All That Man Is

1

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.

It is extremely stressful, he finds, to be in her presence outside the safely purposeful space of the gym. It was the same in the car, in Gábor’s Audi Q3, when she was there. Sometimes Gábor would go in somewhere and leave them in the car together — she in the front, Balázs in the back — and he would be so intensely aware of her presence, of the minuscule squeaks when she moved on the leather seat, or flipped down the sun visor to tweak an eyebrow in the vanity mirror, that, just to hold himself together, he had to fix his eyes on some object outside the darkened window and keep them there, unable to think about anything except how he had masturbated to her, twice, the previous night, which did not seem like a promising starting point for conversation. They never spoke. Sometimes they would be alone in the car for twenty minutes — Gábor was always away for at least twice as long as he said he would be — and they never spoke.

What she is like ‘as a person’ he has no idea. There is something princessy about her. She seems to look down on the staff in the gym — she isn’t friendly with them anyway. The women who work there hate her, and it is assumed that she is with Gábor, who is slightly shorter than her, for his money. She always listens to music while she works out, possibly to stop people trying to talk to her. Balázs has never seen her smile.

He was surprised to see what her mother was like, where she lived. He had expected something smarter, something in Buda maybe, a house with roses in front and a well-preserved fifty-year old offering them coffee, not that wreck of a woman living in that smoky hole of a flat. The time-browned tower block, the odours and voices of the stairwell, the neglected pot plants by the yellow window where the stairs turned — those things were all familiar to him. Most of the people he knew emanated from places like that, himself included. That she did, however, was a surprise.

He finishes the Heineken and says something about stepping outside for a cigarette. Gábor, waggling his fingers at the screen of his phone, says, ‘Yeah, okay. We’ll just be here.’ She does not even look up from her magazine.

—

He smokes on the observation terrace, from where, through a barrier of hardened glass, you can watch the planes taxiing to the end of the runway and taking off at intervals of a few minutes. Standing there and watching them through the feeble heat haze, the sound of the engines coming to him across several hundred metres of warm air, makes him think of the days he spent at Balad Air Base, with the rest of the Hungarian unit, waiting for the flight home. He now looks back on that year with something like nostalgia. He should have stayed in the army — it was safe there, and there were things to do. Since then he has just been treading water, waiting for something to happen…What was going to happen, though?

Gábor is standing there.

He lights a cigarette, a more expensive one than the Park Lanes Balázs smokes. ‘Sorry about the delay,’ he says.

In moulded plastic wrap-around shades, Balázs nods tolerantly.

Gábor seems nervous. It is as if he has something to say but isn’t sure how to say it.

Balázs has started to think that maybe he doesn’t have anything to say after all, when Gábor says, ‘I should tell you what we’ll be doing in London.’

There follow a few seconds during which they stare together at the scene in front of them — the open space of the airport in the sun, the smooth-skinned planes waiting in the shade near the terminal.

‘Emma,’ Gábor says, as if she were there and he were addressing her.

Balázs half-turns his head.

She isn’t there.

Gábor says, ‘Emma’s going to be doing some work in London.’

They watch as a narrow-bodied Lufthansa turboprop starts its takeoff. After a few hundred metres it leaps into the air with a steepness of ascent that is quite startling, as if it were being jerked into the sky on a string. They watch it dwindle to a point in the sky’s hazy dazzle, and then, at some indefinite moment, disappear.

Gábor says, ‘And your job…’ He finds a more satisfactory pronoun. ‘Our job is to look after her. Okay?’

Balázs simply nods.

‘Okay,’ Gábor says, with finality, having performed what was obviously an embarrassing task. ‘Just thought I’d tell you.’ He drops his cigarette and extinguishes it under the toe of his trainer. ‘See you inside.’

Mimicking his employer, Balázs toes out his own cigarette. Then he lights another, and squints out at the shimmer standing on the tarmac.

—

The flight is uneventful. The plane is full, but Gábor has paid for priority boarding and they have seats together — Balázs squashed into the window seat, Gábor stretching his legs in the aisle, and Emma in the middle, listening to music and staring at the plastic seat-back a few inches from the tip of her nose.

Balázs concentrates on the window. There is nothing to see, except a section of wing and fierce light on the endless expanse of white fluffiness far below. You would fall straight through it, he thinks, solid as it looks. He isn’t sure, now, that he understood what Gábor meant when he said that Emma would be ‘doing some work’ in London. Had he even heard him properly? The light hurts his eyes and he half-lowers the plastic shutter. He folds his swollen hands in his lap and sits there, listening to the serrated whisper of her headphones, only just perceptible over the massive white noise of the labouring engines.

—

Zoli meets them at Luton airport in a long silver Mercedes.

Zoli is tall, and not unhandsome, and manages a moustache without looking silly. He has an air of slightly savage intelligence about him — he is in fact a doctor, a gynaecologist, though not currently practising. It is true that there is an unhealthy puffiness to his face, a swollenness, his eyes protruding more than is ideal, but Balázs does not notice these things until he sees them, intermittently, in the rear-view mirror — he is sitting in the back of the Mercedes with Emma, the lowered leather armrest emphatically separating them — as they make their way towards London.

They do so with single-minded speed, Zoli pushing the powerful car through holes in the traffic on the motorway. Holding onto the spring-hinged handle over the window, Balázs sees fleeting past a landscape somehow more thoroughly filled than any in his own country. It seems more orderly. It is very obviously more monied. It is early June and everything looks plump and fresh.

Gábor lights a cigarette. He is sitting in the front with Zoli, who immediately tells him to put it out.

Gábor apologises and presses it into the ashtray.

Still forcing the Mercedes forward, Zoli explains that he has borrowed it from a friend of his who has a luxury limousine hire service. He promised he wouldn’t smoke in it.

‘Sorry,’ Gábor says again. Then he says, ‘This is the new S-Class, yeah? Very nice.’

Zoli agrees vaguely.

He is in his early thirties, only a few years older than the others. Even so, Gábor is having trouble relating to him as an equal, something he normally manages quite easily with older and more important-seeming men. They had made some small talk as they drove out of the airport — though even that came to an abrupt end (Gábor was in the middle of saying something) when Zoli had to pay for the parking — and, as they head into London, Gábor’s usual effortless friendliness seems to have faltered. Whether that is because he is simply intimidated by Zoli, or for some other reason, Balázs does not know. Seeing them shake hands in the arrivals lounge the situation had seemed to him to be this — they had met before but did not know each other well. Zoli and Emma, on the other hand, seemed never to have met. Gábor introduced them, with a strange sort of formality, and Zoli was very friendly to her — a wide smile, a pair of kisses. To Balázs — obviously the minder, with his shit clothes and his muscles — he had offered only a peremptory handshake. Then he had hurried them to short-term parking. They were in a hurry because, as Zoli said, ‘There’s one tonight’ and what with the delay they were pressed for time, as they had first to go to the flat. Zoli, it seemed, had sorted out a flat for them to stay in while they were in London.

They spend some time stuck in traffic, the flow of the motorway silting up as it enters the metropolis. They are slowed by traffic lights. (The air conditioning is on — outside the tinted windows London, what they are able to see of it, swelters.) Then there are smaller thoroughfares, a more local look to things. There are neighbourhoods, parks, high streets, overflowing pubs. Smudged impressions of urban life on an early summer evening. All that goes on for much longer than Balázs imagined it would.

Finally they arrive. The flat is on a quiet street with a few trees in it. Small two-storey houses, all exactly the same. They wait with their luggage and Duty Free while Zoli opens the front door of one of them, swearing to himself as he struggles with the unfamiliar keys. They walk up some narrow stairs to the upper floor, where there is another struggle with the keys, and then they go in. One bedroom, white and sparsely furnished. For Balázs, the sofa in the living room, which overlooks the quiet road. On the other side of the landing, lurking mustily, is a windowless bathroom, into which Emma disappears with her washbag as soon as they arrive.

