The Songs of Manolo Escobar (23 page)

I'd arranged to meet Cheryl in the evening, to join up with some friends for a celebratory drink. After I'd finished my cup of coffee I made to leave the room to get ready, but Papa stopped me. ‘Hey, where you go?'

‘I'm going out.'

‘Why you nae spend time with your family? Why you always go with friends?'

‘I don't,' I protested.

He waved me away and pretended to watch the television.

‘I don't spend all my time with friends,' I insisted. ‘I've been locked away in the library for the past three months studying. I deserve a bit of free time.'

‘Oh, you deserve, always you deserve,' he said sarcastically.

Mama tensed, and Pablito got up from the sofa and left the room.

‘What are you talking about, Papa?'

He bristled and shook his head despairingly – a gesture that suggested that if he had to explain, then his point was already made.

‘Is this about Africa?' I asked. ‘I was going to tell you. I just hadn't got round to it. Besides, I haven't made up my mind that I'm definitely going.'

It was enough for him that I was even considering such a thing. ‘Why you wanna go away? Who force you? Is anyone force you?'

‘No, no one is forcing me. If I do decide to go, it will be because I want to.'

‘Why you dae this? I have tae leave my country. I have nae choice. You nae have to leave.'

‘But Papa, this is completely different. I'd only go for a year and I could return when I wanted to.'

‘Wha about your family? Your family here. Here is your responsibility.'

‘Responsibility? For what?'

I felt a surge of resentment and a strong desire to hold my ground, but he stared me down and my self-assurance dissolved.

‘You stupid. You know this. All time you read books and you stupid.'

‘I'm not stupid.'

‘Why you go Africa? Wha you think find in Africa? I live in Morocco. I know more than you. There is nothing. Nothing for you in Africa.'

‘I'm not going for me, I'm going to help other people.'

‘Other people?' he scoffed with mock laugher. ‘There is other people here. Your mama, your papa, your brother, why you nae help us?'

‘You're not starving.'

‘What you talk, starve?'

‘A million people have already died in Ethiopia because they don't have access to food. I think their need's greater than yours, don't you?'

His eyes narrowed and his body jerked with frustration. ‘Why you nae get job? You know wha age I am when I get first job?'

‘Thirteen,' I said.

‘Si,
thirteen, thirteen. Wha age you now?'

I ignored him.

‘You wha, twenty-three, twenty-four . . . ?'

‘I'm twenty-two.'

‘Okay, twenty-two, and I pay you spend four years to sit and read books. Now is time tae get job and earn money, like your brother, and you go tae bloody Africa.'

‘You want me to be like my brother?' I asked. ‘Divorced by twenty-seven with a son he never sees, unable to hold down a job and still living off his parents?'

‘Okay, you smartarse,' he said witheringly. ‘You nae be smart little shit.'

‘What do you
want
from me, Papa?' I screamed.

It was the first time I had ever raised my voice to him, and he recoiled. I waited for a reaction, not knowing what to expect. I thought he would be outraged, perhaps even violent, but instead he just stood, his eyes wide with incomprehension. I couldn't hold back any longer. ‘What do you want? Tell me!'

‘Hey, you nae shout, you show respect.
Poco de respeto.'

‘But it's the only way to get through to you! You never listen to anything I say.'

He eyed me suspiciously and retreated a step. ‘You nae shout.'

I sat down and put my head in my hands. I could hear his laboured breathing, and I sensed Mama's tension from across the room. Eventually I raised my head and looked directly at him, but he refused to make eye contact.

‘What are you saying, that you want me to stay at home to help out financially? That you want me to bring money into the house? Is that what this is really about?'

‘Why you dae this to me?' he asked, pleadingly. ‘I work tae give you good living, tae give you education, so why you make your papa small?'

I was late arriving at the pub. It was full of excited new graduates, celebrating their freedom. I joined Cheryl, who was sitting in a
group of classmates, along with a few friends from other faculties. Most of them had been drinking all day and they were grinning and half-cut, trading slurred non-sequiturs. She squeezed my hand and asked me if I was all right.

