by David Szalay
‘Isn’t it?’ he says.
They have entered the park and are walking along an asphalt path that follows the edge of a thin, green lake. There aren’t many people around.
‘Did you contest it?’ she asks.
‘Nah. They said if I went quietly they’d give me a decent reference, so …’ He shrugs.
‘And did they?’
‘Yeah,’ he admits.
‘And then you got the job at the gym?’
‘Well, yeah, eventually.’
At its narrowest point, there is a small wooden bridge over the lake and they walk out onto it.
‘But that’s not really enough,’ he says. ‘In itself. It’s only part-time really. So I’ve got to do other stuff as well.’
‘Stuff like this,’ she suggests.
‘Well, yeah,’ he says. They have stopped on the bridge, and looking out at the murky green water he lights a cigarette. He seems uneasy, even embarrassed, that she has touched on why they are in London – or had he touched on it first? He hadn’t meant to, he doesn’t think. Indeed, he shies away from the subject, and says, ‘When I was a kid, I wanted to be a water-polo player.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yeah. I was alright,’ he tells her. ‘I thought I might do it professionally.’
‘And?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘It didn’t happen somehow. Maybe I wasn’t aggressive enough. There were other guys, more aggressive.’ He is squinting at the water. ‘Anyway, it didn’t happen.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Yeah.’ He had thought it was something he had entirely come to terms with. Just for a moment, though, he feels the pain of it again – feels it, in fact, more nearly, more immediately than he ever has before. It’s as though he understands, for the first time, exactly what was at stake – his whole life, everything.
‘What did you want to do,’ he asks, ‘when you were a kid?’
The question sounds odd somehow.
She seems to think, for a few seconds, about whether to answer it at all.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Escape.’
She puts her hands on the sun-pocked paint of the wooden bridge and looks down into the water. Green water, feathers floating on it. ‘It’s a shame we don’t have some bread for those ducks. There’s something so restful about feeding ducks, isn’t there?’
Balázs joins her at the handrail.
‘Don’t you find?’
‘Uh …’
‘It’s probably not something you do much, is it?’ she says, smiling at him. ‘A big tough man like you.’
‘Well, no, not much.
‘I was joking,’ she says.
‘Okay.’
‘When I was little,’ she says, ‘we used to go and stay with my grandparents. They lived in a village somewhere. I used to feed the chickens. I didn’t like that, actually. They were so smelly.’
‘Yeah, chickens stink,’ Balázs says, like someone who knows.
She laughs. ‘Don’t they? They really do.’
They start to walk again, under trees now, on the other side of the lake, its wind-wrinkled surface visible through stirring leaves – the bloodstain-coloured leaves of a copper beech.
‘It’s nice this park, isn’t it?’ she says.
He looks around, as if he had not noticed until now that they were in a park. ‘Yeah,’ he says.
‘It’s so well kept. Look at those flower beds. Are you in a relationship at the moment?’ she asks matter-of-factly.
Startled by the question, he says, ‘Uh, no, not at the moment.’
They walk on, and seconds pass without him saying anything more on the subject. He feels he should, somehow. What is there to say, though? The answer is no. ‘Not at the moment,’ he says again.
Without meaning to they seem to have walked in a circle and are back at the place where they entered the park, the road with the red tarmac cycle lane.
He says, ‘Uh, d’you wanna get a drink or something?’
In the muted red interior of a pub called the Globe, with Hogarth reproductions on the striped wallpaper, while the traffic tumbles past outside, they sit with pints, and a few other tourists.
‘So how long have you and Gábor been …?’ he asks, not knowing quite how to put it. Gábor is in fact the last thing he wants to talk about, but he can’t think of anything else to say.
‘About a year,’ she says.
‘How’d you meet?’ Balázs asks, stuck with the subject now.
‘Through work,’ she says. ‘He was involved with a film I made. We met that way.’
‘He was involved?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’ And then, almost apologetically, ‘I’ve just never been sure what he …?’
‘The technical side,’ she says smoothly. ‘Post-production. Distribution. More distribution. He knows about computers. Or he knows people who do. You know – it’s mostly online.’
‘Okay.’ Balázs lifts his pint.
‘That was my last film, actually,’ she tells him a few moments later, as if it is something that might interest him.
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Gábor wanted me to stop,’ she explains. ‘He was fine with it at first. I mean, he was more than fine with it.’ She laughs. ‘I’m pretty sure he liked it, actually. But then, when we’d been together for a few months, it started to bother him. That’s when he said he wanted me to stop.’
Balázs says, ‘But he’s okay with you doing … I mean …’
‘This?’ she says.
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, it wasn’t his idea, if that’s what you mean.’
‘No?’
‘No.’ Then, as if something has occurred to her, she says, ‘Did he tell you it was?’
Balázs thinks for a second. ‘No.’
‘It was Zoli’s idea,’ she says. ‘You know Zoli.’
‘Zoli, yeah.’
‘It was his idea.’
‘He’s a friend of Gábor’s, yeah?’
‘Not really. I mean, they’re not really friends. They know each other somehow.’
‘It was his idea then,’ Balázs says, unwilling now to leave it there, though trying not to show quite how interested he is.
