by David Szalay
‘Why did you want to do this then?’ Ferdinand asks, irritably, after a few minutes.
‘Do what?’
‘This trip.’
‘I thought it would be good,’ Simon says.
‘You don’t think it’s good?’
‘It’s okay.’
‘What were you hoping for?’
Simon thinks for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.
Still, he was hoping for something. He set out on the train from St Pancras station two weeks ago with some sort of obscure hope.
Prostitutes everywhere in the shadows of the avenue as they walk to the metro station, through the early night.
There is something almost nice about being in her kitchen again, under the neon light. It feels almost like home. She laughs through waves of smoke as Ferdinand tells her about the search for Sun Hat, tells the whole story starting with the meeting yesterday under the walls of St Vitus.
‘So you find a girl?’ she says, smiling at him.
‘And lost her again.’
‘And she was Czech?’
‘No, English.’
‘English! You should find Czech girl – she will not run away from you.’
‘Wouldn’t she?’
‘No. She think you are rich.’
‘I’m not rich.’
‘She think you are. And she was beautiful, this English girl?’
‘Well … She wasn’t bad.’
‘You will find beautiful Czech girl. And you.’ She turns to Simon, her expression somehow more serious. ‘You find girl?’
Simon looks down. ‘No,’ he says, and immediately lifts his cigarette to his lips. He looks up again, to find her eyes still on him.
She is looking at him intently, and with a sort of sadness. ‘And you are such handsome boy,’ she says.
Simon shrugs.
There is a silence.
Her eyes are still on him; he feels them even though he is looking at his own knees.
And then Ferdinand stands up and says he is off to bed.
‘Ah, you are tired,’ she says with approval. ‘Okay. You sleep.’
When Simon also stands, which he does a second later, with a sort of panicky swiftness, she takes hold of his wrist.
She frees it immediately when, with an involuntary movement, he tugs it away.
‘I’m tired too,’ he says.
‘You leave me alone?’ she laughs. ‘You leave a lady alone?’
‘I’m tired.’
‘But you are young – you should be wake all night.’
‘Stay and finish your beer,’ Ferdinand says unhelpfully.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘stay.’
‘I don’t want it. Really, I’m tired.’
Simon has started to edge round the table to where the door is when she takes his hand. She does it in a way that is tender, not forceful. Tenderly she takes his hand. ‘Stay and talk to me,’ she says, looking up at him from her seat.
‘Tomorrow.’ He extricates his hand from the warm hold of her fingers. ‘Okay? We’ll talk tomorrow.’
‘Today is today,’ she says enigmatically, as if it were a proverb. Her hand is on his leg, on the denim somewhere near his hip.
‘I’m tired,’ he pleads.
Ferdinand is already leaving.
‘Stay with me,’ she says quietly, her face serious now, her hand moving round to the front of his thigh.
‘Please,’ he says, seeming nearly tearful. ‘I’m sorry. I’m tired.’
And then he just leaves, and follows his friend into the dark, past the washing machine.
*
‘She wants you, mate,’ Ferdinand says. They are sitting at a wrought-iron table in a park where peacocks occasionally shriek and he is talking, of course, about their landlady.
Simon smokes worriedly.
‘Do it,’ Ferdinand says. ‘Fuck her.’
The idea that he might actually do this has never even occurred to Simon and instead of answering he just frowns at his friend.
‘Why not?’ Ferdinand asks.
Simon’s frown intensifies. He says dismissively, ‘She must be forty.’
‘So what?’ Ferdinand says. He turns for a moment to inspect the terrace where they are sitting. ‘She definitely knows a thing or two,’ he says. ‘And you know, she’s really not too bad. Very nice legs. Have you noticed?’
Simon says nothing.
‘She’s quite sexy,’ Ferdinand says. ‘I mean, when she was young, she was probably quite hot.’
‘Maybe, when she was young,’ Simon mutters.
‘What did she say she was?’
