All That Man Is (16 page)

‘Yeah?'

‘Yeah.' With his index fingers on the steering wheel, Gábor is staring straight ahead, through the wide windscreen at the long dark Mayfair street. ‘That's what I did, when I went.'

‘I didn't know that,' Balázs admits.

‘So what'd you do then?' Gábor asks. There is something strange about the question – if she has told him about the museum and the queue, then surely Gábor has asked her, and she has told him, what they did next. So why, Balázs wonders uneasily, is he asking
him
? Is he suspicious? Is he feeling for discrepancies with Emma's story?

‘Nothing really,' Balázs says. ‘Went for a walk. How was … How was last night?'

Gábor doesn't seem to mind changing the subject. ‘It was excellent,' he says. ‘You should've come.'

‘I was tired,' Balázs says apologetically.

‘Yeah?' It's as if Gábor doesn't quite believe him.

‘Yeah.'

‘I thought maybe you wanted to make a move on Emma.' Gábor is smiling when he says this – it might be a joke. ‘Especially when you went off together like that today.'

‘What d'you mean?' Balázs says.

‘No?' Gábor is still smiling.

‘No,' Balázs says. He feels the heat in his face, the way it seems to implicate him.

‘It's just that most guys around Emma,' Gábor says, looking at him slyly, ‘they've got their fucking tongues hanging out, you know what I mean? You don't seem that into her.'

‘No,' Balázs says.

That doesn't seem enough, though.

The way Gábor had said it – ‘You don't seem that into her' – it sounded like something that needed explaining.

‘You're not gay, are you?' Gábor says, as if it is something he has been meaning to ask for some time.

Balázs is, for a moment, too surprised to speak. Then he says, ‘No.'

‘It's not a problem if you are,' Gábor tells him.

‘No,' Balázs says. ‘No, I'm not. I, uh. No.'

‘She's just not your type, or what?'

With an almost pained expression, Balázs says, ‘Look … I dunno …'

‘Hey, whatever, man. I didn' mean to get personal.'

‘It's okay.'

‘She's not your type, she's not your type,' Gábor says. ‘Whatever.'

They don't talk much after that.

A sort of depression, Balázs finds, seems to have engulfed him. It's like a storm that has threatened all afternoon – in the terrible stillness of the smoky living room – and has now fallen on him in a silent maelstrom of despair. Sitting there in the shadows, he thinks with shame and sadness of his own life, his own things, his own pathetic pleasures.

Gábor's phone.

It is her, and there is obviously some problem. ‘Okay, just stay there,' Gábor says. ‘Just stay where you are. We'll be there in a minute.'

When he has hung up, he says, ‘We've got to go up there again. She had to lock herself in the bathroom.'

The anonymous opulence of room 425. The TV is on loud. Sitting on the bed, its linen an energetic mess like stiffly whipped egg white, is a man. He is about forty, thinnish, the length of his face exaggerated by the way he is losing his hair. Emma is not there, though her dress, which is all she wears on these occasions, is on the floor. The man's clothes are on the floor too – he is naked. He stands up with a strange lack of urgency when he hears them come in. ‘Who are you?' he says.

‘Where is she?' Gábor asks.

‘There.' The man indicates a door. Then he says, more fiercely, ‘Who the fuck are you?'

‘Watch him,' Gábor says to Balázs, and knocks on the door. ‘Hey, it's me,' he shouts, and a moment later is let in.

In the well-lit room, Balázs is left standing face to face with the naked man, no more than a metre from him. The man seems unembarrassed by his nakedness. He sniffs loudly and says, ‘I'm not finished with her, okay?'

Balázs says nothing, and probably looks as if he didn't understand, because the man says, ‘You speak English, you fucking gorilla? I'm not finished. So why don't you and your friend just get out of here?'

When Balázs still says nothing, the man says, ‘You think I hurt her? I didn't hurt her,' he tells Balázs's impassive face. ‘I just told her she's a slut, which she is. That's what I told her, and that's what she is. Hey, gorilla, you fucking ape! I'm talking to

Whoosh

There is a noise like a dog enjoying a knuckle of gristle as the nose breaks and fills with blood.

