David Szalay - All That Man Is

And still thinking of her afterwards, drying on a sunlounger. His eyes are shut. His hair looks orangeish when it is wet. There is a tuft of it in the middle of his flat, white chest. His arms and legs are long and smooth. The trunks hang wetly on his loins and thighs, sticking to them heavily.

Slowly, the sun swings round.

One of the pools features a bar — a circular, straw-roofed structure in the shallow end, the seats of the stools that surround it set just above the surface of the water. Where it touches the side of the pool, there is a gate that allows the barman to enter the dry interior, where the drinks are kept in a stainless-steel fridge.

Some time in the afternoon, Bérnard is wallowing in this shallow pool, thinking of Iveta, when, on a whim, he paddles over and takes a seat on one of the stools. His legs, still in the water, look white as marble. He orders a Keo. He is impatient for evening, for Iveta. The day has started to be tiresome.

He is sitting there, under the thatch, holding his plastic pot of lager and looking mostly at his blue-veined feet, when a voice quite near him says, ‘Hello again.’

A woman’s voice.

He looks up.

It is the woman from the Hotel Poseidon, the fat one he spoke to in the microwave queue last night. She and her even fatter daughter are wading towards him through the shallow turquoise water of the pool — and weirdly, though they are in the pool, they are both wearing dresses, simple ones that hang from stringy shoulder straps, sticking wetly to their immense midriffs, and floating soggily on the waterline.

‘Hello again,’ the mother says, reaching the stool next to Bérnard’s, her face and shoulders and her colossal cleavage sunburnt, her great barrel of a body filling the thin wet dress.

‘Hello,’ Bérnard says.

The daughter, moving slowly in the water, has arrived at the next stool along. She, it seems, is more careful in the sun than her mother — her skin everywhere has a lardy pallor. Only her face has a very slight tan.

‘Hello,’ Bérnard says to her, politely.

He wonders — with a mixture of amusement and pity — whether she will be able to sit on the stool. Surely not.

Somehow, though, she manages it.

Her mother is already in place. She says, ‘Not bad, this, is it?’

Bérnard is still looking at the daughter. ‘Yeah, it’s good,’ he says.

‘Better than we expected, I have to say.’

‘It’s good,’ Bérnard says again.

When the two of them have their sweating plastic tankards of Magners, the older woman says, ‘So what do you think of the Hotel Poseidon then?’ The tone in which she asks the question suggests that she doesn’t think much of it herself.

‘It’s okay,’ Bérnard answers.

‘You think so?’

‘Yeah. Okay,’ he admits, ‘maybe there are some problems…’

The woman laughs. ‘You can say that again.’

‘Yeah, okay,’ Bérnard says. ‘Like my shower, you can say.’

‘Your shower? What about your shower?’

Bérnard explains the situation with his shower — which the smiling man this morning again warned him against using. It would, he promised Bérnard, be sorted out by tomorrow.

The older woman turns to her daughter. ‘Well, that’s just typical,’ she says, ‘isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ she says again, and the younger woman, who is drinking her Magners through a straw, nods.

‘We’ve had no end of things like that,’ the mother says to Bérnard. ‘Like what happened with the towels.’

‘The towels?’

‘One morning the towels go missing,’ she tells him. ‘While we’re downstairs. They just disappear. Don’t they?’ she asks her daughter, who nods again.

‘And then,’ the mother says, ‘when we ask for some more, they tell us we must have stolen them. They say we’ve got to pay forty euros for new ones, or we won’t get our passports back.’

Bérnard murmurs sympathetically.

He has a swig of his drink. He is still fascinated by the daughter’s body — by the pillow-sized folds of fat on her sitting midriff, the way her elbows show only as dimples in the distended shapes of her arms. How small her head seems…

Her mother is talking about something else now, about some Bulgarians in the next room. ‘Keep us up half the night, shouting and God knows what,’ she says. ‘The walls are like paper. We can hear everything — and I do mean everything. We call them the vulgar Bulgars , don’t we?’ she says to her daughter. ‘You know what we saw them doing? We saw them stealing food from the dining room.’

Bérnard laughs.

‘Why they would want to steal that food I don’t know. It’s awful. Well, you experienced it last night. You ask if they’ve any fish — I mean we are next to the sea, aren’t we — they bring you a tin of tuna. It’s unbelievable. And the flies, especially at lunchtime. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not fit for human consumption. We were both down with the squits for a few days last week,’ she says, and Bérnard, unwilling to dwell on that idea, lets his thoughts drift again to Iveta — her thin tanned thighs, her pretty feet in the jewelly sandals — while the fat Englishwoman keeps talking.

They are English, these two, he has worked that out now.

‘One day we thought, enough’s enough, we’re going to eat somewhere else,’ the older woman says. ‘So we asked our rep about good places to eat and he suggested this place the Aphrodite…Do you know it?’

Bérnard shakes his head.

‘Well, we went there on Saturday,’ she says, ‘and after spending over fifty euros on drinks and dinner, I went to the toilet and was told I had to pay a euro to use it. Well, I wasn’t happy and I told the woman I was a customer. And she said that doesn’t matter, you still have to pay. And I said well, I’m not paying, and when I tried to go into the toilet anyway, she pushed me away. She physically pushed me away. Wouldn’t let me use it. So I asked to speak to the manager, and after about fifteen minutes this man appears — Nick, he says his name is — and when I explain to him what happened, he just laughs, laughs in my face. And when that happened…Well, I got so angry. He just laughed in my face. Can you imagine. The Aphrodite,’ she says. ‘Stay away from it.’

‘I will,’ Bérnard tells her.

‘We love Cyprus,’ she says, moving on her stool. ‘Every year we come here. Don’t we? I’m Sandra, by the way. And this is Charmian.’

‘Bérnard,’ says Bérnard.

They stay there drinking for two hours, until the hotel’s shadow starts to move over them. They get quite drunk. And then Bérnard, whose thoughts have never been far from Iveta and what will happen that evening, notices the time and says he has to leave.

The two women have just ordered another pair of Magners — their fourth or fifth — and Sandra says, ‘We’ll see you at supper then.’

Bérnard is wading away. ‘Okay,’ he says.

Showering in the locker room a few minutes later, he has already forgotten about them.

—

When he wakes up it is dark. He is in his room in the Hotel Poseidon. The narrow room is very hot and music thuds from the place nearby.

It was about six when he got back from the Hotel Vangelis, and having a slight headache, he thought he would lie down for a while before supper. He must have fallen into a deep sleep. Sitting up suddenly, he looks at his watch, fearful that it might be too late to find Iveta at Jesters. It is only ten, though, and he lies down again. He is sweating in the close heat of the room. Last night he tried the air conditioning, and it didn’t work.

He washes, as best he can, at the sink.

The light in the bathroom is so dim he can barely see his face in the mirror.