by Adam Croft
At this time of night, the setting of the apartment complex was spectacular. The bamboo bar sat just yards away from the azure blue pool, which in the evenings was lit up by a collection of underwater lights. Visually, it was beautiful. The only assault on Hardwick’s senses came from the dance music, which continued to pulse, and the undiscerning and obnoxious noise coming from some of the other guests.
The main culprits seemed to be a group of three men in their early twenties who were sat at the opposite side of the circular bar, trying keenly and loudly to impress their alpha male credentials on two girls who seemed to be a couple of years younger than them. One of the pack appeared to have snared his prey, his arm draped casually around one of the girls’ necks, his other hand placed firmly on the inside of her thigh.
Hardwick also noticed the group of four who had been in front of him and Ellis in the reception queue earlier that day, who were now sat at one of the tables surrounding the bar. The sea-view woman seemed to be a little more placated after a few drinks, but still seemed somewhat aloof in her body language, opting for crossed arms and a stern look on her face. Hardwick, who had by now had half a carafe of wine and a couple of Camparis and orange, wondered innocently how people could be so miserable when they were away for the week.
Sea-view woman’s partner had also gone for the arm-around-the-shoulder move, with their friends — another couple — sat opposite, laughing and joking over an enormous fishbowl full of some sort of suspicious-looking cocktail.
The barman seemed to be in full spirits, seemingly enjoying his role of alcohol supplier and master of ceremonies in between the quiet moments when he’d just sit and play on his mobile phone.
‘He’s going to drop one of those in a minute,’ Ellis Flint remarked, pointing at the barman, who was juggling an array of cocktail shakers and glasses as the easily-impressed holidaymakers looked on.
‘Yes, well he’ll get a clip round the ear if he tries doing that with my Campari,’ Hardwick replied.
Ellis raised his eyebrow in mock concern. ‘You know, I think that’s the first violent remark I’ve ever heard you make.’
Hardwick seemed somewhat regretful and apologetic, and started tugging at his jacket. ‘Yes, well I think the heat is just getting to me.’
‘I’m not bloody surprised! You’re wearing a suit jacket in this heat! Eight o’clock in the evening and it’s still thirty-odd degrees. I think you can afford to dress a little more casually in this weather,’ said Ellis Flint, who was sweating buckets in his t-shirt and shorts.
‘I am dressed casually, Ellis. I’m wearing chinos.’
‘Chinos aren’t casual! Especially when you’re wearing a suit jacket with them.’
‘It’s light-coloured.’
‘And still far too warm for this weather. Come on, get it off!’ Ellis shouted, having got up from his stool and started tugging at the back of the jacket. Hardwick’s protestations soon drew the attention of the group sat opposite.
‘Wahey! Can’t you boys wait ’til you get back to your room for that?’
‘Got yourself an animal there, mate!’ another one added, laughing.
It had all got a little too much for Hardwick. ‘Ellis, will you get off of my bloody jacket?’ The rare outburst took Ellis by surprise, and he did as he was told. Very quickly. Acquiescing to his greater common sense, though, Hardwick removed his jacket and hung it over the back of his stool.
‘Better?’
‘Just trying to help,’ Flint replied.
‘There’s no need to be blunt, Ellis.’
‘I’m not.’
Before Hardwick could even consider biting his tongue, one of the men from the table of four appeared at his other side, having come up to the bar to order some more drinks.
‘I was wondering when you were going to take that jacket off. Must be mad wearing that in this weather,’ the man said.
‘Oh, for… Why is everyone so concerned about my bloody jacket?’ Hardwick asked incredulously.
‘Just saying, like. Didn’t mean to cause offence.’ The man shrunk into himself visibly, at which Hardwick let out a sigh.
‘I’m sorry. I’m just a bit ratty. I’m not really one for holidays, if I’m honest.’
‘Few drinks inside you, you’ll be fine,’ the man said, pointing at Hardwick’s glass. ‘Can I get you one?’
‘Very kind, thank you,’ Hardwick replied. ‘A Campari and orange, if you don’t mind.’
