All That Man Is

1

Pearl Dundee, Murray’s mother, died, finally, on Sunday afternoon. The funeral was the following Friday.

Murray himself was late. Heads turned in the pews when he opened the cumbersome door of the crematorium chapel. It was bleak and pale in the chapel. Outside it had started to rain again. The minister, who had been speaking, had been saying something about ‘a long, full life’, waited for Murray to find a place.

Afterwards, while they stand outside, he explains to his sister Beckie that his flight from London was delayed.

‘Well, I told you,’ she says, impatient with him, ‘you’d’ve done better to come up last night.’

They are both dressed as if for the office, in dark suits. Murray in a murky tie. He offers her a cigarette and she takes one, and then they accept the condolences of some old lady — a friend of their mother’s, he thinks she must be, who Beckie seems to know. Mauve-hatted, the old lady tells him, as he lights his cigarette, that his mother was ‘a wonderful woman’.

‘Aye, thanks,’ he says, and sees his brother, Alec, emerging into the last day of September, the falling leaves, the shining wet tarmac. He has not spoken to Alec yet.

He has not spoken to Alec for years.

It seems he doesn’t own a suit, Alec — over his white polyester shirt, his black polyester tie, he is wearing a dark blue Puffa jacket. He’s almost unrecognisable, he’s lost that much hair since Murray last set eyes on him.

‘How’s young Alec?’ he says to Beckie. He says it with a smile, trying to be nice. ‘He’s put on a pound or two, anyway.’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’ she suggests.

Murray is still smiling, sort of, as she moves away, to talk to someone else.

Alec is talking to someone else as well, is filling the doorway of the chapel in his Puffa jacket so that the last few people left inside are having to wait. No one seems to want to ask him to move, to step aside to let them leave. It’s his mother’s funeral, that’s probably why.

Smoking hard, Murray turns to the road. The taxis are arriving, to take them to Beckie’s house for the drinks.

He shares a taxi with some old people.

One of them, an old man with smelly breath, old man breath, seems to know him.

‘So how are you, Murray?’ he asks, tightly holding the moulded plastic handle of an aluminium walking stick.

‘I’m okay, fine,’ Murray tells him. ‘Well, you know,’ he adds, ‘it’s a sad day and all.’

‘It is,’ the old man agrees. ‘Pearl,’ he says, ‘was a lovely creature.’

Murray moves his black leather shoes, and his eyes shift nervously to the sliding streets, the grey faces of the houses. Motherwell. It has been a long time since he was up here. Motherwell? No, actually. She passed away. The old man asks him something.

‘No, I don’t live in the UK now,’ he says.

‘Croatia,’ he says, in answer to another question from the old man.

‘Yugoslavia, it used to be part of,’ he says, in answer to another.

—

In his sister’s small house, even with all the people there, he is unable to avoid an encounter with Alec.

He is in the kitchen, tearing open another lager, when Alec is suddenly there — he’s helping out, seeing to it that everyone has a drink, passing round the peanuts. ‘Hello, Murray,’ he says.

‘Alec. Hello…’

‘You still voting Tory?’ Alec wants to know. His face has an upsetting fullness, a middle-aged quality. The shiny pink forehead is huge.

‘Tory?’ Murray says, and slurps from his lager. ‘Nah, those fuckers are too left wing for me now.’

Alec smiles extremely thinly. ‘How are ya anyway?’ he asks, without much interest.

‘I’m okay,’ Murray says. ‘I’m well.’ Then, for want of anything else to say — ‘You still with the union?’

‘I am. What about you?’

‘This and that,’ Murray offers. ‘I’m not based in this country any more.’

‘No, I heard.’

‘Not for a few years.’

‘Some sort of tax exile, are ya?’

Murray smiles, liking the sound of that — liking the sneer in Alec’s voice when he says ‘tax exile’. He has another slurp of lager. ‘Something like that,’ he tells him.

—

He spends the night in Beckie’s spare room. It was her son’s. He’s left home now, is in Australia or somewhere. (What was his name again?)

‘Why don’t we try and stay in touch?’ Beckie suggests the next morning, early, as they drink tea in the kitchen and he waits for his taxi to the airport.

‘Definitely,’ he says, trying not to look at her. When he does, he thinks — Fuck, she looks haggard.

‘You’re sure you don’t want any breakfast?’ she asks.

‘No.’ Less than two years older than me, and look at her. She looks like an old lady.

She says, ‘You look tired.’

‘Do I?’

‘I suppose you didn’t sleep well,’ she says, ‘in Ewen’s room.’

Ewen — that’s it. ‘I slept okay,’ Murray says, thinking greyly of the hours he endured during the night, turning and turning under the Spider-Man duvet in his Y-fronts and vest. The heating turned up too high. The sound of the rain on the window, like someone muttering unpleasant truths. And the photo. In a frame in the upstairs hall. Himself, Murray, at about ten years of age, with Max, the Alsatian they’d had then, that he’d loved so much. Seeing that photo last night, of himself and the dog, had upset him somehow.

‘I slept okay,’ he says again.

‘Lucky you,’ Beckie says. ‘I didn’t.’

Milky tea. Too milky. The dregs, not even tepid, disgusting him.

‘I couldn’t stop thinking,’ she says.

Murray puts down the mug, and tries to swallow what is in his mouth. He is in his suit again, tie in his pocket.

Beckie is in her dressing gown.

‘I just couldn’t stop thinking,’ she says.

Yesterday, when everyone had left, she told him about their mother’s last days. She hadn’t shed a tear then, telling him the hospital stories — the meetings with doctors, the small-hours vigils, the hopeless dawns. She told him about them in the dry voice she probably uses in her office at the town hall. And he had listened without emotion, without feeling anything.

Now it seems she might break down.

Her mouth wobbles.

Murray, instinctively, looks away.

He looks at the window, straight out through that window with mould in its corners, to the dull morning.

And aye, Beckie is in tears now. Holding a dishcloth over her face.

Where the fuck, Murray thinks, looking at the fake Rolex that hangs too loosely on his sallow wrist, is that fucking taxi?

—

Twenty-four hours later, on Sunday morning, he is on a train to Stansted airport, and he feels very much worse.

Rainey was involved. Once they had worked together in telephone sales, him and Paul Rainey — they had spent years together on sales floors, under the strip lighting. Working the phones. The Pig worked with them for much of that time, and he was with them on Saturday night as well. They started in the Penderel’s Oak in the middle of the afternoon. Ended up at the Pig’s flat in Whitechapel about twelve hours later. Murray had slept for an hour or two on the floor of the Pig’s sitting room, on the sofa cushions, in his suit. Then it was up at six — with an implausible pain in his skull — to make the lonely walk to Liverpool Street, and the train to Stansted.

Fucking obese, Rainey was now. It had been a shock to see him. He and the Pig still worked at Park Lane Publications, the office just off Kingsway. Lunchtime in the Penderel’s. Everything the same.

And when they asked Murray what the fuck he was doing, he said, ‘I’m just taking it easy. Enjoying life.’

‘Where you doing that then?’ the Pig said.

‘Croatian Riviera,’ Murray answered. ‘I’m semi-retired,’ he told them.

‘Semi-retired? What’s that mean?’

‘Means no one’ll give him a job,’ Rainey quipped, adding an empty to the many on the table and turning his head towards the bar.

Murray tried to smile. ‘I’ve had no end of offers,’ he said quietly, as if out of modesty.

‘Bollocks,’ Rainey said.

And Murray felt that his old friend had still not forgiven him for the events involving Eddy Jaw, the things that had happened some years back.

They had worked together again since then, of course. When Murray was sacked by Jaw he had found his way, inevitably, to the taupe glass door of Park Lane Publications, had found Paul Rainey working there again — at the same desk even, as if nothing had happened, lifting the same white handset to his sweating head.

Murray had been sacked from that job too. He seemed to have lost his touch, whatever touch he might once have had. It was then that he had decided to explore other options. In a way, the Pig was his inspiration. The Pig, notoriously, had once spent two years in Thailand, ‘enjoying life’, living off the money he had saved. Though Murray hadn’t saved any money, he did have a small house in Cheam — a sixties bungalow in a place called Tudor Close. He had acquired it in the glory days, around 1990. Twenty years later, the mortgage was negligible. So a tenant was installed and Murray set off to look for somewhere where he would be able to live on that small income.

The Croatian Riviera.

His flight to Zagreb is at ten thirty in the morning.

He is sitting in the departures lounge, with a headache. Outside, planes move silently. Sunlight torments him. He feels sick.

He had not told Rainey and the Pig why he was in the UK, about the funeral. He had not mentioned that at all, or even thought of it himself, as they went from pub to pub, moving east from Holborn.

Now, staring out at the planes through the shell of his hangover, he is surprised by a memory, a memory of a hand on his forehead, feeling for his temperature perhaps.

Sunlight throws shadows on the terminal floor.

Ma, says a small, frightened voice in his head, his own voice.

Ma, where are you now?

And finally, sitting there in the departures lounge, staring at the planes moving in the weak October sunlight, he finds the tears in his eyes.

2

Actually, the ‘Croatian Riviera’, the Adriatic seashore, even its least fashionable stretches, had turned out to be too expensive for Murray. He had ended up some way inland, over the hills and far away, in a town on a fairly arid plain, surrounded by dusty vineyards and fields of sunflowers and maize. The Turks had once been defeated there, in fifteen-something, and a monument in the main square memorialised the event. It was the last thing of any importance to happen in the town. In one of the streets leading off the square, there was a youth hostel, the Umorni Putnik, and it was there that Murray had lodged for a while when he arrived.