A short time later Max Miller arrived, looking serious. He had been at a meeting of the Socialist Workers' Society general council, where, he explained, there had been an attempted putsch against a senior office-bearer who was guilty of some unpardonable ideological betrayal. He talked at length, and, though I wasn't really paying attention, I was glad to have the company of someone still capable of coherent speech.

My friendship with Max Miller appeared to have recovered after a difficult period. I'd been uneasy around him after cuckolding him with Cheryl, but he seemed to have gotten over it. He hadn't had a proper girlfriend since they'd split, despite the harem of attractive young women who perpetually surrounded him. Cheryl was unusually reticent about discussing their break-up, but she insisted that he wasn't heartbroken, just a loner.

Max Miller had graduated with a first in philosophy the week before, but he hadn't attended the ceremony, claiming he didn't need a bourgeois trinket to validate his self-worth, but he was gracious enough to buy all of us a drink.

‘So you're really going to work in Ethiopia?' he asked.

Cheryl beamed. ‘Yes, it's all systems go, we've been approved by the charity and we're going to book our flights tomorrow. Aren't we?' she said, squeezing my hand.

I smiled weakly.

‘This time next month we'll be teaching in a village school in Eritrea.'

‘That's great. I really wish I was coming with you, but there's so much going on in the Party at the moment. I'm worried that if I left now the whole branch would fall apart,' Max Miller said.

He put his hand around the back of my head and pulled it towards him. Our foreheads touched, and he squeezed closer.

‘You're doing a great thing, mate, you know that, don't you?'

I tried to nod, but he had my head caught tightly against his.

‘I'm really proud of what you're doing.'

I
was going abroad for the first time and was determined to make the most of it. I had to admit the circumstances weren't ideal: I was travelling with Mama and I was going to attend my grandmother's funeral. Abuela had survived the stroke five years before, the stroke which had almost prompted my parents' repatriation to Spain, but eventually she had succumbed to the twin afflictions of a weak heart and a rampant appetite.

I felt strangely unmoved by the news of her death, and consequently guilty. I told myself I'd never had a proper relationship with her and that such emotional detachment was understandable. I'd met her only once, after all, as a child, and we'd never spoken more than a few words of Spanish to each other. The only lasting memory of her was my embarrassment at the size of her pants. I tried to put these misgivings aside and think of the visit as a horizon-expanding opportunity to sample a new land and culture, to bask in the Mediterranean sun and enjoy the chance to relax, with a bit of bereavement and solemn genuflecting thrown in.

It was actually a good thing that only Mama and I would be making the trip. Papa had already established that he wouldn't be going, and Pablito, as usual, had followed his lead. Papa justified his decision to stay at home by claiming he had no wish to “pray for dead
franquista
in room full a bloody
Franquistas”.

I had no more wish to sit in a room full of bloody
Franquistas
than he did, but I was prepared to do so to support Mama. I also needed a change of scene and routine. I was less than a year into my career as an assistant on the local evening paper, and already I felt as though I'd been doing it for a lifetime.

Every morning I arrived in the office at six o'clock and ministered to the whims of a cadre of ill-tempered hacks until it was time to go home, where Mama had prepared my dinner, which I ate before settling down to watch television for the remainder of the evening until it was time to go to bed, to sleep so I could wake the following morning to go through the whole will-sapping routine again.

Weekends were uneventful. Sometimes I went out with Pablito. His favoured haunt was Cleopatra's nightclub, known locally as Clatty Pat's, an unpretentious venue where your feet stuck to the floor and a night wasn't a good night without a fistfight at the bar. It was a peculiarly democratic environment, where wealth and status stood for nothing in the darkened, late-night charge of alcohol-fuelled confusion and carnal desperation. A limited Egyptian theme amounted to the Ladies and Gents toilets being renamed ‘Pharaohesses' and ‘Pharaohs' and a large stuffed camel in a sandpit which was occasionally used by customers as a urinal.