The men wait in the living room, Gábor on the sofa, Zoli pacing slowly and taking in the view from the uncurtained window, and Balázs just standing there staring at the old lion-coloured carpet and its mass of cigarette burns and other blemishes. Gábor wonders out loud where they might get something to eat. Zoli offers only an uninterested shrug. He says he doesn’t know the area well — he lives in another part of London. Turning to the window again, he says the high street is nearby — there will be something there.

‘D’you mind popping out,’ Gábor says to Balázs, ‘and getting some kebabs or something?’

Balázs looks up from the carpet. ‘Okay.’

‘Do you want something?’ Gábor says.

The question is addressed to Zoli. He is still staring out the window and doesn’t answer.

‘Zoli?’ Gábor says, tentatively. ‘D’you want something?’

‘No,’ he says, without turning.

‘Okay. So, yeah, just get some kebabs,’ Gábor says.

Balázs nods. Then he asks, ‘How many should I get?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll have one. Do you want one?’

‘Uh…Yeah.’

‘And Emma might want one. Four?’ Gábor suggests.

—

The stairs are almost too narrow for his shoulders, he almost has to make his way down sideways. The downstairs hall is dark, despite the frosted square pane in the front door, which opens as he nears the foot of the stairs and admits a youngish woman in a charcoal trouser suit. She leaves the door open for him. Otherwise they ignore each other.

It is very warm and light out in the street, a nice soft evening light that flatters the parked Merc. He lights a Park Lane, and then sets off through the little mazy streets of pinched, identical houses in the direction Zoli had indicated. It takes him twenty minutes to find the high street, and when he does there seems to be nowhere selling specifically kebabs. He walks up and down, sweating now in the summer evening, his orange T-shirt stuck to his skin. He notices a Polish supermarket, and the number of non-white people in the street. Then he phones Gábor. ‘Is chicken okay?’ he says.

Gábor doesn’t seem to understand the question. ‘What?’

‘Chicken,’ Balázs says emphatically. ‘Is it okay?’

‘Chicken?’

‘Yeah.’ He is standing outside a fried chicken place. The street lights have just flickered on, greenish. There is a faint smell of putrefaction. ‘There’s this fried chicken place…’ he says.

‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ Gábor tells him. Then, ‘I mean — does it look okay?’

Balázs looks at the place. ‘Yeah, it looks okay.’

‘Yeah, fine,’ Gábor says. ‘And don’t be too long. We’ve got to leave at ten.’

Balázs slips his phone into the hip pocket of his jeans and steps into the pitiless light. There is a small queue. While he waits he studies the menu — some backlit plastic panels — and when it is his turn, orders without mishap. (His English is quite fluent; he learned it in Iraq — it was the only way they could communicate with the Polish soldiers they were stationed with, and of course with whatever Americans they happened to meet.) He has trouble, though, finding his way back to the flat and has to phone Gábor again for help. Then they sit in the living room, he and Gábor, on the low sofa, eating with their hands from the flimsy grease-stained boxes. The overhead light is on in its torn paper shade and the stagnant air is full of loitering smoke and the smell of their meal, in the hurried eating of which Balázs is so involved that he does not notice Emma’s presence until Zoli speaks.

Then he lifts his head.

His mouth is full and his fingers are shiny with the grease of the chicken pieces. She is standing in the doorway.

‘Wow,’ Zoli had said.

And now, as if speaking Balázs’s thoughts, he says it again.

‘Wow.’

—

Later, sitting in the pearly Merc, he finds an after-image of how she had looked, standing in the doorway, still singed into his vision as he stares out of the window at other things. The London night is as glossy as the page of a magazine. Nobody speaks now as the smoothly moving Merc takes them into the heart of the city, where the money is.

2

It is awkward, especially that first night. In the driver’s seat, Gábor seems morose — he spends a lot of time with his head lolling on the leather headrest, staring out through the windscreen at the plutocratic side street in which they are parked, or studying the Tibetan inscription tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. Unusually for him, he hardly says a word for hours at a time. The hotel is a few minutes’ walk away, on the avenue known as Park Lane — after which Balázs’s inexpensive cigarettes, he has now learned, are named.

When they arrived, Zoli made a phone call. A few minutes later they were joined by a young woman, also Hungarian, who was introduced as Juli and who, it seemed, worked at the hotel. Then she, Zoli and Emma set off, and Gábor told Balázs that the two of them would be waiting there, in the parked Merc, until Emma returned.

It is a pretty miserable night they spend there, mostly in a silence exacerbated by the tepid stillness of the weather.

There are instances of listless conversation, such as when Gábor asks Balázs whether this is his first time in London. Balázs says it is, and Gábor suggests that he might like to do some sightseeing. When Balázs, showing polite interest, asks what he should see, Gábor seems at a loss for a few moments, then mentions Madame Tussauds. ‘They have waxworks of famous people,’ he says. ‘You know.’ He tries to think of one, a famous person. ‘Messi,’ he says finally. ‘Whatever. Emma wants to see it. Anyway, it’s something for you to do, if you want.’

‘Okay, yeah,’ Balázs says, nodding thoughtfully.

They then lapse into a long silence, except for Gábor’s index finger tapping the upholstered steering wheel, a sound like slow dripping, slowly filling a dark sink of preoccupation from which Balázs’s next question, asked some time later, seems mysteriously to flow.

He asks Gábor how he knows Zoli.

‘Zoli?’ Gábor seems surprised that it is something Balázs would have any interest in. ‘Uh,’ he says, as if he has actually forgotten. ‘Friend of a friend. You know.’ There is another longish pause and then, perhaps finding that it is something he wants to talk about after all, Gábor goes on. ‘I met him last time I was here, in London. He suggested we set something up.’

—

She taps on the misted window just after five in the morning. It is light and quite cold. Not much is said as Gábor, waking, unlocks the door and she gets in. Nor while he fiddles with the satnav. Then he switches on the engine, sets the de-mister noisily to work on the windows, and they pull out into the empty street.

She looks tired, more than anything, still in her skimpy dress and heels — though now she has shed the shoes and drawn her legs up under her on the seat. The two men managed a few hours’ sleep while they waited; it is hard to say whether she has. Her brown-ringed eyes suggest not. Her residual alertness seems chemically assisted.

‘Everything was okay?’ Gábor says eventually, while they wait at a traffic light.

‘M-hm.’

‘Are you hungry?’ is his next question, a minute or so later.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Maybe.’

‘You should eat something,’ he advises.

‘Okay.’

They stop at a McDonald’s and Balázs is sent in. He is aware, in her presence, of his own obvious stink — he has been wearing the same T-shirt for twenty-four hours. She wants a Big Mac and large fries, and a Diet Coke.

‘Thanks,’ she says, when he gets back to the car and, turning in the passenger seat, passes her the brown bag.

It is the first word she has ever spoken to him.

To her, he says, ‘No problem,’ though she might not have heard, as at that moment Gábor starts the engine.

She pushes the plastic straw into the cup’s lid and starts to drink.

—

Zoli shows up in the middle of the afternoon, while they are all still asleep.

Gábor emerges vague and tousled in a singlet and boxer shorts to hand over Zoli’s share of the money, which he does in the recessed corner of the living room that has been turned into a derisory pine kitchenette. Zoli then hands out strongly chilled lagers and, as they open them, asks after Emma. She has not been seen since the morning — not by Balázs anyway — when she disappeared into the bedroom as soon as they got back to the flat.

