‘Whatever,’ Gábor said.
The house spat her out at four in the morning, just as the birds were starting to sing in the railinged gardens.
She was drunk. As they drove through the empty streets, she apologised for hiccupping, and then, when she couldn’t stop, seemed to get the giggles.
‘You’re in a good mood,’ Gábor said, fixing her momentarily in the rear-view mirror. ‘D’you have fun then?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said softly.
‘You’re drunk.’
‘Yes, I’m drunk. I’ve had about two bottles of champagne.’
‘Champagne?’ Gábor said. ‘Nice.’
She ignored the sarcasm. ‘Not really.’
‘No? Did he make you drink it?’
She turned to the window, to the blue streets, dawn seeping into them. Monday morning. ‘It helps,’ she said.
—
Tuesday night, the one after the incident with the Indians, is her night off. When she appears as usual at four p.m., Gábor says that Zoli has invited them out. He seems surprised and hurt when she tells him she is tired and wants to stay in. Later he tries again to persuade her — Balázs hears this through the wall — and when he meets with no success, emerges himself in a sharply pressed indigo shirt and extends the invitation half-heartedly to Balázs, who says that he, too, is tired and wants to stay in. Without making any effort to persuade him, Gábor phones Zoli and apologetically passes on the news that Emma won’t be joining them.
‘Nah,’ he says, standing in the middle of the living room with his phone to his ear, ‘nah, she wants to stay in. She says she wants to stay in.’ Zoli says something. ‘I did tell her that,’ Gábor says. Zoli makes some other point, and Gábor says, with feeling, ‘I know, I know.’ Finally Zoli desists and Gábor mixes a JD and Coke in the pine kitchenette, and having hurriedly swallowed it, heads out into the evening.
When the slam of the door has dissipated, a very pure silence settles on the small flat.
Balázs, pretending to read Harry Potter és a Titkok Kamrája, listens hard for any sound, any sign of life from the other room.
After about twenty minutes he hears what sounds like the squeak of a bedspring.
Some time after that — quite a long time, during which his hopeful theory that she turned down the night out specifically so that she would find herself alone in the flat with him is severely tested by the uninterrupted silence — he puts down the novel, with which he is making little progress and, passing quietly through the hall, goes out to get himself some supper.
Her light was on when he left — he saw it under the door.
When he gets back he sees, with a squeeze of disappointment, that it is off. He should have tapped on her door before he went out and asked if she wanted anything. That would have been the obvious thing to do. Now it is too late. Without enthusiasm, he eats his food and, when he has finished, lights the first of a long sequence of Park Lanes.
When he finally falls asleep, it is after two o’clock and the ashtray on the floor next to the sofa is full.
3
‘Is there any coffee?’ she asks, hearing him stir.
She is in the kitchenette, in her dressing gown, opening pine cupboards.
‘No,’ he says, squinting. The room is full of clean sunlight. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘I only drink coffee in the morning,’ she explains. It is ten o’clock in the morning, a time when they are normally asleep.
Naked in his sleeping bag but for a pair of black nylon briefs, Balázs does not move from where he is. ‘Did…Did Gábor get back?’ he asks.
‘He’s sleeping,’ she says.
She has stopped searching the cupboards and is just staring at the kitchenette.
‘Where can I get some coffee?’ she wonders.
And as if it were the simplest thing in the world, he makes his suggestion.
‘If you like,’ he says, ‘I know a place.’
She looks at him, sitting there, up to his waist in the sleeping bag, his tattooed biceps and toaster-like pecs, his small pale eyes obscurely imploring.
—
They are in the habit of speaking to each other now, up to a point. Still, it feels extremely intimate to pass through the downstairs hall together, to leave the house, and walk down the street.
Balázs knows the way to the high street well by now and has seen some coffee places there, some with a few metal tables outside on the narrow, stained pavement. They sit on aluminium chairs, under a restless awning. He is wearing his sunglasses, the soldierly plastic wraparounds with their iridescent wing-shaped lenses, and his orange T-shirt is tucked into his jeans. He sucks at the lid of his coffee cup and looks at the sunny, trading street. ‘Nice day,’ he says.
Also wearing sunglasses, she just smiles, not unsympathetically.
‘Did you sleep okay?’ he asks.
She says she did.
As if aware of some possible impropriety in the situation, she is, it seems, pointedly unforthcoming.
There is a silence.
Wondering what to say next, Balázs has another go at his coffee cup.
Unable to think of anything, he offers her a Park Lane, which she takes. He lights it for her. There is a simple glass ashtray on the aluminium tabletop.
Then he says, ‘I thought I might have a look round today. See some sights or whatever.’ He had hoped she would show some immediate enthusiasm for this idea but she doesn’t. Sitting on the other side of the little round table in a sleeveless top that shows the tattooed sprig of barbed wire encircling her slender upper arm, she just takes a pull of the Park Lane and says nothing. ‘There must be loads to see here,’ he says. When she still doesn’t play along, he opts for a more direct approach, and asks, ‘There anything you want to see? While we’re here.’
She sort of laughs. ‘I don’t know.’
The laugh is very discouraging, and he is about to drop the whole subject, when she says, without seeming interested, ‘What is there?’
‘Well, uh.’ He tries to sound spontaneous. ‘There’s some waxworks place, isn’t there?’
‘Oh, that.’ She seems a lot less into it than Gábor had suggested.
‘What about that?’ he suggests.
She says she doesn’t know where it is.
He says it wouldn’t be a problem to find out.
She seems amused now. She is smiling at him as if he amuses her. ‘Are you really interested?’
He shrugs. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You don’t seem like that sort of person.’
‘What sort of person?’
Still evasively smiling, she says, ‘You know what I mean.’
‘The sort who’s interested in waxworks?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m interested in waxworks,’ he says, implausibly. And then, seeing an opening, ‘What sort of person do I seem like?’
She ignores the question. ‘What time is it?’
He looks at his watch, its muddle of intersecting dials, most of which seem to have no function, and tells her.
‘You’re really interested?’ she asks.
And with a totally straight face, he says, ‘Yeah.’
—
They have to take the underground, and he enjoys, standing in the noisy train, the envy of the other men, the way they watch her in her tall shoes and torn denim. She seems not to notice that she is being looked at, or to notice anything, as she sways with the movements of the train, her sunglasses fixed on some advertisement for a dating service or hair-loss product, or the diagram of the line.
She had said to Balázs, while they were waiting on the platform at Finsbury Park, that she was impressed by his English. Where had he learned it? ‘Iraq,’ he said, surprisingly, and he told her, while they waited, about his time there. He didn’t try to pretend that it had been exciting, or even very interesting. He had spent more or less the entire time in various town-sized bases, playing computer games in plain, air-conditioned rooms and eating American food. He had spoken to not a single Iraqi — except one interpreter who had tried to sell him drugs — and had never fired his weapon. He had done some patrols, though even that only involved travelling around in an armoured vehicle, peering through a tiny window at the flat, beige land. Nothing had ever happened. His most abiding memory, he tells her, was of the heat, the way it took you the moment you stepped out of the air conditioning, the instant watery profuseness of the sweat.