More than a year ago now.

The first person he had met, on the stairs, that first day, was Hans-Pieter, a Dutchman, and a long-term inmate of the hostel.

Hans-Pieter, Murray had immediately thought, was obviously a total fucking loser.

He was also, these days, his only friend.

The day after Murray’s return from the UK, the two of them are passing the afternoon at a pub called Džoker. They are sitting outside, where there are a few tables under umbrellas advertising a local marque of mineral water — though already October, it is very hot. Murray is wearing white shorts that fall to just below his knees, overhanging his violet-veined and hairless lower legs which in turn taper down to dark office socks and large white trainers. Sweat oozes out of his manly face.

‘It’sh hot,’ Hans-Pieter says.

It’s the kind of thing Hans-Pieter will say — the kind of fascinating conversational gambit he comes out with.

Murray just grunts.

Hans-Pieter is probably about ten years younger than Murray — somewhere in his mid-forties. He is unusually tall, obviously shy.

‘I suppose,’ he says, taking a quick, almost furtive, sip of his lager, ‘it’sh global warming.’

Murray, sweating, scoffs. ‘What the fuck you talking about?’

‘Global warming,’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘What — you believe in that?’

Hans-Pieter looks worried, as if he might have made some elementary mistake. Then he says, ‘You don’t believe it?’

‘Do I fuck.’ With the hem of his white T-shirt Murray towels his face of freely flowing sweat. ‘Don’t tell me you believe in that?’ he says, resettling his glasses on his nose.

‘Well.’ Hans-Pieter looks down at his flip-flops. ‘I don’t know. It’sh October,’ he points out.

People are eating ice creams. Pigeons are wetting their wings in the fountain.

Murray is still staring at him. ‘And?’

‘Well.’ Hans-Pieter sounds doubtful. ‘Is this normal? This…this weather…?’

‘There is no evidence,’ Murray tells him, ‘for global warming.’

‘Well, but I thought…’

‘There’s no fucking evidence.’ Murray takes off his glasses to towel his face again. The front of his T-shirt is sodden.

Hans-Pieter’s pale eyelashes flutter humbly. ‘I thought there was,’ he says, ‘some evidence.’

Murray laughs again. ‘You’ve been had.’

Shyly Hans-Pieter says, ‘What about the Shtern report?’

Murray makes an exasperated sound.

‘It says if there’s no action taken on emissions…’

‘For fuck’s sake!’ Murray shouts at him. ‘There’s other reports, there’s reports that say just the opposite.’

‘Aren’t they paid for by dee oil companies?’

Murray sighs. He has heard this shit before, and he won’t have it. The fact is, Murray feels a profound sympathy for ‘the oil companies’. He feels, somehow, that he and ‘the oil companies’ are on the same side. That is, they are the successful ones, the winners of this world, and therefore envied no doubt by losers like Hans-Pieter — Hans-Pieter, who still lives in a youth hostel, while Murray, like some fucking oil company, occupies a well-appointed flat in one of the most elegant Habsburg-era streets of the town. It is his understanding, in fact, that Hans-Pieter is on the Dutch equivalent of the dole, which stretches a lot further here than it does in Amsterdam or wherever he’s from.

‘Do you not understand,’ he says, taking a more indulgent tone with his slow-witted friend, ‘that the whole thing’s a plot against the oil companies? A left-wing plot. Against the market economy. Against individual freedom.’

‘You think that?’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘I know that, pal. They lost the Cold War,’ Murray explains. ‘This is their next move. It’s fucking obvious when you think about it.’

A large drop of sweat falls from the end of his nose.

Hans-Pieter says nothing. He turns his head to the hot square. He has a little earring in his left ear.

‘Anudder one?’ he asks, noticing Murray’s empty glass.

‘Go on then,’ Murray growls.

—

Surprisingly, after that one, only their second, Hans-Pieter makes his excuses and leaves Murray there on his own, to have another half-litre of Pan, the local industrial lager, and survey the square in unexpected solitude.

That Hans-Pieter has something else to do is a surprise. The underlying premise of their friendship is that neither of them ever has anything else to do. No one else to see. There is no one else. That’s why they are friends. Take that away, and it’s not obvious what would be left.

Actually, it’s not quite true that there is no one else. There’s Damjan. An acquaintance of Hans-Pieter, a native. Damjan has a job though — he works at a tyre-fitting shop next to the train tracks. He has a family. He has, in other words, what passes for an ordinary life.

Murray meets him later in the bar of the Umorni Putnik.

Murray is disappointed, arriving there, that Maria isn’t around. Inasmuch as Murray has a purpose in his life now, that purpose involves Maria, who serves drinks in the youth hostel. She is not, he feels, out of his league. For one thing, she is not very attractive. She is young and friendly, and her English is excellent — she even understands Murray when he speaks. He has had his eye on her for some time, since last winter. All year he has been planning to make his move.

He was particularly hoping to find her there this evening. He feels down. Outside, it is already dark. The evenings are shortening now. The nights, as they say, are drawing in.

He sees Damjan arrive.

‘Damjan, mate,’ Murray says, standing eagerly to shake the tyre-fitter’s hand.

Damjan is short, muscular, untalkative — the sort of man that Murray instinctively defers to.

Damjan, while still shaking Murray’s hand, looks around. ‘Hans-Pieter?’ he asks.

‘Not here,’ Murray tells him. ‘I dunno where the fuck he is. Lemme get you a drink.’

‘So,’ Murray says, when they are sitting down. ‘What you been up to then?’

‘What you been up to?’ Murray asks again when Damjan says nothing. ‘What you been doing?’

Damjan, perhaps still not understanding, shrugs, shakes his head.

‘You’re okay, though?’ Murray asks.

‘Okay, yes.’

This is in fact the first time they have had a drink together without Hans-Pieter being there. It turns out to be surprisingly hard work.

They end up talking about tyres.

‘So what about Pirelli?’ Murray finds himself asking. ‘How do they compare? With Firestone, say.’

Increasingly, there are long silences, during which they separately survey the room, trying to find a woman worth looking at.

Then Murray asks another question about tyres, which Damjan dutifully answers.

They have been talking about tyres for almost an hour.

‘I had Mitchell-in on the Merc,’ Murray says, after a long pause. ‘Top quality.’

Damjan just nods, drinks.

‘D’you think we’re going to see Hans-Pieter tonight?’ Murray asks.

Damjan shrugs.

‘You don’t know where he is?’

Damjan, lifting his drink, shakes his head.

Which, it turns out later, is a sort of lie. He knows more or less where Hans-Pieter is. Hans-Pieter is at Maria’s flat, naked, watching an episode of Game of Thrones dubbed into Croatian on Maria’s squat little TV.

3

In the morning, autumn has arrived. The temperature has fallen twenty degrees overnight. Surveying it from his window, in pants and vest, Murray is triumphant. He looks forward to shoving this turbulent autumn day, full of wet leaves, in Hans-Pieter’s face and saying, ‘So what about this then? You fancy an ice cream now, ya fucking parasite?’ He starts to smile, until an eruption of coughing knobbles him and he turns from the window trying to force out the word Fuck as he doubles over and the veins in his temples swell and throb.

‘FUCK!’

‘Fuck.’

Silence settles on the flat, like dust. He found it, the flat, with Hans-Pieter’s help, about a month after arriving in the town. His landlord is a middle-aged man whose mother lived here until she died, and most of her stuff is still in place — vast dark wooden furniture looms in the two rooms. Down at floor level Murray lurks among the old lady’s pictures and knick-knacks, her pedal-operated sewing machine, her damp bedding. He had wanted it fully furnished. He uses her old steel knives and forks, her stained plates. There are even, on the walls, some framed photos of people in old-fashioned clothes, strangers with grave sepia faces.

The flat is still full of warm, stale air. The flapping grey scene outside its two grand windows seems disconnected from the tepid silence of the interior. It seems weird, histrionic. Rain comes at the windowpanes like handfuls of pebbles. Murray lights a cigarette. He smokes a local brand now — to that extent he has gone native. He sits in the hot shaft of the bathroom, surrounded by rust-furred piping, discoloured tile-work, a light bulb burning high overhead.

Afterwards, he dresses, and wrestles an umbrella the short distance to the Umorni Putnik.

Hans-Pieter is there, having breakfast at a table in the shadowy bar. A coffee, a buttered bread roll. He seems to be staring at a point about two feet in front of his eyes. Fucking space cadet, Murray thinks.

Without acknowledging his friend, he addresses himself to the bar, where Ester is on duty. Ester — she is out of his league.

She’s pals with Maria, though, so it’s probably worth keeping in with her: Murray smiles.

He feels the insufficiency of that smile himself, sees its insufficiency for a moment in the deep murky shadows of the mirror behind her. (The price list is written directly onto the mirror — his face peers out from among the numbers.)

‘Yes?’ Ester says.

‘Cappuccino,’ Murray’s face says, in English.

While she works the machine, he looks at a local newspaper. The words mean nothing to him, his eyes drop from picture to picture. Pictures of local politicians — mean-looking men with terrible haircuts trying to smile, as he has just tried to, and with, for the most part, a similar lack of plausibility.

When he has his cappuccino, he joins Hans-Pieter. ‘Morning,’ Murray says, mutters, taking a seat opposite his friend.

Hans-Pieter, his mouth full, just nods.

He seems to be force-feeding himself a bread roll.

Murray regards him with distaste for a few moments. ‘Where were you last night then?’ he asks finally.

Hans-Pieter is swallowing the bread in his mouth. He tries to speak prematurely and the words are indistinct.

