All That Man Is

1

The office, showroom and warehouse occupy adjoining units of an industrial estate in the suburbs of Lille, within earshot of the E42 motorway. It is here that Bérnard has been spending his days this spring, working for his uncle Clovis, who sells windows. The office is as dull a space as it is possible to imagine — laminate floor, air-freshener smell, lightly soiled furniture.

—

Five fifteen on Wednesday afternoon.

From the large windows, listless spring light, and the sounds of the industrial estate. Bérnard is waiting for his uncle to lock up. He is already wearing his jacket, and sits there staring at the objects on the desk — next to a depressed-looking plant, the figurine of the little fairy maiden, winged and sitting under a drooping flower head with a melancholy smile on her heart-shaped face.

Clovis arrives and makes sure that all the drawers are locked.

‘Cheer up,’ he says unhelpfully.

Bérnard follows him down the spare, Clorox-smelling stairs.

Outside they take their places in the BMW, parked as always in the space nearest the door.

There is no way that Clovis would have taken Bérnard on if he wasn’t his sister’s son. Clovis thinks his nephew is a bit thick. Slow, like his father, the train driver. Easily pleased. Able to stare for hours at something like rain running down a window. It is typical of him, Clovis thinks, that he should have dropped out of university. Clovis’s own attitude to university is ambivalent. He suspects that it is mostly just a way for well-to-do kids to avoid working for a few more years. Still, they must learn something there. Some of them, after all, end up as surgeons, as lawyers. So to spend two whole years at university and then drop out, as Bérnard did, with nothing to show for it, seems like the worst of all worlds. A pathetic waste of time.

They leave the estate and feed onto the E42.

The kid smokes pot. That’s not even a secret any more. He smokes it in his room at home — he still lives with his parents, in their narrow brick house in a quiet working-class residential district. He shows no sign of wanting to leave. His meals are made for him, his washing is done. And how old is he now? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Unmanly, is the word.

He once tried to have a talk with him, Clovis did, for his sister’s sake. (The boy’s father was obviously not going to do it.) He sat him down in a bar with a beer and said, in so many words, ‘You’ve got to grow up.’

And the boy just stared at him out of his vague blueish eyes, his blonde hair falling into them, and said, in so many words, ‘What d’you mean?’

And, in so many words, Clovis said, ‘You’re a loser, mate.’

And the boy — if that was the word, his chin was thick with orange stubble — drank his beer and seemed to have nothing more to say for himself.

So Clovis left it at that.

And then Mathilde said to him, when he was trying to tell her, post their drink together, what he thought of her son, ‘Well, if you want to help so much, Clovis, why don’t you give him a job?’

So he had to make a place for him — first in the warehouse, and then, where there was less scope for him to do any damage (they sent the wrong windows to a site once, which Bérnard had loaded onto the truck), in the office. Though he is totally forbidden to answer the phone. And not allowed anywhere near anything to do with money. Which means there isn’t much, in the office, for him to do. He tidies up. And for that, for a bit of ineffectual tidying, he is paid two hundred and fifty euros a week.

Clovis sighs, audibly, as they wait at a traffic light on their way into town. His fingers tap the steering wheel.

They stop at a petrol station to fill up, the Shell station which Clovis favours on Avenue de Dunkerque.

Bérnard, in the passenger seat, is staring out of the window.

Clovis pays for the petrol, V-Power Nitro+, and some summer windscreen-wiper fluid, which he sees they have on sale, and takes his seat in the BMW again.

He is just strapping himself in when his nephew says, speaking for the first time since they left the office, ‘Is it okay if I go on holiday?’

The presumptuous directness of the question, the total lack of supplicatory preamble, are shocking.

‘Holiday?’ Clovis says, almost sarcastically.

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve only just started.’

To that, Bérnard says nothing, and Clovis has to focus, for a few moments, on leaving the petrol station. Then he says, again, ‘You’ve only just started.’

‘I get holidays though, don’t I?’ Bérnard says.

Clovis laughs.

‘I worry about your attitude,’ he says.

Bérnard meets that statement with silence.

Holding the steering wheel, Clovis absorbs waves of outrage.

The silly thing is, he would be more than happy to have his nephew out of the way for a week or two. Or — who knows? — for ever.

‘You planning to go somewhere?’ he asks.

‘Cyprus,’ Bérnard says.

‘Ah, Cyprus. And how long,’ Clovis asks, ‘do you plan to spend in Cyprus?’

‘A week.’

‘I see.’

They travel about a kilometre. Then Clovis says, ‘I’ll think about it, okay?’

Bérnard says nothing.

Clovis half-turns to him and says again, ‘Okay?’

Bérnard, for the first time, seems slightly embarrassed. ‘Well. I’ve already paid for it. That’s the thing. The holiday.’

A further, stronger wave of outrage, and Clovis says, ‘Well, that was a bit silly.’

‘So I need to go,’ Bérnard explains.

‘When is it, this holiday?’ Clovis asks, no longer trying to hide his irritation — if anything, playing it up, enjoying it.

‘It’s next week.’

‘Next week?’ Said with a theatrical expression of surprise.

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, you need to give at least a month’s notice.’

‘Do I? You didn’t tell me that.’

‘It’s in your contract.’

‘Well…I didn’t know.’

‘You should read documents,’ Clovis says, ‘before you sign them.’

‘I didn’t think you’d try to take advantage of me…’

‘Is that what I’m doing?’

‘Look,’ Bérnard says, ‘I’ve already paid for it.’

Clovis says nothing.

‘You’re not really going to try and stop me?’

‘I worry about your attitude, Bérnard.’

They have arrived in Bérnard’s parents’ street, the featureless street of narrow brick houses.

The BMW stops in front of one of them and first Bérnard, and then, more slowly, Clovis, emerges from it.

Unusually, Clovis comes into the house.

