They are English, these two, he has worked that out now.
‘One day we thought, enough’s enough, we’re going to eat somewhere else,’ the older woman says. ‘So we asked our rep about good places to eat and he suggested this place the Aphrodite…Do you know it?’
Bérnard shakes his head.
‘Well, we went there on Saturday,’ she says, ‘and after spending over fifty euros on drinks and dinner, I went to the toilet and was told I had to pay a euro to use it. Well, I wasn’t happy and I told the woman I was a customer. And she said that doesn’t matter, you still have to pay. And I said well, I’m not paying, and when I tried to go into the toilet anyway, she pushed me away. She physically pushed me away. Wouldn’t let me use it. So I asked to speak to the manager, and after about fifteen minutes this man appears — Nick, he says his name is — and when I explain to him what happened, he just laughs, laughs in my face. And when that happened…Well, I got so angry. He just laughed in my face. Can you imagine. The Aphrodite,’ she says. ‘Stay away from it.’
‘I will,’ Bérnard tells her.
‘We love Cyprus,’ she says, moving on her stool. ‘Every year we come here. Don’t we? I’m Sandra, by the way. And this is Charmian.’
‘Bérnard,’ says Bérnard.
They stay there drinking for two hours, until the hotel’s shadow starts to move over them. They get quite drunk. And then Bérnard, whose thoughts have never been far from Iveta and what will happen that evening, notices the time and says he has to leave.
The two women have just ordered another pair of Magners — their fourth or fifth — and Sandra says, ‘We’ll see you at supper then.’
Bérnard is wading away. ‘Okay,’ he says.
Showering in the locker room a few minutes later, he has already forgotten about them.
—
When he wakes up it is dark. He is in his room in the Hotel Poseidon. The narrow room is very hot and music thuds from the place nearby.
It was about six when he got back from the Hotel Vangelis, and having a slight headache, he thought he would lie down for a while before supper. He must have fallen into a deep sleep. Sitting up suddenly, he looks at his watch, fearful that it might be too late to find Iveta at Jesters. It is only ten, though, and he lies down again. He is sweating in the close heat of the room. Last night he tried the air conditioning, and it didn’t work.
He washes, as best he can, at the sink.
The light in the bathroom is so dim he can barely see his face in the mirror.
Then he tidies up a bit. It is his assumption that Iveta will be in this room later, and he does not want it littered with his dirty stuff.
He spends quite a lot of time deciding what to wear, finally opting for the dressier look of the plain white shirt, and leaving the horizontally striped polo for another night. He leaves the top three buttons of the shirt undone, so that it is open down to the tuft of hair on his sternum, and digs in his suitcase for the tiny sample of Ermenegildo Zegna Uomo that was once stuck to a magazine in his uncle’s office. He squirts about half of it on himself, and then, after inquisitively sniffing his wrists, squirts the other half on as well.
Satisfied, he turns his attention to his hair, combing back the habitual mop to the line of his skull — thereby disclosing, unusually, his low forehead — and holding the combed hair in place with a generous scoop of scented gel.
In the buzzing light of the bathroom he inspects himself.
He buttons the third button of his shirt.
Then he unbuttons it again.
Then he buttons it again.
His forehead, paler than the rest of his face, looks weird, he thinks.
Working with the comb he tries to hide it, but that just makes it look even weirder.
Finally, impatient with himself, he tries to put the hair back the way it was before.
There is still something weird about it, and he worries as he hurries down the stairs to the lobby and, in a travelling zone of Uomo, out into the warm night.
It is nearly eleven now, and he has not eaten anything. It’s not that he is hungry — far from it — it’s just that he feels he ought to ‘line’ his stomach.
He stops at Porkies and eats part of a kebab, forcing a few mouthfuls down. He is almost shaking with excitement, with anticipation. He tries to still his nerves with a vodka-Red Bull, and with the memories of how easily they talked in the morning, of how eagerly she had told him how to find Jesters — she practically drew him a map. The memories help.
He abandons the kebab and starts for Jesters, through the heaving streets.
He finds it easily, following a pack of shirtless singing youths to its shed-like facade, outlined in hellish neon tubes. The looming neon cap-and-bells, the drunken queue.
Five euros, he hands over.
Inside, he looks for her.
Moving through strobe light, through a wall of throbbing sound, he looks for her.
The place is solid flesh. Limbs flickering in darkness. He could search all night, he thinks, and not find her.
Holding his expensive Beck’s, he scans the place with increasing desperation. For the first time it occurs to him that she might not actually be there.
He has a nervous pull of the lager and pushes his way through a hedge of partying anonymity.
Some girls, on heat, are flaunting on a platform.
At their feet, a pool of staring lads in sweat-wet T-shirts. He watches for a moment, up-skirting with the other males, and then, with a shock of adrenalin, he sees someone, a face he sort of knows — one of her friends from this morning, he thinks it is, moving away from him.
He follows her. His eyes stuck to the skin of her exposed back, its dull shine of perspiration, he tears a path through interlacing limbs.
And she leads him to Iveta. She leads him to Iveta. He sees her in a pop of light as the music winds up. She does not see him. Her eyes are shut. She is in a man’s hands, mouths melting together.
And then the hit crashes into its chorus.
5
The Hotel Vangelis, the next afternoon. Waist deep in water he is at the in-pool bar, drinking Cypriot lager and absorbing sunburn. He still smells of Ermenegildo Zegna Uomo. He had welcomed the arrival, about an hour before, of Sandra and Charmian. They are stationed next to him now, huge on their submerged stools, and Sandra is talking. She is telling him how the man she always refers to as ‘Charmian’s father’ died horrifically after falling into a vat of molten zinc — he worked in an industrial installation of some sort — and how heartbroken she was after that. Tasting his Keo, Bérnard appreciates the parity she seems to accord that event and his finding a girl he had only just met snogging someone else in a nightclub.
Already quite drunk, and exhausted by a night spent wandering the litter-strewn streets of Protaras, he had told them about that. He found he wanted to talk about it. And when he had finished his story, Sandra sighed and said she knew how he felt, and told him the story of her husband’s death.
It was awful enough to be on the news — she is telling him how upsetting it was to see strangers talking about it on the local TV news.
‘And the worst thing,’ she says, ‘is they think he was alive for up to twenty seconds after he fell in.’
‘When did it happen?’ Bérnard asks her morosely.
‘Nine years ago,’ Sandra says, sighing again. ‘And I miss him every single day.’
Bérnard finishes his Keo and hands the empty plastic pot to the barman.
‘What do you do, Bernard?’ Sandra asks him, pronouncing his name the English way.
He tells her he was working for his uncle, until he was sacked.