David Szalay - All That Man Is

‘Oh, go on!’ Sandra says to her, sweating dangerously, her vast red cleavage shining as if with varnish.

Charmian shakes her head again.

‘You are sure?’ Bérnard asks, out of breath.

When Charmian just ignores him, Sandra says, ‘Don’t be so rude!’

She gives Bérnard an apologetic, exasperated look.

Then they sit down to finish the red wine.

—

Their final stop of the evening is Porkies, for a kebab. Bérnard does not have one. He just watches the others eat. In his state of extreme drunkenness, Charmian has taken on a strange, fascinating quality. Sitting opposite her, he watches her eating the kebab with what seem to be modest flickers of desire. They surprise him. Her face, admittedly, is nice enough and there is nothing wrong with the pale blue of her long-lashed eyes…

He looks away, wondering what to make of this. What, if anything, to do about it.

He is still wondering in the taxi that takes them back to the Hotel Poseidon. He is sitting in the front, next to the driver. The surprising question presses itself on him: Should he make some sort of move?

Awkward, with her mother there.

The taxi stops at the crumbling concrete steps of the Poseidon.

With difficulty, with Bérnard helping, heaving heavy flesh, the ladies extract themselves from its low seats.

And then they are in the lobby.

And he almost says to Charmian something about whether she wants to see his room.

And then it is too late.

Sandra has kissed him goodnight.

He is alone in his room, which starts to turn if he shuts his eyes.

—

He tries a wank, but he is too drunk.

In the morning he lies there on the single bed, imprisoned in his hangover, trying to piece together the fragments of the evening and feeling that he nearly did something very, very silly.

—

He opens his eyes.

—

The heat of the sun throbs from the closed curtains and the sounds of the street intrude into the painful stillness of the dim, narrow room. He lies there for most of the morning, instantly feeling sick if he moves at all.

At some point he falls asleep again, and when he wakes up he feels okay.

He is able to move.

To sit.

To stand.

To peel back the edge of the curtain and squint at the white, fiery day — the glare of the vacant lot next door.

The sky’s merciless scream of blue.

It is eleven fifty, nearly time for lunch, and he is hungry now.

He feels strange, as if in a dream, as he descends the cool stairs.

Descending the cool stairs, he really feels as if he is still in bed, and dreaming this.

The dining room.

Murmur of voices — Russian, Bulgarian.

The buffet of congealed brown food.

The microwave queue.

And there they are, Sandra and Charmian, at their usual table, which is where he sits now too.

As he approaches — feeling weightless, as if he is floating over the filthy carpet — Sandra says, ‘We didn’t see you at breakfast, Bernard.’

She seems more or less unaffected by the night’s drinking — her ruddiness only slightly attenuated, her voice only marginally hoarser than normal.

Charmian, sitting next to her, looks quite pale.

‘No, I, er…’ Bérnard mumbles, taking a seat. ‘I was sleeping.’

‘Last night too much for you, was it?’

Bérnard laughs weakly. Then there is a short pause. The thought of eating has lost most of its appeal. ‘It was good,’ he says finally.

‘It was, wasn’t it,’ Sandra says.

She has already eaten — the emptied plate is on the table in front of her. Charmian too is just finishing up.

Bérnard opens his can of Fanta and pours most of it into a greasy glass.

‘You not having anything?’ Sandra asks him, moving her faint blonde eyebrows in the direction of the buffet.

‘Later, maybe,’ Bérnard says. He is starting to think that this was a mistake, making an appearance here. He feels less normal than he thought he did. The taste of the Fanta — a tiny sip, the first thing to have passed his lips today — makes him feel slightly more grounded.

Charmian stands abruptly.

He finds it hard to believe, now, that he considered making some sort of move on her last night.

He is pretty sure he didn’t actually say anything, or do anything. Still, even just having had the idea embarrasses him.

She is off to the buffet for seconds. He watches, briefly, her cumbersome waddle as she passes among the tables. Others are watching her too, he sees.

Somewhere near him, Sandra’s voice says, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Charmian really likes you.’

Bérnard feels, again, that he is still in bed upstairs and just dreaming this.

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ Sandra says, when he turns to her, with a look of pale incomprehension on his face.

‘Have you?’ she asks.

He shakes his head.

Sandra looks away and a few seconds pass. Some Russians laugh at something.

Then Sandra says, ‘Do you like sex, Bernard?’

Bérnard tries to steady himself with another sip of Fanta. ‘Sex?’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘Of course…’

Sandra chuckles. ‘Spoken like a true Frenchman.’

He is not sure what she means by this, or even if he heard her properly. ‘I’m sorry…?’ he asks.

‘Why don’t you ask Charmian up to your room after lunch?’ Sandra says. ‘I think she’d like that.’

Puzzled, Bérnard says, ‘To my room?’

‘Yes. I think she’d like that.’

He does not have time to ask any more questions — Charmian is there again, has taken her place at the table without a word, without looking at Bérnard, and is tucking into her next plate of microwaved lunch.

—

They are in the lobby afterwards when he says to her, ‘You would like to see my room?’

The words, flat and matter-of-fact, just seem to escape him. He had not planned to say them, or to say anything.

She looks at her mother.

Sandra says, ‘I’m going to have a little lie-down.’

She starts up the stairs on her own.

After a few moments, without saying anything else, they follow her.

They follow her as far as the first floor. She is taking a breather where the stairs turn and just nods at them as they leave her there in the stairwell window’s soiled light and enter, with Bérnard one pace ahead, the shadows of the passageway.

They stop, in semi-darkness, at Bérnard’s door. He operates the key, and lets Charmian precede him into the room.

He is aware, following her into it, that the narrow room smells quite strongly. The curtains are drawn and his dirty clothes are all over the floor.

‘I am sorry about the mess,’ he says, shutting the door.

‘Our room’s just the same,’ she tells him.

‘Yes?’

They stand there, in the soupy air. He has that feeling, again, that he’s dreaming this. She is huge. Her hugeness makes the whole situation seem more dreamlike.

‘What do you want to do then?’ she asks, still taking the place in — looking at the open suitcase still half-full of stuff on the neatly made bed, the one he doesn’t sleep in, nearer the door.

He shrugs, as if he hasn’t any idea what he wants to do, as if he hasn’t even thought about it.

‘Do you want to have a shower?’ she asks without obvious enthusiasm, looking at him now.

‘The shower doesn’t work.’

‘Oh, yeah — you said.’

‘Yes.’

They stand there for a while longer, and then she says, ‘Do you want to see my tits?’

After hesitating for a second, he says, ‘Okay.’

In the dim light she takes her top off — a frilly-edged shirt like the one she was wearing last night — and extricates herself from the colossal bra. The tits hang down. Doughy, blue-veined, they sit on the shelf of the next tier of her, each one equivalent, more or less, to Bérnard’s head. The nipples are pale pink, very pale, and the size of saucers — they occupy meaningful territory.