—

Bérnard’s parents are both there. His father, in a vest, is drinking a beer. He has, within the last half-hour, returned from work. He is short, blonde, with a moustache — Asterix, basically. He is sitting at the table in the front room, the room into which the front door directly opens, with a single window onto the street, in the light of which he is studying La Voix du Nord. Bérnard’s mother, further back in the same space, where the kitchen is, is doing the washing-up.

On Bérnard’s entrance, neither of them looks up from what they are doing.

‘Salut,’ he says.

They both murmur something. His father has a swig from the brown bottle in his hand.

‘André,’ Clovis says to him.

At that, André looks up from the paper. Mathilde, too, looks across from the neon puddle of the kitchen. She smiles to see her brother.

André does not smile.

If happiness is having one euro more than your brother-in-law, then Clovis is happy a million times over.

And André — André is fucked.

Clovis steps forward into the room.

‘To what do we owe the honour?’ André says.

Mathilde asks her brother if he’d like something.

‘No, thank you,’ Clovis says.

Having left the harsh light of the kitchen, she kisses him on the face.

‘I find myself in a difficult position,’ Clovis says.

His sister indicates that he should sit. Again, he declines.

‘I wanted to help,’ he says. ‘I tried to help. But Bérnard has made it clear that he does not want the sort of help that I am able to offer him.’

At the sound of his name, Bérnard, who has been peering into the fridge, looks at his uncle.

‘I’m afraid so,’ Clovis says sadly.

‘What do you mean?’ André asks.

Clovis looks at him and says, ‘I’m sacking your son.’

He half-turns his head in the direction of the kitchen and says, ‘Yes, that’s right, Bérnard — you can go where you like now.’

Bérnard, still illuminated by the open fridge, just stares at his uncle.

Mathilde is already pleading with him.

He is shaking his head. ‘No, no,’ he is saying. ‘No, I’ve made up my mind.’

‘I knew this would happen,’ André murmurs furiously.

‘What?’ Clovis asks him. ‘What did you know?’

Through a friend at the Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie, he had, a few years ago, found André a job as a Eurostar driver; the interview would have been a formality. André, saying something about the long hours, had turned the opportunity down, and still spends his days trundling back and forth between Lille and Dunkerque, Lille and Amiens. The stopping service. Local routes. Not even the Paris gig.

‘What did you know?’ Clovis asks him, looming over the table where André is sitting with his paper.

André says, clinging to his beer, ‘You didn’t really want to help, did you?’

‘Oh, I did,’ Clovis tells him. ‘I did indeed. Your son is lazy.’ He throws his voice towards the kitchen. ‘Yes, Bérnard. I’m sorry to say it, but you are. You have no ambition. No desire to improve yourself, to move up in the world…’

‘Please, Clovis, please,’ Mathilde is still saying.

He silences her with a lightly placed hand — her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. I am sorry,’ he says. ‘Despite what your husband says, I did want to help. And I tried. I did what I could. And I will pay him,’ he says, drawing himself up like a monarch in his suede jacket, ‘a month’s wages in lieu of notice.’

‘Clovis…’

‘There is only so much I can do,’ he tells her. ‘What can I do? What do you want me to do?’

‘Give him one more chance.’

‘If I thought it would help him, I would.’

André mutters something.

‘What?’

‘Bollocks,’ André says more distinctly.

‘No. No, André, it is not bollocks,’ Clovis says, speaking quietly, in a voice trembling with anger. ‘How have I benefited in any way from taking Bérnard on? Tell me how I have benefited.’

There is a tense silence.

Then Clovis, in a sad voice, says, ‘I’m sorry, Bérnard.’

Bérnard, now eating a yoghurt, just nods. He is not as upset as either of his parents seem to be.

He is not actually upset at all. The main facts, as he sees them, are: 1) he does not have to go to work tomorrow, or ever again, and 2) he is getting a thousand euros for nothing.

His mother’s near-tearfulness, his father’s smouldering fury, are just familiar parts of the family scenery.

He is aware that there exists between his father and his uncle some terrible issue, some fundamental unfriendliness — it is not something, however, that he understands. It has always been there. It is just part of life.

Like the way his parents argue.

They are arguing now.

From his room on the top floor of the house he hears them, far below.

When they argue it is either about money — which is always tight — or about Bérnard.

They worry about him, that he understands. They are arguing now out of their worry, shouting at each other.

He does not worry about himself. Their worry, however, sets off a sort of unwelcome humming in his psyche; like the high-pitched pulse of an alarm somewhere far off down the street, leaking anxiety into the night. Their voices now, travelling up through two floors, are like that. They are arguing about him, about what he is going ‘to do with his life’.

To him, the question seems entirely abstract.

He is playing a first-person shooter, listlessly massacring thousands of monstrous enemies.

After an hour or so he tires of it, and decides to visit Baudouin.

—

Baudouin is also playing a first-person shooter, albeit on a much larger and more expensive display — a vast display, flanked by muscular speakers. His father, also Baudouin, is a dentist, and the younger Baudouin is himself studying dentistry at the university. He is the only university friend with whom Bérnard is still in touch.

In keeping with his impeccably provisioned life, Baudouin always has a substantial stash of super-skunk — imported from Holland, and oozing crystals of THC — and Bérnard skins up while his friend finishes the level.

He says, ‘I’ve been sacked.’

Baudouin, the future dentist, takes out half a dozen zombies. ‘I thought you worked for your uncle,’ he says.

‘Yeah. He sacked me.’

‘What a twat.’

‘He is a twat.’

Baudouin stretches out a white hand for the spliff.

Bérnard obliges him. ‘I don’t give a shit,’ he says, as if worried that his friend might think he did.

Baudouin, blasting, grunts.

‘I get a month’s pay. Severance or whatever.’ Bérnard says that with some pride.

Baudouin, however, seems unimpressed: ‘Yeah?’

‘And now I can come to Cyprus for sure.’