Murray squints at him irritably. ‘What was that?’

‘Ammarias,’ Hans-Pieter says, swallowing.

‘What?’

Hans-Pieter swallows properly. ‘Maria’s. At Maria’s flat.’

‘What d’you mean?’

Hans-Pieter is unable to hold Murray’s stare. ‘You know — Maria?’

‘Maria,’ Murray says, struggling, it seems, to understand who they are talking about, ‘who works here?’

‘Yes.’

You were at her flat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’ Murray asks, sincerely puzzled.

‘Well.’ Hans-Pieter laughs shyly. ‘You know…’

‘No, I don’t know.’

‘We’ve…We’ve got something going,’ Hans-Pieter says.

Murray, for a moment, looks totally nonplussed. ‘What — you?’

Hans-Pieter nods.

‘You and Maria?’

Hans-Pieter looks down. ‘Well, yes,’ he admits. He seems embarrassed. And it might be that he misunderstands Murray’s perspective. Maria is twenty years younger than Hans-Pieter, more or less. She is overweight and unattractive. Things that are, potentially, sources of embarrassment.

‘How did that happen?’ Murray says. He has turned quite pale.

Last Friday night, Hans-Pieter tells him, he was there in the Umorni Putnik until it shut, as he usually is, and it was pissing down outside, and she didn’t have an umbrella — she was waiting for it to stop, so he suggested she come up to his room and wait there, have a smoke, and she did, and they ended up spending the night together. Since then, he tells Murray, he has twice spent the night at her flat.

‘That’s it,’ Hans-Pieter says.

He starts on his second bread roll.

For some time Murray says nothing.

The little trees in the street outside shake and sway.

At the shadow-draped bar, Ester is talking to someone on her phone, laughing.

And I was at Beckie’s place, Murray thinks, trying to sleep. The Spider-Man duvet. And they were. At that same moment. Last Friday.

He is staring at Hans-Pieter with an expression of shocked loathing. ‘What the fuck does she see in you?’ he says.

—

What does she see in Hans-Pieter? The question keeps Murray awake that night. He sits there, in the tall mausoleum-like spaces of his flat, smoking in the darkness. What seems obvious to him is that if he had only made his own intentions plainer, sooner, he and not Hans-Pieter would have her. That thought torments him for a while. Not that he even particularly wants to have her in any physical sense. There was something limply sentimental, something vague, something almost like pity, about his feelings for Maria. And what she sees in Hans-Pieter is obvious enough — Hans-Pieter is just a lesser version of himself, a poor woman’s Murray. A foreigner from somewhere further west, with at least some money. Hans-Pieter even has a car — an old rust-perforated 1.2 litre Volkswagen Polo, leaking oil in a side street. In the context of the Umorni Putnik, that makes him a more or less plausible sugar daddy.

He’s welcome to her, Murray decides.

He’s welcome to the fat tart.

And the good thing is, this will give him more time to focus on his business interests. Which is what he should be doing anyway, not messing about with floozies. His business interests. Airport transfers. Minibus to Zagreb airport. Blago has the drivers lined up. He has the advertising lined up. The website is ready to go. He just needs the minibuses. He has enough for one, he says, but he needs four to make the business viable. So he offered Murray the opportunity to invest. They talked about it in Džoker, and then over lunch. Put in the money for the minibuses, get a fifty per cent stake, was Blago’s proposal. And sitting in an HSBC in Kingston upon Thames last Wednesday, Murray had finalised the loan, against the house in Cheam, and transferred the money to the account of Slavonski Zračne Luke d.o.o., the details of which — IBAN number and so forth — Blago had provided for him. Blago has shown him the minibuses he intends to buy — ex-police vehicles he found online, for sale in Osijek. Said he’d be going down there to get them just as soon as the money arrives. Murray said he wanted to come with him, to see the vehicles for himself. ‘I know a thing or two about that,’ he had told Blago. He had insisted on having a veto, if he didn’t think they were up to scratch.

He has tried Blago’s phone once or twice since he got back from the UK, to find out if the money has arrived.

No answer. That was typical Blago.

—

The most pressing issue, he finds, is the Hans-Pieter-shaped hole in his own days, which he now mostly drifts through alone. They used to meet every morning in the Umorni Putnik. These days, most of the time, Hans-Pieter isn’t there. Murray drinks his cappuccino, while pretending to look at the paper. He stays there for more than an hour, sometimes.

Occasionally Hans-Pieter does show up. One morning, when he does, Murrays says to him, ‘What you up to later then?’ Which is what he always used to say — and the answer would always be words to the effect of ‘not much’, and they would agree to meet at Džoker ‘later’, meaning some time fairly soon after lunch.

Today, however, Hans-Pieter just shrugs.

When Murray suggests a drink in Džoker ‘later’, Hans-Pieter is initially evasive, and then says something about a film he’s planning to see.

‘Oh?’ Murray says. ‘What you seeing?’

Iron Man 3, Hans-Pieter tells him.

There is a silence. Then Murray says, ‘Mind if I come along?’

Another silence. Hans-Pieter says, not particularly warmly, ‘If you want.’

‘If it’s okay with you,’ Murray says.

Hans-Pieter looks down at his Adidas trainers. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Where shou’ we meet then?’ Murray asks.

‘Here?’ Hans-Pieter suggests, without enthusiasm.

So they meet there, in the middle of the afternoon, Hans-Pieter and Maria arriving together.

Maria does not seem pleased to see him — to see Murray, waiting there in his slacks. He tries to be friendly. She isn’t having it. She hardly says a word on the bus out to the edge of town, where there is a tatty shopping mall with a few screens embedded in it.

It is then, strap-hanging, that Murray starts to wonder whether this was really such a good idea. The others seem to be deliberately not looking at him. When his and Maria’s eyes meet, he tries to smile at her. She looks away immediately and he asks her about the film. ‘So what we going to see then?’ he says. ‘Is it any good?’ She pretends not to hear him.

Most of the other people in the ticket queue are kids — lads with faceted glass earrings and sagging waistbands and shrieking ladesses in tiny skirts or tracksuits, slurping sugary drinks and throwing popcorn at each other. Among these high-spirited youngsters, with Hans-Pieter and Maria sometimes snogging next to him, Murray sits for two hours, watching the noisy action film. It is dubbed in Croatian and he understands fuck-all.

Afterwards, while Maria is in the ladies, Hans-Pieter tells him they’re going back to her place, and asks Murray what he’s going to do.

‘I dunno,’ Murray says, just standing there in the foyer.

There is a short silence and Murray has the appalling feeling that Hans-Pieter is pitying him — that fucking Hans-Pieter is feeling sorry for him.

Well, fuck that.

‘Don’t you worry,’ he says. ‘I’ve got things to do. You give her one from me, okay?’ And with an unpleasant smile, he nods towards Maria, who is approaching them.

—

He spends the next few hours in Džoker, drinking Pan lager and thinking, If the likes of Hans-Pieter can sort himself out with a woman, then I sure as fuck can.

Matteus nods.

Without meaning to, Murray had said it aloud. Matteus, tall and austere, possessor of a monastic vibe, is taking glasses out of the dishwasher and putting them on a shelf under the bar.

It is not even eight o’clock, and Murray is already quite drunk.

In Oaza later, he happens on Damjan.

They are sitting at a table together in the kebab shop and Murray is saying, ‘If the likes of Hans-Pieter can sort himself out with a woman, then I sure as fuck can.’ Inelegantly, he is eating a kebab.

Damjan says, ‘Sure.’ He and his friend have already finished, were about to leave when Murray arrived. They talk in Croatian, the two of them — a muttered wry exchange of words. Murray, shoving the last wet mess of the kebab into his mouth, wonders what they are talking about.

‘What you gonna do now?’ he asks, wiping his lips with a paper napkin.

Damjan’s friend, it turns out, speaks perfect English. He sounds like an American.

‘We’re gonna go party,’ he says, grinning. ‘You wanna come?’

‘Fuck, yeah,’ Murray says. ‘Good man. Let’s go.’

As they leave, one of the twins says something to Damjan.

The kebab shop is owned by Albanian twins, identical, of vaguely thuggish appearance. Shaved, spherical heads. Fleshy noses. Strong necks and heavy eyebrows. Murray can never tell them apart. At first he didn’t realise there were two of them; then one day he saw them together. They usually sit out on the terrace in front, under the awning where a water-feature tinkles, puffing at a hookah and drinking tea. Other, more desperate-looking men — often with moustaches — hang out with them there, and any number of women, young and old. A souped-up white Honda Accord EX 2.2 litre diesel is frequently parked in front of the shop, which Murray assumes must be owned by one of them.

And he envies the way one of them nods at Damjan as they leave, and offers him a few words of farewell. He wishes the twins would acknowledge him like that. He has been eating their kebabs for over a year, and he has always felt that he and they share something, something that sets them apart from the other people in this place, a superiority of some sort. And yet they never speak to him, as one of them just spoke to Damjan, or acknowledge him in any way.

On the spur of the moment Murray decides that he will be the first to speak. The twin who spoke to Damjan is standing there, near the door, slouching against the jamb, and poking about in his mouth with a toothpick.

‘Alright,’ Murray says to him, forcefully he hopes, as he passes him on the way out.

And the twin just looks slightly surprised — in his collarless shirt, his tan leather jacket — and watches Murray leave.

And how the fuck did that happen?

Safely in his mausoleum, hugging the toilet, Murray weeps. Drops tears onto the filthy floor.

How did that happen?

He has never been so intimate with the root of this toilet, with the rusty bolts that hold it to the old linoleum.

