Better Than Easy (40 page)

As time goes by, as experience
amazingly
demonstrates this fact to me time and time again – that when Ricardo says he'll cook he cooks, that when he says he'll phone he phones, that when he says he'll be late he's late, that when he says he'll buy candles he buys candles … and as Ricardo continues to
say
the same things to me over and over: that we'll be together our whole lives, that he wants to see me get old and wrinkly, that he loves me even when I'm angry, that he loves me even when
he's
angry … well,
after a while, I start to believe him; after a while, I can't help
but
believe him.

And finally finding that after all these years – finding someone I can believe in, someone with whom my belief in the future is carried not by my own blind faith but by the empirical evidence that every day we spend together brings … well, it feels good. It feels brilliant.

Keep reading for a preview of

SLEIGHT OF HAND

The next instalment in the
Fifty Reasons Series, by Nick Alexander

It was the incident with the dog that did it. We were sitting having a drink at Max's – a scruffy wooden bar at the edge of the national park. It had become a ritual of ours, a Friday night mojito, sometimes two – our attempt at marking the beginning of the weekend – at marking the passage of time. Neither Ricardo's random callouts as a doctor, nor my occasional translation work, nor the weird, season-less weather of Colombia provided much clue as to where you might be in the week, the year, in life. Our stay here so far felt, somehow, out-of-time – as if contained within brackets.

Max's was a perfect beach-bar and (in season) a sometimes-restaurant: a wooden shack built on stilts with the dense forest of the national park to the west, the occasionally raging Caribbean to the north, and a dusty/muddy car park everywhere else.

It was a twenty minute walk along the coast from our house and often, outside the tourist season, we, along with the effervescent, whistling Max, were the only people there. Occasionally there would be a couple of gamekeepers playing draughts in a corner, and of course for those few months of the year when Europeans and Americans take their brief holidays, the place would look more like Club Med than a lost corner of the Caribbean. But generally the only noise was the endless salsa drifting from Max's thankfully weedy transistor radio, and, depending on the direction of the wind, the sound of the waves.

Before the corronchos arrived it had all felt pretty perfect. The late afternoon sun was warm, the mojitos were cool enough for condensation to be
trickling down the outside of the glass, and Max's radio had, rather superbly, run out of batteries. Not only had I finally finished and emailed my fifty-thousand word drudgery on EEC agricultural policy, but Ricardo's so often absent colleague was, for once, on-call: a whole weekend to ourselves.

Ricardo drew a circle in the dew on the side of his glass, looked up and smiled at me. “You know, Chupa Chups, there are moments when this place really is pa …” he said, and then paused, distracted by the sound of a car.

Like all nick-names Chupa Chups came about by accident. I had asked him what the lollypop brand name meant, and Ricardo had translated it as, “Sucky Suck.” For weeks, I had been unable to see or hear those words without cracking up laughing, and the name had stuck. It still made me grin, even though I was mortified when from time to time, he accidentally used it in public.

We both turned to watch as a Porsche Cayenne appeared from the forest track. It stopped at the edge of the car park in a cloud of dust, and four young men in Miami-Vice suits got out – one of the guys actually had his jacket sleeves pushed up.

Ricardo sighed and looked back out to sea, and I copied him and did likewise, for there are men that you don't watch in Colombia – men, often enough, with Porsche Cayennes.

The four men lingered by the car talking energetically or maybe arguing. With the distance and their accents, and over the salsa music drifting from the car, I couldn't understand a word. Their over-loud voices sounded, though, like a challenge. The main thing they seemed to be saying, was,
“Look at us. Look over here. Aren't we something?” And that was when the dog appeared.

It was irritating, it's true – a mangy, skinny half-breed sniffing around the edges of the terrace, pissing in a corner, pushing under tables and around chairs in its hunt for crumbs, and then around our feet, and finally out into the car park, and over towards the Porsche.