Simon waits for a few moments, then says, ‘She said she was almost a champion swimmer …’
‘Except she was the wrong shape, that’s it. That was quite funny.’ Ferdinand smiles. ‘Well, those swimmers are all totally flat-chested. Why don’t you fuck her?’ he asks.
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘She doesn’t want me,’ Ferdinand points out. ‘It’s you she wants.’
‘She was drunk.’
‘She’s always drunk.’
‘What do you want to do this afternoon?’ Simon starts to ask.
‘I think you should fuck her,’ Ferdinand says.
‘Seriously …’
‘I am being serious …’
‘No, I mean what should we do this afternoon?’
‘Don’t you find her attractive? At all?’
‘No,’ Simon says. ‘Not really.’
‘Not really?’
‘No.’
‘I think she’s okay,’ Ferdinand says. ‘Seriously, I think you should do her.’
Simon lights another cigarette. He has been smoking heavily, even more heavily than usual, all morning.
‘You know,’ Ferdinand says, ‘you can tell from a woman’s eyebrows exactly what her pubes are like.’
Simon laughs – a single embarrassed exhalation. He is about to ask, again, what they should do that afternoon, when his friend says, ‘Don’t you want to get laid?’
Simon shrugs and puts the cigarette to his lips. He stares at the paint-thick wrought iron of the tabletop.
‘It’s not a big deal,’ Ferdinand says. ‘I just think you should do her. You might enjoy it, that’s all.’
They sit in silence for a minute, Simon still staring at the metal lattice of the table, Ferdinand turning his head to look around at the other people there. Then he says, ‘So, what are we going to do this afternoon?’
Simon, having found his voice again, suggests something about Kafka, an exhibition.
‘Yeah, okay,’ Ferdinand says.
In the end, though, despite hours of searching, they do not succeed in finding it, the Kafka exhibition, and spend another afternoon rattling around the tram- and tourist-filled centre of an old European capital.
‘Do you really not want her?’ Ferdinand says later.
They are sitting opposite each other on the benches of a beer hall, in a clatter of voices, each with a litre jug of Prague lager, half-drunk.
‘She’s not an unattractive woman,’ Ferdinand says. ‘I wonder what she looks like naked. I mean, don’t you just want to see her naked?’
Simon does not seem to hear. He is looking away. A pinkness, however, suffuses his face.
Finally he turns to Ferdinand. ‘I think we should leave tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I mean, leave Prague.’
‘Really?’ Ferdinand seems surprised.
‘Do you want to stay?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘I don’t,’ Simon says.
‘Okay.’
‘So we’ll leave tomorrow?’
‘If you want.’
They stop at the station to look at timetables. Vienna, they have decided, will be their next destination – Simon, it seems, is interested in some Kunst they have there. There is a train at about ten in the morning.
Then they make their way out to the suburbs again.
They make their way to the smoky kitc
hen, where she is waiting for them in her yellow dressing gown.
Simon has been hoping all day that her husband will have returned from Brno – that by that simple development the whole situation will be defused.
Her husband has not returned from Brno.
She is waiting for them alone and they take their seats in the kitchen. Simon is hardly able to look at her. It was the same in the morning – he seemed frightened when he finally appeared, still moist from his interminable shower. She does not pay so much attention to him this evening, however. She talks more to Ferdinand, who seems keen to save his friend embarrassment and makes an effort to engage her, to draw her attention away from Simon, who does not speak at all until Ferdinand says, after only half an hour or so, ‘Well, we’re quite tired, I think – aren’t we, mate?’
Then Simon says, ‘Yes,’ and immediately stands up.
‘So we’ll be off to bed, I suppose,’ Ferdinand says, also standing.
She makes them have another slivovice, standing there, and then lets them leave.
*
Simon wakes the next morning to find Ferdinand not there. This is unusual. Usually it is Simon who wakes first. He listens, trying to hear voices from the kitchen, or the sound of the shower perhaps. There is nothing. Shadows from the tree outside the window move shiveringly on the wall. He pulls on his jeans, his T-shirt. He visits the fetid toilet – a flimsy door, ventilated at ankle level, in the windowless passage where the washing machine is.