He sits up, after a while, and dries his eyes.

He inspects, in the mirror, his fat lip.

This mirror always gives the impression of fog. His face looms out of it, damaged. He stares at himself with contempt.

There was a woman. Aye, there was a woman. There were lots of women. With Damjan and his friend he had trawled through the nightspots of the town — two or three of them, there were. Nightspots. Full of students, kids. No success there, though he had tried, God knows. He had tried in the noise of the new music to have it off with a few of them. Kids with dyed hair. And Murray leering over them, trying to make himself understood. Shouting about the S-Class he had once owned. Shouting, ‘You been to London?’ Shouting, ‘I’ll show you round, okay?’ He had offered her a job, that one. And she was about to give him her number, he thinks, when her friends pulled her away. (Later, seen her being sick in the car park. Was it her?) Damjan’s friend disappeared. So just him and Damjan went on to the all-night place. ‘I know one place,’ Damjan said, speaking more fluently than usual. ‘I know one place is open all night.’ Taxi. Yes, taxi. And then tumble out into the raw air again. Damjan paying. ‘You got any smokes?’ Murray asking him. And then the place. The woman, perched up there on her stool. Not a kid, this one. Or maybe he was perched on the stool and she was there, suddenly, talking to him. And he was telling her about the S-Class he had once owned. Asking her, ‘You been to London?’ She was, what? Forty? Fifty? And no oil painting. Even then, in the state he was in, he knew that. She kept touching him. Hand on his leg. (And where was Damjan?) Hand on his leg. And he said to her, straight out, ‘You wanna come back to mine?’

And she just nodded, and moved her hand up his leg.

‘Okay then,’ he said.

‘A minute,’ she said, squeezing his leg. ‘Wait.’

‘Okay then,’ he said. And waited, feeling pleased with himself. And then starting to worry about whether he’d be able to do it, the state he was in. And he looked for her and saw her talking to two men near the toilets. And something about the way she was talking to them made him understand. He just wanted out of it then. He slid off the stool, trying to keep his footing, and started to move towards the door. And then she was holding his arm. Holding it hard. ‘Okay?’ she said, ‘we go?’ ‘Look, I’m tired,’ he told her, trying to pull his arm free, ‘I’ll see you another time.’ ‘Don’t say that,’ she said, her hand on his trousers, feeling for something. ‘I’m fucking tired,’ he snapped, shoving her away. Outside, the cold night air. Haloed street lamps. He started to walk quickly, not knowing where he was. And yes, those were footsteps following him, and as soon as he started to jog, hands seizing him. Threw him against the side of a parked van. The two men. Faceless in the shadows. His voice emerging as an effeminate squawk: ‘What d’you want?’ There were various issues. He had, they seemed to be telling him, entered into an agreement. So he owed them money. And he had hit her, they said. They wanted more money for that. ‘I did not hit her’. Everything he had on him, seemed to be what they wanted. ‘I never hit her…’ He took a punch to the face. Then, from a position on the pavement, handed over his wallet, and they emptied it of kuna and threw it on top of him.

And then he was alone, lying on a wet pavement, wondering if he was in fact dreaming. Please, let me be dreaming

His mouth seemed to be the wrong shape. Near his eyes, something…What was that?

—

Hubcap.

Fuck.

Hubcap of a…

Toyota Yaris?

Dizzy when he stood up.

And sick. Suddenly he felt very sick.

—

Two days later, when his mouth has deflated, he emerges and finds Hans-Pieter in the Umorni Putnik.

‘I heard about your night out,’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘Yeah, that. It was quite a night.’

‘I heard it,’ Hans-Pieter says.

It is some time in the afternoon. Maria is working, is there.

‘Oh, yeah?’ Murray wants to know, smiling worriedly. ‘What’d you hear?’

‘Damjan said it was a good night.’

Murray’s smile turns less worried. He says, ‘A fucking massive night, actually.’

‘You’ve been recovering,’ Hans-Pieter asks, ‘since then?’

‘That’s right. In the recovery position. If you know what I mean.’ Murray himself isn’t sure what he means. He tastes his lager, the first that has passed his lips since then.

Yesterday he experienced a sort of dark afternoon of the soul. Some hours of terrible negativity. A sense, essentially, that he had wasted his entire life, and now it was over. The sun was shining outside.

As it is now, igniting the yellow of the leaves that still cling to the little trees in front of the hostel.

He sees them through the dusty window.

‘How about you?’ he asks Hans-Pieter. ‘You okay?’

‘I’m okay,’ Hans-Pieter says.

Murray sees one of the leaves detach and drop.

Hans-Pieter says, ‘Damjan says you were sort of on the pull, the other night.’

‘What — I was?’

‘That’s what he said.’

Murray does something with his mouth, something uneasy. ‘Don’t know about that.’

‘Well,’ Hans-Pieter says, ‘I know a very nice lady, you might be interested in.’

‘Who’s that then?’ Murray asks snootily.

‘A very nice lady,’ Hans-Pieter says again. Then he whispers, ‘Maria’s mudder.’

In a savage whisper Murray says, ‘Maria’s mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘No fucking way. ’

‘Why not?’

‘Fuck off,’ Murray scoffs.

‘Why not? She’s quite young…’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Forty-eight, I tink. And she’s in nice shape,’ Hans-Pieter tell him.

‘You’ve seen her, have you?’

‘Sure.’

Maria, having no one to serve, has ventured out in search of empties. She stops at Hans-Pieter’s shoulders, puts her hands on them. Her substantial hip is smack in Murray’s line of sight.

‘I was just telling Murray,’ Hans-Pieter says to her, half-turning his head, ‘about your mother.’

‘Yeah?’ she smiles. She seems to have forgiven Murray for the way he tagged along to Iron Man 3 with them the other day. It occurs to him, in fact, that the way he tagged along that day might actually have suggested to her the idea of fixing him up with her obviously lonely and desperate mother.

‘Just take her out for a drink,’ Hans-Pieter…what? Suggests? Orders? Murray is still wondering what to make of this development — fucking Hans-Pieter telling him what to do — when Maria says, ‘She’s really pretty. And much thinner than me.’

‘We won’t hold dat against her,’ Hans-Pieter says, almost suavely.

‘She’s always telling me I should lose weight.’

‘Don’t listen to her.’

‘It’s true — I should.’

‘Absolutely not,’ Hans-Pieter tells her. And then says to Murray, ‘So will you do it? Take her for a drink?’

It’s awkward, saying something like, ‘Not on your life, no fucking way,’ with Maria standing there, still smiling at him, a piece of pink-dyed hair falling over her eye.

‘You got a picture?’ he asks her after a few moments. ‘I mean, on your phone or something?’

‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Yeah, here.’

Leaning forward over Hans-Pieter’s shoulder, she passes Murray her phone.

He looks.

A woman holding a cat. Not very easy to make out. Thinner than Maria, yes. Okay? Maybe.

‘What about your father?’ he asks, handing back the phone without saying anything about the photo, and smirking. ‘He won’t mind?’

‘He lives in Austria,’ she says. ‘And they’re divorced. Obviously.’

‘Obviously,’ Murray says. It had been a joke. He had assumed that her father wasn’t still on the scene. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll give it a go.’

‘Do you want her number then?’ Maria asks.

‘She speaks English, does she?’

‘Of course.’

‘Or why don’t you call her?’ he suggests, suddenly nervous. ‘Set it up.’

Leaning on his shoulder, she looks at Hans-Pieter, wanting his opinion, perhaps even his permission.

‘Sure,’ Hans-Pieter says. ‘Set it up.’

Without warning, another leaf detaches itself from one of the trees outside and drops down to the pavement.

—

On his way home, a few hours later, Murray stops at Oaza to pick up a kebab. The plastic sign — palm tree, smiling camel — is illuminated in the gloom. One of the Albanian twins is standing around near the entrance, keeping an eye on things. He does not acknowledge Murray, and Murray, after a moment’s hesitation, says nothing to him either. Having ordered in English, he just waits there for his kebab, eyeing the slices of baklava as if wondering whether to have one. He wishes more than ever that the twins would offer him some sign, some little sign, that they looked on him as an equal — as an equal, no more than that. Damjan had been honoured with a nod, a few words, had been thereby elevated in Murray’s estimation. He thinks more highly of Damjan now. The baklavas shine, sodden with honey. Yes, Damjan seems in some way superior to him now.

Seemingly unaware of Murray’s presence the twin exchanges a few words, in some language Murray does not know, with the kebabist, who is shoving tongfuls of shredded salad into a pitta. He spoons on the sauces and hands Murray his supper, tightly wrapped in tinfoil, warm to the touch.

‘Thanks,’ Murray says.

The man just nods.

And then, as he leaves, Murray does it. He looks the twin straight in the eye. He says, in a loud firm voice, ‘See ya, then, pal.’

And then he is outside, in the night air.

The twin had said nothing to him. Nothing.

Maybe he was just surprised.

—

That night Murray has a dream. He is lying on his bed. Outside, rain is falling — falling heavily and steadily. The window is open. He is lying on his bed, listening to the rain. It is like rain he might have listened to somewhere else, long ago. The room is strangely empty. There is nothing in it except the bed on which he is lying with his head at the wrong end, where his feet should be. He lies there listening to the rain and from the darkness of the bathroom, a large dog emerges — an Alsatian. Panting quietly, the dog lies down on the floor next to the bed. As it lies down it knocks over a glass that is there — the sound of the glass falling and then rolling a little way across the floor. With a tiny whimper the dog yawns, and then starts to pant again. The rain is still falling. Without otherwise moving, Murray has stretched out his hand and is stroking the dog’s neck, the deep fur. The dog pants quietly. The rain falls and falls, making a puddle on the floor next to the open window.