Passing him the spliff again, and without looking at him, Baudouin says, ‘Oh, I need to talk to you about that.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t go.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I didn’t pass Biochemistry Two,’ Baudouin says. ‘I need to take it again.’

‘When’s the exam?’ Bérnard asks.

‘In two weeks.’

‘So why can’t you go?’

‘My dad won’t let me.’

‘Fuck that.’

Baudouin laughs, as if in agreement. Then he says, ‘No, he says it’s important I don’t fail again.’

Bérnard, sitting somewhat behind him on one of the tatami mats that litter the floor, has a pull on the spliff. He feels deeply let down. ‘You seriously not coming then?’ he asks, unable to help sounding hurt.

What makes it worse, the whole thing was Baudouin’s idea.

It had been he who found, somewhere online, the shockingly inexpensive package that included flights from Charleroi airport and seven nights at the Hotel Poseidon in Protaras. It had been he who persuaded Bérnard — admittedly, he needed little persuading — that Protaras was a hedonistic paradise, that the weather in Cyprus would be well hot enough in mid-May, and that it was an excellent time for a holiday. He had stoked up Bérnard’s enthusiasm for the idea until it was the only thing on which he fixed his mind as he tried to survive the interminable afternoons on the greyish-brown industrial estate.

And now he says, still mostly focused on the screen in front of him, ‘No. Seriously. I can’t.’

His hand, stretched out, is waiting for the spliff.

Bérnard passes it to him, silently.

‘What am I supposed to do?’ he asks after a while.

‘Go!’ Baudouin says, over the manic whamming of the speakers. ‘Obviously, go. Why wouldn’t you? I would.’

‘On my own?’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’

‘Only saddoes,’ Bérnard says, ‘go on holiday on their own.’

‘Don’t be stupid…’

‘It’s true.’

‘It’s not.’

Bérnard has the spliff again, what’s left of it, an acrid stub. ‘It so is.’ He says, ‘I’ll feel like a fucking loser.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Baudouin says, finishing the level finally and saving his position. He turns to Bérnard. ‘Think Steve McQueen,’ he says. Baudouin is a fan of the late American actor. He has a large poster of him — squinting magisterially astride a vintage motorbike — on the wall of the room in which they sit. ‘Think Belmondo.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Do you think I’m pleased I can’t go?’ Baudouin asks. A Windows Desktop, weirdly vast and static, now fills the towering screen.

‘Whatever,’ Bérnard says again.

While he moodily sets to work on the next spliff, massaging the tobacco from one of his friend’s Marlboro Lights, Baudouin starts an MP4 of Iron Man 3 — a film which has yet to arrive in the Lille cinemas.

‘You seen this?’ he asks, after drinking at length from a bottle of Evian.

‘What is it?’

‘Iron Man Three.’

‘No.’

‘It’s got Gwyneth Paltrow in it,’ Baudouin says.

‘Yeah, I know.’

They watch it in English, which they both speak well enough for the dialogue to present no major problems.

Whenever Gwyneth Paltrow is on screen Baudouin stops talking and starts devotedly ogling. He has, as they say, a ‘thing’ about her. It is not a ‘thing’ his friend understands, particularly — not the full hormonal, worshipping intensity of it.

‘She’s alright,’ Bérnard says.

‘You, my friend, are working class.’

‘She’s got no tits,’ Bérnard says.

‘That you should say that,’ Baudouin tells him, ‘does sort of prove my point.’

Then he says, in a scholarly tone, ‘In Shakespeare in Love you see her tits. They’re not as small as you might think.’

Willing to be proven wrong, Bérnard makes a mental note to torrent the film when he gets home.

Which he does, and discovers that his friend has a point — there is indeed something there, something appreciable. And, hunched over himself, a hand-picked frame on the screen, he does appreciate it.

2

At four o’clock on Monday morning, on the bus to Charleroi airport, he feels sad, loserish, very lonely. Dawn arrives on the empty motorway. The sun, smacking him in the face. Shadows everywhere. He stares, through smarting eyes, at the landscape as it passes — its flatness, its shimmer. There is an exhilarating whisper of freedom, then, that lasts until he sees a plane hanging low in the sky, and again finds himself facing the affront to his ego of having to holiday alone.

3

From Larnaca airport — newer and shinier than Charleroi — a minibus operated by the holiday firm takes him, and about twelve other people, to Protaras. A dusty, unpleasant landscape. No sign of the sea. He is, on that air-conditioned bus, with little blue curtains that can be closed against the midday sun, the only person travelling on his own.

The drop-offs start.

He is the last to be dropped off.

Most of the others are set down at newish white hotels next to the sea, which did eventually appear, hotels that look like the top halves of cruise ships.

Then, when he is alone on the bus, it leaves the shore and starts inland, taking him first through some semi-pedestrianised streets full of lurid impermanent-looking pubs and then, the townscape thinning out, past a sizeable Lidl and into an arid half-made hinterland, without much happening, where the Hotel Poseidon is.

The Hotel Poseidon.

Three storeys of white-painted concrete, studded with identical small balconies. Broken concrete steps leading up to a brown glass door.

It is now the heat of the day — the streets around the hotel are empty and shadowless as the sun drops straight down on them. In the lobby the air is hot and humid. At first he thinks there is no one there. Then he sees the two women lurking in the warm semi-darkness behind the desk.

He explains, in English, who he is.

They listen, unimpressed.

Having taken his passport, one of them then leads him up some dim stairs to the floor above, and into a narrow space with a single window at one end and two low single beds placed end to end against one wall.

A sinister door is pointed to. ‘The bathroom,’ she says.

And then he is alone again.

He is able to hear, indistinctly, voices, from several directions. From somewhere above him, footsteps. From somewhere else, a well-defined sneeze.

He stands at the window: there are some trees, some scrubby derelict land, some walls.

Far away, a horizontal blue line hints at the presence of the sea.

He is standing there feeling sorry for himself when there is a knock on the door.