Gábor had joined her soon after, leaving Balázs to press his face into the odorous sofa as he tried to escape the light that flooded in through the windows and ignore the sounds from the street, intermittent but easily audible from the first floor, and fall asleep. At about ten o’clock, still unable to sleep, he had masturbated under a weak shower to a torrent of images of Emma in a vaguely delineated hotel room, images of the sort that had filled his head all night. A shocking quantity of seed turned down the plughole. Some time after that, with a T-shirt tied over his eyes, he did finally fall asleep.

‘So everything went okay?’ Zoli says, and swigs.

‘Yeah, I think so,’ Gábor says, with a sort of sleepy snuffle. They are standing at the pine breakfast bar.

‘I know him, that guy,’ Zoli says. ‘He’s okay. He’s a nice guy. I put him in first because I knew he wouldn’t cause any hassle.’

Gábor just nods.

‘Some of the others I don’t know,’ Zoli says. And then, ‘I’m not expecting any hassle, though.’

‘No,’ Gábor says.

‘These aren’t people who want to talk to the police, to journalists, you know what I mean. They’ve got too much to lose. Some of them are famous, I think.’

‘Yeah?’ Gábor says. He doesn’t seem interested.

‘I think so,’ Zoli says, with a nod and a swig. ‘She still asleep?’ he asks.

‘Yeah,’ Gábor says.

Zoli doesn’t stay long, and after he leaves Gábor goes back to bed. If he had had a bed, Balázs might have done the same. Instead he goes out into the blinding day and gets another box of chicken pieces from the same place as the night before. Then he lies on the sofa with the window open, smoking and trying to read a book — Harry Potter és a Titkok Kamrája. He is working his way slowly through the series.

He finds it difficult to focus on the story.

Then he finds it difficult to focus on the words.

—

When he wakes up she is standing in the doorway, in a dressing gown. He has no idea what time it is. It is still daylight.

‘Hi,’ she says in a neutral voice.

‘Hi.’ He sits up. ‘What, uh, what time is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Gábor wants to go shopping.’

Balázs is not sure what to say.

She tilts her head as if looking at something upside down — Harry Potter és a Titkok Kamrája. ‘Is that any good?’ she asks.

‘Uh.’ He picks it up and looks at the front, as if the answer might be there. ‘It’s alright,’ he says. He tries to think of something else to say about it.

She stays there for a few moments more, in the mote-filled afternoon light.

Then she yawns, and leaves.

—

Later, when they are sitting in the parked Merc, Gábor tells him about the shopping trip — two and a half hours in the scrum of Oxford Street, followed by a meal in the red velvet interior of an Angus Steakhouse. They have been talking more than they did the first night, the two men. It is drizzling. Maybe that helps, the way the surrounding hubbub softens the silence. The fact is, they do not know each other well. Even in the context of the gym they are not particularly friendly.

At about midnight, Balázs leaves the Merc and walks through the drizzle to the nearby KFC to get their ‘lunch’ — two ‘Fully Loaded’ meals.

Taking his seat again, he finds Gábor in a pensive mood. ‘Sometimes I worry about my attitude to women,’ Gábor says. Water trickles down the window against which his head is silhouetted. ‘D’you worry about that?’

Balázs has just bitten into his chicken fillet burger and cannot immediately answer. When he has swallowed what is in his mouth, he says, ‘What d’you mean?’

‘Just my attitude to women,’ Gábor says miserably. ‘Maybe it isn’t healthy.’ He turns to Balázs, still wet in the passenger seat, and says, ‘What do you think?’

Balázs just stares at him.

‘What would you do in my position?’ Gábor asks.

‘What would I do?’

‘Yeah, if you were in my position.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘If you and Emma were…whatever,’ Gábor says impatiently. ‘Would you let her do this?’

‘Would I let her?’

‘Yeah.’

Balázs is having trouble imagining, with any emotional specificity, the situation Gábor wants him to — a situation in which he and Emma were…whatever. Sex, is all he is able to imagine, and that of an impossibly lubricious kind. ‘Don’ know,’ he says. And then, trying to be more helpful, ‘Maybe.’

‘You would?’

‘Well…’ Balázs attempts to think about it honestly. ‘Maybe not,’ he says. ‘It depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On what…You know…What sort of relationship…?’

‘That’s it,’ Gábor says. ‘That’s my point. That’s what I’m talking about.’ He turns his attention, finally, to the food in his lap.

‘You’re worried this won’t be, uh…this won’t be positive for your relationship?’ Balázs asks.

‘Yeah,’ Gábor says simply, and pushes a sheaf of French fries into his mouth.

‘Well…D’you talk to her about it?’

Gábor shakes his head, and speaks with his mouth full. ‘Not really, to be honest. I mean, I try sometimes. She doesn’t want to. Whatever.’

They eat.

‘It’s her birthday next week.’ Gábor sounds slightly wistful now.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. I’m taking her to a kind of wellness spa place.’

‘Yeah?’ Balázs says again.

‘In Slovakia. They’ve got this luxury hotel up in the mountains. We’ve been there before. Kempinski hotel. You know those hotels?’

Balázs frowns, as if trying to remember, then shakes his head.

‘Fucking nice,’ Gábor tells him. ‘There’s this lake, surrounded by mountain peaks — she loves that shit. They’ve got every kind of treatment,’ he says. ‘Literally. You know. Mud baths, whatever.’

—

The days pass, and every day is the same, from Zoli’s visit in the mid-afternoon, through the long night, to the stop at McDonald’s in the smeary sun and the spasm in the mildewed shower, which smoothes the way to sleep.

Still, his sleep is poor. He feels stretched thin with fatigue, feels as insubstantial sometimes as the sails of smoke that sag in the windless air of the warm living room. Sometimes he feels transparent, at other times insufferably solid, but all the time there is the small furtive thrill of inhabiting the same space as her. Of using, for instance, the same bathroom. The small, water-stained bathroom is full of her stuff. He examines it with intense interest.

If her proximity thrills him, however, it tortures him as well in the long pallid hours of each afternoon, as he lies on the sofa knowing that she is there, on the other side of the flimsy wall, at which he stares as if trying to see through it, while the fantasies unspool in his smooth skull.

As for her, he marvels at how fresh she seems. If on Monday, which was the fourth day, she looked a little haggard and hungover when she appeared at four o’clock in the afternoon in her old towelling dressing gown, it was nothing she was not able to magic away with twenty minutes in front of the bathroom mirror.

Monday was the night they had the problem, the night of the incident. It was still early, not even eleven, when Gábor got the text. ‘Shit,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s from Emma.’

‘What’s it say?’ Balázs asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Isn’t that the signal?’

‘Maybe it’s a mistake,’ Gábor said.

‘Isn’t it the signal?’ Balázs asked again.

‘Yeah,’ Gábor sighed. ‘Okay,’ he said heavily, ‘let’s go.’ He was scared, Balázs thought. That’s why he was taking the hammer — he had a hammer with him, he kept it under the driver’s seat. Now it was up his sleeve.

They started to walk towards the hotel. Gábor was shaking his head, his face full of sorrowful intensity and fear. As they walked, he phoned Juli, who was working nights all week. She said she would meet them at the staff entrance.

She was waiting there, smoking nervously, when they arrived.

They followed her along a passageway with a green plastic floor, to the service stairs. ‘It’s the fourth floor,’ she told them, handing Gábor the key card. Gábor nodded, and he and Balázs started solemnly up the stairs.

Scuffed walls, a neon tube over each landing.

‘You ready?’ Gábor asked.

Balázs shrugged.

Gábor said, ‘This is where you earn your money.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’ll make sure she’s okay, you deal with him. I mean, if there’s any trouble.’

‘Okay.’

‘And the minimum of necessary force, yeah? I know I don’t need to tell you that. We don’t want…You know what I mean.’