—

On Sunday afternoon he takes Maria’s mother out for a drink.

He was relieved, when they met outside the Irish pub, not to fancy her at all. Not at all. She was a tallish middle-aged woman, ungainly in a pair of jeans, her short hair dyed a deep purple like the outside of an aubergine.

When they shook hands, her hand felt frozen and knobbly in his.

The Irish pub was just about the poshest place in town, where the top people from the town hall went, and the senior members of the local mafia. A Guinness in there was almost as expensive as it would be in London. The interior was like a transients’ pub near a large British mainline station. Very tired and heavily soiled. To that extent, it was authentic. The table service was not.

They sat in a padded booth facing each other and Murray asked the waiter for a half-litre of stout. Maria’s mother had a white wine.

Not fancying her at all, Murray was less nervous than he had feared he might be. Her English was excellent, and soon he was telling her about London and telesales and, less forthcomingly, about Scotland. She seemed interested in Scotland, kept asking him questions about it. He didn’t much want to talk about that. As darkness fell outside, he was telling her about the Mercedes S-Class he had once had, and the top-of-the-range Michelin tyres he had put on it. ‘Top top quality,’ he told her.

She nodded. She was drinking her second glass of wine.

He was on his third stout. ‘Makes a big difference, the tyres,’ he told her, encircling the stout with his hands.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Huge difference.’

She was a schoolteacher, an English teacher. And maybe, he thought, he did fancy her slightly after all.

She’d seemed as interested in the S-Class as any woman ever had, he’d say that for her. She’d wanted him to explain what an S-Class was, for a start. So he’d walked her through the entire Mercedes range, from the 1.8 litre A-Class through the C- and E-Classes, the various engine options available for those, all the way up to the S 500 L.

It took about half an hour.

Then he said, ‘What sort of car do you drive?’

Some Suzuki, she said.

He said he didn’t know much about Suzukis.

‘Never mind.’

‘Happy with it?’ he asked.

She nodded, smiled. ‘It’s fine.’

‘What…What size engine’s it got?’

She seemed to find something funny about the question. She laughed anyway. ‘I don’t know. I’m so happy about Maria and Hans-Pieter,’ she said. ‘He’s such a nice man.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Murray agreed vaguely, looking out of the window for a moment. He didn’t want to talk about Hans-Pieter, that was for sure.

‘I wish Maria would lose some weight,’ her mother said earnestly. ‘Don’t you think she should lose some weight?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Will you mention it to her? She doesn’t listen to me.’

‘Me?’ Murray said, not knowing quite what to make of this. ‘Sure. I’ll have a word wi’ her. D’you want another drink?’

‘I’m okay. Thank you.’

Starting on his fourth stout he decided that he definitely did fancy her, quite a lot.

He was telling her about his business — the airport transfer thing. He had finally managed to get hold of Blago — ‘my local partner’ was how he described him to Maria’s mother — and Blago had told him that the money had arrived safely. They would drive down to Osijek next week, was the idea, to have a look at the ex-police minibuses. Make a decision on that. It was moving forward. He told her it had the potential to turn into something ‘fairly major’. Looking her intently in the eye, he said, ‘The transport sector’s woefully underdeveloped in this part of Croatia.’

She agreed.

It was then that he tried to take her hand. She quickly withdrew it, but with a little smile that was open to misinterpretation.

So he went to the gents and promised himself to have another try later. He zipped himself up and washed his hands. ‘Death,’ he said to his preened, sickly image in the mirror, ‘or victory.’

—

The Wednesday of the following week.

Maria is working, so Hans-Pieter and Murray are having lunch together. They walk to the Chinese place, Zlatna Rijeka. It’s in a melancholy little square, cobbled, and full of drifting leaves.

Inside, they confront the buffet.

Hans-Pieter chooses a heap of beansprouts and carrot slices bright with MSG.

Murray starts with a plate of dark shreds of meat, also very shiny.

They sit in the window and watch the world go by. There is an old bookshop opposite. Some bicycles chained to a metal frame.

It’s obvious what Hans-Pieter, shovelling beansprouts into his wide mouth, will want to talk about.

He must already know what happened. He must have heard from Maria. Still, he says, ‘How’d it go on Sunday?’

Murray concentrates on his glossy meat mixed with pieces of onion and green pepper. ‘You tell me,’ he murmurs.

‘Well,’ Hans-Pieter admits, pursuing the last slippery beansprouts on his plate with the tines of a cheap fork, ‘not too good, I heard.’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ Murray protests quietly. ‘I don’t know how that happened,’ he says again.

Hans-Pieter watches him for a moment. ‘The police?’

Murray seems very low.

‘Maria still not talking to me?’ he asks, his eyes down.

Hans-Pieter says, ‘She wants an explanation. From you. About what happened. She doesn’t understand.’

‘About what happened?’

‘Yah.’

‘When we left the pub,’ Murray says, ‘I took her hands. She let me do that.’

Hans-Pieter nods and swigs from his Sprite.

‘She let me do that,’ Murray says again.

‘Yah.’

‘So I thought, Okay. You know…’

Hans-Pieter indicates that he does.

‘So I was holding her hands…’

Her hands were icy, knobbly. He was in a fog of Guinness at the time. She was smiling. He sees it now, that fearful rictus.

‘…and I tried to kiss her,’ Murray says. He meets Hans-Pieter’s pale, blonde-lashed eyes. ‘And then. And then. She sorta scRReeemed.’

‘She screamed?’

‘Aye.’

‘Why did she scream?’ Hans-Pieter asks. He seems to put the question to his Sprite — he is not looking at Murray, anyway.

‘I was just trying to kiss her,’ Murray says.

‘And then what happened?’

‘Then some fucker was holding me down, someone else was phoning the police.’

‘And what was she doing?’

‘What was she doing? I don’t know.’

‘So then the police arrived,’ Hans-Pieter prompts.

‘Aye,’ Murray says. ‘They arrived. And I suppose I musta given one of’m a shove or something.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘I don’t know…The way they were treating me…’

‘I understand,’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘So then they took me to the station. With the fucking siren going and everything.’

Hans-Pieter just nods sympathetically.

‘And I spent the night,’ Murray says, ‘in a fucking cell.’

‘They let you go in the morning.’ Hans-Pieter obviously knows the story already.

‘They said Mrs Jevtovic didn’t want to make a case against me. And I thought, Who the fuck is Mrs Jevtovic?’

‘That’s Maria’s mudder.’

‘Yeah, I know. I just wasn’t thinking straight that morning.’

That morning. Not nice. One of the very lowest points. Emerging into the daylight…

‘I just tried to kiss her,’ he says, almost tearfully. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘Okay.’

‘What does she say I did?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Hans-Pieter says, evasively.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Murray tells him.

Hans-Pieter says nothing. He has finished his lunch.

Murray picks up his fork and sets about finishing his own, those strings of meat in dark, sticky sauce.

His teeth encounter something. ‘What the fuck,’ he says. He spits the object, small and hard as a shotgun pellet, into a paper napkin.

‘What the fuck is that?’

Hans-Pieter peers down at the wet napkin, the tiny object.

Murray is eating again.

After examining it for a while, Hans-Pieter says, ‘Shit, you know what I think it is?’

‘What?’

‘I think…I mean, I’m not sure…I think it’s one of those microchips.’

‘What microchips?’ Murray says, with his mouth full.

‘They use to identify animals.’

‘Animals?’

‘Yeah, like dogs,’ Hans-Pieter says.

Murray, after a moment, spits out what is in his mouth.

‘What are you saying?’ he pants, distraught. ‘Are you saying I’m eating a fucking dog?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘Am I eating a dog?’ Murray shouts at him. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘Am I eating a fucking dog?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hans-Pieter says, shocked and embarrassed by the shouting, and by the tears that are so unexpectedly now welling out of Murray’s eyes, that are starting on their way down his strong, flushed face.

Preposterously he tries to hide it, his face, with a scrap of paper napkin.

‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it,’ he mumbles.

Hans-Pieter looks helplessly at the Chinese woman overseeing the buffet.

With his face in his hands, Murray is sobbing openly now. He says something it’s hard to make out through the sobs, the wet fingers, the fraying paper napkin.

The Chinese woman has made eye contact with Hans-Pieter. She wants him to do something, to stop his friend upsetting her other patrons.

So Hans-Pieter puts a timid hand on Murray’s shoulder and suggests, in a low voice, that they leave.

4

Knocking. Knocking.

And voices.

Murray?

Murray?

Then silence, again.

Shame.

5

They meet at Džoker. Hans-Pieter and Damjan are already there. A few weeks have passed. Murray has not been seen much in that time, though Maria has sort of forgiven him — will let him sit quietly in the Umorni Putnik, even if she is still not speaking to him. He has not seen much of Hans-Pieter either. Hans-Pieter has been painting Maria’s flat, painting out the fluorescent orange with something less oppressive, less like living inside a migraine.

Murray fetches a Pan from Matteus, and joins Hans-Pieter and Damjan at the table near entrance, under the mirror.

‘Živjeli!’ It is the only Croatian word he knows.

He takes off his scarf. A cold front is moving across the flat land, laying down frosts in the morning, frosts that quickly melt to leave everything shining wet. ‘So,’ he says, sitting.

‘So,’ Hans-Pieter echoes, his face stippled with paint.

Damjan says nothing. There is a TV showing a Champions League match, with the sound off, and he is watching it.

