Standing on the up escalator at Baker Street Station, he asks her which famous person she is most looking forward to seeing in the museum. Her answer does not please him. He fucking hates Johnny Depp and those pirate films he is in. More than that, it seems possible that in selecting Depp, she was sending a deliberate message that he, Balázs, was ‘not her type’, that he shouldn’t get any ideas. (Why hadn’t she said Bruce Willis?) He wishes he hadn’t asked her the question, and doesn’t speak again as they leave the station.
Out in the sunlight at street level, they look for the museum. When they find it, the queue of people waiting ‘to meet the stars’ is shocking. Where it starts, far up a side street, there is a sort of diffuse, subsidiary queue of people wondering whether to join the main queue, which is marked, every twenty metres or so, with signs indicating how long the wait will be from that point — Approx. 2½ hrs is the first, though that itself is quite far from where the queue is now being supplied with new material. Further ahead — in the vicinity of Approx. 1 hr — mime artists and a man on stilts attempt to entertain distraught and exhausted children.
Balázs, absorbing the situation with weary stoicism, takes his place in the queue. He is docile and long-suffering when it comes to queuing — he takes a sort of joyless pride in waiting his turn, and in not being deterred by having to do so.
‘We’re not really going to wait, are we?’ she says, standing beside him.
‘Well…’
She laughs. ‘I mean, we’ll be here for hours.’
‘Yeah,’ Balázs agrees.
‘Do we really want to do that?’
‘I dunno.’
She folds her arms and they stand there for a minute or two in the fresh shade of the early-summer morning, a minute or two during which the queue does not move at all, and Balázs senses a souring of her mood — she has started to frown at her own feet. ‘Shou’ we do something else then?’ he ventures, lighting a Park Lane.
‘Like what?’ she asks.
He shrugs, looks uninspired.
‘We could just walk a bit,’ she suggests.
There is a glimmer of green at the end of the side street and they start to walk towards it, initially in silence.
Just as the silence is threatening to turn awkward, she says, ‘When did you get back from Iraq?’
‘Uh.’ He has to think for a moment. ‘Eight years ago.’
It seems amazing — awful — that eight years have passed since then.
In fact it is more — it was December 2004, that winter day, the windy airfield. Home. ‘Eight and a half,’ he says, making the amendment. He was twenty then, had been in the army since he was eighteen. He tells her that he stayed in the army for a year or two after that.
‘And what have you been doing since then?’ she asks. ‘Working at the gym?’
‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘working at the gym, and some other things.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘I was a security guard for a bit.’ He asks her if she knows a particular Tesco in Budapest. She says she does. ‘There,’ he says.
The subject seems likely to peter out at this point, and then she says, ‘What was that like?’
What was that like? Well, there was the humid nylon pseudo-law-enforcement uniform, the hours of loitering near the entrance, the dull CCTV screens of the security station. ‘It was okay,’ he says.
They have arrived at a perpendicular street. On the other side is a stunning cliff face of pristine cream houses, through a wide opening in which the green trees of a park are visible. The street they are walking down goes through the opening, where it acquires a red tarmac cycle lane, and on into the park. They wait at the lights while the traffic streams past. This place, he thinks, staring at the high houses while they wait, is made of money. He says, ‘I got sacked in the end. From Tesco.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Suspected collusion with shoplifters,’ he says.
‘Suspected?’
‘Yeah, suspected. I didn’t collude with anybody.’
‘Why did they suspect you then?’
‘Well, they were losing a lot of stuff. So I wasn’t much good at the job anyway.’ It was true that he had had a tendency to fall for what turned out to be diversionary tactics. The staged scuffle, the fake heart attack, the swarthy old woman selling violets, the old man with the never-ending story. He was probably a soft touch that way. That might have been what the manager thought too. Still, it’s easier to sack someone for being dishonest.
‘Isn’t it?’ he says.
They have entered the park and are walking along an asphalt path that follows the edge of a thin, green lake. There aren’t many people around.
‘Did you contest it?’ she asks.
‘Nah. They said if I went quietly they’d give me a decent reference, so…’ He shrugs.
‘And did they?’
‘Yeah,’ he admits.
‘And then you got the job at the gym?’
‘Well, yeah, eventually.’
At its narrowest point, there is a small wooden bridge over the lake and they walk out onto it.
‘But that’s not really enough,’ he says. ‘In itself. It’s only part-time really. So I’ve got to do other stuff as well.’
‘Stuff like this,’ she suggests.
‘Well, yeah,’ he says. They have stopped on the bridge, and looking out at the murky green water he lights a cigarette. He seems uneasy, even embarrassed, that she has touched on why they are in London — or had he touched on it first? He hadn’t meant to, he doesn’t think. Indeed, he shies away from the subject, and says, ‘When I was a kid, I wanted to be a water-polo player.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yeah. I was alright,’ he tells her. ‘I thought I might do it professionally.’
‘And?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘It didn’t happen somehow. Maybe I wasn’t aggressive enough. There were other guys, more aggressive.’ He is squinting at the water. ‘Anyway, it didn’t happen.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Yeah.’ He had thought it was something he had entirely come to terms with. Just for a moment, though, he feels the pain of it again — feels it, in fact, more nearly, more immediately than he ever has before. It’s as though he understands, for the first time, exactly what was at stake — his whole life, everything.
‘What did you want to do,’ he asks, ‘when you were a kid?’
The question sounds odd somehow.
She seems to think, for a few seconds, about whether to answer it at all.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Escape.’
She puts her hands on the sun-pocked paint of the wooden bridge and looks down into the water. Green water, feathers floating on it. ‘It’s a shame we don’t have some bread for those ducks. There’s something so restful about feeding ducks, isn’t there?’
Balázs joins her at the handrail.