I had never seen Pablito more at home than when he was propped up at the bar of Clatty Pat's with a glass in one hand and an inebriated female attendee hanging on his every double-entendre. Inevitably I'd leave earlier than him, incoherent and bloated with strong lager. Pablito would return home the following mid-morning and climb beneath his bedcovers, rough and sated, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and cheap sex.

Mostly I stayed in and wrote to Cheryl. Although I'd decided after all to stay at home and get a job, she had gone to Africa as planned. And because telephone communication to Ethiopia was unreliable and expensive, we'd only spoken twice in ten months. There was a slight time delay too, which meant that both conversations had been disjointed and annoyingly faint. We'd had to shout, so it had been difficult to gauge her tone. And of course I couldn't be as intimate as I'd have liked with my parents in the next room. Letter-writing was equally unsatisfactory. She sent detailed, effusive stories about the great work she was doing with the collection of dynamic, committed people she'd met, but
she wrote very little about us, about whether or not she missed me, whether she still felt the same about me. Her new friends sounded glamorous and infuriatingly middle-class – they all had names like Nadia, Brett and Corey, and they'd been brought up on game reserves in Tanzania and Zambia, or had attended American schools in Switzerland, or both. They all had ‘really amazing plans for the future' – studying multimedia and Sanskrit at Columbia, joining the International Red Cross, or working in bonds on Wall Street. Whenever a male name appeared in one of her letters, I felt a painful stab of sexual jealousy. If the same name was mentioned more than once, I collapsed into a pit of self-hating despair and tortured myself imagining them all having vigorous, exotic sex in a great altruistic gap-year orgy.

In one letter Cheryl told me that Max Miller had recently joined the VSO programme and that he, too, was being posted to Ethiopia. I hadn't seen him since we'd left university. I wrote back, hinting that I was upset he hadn't told me about it in person, but she wrote that he'd only recently accepted the posting and she had found out about it after seeing his name on a list of new appointees. She went on to point out, unsolicited, how he'd be based in Addis Ababa, almost five hundred miles away from where she was, so it was unlikely they'd ever see one another.

My trip to Spain could not have been more timely. At last I felt as though I too was being adventurous and achieving something. From the moment I stepped off the aircraft, into the hot buffeting wind on the runway, I felt surprised and liberated, as if colour had suddenly been introduced into my monochrome world. The landscape was rough, with a dry, smoky smell from the parched earth. The airport workers were dark-skinned and attractive, and their manner was pleasantly informal. They smiled at me as we passed them, and I felt somehow they were familiar.

We moved through the terminal building at an agreeably relaxed pace and hailed a taxi whose engine clattered and clunked as we pulled on to a busy dual carriageway. The smiling driver,
who chain-smoked and wore sandals, drove speedily and volubly, giving us what I assumed was a running commentary on the events of his day. We drove into the narrow steets of Malaga, past residential blocks with candy-striped canopies, boxy air-conditioning units and chaotically draped items of laundry. Mama's family had moved here from Tangier in the late 1950s after Morocco had gained independence, shortly after she and Papa had moved to Scotland.

It was mid-afternoon when we arrived at Tia Teresa's apartment, located in an unremarkable neighbourhood near the centre. The street was eerily quiet, its shops closed for the
siesta.
Next to her building a municipal basketball court lay empty, its concrete pitch baking in the afternoon sun. As we emerged from the taxi I felt the intense heat drain my limbs of strength. I began to sweat heavily, the moisture causing my shirt to stick hard to my back.

Mama rang the buzzer and the glass door clicked open. It was a relief to step into the coolness of the polished stone hallway. We struggled up to the first floor with our suitcases. Teresa greeted us warmly, ushering us into a dim apartment that smelled of garlic and perming lotion. We moved along a row of grinning strangers, like guests in a line-up at a wedding reception, who clutched us and kissed us vigorously, reminding me of Abuela's arrival in Scotland all those years ago.

Someone relieved us of our suitcases and we were guided into a cool parlour furnished with a mock-leather three-piece suite, a dining table and a matching display cabinet filled with cheap wine glasses and photographs of various children attending their First Communions.