He was worrying about the police, obviously. It was something that was on Balázs’s mind too. ‘Why don’t you leave the hammer here?’ he said, stopping.

‘What?’

‘Leave the hammer here. You can get it later.’

‘Why?’

Balázs wondered how to put it. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if…’ He started again. ‘Let’s say the police get involved, and you’ve got a hammer…A weapon. D’you see what I’m saying? We won’t need it anyway.’

Gábor was doubtful. ‘We won’t need it?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’ After a further hesitation, Gábor said, ‘Okay.’ He put the hammer down quietly and they passed through a fire door into the heavy, monied hush of the hallway on the other side. It was unlike anywhere Balázs had ever been, the sort of place he had only seen in American films — that was how it felt, like he was in an American film.

They were standing outside 425, the lacquered woodwork of the door. Listening, they heard nothing. Then Gábor swiped the sensor, the lock whirred and disengaged, and they went in.

‘What’s this?’ Gábor said. He sounded surprised, almost disappointed.

There were three people in the room, which was large and well lit — Emma and two Indian men, all sitting down, and all seemingly waiting patiently, in polite silence.

‘Okay, listen,’ one of the Indians said immediately, standing. ‘We want to talk to you.’ He was much the older of the two of them and had been sitting on an upholstered chair between the tall, draped windows.

Gábor ignored him and said to Emma, in Hungarian, ‘What’s going on?’

She shrugged. ‘There are two of them.’

‘I can see that. What’s been happening?’

‘Nothing.’

The older man was wearing a tweed jacket and seemed to be waiting for Gábor to finish speaking to Emma.

Gábor turned to him and said, in English, ‘Only one of you can be here.’

‘Yes, this is what we want to talk to you about,’ the man said.

‘Only one of you,’ Gábor told him again.

‘I understand, I understand…’

‘Okay, you understand. So one of you go. Please.’

The Indians — the older with his nice jacket and manners, his elegant cologne; the younger, scrawny in a Lacoste polo shirt, and still in his seat — were profoundly unintimidating. There was a fairly obvious sense that Balázs, standing with his arms folded near the door, displacing a lot of air, would be able to deal with them simultaneously if necessary. The older man’s exaggerated politeness, with its weird edge of suppressed hysteria, may just have been an acknowledgement of that.

‘I understand,’ he was saying yet again. ‘The young lady told us that only one of us could, uh…you know,’ he said. ‘I understand. That’s okay. That’s okay. My, uh, my young friend will be…will be doing that.’

Moving only his eyes, Balázs looked at the younger man. He was about twenty perhaps, or even younger, and, slumped in his seat, staring at his loafers, seemed not even to be following what was happening.

Gábor said to Emma, again in Hungarian, ‘Do you have the money?’

She nodded.

‘Who paid you?’

She pointed to the older Indian, who said, ‘I just want to watch.’

Gábor turned to him. ‘You want to watch?’

‘Yes.’

‘Baszd meg.’

‘Is it a problem?’

‘Yes, it’s a problem,’ Gábor said in a louder voice.

‘Why?’

‘Why? Why?’ With what seemed to be a sudden loss of temper, Gábor seized the man by the scruff of his jacket and first swung and then started shoving him towards the door, until Balázs, packed into his lurid turquoise shirt, intervened and separated them.

There was a moment of tense quiet while Gábor, evidently struggling to maintain a professional demeanour, focused on his shoes.

Then he looked up and said, tautly, ‘It’s a problem, okay. A problem. Please?’ With stiff politeness, an extended hand, he showed the man the door.

The Indian was starting to sweat somewhat. Nevertheless he seemed determined to negotiate it out. Panting slightly, he said, ‘No, just a minute. Please. I also say please. Just a minute.’

‘Let’s go,’ Gábor said.

‘Please,’ the man went on. ‘Let’s just talk for a minute. Let’s just talk. Your friend said the money was for a whole night with the, the young lady. Your friend said that.’

‘Yes,’ Gábor said, with strained patience.

‘Now, listen,’ the Indian said, his pate starting to shine, ‘what I want to suggest is, uh, that we only take an hour or two of her time — but that I’m allowed to watch. Just watch! Is that fair? Doesn’t that seem fair?’

‘Look,’ Gábor said. ‘She doesn’t do stuff like that, okay? She’s a nice girl.’

‘Oh, she’s a nice girl — of course she’s a nice girl…’

‘Yeah, she’s a nice girl. Let’s go.’

‘Okay, you want more money,’ the Indian said, as if surrendering, as Gábor took hold of his arm. ‘How much? How much? A thousand pounds,’ he offered.

Gábor, transparently surprised by the size of the offer, did not say anything. He swallowed cautiously and looked at Emma.

‘Okay? A thousand pounds?’

‘Uh,’ Gábor said, frowning as if trying to work something out. He seemed unable to do so, however, and finally said, ‘It’s up to her.’

‘Of course!’ The man turned smartly to Emma. She was sitting, with some dignity, in a tub chair. The man said, ‘A thousand pounds, madam, simply to sit in the corner. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse. What say you?’

Even the young Indian lifted his overlarge head, with its cockatooish plume of blow-dried hair, and looked at her now as they all waited to hear what she would answer.

‘Just say no,’ Gábor said to her, in their own language. ‘Just say no, and we’ll get rid of him.’

‘Why?’ she said finally. ‘What difference does it make?’

Gábor’s face underwent a very slight distortion.

‘What difference does it make?’ she said again.

‘You’ll do it then?’

She shrugged, and Gábor turned to the waiting Indian, who had not understood the exchange, and said, ‘Okay. Where’s the money?’

‘I, uh, I have it here.’ He took from the inside pocket of his jacket a tan leather wallet.

As he counted out the money, Gábor said, ‘You just watch.’

‘Of course, of course,’ the man said distractedly.

‘You don’t touch.’

A shake of the shining head. ‘No.’

‘Any trouble, we’ll be here.’

The man held out the money. ‘I promise you, there won’t be any trouble.’

‘Give the money to her,’ Gábor said.

‘Oh, excuse me. Madame?’

Emma stood up — even without her shoes she was taller than the dapper man — and took the money and put it in the small handbag which was on one of the tables next to the brocaded expanse of the bed.

‘Okay,’ Gábor said to Balázs, while she was doing that. ‘Let’s go.’

—

Gábor hardly spoke for the rest of the night, his face swallowed by shadow in the parked Merc. He had speculated bitterly, as they walked back, on the nature of the Indian’s perversion, but once they had taken their seats on the anthracite leather, he seemed to have nothing more to say.

The previous night had also challenged his composure, though not nearly to the same extent. Zoli had told them, when he came as usual to collect his money, that the client for that night did not want to go to the hotel, so they should go instead to his house. It turned out to be in a grand square of stucco terraces. The two men had watched through the windscreen as Emma, in the familiar little flesh-coloured sheath of a dress, went up the steps to the porticoed entrance, with its big hanging lantern, and pushed the doorbell. A minute later the house swallowed her.

‘Whatever,’ Gábor said.

The house spat her out at four in the morning, just as the birds were starting to sing in the railinged gardens.

She was drunk. As they drove through the empty streets, she apologised for hiccupping, and then, when she couldn’t stop, seemed to get the giggles.

‘You’re in a good mood,’ Gábor said, fixing her momentarily in the rear-view mirror. ‘D’you have fun then?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said softly.

‘You’re drunk.’

‘Yes, I’m drunk. I’ve had about two bottles of champagne.’

‘Champagne?’ Gábor said. ‘Nice.’

She ignored the sarcasm. ‘Not really.’

‘No? Did he make you drink it?’

She turned to the window, to the blue streets, dawn seeping into them. Monday morning. ‘It helps,’ she said.