‘We’ve not seen much of you, Murray,’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘No,’ Murray says. ‘I’ve been staying in.’

‘Okay.’

‘End of the month,’ Murray says. ‘You know.’

End of the month, money tight. Hans-Pieter knows. He nods. He says, ‘How are you?’

The question seems loaded. Murray looks at him suspiciously. ‘Okay. I suppose.’

‘You’ve not been out much?’

‘No. I said. I’ve been staying in.’

‘Okay.’ Hans-Pieter seems tense about something. He says, ‘I told Damjan about your situation.’

‘My situation? What situation?’

‘Your…Your life situation.’

‘What’s that mean?’ Murray looks at Damjan, who is watching the football. ‘What’s this about?’

‘Damjan thinks,’ Hans-Pieter says. He stops.

‘What’s he think?’

‘He thinks that maybe…Maybe…’

‘Maybe what?’

‘Maybe you are cursed,’ Hans-Pieter says.

Murray emits a strangled laugh. ‘What?’

Hans-Pieter appeals to Damjan, who is still staring at the TV, Real Madrid against someone. ‘Don’t you think that?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe,’ Damjan says, still following the match.

‘You had a similar problem, I think,’ Hans-Pieter says to him.

‘Yes.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Murray asks.

Hans-Pieter has some sympathy for this point of view. ‘It sounds weird.’

‘I was victim,’ Damjan says, ‘for five years. Victim of curse.’

The fact that it is Damjan saying this — Damjan, the tyre-fitter, a man even now unable to tear his eyes away from the football — prevents Murray from dismissing the whole thing out of hand as total fucking shite, as he undoubtedly would if it were Hans-Pieter alone putting the idea to him.

Still, he says, ‘This isn’t some kind of wind-up?’

Damjan turns to Hans-Pieter, who doesn’t know what a ‘wind-up’ is either.

‘You’re not taking the piss?’ Murray says. ‘This isn’t a joke?’

‘It’s not a joke,’ Hans-Pieter says.

Solemnly, Damjan explains. ‘I tell you, for five years I am victim. Okay. Everything is fuck up for me. Then I go to see lady. Powerful lady.’

Murray has a question. ‘What fuckin’ lady?’

‘Here, in the town.’

‘She is quite famous here, I think,’ Hans-Pieter puts in.

‘I hear about her,’ Damjan says. ‘I go. I see her. I pay to her five hundred kuna. And she help me. She take away this thing.’

‘Ah, bollocks,’ Murray scoffs. ‘Five hundred kuna?’

Damjan seems unwilling to joke about this, or treat it lightly in any way. He seems to find Murray’s attitude disrespectful. ‘Is not expensive,’ he says, ‘to take away this curse.’

‘It’s not so much,’ Hans-Pieter agrees. ‘Fifty euro?’

‘Who was it cursed you, then?’ Murray wants to know. ‘Who cursed me?’

Damjan just shrugs. The question doesn’t seem to interest him. ‘I don’t know. Impossible to know.’

Real Madrid score a spectacular goal.

‘You really believe this?’ Murray asks him.

‘I believe it, yes. I believe it.’

Damjan has noticed that something has happened in the football and is watching it again.

‘Smoke?’ Hans-Pieter suggests.

He and Murray stand outside, under the wet awning. The square is dark and dripping. The fountains are switched off. Pigeons huddle on the facades, high up, over unlit windows. There’s one other smoker there, a small furtive man with a trim beard who spends even more time in Džoker than Murray does. They exchange nods.

‘This is bullshit, isn’t it?’ Murray says.

Hans-Pieter’s hands are in the pockets of his enormous jeans — they seem to be made of various different shades of denim, stitched together haphazardly. The cigarette hangs wagging from his lip. He shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Damjan doesn’t think so, I suppose.’

Weird that, that Damjan, of all people, takes shite like this seriously. Turn out he does fucking yoga next. Murray says, ‘I mean, honestly…’

‘Maybe it’s worth a try,’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘It’s just shit, isn’t it?’

‘It’s only five hundred kuna.’

‘Only five hundred kuna! Fuck’s sake.’

‘Maybe she can help you…’

‘Do I look like I need help?’ Murray asks.

Hans-Pieter says nothing.

‘Fucking mumbo jumbo. Does she even speak English, this woman?’

—

Sunday. The last, dark Sunday of October. Even the rain has stopped. There is nowhere to hide on a day like this. Streets. Murray walks down them. Days and days he has spent in the flat, among the daguerreotypes, the old lady’s decrepit stuff — dresses still hanging damp in that huge wardrobe, funereal woodwork, moths moving on ancient fabric, eating at the velvet padding of mildewed hangers. The desolate atmosphere of musty, discolouring lace.

A few people, here and there, in the streets. Sounds, at least, of life. He will stay out until it is dark, he says to himself, just walking — though he has started to feel an unfamiliar, frightening stiffness in his joints this autumn, more and more as the weather gets wetter. In the mornings his hands hurt. His knees needle with pain on the stone steps of the house, in the vast silent stairwell. He has to stop, halfway up. Lean on the wall, working incandescent lungs.

A few people, here and there. The air is heavy with moisture. The trees are black with it. Leaves plaster the twisting streets near the main square. Unlit windows.

He feels totally desolate. It is something he notices, at a particular moment — that he feels totally desolate.

He is looking down at the wet leaves at his feet.

It is almost dark.

He takes out his phone and stands there for a minute. Then he does something he has never done. He phones Hans-Pieter.

‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Is that you?’

His voice sounds quiet there, under the empty trees.

‘It’s me — Murray. What you doing? Fancy a drink?’ He says, ‘Nowish? Okay. Okay. See you there.’

He puts his phone away.

Hans-Pieter said he was with ‘some people’. Who these people are, Murray has no idea. However, that Hans-Pieter now seems to have some sort of social life, as well as a woman, only deepens his sense of desolation.

They turn out to be Dutch pensioners, loads of them. They live permanently in the area, have taken over one of the villages a few kilometres outside town, and they appear to have adopted Hans-Pieter. They have just finished a lunch which went on all afternoon and when Murray joins them everyone is fairly tipsy, the wine-flushed Netherlanders shouting and laughing in their own language. Hans-Pieter is fully involved in this jolly scene. Stuck at the end of the long table, wedged in where there isn’t really space, more or less ignored even by Hans-Pieter, Murray does not feel very welcome.

There seems to be no possibility of the party ending soon — another mammoth drinks order has just been fulfilled by the waitress — so he leans over to Hans-Pieter, at whose elbow he is lurking, and says, ‘Look, I’m off, okay?’

Hans-Pieter has just shot a slivovica, the plum stuff they make here. His eyes are watering. His face is all mottled and hot. He does not try to persuade his friend to stay. He just says, ‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m fucking sure,’ Murray tells him.

He has been sitting there for an hour without speaking to anybody.

‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I’ve got to go to Osijek tomorrow.’

‘Osijek? Why?’

‘To look at these minibuses,’ Murray says. ‘You know.’ He has spent a lot of time, the last few months, telling Hans-Pieter about this investment, about how the transport sector in this part of Croatia is underdeveloped, about the opportunities thus presented for a man like himself. ‘With Blago,’ he says.

Hans-Pieter seems surprised. ‘With Blago?’

‘Aye, with Blago.’ Murray notices Hans-Pieter’s expression — something odd about it. ‘Why? What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ Hans-Pieter says. A song has started up among the drunken Dutchlings, a noisy singalong. ‘It’s just I thought Blago went to Germany,’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘What you talking about?’

‘Someone told me…I think Blago’s in Germany or something. A job there,’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Murray tells him. ‘We’re going to Osijek tomorrow. We’ve got minibuses to look at.’

‘Okay,’ Hans-Pieter says, turning back to his table of drunk, elderly friends. ‘I just heard he was in Germany.’

‘Who told you that?’ Murray almost has to shout over the loud, tuneless singing.

‘Someone told me. I don’t know. They said he’s got a job there. He’s not coming back. They said. I don’t know.’

Hans-Pieter is being encouraged to take part in the singing, which he now does, in a shy mumbly way.

Standing out in the raw night, Murray tries the number. Not even voicemail — a woman’s voice telling him something in Croatian. He tries the number again. Same thing. Same message. Number doesn’t exist. Something like that.

6

She does not speak English. Her daughter is there to translate. There is something wrong with her, the daughter. She needs help walking. Her voice is slurred. She looks weird. It’s hard to say how old she is. Maybe twenty.

Her mother — Vletka, Murray has been told her name is — instructs him to sit.

‘Please, sit down,’ the daughter says, with a sweet smile. She has a very sweet smile. Among strands of lank black hair, her ham-pink scalp is visible.

Murray, nervously, sits on a green velvet sofa.

There is something dead about the light in the room. It all arrives at one end, where curtains of yellowing lace half-hide a balcony hung with clothes-lines.

At the other end, facing the window, this velvet sofa, in which Murray now feels trapped, his feet hardly touching the brown carpet, stuff looming all around him. The place is low-ceilinged, oppressively so. Along one wall, there is a large sideboard. He catches sight of himself in a convex mirror, looking hideous. Vletka is lighting candles. The daughter smiles at him from where she is sitting at a small table placed against the wall opposite the sideboard. Next to her head, in tapestry, a tearful Jesus. Porcelain dogs clutter a shelf.

Vletka, lighting candles, says something snappishly.

The daughter translates, smiling: ‘Do you want some tea?’

‘I’m okay,’ Murray blurts, uneasily feeling the soft velvet with his hand.

