All That Man Is (12 page)

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 take-off. 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.

Gábor says, ‘And your job …' He finds a more satisfactory pronoun. ‘
Our
job is to look after her. Okay?'

Balázs simply nods.

‘Okay,' Gábor says, with finality, having performed what was obviously an embarrassing task. ‘Just thought I'd tell you.' He drops his cigarette and extinguishes it under the toe of his trainer. ‘See you inside.'

Mimicking his employer, Balázs toes out his own cigarette. Then he lights another, and squints out at the shimmer standing on the tarmac.

The flight is uneventful. The plane is full, but Gábor has paid for priority boarding and they have seats together – Balázs squashed into the window seat, Gábor stretching his legs in the aisle, and Emma in the middle, listening to music and staring at the plastic seat-back a few inches from the tip of her nose.

Balázs concentrates on the window. There is nothing to see, except a section of wing and fierce light on the endless expanse of white fluffiness far below. You would fall straight through it, he thinks, solid as it looks. He isn't sure, now, that he understood what Gábor meant when he said that Emma would be ‘doing some work' in London. Had he even heard him properly? The light hurts his eyes and he half-lowers the plastic shutter. He folds his swollen hands in his lap and sits there, listening to the serrated whisper of her headphones, only just perceptible over the massive white noise of the labouring engines.

*

Zoli meets them at Luton airport in a long silver Mercedes.

Zoli is tall, and not unhandsome, and manages a moustache without looking silly. He has an air of slightly savage intelligence about him – he is in fact a doctor, a gynaecologist, though not currently practising. It is true that there is an unhealthy puffiness to his face, a swollenness, his eyes protruding more than is ideal, but Balázs does not notice these things until he sees them, intermittently, in the rear-view mirror – he is sitting in the back of the Mercedes with Emma, the lowered leather armrest emphatically separating them – as they make their way towards London.

They do so with single-minded speed, Zoli pushing the powerful car through holes in the traffic on the motorway. Holding onto the spring-hinged handle over the window, Balázs sees fleeting past a landscape somehow more thoroughly filled than any in his own country. It seems more orderly. It is very obviously more monied. It is early June and everything looks plump and fresh.

Gábor lights a cigarette. He is sitting in the front with Zoli, who immediately tells him to put it out.

Gábor apologises and presses it into the ashtray.

Still forcing the Mercedes forward, Zoli explains that he has borrowed it from a friend of his who has a luxury limousine hire service. He promised he wouldn't smoke in it.

‘Sorry,' Gábor says again. Then he says, ‘This is the new S-Class, yeah? Very nice.'

Zoli agrees vaguely.

He is in his early thirties, only a few years older than the others. Even so, Gábor is having trouble relating to him as an equal, something he normally manages quite easily with older and more important-seeming men. They
had
made some small talk as they drove out of the airport – though even that came to an abrupt end (Gábor was in the middle of saying something) when Zoli had to pay for the parking – and, as they head into London, Gábor's usual effortless friendliness seems to have faltered. Whether that is because he is simply intimidated by Zoli, or for some other reason, Balázs does not know. Seeing them shake hands in the arrivals lounge the situation had seemed to him to be this – they had met before but did not know each other well. Zoli and Emma, on the other hand, seemed never to have met. Gábor introduced them, with a strange sort of formality, and Zoli was very friendly to her – a wide smile, a pair of kisses. To Balázs – obviously the minder, with his shit clothes and his muscles – he had offered only a peremptory handshake. Then he had hurried them to short-term parking. They were in a hurry because, as Zoli said, ‘There's one tonight' and what with the delay they were pressed for time, as they had first to go to the flat. Zoli, it seemed, had sorted out a flat for them to stay in while they were in London.

They spend some time stuck in traffic, the flow of the motorway silting up as it enters the metropolis. They are slowed by traffic lights. (The air conditioning is on – outside the tinted windows London, what they are able to see of it, swelters.) Then there are smaller thoroughfares, a more local look to things. There are neighbourhoods, parks, high streets, overflowing pubs. Smudged impressions of urban life on an early summer evening. All that goes on for much longer than Balázs imagined it would.

Finally they arrive. The flat is on a quiet street with a few trees in it. Small two-storey houses, all exactly the same. They wait with their luggage and Duty Free while Zoli opens the front door of one of them, swearing to himself as he struggles with the unfamiliar keys. They walk up some narrow stairs to the upper floor, where there is another struggle with the keys, and then they go in. One bedroom, white and sparsely furnished. For Balázs, the sofa in the living room, which overlooks the quiet road. On the other side of the landing, lurking mustily, is a windowless bathroom, into which Emma disappears with her washbag as soon as they arrive.

The men wait in the living room, Gábor on the sofa, Zoli pacing slowly and taking in the view from the uncurtained window, and Balázs just standing there staring at the old lion-coloured carpet and its mass of cigarette burns and other blemishes. Gábor wonders out loud where they might get something to eat. Zoli offers only an uninterested shrug. He says he doesn't know the area well – he lives in another part of London. Turning to the window again, he says the high street is nearby – there will be something there.

