by David Szalay
Bérnard’s parents are both there. His father, in a vest, is drinking a beer. He has, within the last half-hour, returned from work. He is short, blonde, with a moustache – Asterix, basically. He is sitting at the table in the front room, the room into which the front door directly opens, with a single window onto the street, in the light of which he is studying La Voix du Nord. Bérnard’s mother, further back in the same space, where the kitchen is, is doing the washing-up.
On Bérnard’s entrance, neither of them looks up from what they are doing.
‘Salut,’ he says.
They both murmur something. His father has a swig from the brown bottle in his hand.
‘André,’ Clovis says to him.
At that, André looks up from the paper. Mathilde, too, looks across from the neon puddle of the kitchen. She smiles to see her brother.
André does not smile.
If happiness is having one euro more than your brother-in-law, then Clovis is happy a million times over.
And André – André is fucked.
Clovis steps forward into the room.
‘To what do we owe the honour?’ André says.
Mathilde asks her brother if he’d like something.
‘No, thank you,’ Clovis says.
Having left the harsh light of the kitchen, she kisses him on the face.
‘I find myself in a difficult position,’ Clovis says.
His sister indicates that he should sit. Again, he declines.
‘I wanted to help,’ he says. ‘I tried to help. But Bérnard has made it clear that he does not want the sort of help that I am able to offer him.’
At the sound of his name, Bérnard, who has been peering into the fridge, looks at his uncle.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Clovis says sadly.
‘What do you mean?’ André asks.
Clovis looks at him and says, ‘I’m sacking your son.’
He half-turns his head in the direction of the kitchen and says, ‘Yes, that’s right, Bérnard – you can go where you like now.’
Bérnard, still illuminated by the open fridge, just stares at his uncle.
Mathilde is already pleading with him.
He is shaking his head. ‘No, no,’ he is saying. ‘No, I’ve made up my mind.’
‘I knew this would happen,’ André murmurs furiously.
‘What?’ Clovis asks him. ‘What did you know?’
Through a friend at the Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie, he had, a few years ago, found André a job as a Eurostar driver; the interview would have been a formality. André, saying something about the long hours, had turned the opportunity down, and still spends his days trundling back and forth between Lille and Dunkerque, Lille and Amiens. The stopping service. Local routes. Not even the Paris gig.
‘What did you know?’ Clovis asks him, looming over the table where André is sitting with his paper.
André says, clinging to his beer, ‘You didn’t really want to help, did you?’
‘Oh, I did,’ Clovis tells him. ‘I did indeed. Your son is lazy.’ He throws his voice towards the kitchen. ‘Yes, Bérnard. I’m sorry to say it, but you are. You have no ambition. No desire to improve yourself, to move up in the world …’
‘Please, Clovis, please,’ Mathilde is still saying.
He silences her with a lightly placed hand – her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. I am sorry,’ he says. ‘Despite what your husband says, I did want to help. And I tried. I did what I could. And I will pay him,’ he says, drawing himself up like a monarch in his suede jacket, ‘a month’s wages in lieu of notice.’
‘Clovis …’
‘There is only so much I can do,’ he tells her. ‘What can I do? What do you want me to do?’
‘Give him one more chance.’
‘If I thought it would help him, I would.’
André mutters something.
‘What?’
‘Bollocks,’ André says more distinctly.
‘No. No, André, it is not bollocks,’ Clovis says, speaking quietly, in a voice trembling with anger. ‘How have I benefited in any way from taking Bérnard on? Tell me how I have benefited.’
There is a tense silence.
Then Clovis, in a sad voice, says, ‘I’m sorry, Bérnard.’
Bérnard, now eating a yoghurt, just nods. He is not as upset as either of his parents seem to be.
He is not actually upset at all. The main facts, as he sees them, are: 1) he does not have to go to work tomorrow, or ever again, and 2) he is getting a thousand euros for nothing.