—

Tuesday night, the one after the incident with the Indians, is her night off. When she appears as usual at four p.m., Gábor says that Zoli has invited them out. He seems surprised and hurt when she tells him she is tired and wants to stay in. Later he tries again to persuade her — Balázs hears this through the wall — and when he meets with no success, emerges himself in a sharply pressed indigo shirt and extends the invitation half-heartedly to Balázs, who says that he, too, is tired and wants to stay in. Without making any effort to persuade him, Gábor phones Zoli and apologetically passes on the news that Emma won’t be joining them.

‘Nah,’ he says, standing in the middle of the living room with his phone to his ear, ‘nah, she wants to stay in. She says she wants to stay in.’ Zoli says something. ‘I did tell her that,’ Gábor says. Zoli makes some other point, and Gábor says, with feeling, ‘I know, I know.’ Finally Zoli desists and Gábor mixes a JD and Coke in the pine kitchenette, and having hurriedly swallowed it, heads out into the evening.

When the slam of the door has dissipated, a very pure silence settles on the small flat.

Balázs, pretending to read Harry Potter és a Titkok Kamrája, listens hard for any sound, any sign of life from the other room.

After about twenty minutes he hears what sounds like the squeak of a bedspring.

Some time after that — quite a long time, during which his hopeful theory that she turned down the night out specifically so that she would find herself alone in the flat with him is severely tested by the uninterrupted silence — he puts down the novel, with which he is making little progress and, passing quietly through the hall, goes out to get himself some supper.

Her light was on when he left — he saw it under the door.

When he gets back he sees, with a squeeze of disappointment, that it is off. He should have tapped on her door before he went out and asked if she wanted anything. That would have been the obvious thing to do. Now it is too late. Without enthusiasm, he eats his food and, when he has finished, lights the first of a long sequence of Park Lanes.

When he finally falls asleep, it is after two o’clock and the ashtray on the floor next to the sofa is full.

3

‘Is there any coffee?’ she asks, hearing him stir.

She is in the kitchenette, in her dressing gown, opening pine cupboards.

‘No,’ he says, squinting. The room is full of clean sunlight. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I only drink coffee in the morning,’ she explains. It is ten o’clock in the morning, a time when they are normally asleep.

Naked in his sleeping bag but for a pair of black nylon briefs, Balázs does not move from where he is. ‘Did…Did Gábor get back?’ he asks.

‘He’s sleeping,’ she says.

She has stopped searching the cupboards and is just staring at the kitchenette.

‘Where can I get some coffee?’ she wonders.

And as if it were the simplest thing in the world, he makes his suggestion.

‘If you like,’ he says, ‘I know a place.’

She looks at him, sitting there, up to his waist in the sleeping bag, his tattooed biceps and toaster-like pecs, his small pale eyes obscurely imploring.

—

They are in the habit of speaking to each other now, up to a point. Still, it feels extremely intimate to pass through the downstairs hall together, to leave the house, and walk down the street.

Balázs knows the way to the high street well by now and has seen some coffee places there, some with a few metal tables outside on the narrow, stained pavement. They sit on aluminium chairs, under a restless awning. He is wearing his sunglasses, the soldierly plastic wraparounds with their iridescent wing-shaped lenses, and his orange T-shirt is tucked into his jeans. He sucks at the lid of his coffee cup and looks at the sunny, trading street. ‘Nice day,’ he says.

Also wearing sunglasses, she just smiles, not unsympathetically.

‘Did you sleep okay?’ he asks.

She says she did.

As if aware of some possible impropriety in the situation, she is, it seems, pointedly unforthcoming.

There is a silence.

Wondering what to say next, Balázs has another go at his coffee cup.

Unable to think of anything, he offers her a Park Lane, which she takes. He lights it for her. There is a simple glass ashtray on the aluminium tabletop.

Then he says, ‘I thought I might have a look round today. See some sights or whatever.’ He had hoped she would show some immediate enthusiasm for this idea but she doesn’t. Sitting on the other side of the little round table in a sleeveless top that shows the tattooed sprig of barbed wire encircling her slender upper arm, she just takes a pull of the Park Lane and says nothing. ‘There must be loads to see here,’ he says. When she still doesn’t play along, he opts for a more direct approach, and asks, ‘There anything you want to see? While we’re here.’

She sort of laughs. ‘I don’t know.’

The laugh is very discouraging, and he is about to drop the whole subject, when she says, without seeming interested, ‘What is there?’

‘Well, uh.’ He tries to sound spontaneous. ‘There’s some waxworks place, isn’t there?’

‘Oh, that.’ She seems a lot less into it than Gábor had suggested.

‘What about that?’ he suggests.

She says she doesn’t know where it is.

He says it wouldn’t be a problem to find out.

She seems amused now. She is smiling at him as if he amuses her. ‘Are you really interested?’

He shrugs. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You don’t seem like that sort of person.’

‘What sort of person?’

Still evasively smiling, she says, ‘You know what I mean.’

‘The sort who’s interested in waxworks?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m interested in waxworks,’ he says, implausibly. And then, seeing an opening, ‘What sort of person do I seem like?’

She ignores the question. ‘What time is it?’

He looks at his watch, its muddle of intersecting dials, most of which seem to have no function, and tells her.

‘You’re really interested?’ she asks.

And with a totally straight face, he says, ‘Yeah.’

—

They have to take the underground, and he enjoys, standing in the noisy train, the envy of the other men, the way they watch her in her tall shoes and torn denim. She seems not to notice that she is being looked at, or to notice anything, as she sways with the movements of the train, her sunglasses fixed on some advertisement for a dating service or hair-loss product, or the diagram of the line.

She had said to Balázs, while they were waiting on the platform at Finsbury Park, that she was impressed by his English. Where had he learned it? ‘Iraq,’ he said, surprisingly, and he told her, while they waited, about his time there. He didn’t try to pretend that it had been exciting, or even very interesting. He had spent more or less the entire time in various town-sized bases, playing computer games in plain, air-conditioned rooms and eating American food. He had spoken to not a single Iraqi — except one interpreter who had tried to sell him drugs — and had never fired his weapon. He had done some patrols, though even that only involved travelling around in an armoured vehicle, peering through a tiny window at the flat, beige land. Nothing had ever happened. His most abiding memory, he tells her, was of the heat, the way it took you the moment you stepped out of the air conditioning, the instant watery profuseness of the sweat.

Standing on the up escalator at Baker Street Station, he asks her which famous person she is most looking forward to seeing in the museum. Her answer does not please him. He fucking hates Johnny Depp and those pirate films he is in. More than that, it seems possible that in selecting Depp, she was sending a deliberate message that he, Balázs, was ‘not her type’, that he shouldn’t get any ideas. (Why hadn’t she said Bruce Willis?) He wishes he hadn’t asked her the question, and doesn’t speak again as they leave the station.

Out in the sunlight at street level, they look for the museum. When they find it, the queue of people waiting ‘to meet the stars’ is shocking. Where it starts, far up a side street, there is a sort of diffuse, subsidiary queue of people wondering whether to join the main queue, which is marked, every twenty metres or so, with signs indicating how long the wait will be from that point — Approx. 2½ hrs is the first, though that itself is quite far from where the queue is now being supplied with new material. Further ahead — in the vicinity of Approx. 1 hr — mime artists and a man on stilts attempt to entertain distraught and exhausted children.

Balázs, absorbing the situation with weary stoicism, takes his place in the queue. He is docile and long-suffering when it comes to queuing — he takes a sort of joyless pride in waiting his turn, and in not being deterred by having to do so.

‘We’re not really going to wait, are we?’ she says, standing beside him.

‘Well…’

She laughs. ‘I mean, we’ll be here for hours.’

‘Yeah,’ Balázs agrees.

