Gábor laughs. ‘What haven’t they got?’
She puts a plate with two slices of bread on it on the small, square table next to Balázs’s Michaelangelesque elbow. (His mouth working, he acknowledges it with a nod of his head.)
Gábor says, ‘We’ll find you something. Whatever.’
‘You’ve got business there, have you?’ the woman says.
‘That’s right.’
‘And your friend?’ she asks. (Balázs keeps on eating.) ‘Has he got business there too?’
‘He’s helping me.’
‘Is he?’ She is staring straight at him, at ‘Gábor’s friend’ — a sun-toughened lump of muscle in a tight T-shirt, skin tattooed, face lightly pockmarked.
‘Security,’ Gábor specifies.
‘How’s the cabbage?’ she asks, still staring at Balázs. ‘Okay?’
He looks up. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Thanks.’
She turns back to Gábor. ‘And what’s Emma going to do while you two take care of your business?’
‘What do you think?’ Gábor says. ‘Shopping.’
—
They aren’t actually friends. They know each other from the gym. Balázs is Gábor’s personal trainer, though Gábor’s attendance is uneven — he might turn up four or five times one week, then not for a whole month, thus undoing all the work they put in together on the machines and treadmills. He also eats and drinks too much of too many of the wrong things. When he does show up, Emma is sometimes with him, and sometimes she is there on her own. These days she is there more often than he is — Monday, Wednesday, Friday, every week. All the men who work at the gym want to fuck her, Balázs isn’t alone in that. He wants it more than the others though — or he wants something more than they do, something more from her. It’s starting to be an unhealthy, obsessive thing.
She doesn’t even acknowledge him when she comes into the kitchen. Without seeming to (he is lighting a Park Lane) he notices that she is wearing the cork-soled platform shoes that make him think of pornography. In fact, he has an idea that Gábor — like not a few of the members of the gym, with their BMWs parked outside — is somehow involved in the production of pornography. One of the BMW drivers even offered him a part in a film, offered him a month’s wages for one day’s ‘work’ — Balázs had the well-muscled, tattoo-festooned look the producer favoured. His lightly pockmarked face was apparently not a problem, though the man had intimated that his size might be. Balázs had turned him down; partly to leave no hint that he was worried he might be too small, he had told him, or implied, that his girlfriend wouldn’t let him do it. That wasn’t true. He has no girlfriend.
Nor was it that he didn’t need the money. He did. He needs whatever bits and pieces of extra work he can find. He has been employed by Gábor as a minder several times already — usually when he visits people at their offices, often in smart villas in the leafier parts of Budapest — though what Gábor does exactly, and what his business is in London, Balázs does not know.
—
The easyJet flight to Luton is four hours delayed. Gábor does not take this well. He seems especially concerned about Zoli, who for a while he is unable to reach on the phone. Zoli is evidently some associate of his in London, who will be meeting them at the airport, and Gábor is frantic at the idea that he might have to wait for them there for hours. When Gábor finally speaks to him, Zoli already knows about the delay.
They are by then installed at a table in the sun-dappled interior of the terminal. Gábor finishes apologising to Zoli and puts down his phone. ‘It’s alright,’ he says.
Balázs nods and takes a mouthful of lager. The two men each have a half-litre of Heineken.
Balázs wonders how it will be in London. He imagines meetings in soporific offices, himself standing near the door, or waiting outside. For Emma, though, this is a sort of holiday so she and Gábor will probably want to have some time to themselves.
It is extremely stressful, he finds, to be in her presence outside the safely purposeful space of the gym. It was the same in the car, in Gábor’s Audi Q3, when she was there. Sometimes Gábor would go in somewhere and leave them in the car together — she in the front, Balázs in the back — and he would be so intensely aware of her presence, of the minuscule squeaks when she moved on the leather seat, or flipped down the sun visor to tweak an eyebrow in the vanity mirror, that, just to hold himself together, he had to fix his eyes on some object outside the darkened window and keep them there, unable to think about anything except how he had masturbated to her, twice, the previous night, which did not seem like a promising starting point for conversation. They never spoke. Sometimes they would be alone in the car for twenty minutes — Gábor was always away for at least twice as long as he said he would be — and they never spoke.
What she is like ‘as a person’ he has no idea. There is something princessy about her. She seems to look down on the staff in the gym — she isn’t friendly with them anyway. The women who work there hate her, and it is assumed that she is with Gábor, who is slightly shorter than her, for his money. She always listens to music while she works out, possibly to stop people trying to talk to her. Balázs has never seen her smile.
He was surprised to see what her mother was like, where she lived. He had expected something smarter, something in Buda maybe, a house with roses in front and a well-preserved fifty-year old offering them coffee, not that wreck of a woman living in that smoky hole of a flat. The time-browned tower block, the odours and voices of the stairwell, the neglected pot plants by the yellow window where the stairs turned — those things were all familiar to him. Most of the people he knew emanated from places like that, himself included. That she did, however, was a surprise.
He finishes the Heineken and says something about stepping outside for a cigarette. Gábor, waggling his fingers at the screen of his phone, says, ‘Yeah, okay. We’ll just be here.’ She does not even look up from her magazine.
—
He smokes on the observation terrace, from where, through a barrier of hardened glass, you can watch the planes taxiing to the end of the runway and taking off at intervals of a few minutes. Standing there and watching them through the feeble heat haze, the sound of the engines coming to him across several hundred metres of warm air, makes him think of the days he spent at Balad Air Base, with the rest of the Hungarian unit, waiting for the flight home. He now looks back on that year with something like nostalgia. He should have stayed in the army — it was safe there, and there were things to do. Since then he has just been treading water, waiting for something to happen…What was going to happen, though?
Gábor is standing there.
He lights a cigarette, a more expensive one than the Park Lanes Balázs smokes. ‘Sorry about the delay,’ he says.
In moulded plastic wrap-around shades, Balázs nods tolerantly.
Gábor seems nervous. It is as if he has something to say but isn’t sure how to say it.
Balázs has started to think that maybe he doesn’t have anything to say after all, when Gábor says, ‘I should tell you what we’ll be doing in London.’
There follow a few seconds during which they stare together at the scene in front of them — the open space of the airport in the sun, the smooth-skinned planes waiting in the shade near the terminal.
‘Emma,’ Gábor says, as if she were there and he were addressing her.
Balázs half-turns his head.
She isn’t there.
Gábor says, ‘Emma’s going to be doing some work in London.’
They watch as a narrow-bodied Lufthansa turboprop starts its takeoff. After a few hundred metres it leaps into the air with a steepness of ascent that is quite startling, as if it were being jerked into the sky on a string. They watch it dwindle to a point in the sky’s hazy dazzle, and then, at some indefinite moment, disappear.