His mother’s near-tearfulness, his father’s smouldering fury, are just familiar parts of the family scenery.
He is aware that there exists between his father and his uncle some terrible issue, some fundamental unfriendliness – it is not something, however, that he understands. It has always been there. It is just part of life.
Like the way his parents argue.
They are arguing now.
From his room on the top floor of the house he hears them, far below.
When they argue it is either about money – which is always tight – or about Bérnard.
They worry about him, that he understands. They are arguing now out of their worry, shouting at each other.
He does not worry about himself. Their worry, however, sets off a sort of unwelcome humming in his psyche; like the high-pitched pulse of an alarm somewhere far off down the street, leaking anxiety into the night. Their voices now, travelling up through two floors, are like that. They are arguing about him, about what he is going ‘to do with his life’.
To him, the question seems entirely abstract.
He is playing a first-person shooter, listlessly massacring thousands of monstrous enemies.
After an hour or so he tires of it, and decides to visit Baudouin.
Baudouin is also playing a first-person shooter, albeit on a much larger and more expensive display – a vast display, flanked by muscular speakers. His father, also Baudouin, is a dentist, and the younger Baudouin is himself studying dentistry at the university. He is the only university friend with whom Bérnard is still in touch.
In keeping with his impeccably provisioned life, Baudouin always has a substantial stash of super-skunk – imported from Holland, and oozing crystals of THC – and Bérnard skins up while his friend finishes the level.
He says, ‘I’ve been sacked.’
Baudouin, the future dentist, takes out half a dozen zombies. ‘I thought you worked for your uncle,’ he says.
‘Yeah. He sacked me.’
‘What a twat.’
‘He is a twat.’
Baudouin stretches out a white hand for the spliff.
Bérnard obliges him. ‘I don’t give a shit,’ he says, as if worried that his friend might think he did.
Baudouin, blasting, grunts.
‘I get a month’s pay. Severance or whatever.’ Bérnard says that with some pride.
Baudouin, however, seems unimpressed: ‘Yeah?’
‘And now I can come to Cyprus for sure.’
Passing him the spliff again, and without looking at him, Baudouin says, ‘Oh, I need to talk to you about that.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t go.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I didn’t pass Biochemistry Two,’ Baudouin says. ‘I need to take it again.’
‘When’s the exam?’ Bérnard asks.
‘In two weeks.’
‘So why can’t you go?’
‘My dad won’t let me.’
‘Fuck that.’
Baudouin laughs, as if in agreement. Then he says, ‘No, he says it’s important I don’t fail again.’
Bérnard, sitting somewhat behind him on one of the tatami mats that litter the floor, has a pull on the spliff. He feels deeply let down. ‘You seriously not coming then?’ he asks, unable to help sounding hurt.
What makes it worse, the whole thing was Baudouin’s idea.
It had
been he who found, somewhere online, the shockingly inexpensive package that included flights from Charleroi airport and seven nights at the Hotel Poseidon in Protaras. It had been he who persuaded Bérnard – admittedly, he needed little persuading – that Protaras was a hedonistic paradise, that the weather in Cyprus would be well hot enough in mid-May, and that it was an excellent time for a holiday. He had stoked up Bérnard’s enthusiasm for the idea until it was the only thing on which he fixed his mind as he tried to survive the interminable afternoons on the greyish-brown industrial estate.
And now he says, still mostly focused on the screen in front of him, ‘No. Seriously. I can’t.’
His hand, stretched out, is waiting for the spliff.
Bérnard passes it to him, silently.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ he asks after a while.
‘Go!’ Baudouin says, over the manic whamming of the speakers. ‘Obviously, go. Why wouldn’t you? I would.’
‘On my own?’
‘Why wouldn’t you?’
‘Only saddoes,’ Bérnard says, ‘go on holiday on their own.’
‘Don’t be stupid …’
‘It’s true.’
‘It’s not.’