‘Do we really want to do that?’

‘I dunno.’

She folds her arms and they stand there for a minute or two in the fresh shade of the early-summer morning, a minute or two during which the queue does not move at all, and Balázs senses a souring of her mood — she has started to frown at her own feet. ‘Shou’ we do something else then?’ he ventures, lighting a Park Lane.

‘Like what?’ she asks.

He shrugs, looks uninspired.

‘We could just walk a bit,’ she suggests.

There is a glimmer of green at the end of the side street and they start to walk towards it, initially in silence.

Just as the silence is threatening to turn awkward, she says, ‘When did you get back from Iraq?’

‘Uh.’ He has to think for a moment. ‘Eight years ago.’

It seems amazing — awful — that eight years have passed since then.

In fact it is more — it was December 2004, that winter day, the windy airfield. Home. ‘Eight and a half,’ he says, making the amendment. He was twenty then, had been in the army since he was eighteen. He tells her that he stayed in the army for a year or two after that.

‘And what have you been doing since then?’ she asks. ‘Working at the gym?’

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘working at the gym, and some other things.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘I was a security guard for a bit.’ He asks her if she knows a particular Tesco in Budapest. She says she does. ‘There,’ he says.

The subject seems likely to peter out at this point, and then she says, ‘What was that like?’

What was that like? Well, there was the humid nylon pseudo-law-enforcement uniform, the hours of loitering near the entrance, the dull CCTV screens of the security station. ‘It was okay,’ he says.

They have arrived at a perpendicular street. On the other side is a stunning cliff face of pristine cream houses, through a wide opening in which the green trees of a park are visible. The street they are walking down goes through the opening, where it acquires a red tarmac cycle lane, and on into the park. They wait at the lights while the traffic streams past. This place, he thinks, staring at the high houses while they wait, is made of money. He says, ‘I got sacked in the end. From Tesco.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Suspected collusion with shoplifters,’ he says.

‘Suspected?’

‘Yeah, suspected. I didn’t collude with anybody.’

‘Why did they suspect you then?’

‘Well, they were losing a lot of stuff. So I wasn’t much good at the job anyway.’ It was true that he had had a tendency to fall for what turned out to be diversionary tactics. The staged scuffle, the fake heart attack, the swarthy old woman selling violets, the old man with the never-ending story. He was probably a soft touch that way. That might have been what the manager thought too. Still, it’s easier to sack someone for being dishonest.

‘Isn’t it?’ he says.

They have entered the park and are walking along an asphalt path that follows the edge of a thin, green lake. There aren’t many people around.

‘Did you contest it?’ she asks.

‘Nah. They said if I went quietly they’d give me a decent reference, so…’ He shrugs.

‘And did they?’

‘Yeah,’ he admits.

‘And then you got the job at the gym?’

‘Well, yeah, eventually.’

At its narrowest point, there is a small wooden bridge over the lake and they walk out onto it.

‘But that’s not really enough,’ he says. ‘In itself. It’s only part-time really. So I’ve got to do other stuff as well.’

‘Stuff like this,’ she suggests.

‘Well, yeah,’ he says. They have stopped on the bridge, and looking out at the murky green water he lights a cigarette. He seems uneasy, even embarrassed, that she has touched on why they are in London — or had he touched on it first? He hadn’t meant to, he doesn’t think. Indeed, he shies away from the subject, and says, ‘When I was a kid, I wanted to be a water-polo player.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yeah. I was alright,’ he tells her. ‘I thought I might do it professionally.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘It didn’t happen somehow. Maybe I wasn’t aggressive enough. There were other guys, more aggressive.’ He is squinting at the water. ‘Anyway, it didn’t happen.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘Yeah.’ He had thought it was something he had entirely come to terms with. Just for a moment, though, he feels the pain of it again — feels it, in fact, more nearly, more immediately than he ever has before. It’s as though he understands, for the first time, exactly what was at stake — his whole life, everything.

‘What did you want to do,’ he asks, ‘when you were a kid?’

The question sounds odd somehow.

She seems to think, for a few seconds, about whether to answer it at all.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Escape.’

She puts her hands on the sun-pocked paint of the wooden bridge and looks down into the water. Green water, feathers floating on it. ‘It’s a shame we don’t have some bread for those ducks. There’s something so restful about feeding ducks, isn’t there?’

Balázs joins her at the handrail.

‘Don’t you find?’

‘Uh…’

‘It’s probably not something you do much, is it?’ she says, smiling at him. ‘A big tough man like you.’

‘Well, no, not much.

‘I was joking,’ she says.

‘Okay.’

‘When I was little,’ she says, ‘we used to go and stay with my grandparents. They lived in a village somewhere. I used to feed the chickens. I didn’t like that, actually. They were so smelly.’

‘Yeah, chickens stink,’ Balázs says, like someone who knows.

She laughs. ‘Don’t they? They really do.’

They start to walk again, under trees now, on the other side of the lake, its wind-wrinkled surface visible through stirring leaves — the bloodstain-coloured leaves of a copper beech.

‘It’s nice this park, isn’t it?’ she says.

He looks around, as if he had not noticed until now that they were in a park. ‘Yeah,’ he says.

‘It’s so well kept. Look at those flower beds. Are you in a relationship at the moment?’ she asks matter-of-factly.

Startled by the question, he says, ‘Uh, no, not at the moment.’

They walk on, and seconds pass without him saying anything more on the subject. He feels he should, somehow. What is there to say, though? The answer is no. ‘Not at the moment,’ he says again.

Without meaning to they seem to have walked in a circle and are back at the place where they entered the park, the road with the red tarmac cycle lane.

He says, ‘Uh, d’you wanna get a drink or something?’

—

In the muted red interior of a pub called the Globe, with Hogarth reproductions on the striped wallpaper, while the traffic tumbles past outside, they sit with pints, and a few other tourists.

‘So how long have you and Gábor been…?’ he asks, not knowing quite how to put it. Gábor is in fact the last thing he wants to talk about, but he can’t think of anything else to say.

‘About a year,’ she says.

‘How’d you meet?’ Balázs asks, stuck with the subject now.

‘Through work,’ she says. ‘He was involved with a film I made. We met that way.’

‘He was involved?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’ And then, almost apologetically, ‘I’ve just never been sure what he…?’

‘The technical side,’ she says smoothly. ‘Post-production. Distribution. More distribution. He knows about computers. Or he knows people who do. You know — it’s mostly online.’

‘Okay.’ Balázs lifts his pint.

‘That was my last film, actually,’ she tells him a few moments later, as if it is something that might interest him.

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Gábor wanted me to stop,’ she explains. ‘He was fine with it at first. I mean, he was more than fine with it.’ She laughs. ‘I’m pretty sure he liked it, actually. But then, when we’d been together for a few months, it started to bother him. That’s when he said he wanted me to stop.’

Balázs says, ‘But he’s okay with you doing…I mean…’

‘This?’ she says.

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, it wasn’t his idea, if that’s what you mean.’

‘No?’

‘No.’ Then, as if something has occurred to her, she says, ‘Did he tell you it was?’

Balázs thinks for a second. ‘No.’

‘It was Zoli’s idea,’ she says. ‘You know Zoli.’

‘Zoli, yeah.’

‘It was his idea.’

‘He’s a friend of Gábor’s, yeah?’

‘Not really. I mean, they’re not really friends. They know each other somehow.’

‘It was his idea then,’ Balázs says, unwilling now to leave it there, though trying not to show quite how interested he is.

‘Well, he told me how much money I could make here, and said he’d sort it out. I said I’d think about it. Gábor didn’t like the idea. He didn’t want me to do it.’

‘Well…I don’t know,’ Balázs says thoughtfully.

The open doors of the pub admit the passing wail of a police siren.