Then he finds Ferdinand in the kitchen, sitting at the table, eating the sour yoghurt-like stuff she serves, which Simon does not like even with jam in it. Ferdinand is alone. ‘Morning,’ he says.
‘Where is she?’ Simon asks.
‘She’s around somewhere,’ Ferdinand says between spoonfuls of yoghurt.
‘You’ve seen her?’
Ferdinand just nods. Something strange about the way he does that.
‘You’re up early, aren’t you?’ Simon asks him.
‘Not really.’
‘How long have you been up?’
‘Uh.’ With the little spoon, not looking at his friend, Ferdinand scrapes the last out of the yoghurt pot. ‘Half an hour?’
‘Is there any coffee?’
‘She made some. It’s probably on the hob, isn’t it?’
Simon, at the hob, pours himself some. As he turns to take his seat again he sees something on the floor. Though it seems familiar, he is not sure what it is. Only as he sits down again does it strike him – it is her yellow dressing gown. Her dressing gown, there on the kitchen floor.
‘How’d you sleep?’ Ferdinand asks.
‘Okay.’
Ferdinand says, ‘You still want to leave today?’
‘Yes,’ Simon says.
Her dressing gown, there on the kitchen floor.
And then the train to Vienna. Ferdinand falls asleep immediately, as it leaves Prague, is snoring in his seat as it flows ker-thunking over points, and suburbs pass in the windows. Simon, awake, stands in the corridor and watches the landmarks of the city dwindle.
There is a strange sense of loss, a sense of loss without an obvious object.
He takes his seat.
He looks at his friend, sleeping opposite him, and for the first time he feels a sort of envy. That he … With her … If Ferdinand was willing to … And saw her …
Her dressing gown, there on the kitchen floor.
The Ambassadors makes him sleepy.
He puts it down.
He looks out the window, and the suburbs evaporate in front of his eyes.
2
1
The office, showroom and warehouse occupy adjoining units of an industrial estate in the suburbs of Lille, within earshot of the E42 motorway. It is here that Bérnard has been spending his days this spring, working for his uncle Clovis, who sells windows. The office is as dull a space as it is possible to imagine – laminate floor, air-freshener smell, lightly soiled furniture.
Five fifteen on Wednesday afternoon.
From the large windows, listless spring light, and the sounds of the industrial estate. Bérnard is waiting for his uncle to lock up. He is already wearing his jacket, and sits there staring at the objects on the desk – next to a depressed-looking plant, the figurine of the little fairy maiden, winged and sitting under a drooping flower head with a melancholy smile on her heart-shaped face.
Clovis arrives and makes sure that all the drawers are locked.
‘Cheer up,’ he says unhelpfully.
Bérnard follows him down the spare, Clorox-smelling stairs.
Outside they take their places in the BMW, parked as always in the space nearest the door.
There is no way that Clovis would have taken Bérnard on if he wasn’t his sister’s son. Clovis thinks his nephew is a bit thick. Slow, like his father, the train driver. Easily pleased. Able to stare for hours at something like rain running down a window. It is typical of him, Clovis thinks, that he should have dropped out of university. Clovis’s own attitude to university is ambivalent. He suspects that it is mostly just a way for well-to-do kids to avoid working for a few more years. Still, they must learn something there. Some of them, after all, end up as surgeons, as lawyers. So to spend two whole years at university and then drop out, as Bérnard did, with nothing to show for it, seems like the worst of all worlds. A pathetic waste of time.
They leave the estate and feed onto the E42.
The kid smokes pot. That’s not even a secret any more. He smokes it in his room at home – he still lives with his parents, in their narrow brick house in a quiet working-class residential district. He shows no sign of wanting to leave. His meals are made for him, his washing is done. And how old is he now? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Unmanly, is the word.
