Last Words (4 page)

Needless to say I was overdressed. I hurried downstairs and picked up the bottle of white wine sitting in the fridge and went back more appropriately attired, wishing the whole time that I hadn’t been drinking heavily the day before. Oh yeah, I also had my sunglasses. Everyone had sunglasses, which helps to hide your gaze. One of the neighbours was cooking up a giant wok of paella and everyone was welcomed to try it, the only prerequisite was that you had to introduce yourself and say where you were from.

After that some of us from the apartment started playing cards. Rachel won the first game on a fluke and only then did we discover there was a penalty if you lost, so Michael, Derek, Cristina, Sofia (the Russian girl) and I had to introduce ourselves to everyone on the rooftop (there must have been forty people up there). This was all thanks to Rachel coming up with the rules to the game. She’s a tricky one. I was expecting just to run a lap of the rooftop, only I soon discovered why that’s a bad idea: racing around the rooftop on a hot day with sweaty feet is likely to end up with someone falling four storeys on top of a poor prostitute.

As soon as a camera came out all the clothes went back on. If I ever do a Ph.D. in behavioural science then I have my thesis worked out, thanks to today. The number of selfies required for a girl to be happy with the result is determined by how attractive they believe they are on a scale of 10. Let’s say they are a 7. They are in a photo with three other 7s. It’s going to require 28 photos before they have a picture they’re happy with. Halve that number for the actual photos taken if the camera holder is a guy whose patience can be measured in minutes. Halve it again if his patience expires in seconds. I have about a hundred photos. I was looking as debonair as always.

Anyway. Rachel tells me it requires 2,000 hours of study and practice to reach a basic level of fluency in a language closely related to your own. 2,000 fucking hours?

“Yeah. Depressing as hell, isn’t it?” she said.

That made me think. If I did forty minutes of language learning a day in school, five days a week, I would get to about 120 hours a year. Maybe 150 if I did all the homework as well. And here I am, surrounded by people who are fluent in English when it’s their second or even third language. How?

Part 2.

It’s Thursday so that means it’s a giant housemate cooking day where everyone eats together. I didn’t know this but being the new guy I had to cook something. Ediz, the skinny Turkish guy, and Katy, the Croatian, also helped. I cooked chilli because it’s the one dish I never fuck up. Then again, having a dozen people in the apartment all eating food that will make you fart very quickly makes you learn that some foods are better not served in monstrous portions. Everyone left to go to their rooms for thirty seconds before coming back smelling of deodorant.

Ediz brought in the makings of kebabs which is actually kind of genius. All you need is flatbread and chopped up salad, as everyone else filled their kebabs with my chilli. I spent an hour making my feast and all he did was chop up some lettuce, cucumber, and tomatoes, then provide sauce and bread. Lazy arse.

Katy made some dumpling thing that was incredible when mixed with soy sauce.

Oh! The funniest thing today was Louise, the Sligo Irish girl. She missed out on the rooftop party and was out at her class today. She came back home as everyone was having dinner. Most of us still weren’t fully dressed. It’s weird how if everyone is naked or semi-naked a fully clothed person will feel out of place and rather stupid. So in walked Louise, right through the front door where eleven of us were sitting and standing around wearing as little as possible. Louise went bright red and ran off to her room with as much Catholic dignity as possible. Unfortunately Katy was there, scantily clad, and explained that being half naked was now customary. Louise said thanks but no thanks and spent the night studying.

Derek and a few others took me out to the gay quarter, called Chueca. I walked through the area the other night but that was the lite side. There were lots of people in drag, lots of big muscles and you know what? It was a lot of weird fun. I got a couple of offers but no thanks, I don’t ever imagine being that drunk. There was one guy on the street showing off his wang. Let’s just say there was a reason why he was showing it off and I might have high fived him if I hadn’t suspect where his hand had been.

Part 3.

We were all watching this thing on TV. It was a documentary in English with Spanish subtitles and it was actually quite interesting. It was about monkeys in captivity, in a large pen being studied by scientists. It sounds boring, and I admit I walked off after Rachel told me about it, but then I came back and saw the weirdest of things.