‘I wouldn’t be able to live with it, if I was him.’

She smiles. ‘That’s a nice thing to say. Can we smoke in here?’

‘Uh.’ He looks for ashtrays, sees No Smoking signs. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Do you want to go outside then?’

They stand on the pavement in the steady traffic noise. ‘Zoli wants me to move here,’ she shouts.

‘Does he?’

‘He suggested it. The first night, when we were in the hotel, and Gábor wasn’t there. He said I should move here. He said he’d set me up somewhere nice. My own place. I’d only have to work once or twice a month or something.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I didn’t say anything — I laughed. He said he was serious, I shouldn’t laugh.’

‘Do you want to move here?’

‘What, and deal with Zoli all the time? I don’t think so. He’s a total shit, that’s obvious. Isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, I s’pose,’ Balázs says, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

He still seems to be thinking about it when she says, ‘Do you know why I like you?’

He just stares at her.

‘You don’t judge people,’ she says.

‘Don’t I?’ he asks.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not even Zoli. Definitely not me. Definitely not me. And I know when I’m being judged.’

When they have finished their pints he asks her if she wants another. After asking him what time it is, she says no. ‘I don’t think I’d better.’ Then she excuses herself and goes to look for the ladies. Some elderly Americans, sitting at a nearby table with a map and soft drinks, seem to inspect her as she passes them. When she has moved on, one of them says something and there is a murmur of laughter. Yeah, they’re judging her, Balázs thinks, leaning forward on the tabletop over his folded arms in an attempt to see her as she walks away on the cork-soled shoes. It is nearly one o’clock. Despite her not wanting another pint, he assumes that they will spend the whole afternoon together — what else is there to do? — and he is shocked when she sits down again and says, ‘Should we head back to the flat then?’

He feels as though he has been slapped.

‘Yeah?’ he says. And then, when that doesn’t seem to express enough disapproval of the suggestion, ‘Really?’

‘What do you want to do?’ It’s as if she is negotiating.

‘I dunno.’ He scratches his head.

In fact, he does know — the knowledge is painfully present to him.

When maybe ten seconds have passed without him saying anything else, she says, ‘I think we should head back.’

He shrugs sadly. ‘Yeah, okay.’

They walk to the underground in silence, and hardly speak on the train.

4

The parked Merc, its familiar shadows. Gábor says, ‘So I hear you and Emma did some sightseeing today.’ He was still sleeping when they got back from their excursion, and Balázs doesn’t know what Emma has told him about it. That she has told him about it at all is somehow disappointing. Warily, he says, ‘Yeah, uh…’

‘You went to the wax museum,’ Gábor says.

‘Well, yeah. We didn’t go in, though.’ Still unsure what Gábor thinks about it, Balázs’s tone is defensive.

‘No, that’s what she said,’ Gábor says. ‘She said you’d’ve had to queue for two hours or something.’

‘More,’ Balázs says.

‘You can get priority tickets,’ Gábor tells him.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ With his index fingers on the steering wheel, Gábor is staring straight ahead, through the wide windscreen at the long dark Mayfair street. ‘That’s what I did, when I went.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Balázs admits.

‘So what’d you do then?’ Gábor asks. There is something strange about the question — if she has told him about the museum and the queue, then surely Gábor has asked her, and she has told him, what they did next. So why, Balázs wonders uneasily, is he asking him? Is he suspicious? Is he feeling for discrepancies with Emma’s story?

‘Nothing really,’ Balázs says. ‘Went for a walk. How was…How was last night?’

Gábor doesn’t seem to mind changing the subject. ‘It was excellent,’ he says. ‘You should’ve come.’

‘I was tired,’ Balázs says apologetically.

‘Yeah?’ It’s as if Gábor doesn’t quite believe him.

‘Yeah.’

‘I thought maybe you wanted to make a move on Emma.’ Gábor is smiling when he says this — it might be a joke. ‘Especially when you went off together like that today.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Balázs says.

‘No?’ Gábor is still smiling.

‘No,’ Balázs says. He feels the heat in his face, the way it seems to implicate him.

‘It’s just that most guys around Emma,’ Gábor says, looking at him slyly, ‘they’ve got their fucking tongues hanging out, you know what I mean? You don’t seem that into her.’

‘No,’ Balázs says.

That doesn’t seem enough, though.

The way Gábor had said it — ‘You don’t seem that into her’ — it sounded like something that needed explaining.

‘You’re not gay, are you?’ Gábor says, as if it is something he has been meaning to ask for some time.

Balázs is, for a moment, too surprised to speak. Then he says, ‘No.’

‘It’s not a problem if you are,’ Gábor tells him.

‘No,’ Balázs says. ‘No, I’m not. I, uh. No.’

‘She’s just not your type, or what?’

With an almost pained expression, Balázs says, ‘Look…I dunno…’

‘Hey, whatever, man. I didn’ mean to get personal.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘She’s not your type, she’s not your type,’ Gábor says. ‘Whatever.’

They don’t talk much after that.

A sort of depression, Balázs finds, seems to have engulfed him. It’s like a storm that has threatened all afternoon — in the terrible stillness of the smoky living room — and has now fallen on him in a silent maelstrom of despair. Sitting there in the shadows, he thinks with shame and sadness of his own life, his own things, his own pathetic pleasures.

Gábor’s phone.

It is her, and there is obviously some problem. ‘Okay, just stay there,’ Gábor says. ‘Just stay where you are. We’ll be there in a minute.’

When he has hung up, he says, ‘We’ve got to go up there again. She had to lock herself in the bathroom.’

—

The anonymous opulence of room 425. The TV is on loud. Sitting on the bed, its linen an energetic mess like stiffly whipped egg white, is a man. He is about forty, thinnish, the length of his face exaggerated by the way he is losing his hair. Emma is not there, though her dress, which is all she wears on these occasions, is on the floor. The man’s clothes are on the floor too — he is naked. He stands up with a strange lack of urgency when he hears them come in. ‘Who are you?’ he says.

‘Where is she?’ Gábor asks.

‘There.’ The man indicates a door. Then he says, more fiercely, ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘Watch him,’ Gábor says to Balázs, and knocks on the door. ‘Hey, it’s me,’ he shouts, and a moment later is let in.

In the well-lit room, Balázs is left standing face to face with the naked man, no more than a metre from him. The man seems unembarrassed by his nakedness. He sniffs loudly and says, ‘I’m not finished with her, okay?’

Balázs says nothing, and probably looks as if he didn’t understand, because the man says, ‘You speak English, you fucking gorilla? I’m not finished. So why don’t you and your friend just get out of here?’

When Balázs still says nothing, the man says, ‘You think I hurt her? I didn’t hurt her,’ he tells Balázs’s impassive face. ‘I just told her she’s a slut, which she is. That’s what I told her, and that’s what she is. Hey, gorilla, you fucking ape! I’m talking to

Whoosh

—

There is a noise like a dog enjoying a knuckle of gristle as the nose breaks and fills with blood.

The man staggers back against the bed, looking confused. There is suddenly a huge amount of blood, all over his mouth.

‘She’s okay…’ Gábor says from the open bathroom door. ‘What the fuck…’

The man is on his knees, with his blood-smeared hands at his face and blood dripping quickly into the deep pile of the carpet.

Balázs is already leaving. Outside in the corridor it is as if he has never been there before. Blinded by adrenalin he is unable to find the service stairs and descends instead in a jewel-box of a lift. The doors open on the lobby, its dull dazzle. The shimmering cloud of a chandelier. The blood on his hand, slippery a minute ago, is now sticky, and his hand is starting to throb. With a single smooth turn, the revolving door exchanges the silent lobby for the noises of the night — the intermittent hiss of traffic from the avenue, the more immediate thrum of a taxi pulling up to the hotel entrance.