It is a short man in an ill-fitting suit. Unlike the two women in the lobby, he is smiling. ‘Hello, sir,’ he says, still smiling.

‘Hello,’ Bérnard says.

‘I hope you are enjoying your stay,’ the man says. ‘I just wanted to have a word with you please about the shower.’

‘Yes?’

‘Please don’t use the shower.’

After a short pause, Bérnard says, ‘Okay.’ And then, feeling obscurely that he should ask, ‘Why not?’

The man is still smiling. ‘It leaks, you see,’ he says. ‘It leaks into the lobby. So please don’t use it. I hope you understand.’

Bérnard nods and says, ‘Sure. Okay.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ the man says.

When he has left, Bérnard has a look at the bathroom. It is a windowless shaft with a toilet, a sink, a metal nozzle in the wall over the toilet and what seems to be an associated tap — which is presumably the unusable shower — a flaky drain in the middle of the floor, and a sign in Greek, and also in Russian, Bérnard thinks, of which the only thing he can understand are the numerous exclamation marks. He switches off the light.

Sitting on one of the single beds, he starts to feel that it is probably unacceptable for him not to have access to a shower, and decides to speak to someone about it.

There is no one in the lobby, though, so after waiting for ten minutes, he leaves the hotel and starts to walk in what he thinks is the direction of the sea.

In addition to the shower, there is something else he feels might be unsatisfactory: he was sure the hotel was supposed to have a pool. Baudouin had talked about afternoons spent ‘vegging next to the pool’, had even sent him a link to a picture of it — the picture had shown what appeared to be some sort of aqua park, with a number of different pools and water slides, populated by smiling people. The whole thing had seemed, from the picture, to be more or less next to the sea.

And that was another thing.

The hotel was advertised as five minutes’ walk from the sea, yet he has been trudging for at least double that through the desolate heat and is only just passing the Lidl.

In fact, to walk to the sea takes half an hour.

Once there he hangs about for a while — stands at the landward margin of a brown beach, thick with sun umbrellas down to the listless flop of the surf.

He has a pint in a pub hung with Union Jacks and England flags, and advertising English football matches, and then walks slowly back to his hotel. The Lidl is easy to find: there are signs for it throughout the town. And from the Lidl he is able, with only one or two wrong turnings, to find the Hotel Poseidon.

In the hot lobby he walks up to the desk, where there is now someone on duty, intending to talk about the shower situation and the lack of a swimming pool on the premises.

It is the smiling man, who says, ‘Good afternoon, sir. There is a message for you.’

‘For me?’

‘For you, sir.’ The smiling man — middle-aged, with a lean, tanned face — pushes a slip of paper across the desk.

It is a handwritten note:

Dropped by — you weren’t in. I’ll be in Waves from 5 if you wanna meet up and talk things through. Leif

Bérnard looks up at the smiling man’s kind, avuncular face.

‘Are you sure this is for me?’ he asks.

Still smiling kindly, the man nods.

Looking at the note again, Bérnard asks him if he knows where Waves is.

It is near the sea, the man tells him, and explains how to get there. ‘It’s a popular place with young people,’ he says.

Bérnard thanks him. It is already five, and he is about to set off again when he remembers the shower, and turns back. He does not know exactly how to put it, how to express his dissatisfaction. He says, uncertainly, ‘Listen, um. The shower…’

Immediately, as soon as the word shower has been spoken, the smiling man says, ‘The problem will be sorted out tomorrow.’ For the first time, he is not smiling. He looks very serious. His eyes are full of apology. ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’

‘Okay,’ Bérnard says. ‘Thank you.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the man says again, this time with a small deferential smile.

‘There is one other thing,’ Bérnard says, emboldened.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘There is a swimming pool?’

The man’s expression turns sad, almost mournful. ‘At the moment, no, sir, there is not,’ he says. He starts to explain the situation — something about a legal dispute with the apartments next door — until Bérnard interrupts him, protesting mildly that the hotel had been sold to him as having a pool, so it seems wrong that there isn’t one.

The smiling man says, ‘We have an arrangement with the Hotel Vangelis, sir.’

There is a moment of silence in the oppressive damp heat of the lobby.

‘An arrangement?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What sort of arrangement?’

The arrangement turns out to be that for ten euros a day inmates of the Poseidon can use the pool facilities of the Hotel Vangelis, which are extensive — the aqua park pictured on the Poseidon’s website, and also in the leaflet which the smiling man is now pressing into Bérnard’s hand.

The smiling man has a moustache, Bérnard notices at that point. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Thank you. What time is supper?’

‘Seven o’clock, sir.’

‘And where?’

‘In the dining room.’ The smiling man points to a glass door on the other side of the lobby. Dirty yellow curtains hang on either side of the door. Next to the door there is an empty lectern. The room on the other side of the door is dark.

—

‘You wanna party, yeah?’ Leif asks, smiling lazily, as Bérnard, with a perspiring Keo, the local industrial lager, takes a seat opposite him.

Bérnard nods. ‘Of course,’ he says, fairly seriously.

A tall, tanned Icelander, only a few years older than Bérnard, Leif turned out to be the company rep.

Now he is telling Bérnard about the night life of Protaras. He is talking about some nightclub — Jesters — and the details of a happy-hour offer there. ‘And then three cocktails for the price of two from seven till eight,’ he says. ‘Take advantage of it. Like I told the others, it’s one of the best offers in the resort.’

‘Okay,’ Bérnard says.

Leif is drinking a huge smoothie. He keeps talking about ‘the others’, and Bérnard wonders whether he missed some prearranged meeting that no one told him about.

Who were these ‘others’?

‘Kebabs,’ Leif says, as if it were a section heading. ‘The best place is Porkies, okay? It’s just over there.’ He takes his large splayed hand from the back of his shaved head and points up the street. Bérnard looks and sees an orange sign: Porkies.

‘Okay,’ he says.

They are sitting on the terrace of Waves, he and Leif. Inside, music thumps. Although it is only just six, there are already plenty of drunk people about. A drinking game is in progress somewhere, with lots of excitable shouting.