The man staggers back against the bed, looking confused. There is suddenly a huge amount of blood, all over his mouth.

‘She's okay …' Gábor says from the open bathroom door. ‘What the fuck …'

The man is on his knees, with his blood-smeared hands at his face and blood dripping quickly into the deep pile of the carpet.

Balázs is already leaving. Outside in the corridor it is as if he has never been there before. Blinded by adrenalin he is unable to find the service stairs and descends instead in a jewel-box of a lift. The doors open on the lobby, its dull dazzle. The shimmering cloud of a chandelier. The blood on his hand, slippery a minute ago, is now sticky, and his hand is starting to throb. With a single smooth turn, the revolving door exchanges the silent lobby for the noises of the night – the intermittent hiss of traffic from the avenue, the more immediate thrum of a taxi pulling up to the hotel entrance.

Balázs walks. He is in the avenue's trench of triple-shadowed light. Every few seconds some vehicle overtakes him. He isn't thinking anything, just feeling the night air on the skin of his face.

Slowly he becomes aware of things – the trees, their leaves a lurid green in the towering lamplight. The darkness on the other side of the avenue that must be some sort of park. Some people waiting at a bus stop.

He stops in front of a ghostly BMW showroom. He wonders what he is going to do. Tremblingly, the situation starting unpleasantly to impinge, he lights a Park Lane. He isn't even sure what happened. He hit the man – at least once – he knows that. Judging by the throb and soreness in his own hand he hit him hard. Probably he broke his nose. Staring without seeing them at the waxed and frowning BMWs, Balázs tells himself that the man will not want to involve the police. He was wearing a wedding ring, for one thing – Balázs had noticed that. He would have to tell his wife some lie to explain the damage to his face, but he would have had to tell her some lie anyway.

Balázs starts to walk again. He remembers now the way that Gábor had shouted at him when he emerged from the bathroom to find the man bleeding onto the carpet, had shouted after him as he left the room. It isn't what Gábor would have wanted. And Emma … Just as he was leaving he had been aware of her emerging from the bathroom too, in one of the hotel's towelling robes, and releasing a short scream …

Balázs wonders, for a moment, whether he should just flee the whole situation – just head home on his own, hurry to the airport
now
. He doesn't have his passport on him, is one problem. Everything is at the house. No, he will walk a bit more while the adrenalin works its way out of his system. Then he will face whatever it is he has to face.

When, some time later, he finds the side street where they were parked, however, the Mercedes is not there.

He doesn't know how to get home from the hotel, except on the underground, so he has to wait for the trains to start. Four o'clock finds him in Knightsbridge, pressing his nose to the windows of Harrods. Half an hour later he is wandering through Eaton Square. At five, watched by suspicious policemen, he passes in front of Buckingham Palace. It is fully light now, the sun is up, and he waits in Green Park for the station to open.

An hour later he finds Gábor in the smoke-filled living room of the flat, on the phone. He is obviously talking to Zoli.

While he talks he does not acknowledge Balázs's presence, standing there waiting for him to finish, until he says to Zoli, in a quiet voice, ‘Yeah, he's here. He just got back.'

A minute later he puts down his phone and says, ‘Zoli is fucking livid.'

‘I'm sorry,' Balázs says.

‘Do you know who that is whose nose you broke?'

Balázs shakes his head.

‘What the fuck were you doing?' Gábor shouts at him.

‘I'm sorry,' Balázs says again, lowering his eyes.

‘I mean, are you out of your fucking mind?'

‘I thought … I thought he hurt her,' Balázs says.

‘No, he did
not
hurt her. I told you she was okay.'

‘She's okay? So what happened, why did she …?'

‘Do you have any idea,' Gábor says, ignoring him, ‘what I have had to deal with?'