Bérnard has the spliff again, what’s left of it, an acrid stub. ‘It so is.’ He says, ‘I’ll feel like a fucking loser.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Baudouin says, finishing the level finally and saving his position. He turns to Bérnard. ‘Think Steve McQueen,’ he says. Baudouin is a fan of the late American actor. He has a large poster of him – squinting magisterially astride a vintage motorbike – on the wall of the room in which they sit. ‘Think Belmondo.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Do you think I’m pleased I can’t go?’ Baudouin asks. A Windows Desktop, weirdly vast and static, now fills the towering screen.
‘Whatever,’ Bérnard says again.
While he moodily sets to work on the next spliff, massaging the tobacco from one of his friend’s Marlboro Lights, Baudouin starts an MP4 of Iron Man 3 – a film which has yet to arrive in the Lille cinemas.
‘You seen this?’ he asks, after drinking at length from a bottle of Evian.
‘What is it?’
‘Iron Man Three.’
‘No.’
‘It’s got Gwyneth Paltrow in it,’ Baudouin says.
‘Yeah, I know.’
They watch it in English, which they both speak well enough for the dialogue to present no major problems.
Whenever Gwyneth Paltrow is on screen Baudouin stops talking and starts devotedly ogling. He has, as they say, a ‘thing’ about her. It is not a ‘thing’ his friend understands, particularly – not the full hormonal, worshipping intensity of it.
‘She’s alright,’ Bérnard says.
‘You, my friend, are working class.’
‘She’s got no tits,’ Bérnard says.
‘That you should say that,’ Baudouin tells him, ‘does sort of prove my point.’
Then he says, in a scholarly tone, ‘In Shakespeare in Love you see her tits. They’re not as small as you might think.’
Willing to be proven wrong, Bérnard makes a mental note to torrent the film when he gets home.
Which he does, and discovers that his friend has a point – there is indeed something there, something appreciable. And, hunched over himself, a hand-picked frame on the screen, he does appreciate it.
2
At four o’clock on Monday morning, on the bus to Charleroi airport, he feels sad, loserish, very lonely. Dawn arrives on the empty motorway. The sun, smacking him in the face. Shadows everywhere. He stares, through smarting eyes, at the landscape as it passes – its flatness, its shimmer. There is an exhilarating whisper of freedom, then, that lasts until he sees a plane hanging low in the sky, and again finds himself facing the affront to his ego of having to holiday alone.
3
From Larnaca airport – newer and shinier than Charleroi – a minibus operated by the holiday firm takes him, and about twelve other people, to Protaras. A dusty, unpleasant landscape. No sign of the sea. He is, on that air-conditioned bus, with little blue curtains that can be closed against the midday sun, the only person travelling on his own.
The drop-offs start.
He is the last to be dropped off.
Most of the others are set down at newish white hotels next to the sea, which did eventually appear, hotels that look like the top halves of cruise ships.
Then, when he is alone on the bus, it leaves the shore and starts inland, taking him first through some semi-pedestrianised streets full of lurid impermanent-looking pubs and then, the townscape thinning out, past a sizeable Lidl and into an arid half-made hinterland, without much happening, where the Hotel Poseidon is.
The Hotel Poseidon.
Three storeys of white-painted concrete, studded with identical small balconies. Broken concrete steps leading up to a brown glass door.
It is now the heat of the day – the streets around the hotel are empty and shadowless as the sun drops straight down on them. In the lobby the air is hot and humid. At first he thinks there is no one there. Then he sees the two women lurking in the warm semi-darkness behind the desk.
He explains, in English, who he is.
They listen, unimpressed.
Having taken his passport, one of them then leads him up some dim stairs to the floor above, and into a narrow space with a single window at one end and two low single beds placed end to end against one wall.
A sinister door is pointed to. ‘The bathroom,’ she says.
And then he is alone again.
He is able to hear, indistinctly, voices, from several directions. From somewhere above him, footsteps. From somewhere else, a well-defined sneeze.
