The narrow crooked street also led uphill to his and Paul's and Derek's apartment. Once the pulsating neon and the throbbing competitive rhythms of the discos fell behind, Janet began resting her fingers on his bare arm at each erratically canted bend. He thought of laying a hand over hers, but suspected that would only make her aware of his feverish heat fuelled by alcohol. He became conscious of tasting of it, and was wondering what he could possibly offer her when she clutched at his wrist. 'What's that?' she whispered.
He'd thought the trestle table propped against the rough white wall of one of the rudimentary houses that constricted the dim street was heaped with refuse until the heap lifted itself on one arm. Apparently the table served as a bed for an undernourished man wearing not even very many rags. He clawed his long hair aside to display a face rather too close to the skull beneath and thrust out the other hand. 'He just wants money,' Barry guessed aloud, and in case Janet assumed that was intended as a cue to her, declared 'I've got some.'
He didn't think he had much. Bony fingers snatched the notes and coins spider-like. At once, too fast for Barry to distinguish how, the man huddled back into resembling waste. 'You didn't have to give him all that,' Janet murmured as they hurried to the next bend. 'You'll be seeing more like him.'
Barry feared she thought he'd been trying to impress her with his generosity, which he supposed he might have been. 'We like to share what we've got, don't we, us Yorkshire folk.'
Before he'd finished speaking he saw that she could think he was making a crude play for her along with emphasizing her trace of an accent more than she might like. Her silence gave his thoughts time to grow hot and arid as the night while he trudged beside her up a steep few hundred yards - indeed, overtook her before she said 'This is as far as I go.'
She was opening her small black spangled handbag outside a door lit by a plastic rectangle that might as well have been a sliver of the moon. 'I'm just up the road,' he told her.
Did that sound like yet another unintentional suggestion? All she said was 'Maybe I'll see you in the market.'
'Which one's that?'
She gazed so long into the depths of her bag that he was starting to feel she thought his ignorance unworthy of an answer when she said 'What are you going to think of me now.'
He had to treat it as a question. 'Well, I know we've only—'
'Denise and San have got the keys. I didn't realize I'd drunk that much. Back we go.'
She was at the first corner before he'd finished saying 'Shall I come with you?'
'No need.'
'I will, though.'
'Suit yourself,' she said and quickened her pace.
He felt virtuous for not abandoning her to pass the man on the table by herself. In fact that stretch was as deserted as the rest of the slippery uneven variously sloping route. The seafront was still crowded, and she had to struggle past a haphazard queue outside the Mediterranean Nights. 'I won't be long,' she told him.
She was. Once he felt he'd waited longer than enough he tried to follow her, but the swarthy doorman who'd been happy to readmit her showed no such enthusiasm on Barry's behalf. Even if he'd had the money, Barry told himself, he wouldn't have paid to get back in. He supposed he could have said that Paul and Derek would vouch for him - that was assuming they weren't in an especially humorous mood - but he couldn't be bothered arguing with the doorman. If Janet's friends had persuaded her to have another drink or two, or she'd met someone else, that had to be fine with him.
He did his best to look content as he tramped back along the seafront, and was trudging uphill before he indulged in muttering to himself. He fell silent as he passed Janet's lodgings, the Summer Breeze Apartments, on the way to swaying around several jagged unlit bends that hindered his arrival at his own quarters. Some amusement was to be derived from coaxing the key to find the lock of the street door and from reeling up the concrete stairs, two steps up, one back down. Further drunken fumbling was involved in admitting himself to the apartment, where most of the contents of his and Paul's and Derek's cases had yet to fight for space in the wardrobe and the bathroom. At the end of an interlude in the latter, more protracted than conclusive, he lurched through the room containing his friends' beds to the couch in the kitchen area. Without too many curses he succeeded in unfolding the couch and, having fallen over and onto it, dragging a sheet across himself.
Perhaps all he could hear in the street below the window were clubbers returning to their apartments, but they sounded more like a stealthy crowd that wasn't about to go away. He was thinking, if no more than that, of making for the balcony to look when the slam of the street door sent Paul's and Derek's voices up from the muted hubbub. Soon his friends fell into their room, switching on lights at random. 'He's here. He's in bed,' Paul announced.
'Thought you'd pulled some babe,' Derek protested.
'She didn't have her key,' Barry roused himself to attempt to pronounce. 'You didn't see her coming back, then.'
'You could have brought her up here as long as you let us know,' Paul said.
'Put a notice on the door or something,' said Derek.
'Next time,' Barry told them, not that he thought there was much of a chance. Still, he could dream, or perhaps he could only sleep. He hadn't the energy to ask what was happening outside. The murmur from the street and the blundering of his friends about the apartment receded, bearing his awareness, which he was happy to relinquish.
Snoring wakened him - at first, only his own. The refrain was taken up by Derek, who was lying on his back, while Paul gave tongue into a pillow. The chorus was by no means equal to the noise from the street. Unable to make sense of it, Barry dragged the floor-length windows apart and groped between them into unwelcome sunlight. Leaning over the rudimentary concrete balustrade, he blinked his vision into focus. The street had disappeared.
Or rather, its surface had. From bend to bend it was hidden by the awnings of market stalls and by the crowd the stalls had drawn. Barry supported himself on his elbows, though the heat of the concrete was only just bearable, until he succeeded in dredging up some thoughts. His mouth was dry and yet oily with reminiscences of alcohol, his skull felt baked too thin, but shouldn't he wander down in case Janet was hoping to encounter him? Mightn't she have waited, not realizing he'd given away the contents of his pocket, for him to rejoin her in the Mediterranean Nights? He picked his way to the bathroom and, having made space for it, drank as much water as he could stomach, then showered and dressed. 'I'll be in the market,' he said, receiving a mumble from one of his friends and an emphatic snore from the other.
In the lobby the owner of the apartments was crammed into a shabby armchair overlooked by a warren of compartments, some lodging keys, behind the reception counter. He wore a flower-bed of a shirt too large even for him, which framed enough chest hair to cover his bald head. He opened his eyes half an inch and used a forearm to wipe his heavily ruled brow as Barry took out his traveller's cheques. 'You want pay?' the owner said.
'Please.'
'How much you pay?'
'No, we paid in England. My friend Derek had to show you the voucher when we checked in, remember.' When the man only scowled at the beads of sweat his tufted forearm had collected, Barry tried to simplify the point. 'The paper said we paid.'
'Now you pay for things go smash. Nothing smash, money back.'
'Derek's in charge of booking and stuff like that. You'll need to speak to him,' Barry said, knowing that with a hangover Derek would be even more combative than usual. 'He's the man in charge.'
'So why I talk to you?'
Barry pointed at the sign beside the pigeonholes: TRAVVLER'S' CHEKS CACHED.
'It says you give money.'
For a breath that threatened to pop his shirt buttons the man seemed inclined to misunderstand, and then he thrust a ballpoint bandaged with several thicknesses of inky plaster across the counter. 'You put name.'