He once tried to have a talk with him, Clovis did, for his sister’s sake. (The boy’s father was obviously not going to do it.) He sat him down in a bar with a beer and said, in so many words, ‘You’ve got to grow up.’
And the boy just stared at him out of his vague blueish eyes, his blonde hair falling into them, and said, in so many words, ‘What d’you mean?’
And, in so many words, Clovis said, ‘You’re a loser, mate.’
And the boy – if that was the word, his chin was thick with orange stubble – drank his beer and seemed to have nothing more to say for himself.
So Clovis left it at that.
And then Mathilde said to him, when he was trying to tell her, post their drink together, what he thought of her son, ‘Well, if you want to help so much, Clovis, why don’t you give him a job?’
So he had to make a place for him – first in the warehouse, and then, where there was less scope for him to do any damage (they sent the wrong windows to a site once, which Bérnard had loaded onto the truck), in the office. Though he is totally forbidden to answer the phone. And not allowed anywhere near anything to do with money. Which means there isn’t much, in the office, for him to do. He tidies up. And for that, for a bit of ineffectual tidying, he is paid two hundred and fifty euros a week.
Clovis sighs, audibly, as they wait at a traffic light on their way into town. His fingers tap the steering wheel.
They stop at a petrol station to fill up, the Shell station which Clovis favours on Avenue de Dunkerque.
Bérnard, in the passenger seat, is staring out of the window.
Clovis pays for the petrol, V-Power Nitro+, and some summer windscreen-wiper fluid, which he sees they have on sale, and takes his seat in the BMW again.
He is just strapping himself in when his nephew says, speaking for the first time since they left the office, ‘Is it okay if I go on holiday?’
The presumptuous directness of the question, the total lack of supplicatory preamble, are shocking.
‘Holiday?’ Clovis says, almost sarcastically.
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve only just started.’
To that, Bérnard says nothing, and Clovis has to focus, for a few moments, on l
eaving the petrol station. Then he says, again, ‘You’ve only just started.’
‘I get holidays though, don’t I?’ Bérnard says.
Clovis laughs.
‘I worry about your attitude,’ he says.
Bérnard meets that statement with silence.
Holding the steering wheel, Clovis absorbs waves of outrage.
The silly thing is, he would be more than happy to have his nephew out of the way for a week or two. Or – who knows? – for ever.
‘You planning to go somewhere?’ he asks.
‘Cyprus,’ Bérnard says.
‘Ah, Cyprus. And how long,’ Clovis asks, ‘do you plan to spend in Cyprus?’
‘A week.’
‘I see.’
They travel about a kilometre. Then Clovis says, ‘I’ll think about it, okay?’
Bérnard says nothing.
Clovis half-turns to him and says again, ‘Okay?’
Bérnard, for the first time, seems slightly embarrassed. ‘Well. I’ve already paid for it. That’s the thing. The holiday.’
A further, stronger wave of outrage, and Clovis says, ‘Well, that was a bit silly.’
‘So I need to go,’ Bérnard explains.
‘When is it, this holiday?’ Clovis asks, no longer trying to hide his irritation – if anything, playing it up, enjoying it.
‘It’s next week.’
‘Next week?’ Said with a theatrical expression of surprise.
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, you need to give at least a month’s notice.’
‘Do I? You didn’t tell me that.’
‘It’s in your contract.’
‘Well … I didn’t know.’
‘You should read documents,’ Clovis says, ‘before you sign them.’
‘I didn’t think you’d try to take advantage of me …’
‘Is that what I’m doing?’
‘Look,’ Bérnard says, ‘I’ve already paid for it.’
Clovis says nothing.
‘You’re not really going to try and stop me?’
‘I worry about your attitude, Bérnard.’
They have arrived in Bérnard’s parents’ street, the featureless street of narrow brick houses.
The BMW stops in front of one of them and first Bérnard, and then, more slowly, Clovis, emerges from it.
Unusually, Clovis comes into the house.