‘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.’