Balázs, after a long silence, is about to say sorry again, when Gábor goes on. He speaks in a ferocious semi-whisper, perhaps because Emma is trying to sleep in the other room. ‘First I've got to deal with the guy with the broken nose,' Gábor says, ‘this guy on the floor. Give him towels to soak up the blood, find his teeth and give them to him – I mean, it was
disgusting
, man! Then he starts saying he's going to call the police. I mean, he gets really fucking angry suddenly. So I have to try and calm him down, tell him he probably doesn't want to call the police, that he probably doesn't want to involve them. And he tells me to go fuck myself, he doesn't give a shit, he's going to call them, and we're all going to get arrested. And I'm worried he
is
going to call them – that he isn't thinking straight, he's full of cocaine, he's probably concussed or something. I mean, he might do something stupid, something
he
regrets later as well. So I tell him I'm going to call Zoli and talk to him, and he shouldn't do anything till I've done that. And anyway he's still dizzy and can't even stand up, and doesn't know where his phone is – his clothes and stuff's all over the place. I mean, he's still fucking naked at this point, and when he tries to stand up he just falls over again. So I call Zoli, yeah, and of course he's asleep, because it's the middle of the fucking night, and at first he doesn't answer, but I keep trying and eventually he picks up, and obviously he knows there's a problem otherwise I wouldn't be calling him in the middle of the night, but then I've got to tell him what happened, I've got to tell him that you broke the guy's fucking nose. And he says, “What did the guy do?” And I've got to tell him that the guy did nothing, basically, you just broke his nose. I mean, Zoli can hardly fucking
believe
it when I tell him that,' Gabor says, suddenly flaring up himself, and taking a moment to light a cigarette. ‘And he immediately starts having a go at
me
for bringing you into this whole thing – I mean, like it was
my
fault what happened. And then he starts saying he's going to break your legs and stuff. I mean, he says it like he really means it, and maybe he knows people who can do that, I don't know. Anyway, I tell him the guy's threatening to call the police. And he says I can't let him do that. And I say, “What the fuck do you want me to do – kill him?” And Zoli says, “Let me talk to him.” So I tell the guy Zoli wants to talk to him, and give him the phone. And the guy looks fucking terrible – I mean, his face is swollen like a fucking balloon and all purple, and his nose is just a fucking grotesque mess. Anyway, he takes the phone and talks to Zoli, and he's still really fucking angry – he's shouting about how he's going to call the police and how it might be embarrassing for him but we're the ones who are going to go to jail and stuff. Fuck, it takes Zoli about half an hour to calm him down, and then he gives the phone back to me and says Zoli wants to talk to me again, and Zoli tells me he's agreed with the guy that he won't call the police if we give him his money back, and at that point I'm just fucking relieved to have this sorted out so he's not going to call the police, so I tell Emma to get the money and she does, and I give it back to the guy. That felt really shit.' Gábor stubs out his cigarette.

Balázs is still standing there, near the door.

Gábor says, ‘I tell him to get dressed and clean himself up, and I'll be back in ten minutes. Then I take Emma back to the car, and leave her there and go back up to the room, where the guy's got his clothes on and has washed most of the blood off his face. Anyway, he leaves and then I've got to try and clean the fucking room up. I mean, there's blood everywhere.' Gábor sighs, weary with telling the story now. ‘So I call Juli and we find some kind of carpet-cleaning machine in a cupboard somewhere, some kind of steam cleaner, and she shows me how to use it, and I've got to try and clean the carpet with it.' Almost tearfully he shouts at Balázs, ‘I mean, this fucking unwieldy machine! I didn't even know how to work it properly!' He lights yet another cigarette. Still standing there, Balázs lights one too. ‘I mean, I fucking hated you while I was doing that,' Gábor says. ‘I wanted to fucking kill you.'

‘I'm really sorry,' Balázs says.

‘Where the fuck did you go?'

‘I dunno. Nowhere.'

Gábor looks at him for a few moments, as if he doesn't understand. Then he says, ‘I can't pay you, man. I mean, what I was going to pay you for this week. I mean, we had to give the guy his money back – which is much more than I was going to pay you, okay. I mean, we lost that money because of what you did, so …'

Though it had not occurred to him that this might happen, Balázs just shrugs.

‘I mean, Zoli wants you to pay us the difference,' Gábor says, with some vehemence. ‘He wants you to pay us the fucking difference, and that's like a million forints. I told him you can't do that, you just don't have the money, and he said maybe you'd prefer to have your legs broken. I mean, he is
fucking
angry, man. And so is Emma,' Gábor says more moodily, looking away.