‘D'you mind popping out,' Gábor says to Balázs, ‘and getting some kebabs or something?'

Balázs looks up from the carpet. ‘Okay.'

‘Do you want something?' Gábor says.

The question is addressed to Zoli. He is still staring out the window and doesn't answer.

‘Zoli?' Gábor says, tentatively. ‘D'you want something?'

‘No,' he says, without turning.

‘Okay. So, yeah, just get some kebabs,' Gábor says.

Balázs nods. Then he asks, ‘How many should I get?'

‘I don't know. I'll have one. Do you want one?'

‘Uh … Yeah.'

‘And Emma might want one. Four?' Gábor suggests.

The stairs are almost too narrow for his shoulders, he almost has to make his way down sideways. The downstairs hall is dark, despite the frosted square pane in the front door, which opens as he nears the foot of the stairs and admits a youngish woman in a charcoal trouser suit. She leaves the door open for him. Otherwise they ignore each other.

It is very warm and light out in the street, a nice soft evening light that flatters the parked Merc. He lights a Park Lane, and then sets off through the little mazy streets of pinched, identical houses in the direction Zoli had indicated. It takes him twenty minutes to find the high street, and when he does there seems to be nowhere selling specifically kebabs. He walks up and down, sweating now in the summer evening, his orange T-shirt stuck to his skin. He notices a Polish supermarket, and the number of non-white people in the street. Then he phones Gábor. ‘Is chicken okay?' he says.

Gábor doesn't seem to understand the question. ‘What?'

‘Chicken,' Balázs says emphatically. ‘Is it okay?'

‘Chicken?'

‘Yeah.' He is standing outside a fried chicken place. The street lights have just flickered on, greenish. There is a faint smell of putrefaction. ‘There's this fried chicken place …' he says.

‘Yeah, that's fine,' Gábor tells him. Then, ‘I mean – does it look okay?'

Balázs looks at the place. ‘Yeah, it looks okay.'

‘Yeah, fine,' Gábor says. ‘And don't be too long. We've got to leave at ten.'

Balázs slips his phone into the hip pocket of his jeans and steps into the pitiless light. There is a small queue. While he waits he studies the menu – some backlit plastic panels – and when it is his turn, orders without mishap. (His English is quite fluent; he learned it in Iraq – it was the only way they could communicate with the Polish soldiers they were stationed with, and of course with whatever Americans they happened to meet.) He has trouble, though, finding his way back to the flat and has to phone Gábor again for help. Then they sit in the living room, he and Gábor, on the low sofa, eating with their hands from the flimsy grease-stained boxes. The overhead light is on in its torn paper shade and the stagnant air is full of loitering smoke and the smell of their meal, in the hurried eating of which Balázs is so involved that he does not notice Emma's presence until Zoli speaks.

Then he lifts his head.

His mouth is full and his fingers are shiny with the grease of the chicken pieces. She is standing in the doorway.

‘Wow,' Zoli had said.

And now, as if speaking Balázs's thoughts, he says it again.

‘
Wow
.'

Later, sitting in the pearly Merc, he finds an after-image of how she had looked, standing in the doorway, still singed into his vision as he stares out of the window at other things. The London night is as glossy as the page of a magazine. Nobody speaks now as the smoothly moving Merc takes them into the heart of the city, where the money is.

It is awkward, especially that first night. In the driver's seat, Gábor seems morose – he spends a lot of time with his head lolling on the leather headrest, staring out through the windscreen at the plutocratic side street in which they are parked, or studying the Tibetan inscription tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. Unusually for him, he hardly says a word for hours at a time. The hotel is a few minutes' walk away, on the avenue known as Park Lane – after which Balázs's inexpensive cigarettes, he has now learned, are named.

When they arrived, Zoli made a phone call. A few minutes later they were joined by a young woman, also Hungarian, who was introduced as Juli and who, it seemed, worked at the hotel. Then she, Zoli and Emma set off, and Gábor told Balázs that the two of them would be waiting there, in the parked Merc, until Emma returned.

It is a pretty miserable night they spend there, mostly in a silence exacerbated by the tepid stillness of the weather.

There are instances of listless conversation, such as when Gábor asks Balázs whether this is his first time in London. Balázs says it is, and Gábor suggests that he might like to do some sightseeing. When Balázs, showing polite interest, asks what he should see, Gábor seems at a loss for a few moments, then mentions Madame Tussauds. ‘They have waxworks of famous people,' he says. ‘You know.' He tries to think of one, a famous person. ‘Messi,' he says finally. ‘Whatever. Emma wants to see it. Anyway, it's something for you to do, if you want.'

‘Okay, yeah,' Balázs says, nodding thoughtfully.

They then lapse into a long silence, except for Gábor's index finger tapping the upholstered steering wheel, a sound like slow dripping, slowly filling a dark sink of preoccupation from which Balázs's next question, asked some time later, seems mysteriously to flow.