‘Well, he told me how much money I could make here, and said he’d sort it out. I said I’d think about it. Gábor didn’t like the idea. He didn’t want me to do it.’
‘Well … I don’t know,’ Balázs says thoughtfully.
The open doors of the pub admit the passing wail of a police siren.
‘I wouldn’t be able to live with it, if I was him.’
She smiles. ‘That’s a nice thing to say. Can we smoke in here?’
‘Uh.’ He looks for ashtrays, sees No Smoking signs. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do you want to go outside then?’
They stand on the pavement in the steady traffic noise. ‘Zoli wants me to move here,’ she shouts.
‘Does he?’
‘He suggested it. The first night, when we were in the hotel, and Gábor wasn’t there. He said I should move here. He said he’d set me up somewhere nice. My own place. I’d only have to work once or twice a month or something.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I didn’t say anything – I laughed. He said he was serious, I shouldn’t laugh.’
‘Do you want to move here?’
‘What, and deal with Zoli all the time? I don’t think so. He’s a total shit, that’s obvious. Isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, I s’pose,’ Balázs says, as if the idea had never occurred to him.
He still seems to be thinking about it when she says, ‘Do you know why I like you?’
He just stares at her.
‘You don’t judge people,’ she says.
‘Don’t I?’ he asks.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not even Zoli. Definitely not me. Definitely not me. And I know when I’m being judged.’
When they have finished their
pints he asks her if she wants another. After asking him what time it is, she says no. ‘I don’t think I’d better.’ Then she excuses herself and goes to look for the ladies. Some elderly Americans, sitting at a nearby table with a map and soft drinks, seem to inspect her as she passes them. When she has moved on, one of them says something and there is a murmur of laughter. Yeah, they’re judging her, Balázs thinks, leaning forward on the tabletop over his folded arms in an attempt to see her as she walks away on the cork-soled shoes. It is nearly one o’clock. Despite her not wanting another pint, he assumes that they will spend the whole afternoon together – what else is there to do? – and he is shocked when she sits down again and says, ‘Should we head back to the flat then?’
He feels as though he has been slapped.
‘Yeah?’ he says. And then, when that doesn’t seem to express enough disapproval of the suggestion, ‘Really?’
‘What do you want to do?’ It’s as if she is negotiating.
‘I dunno.’ He scratches his head.
In fact, he does know – the knowledge is painfully present to him.
When maybe ten seconds have passed without him saying anything else, she says, ‘I think we should head back.’
He shrugs sadly. ‘Yeah, okay.’
They walk to the underground in silence, and hardly speak on the train.
4
The parked Merc, its familiar shadows. Gábor says, ‘So I hear you and Emma did some sightseeing today.’ He was still sleeping when they got back from their excursion, and Balázs doesn’t know what Emma has told him about it. That she has told him about it at all is somehow disappointing. Warily, he says, ‘Yeah, uh …’
‘You went to the wax museum,’ Gábor says.
‘Well, yeah. We didn’t go in, though.’ Still unsure what Gábor thinks about it, Balázs’s tone is defensive.
‘No, that’s what she said,’ Gábor says. ‘She said you’d’ve had to queue for two hours or something.’
‘More,’ Balázs says.
‘You can get priority tickets,’ Gábor tells him.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ With his index fingers on the steering wheel, Gábor is staring straight ahead, through the wide windscreen at the long dark Mayfair street. ‘That’s what I did, when I went.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Balázs admits.
‘So what’d you do then?’ Gábor asks. There is something strange about the question – if she has told him about the museum and the queue, then surely Gábor has asked her, and she has told him, what they did next. So why, Balázs wonders uneasily, is he asking him? Is he suspicious? Is he feeling for discrepancies with Emma’s story?
‘Nothing really,’ Balázs says. ‘Went for a walk. How was … How was last night?’
Gábor doesn’t seem to mind changing the subject. ‘It was excellent,’ he says. ‘You should’ve come.’
‘I was tired,’ Balázs says apologetically.
‘Yeah?’ It’s as if Gábor doesn’t quite believe him.
‘Yeah.’
‘I thought maybe you wanted to make a move on Emma.’ Gábor is smiling when he says this – it might be a joke. ‘Especially when you went off together like that today.’
‘What d’you mean?’ Balázs says.
‘No?’ Gábor is still smiling.
‘No,’ Balázs says. He feels the heat in his face, the way it seems to implicate him.
‘It’s just that most guys around Emma,’ Gábor says, looking at him slyly, ‘they’ve got their fucking tongues hanging out, you know what I mean? You don’t seem that into her.’
‘No,’ Balázs says.
That doesn’t seem enough, though.
The way Gábor had said it – ‘You don’t seem that into her’ – it sounded like something that needed explaining.
‘You’re not gay, are you?’ Gábor says, as if it is something he has been meaning to ask for some time.
Balázs is, for a moment, too surprised to speak. Then he says, ‘No.’
‘It’s not a problem if you are,’ Gábor tells him.
‘No,’ Balázs says. ‘No, I’m not. I, uh. No.’
‘She’s just not your type, or what?’