‘It’s open twenty-four hours,’ Leif says, still talking about Porkies.

‘Okay.’

‘And be careful — the hot sauce is hot.’

He says this so seriously that Bérnard thinks he must be joking and laughs.

Just as seriously, though, Leif says, ‘It is a really fucking hot sauce.’ He tips the last of his smoothie into his mouth. There is a sort of very faint disdain in the way he speaks to Bérnard. His attention always seems vaguely elsewhere; he keeps slowly turning his head to look up and down the street, which is just starting to acquire its evening hum, though the sun is still shining, long-shadowedly.

‘So that’s about it,’ he says. He has the air of a man who gets laid effortlessly and often. Indeed, there is something post-coital about his exaggeratedly laid-back manner. Bérnard is intimidated by him. He nods and has a sip of his beer.

‘You here with some mates?’ Leif asks him.

‘No, uh…’

‘On your own?’

Bérnard tries to explain. ‘I was supposed to be with a friend…’ He stops. Leif, obviously, is not interested.

‘Okay,’ Leif says, looking in the direction of Porkies as if he is expecting someone.

Then he turns to Bérnard again and says, ‘I’ll leave you to it. You have any questions just let me know, yeah.’

He is already standing up.

Bérnard says, ‘Okay. Thanks.’

‘See you round,’ Leif says.

He doesn’t seem to hear Bérnard saying, ‘Yeah, see you.’

As he walks away the golden hair on his arms and legs glows in the low sun.

Bérnard finishes his drink quickly. Then he leaves Waves — where the music is now at full nightclub volume — and starts to walk, again, towards the Hotel Poseidon.

He feels slightly worse, slightly more isolated, after the meeting with Leif. He had somehow assumed, when he first sat down, that Leif would show him an evening of hedonism, or at least provide some sort of entrée into the native depravity of the place. That he did not, that he just left him on the terrace of Waves to finish his drink alone, leaves Bérnard feeling that he has failed a test — perhaps a fundamental one.

This feeling widening slowly into something like depression, he walks into the dead hinterland where the Hotel Poseidon is.

It is just after seven when he arrives at the hotel. The lobby is sultry and unlit. The dining room, on the other hand, is lit like a hospital A&E department. It doesn’t seem to have any windows, the dining room. The walls are hung with dirty drapes. He sits down at a table. He seems to be the last to arrive — most of the other tables are occupied, people lowering their faces towards the grey soup, spooning it into their mouths. It is eerily quiet. Someone is speaking in Russian. Other than that the only sound, from all around, is the tinking of spoon on plate. And a strange humming, quite loud, that lasts for twenty or thirty seconds, then stops, then starts again. A waiter puts a plate of soup in front of him. Bérnard picks up his spoon, and notices the encrustations on its cloudy metal surface, the hard deposits of earlier meals. With a napkin — which itself shows evidence of previous use — he tries to scrub them off. The voice is still speaking in Russian, monotonously. Having cleaned his spoon, he turns his attention to the soup. It is a strange grey colour. And it is cold. He looks around, as if expecting someone to explain. No one explains. What he does notice, however, is the microwave on the other side of the room — the source of the strange intermittent humming — and the queue of people waiting to use it, each with a plate of soup. He picks up his own soup and joins them.

He is preceded in the queue by a woman in her mid-forties, probably, who is quite short and very fat. She has blonde hair, and an orange face — red under her eyes and along the top of her nose. He noticed her sitting at a table near him when he sat down — she is the sort of fat person it is hard to miss. What makes her harder to miss is that she is with another woman, younger than her and even fatter. This younger woman — her daughter perhaps — is actually fascinatingly huge. Bérnard tried not to stare.

After they have been standing in the microwave queue for a few minutes, listening to the whirr of the machine and taking a step forward every time it stops, the older woman says to him, in English, ‘It’s a disgrace, really, isn’t it?’

‘Mm,’ Bérnard agrees, surprised at being spoken to.

The woman is sweating freely — the dining room is very warm. ‘Every night the same,’ she says.

‘Really?’

‘Really,’ she says, and then it is her turn and she shoves her plate into the microwave.

4

Iveta. Ah, Iveta.

He first sees her the next morning, in Porkies.

He has had almost no sleep, is tipsy with fatigue. It was a nuit blanche, nearly. He wasn’t out late, it wasn’t that — he had a few lonely drinks on the lurid stretch, tried unsuccessfully to talk to some people, was humiliatingly stung in a hostess bar, and then, feeling quite depressed, made his way back to the Poseidon. At that point he was just looking forward to getting some sleep. And that’s when the problems started. Though the hotel seemed totally isolated, there was at least one place in the immediate vicinity which thudded with dance music till the grey of dawn. Within the hotel itself, doors slammed all night, and voices shouted and sang, and people fucked noisily on all sides.

Finally, just as natural light started to filter through the ineffectual curtains, everything went quiet.

Bérnard, sitting up, looked at his watch. It was nearly five, and he had not slept at all.

And then, from the vacant lot next door, where people would illegally park, they started towing the cars.

He must have fallen asleep somehow while they were still doing that, while the alarms were still being triggered, one after another — when he next sat up and looked at his watch it was ten past ten.

Which meant he had missed the hotel breakfast.

So he went out into the morning, which was already hot, to find something to eat, and ended up in Porkies.

Porkies, even at ten thirty a.m., is doing a steady trade. Many of the people there, queuing for their kebabs, are obviously on the final stop of a night out. Hoarsely, they talk to each other or, still damp from the foam disco, stare in the fresh sunlight near the front of the shop, where a machine is loudly extracting the juice from orange halves.

With his heavy kebab Bérnard finds a seat at the end of the counter, the last of the stools that are there.

Next to him, facing the brown-tinted mirror tiles and still in their party kit with plenty of flesh on show, is a line of young women, laughing noisily as they eat their kebabs, and speaking a language he is unable to place.

