Her friends are starting to leave.
‘Sleeping!’
She says that with a laugh that unsettles him, makes him feel that maybe their whole interaction has been, for her, a sort of joke, something with no significance, something that will lead nowhere. And he wants her now. He wants her. She is wearing denim hot pants, he sees for the first time, and sandals with a slight heel.
‘What about later?’ he says, trying not to sound desperate. The sense of effortlessness has evaporated. It evaporated the moment she seemed happy to leave without any prospect of seeing him again.
Now, however, she lingers.
Her friends are leaving, and yet she is still there, lingering.
‘You want to meet later?’ she says, with some seriousness.
‘I want to see you again.’
She looks at him for a few moments. ‘We’ll be in Jesters tonight,’ she says. ‘You know Jesters?’
‘I heard of it,’ Bérnard says. ‘I never been there.’
‘Okay,’ she says, still with this serious look on her face. And she tells him, in unnecessary detail, and making sure he understands, how to find it.
‘Okay,’ he says, smiling easily again. ‘I’ll see you there. Okay?’
She nods, and hurries to join her friends, who are waiting near the door.
He watches them leave and then, squirting more sauce onto it, unhurriedly finishes his kebab.
His mood, of course, is totally transformed. He fucking loves this place now, Protaras. Walking down the street in the sun, everything looks different, everything pleases his eye. He wonders whether he’s in love, and then stops at the pharmacy next to McDonald’s for a ten-pack of Durex.
‘Hello, my friend,’ he says to the smiling man, who is on duty in the humid lobby of the Hotel Poseidon.
‘Good morning, sir. You slept well, sir?’
‘Very well,’ Bérnard says, without thinking. ‘Yesterday you said something, about another hotel, the swimming pool…?’
‘The Hotel Vangelis, yes, sir.’
‘Where is that?’
—
Bérnard, eventually finding the Hotel Vangelis, says he is staying at the Hotel Poseidon, pays ten euros, gets stamped on the hand with a smudged logo, and then follows a pointed finger down a passage smelling of pool chemicals to a locker room, and the sudden noise and dazzle of the aqua park.
In knee-length trunks, he swims. His skin is milky from the Lille winter. He does a few sedate laps of the serious swimmers’ pool, then queues with kids for a spin on the water slide. Next he tries the wave-machine pool, lifting and sinking in the water, in the chlorine sparkle, one wet head among many, all the time thinking of Iveta.
And still thinking of her afterwards, drying on a sunlounger. His eyes are shut. His hair looks orangeish when it is wet. There is a tuft of it in the middle of his flat, white chest. His arms and legs are long and smooth. The trunks hang wetly on his loins and thighs, sticking to them heavily.
Slowly, the sun swings round.
One of the pools features a bar — a circular, straw-roofed structure in the shallow end, the seats of the stools that surround it set just above the surface of the water. Where it touches the side of the pool, there is a gate that allows the barman to enter the dry interior, where the drinks are kept in a stainless-steel fridge.
Some time in the afternoon, Bérnard is wallowing in this shallow pool, thinking of Iveta, when, on a whim, he paddles over and takes a seat on one of the stools. His legs, still in the water, look white as marble. He orders a Keo. He is impatient for evening, for Iveta. The day has started to be tiresome.
He is sitting there, under the thatch, holding his plastic pot of lager and looking mostly at his blue-veined feet, when a voice quite near him says, ‘Hello again.’
A woman’s voice.
He looks up.
It is the woman from the Hotel Poseidon, the fat one he spoke to in the microwave queue last night. She and her even fatter daughter are wading towards him through the shallow turquoise water of the pool — and weirdly, though they are in the pool, they are both wearing dresses, simple ones that hang from stringy shoulder straps, sticking wetly to their immense midriffs, and floating soggily on the waterline.
‘Hello again,’ the mother says, reaching the stool next to Bérnard’s, her face and shoulders and her colossal cleavage sunburnt, her great barrel of a body filling the thin wet dress.
‘Hello,’ Bérnard says.
The daughter, moving slowly in the water, has arrived at the next stool along. She, it seems, is more careful in the sun than her mother — her skin everywhere has a lardy pallor. Only her face has a very slight tan.
‘Hello,’ Bérnard says to her, politely.
He wonders — with a mixture of amusement and pity — whether she will be able to sit on the stool. Surely not.
Somehow, though, she manages it.
Her mother is already in place. She says, ‘Not bad, this, is it?’
Bérnard is still looking at the daughter. ‘Yeah, it’s good,’ he says.
‘Better than we expected, I have to say.’
‘It’s good,’ Bérnard says again.
When the two of them have their sweating plastic tankards of Magners, the older woman says, ‘So what do you think of the Hotel Poseidon then?’ The tone in which she asks the question suggests that she doesn’t think much of it herself.
‘It’s okay,’ Bérnard answers.
‘You think so?’
‘Yeah. Okay,’ he admits, ‘maybe there are some problems…’
The woman laughs. ‘You can say that again.’
‘Yeah, okay,’ Bérnard says. ‘Like my shower, you can say.’
‘Your shower? What about your shower?’
Bérnard explains the situation with his shower — which the smiling man this morning again warned him against using. It would, he promised Bérnard, be sorted out by tomorrow.
The older woman turns to her daughter. ‘Well, that’s just typical,’ she says, ‘isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ she says again, and the younger woman, who is drinking her Magners through a straw, nods.
‘We’ve had no end of things like that,’ the mother says to Bérnard. ‘Like what happened with the towels.’
‘The towels?’
‘One morning the towels go missing,’ she tells him. ‘While we’re downstairs. They just disappear. Don’t they?’ she asks her daughter, who nods again.
‘And then,’ the mother says, ‘when we ask for some more, they tell us we must have stolen them. They say we’ve got to pay forty euros for new ones, or we won’t get our passports back.’
Bérnard murmurs sympathetically.
He has a swig of his drink. He is still fascinated by the daughter’s body — by the pillow-sized folds of fat on her sitting midriff, the way her elbows show only as dimples in the distended shapes of her arms. How small her head seems…
Her mother is talking about something else now, about some Bulgarians in the next room. ‘Keep us up half the night, shouting and God knows what,’ she says. ‘The walls are like paper. We can hear everything — and I do mean everything. We call them the vulgar Bulgars, don’t we?’ she says to her daughter. ‘You know what we saw them doing? We saw them stealing food from the dining room.’
Bérnard laughs.
‘Why they would want to steal that food I don’t know. It’s awful. Well, you experienced it last night. You ask if they’ve any fish — I mean we are next to the sea, aren’t we — they bring you a tin of tuna. It’s unbelievable. And the flies, especially at lunchtime. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not fit for human consumption. We were both down with the squits for a few days last week,’ she says, and Bérnard, unwilling to dwell on that idea, lets his thoughts drift again to Iveta — her thin tanned thighs, her pretty feet in the jewelly sandals — while the fat Englishwoman keeps talking.