6
The man ordered the drinks from the barman, who had momentarily stopped throwing glass objects around. As the drinks were being poured, the sea-view woman came to join the man at the bar.
‘Think we’re going to sit up here. Those wicker chairs really dig into the back of my legs,’ she said, having carted the other two in their group up to the bar with her. Her tight red dress seemed almost to have been tailored for her body; a body which Ellis Flint had duly noted and considered his approval of. It struck Hardwick that perhaps the old maxim was true that you either had looks or personality, but rarely both.
‘I’m James, by the way,’ the man who’d ordered the drinks said, offering his hand to Hardwick and Flint, who both introduced themselves in return. The man went on to introduce his red-dressed sea-loving girlfriend, Jennifer (who insisted that she was his “fiancée, actually”), and their friends, Darryl and Alicia, who were also a couple and were friends of James and Jennifer.
James and Jennifer appeared to be in their late twenties, as did Alicia, although Darryl was slightly older — late thirties, Hardwick would’ve guessed. It was Darryl who did most of the talking, although he never said anything of any real note, while Jennifer seemed to dominate the group silently and with the odd well-placed comment which could turn the whole conversation on its head. The odd dynamic was not lost on Hardwick.
It wasn’t long before the conversation was flowing, as were the drinks, and the group of the three loud boys and two girls were also at the bar, throwing back shots of a clear liquid, the pungently sweet smell of aniseed making Hardwick feel slightly ill. He was, however, quite happy to accept their continual offers of more Campari and orange, never one to turn down the offer of a free drink.
Hardwick and James continued to chat for the next half an hour, with Ellis Flint quite happily and merrily helping the younger lads demolish another bottle of ouzo. James had already told Hardwick that he was a civil servant, working in a local planning department dealing with industrial and commercial planning. Even to Hardwick this was something of a less-than-interesting subject, but the way James spoke made even the most tedious of subjects sound interesting and engaging. The pair had discovered mutual loves of travel, good books and the arts.
James had told Hardwick of the travels he’d been on in his gap year (which had actually been two years), backpacking around Australia, travelling across Vietnam and China and having seen a fair bit of Eastern Europe.
‘It’s the Balkan cities which are the most incredible these days,’ he said. ‘You go to Belgrade or Sarajevo now and you’d be amazed. You’d think you were in London or New York. Although you’ve got to do those sorts of countries in a certain order. Still some animosity between them in places. You travelled around much?’
‘Quite a lot as a child,’ Hardwick told him. ‘My parents were environmental scientists, in the early days. We moved around all over the place. Patagonia, Siberia, India, the Far East.’
‘Wow. You must have seen a lot then,’ James said.
‘Yes. Too much,’ Hardwick replied, not going into any detail.
‘It’s rare I ever get to speak to anyone about stuff like this,’ he said. ‘I’m usually stuck around the house sorting things out for Jennifer and don’t get to go out all that much.’
‘Don’t your friends share the same interests?’ Hardwick asked, gesturing towards the remaining three in his group.
James made a noise that sounded like a car doing an emergency stop on gravel. ‘They’re Jennifer’s friends.’
‘You don’t get on?’
‘No, not especially. I mean, Alicia’s all right sometimes and generally pretty harmless, but Darryl and I… well, we don’t see eye to eye.’ James took a slurp of his drink. Hardwick could see James’s teeth grinding as he spoke about his dislike of Darryl. ‘He’s arrogant, selfish and rude. Not my sort of bloke at all.’
‘So why are you on holiday with them, may I ask?’
James took a deep breath and exhaled as he spoke. ‘Jennifer and Alicia are best friends. Have been since junior school. To be honest, she’s about the only real friend she’s got left.’
‘I see. Does it not bother you having to come on holiday with them?’
‘Nah. Like I said, I don’t mind Alicia. As long as I’m able to avoid Darryl or pretend he’s not there… well, a holiday’s a holiday ain’t it?’
Hardwick chuckled quietly to himself. ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.’
The forceful slap on the back told Hardwick that Ellis Flint had perhaps demolished a little too much of the ouzo.