He gets talking to the one sitting next to him when he asks her to pass him the squeezable thing of sauce and then, taking it from her, says, ‘It was a nice night?’

‘Where are you from?’ he asks her next — the inevitable Protaras question.

She is Latvian, she says, she and her friends. Bérnard isn’t sure where Latvia is. One of those obscure Eastern European places, he supposes.

He informs her that he is French.

She is on the small side, with a slightly too-prominent forehead, and spongy blonde hair — a cheap chemical blonde, displaced by something mousier near the roots. Still, he likes her. He likes her little arms and shoulders, her childish hands holding the kebab. The tired points of glitter on her nose.

He introduces himself. ‘Bérnard,’ he says.

Iveta, she tells him her name is.

‘I like that name,’ he says. He smiles, and she smiles too, and he notes her nice straight white teeth.

‘You have very nice teeth,’ he says.

And then learns that her father is a dentist.

He says, mildly bragging, ‘I know a guy, his father is a dentist.’

She seems interested. ‘Yes?’

There is something effortless about this, as they sit there eating their kebabs. Effortlessly, almost inadvertently, he has detached her from the others. She has turned away from them, towards him.

‘You like Cyprus?’ he asks.

Eating, she nods.

This is her second time in Protaras, he discovers. ‘Maybe you can show me around,’ he suggests easily. ‘I don’t know it. It’s my first time here.’

And she just says, with a simplicity which makes him feel sure he is onto something here, ‘Okay.’

‘Where are you staying?’ he asks.

She mentions some youth hostel, and he feels proud of the fact that he is staying in a proper hotel — proud enough to say, as if it were a totally natural question, ‘What are you doing today?’

Her friends are starting to leave.

‘Sleeping!’

She says that with a laugh that unsettles him, makes him feel that maybe their whole interaction has been, for her, a sort of joke, something with no significance, something that will lead nowhere. And he wants her now. He wants her. She is wearing denim hot pants, he sees for the first time, and sandals with a slight heel.

‘What about later?’ he says, trying not to sound desperate. The sense of effortlessness has evaporated. It evaporated the moment she seemed happy to leave without any prospect of seeing him again.

Now, however, she lingers.

Her friends are leaving, and yet she is still there, lingering.

‘You want to meet later?’ she says, with some seriousness.

‘I want to see you again.’

She looks at him for a few moments. ‘We’ll be in Jesters tonight,’ she says. ‘You know Jesters?’

‘I heard of it,’ Bérnard says. ‘I never been there.’

‘Okay,’ she says, still with this serious look on her face. And she tells him, in unnecessary detail, and making sure he understands, how to find it.

‘Okay,’ he says, smiling easily again. ‘I’ll see you there. Okay?’

She nods, and hurries to join her friends, who are waiting near the door.

He watches them leave and then, squirting more sauce onto it, unhurriedly finishes his kebab.

His mood, of course, is totally transformed. He fucking loves this place now, Protaras. Walking down the street in the sun, everything looks different, everything pleases his eye. He wonders whether he’s in love, and then stops at the pharmacy next to McDonald’s for a ten-pack of Durex.

‘Hello, my friend,’ he says to the smiling man, who is on duty in the humid lobby of the Hotel Poseidon.

‘Good morning, sir. You slept well, sir?’

‘Very well,’ Bérnard says, without thinking. ‘Yesterday you said something, about another hotel, the swimming pool…?’

‘The Hotel Vangelis, yes, sir.’

‘Where is that?’

—

Bérnard, eventually finding the Hotel Vangelis, says he is staying at the Hotel Poseidon, pays ten euros, gets stamped on the hand with a smudged logo, and then follows a pointed finger down a passage smelling of pool chemicals to a locker room, and the sudden noise and dazzle of the aqua park.

In knee-length trunks, he swims. His skin is milky from the Lille winter. He does a few sedate laps of the serious swimmers’ pool, then queues with kids for a spin on the water slide. Next he tries the wave-machine pool, lifting and sinking in the water, in the chlorine sparkle, one wet head among many, all the time thinking of Iveta.

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.

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.

5

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.

Then he notices a lifeguard looming over them, his shadow on the water. He is talking to Sandra. He has just finished saying something, and he moves away, and takes his seat again, up a sloping ladder, like a tennis umpire.

‘We’ve been told off,’ Sandra says, hanging languidly in the water, only her sunburnt head, with its mannish jawline and feathery blonde pudding-bowl, above the surface.

Bérnard isn’t sure what’s going on. He still feels light-headed, vaguely unwell. ‘What?’

‘We’ve been told off,’ Sandra says again.

Bérnard, from his crouch in the water, which feels chilly now that he has stopped moving, just stares at her. His body is bony. Individual vertebrae show on his white back. Sandra is still saying something to him. Her voice sounds muffled. ‘…told to stop being so immature…’ he hears it say.

She has started to swim away from him — her head moving away on a very slow, lazy breaststroke.

The surface of the pool, which had been all discomposed by his antics, is smoothing itself out again, is slapping the sides with diminishing vigour.

—

After the horseplay they lie on the side, on sunloungers. Sandra just about fits onto one. Charmian, however, needs to push two together. Bérnard helps her. Then, without saying anything, he takes his place on his own lounger and shuts his eyes. It is late afternoon. The sun has a dull heat. In their dripping dresses, Sandra and Charmian are smoking cigarettes and talking about food. Bérnard isn’t really listening.

Then Sandra’s voice says, ‘Bernard,’ and he opens his eyes.

They are both looking at him.

Charmian, however, quickly looks away.

‘We’re going out for a meal tonight,’ Sandra says. ‘Want to come?’

