David Szalay - All That Man Is

Then he understands.

‘That’s more like it,’ she says, immediately noticing. She smiles, showing her small yellow teeth. ‘She said you were insatiable, and you are as well.’ She puts her hand on his smooth chest and says, ‘Charmian’ll be back tomorrow, don’t worry. She’s a bit sore today. Didn’t think she was up to it. So I asked her if it was alright if I had a go. I’ve never had a Frenchman before,’ she says, almost tremulously. ‘I want you to show me what all the fuss is about — alright?’ She is looking up at him, her hand on his face now. ‘Will you do that for me, Bernard?’ Her sea-green eyes are full of imploration. ‘Will you?’

—

She leaves after dark — she was more eager, more humble than the younger woman — and he sleeps until eight in the morning, without waking once.

When he does wake, still lying on the mattress on the floor, the room is full of sunlight.

He walks to Porkies and has an egg roll, a Greek coffee.

And then, already in his trunks, and equipped with one of the Poseidon’s small, scratchy towels, he makes his way to the sea.

As he had the previous day, he woke with a desire to swim in the sea.

It is still too early for the beach to be full. The Russians are there, of course, with their pungent cigarettes, their Thermoses of peat-coloured tea.

He walks down to the low surf — it is quite far from the road, the tide is out — and takes off his shirt and shoes. He puts his wallet in one of the shoes, and puts his shirt on top of them, weighing it down with an empty bottle he finds. The sand feels cold between his toes. The wind is quite strong and also feels cold when it blows. The waves, flopping onto the shore, are greenish. He lets the foaming surf wash the powdery sand from his white feet.

He wades out into the waves until they wet his long trunks, lifting his arms as the cloudy water rises around him, and lowering them as it sinks away. His skin puckers in the water, the windy air. An oncoming wave pours over him. For a moment, pouring over him, it obliterates everything in noise and push of water.

He feels its strength, feels it move away, and then he is in the smoother water on the far side of the falling waves. He is lying on the shining surface, the sea holding him, sun on his face and whispering salt water filling his ears. With his eyes shut, it seems to him that he can hear every grain of sand moving on the sea floor.

—

The tumbling surf feels warm now. It slides up the shore, stretching as far as its energy will take it, laying a lace of popping foam on the smoothed, shining sand.

Further up the sand is hot.

Tingling, he lies on it, lungs filling and emptying.

Arm over eyes, mouth open. Heart working.

Mind empty.

He is aware of nothing except the heat of the sun. The heat of the sun. Life.

It is ten o’clock in the morning and the kitchen is full of standing smoke and the smell of stuffed cabbages. ‘So you’re off to London?’ Emma’s mother says. Though she is not an old woman, probably not even fifty, she has the sour demeanour of someone disappointedly older. She looks older too as she moves ponderously around the kitchen in a shapeless tracksuit, or leans heavily on the grim, antiquated gas cooker.

Gábor says, ‘We’ll bring you something back. What do you want?’

‘You don’t need to bring me anything,’ she says. Her hair is dyed a maximal black. White roots show. Outside the window, its sill crammed with dusty cacti, an arterial road growls. She lights a cigarette. ‘I don’t need anything,’ she says.

‘It’s not about needing,’ Gábor tells her. ‘What do you want ?’ he asks.

She shrugs and lifts the cigarette to her seamed mouth, to rudimentary dentures. ‘What have they got in London?’

Gábor laughs. ‘What haven’t they got?’

She puts a plate with two slices of bread on it on the small, square table next to Balázs’s Michaelangelesque elbow. (His mouth working, he acknowledges it with a nod of his head.)

Gábor says, ‘We’ll find you something. Whatever.’

‘You’ve got business there, have you?’ the woman says.

‘That’s right.’

‘And your friend?’ she asks. (Balázs keeps on eating.) ‘Has he got business there too?’

‘He’s helping me.’

‘Is he?’ She is staring straight at him, at ‘Gábor’s friend’ — a sun-toughened lump of muscle in a tight T-shirt, skin tattooed, face lightly pockmarked.

‘Security,’ Gábor specifies.

‘How’s the cabbage?’ she asks, still staring at Balázs. ‘Okay?’

He looks up. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Thanks.’

She turns back to Gábor. ‘And what’s Emma going to do while you two take care of your business?’

‘What do you think?’ Gábor says. ‘Shopping.’

—

They aren’t actually friends. They know each other from the gym. Balázs is Gábor’s personal trainer, though Gábor’s attendance is uneven — he might turn up four or five times one week, then not for a whole month, thus undoing all the work they put in together on the machines and treadmills. He also eats and drinks too much of too many of the wrong things. When he does show up, Emma is sometimes with him, and sometimes she is there on her own. These days she is there more often than he is — Monday, Wednesday, Friday, every week. All the men who work at the gym want to fuck her, Balázs isn’t alone in that. He wants it more than the others though — or he wants something more than they do, something more from her. It’s starting to be an unhealthy, obsessive thing.

She doesn’t even acknowledge him when she comes into the kitchen. Without seeming to (he is lighting a Park Lane) he notices that she is wearing the cork-soled platform shoes that make him think of pornography. In fact, he has an idea that Gábor — like not a few of the members of the gym, with their BMWs parked outside — is somehow involved in the production of pornography. One of the BMW drivers even offered him a part in a film, offered him a month’s wages for one day’s ‘work’ — Balázs had the well-muscled, tattoo-festooned look the producer favoured. His lightly pockmarked face was apparently not a problem, though the man had intimated that his size might be. Balázs had turned him down; partly to leave no hint that he was worried he might be too small, he had told him, or implied, that his girlfriend wouldn’t let him do it. That wasn’t true. He has no girlfriend.

Nor was it that he didn’t need the money. He did. He needs whatever bits and pieces of extra work he can find. He has been employed by Gábor as a minder several times already — usually when he visits people at their offices, often in smart villas in the leafier parts of Budapest — though what Gábor does exactly, and what his business is in London, Balázs does not know.

—

The easyJet flight to Luton is four hours delayed. Gábor does not take this well. He seems especially concerned about Zoli, who for a while he is unable to reach on the phone. Zoli is evidently some associate of his in London, who will be meeting them at the airport, and Gábor is frantic at the idea that he might have to wait for them there for hours. When Gábor finally speaks to him, Zoli already knows about the delay.

They are by then installed at a table in the sun-dappled interior of the terminal. Gábor finishes apologising to Zoli and puts down his phone. ‘It’s alright,’ he says.

Balázs nods and takes a mouthful of lager. The two men each have a half-litre of Heineken.

Balázs wonders how it will be in London. He imagines meetings in soporific offices, himself standing near the door, or waiting outside. For Emma, though, this is a sort of holiday so she and Gábor will probably want to have some time to themselves.