‘Kempston, you beast! How’s it hanging?’ he said, as he hung off Hardwick’s neck with one arm and prodded him in the face with his free hand.
‘Just fine, Ellis, thank you.’
‘You know, those lads are really something. You wouldn’t believe the sorts they’ve pulled this week!’
‘Yes, lovely. Would you like a pint of water?’
‘No, I want a b-beer. Something long and cold so I can watch these smooth operators in action!’ Ellis slurred as he pointed over to the table James had vacated earlier. Darryl was nowhere to be seen, but the three lads Ellis had been drinking with were now swarming around Jennifer and Alicia like a pack of dogs.
‘Isn’t that your girlfriend?’ Hardwick asked James, who sipped his drink with greater alacrity than usual, his face reddening by the second.
‘Yes. Loving the attention, I’m sure,’ he replied, a little too calmly.
‘Don’t you want to… well, stop it?’ Hardwick said as he watched one of the lads’ hands crawl up Jennifer’s leg like a possessed tarantula.
Before James could reply, Jennifer had pushed the lad (who Ellis told Hardwick was called Nick) away and slapped him across the side of his face. The bamboo-framed chairs scraping on tiles sounded like an orchestra tuning up as the other two predators realised their prey was not playing ball this time.
7
The lads soon skulked off back in the direction of the table they’d previously been sitting at and said very little. Alicia seemed to be trying to placate Jennifer and inject a bit of humour in order to defuse the situation, but Jennifer instead opted to shoot daggers at the lads, who were sat like a pack of scolded puppies with their tails between their legs.
‘Looks like she’s told them what’s what,’ Ellis said, taking another long slurp of his pint.
‘Yeah, once he had his hand up her dress,’ James replied. ‘Bloody lucky, too. Blokes like that don’t deserve any respect. If they can’t respect women, they deserve everything that’s coming to them.’
It was then that James spotted Darryl sauntering back across the complex from the direction of the toilet block on the other side of the pool, seemingly oblivious to what had just happened.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ James barked at Darryl as he got back to the table, an unexpected air of confidence and bravado having come over him.
‘Er, having a slash. That all right with you?’
‘No! Not when you bugger off and leave these two on their own to be set upon by bloody Casanova and Co. over there!’ James shouted back, jabbing his finger in the direction of Nick, Paul and Ryan. ‘
‘Oh, right, OK,’ Darryl replied,’ taking a step towards James so that their faces were inches apart and their chests were almost touching. I’ll just sit here and piss myself then, shall I, because you’re not man enough to stand up for your own bird?’
The stockier of the three lads, known as Paul, had got up and put his arm between James and Darryl and offered his own form of apology. ‘Listen, we didn’t mean anything by it, all right? It’s just Nick and the way he is. No offence meant, yeah? Let’s just forget about it and have a drink.’
‘“Just the way he is”?’ Jennifer said in a mocking tone of voice as she rose from her chair to confront Paul. ‘Well if you know what he’s like, then why the hell did you even let him bother in the first place? I’ll tell you why,’ she said, before he could even answer the question. ‘It’s because you’re a pathetic, weak little fat man. You wouldn’t stand a chance with me if you were the last bloke on Earth, now piss off back to your sad little friends.’
Paul said nothing, but nodded sagely before turning and heading back to Ryan and Nick at the other table.
Darryl, meanwhile, had stood at the bar and taken his mobile phone out of his pocket in a manly look-how-much-I-don’t-care kind of way. Hardwick was no expert on modern technology — far from it — but even he recognised it straight away as a fairly new iPhone, with the bright, rich colours of the screen showing off the beauty of the picture of a hyacinth which Darryl had set as his phone’s background wallpaper.
The situation seemed to have calmed for a moment, with the three lads keeping much quieter and more subdued than they had been up until that point, now speaking quietly to Emma and Hayley on the table next to them. Jennifer was sat back in her chair, saying nothing but instead opting to reapply her makeup, which she was inspecting in her compact mirror.