It snuffled its way around the rear of the car, and then fatally, and I mean, fatally, pissed on one of the tyres. One of the Porsche boys – the fat one with pocked skin, gave it an ineffectual kick and it yelped before starting somewhat lazily, to bark.

I became aware that my stress levels were rising. My skin was prickling and my throat felt suddenly dry, and I wondered briefly if I was being paranoid, or if I was channeling some future catastrophe, or if Ricardo, so calmly looking out to sea, was, as often, radiating his own specifically Colombian understanding of the situation.

One of the guys shouted over and asked, “¿Es éste tu perro?” – is it your dog? and Ricardo glanced over and simply shook his head in reply. To me, as an aside, he murmured, “No contestes.” – don't reply. From the fact that he had chosen to speak in Spanish I knew I wasn't imagining anything: the only reason Ricardo ever used Spanish with me, was to avoid drawing attention to my status as a non-Colombian. I held my breath, and we both turned and looked back out to sea.

Nothing happened for a minute or so and despite the tension provoked by not-looking, I managed to start to breathe again.

And then I heard the boot open and one of the
guys laughed, and another cheered, and as cover, I raised my glass for a sip and glanced over just in time to see the fat guy pull an AK47 from the boot of the car and raise it to his hip. I opened my mouth to warn Ricardo but he kicked me hard, so I turned back out to sea and remained, like he, stoic, merely imagining the dog's dancing body as the rounds of gunfire let rip and hoping that there, that day, the dog would be the only one to die.

In the year since we had been living here, there had been other events of course: the disappearance of the Swedish girl last summer, the stabbing at a party we attended, the minicab murders … And even if Ricardo found reassurance variously in the fact that the Swedish girl had been found (with apparent amnesia) and the stab victim had survived (with a scar), and the minicab murders had all happened more than two-hundred kilometres away, for me these were all straws on a camel's back, drops of water in a proverbial French vase.

But the tipping point, the moment I specifically thought, “No, I don't want to live here. I want to go home,” was when they shot that dog. Because that's when I realised that these guys in suits in Porsche Cayennes have machine guns stored next to the wheel-jack. And that's when I saw that Ricardo sighed. As my own body jerked at each fired round, Ricardo sighed – he had become used to this. And I didn't want to get used to it.

I had assumed that the guys would now come to the bar, but once no more amusement was to be found in filling the dog with bullets, the gun was put back
in the trunk, and the four guys simply climbed back into their 4x4 and accelerated off in a cloud of dust and fading salsa rhythms.

With a whachagonnado shrug and a raised eyebrow Max descended leisurely to the car park, and scooped the corpse of the dog into a bin-bag. When he had done this, his hands still bloodied, he leant against the fence and rolled himself a cigarette.

I said automatically, “I want to go home,” and Ricardo, assuming that I meant to Federico's beach-house, downed the last of his drink and, with a nod and a weak smile, stood up. I chose, for the time being, not to explain further.

Ricardo took the coastal path back to the house and I didn't argue. The route through the forest was shorter but felt, if you were in a particular kind of mood, more menacing.

The path was pretty narrow, so I followed him – a little numb from the adrenalin aftershock – watching his buttocks move up and down, his shirt slowly sticking to his back, and then glancing left at the brochure-perfect beaches and right into the long shadows of the forest, and back again at the perfect beach. I thought about the contrasts of Colombia, so beautiful, so friendly. And yet …

Ricardo only turned once to speak to me during the walk. “I'm sorry about that,” he said, as if it had somehow been his fault. But I knew what he meant. It was his country. He had brought me here. I knew how he took such things personally.

As we walked, I wondered if this feeling – that I had had it with Colombia – was a new permanent state of being or simply a momentary reaction to
danger, and I decided that I needed a trip back to Europe to find out. I hadn't been back since we moved here over a year ago. It was time.

But if I told him how I felt, would it damage our relationship? That would be the last thing I would want.

Faithful, good natured, straightforward Ricardo – the man I thought I would never meet.