Balázs walks. He is in the avenue’s trench of triple-shadowed light. Every few seconds some vehicle overtakes him. He isn’t thinking anything, just feeling the night air on the skin of his face.

Slowly he becomes aware of things — the trees, their leaves a lurid green in the towering lamplight. The darkness on the other side of the avenue that must be some sort of park. Some people waiting at a bus stop.

He stops in front of a ghostly BMW showroom. He wonders what he is going to do. Tremblingly, the situation starting unpleasantly to impinge, he lights a Park Lane. He isn’t even sure what happened. He hit the man — at least once — he knows that. Judging by the throb and soreness in his own hand he hit him hard. Probably he broke his nose. Staring without seeing them at the waxed and frowning BMWs, Balázs tells himself that the man will not want to involve the police. He was wearing a wedding ring, for one thing — Balázs had noticed that. He would have to tell his wife some lie to explain the damage to his face, but he would have had to tell her some lie anyway.

Balázs starts to walk again. He remembers now the way that Gábor had shouted at him when he emerged from the bathroom to find the man bleeding onto the carpet, had shouted after him as he left the room. It isn’t what Gábor would have wanted. And Emma…Just as he was leaving he had been aware of her emerging from the bathroom too, in one of the hotel’s towelling robes, and releasing a short scream…

Balázs wonders, for a moment, whether he should just flee the whole situation — just head home on his own, hurry to the airport now. He doesn’t have his passport on him, is one problem. Everything is at the house. No, he will walk a bit more while the adrenalin works its way out of his system. Then he will face whatever it is he has to face.

When, some time later, he finds the side street where they were parked, however, the Mercedes is not there.

—

He doesn’t know how to get home from the hotel, except on the underground, so he has to wait for the trains to start. Four o’clock finds him in Knightsbridge, pressing his nose to the windows of Harrods. Half an hour later he is wandering through Eaton Square. At five, watched by suspicious policemen, he passes in front of Buckingham Palace. It is fully light now, the sun is up, and he waits in Green Park for the station to open.

—

An hour later he finds Gábor in the smoke-filled living room of the flat, on the phone. He is obviously talking to Zoli.

While he talks he does not acknowledge Balázs’s presence, standing there waiting for him to finish, until he says to Zoli, in a quiet voice, ‘Yeah, he’s here. He just got back.’

A minute later he puts down his phone and says, ‘Zoli is fucking livid.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Balázs says.

‘Do you know who that is whose nose you broke?’

Balázs shakes his head.

‘What the fuck were you doing?’ Gábor shouts at him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Balázs says again, lowering his eyes.

‘I mean, are you out of your fucking mind?’

‘I thought…I thought he hurt her,’ Balázs says.

‘No, he did not hurt her. I told you she was okay.’

‘She’s okay? So what happened, why did she…?’

‘Do you have any idea,’ Gábor says, ignoring him, ‘what I have had to deal with?’

Balázs, after a long silence, is about to say sorry again, when Gábor goes on. He speaks in a ferocious semi-whisper, perhaps because Emma is trying to sleep in the other room. ‘First I’ve got to deal with the guy with the broken nose,’ Gábor says, ‘this guy on the floor. Give him towels to soak up the blood, find his teeth and give them to him — I mean, it was disgusting, man! Then he starts saying he’s going to call the police. I mean, he gets really fucking angry suddenly. So I have to try and calm him down, tell him he probably doesn’t want to call the police, that he probably doesn’t want to involve them. And he tells me to go fuck myself, he doesn’t give a shit, he’s going to call them, and we’re all going to get arrested. And I’m worried he is going to call them — that he isn’t thinking straight, he’s full of cocaine, he’s probably concussed or something. I mean, he might do something stupid, something he regrets later as well. So I tell him I’m going to call Zoli and talk to him, and he shouldn’t do anything till I’ve done that. And anyway he’s still dizzy and can’t even stand up, and doesn’t know where his phone is — his clothes and stuff’s all over the place. I mean, he’s still fucking naked at this point, and when he tries to stand up he just falls over again. So I call Zoli, yeah, and of course he’s asleep, because it’s the middle of the fucking night, and at first he doesn’t answer, but I keep trying and eventually he picks up, and obviously he knows there’s a problem otherwise I wouldn’t be calling him in the middle of the night, but then I’ve got to tell him what happened, I’ve got to tell him that you broke the guy’s fucking nose. And he says, “What did the guy do?” And I’ve got to tell him that the guy did nothing, basically, you just broke his nose. I mean, Zoli can hardly fucking believe it when I tell him that,’ Gabor says, suddenly flaring up himself, and taking a moment to light a cigarette. ‘And he immediately starts having a go at me for bringing you into this whole thing — I mean, like it was my fault what happened. And then he starts saying he’s going to break your legs and stuff. I mean, he says it like he really means it, and maybe he knows people who can do that, I don’t know. Anyway, I tell him the guy’s threatening to call the police. And he says I can’t let him do that. And I say, “What the fuck do you want me to do — kill him?” And Zoli says, “Let me talk to him.” So I tell the guy Zoli wants to talk to him, and give him the phone. And the guy looks fucking terrible — I mean, his face is swollen like a fucking balloon and all purple, and his nose is just a fucking grotesque mess. Anyway, he takes the phone and talks to Zoli, and he’s still really fucking angry — he’s shouting about how he’s going to call the police and how it might be embarrassing for him but we’re the ones who are going to go to jail and stuff. Fuck, it takes Zoli about half an hour to calm him down, and then he gives the phone back to me and says Zoli wants to talk to me again, and Zoli tells me he’s agreed with the guy that he won’t call the police if we give him his money back, and at that point I’m just fucking relieved to have this sorted out so he’s not going to call the police, so I tell Emma to get the money and she does, and I give it back to the guy. That felt really shit.’ Gábor stubs out his cigarette.

Balázs is still standing there, near the door.

Gábor says, ‘I tell him to get dressed and clean himself up, and I’ll be back in ten minutes. Then I take Emma back to the car, and leave her there and go back up to the room, where the guy’s got his clothes on and has washed most of the blood off his face. Anyway, he leaves and then I’ve got to try and clean the fucking room up. I mean, there’s blood everywhere.’ Gábor sighs, weary with telling the story now. ‘So I call Juli and we find some kind of carpet-cleaning machine in a cupboard somewhere, some kind of steam cleaner, and she shows me how to use it, and I’ve got to try and clean the carpet with it.’ Almost tearfully he shouts at Balázs, ‘I mean, this fucking unwieldy machine! I didn’t even know how to work it properly!’ He lights yet another cigarette. Still standing there, Balázs lights one too. ‘I mean, I fucking hated you while I was doing that,’ Gábor says. ‘I wanted to fucking kill you.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ Balázs says.

‘Where the fuck did you go?’

‘I dunno. Nowhere.’

Gábor looks at him for a few moments, as if he doesn’t understand. Then he says, ‘I can’t pay you, man. I mean, what I was going to pay you for this week. I mean, we had to give the guy his money back — which is much more than I was going to pay you, okay. I mean, we lost that money because of what you did, so…’

Though it had not occurred to him that this might happen, Balázs just shrugs.

‘I mean, Zoli wants you to pay us the difference,’ Gábor says, with some vehemence. ‘He wants you to pay us the fucking difference, and that’s like a million forints. I told him you can’t do that, you just don’t have the money, and he said maybe you’d prefer to have your legs broken. I mean, he is fucking angry, man. And so is Emma,’ Gábor says more moodily, looking away.

‘Is she?’ Balázs says quietly, surprised.

‘Well, yeah! She had to fuck that guy,’ Gábor says, spelling it out, ‘and she didn’t even get paid.’

‘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.