David Szalay - All That Man Is

‘Don’t be stupid…’

‘It’s true.’

‘It’s not.’

Bérnard has the spliff again, what’s left of it, an acrid stub. ‘It so is.’ He says, ‘I’ll feel like a fucking loser.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Baudouin says, finishing the level finally and saving his position. He turns to Bérnard. ‘Think Steve McQueen,’ he says. Baudouin is a fan of the late American actor. He has a large poster of him — squinting magisterially astride a vintage motorbike — on the wall of the room in which they sit. ‘Think Belmondo.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Do you think I’m pleased I can’t go?’ Baudouin asks. A Windows Desktop, weirdly vast and static, now fills the towering screen.

‘Whatever,’ Bérnard says again.

While he moodily sets to work on the next spliff, massaging the tobacco from one of his friend’s Marlboro Lights, Baudouin starts an MP4 of Iron Man 3 — a film which has yet to arrive in the Lille cinemas.

‘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.’