There were a dozen monkeys living together, male and female. There was a rope which opened a food chute that allowed food to come out whenever a monkey pulled on the rope. After a while the scientists switched things around. They selected a weak male monkey, not the alpha, and they decided that only he could open the chute with the rope. All of the monkeys tried the rope and none were successful, only the young weak male. The scientists wanted to see if he became the alpha through their interference. It was bizarre and fascinating at the same time. This little monkey was all of a sudden given this great power over his … people? Tribe? Pack? Who knows?

The others became jealous and started fighting him so he backed away and went hungry. The rest of the pack tried the rope and weren’t able to get any food. When desperation kicked in they started attacking the weak one again. Eventually, when he was desperate for food, the weak one tried the chute and was given food for the whole group. This became a pattern. He would give them food, they would fight, he would back off, everyone went hungry, they fought him again, and it turned him into something of a nervous wreck.

And then … then the females started to pay him some attention. Whenever the males fought him one on one the females came to his defence. They comforted him and the group turned against the aggressive alpha male. The weak one still couldn’t beat him in a fight, but he did have a friend. The females allowed the friend to come in and he became something of a bodyguard. He was given a lot of affection by the lady monkeys. Slowly the whole group dynamic shifted and the weak monkey became the centre of attention. He still wouldn’t have been the alpha male because he couldn’t win a fight, but it was interesting to see what happened when the scientists interfered.

That was the angle I took away from it. Rachel thought the whole thing was cruel. The scientists were cold and manipulative dicks. They just messed around with another specie to see what would happen to satisfy their own curiosity. I’m not a tree hugger by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I’m a fucking carnivore and I like to joke that my burger tastes better when you know the animal died screaming. I get a laugh. It’s a revolted laugh, but it’s a laugh nonetheless. But these scientists were actually risking this poor monkey. If the alpha male got pissed off enough he was going to kill that little thing all because he was hungry.

At the end of the program they did say the chute went back to being opened by everyone and the balance was kinda restored. I bet that was a severe blow to the weak monkey’s ego.

Back when I was twelve our school had a disco. The week before, two girls, Becky and Jamie, started to ‘like me’. Long story short, my dickhead friend told Becky and Jamie to ‘like me’ so that I would choose between which one I liked (Becky), then she and Jamie could dump me at the dance.

Which they did.

In front of my friends.

They said it was all a joke. They laughed, they said my ‘friend’ had put them up to it, and he was there laughing like a jackass. Ten years later he eventually apologised. I had all of this attention. I thought I was doing something right by the ladies, then bam! It was gone, nothing more than a joke because I couldn’t fight back.

The lady monkeys went back to mostly ignoring the weak monkey because they could feed themselves and were overpowered by the alpha male. I felt bad for that little monkey. He was dumped with responsibility and then the powers-that-be drop-kicked him back into the gutter when he finally had something going with the women.

Here is where Rachel and I disagree. I said it would have been better to keep the experiment going on forever, or slowly introduce the whole community feeding themselves again over time, not in one go. Rachel wanted it over immediately. She doesn’t agree that it was fair, but she said the monkey will get over it.

Maybe.

My dad would say it was supposed to build character. I wonder if he ever did that to some weak kid at school, or if my mum ever pretended to like a guy just to mess with him.

I just asked Rachel that and she gave me one of those sympathetic looks as though I am so naïve. “Did your mum go to a co-ed school?” Rachel asked.

“Yep.”

“Then yes, she did that to someone, even if she didn’t mean to.”

Great. My mum was an emotional whore. I should have known.

Rachel says she had a great time in school. She liked studying, she liked her friends, she was good at what she did. I think that’s a category one warning sign of having a disgruntled future; nothing will compare to her teenage years.

15 July

Sofia was awake early this morning, crying. There’s a time difference between here and Russia (plenty of time differences even within Russia, I guess). Her folks called her. The government there is in serious trouble. Yesterday one of the ministers said they were containing the bird flu but everyone should be careful and remain indoors. He said there had been six fatalities. Not quite true. There are now eighty four fatalities and six thousand showing symptoms.

