily quiet. Someone is speaking in Russian. Other than that the only sound, from all around, is the tinking of spoon on plate. And a strange humming, quite loud, that lasts for twenty or thirty seconds, then stops, then starts again. A waiter puts a plate of soup in front of him. Bérnard picks up his spoon, and notices the encrustations on its cloudy metal surface, the hard deposits of earlier meals. With a napkin – which itself shows evidence of previous use – he tries to scrub them off. The voice is still speaking in Russian, monotonously. Having cleaned his spoon, he turns his attention to the soup. It is a strange grey colour. And it is cold. He looks around, as if expecting someone to explain. No one explains. What he does notice, however, is the microwave on the other side of the room – the source of the strange intermittent humming – and the queue of people waiting to use it, each with a plate of soup. He picks up his own soup and joins them.