The place wasn’t easy to find. It’s in a part of the town he doesn’t know, a twenty-minute taxi to a whole nother world of weather-stained estates, solemn cuboid structures separated by parked cars and dreary parks, hard paths under sad trees, deserted playgrounds, an electricity substation garlanded with barbed wire. Each of the buildings has a name — some Croatian hero. Murray was looking for Faust Vrančić House, number eleven.

He punched one-one into the entryphone and waited while crackly electric pulses sounded. Then a voice. ‘Da?’

‘It’s Murray,’ Murray said. ‘I’m here to see, uh, Vletka?’

The fizzing voice said, ‘Tko je to?’

‘Murray,’ Murray said again, louder. ‘I’ve come to see Vletka. Murray.’

A more high-pitched electric noise, insistent, and something happening in the door, a heavy metal door with safety-glass panels. Murray fought it open.

A pungent stairwell.

He was shitting himself.

She sits down on the sofa, Vletka. She’s in a dressing gown. A solid, surly woman, she seems to Murray. Like someone who sells you a train ticket to Zagreb, frowning at you through the perforated glass as you try to explain what it is you want, while the queue lengthens. Short hair. Little buds of gold in her earlobes. Breath that smells of cigarette smoke, bacteria.

She says something to Murray in a sharp, imperative voice.

‘She says you should relax,’ is the translation.

Murray’s mouth: strange munching movements. A fixed, terrified smile. She has taken one of his hands now.

He has this weird fear that she’s going to ask him to strip.

She doesn’t. She is staring into his eyes, though, which is almost worse. Her own eyes are greyish-brown. Her eyelashes are short and unfeminine. She has no eyebrows.

When Murray looks away, she snaps something at him.

‘Please, you should look into her eyes,’ the daughter tells him, more softly.

Murray does so.

Those fucking eyes. The stress of the stare is like some terrible sound that just won’t stop, a squealing scraping of metal…

She’s still holding his hand, all damp in hers.

The stare softens perceptibly. She says something. Her voice sounds dry and detached.

‘She says you are in a very bad situation,’ the daughter says.

Murray, still holding the stare though it’s making his head hurt now, says, ‘Yeah?’

The room is hot. He is sweating. It’s not just the heat. It’s the sense that some sort of invasive procedure is taking place.

The daughter translates a brusque instruction: ‘Shut your eyes, please.’

He does.

Her mother’s hand is now on his face. The whole situation is so odd that this seems okay, sort of.

‘Is this about some curse?’ Murray asks, feeling safer with his eyes shut.

The daughter translates. Vletka answers.

‘She doesn’t know what it is,’ the daughter tells Murray. ‘Just that you are in —’ the same phrase — ‘a very bad situation.’

‘What does she mean by that?’ Murray says, his eyes still shut. Vletka’s hand has taken hold of his skull, the front of his skull, and is squeezing it quite hard.

The daughter translates.

The mother answers, sounding exasperated now, squeezing Murray’s skull still harder.

‘She says it is like a poison,’ the daughter finally says, after some follow-up questions in Croatian, while Murray waited, the strong points of Vletka’s hard fingers starting to hurt his head.

‘Poison? What’s that mean?’ he wants to know.

Vletka loudly shushes him.

An instruction arrives via her daughter’s polite voice: ‘Please, do not speak.’

The fingers are starting to properly hurt. It’s as though some metal instrument is being tightened on his head.

Suddenly, it stops.

He opens his eyes, tentatively, just in time to see the slap flying at him.

He feels the numb shock of it in his face. Then the heat arrives, intense, a moment later.

‘What the fuck was that for?’ he shouts, his hand at his stinging face.

Vletka is speaking at him angrily in her own language. Her hand is on his forehead now, applying pressure, or holding his head in place.

Then she slaps him again.

‘Stop doing that!’ Murray yells, trying to stand up. She snatches his arm, while he is still off balance, and pulls him back down onto the sofa.

‘Sh, sh, sh,’ she says, as if to a small child, stroking his face.

‘Stop doing that,’ Murray says again.

‘Sh, sh.’

‘Zatvorite oči,’ Vletka says.

‘Please, shut your eyes,’ her daughter instructs him.

‘Is she going to hit me again?’

‘Please,’ the younger woman says softly, ‘shut your eyes.’

Vletka is still stroking his face in a way Murray finds he quite likes. He shuts his eyes. She is all soft-voiced now, and holding his hand. Singing something, holding his hand, stroking it. The singing stops. He is aware of her weight moving, leaving the sofa. He opens his eyes to find her on her feet, extinguishing candles.

‘Are we done then?’ he asks.

The daughter translates for him.

Vletka shakes her head. She says something and indicates the table where her daughter is sitting.

‘Please, sit down here.’

‘What happens now?’ Murray says.

Vletka just tells him to sit at the table again. So he does, sitting opposite her daughter. And then Vletka joins them too, having taken something out of a drawer. A pack of cards.

She sits at the table, taking the seat facing the wall, the histrionic Jesus tapestry. On her left, her daughter’s oversized, smiling head. On the other side, Murray, asking if he can smoke.

He can.

He lights up while Vletka shuffles the cards.

And in fact she is smoking too, letting a cheap cigarette hang whorishly from her lip — the mid-afternoon dressing gown is part of the effect as well — as she skilfully shuffles the old pack. The air in the room, already somehow grey and dim, is soon harsh and blue with smoke.

She puts the pack face down on the tabletop. Then, with a single practised movement, spreads it into a perfectly symmetrical fan.

The instruction arrives, as always, via the daughter: ‘Please, take one.’

Murray looks furtively at Vletka. She is looking the other way, drawing tiredly on her fag, waiting for him to take his card. His hand ventures out into the middle of the table. It hovers for a moment over the fan and then his index finger lands on a card and tugs it free of the others. As if she is in a hurry, Vletka snatches it up and looks at it. ‘Prošlosti,’ she says, placing it face up on the table.

‘The past,’ the daughter tells him.

The card shows a man, seated, facing out, hugging a large coin. He also has a coin on his head — as well as something that looks like a simple crown — and his feet seem to hold two further coins in place on the floor. His posture is hunched, tense, defensive. He is staring straight out of the card and his expression is grim. There is something about him that suggests exhaustion. Blood-saturated eyes, strangers to sleep. Behind him, some distance away, is a city.

‘Please,’ the daughter translates, smiling at Murray across the table, showing him her large yellow teeth, ‘take another one.’

Murray does.

When he has pulled it free of the fan, Vletka turns it over and says, ‘Prisutna.’

‘The present.’

A tower against a black sky. A huge zigzag of lightning has just struck the top of the tower, violently dislodging the crown that was there. Flames leap out of the broken summit. Two figures tumble down through the dark air, as if the force of the explosion has thrown them out of their tower, which seemed so secure. Their faces are open with terror. One of them is wearing a crown.

The daughter tells Murray to take another card.

He presses his cigarette into the notch of the ashtray and does so.

Vletka adds it to the other two and says, ‘Budućnost.’

‘The future.’

Murray, having reclaimed his cigarette, is staring at the three cards.

The guy hugging his coins.

The shattered tower.

The greybeard with his lamp.

—

The final card shows an elongated figure in a monkish habit. Hooded. White-bearded. Holding in one hand a lit lamp, in the other a long staff. His head is bowed and his eyes might be closed, even though he is holding the lamp up as if to illuminate something. He seems to be standing in a frozen or snowy wasteland. There is, anyway, nothing there.

Vletka studies the cards for a minute, finishing her cigarette. Then she stubs it out with a few gentle, thoughtful movements. She seems bored, actually. She says, indicating the first card, ‘Ovo je tvoja prošlost.’

‘This is your past,’ the daughter says to Murray, who has taken a position with his hands knitted on the table in front of him, his shoulders slumped. He feels tired. ‘Yeah?’ he says.

Still indicating the first card, Vletka starts saying words. It sounds like a list. Her daughter translates, her words overlapping with her mother’s. ‘Materialism,’ she says, ‘acquiring material possessions, only interested in wealth, power, status, winning your share, and keeping what you have, ownership, jealousy, wanting to impose your will, denying weaknesses.’ She is smiling at Murray. She is always smiling, despite the fact that most of her hair has already fallen out, and her voice sounds slurred and stupid, and she needs help to walk even a few steps. She says, ‘This is your past.’

‘If you say so,’ Murray says, with some sarcasm. His mouth makes those strange munching movements. His eyes flit fearfully between the two women.

With her finger on the lightning-struck tower, the shattered phallus spilling fire, the plummeting victims, Vletka is now telling Murray about his present.

‘This is your present,’ the daughter says. ‘Upheaval, turbulence, plans destroyed, disorder, pride humbled, humiliation, violence even…’

His eyes narrowing, Murray unknits his fingers to find his cigarettes.

The daughter says in her silly voice, ‘The destruction of a way of living. The impact of things over which you have no control. The final end of a…a part of your life. This is your present.’

With the lighter that is there on the table — a souvenir lighter from a Macedonian health spa or place of pilgrimage or something — Murray lights his cigarette.

Vletka’s finger moves to the final card.

‘This is your future,’ her daughter says.

And Vletka says sternly, ‘Ne — to može biti vaša budućnost.’

‘This might be your future.’

‘Moguća budućnost.’

‘A possible future.’

‘Moguće,’ Vletka emphasises.

‘It is possible.’

Vletka starts on the final list, and her daughter says, still with a stupid smile on her face, ‘Solitude, introspection, stillness, quiet, seclusion, withdrawing from the world, silence, submission, meditation…’

Fuckin’ wonderful, Murray thinks.

‘That it then?’ he asks.

‘That’s it,’ the daughter says, still smiling at him.