Ho. ly. fuck.

They’ve closed off the city. No one is working. Everyone is staying home. The army is moving in with masks and suits and handing out food but it won’t be enough. All flights in and out of Russia have been cancelled and the borders are closing up as well. We’re waiting by the TV for the news but nothing has been mentioned about it yet. I even called home to see what was happening and no one has heard any of this. Mum asked why I didn’t tell her that I was in Ibiza. Maybe she should just stop looking at Clint’s updates online.

Part 2.

The President just made the announcement, advising people not to travel. He offered his sympathy and support to the Russian people. The Spanish are also bracing themselves and their hospitals. Michael told me the news stations would play this safely. The news are responsible for not spreading any panic. That has got to conflict with a lot of their rating-grabbing sensibilities.

Part 3.

We went out. It’s life as usual here and we were in Arguelles (which I’ve been saying wrong all day), when her Cambodian friend called to say that they’ve found a replacement teacher for the class. I wandered around for a couple of hours, keeping close to the buildings and staying in lots of shaded areas.

I ended up chatting to this guy from Seattle when I stopped for a Coke. I heard his accent coming a mile away.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Glasgow,” I lied.

So I did the whole thing in Scottish. I even told him my name was Dave and that I was studying sociology in Berlin. I’m in Madrid with my girlfriend who’s catching up with her sister.

It was his first time in Madrid and he asked if I knew how to get to Sol. Why yes. Yes I do. I brought him to the bear eating the strawberry tree when he got a text from his boyfriend saying that he was held up next to a statue of a bull. I knew where that one was as well! They were both nice. Stuart’s boyfriend is from Puerto Rico and they’ve never been to Europe before. I showed them a couple of good spots to eat, like here does good wine in an intimate setting and if you happen to be up late at night then over there is a good spot for churros.

I may have said that my girlfriend was from Milan and that her name was Cristina. And that she’s studying chemistry and wants to do her Ph.D. in the States. I did my impersonation of her rattling her bracelets around as she spoke. They asked how we met, considering that I’m a Scottish guy in Berlin and she’s an Italian with a Spanish brother-in-law.

We had a mutual friend online. We both commented on a bunch of his posts about women’s rights, gun control, and finally authentic Italian cuisine as done by British chefs. That one kicked it off and we got into some heated discussions about what is proper bolognaise and pizza, and what is not. She sent me a video of her making pasta the proper way. I liked her accent. So I sent her a video of me eating chips out of a newspaper. She thought it was repulsive but kinda funny. We became email buddies. One morning she wrote that she just had a shit day at uni and all of her friends were busy doing something else. So I bailed on class, flew to Italy, and four hours after getting her email I knocked on her door, saying that a real friend drops everything for someone in need. From then on we were inseparable.

The two guys started getting misty eyed. Unfortunately I was starting to like my fantasy world a little too much and knew it was time to bail. They wished me luck, I did the same, and I sauntered back to Callao. Somehow I managed to perk myself up and break my own heart all at the same time.

Louise has been trying to book a flight back home, which isn’t easy since the Internet is still sluggish. Her Spanish is reasonable but the travel agent didn’t care if she couldn’t keep up, so after forty minutes she swore like the Pope wasn’t listening and came into the kitchen almost in tears. She’s about to head out to the airport to try her luck there. Today was her final day of class. Monday is her graduation. She’s trying to fly out either tonight (they will mail her certificate) or she will fly out tomorrow (and still they will mail it), but either way she wants to go home. She has assured us it isn’t because the entire household was naked yesterday, she just never booked a return ticket from Madrid. She was hoping to travel to Valencia with a couple of friends but they bailed on her. She doesn’t want to go alone so she would rather go home sooner than later. Either way she has to be gone by Monday because someone else is supposed to arrive and take her bed, so there will be a new housemate! Katy is hoping it’s a girl.