—

They meet in the lobby of the hotel. Bérnard is talking to the smiling man — who is telling him that his shower will definitely be fixed tomorrow — when the ladies appear. There is an awkwardness. Unlike the previous night, Bérnard has made absolutely no effort at all with his preparations. The ladies, on the other hand, have to some extent dressed up. He sees that immediately. They have make-up on — quite a lot of make-up — and though Sandra is wearing a dress similar to the one she swims in, hanging from flimsy shoulder straps, its green-and-white floral pattern straining to hold the enormities of her figure, Charmian, extraordinarily, is in a pair of jeans and a blouse with delicate lacy details.

‘All set then?’ Sandra says, as Bérnard turns to them.

The smiling man watches tactfully as they leave.

They proceed in silence, initially, through the plain half-made streets near the hotel. The evening is no more than pleasantly warm — the nights are still mild sometimes, this early in the season. Even so, and in spite of the fact that they are walking downhill, Charmian, in particular, is soon shedding sheets of watery sweat.

‘It’s not far,’ Sandra says, panting.

‘What…what sort of place is it?’ Bérnard asks.

‘Typical Greek,’ Sandra tells him.

It turns out to be a long single-storey construction on an arid stretch of road, painted deep red, and covered with signage.

In the huge air-conditioned interior they are shown to a table. Music is playing, the latest international hits, and on screens attached to the walls men are playing golf in America. It is still too early for the place to be very full. The waitress brings big laminated menus, which they study in silence. There are pictures of each item — unappealingly documentary images like police evidence photos.

Things loosen up once the wine starts to take effect — a large jug of it that Sandra orders, which tastes faintly of pine trees.

‘I love this stuff,’ she says.

A stainless-steel plate of stuffed vine leaves also appears, leaking olive oil, and dishes of taramasalata and hummus, and a plate of warm pitta bread.

Bérnard pours himself some more of the weird wine, and then tops the others up as well. He is telling them about his experience in the hostess bar, his first night there, when he was intimidated into emptying his wallet on overpriced drinks for a pair of haughty, painted ladies. Sandra had told him how the taxi driver had tried to overcharge them on the way home from the Hotel Vangelis that afternoon, and he is offering his own tale of unscrupulous piracy. Mopping up the last of the tarama with the last piece of pitta, Sandra says, ‘You don’t need to take that, Bernard.’

‘It’s okay,’ Bérnard says mellowly. ‘Shit happens.’ He drinks some more wine.

‘You shouldn’t take it,’ she says. ‘A hundred euros?’

‘Yes.’

‘I tell you what we’re going to do,’ she says, looking around for the waiter. ‘When we’ve finished here, we’re going to go over there and get your money back.’

Bérnard laughs quietly.

‘I’m not joking,’ Sandra says. ‘We’re going to go over there and get your money back. You can’t let them get away with that, Bernard.’

Bérnard sighs. ‘They won’t give it back,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ Sandra says, ‘they will. When we tell them we’re going to the police they’ll give it back. Remember what happened to us that time in Turkey?’ she asks Charmian, who nods. Charmian has hardly said a word all evening, has only eaten half-heartedly four or five stuffed vine leaves. She seems out of sorts. Turning to Bérnard again, Sandra starts on the Turkish story. ‘This man tried to rip us off changing money in the street. Well, he shouldn’t have picked on us, should he…’

Then the main course arrives.

There is enough food, Bérnard thinks, for eight or ten people.

Platters of grilled lamb, chicken, fish. A huge dish of rice. Portions of fries for everyone and a heap of Greek salad which would on its own have fed a whole family. Also another jug of the wine, even though the first one is still half-full.

With some help from Bérnard the ladies obliterate the spread in under half an hour.

Sandra pours out the last of the wine.

Bérnard is drunk. Quite how drunk, he didn’t understand until he went to the toilet — his shiny face in the mirror stared back at him with eerie impassivity, then suddenly put out its tongue.

The others, however, seem unaffected, except that Sandra looks even redder than usual.

The place has filled up a bit and a band has started playing.

Sandra and the waiter have some sort of dispute over the bill — the manager is summoned — and when that is finally sorted out, she pays and they leave.

Bérnard had tried to offer some money, and on the pavement outside, he tries again. He says, with his wallet once more in his hand, ‘So…?’

‘I think I’m just going to use the lav,’ Sandra says, apparently not having heard him, and leaves him there with Charmian.

He pockets his wallet.

Charmian isn’t looking at him. She is facing the other way, as if she does not want to be associated with him. He wonders whether he has offended her somehow.

He stands there, drunk, looking at her, the slabs of her arms protruding from the frilly sleeves of her blouse, the grotesque inflations of her jeans.

When Sandra rejoins them, he is still just standing there, and Charmian is still staring off down the street.

—

In the end, he is unable to find the hostess bar. They spend about half an hour looking for it, on the fringes of Protaras’s nightlife, in the streets where the neon stops. They drop into a snack bar for pizza slices, sit eating them in a plastic booth. Then a place with live music — some zithering ‘traditional’ band and older couples swaying under a turning glitter ball. Bérnard, badly drunk now, gives Sandra a spin on the dance floor, treading on her feet, feeling the immense swell of her side hot and damp under his hand. He offers to do the same for Charmian but she just shakes her head.

‘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.

6

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.

It is a strange moment — him just standing there, looking, while she waits.

He notices, eventually, that he has an erection.

She notices too, and with slow movements, she kneels in front of him and slides down the zip of his jeans.

Her mouth is soft and warm.

‘You have done this before,’ he says after a while, sincerely impressed.

She just shrugs. She wipes her mouth and moves back a bit. With a fair amount of shoving and tugging she gets herself out of her jeans.

Her legs do not quite have the overwhelmingly vertical quality of a normal leg — they have a definite and assertive horizontal dimension too. And not much in the way of knees. When she drags down her lace-edged pants, he sees, for a moment, somewhere among all the whitish flesh, a soft tuft of hair the colour of peanut butter.

She takes his hand and pulls him towards the bed where he sleeps, its sweaty mess of sheets.

While she stands there waiting, he sits on the edge of the bed and pulls his own jeans over his feet, his horizontally striped polo shirt over his head.