With an almost pained expression, Balázs says, ‘Look … I dunno …’
‘Hey, whatever, man. I didn’ mean to get personal.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘She’s not your type, she’s not your type,’ Gábor says. ‘Whatever.’
They don’t talk much after that.
A sort of depression, Balázs finds, seems to have engulfed him. It’s like a storm that has threatened all afternoon – in the terrible stillness of the smoky living room – and has now fallen on him in a silent maelstrom of despair. Sitting there in the shadows, he thinks with shame and sadness of his own life, his own things, his own pathetic pleasures.
Gábor’s phone.
It is her, and there is obviously some problem. ‘Okay, just stay there,’ Gábor says. ‘Just stay where you are. We’ll be there in a minute.’
When he has hung up, he says, ‘We’ve got to go up there again. She had to lock herself in the bathroom.’
The anonymous opulence of room 425. The TV is on loud. Sitting on the bed, its linen an energetic mess like stiffly whipped egg white, is a man. He is about forty, thinnish, the length of his face exaggerated by the way he is losing his hair. Emma is not there, though her dress, which is all she wears on these occasions, is on the floor. The man’s clothes are on the floor too – he is naked. He stands up with a strange lack of urgency when he hears them come in. ‘Who are you?’ he says.
‘Where is she?’ Gábor asks.
‘There.’ The man indicates a door. Then he says, more fiercely, ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘Watch him,’ Gábor says to Balázs, and knocks on the door. ‘Hey, it’s me,’ he shouts, and a moment later is let in.
In the well-lit room, Balázs is left standing face to face with the naked man, no more than a metre from him. The man seems unembarrassed by his nakedness. He sniffs loudly and says, ‘I’m not finished with her, okay?’
Balázs says nothing, and probably looks as if he didn’t understand, because the man says, ‘You speak English, you fucking gorilla? I’m not finished. So why don’t you and your friend just get out of here?’
When Balázs still says nothing, the man says, ‘You think I hurt her? I didn’t hurt her,’ he tells Balázs’s impassive face. ‘I just told her she’s a slut, which she is. That’s what I told her, and that’s what she is. Hey, gorilla, you fucking ape! I’m talking to
Whoosh
There is a noise like a dog enjoying a knuckle of gristle as the nose breaks and fills with blood.
The man staggers back against the bed, looking confused. There is suddenly a huge amount of blood, all over his mouth.
‘She’s okay …’ Gábor says from the open bathroom door. ‘What the fuck …’
The man is on his knees, with his blood-smeared hands at his face and blood dripping quickly into the deep pile of the carpet.
Balázs is already leaving. Outside in the corridor it is as if he has never been there before. Blinded by adrenalin he is unable to find the service stairs and descends instead in a jewel-box of a lift. The doors open on the lobby, its dull dazzle. The shimmering cloud of a chandelier. The blood on his hand, slippery a minute ago, is now sticky, and his hand is starting to throb. With a single smooth turn, the revolving door exchanges the silent lobby for the noises of the night – the intermittent hiss of traffic from the avenue, the more immediate thrum of a taxi pulling up to the hotel entrance.
Balázs walks. He is in the avenue’s trench of triple-shadowed light. Every few seconds some vehicle overtakes him. He isn’t thinking anything, just feeling the night air on the skin of his face.
Slowly he becomes aware of things – the trees, their leaves a lurid green in the towering lamplight. The darkness on the other side of the avenue that must be some sort of park.
Some people waiting at a bus stop.
He stops in front of a ghostly BMW showroom. He wonders what he is going to do. Tremblingly, the situation starting unpleasantly to impinge, he lights a Park Lane. He isn’t even sure what happened. He hit the man – at least once – he knows that. Judging by the throb and soreness in his own hand he hit him hard. Probably he broke his nose. Staring without seeing them at the waxed and frowning BMWs, Balázs tells himself that the man will not want to involve the police. He was wearing a wedding ring, for one thing – Balázs had noticed that. He would have to tell his wife some lie to explain the damage to his face, but he would have had to tell her some lie anyway.
Balázs starts to walk again. He remembers now the way that Gábor had shouted at him when he emerged from the bathroom to find the man bleeding onto the carpet, had shouted after him as he left the room. It isn’t what Gábor would have wanted. And Emma … Just as he was leaving he had been aware of her emerging from the bathroom too, in one of the hotel’s towelling robes, and releasing a short scream …
Balázs wonders, for a moment, whether he should just flee the whole situation – just head home on his own, hurry to the airport now. He doesn’t have his passport on him, is one problem. Everything is at the house. No, he will walk a bit more while the adrenalin works its way out of his system. Then he will face whatever it is he has to face.
When, some time later, he finds the side street where they were parked, however, the Mercedes is not there.
He doesn’t know how to get home from the hotel, except on the underground, so he has to wait for the trains to start. Four o’clock finds him in Knightsbridge, pressing his nose to the windows of Harrods. Half an hour later he is wandering through Eaton Square. At five, watched by suspicious policemen, he passes in front of Buckingham Palace. It is fully light now, the sun is up, and he waits in Green Park for the station to open.