A part of him, the Colombian part, will always remain alien to me. It's hard to explain what the essence of that difference is … Perhaps a coldness that enables him to sigh as someone machine-guns a dog to smithereens is what best sums it up. Maybe a lightness of being that means that these things don't get to him the way they do to me – an optimism that is entirely unaffected by murder, rape or natural disaster. I know that all sounds contradictory, and really that's the whole point. The fact that I can't decide whether to describe it as solid and unshakable, or courageously optimistic, or cold and unfeeling, says it all: alien. Simply.

But other than this undefinable otherness, we are the most perfect fit I have ever found.

Back at the house, Ricardo said, “You just relax Chupy and watch the sunset and I'll make dinner,” and I knew that the business of the machine gun and the dog – the most violent thing I had ever witnessed – was now over for him. For Ricardo it required no further discussion.

I checked my email to make sure my translation had reached its destination (it had), and was just about to shut down the computer for the evening when a rare email from Jenny popped up. Her mother had died, she said. She felt incredibly sad and
alone, she said.

And my first thought, my very first shameful thought, was that here was the perfect excuse for a trip home. And then, I thought, “And you reckon Ricardo is the cold one?”

By Nick Alexander

Mark is looking for love in all the wrong places. He always ignores the warning signs preferring to dream, time and again, that he has finally met the perfect lover until, one day …

Through fifty adventures, Nick Alexander, takes us on a tour of modern gay society: bars, night-clubs, blind dates, Internet dating … It's all here.

Funny and moving by turn,
Fifty Reasons to Say Goodbye
is ultimately a series of candidly vivid snapshots and a poignant exploration of that long winding road: the universal search for love.

“A witty, polished collection of vignettes … Order this snappy little number.” – Tim Teeman,
The Times

Available for download at:
Amazon iTunes

By Nick Alexander

Following the loss of his partner, Mark, the hero from the bestselling
Fifty Reasons to Say Goodbye
, tries to pick up the pieces and build a new life for himself in gay friendly Brighton.

Haunted by the death of his lover and a fading sense of self, Mark struggles to put the past behind him, exploring Brighton's high and low-life, falling in love with charming, but unavailable Tom, and hooking up with Jenny, a long lost girlfriend from a time when such a thing seemed possible. But Jenny has her own problems, and as all around are inexorably sucked into the violence of her life, destiny intervenes, weaving the past to the present, and the present to the future in ways no one could have imagined.

“Alexander has a beautifully turned ear for a witty phrase … I think we can all recognise the lives that live within these pages, and we share their triumphs and tragedies, hopes and lost dreams.” – Joe Galliano,
Gay Times

Available for download at:
Amazon iTunes

By Nick Alexander

On holiday with new boyfriend Tom, Mark – the hero from the best-selling novels,
Fifty Reasons to Say Goodbye
and
Sottopassaggio
– heads off to rural Italy for a spot of camping.

When the ruggedly seductive Dante invites them onto his farmland the lovers think they have struck lucky, but there is more to Dante than meets the eye – much more.

Thoroughly bewitched, Tom, all innocence, appears blind to Dante's dark side … Racked with suspicion, it is Mark who notices as their holiday starts to spin slowly but very surely out of control – and it is Mark, alone, who can maybe save the day …

Good Thing, Bad Thing
is a story of choices; an exploration of the relationship between understanding and forgiveness, and an investigation of the fact that life is rarely quite as bad – or as good – as it seems. Above all
Good Thing, Bad Thing
is another cracking adventure for gay everyman Mark.

“Spooky, and emotionally turbulent – yet profoundly comedic, this third novel in a captivating trilogy is a roller-coaster literary treasure all on its own. But do yourself a favour, and treat yourself to its two prequels as soon as
you can …” – Richard Labonte,
Book Marks

Available for download at:
Amazon iTunes

By Nick Alexander

Better Than Easy
– the fourth volume in the Fifty Reasons series – finds Mark about to embark on the project of a lifetime, the purchase of a hilltop gîte in a remote French village with partner Tom.