They are both naked now, and his hard-on is almost embarrassingly fervent. It almost hurts. She tries to lie back on the bed and open her legs. She needs to open her legs as wide as they will go or the flesh, pouring in from every direction, will obstruct him. The single bed, however, in its position flush to the wall, is simply too narrow for her to do that. She hardly fits onto it with her legs held parallel. After a few moments of frustration, Bérnard says, ‘I know. We put the mattress on the floor, okay?’

They stand up and start to move the mattress onto the floor.

Bérnard’s aching erection knocks against his stomach as he struggles with his end of the mattress.

They put it down on the brown tiles.

For a moment she stands there, in the veiled light, naked, looking like a huge melted candle, all drips and slumps of round-shaped waxy flesh. Pendulous surrenders. Those pale pink nipples the size of his face. There is just so much of her, it seems to him, standing at his end, stunned by how much he wants her now, so much of her, a quantity of woman nearly equal, if that were possible, to his need to possess it, physically, in every way imaginable. Though in fact at this moment that need seems infinite. His member nodding, his lungs pulling at the air, it seems that there is nothing else to him, that that is all he is.

She takes her place on the mattress.

And then it starts.

—

It lasts all afternoon, and into the evening. The light softens in the folds of the curtains. Finally they sleep for a while, and when he opens his eyes, she is dressing herself. Though she is wearing her shirt, she seems to be naked from the waist down.

‘What time is it?’ he asks.

‘Seven,’ she says. ‘You coming to supper?’

She pulls one of the curtains open and admits a wedge of light in which she immediately finds her enormous knickers. Sitting heavily on the second bed, she manoeuvres them on.

‘I don’t think so,’ Bérnard says. He is lying naked on the mattress on the floor, supine. Worn out by orgasms — at least five of them, he isn’t sure exactly how many — he feels sleepy and immobile. The idea of dressing, of dragging himself down to the dining room, seems impossible.

‘Fair enough,’ Charmian says, working her jeans on now.

‘I’ll see you later then?’ she says, when she is dressed, and standing at the door.

‘Yes, see you,’ Bérnard says.

When she has left, he lies there still, the air warm on his skin, his eyes fixed on the soiled paintwork of the ceiling as darkness slowly hides it.

Sounds arrive at the window

a moped’s noisy whirr

a snatch of music

very distant shouts

7

At lunch the next day he is shy and embarrassed. The women are normal, the same as always. Charmian, focusing on the food, hardly says anything, hardly looks at him. Sandra talks. She says, ‘You weren’t at the pool this morning, Bernard.’

He says he went to the beach.

‘Was that nice?’ Sandra asks.

He says it was.

‘We don’t really like the sea, do we?’

Charmian says, trying to force some last strings of meat from a scrawny, bleeding chicken leg, ‘It’s okay.’

‘I’m scared of sharks,’ Sandra says.

‘That is not a problem here, I think,’ Bérnard tells her.

Sandra is adamant — ‘Oh, there are sharks here. And anyway I always end up with my knickers full of sand. Sand everywhere. You know what I mean? Still finding it when we get home. Still finding it weeks later.’

‘Okay,’ Bérnard says.

‘They sorted out your shower yet?’ she asks him.

‘No.’

‘No? It’s just disgraceful. You need to be more assertive, Bernard.’

‘Yes,’ he agrees, ‘I think so…’

‘You’ve been here nearly a week now and they still haven’t sorted it out. It’s just not acceptable.’

‘No.’

Bérnard looks shyly at Charmian again. She seems to be avoiding his eye.

‘We’re going horse-riding this afternoon,’ Sandra announces, improbably.

‘Horse-riding?’

‘Yes. Our rep sorted it out for us.’

‘There is horse-riding?’ Bérnard asks.

‘Apparently.’

—

After lunch, while they wait in the lobby, Bérnard says to Charmian, ‘I will see you later? You will come to my room?’

Despite the exhaustiveness of yesterday’s session he finds, slightly to his own surprise, that he wants more.

She is eating a pack of toffee popcorn, the sort of thing she always has on her, in her handbag. She looks at him for a moment as if she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Then she says, ‘Yeah, okay.’

‘Okay,’ Bérnard says, feeling pleased with himself. ‘I will see you later.’

He looks quickly at Sandra — it was awkward, somehow, to speak out with her there. She doesn’t seem to have heard, though. She is just fanning herself with a brochure, and looking towards the brown glass door.

—

The afternoon passes slowly. Bérnard sprawls on the pummelled, stained mattress on the floor of his room. He looks out the window. Nothing interests him. The only thing he is able to think about is what will happen later, when Charmian shows up.

Finally, at about five there is a knock on the door.

He opens it, wearing only his pants.

It is not Charmian.

It is her mother — feathery blonde pudding-bowl, red face, even redder cleavage.

‘Hello, Bernard,’ she says.

He swings the door mostly shut, leaving only his shocked face visible to her. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t even manage hello.

‘Can I come in then?’ Sandra asks.

‘I need…I need to get dressed.’

‘Don’t bother about that,’ Sandra says authoritatively. ‘Come on — let me in.’

He opens the door and stands aside and Sandra advances, with obvious interest, into the narrow stale-smelling room.

The thin sundress drapes her distended physique.

Her face is papery, parched, especially around the eyes.

‘Our room’s just like this,’ she says.

Bérnard is standing there in his pants.

‘You look worried, Bernard,’ she says. She looks at the mattress in its odd position on the floor. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about.’ Her eyes stay on the mattress for a few seconds, as if inspecting it, and then she says, ‘I’ve heard good things about you, Bernard.’

He looks puzzled.

‘Oh, yes, very good things.’

‘What things?’ he asks worriedly.

She laughs at the expression on his face. ‘Well, what d’you think? You know why I’m here, don’t you?’ she says, looking him in the eye.

It takes him a few seconds.

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.