By this point, the long-haired glass-juggling Albanian barman, who had earlier introduced himself as Arjun before proceeding to do very little other than lean back on his stool against the glass-washer and put his feet up on the bar while playing games on his own mobile phone, had finally decided to pipe up.
‘Eh, peace, people,’ he said in one of his heavily accented mock-English catchphrases which he’d perfected to impress the type of holidaymakers who found that sort of thing funny. ‘Happy times. Happy happy. Let’s all get pissed, eh?’
8
By nine-thirty, Ellis Flint was beginning to seem rather sober compared with Hardwick, who’d dealt with the stresses of the evening by taking it out on another bottle of Campari. Hardwick was never one to seem outwardly inebriated, but even he recognised that the control he had over his vast brain was beginning to slip. The worrying thing was that he didn’t mind one bit.
He was never really one to suffer from hangovers. This was something which made Ellis Flint insanely jealous, as two swigs of mouthwash the previous evening would have his head pounding the next morning. For Hardwick, though, a six-o’clock rise and a brisk walk would have him set up perfectly for the day. Safe in that knowledge, he took another sip of his drink and smiled.
The hotel’s owner, a fat man with a thick moustache and sweat patches on his shirt, had been sat on one stool for the best part of half an hour, ensuring that those holidaymakers with a sense of smell had gravitated to the exact polar opposite of the circular bar. He’d taken to engaging the guests in conversation, but their noses were thankful where their ears were not, as he seemed to have the habit of shouting his words to whomever he was speaking, from wherever he was sat. Distance was no object for this man’s talent for projecting his voice, and he seemed to revel in having conversations with people who were as far away as possible.
Nick, Paul and Ryan had now merged tables with the two younger girls, Hayley and Emma. While Ryan was busy playing tonsil tennis with Emma and Nick was having a heated squabble with Hayley, Paul sat back and flicked through the social networking app on his smartphone, trying his level best to seem oblivious to the romantic episodes carrying on around him.
From what Hardwick could overhear (and he was an experienced and practised overhearer) Hayley had been having some sort of holiday fling with Nick, and wasn’t best pleased at seeing that he’d tried his luck with Jennifer earlier that evening. Nick’s point of view had been that his relationship with Hayley was hardly a serious on
e, and that she shouldn’t get het up about it. Hayley disagreed and ensured that Nick had a matching palm-print on his other cheek.
By nine forty-five Nick and Hayley’s disagreement seemed to have died down, as they latched onto each other like a pair of Chinese sucker fish, the events of the evening seemingly forgotten. Unfortunately, the wind had started to increase slightly, much to the revulsion of the guests who were seated downwind of Stavros, the hotel’s owner. Fortunately for them, this was also the time that he had bellowed to everyone that he needed to disappear off to his office to do some work on his accounts.
The atmosphere continued to be somewhat strained, although Nick, Paul and Ryan were doing their level best to keep spirits high, having cajoled Ellis, Hayley and Emma into doing the Macarena at the side of the pool. Hardwick, who wasn’t hungry and didn’t like burgers, instead opted to read the burger menu for the fortieth time that evening.
James, Jennifer, Darryl and Alicia were starting to feel the effects of the sun, drinks and long day, and the tension in their group was still palpable although the conversation had since turned to more pleasant subjects.
‘I’m probably going to go up to bed, make the most of tomorrow. I’m not feeling great,’ Alicia said, rubbing her eyes and forehead.
‘It’s the sun. You’re probably just tired,’ Jennifer said authoritatively.
‘Yeah, probably. Just need to get my head down, I think. What time are we meeting for breakfast?’
‘Nine o’clock, we said earlier,’ Darryl replied. ‘Although it’ll be a miracle if any of us are up by then. Think I’m going to have a bit of a head on me anyway. I’ll take her back,’ he said to the others. ‘Make sure she’s all right.’
‘I am still here, you know,’ Alicia replied. ‘I’ll be fine. I’m just not feeling great.’
‘Well you don’t look fine, and I just want to sit with you for a bit and make sure you’re not going to be ill. Come on,’ he said, as he helped escort her across the poolside area towards their apartment.