David Szalay - All That Man Is

‘Yeah.’

‘So yeah, she’s angry.’

‘But she’s okay?’

Gábor ignores the question. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘there’s two more nights. I think you should just stay here, whatever. I’ll take care of things.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think you should just be out of this from now on. I mean, we’re not paying you now, so…Look, just forget it. Leave it to me. Your work is done. Okay?’

—

Zoli does not come round that day, of course, since there is no money to collect, and by the time he appears the next day, he seems to have calmed down and merely ignores Balázs. Balázs, lying on the sofa with Harry Potter és a Titkok Kamrája , ignores him back. There is no talk of leg-breaking — only the coldness normally accorded to someone who has seriously fucked up.

And this coldness extended, Balázs found, to Emma. She had seemed to avoid him the previous afternoon. She had stayed out of the living room, and it was only when they met accidentally at the bathroom door that they spoke.

Without looking him in the eye, she said, ‘Oh, sorry.’

And Balázs, emerging, said, ‘No, it’s okay, I’ve finished.’

Still filling the door, he was in her way.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said.

Still without looking at him, she nodded. ‘Okay.’

And that was it — he stood aside and she went past into the damp reek of the bathroom.

A few hours later she and Gábor left for the hotel.

Gábor put his head round the living-room door. ‘Okay, we’re going,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Balázs said, ‘okay.’

When they had left he sat there for a while. Meditatively, he smoked two Park Lanes, then he put on his jacket and went out into the street. The sky was a super-intense evening blue, and subdivided by jet trails in various states of dispersal, some plain white, some, perhaps those higher up, a fanciful pink. Down where he walked, dusk was deep in the small street, silvering the windscreens of the parked cars. Everything was quiet, and there was a pleasant emptiness inside him too — something like the unlit windows of the houses he walked past, a peaceful vacancy. Silent interiors. No one home.

It was less than a week since he had first done this walk, from the flat to the high street, and already it felt like something totally familiar — something that, no matter how hard he looked, would show him nothing new.

And then there was the girl at the chicken place. She was always there, serving the customers, but he hadn’t really noticed her until tonight. The little smile she gave him when she took his order, it occurred to him, as he sat down to wait for his food, was not the first. Part of the lace edge of her bra showed in the V-shaped neckline of her T-shirt, where a little gold cross lay on the skin. He watched her dealing with the next customer, her earnest manner, her hand tightly gripping the pen with which she wrote the orders down. He wondered what she thought about things. Though she was not smiling now, she had a nice face.

It is light when he leaves the hotel. Light. Primordial sunlight disclosing empty streets, disclosing form with shadow, the stucco facades. And silence. Here in the middle of London, silence. Not quite silence, of course. Never true silence here. The sublimated rumble of a plane. The burble of pigeons courting on a cornice. A taxi’s busy rattle along Sussex Gardens, past the terraced hotel fronts, from one of which he now emerges.

He feels that he is leaving London unseen, slipping out while everyone else is still asleep, as he walks, with his single small holdall, to the square where he left the car. The square is hotel-fringed, shabby. A few benches and plants in the middle. Sticky pavements. The car is still there, surrounded by empty parking spaces. It is not his. It is someone else’s. He is simply delivering it. Slinging his holdall onto the passenger seat, he takes his place at the wheel.

He sits there for a few seconds, enjoying a feeling of inviolable solitude. Solitude, freedom. They seem like nearly the same thing as he sits there.

Then he starts the engine, which sounds loud in the silence of the square.

He is aware now that he does not know exactly which way to go. He looked yesterday and it all seemed simple enough, the way out of London, south-east, towards Dover. Now even finding his way to the river seems problematic. He tries to picture it, the streets he will need to take. When he has formed some sort of mental picture of where he is going, and only then, he pulls out.

He waits at a light on Park Lane, some posh hotel on one side, the park on the other, staring sleepily straight ahead.

When he gets to the river there might be a problem. He hopes there will be signs for Dover. The possibility of getting lost makes him mildly nervous, even though he would not be in any serious danger of missing the ferry. He has plenty of time. It is his habit, when travelling, always to allow more time than he needs.

He went to sleep very early last night. The previous night, Friday, he had been out late, with Macintyre, the Germanic philology specialist at UCL. And then he had had to get up early on Saturday to take the train to Nottingham and pick up the car from its previous ‘keeper’, a Pakistani doctor. (Dr N. Khan was the name on the documents.) He had done the whole thing on a hangover, which had made the day pass over him like a dream — made it seem even now like something he had dreamed, the time he spent in Dr Khan’s front room, looking through the service history, while the doctor’s cat watched him.

He swings around Hyde Park Corner, the sun pouring down Piccadilly like something out of Turner, the palaces opposite the park half-dissolving in a flood of light.

He squints, tries to push it away with his hand.

Macintyre had not been very helpful. He was supposed to have looked at the manuscript, the section on Dutch and German analogues in particular. They had talked about it for a while, in The Lowlander. Macintyre, with a suggestion of subtle mockery that was entirely typical of him, always insisted on meeting there. The early modern shifts in German pronunciation, for instance. The way some dialects…

He has to focus, as he flows through them, on the layout of the streets around Victoria station.

The way some dialects were still impervious to those shifts, after more than five hundred years.

The traffic system pulls him one way, then another, past empty office towers. He looks for the lane that will throw him left eventually, onto Vauxhall Bridge Road.

There.

No, Macintyre had not been as helpful as he might have been. Obviously, he was holding back. Professional jealousies were operative. He did not want to give too much away about what he was working on now. That was why he had wanted to talk about other things. Kept steering the talk away from shop. Wanted to know, when he had had a few Duvels, about his ‘sex life’. ‘How’s your sex life, then?’ he had said.

Well, he had mentioned Waleria. Said something about her. Something non-committal.

The lights halfway down Vauxhall Bridge Road start to turn as he approaches them and after a moment’s hesitation he stops.

Macintyre was married, wasn’t he? Kids.

The lights go green. Unhurriedly he moves off. A minute later — the Thames. That exhilarating momentary sense of space. The water, sun-white.

Then streets again.

In south London he feels even freer. These are streets he does not know, that may be why. Strange to him, these sleeping estates. These hulks, slowly mouldering. He has a vague idea that he needs to find the Old Kent Road. Old Kent Road. That insane game of Monopoly that happened in the SCR once. He thinks of that for a moment, and imagines the Old Kent Road to be liveried in a drab brown.