David Szalay - All That Man Is

Then he tidies up a bit. It is his assumption that Iveta will be in this room later, and he does not want it littered with his dirty stuff.

He spends quite a lot of time deciding what to wear, finally opting for the dressier look of the plain white shirt, and leaving the horizontally striped polo for another night. He leaves the top three buttons of the shirt undone, so that it is open down to the tuft of hair on his sternum, and digs in his suitcase for the tiny sample of Ermenegildo Zegna Uomo that was once stuck to a magazine in his uncle’s office. He squirts about half of it on himself, and then, after inquisitively sniffing his wrists, squirts the other half on as well.

Satisfied, he turns his attention to his hair, combing back the habitual mop to the line of his skull — thereby disclosing, unusually, his low forehead — and holding the combed hair in place with a generous scoop of scented gel.

In the buzzing light of the bathroom he inspects himself.

He buttons the third button of his shirt.

Then he unbuttons it again.

Then he buttons it again.

His forehead, paler than the rest of his face, looks weird, he thinks.

Working with the comb he tries to hide it, but that just makes it look even weirder.

Finally, impatient with himself, he tries to put the hair back the way it was before.

There is still something weird about it, and he worries as he hurries down the stairs to the lobby and, in a travelling zone of Uomo, out into the warm night.

It is nearly eleven now, and he has not eaten anything. It’s not that he is hungry — far from it — it’s just that he feels he ought to ‘line’ his stomach.

He stops at Porkies and eats part of a kebab, forcing a few mouthfuls down. He is almost shaking with excitement, with anticipation. He tries to still his nerves with a vodka-Red Bull, and with the memories of how easily they talked in the morning, of how eagerly she had told him how to find Jesters — she practically drew him a map. The memories help.

He abandons the kebab and starts for Jesters, through the heaving streets.

He finds it easily, following a pack of shirtless singing youths to its shed-like facade, outlined in hellish neon tubes. The looming neon cap-and-bells, the drunken queue.

Five euros, he hands over.

Inside, he looks for her.

Moving through strobe light, through a wall of throbbing sound, he looks for her.

The place is solid flesh. Limbs flickering in darkness. He could search all night, he thinks, and not find her.

Holding his expensive Beck’s, he scans the place with increasing desperation. For the first time it occurs to him that she might not actually be there.

He has a nervous pull of the lager and pushes his way through a hedge of partying anonymity.

Some girls, on heat, are flaunting on a platform.

At their feet, a pool of staring lads in sweat-wet T-shirts. He watches for a moment, up-skirting with the other males, and then, with a shock of adrenalin, he sees someone, a face he sort of knows — one of her friends from this morning, he thinks it is, moving away from him.

He follows her. His eyes stuck to the skin of her exposed back, its dull shine of perspiration, he tears a path through interlacing limbs.

And she leads him to Iveta. She leads him to Iveta. He sees her in a pop of light as the music winds up. She does not see him. Her eyes are shut. She is in a man’s hands, mouths melting together.

And then the hit crashes into its chorus.

The Hotel Vangelis, the next afternoon. Waist deep in water he is at the in-pool bar, drinking Cypriot lager and absorbing sunburn. He still smells of Ermenegildo Zegna Uomo. He had welcomed the arrival, about an hour before, of Sandra and Charmian. They are stationed next to him now, huge on their submerged stools, and Sandra is talking. She is telling him how the man she always refers to as ‘Charmian’s father’ died horrifically after falling into a vat of molten zinc — he worked in an industrial installation of some sort — and how heartbroken she was after that. Tasting his Keo, Bérnard appreciates the parity she seems to accord that event and his finding a girl he had only just met snogging someone else in a nightclub.

Already quite drunk, and exhausted by a night spent wandering the litter-strewn streets of Protaras, he had told them about that. He found he wanted to talk about it. And when he had finished his story, Sandra sighed and said she knew how he felt, and told him the story of her husband’s death.

It was awful enough to be on the news — she is telling him how upsetting it was to see strangers talking about it on the local TV news.

‘And the worst thing,’ she says, ‘is they think he was alive for up to twenty seconds after he fell in.’

‘When did it happen?’ Bérnard asks her morosely.

‘Nine years ago,’ Sandra says, sighing again. ‘And I miss him every single day.’

Bérnard finishes his Keo and hands the empty plastic pot to the barman.

‘What do you do, Bernard?’ Sandra asks him, pronouncing his name the English way.

He tells her he was working for his uncle, until he was sacked.

‘Why’d he sack you then?’ she asks.

‘He sounds like a tosser,’ she says, when he has told her what happened.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘What is it, a tosser?’

‘A tosser?’ Sandra laughs, and looks at Charmian. ‘How would you explain?’

‘Sort of like an idiot?’ Charmian suggests.

‘But what’s it mean literally?’

‘Literally?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s like wanker, isn’t it?’

Sandra laughs again. ‘How do we explain that to Bernard?’

‘I don’t know.’

Sandra says, turning to Bérnard, ‘Literally, it means someone who plays with himself.’

‘Okay.’

‘You know what I mean?’ Sandra is smirking.

Charmian seems embarrassed — her face has turned all pink, and she is urgently sucking up cider and looking the other way.

‘I think so,’ Bérnard says, smiling slightly embarrassedly himself.

‘But really it just means an idiot, someone we don’t like.’

‘Then he is a tosser, my uncle.’

‘He sounds like it.’ She turns to Charmian again. ‘Imagine sacking your own nephew, just because he wants to go on holiday!’

Charmian nods. She looks quickly at Bérnard.

Warming to the subject, Bérnard starts to tell them more about his uncle — how he lives in Belgium to pay less tax, how he…

‘Where you from then, Bernard?’ Sandra asks him.

‘Lille.’

‘Where’s that then?’

‘It’s sort of near Belgium, isn’t it?’ Charmian ventures shyly.

Bérnard nods.

‘How’d you know that then?’ Sandra asks her, impressed.

Charmian says, ‘The Eurostar goes through there sometimes, doesn’t it?’ The question is addressed, somewhat awkwardly, to Bérnard.

Who just says, ‘Yeah,’ and turns his head towards the sparkle of the pool.

‘We’re from Northampton,’ Sandra tells him. ‘It’s famous for shoes.’

—

They swim together, later. The ladies, still in their billowing dresses, letting the water lift them, and Bérnard moving more vigorously, doing little displays of front crawl, and then lolling on his back in the water, letting the sun dazzle his chlorine-stung eyes. Sandra encourages him to do a handstand in the shallow end. Not totally sober, he obliges her. He surfaces to ask how it was, and she shouts at him to keep his legs straight next time, while Charmian, still bobbing about nearby, staying where she can find the cool blue tiles with her toes, looks on. He does another handstand, unsteady in his long wet trunks. The ladies applaud. Triumphant, he dives again, into watery silence, blue world, losing all vertical aplomb as his big hands strive for the tiles. His legs thrash to drive him down. His lungs keep lifting his splayed hands from the tiles. His face feels full of blood. Streams of bubbles pass over him, upwards from his nostrils. And then he is in air again, squatting shoulder deep in the tepid water, the water sharp and bright with chemicals streaming from orange slicks of hair that hang over his eyes. He feels queasy for a moment. All those Keo lagers…He fears, just for a moment, that he is going to throw up.