He stands at the window: there are some trees, some scrubby derelict land, some walls.
Far away, a horizontal blue line hints at the presence of the sea.
He is standing there feeling sorry for himself when there is a knock on the door.
It is a short man in an ill-fitting suit. Unlike the two women in the lobby, he is smiling. ‘Hello, sir,’ he says, still smiling.
‘Hello,’ Bérnard says.
‘I hope you are enjoying your stay,’ the man says. ‘I just wanted to have a word with you please about the shower.’
‘Yes?’
‘Please don’t use the shower.’
After a short pause, Bérnard says, ‘Okay.’ And then, feeling obscurely that he should ask, ‘Why not?’
The man is still smiling. ‘It leaks, you see,’ he says. ‘It leaks into the lobby. So please don’t use it. I hope you understand.’
Bérnard nods and says, ‘Sure. Okay.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ the man says.
When he has left, Bérnard has a look at the bathroom. It is a windowless shaft with a toilet, a sink, a metal nozzle in the wall over the toilet and what seems to be an associated tap – which is presumably the unusable shower – a flaky drain in the middle of the floor, and a sign in Greek, and also in Russian, Bérnard thinks, of which the only thing he can understand are the numerous exclamation marks. He switches off the light.
Sitting on one of the single beds, he starts to feel that it is probably unacceptable for him not to have access to a shower, and decides to speak to someone about it.
There is no one in the lobby, though, so after waiting for ten minutes, he leaves the hotel and starts to walk in what he thinks is the direction of the sea.
In addition to the shower, there is something else he feels might be unsatisfactory: he was sure the hotel was supposed to have a pool. Baudouin had talked about afternoons spent ‘vegging next to the pool’, had even sent him a link to a picture of it – the picture had shown what appeared to be some sort of aqua park, with a number of different pools and water slides, populated by smiling people. The whole thing had seemed, from the picture, to be more or less next to the sea.
And that was another thing.
The hotel was advertised as five minutes’ walk from the sea, yet he has been trudging for at least double that through the desolate heat and is only just passing the Lidl.
In fact, to walk to the sea takes half an hour.
Once there he hangs about for a while – stands at the landward margin of a brown beach, thick with sun umbrellas down to the listless flop of the surf.
He has a pint in a pub hung with Union Jacks and England flags, and advertising English football matches, and then walks slowly back to his hotel. The Lidl is easy to find: there are signs for it throughout the town. And from the Lidl he is able, with only one or two wrong turnings, to find the Hotel Poseidon.
In the hot lobby he walks up to the desk, where there is now someone on duty, intending to talk about the shower situation and the lack of a swimming pool on the premises.
It is the smiling man, who says, ‘Good afternoon, sir. There is a message for you.’
‘For me?’
‘For you, sir.’ The smiling man – middle-aged, with a lean, tanned face – pushes a slip of paper across the desk.
It is a handwritten note:
Dropped by – you weren’t in. I’ll be in Waves from 5 if you wanna meet up and talk things through. Leif
Bérnard looks up at the smiling man’s kind, avuncular face.
‘Are you sure this is for me?’ he asks.
Still smiling kindly, the man nods.
Looking at the note again, Bérnard asks him if he knows where Waves is.
It is near the sea, the man tells him, and explains how to get there. ‘It’s a popular place with young people,’ he says.
Bérnard thanks him. It is already five, and he is about to set off again when he remembers the shower, and turns back. He does not know exactly how to put it, how to express his dissatisfaction. He says, uncertainly, ‘Listen, um. The shower …’
Immediately, as soon as the word shower has been spoken, the smiling man says, ‘The problem will be sorted out tomorrow.’ For the first time, he is not smiling. He looks very serious. His eyes are full of apology. ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’
‘Okay,’ Bérnard says. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the man says again, this time with a small deferential smile.
‘There is one other thing,’ Bérnard says, emboldened.