—

He is putting his jacket on. The daughter, leaning on Vletka and on a walking stick, has lurched out of the room in her old woman’s knitted shawl. It’s like one of her legs is six inches shorter than the other, Murray thinks, pretending not to notice, finishing his cigarette at the table on his own.

The cards are still there.

He ignores them.

Still, the stuff she said about his present wasn’t so wrong.

Fuck though, she knew he was in a bad way — people only show up here when they’re in a bad way.

And his past?

The smouldering end of the cigarette crackles, the cheap tobacco, as he inhales strongly.

Ah, bollocks.

That was everybody’s past, what she said. We all think we’re special — we’re all the fucking same.

That’s how they operate, people like her.

Five hundred kuna. Fuck’s sake.

He is putting on his jacket, looking forward to leaving, when the women are there again. The daughter is holding a plate of sticky-looking cakes.

Murray is just shrugging his shoulders into his jacket — a sensible thing with a hood, elasticated wrists, lots of pockets.

‘You would like a cake?’ she says, smiling as always.

He looks, for a moment, at the things on the plate — lumps, each with a layer of sugary frosting. They are misshapen, sad-looking.

‘A cake? Uh…Yeah, okay. Thanks.’

He takes one. They are watching him as, after a pause, he lifts it to his mouth. In his other hand the cigarette is still going. He puts the cake into his mouth. The first thing is: it hurts his teeth. A lot. It’s shocking, how much it hurts. Sharp lines of pain lance down into his jaw, up into his skull. He forces himself not to wince, his miserable teeth working on the stuff. It has a weird texture — it seems to melt away in his mouth, melt into something sandy, muddy almost. It tastes of sugar, and something else, something foul. They are still watching him. The daughter still smiling, her upper lip downy, her lower lip glistening. He tries to smile back as he swallows, his Adam’s apple forcing the thing down. ‘Nice,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’

She lifts the plate up towards him, offering him another.

‘No. Thank you,’ he says. ‘No.’

—

Ushered through the dark, narrow hall — past hanging coats and hats, and a mirror that tells him nothing — he finds himself in the stairwell again.

The door of the flat closes and he starts down the stairs, spurning the besmirched lift. The cement stairs are darkly shiny, polished by decades of footfall so that they look wet even though they aren’t. At each landing there is an island of light from the window, and a line of communal pot plants — rubbery leaves, dead leaves, crusty soil. At the bottom, metal postboxes with little nameplates. A metal thing set in the floor for scraping the mud off your shoes. Some notices on the wall, a slew of junk mail. The heavy door with its two panes of safety glass, the lower one spider-webbed with damage.

He stops there.

For some time he stands there, in the dim daylight.

A strand of cobweb waves in the air over a radiator. He is looking at it, waving in the rising heat of the radiator. Everything is perfectly still, except for that strand of cobweb, waving.

He stands there, watching it.

He is still standing there, watching the cobweb, weirdly absorbed in the way it moves.

Then he shoves through the heavy front door, makes it screech on its hinges.

He shoves through it, out into the world again.

7

Two and a half hours it takes, to drive to the sea. First the flat land, then the limestone hills, then mountains. Sparse vegetation. The motorway, which starts at Zagreb, is empty. It is a Wednesday morning in early November, that might be why. And now Hans-Pieter has switched on the windscreen wipers — a slow, intermittent setting. They sweep, and stop. They sweep, and stop. Each time with a little squeak. Drizzle obscures the distances of flat farmland in the early part of the drive. The wipers sweep, and stop. Deserted villages, strung out along the road. Dark fields of stubble or ploughed soil. The landscape undulates slightly, is the most that can be said for it.

Next to Hans-Pieter in the front is Maria.

From where he is sitting, Murray can see her chewing at her gum, staring without interest at the dull landscape.

He is actively pleased, at this point, that she is Hans-Pieter’s lookout, not his own. She isn’t his problem. He turns the other way. They are just passing through one of those villages, fucking awful place. One-storey houses line the road, in little fenced plots of land. There is some sort of pub, he sees — a sign with a Pan logo, a sign saying Pizza. That’s it. That’s the village. That’s the life you have here. Murray watches it taper to nothing. More dead fields.

There’s this point when you think, Why pretend? What’s the point? Who’re you trying to fool?

Who are you trying to fool? Yourself?

So what is the point?

There is no point.

What difference does it make anyway?

We’re all headed to the same place.

They are talking in the front, Hans-Pieter and Maria. Talking in low voices so that he can’t hear, over the noise of the engine and the wheels and the wind, what they are saying exactly. It surprised him, this invitation. Last night, he was in Džoker, talking to Matteus about football, when Hans-Pieter turned up in his duffel coat, ordered a white wine. He put in his two cents about the football — a stupid opinion, Murray thought. Then Hans-Pieter said, ‘We’re thinking of taking a trip to the seaside tomorrow. You want to come?’

They were perched up on tall stools, facing the shelves of spirits, and the postcards that people had sent over the years, and that Matteus had pinned up. Not that many of them, less than ten.

Murray said, ‘Isn’t the weather a bit shite for that?’

Hans-Pieter had a quick, timid sip of wine. ‘Should be okay tomorrow,’ he said. ‘They say.’

Murray shrugged. ‘Okay then. If Maria doesn’t mind.’

‘It was her idea,’ Hans-Pieter told him.

It was her idea.

What was that about?

Part of Murray allowed himself to think that this meant it was him she fancied, and had done all along.

That just wasn’t true, though, was it?

What this was actually about was that she felt sorry for him. That she and Hans-Pieter, when they talked about him at all, talked about how fucking pitiable he was.

Word was out about Blago, what had happened with that. Blago did indeed seem to have gone to Germany. Murray’s money seemed to have gone with him. The man and the money had vanished, anyway. Hans-Pieter’s advice was to tell the police, tell them everything. Murray was too embarrassed to do that. And anyway the police already knew him, from that time after the Irish pub. He just didn’t want to see them again, simple as that.

The rain is intensifying.

Hans-Pieter ups the tempo of the wipers.

So much for the weather forecast.

Maria turns to Hans-Pieter to make a similar point. She has a fat whitehead near her mouth. A stud in her nose. He’s welcome to her, Murray thinks.

—

Once they hit the motorway it takes an hour and a half. Murray nods off. Wakes to stark limestone hills. Then the sea, greyly glittering. They park in a municipal lot — plenty of space, today — and find a place for lunch. A mixed grill for Murray, with that sweetish red-pepper sauce they do here. A glass of the local plonk. A squall passing outside. Maria is being friendly. She does most of the talking. Hans-Pieter hardly says anything. He picks at his grilled fish, prising flesh from bone, and rarely lifts his eyes from it. The lazy silence of a man in settled circumstances, letting his other half entertain the guest. Intervenes to correct her sometimes, that’s all. She has rings on most of her fingers. Blue eyeshadow. She’s encouraging Murray to go to the police — they’re still talking about that. It’s what they’ve been talking about for a week. He hasn’t even told them the true amount Blago took from him. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He wants to forget all that. She’s just trying to be nice, though. Shouldn’t be impatient with her.

‘What’s the point?’ he says. ‘They’ll not find him.’

She is adamant. ‘How do you know?’

She just likes the drama of it, he thinks. At least it’s something — something has happened at least.

‘You can’t let him get away with it!’ she insists.

‘I shouldn’t have trusted him,’ Murray tells her, feeling the wine a bit. ‘I was an idiot. End of.’

It’s raining outside again.

Murray and Maria have flaming sambucas.

I was an idiot. End of. Put that on my fucking tombstone, Murray thinks as they leave and head for the sea — down some steps, through some drizzly streets. He has dropped back now. Hans-Pieter and Maria are hand in hand, up ahead of him. Jack Sprat would eat no fat…That’s what they look like, those two — Jack Sprat and the wife.

No, he’s okay, Hans-Pieter, the shy Dutchman in his duffel coat.

She’s okay as well, waddling along next to him.

They’re my only friends, anyway.

I was an idiot. End of.

There aren’t really beaches here. There are walkways along the shore, winding paved paths, overleaned by spry old pines. Dry patches of paving stones under the pines. On one side as they walk, former villas of Austro-Hungarian notables, now hotels. On the other side, steep steps or even ladders down to strips of shingle, or empty terraces, or little marinas. The sloshing sea. Slapping at green-matted walls. At squeaking jetties.

He is kissing her. Hans-Pieter is kissing Maria, leaning down to her, snogging in the shelter of his upturned collar.

They are about twenty yards ahead of him. They seem to have forgotten he is there. Murray stops, to save himself embarrassment, and turns to the sea.

Hooded, he takes up a position of heroic reflection, hands resting on the top bar of the metal railing that follows the edge of the walkway, eyes seeping water and fixed on the distant island, far out over the windy inlet, no more than a dark horizontal smudge.

And, nearer, in the middle distance, some sort of yacht. More of a fucking ship, actually. How many decks does that thing have? Four, five? Must be a hundred yards long, at least. It moves on the waves, you can see, if you keep your eyes on it.

And look at that! Look at the way the sunlight falls down between the clouds! White the sea underneath it. Sudden islands of blinding white. The yacht turns black, waves blink around it. Sudden islands of blinding white. And in Murray, watching, an unfamiliar euphoria. Sudden islands of blinding white. Then melt away. Dull sea.

Damp wind in his face.

He turns his head in the hood of his jacket, sees the lovers still necking further up the walkway, in the shelter of a wind-mangled pine.

Fuck it.

His eyes find the superyacht again.

And fuck that as well.

Aye, fuck the lot of it.