Bérnard tries to explain. ‘I was supposed to be with a friend…’ He stops. Leif, obviously, is not interested.
‘Okay,’ Leif says, looking in the direction of Porkies as if he is expecting someone.
Then he turns to Bérnard again and says, ‘I’ll leave you to it. You have any questions just let me know, yeah.’
He is already standing up.
Bérnard says, ‘Okay. Thanks.’
‘See you round,’ Leif says.
He doesn’t seem to hear Bérnard saying, ‘Yeah, see you.’
As he walks away the golden hair on his arms and legs glows in the low sun.
Bérnard finishes his drink quickly. Then he leaves Waves — where the music is now at full nightclub volume — and starts to walk, again, towards the Hotel Poseidon.
He feels slightly worse, slightly more isolated, after the meeting with Leif. He had somehow assumed, when he first sat down, that Leif would show him an evening of hedonism, or at least provide some sort of entrée into the native depravity of the place. That he did not, that he just left him on the terrace of Waves to finish his drink alone, leaves Bérnard feeling that he has failed a test — perhaps a fundamental one.
This feeling widening slowly into something like depression, he walks into the dead hinterland where the Hotel Poseidon is.
It is just after seven when he arrives at the hotel. The lobby is sultry and unlit. The dining room, on the other hand, is lit like a hospital A&E department. It doesn’t seem to have any windows, the dining room. The walls are hung with dirty drapes. He sits down at a table. He seems to be the last to arrive — most of the other tables are occupied, people lowering their faces towards the grey soup, spooning it into their mouths. It is eerily quiet. Someone is speaking in Russian. Other than that the only sound, from all around, is the tinking of spoon on plate. And a strange humming, quite loud, that lasts for twenty or thirty seconds, then stops, then starts again. A waiter puts a plate of soup in front of him. Bérnard picks up his spoon, and notices the encrustations on its cloudy metal surface, the hard deposits of earlier meals. With a napkin — which itself shows evidence of previous use — he tries to scrub them off. The voice is still speaking in Russian, monotonously. Having cleaned his spoon, he turns his attention to the soup. It is a strange grey colour. And it is cold. He looks around, as if expecting someone to explain. No one explains. What he does notice, however, is the microwave on the other side of the room — the source of the strange intermittent humming — and the queue of people waiting to use it, each with a plate of soup. He picks up his own soup and joins them.
He is preceded in the queue by a woman in her mid-forties, probably, who is quite short and very fat. She has blonde hair, and an orange face — red under her eyes and along the top of her nose. He noticed her sitting at a table near him when he sat down — she is the sort of fat person it is hard to miss. What makes her harder to miss is that she is with another woman, younger than her and even fatter. This younger woman — her daughter perhaps — is actually fascinatingly huge. Bérnard tried not to stare.
After they have been standing in the microwave queue for a few minutes, listening to the whirr of the machine and taking a step forward every time it stops, the older woman says to him, in English, ‘It’s a disgrace, really, isn’t it?’
‘Mm,’ Bérnard agrees, surprised at being spoken to.
The woman is sweating freely — the dining room is very warm. ‘Every night the same,’ she says.
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ she says, and then it is her turn and she shoves her plate into the microwave.
4
Iveta. Ah, Iveta.
He first sees her the next morning, in Porkies.
He has had almost no sleep, is tipsy with fatigue. It was a nuit blanche, nearly. He wasn’t out late, it wasn’t that — he had a few lonely drinks on the lurid stretch, tried unsuccessfully to talk to some people, was humiliatingly stung in a hostess bar, and then, feeling quite depressed, made his way back to the Poseidon. At that point he was just looking forward to getting some sleep. And that’s when the problems started. Though the hotel seemed totally isolated, there was at least one place in the immediate vicinity which thudded with dance music till the grey of dawn. Within the hotel itself, doors slammed all night, and voices shouted and sang, and people fucked noisily on all sides.
Finally, just as natural light started to filter through the ineffectual curtains, everything went quiet.
Bérnard, sitting up, looked at his watch. It was nearly five, and he had not slept at all.
And then, from the vacant lot next door, where people would illegally park, they started towing the cars.
He must have fallen asleep somehow while they were still doing that, while the alarms were still being triggered, one after another — when he next sat up and looked at his watch it was ten past ten.
Which meant he had missed the hotel breakfast.
So he went out into the morning, which was already hot, to find something to eat, and ended up in Porkies.
Porkies, even at ten thirty a.m., is doing a steady trade. Many of the people there, queuing for their kebabs, are obviously on the final stop of a night out. Hoarsely, they talk to each other or, still damp from the foam disco, stare in the fresh sunlight near the front of the shop, where a machine is loudly extracting the juice from orange halves.
With his heavy kebab Bérnard finds a seat at the end of the counter, the last of the stools that are there.
Next to him, facing the brown-tinted mirror tiles and still in their party kit with plenty of flesh on show, is a line of young women, laughing noisily as they eat their kebabs, and speaking a language he is unable to place.
He gets talking to the one sitting next to him when he asks her to pass him the squeezable thing of sauce and then, taking it from her, says, ‘It was a nice night?’
‘Where are you from?’ he asks her next — the inevitable Protaras question.
She is Latvian, she says, she and her friends. Bérnard isn’t sure where Latvia is. One of those obscure Eastern European places, he supposes.
He informs her that he is French.
She is on the small side, with a slightly too-prominent forehead, and spongy blonde hair — a cheap chemical blonde, displaced by something mousier near the roots. Still, he likes her. He likes her little arms and shoulders, her childish hands holding the kebab. The tired points of glitter on her nose.
He introduces himself. ‘Bérnard,’ he says.
Iveta, she tells him her name is.
‘I like that name,’ he says. He smiles, and she smiles too, and he notes her nice straight white teeth.
‘You have very nice teeth,’ he says.
And then learns that her father is a dentist.
He says, mildly bragging, ‘I know a guy, his father is a dentist.’
She seems interested. ‘Yes?’
There is something effortless about this, as they sit there eating their kebabs. Effortlessly, almost inadvertently, he has detached her from the others. She has turned away from them, towards him.
‘You like Cyprus?’ he asks.
Eating, she nods.
This is her second time in Protaras, he discovers. ‘Maybe you can show me around,’ he suggests easily. ‘I don’t know it. It’s my first time here.’
And she just says, with a simplicity which makes him feel sure he is onto something here, ‘Okay.’
‘Where are you staying?’ he asks.
She mentions some youth hostel, and he feels proud of the fact that he is staying in a proper hotel — proud enough to say, as if it were a totally natural question, ‘What are you doing today?’