The Songs of Manolo Escobar (15 page)

There was no radio in the van to listen to, so I moved into the driver's seat and fiddled with the gearstick, the handbrake and the various buttons and knobs for a while, and then I got out of the van and wandered to the far side of the car park, peering over the bridge on to the gushing river below. I looked across the open moors to the red, craggy hills in the distance, then climbed down the riverbank and collected a handful of stones, which I lobbed into the water.

After a while, when I could no longer stand the midges, I made my way back to the van. As I crossed the car park I heard the sound of clapping and whooping along to the music. It just didn't seem fair that I should be stuck outside, missing out on all the fun.

I opened the door to the bar and peered inside. The room had a warm, comfortable atmosphere, with a thick, deep-red carpet and dark, sturdy furniture padded with tartan fabric. The white, roughly Artexed walls were hung with paintings of Highland scenes and a mounted stag's head. Behind the bar, dozens of malt whisky bottles formed an impressive display. A sea of half-empty glasses and mixer bottles blanketed the dimpled copper-clad tables.

The customers were dressed in hiking gear or bikers' leathers and most were drunk. Two heavily-built men dressed in kilts were playing a traditional reel on a fiddle and a squeezebox. Papa and Pablito sat immediately beside them, talking to two women. I only managed to get a proper look at the one seated next to Papa. She was quite pretty, with blonde hair in a feather cut like Suzi Quatro, and she had large, sticky-out tits that were clamped tight inside a pink t-shirt. She held a cigarette in one hand and a pint of beer in the other. She was staring intently at Papa, who was talking at some length, as if he was telling her a story. She inclined her head towards him, draped her hand around the back of his head and pulled his face closer towards her ear. The gesture was so intimate it made me feel as though I was intruding.

I returned to the van and sat inside until it was dark. I hoped the customers might begin to drift off, but if anything the bar was getting busier as more cars and motorbikes arrived. At one stage I was sure I heard the familiar strains of ‘Porompompero' emerging.

I curled up on the passenger seat and tried to sleep, but there was nothing to cover me – we'd left the sleeping bags in the tent back at the fishing spot, and the night's coldness was closing in. Eventually I could bear it no longer and I returned to the bar. I opened the door and peered inside. Through the crowds and clouds of smoke, I made out Papa, in the same seat as before – only now Suzi Quatro was sitting on his lap. Pablito had a stupid look on his face. He was talking to another woman, who had dark hair and was wearing a denim bomber jacket. Pablito tried to pull her on to his knee, but she resisted and slapped him on the chest playfully. I fought my way through the bodies and grabbed Papa by the arm.

‘Can we go now? It's freezing outside,' I pleaded.

His face reddened and he manoeuvred the girl off his knee. ‘You wait in van. We only be one minute.'

I returned to the van and waited for another twenty minutes. In the end I got out and walked around briskly to keep warm. Eventually, after another hour or so, the door of the bar opened and people started to drift out, into cars and on to motorbikes. Papa and Pablito were among the last to leave, and behind them Suzi Quatro and her friend teetered across the car park, clutching a bottle of beer in each hand, singing ‘Viva Espana' at the top of their voices.

‘We drop girls at their tent,' Papa said casually.

Papa drove, with Suzi Quatro in the passenger seat, and her friend, Pablito and I sitting on the bare metal floor in the back. The smell of stale alcohol and cigarette smoke made me feel nauseous.

‘How dae ye say dildo in Spanish?' the friend asked.

They both erupted in braying laughter.

‘Aye, and blow job. How dae ye say blow job?' Suzi Quatro added.

‘Hey, I have young son, you watch language,' Papa said angrily.

We stopped at a field located off” the main road about two miles from the hotel, where a small canvas tent was pitched alongside two motorbikes. Everyone got out of the van and Suzi Quatro disappeared into the tent, emerging seconds later with a bottle-opener. She uncapped two bottles of beer and handed one each to her friend and Pablito. She uncapped a third and handed it to Papa, but he refused and she drank it herself.

‘Papa, can we go now? I'm freezing and tired,' I implored.

Suzi Quatro disappeared back into the tent and emerged with a sleeping bag, which she handed to me.

‘Here you are, wee man, wrap this round yersel,' she said.

As she stood in the glow of the van's headlights, I caught sight of her face properly. It was lined and baggy and coated in a heavy layer of make-up. It was clear she wasn't as young as her dress implied.

‘You sleep in van, we nae be long, only two minute,' Papa said.

Reluctantly I took the sleeping bag and climbed into the vehicle. There was a strong smell musky of bodies and cheap perfume from the quilted nylon, but at least it was warm. I huddled down into it and tried to sleep.

The sound of chatter and laughter stopped and everything was silent. I climbed into the front passenger seat and tried to look out of the windscreen, but it had steamed over with my breath. I rubbed a small circle in the bottom corner with the sleeve of my jumper to act as a spyhole. Papa had switched the headlights off, so it was difficult to make out what was going on. I squinted through the darkness, just managing to make out Pablito and Suzi Quatro's friend kissing.

After a few moments Papa and Suzi Quatro emerged from the tent. Papa's shirt was hanging out of his trousers, and she was wearing a long t-shirt that stretched over her thighs. As he
walked away she slapped him on the back of the head, and he stopped and faced her. I thought he was going to hit her, but he turned away.

‘Mi cago en su padre,'
he shouted. It was a phrase Mama had banned him from using in the house. ‘I shit on your father.'

Papa grabbed hold of Pablito, still in a clinch with the friend, and pulled him away.

‘Oi, whit d'ye think yer daen?' the friend shouted.

I scampered over the seats into the back of the van and lay on top of the sleeping bag, pretending to be asleep.

‘Who the fuck d'ye think ye are, ya dago bastard?' Suzi Quatro yelled.

The doors opened and Papa and Pablito hurriedly climbed in. Pablito was clearly irritated at the turn of events.

‘What happened, Papa, what did you do to her?' he asked.

Papa turned the ignition and slammed the gearstick into reverse. The wheels skidded on the damp grass as the vehicle spun around.

‘I tell her she is drunk, and she stink like bitch that is fuck by all dogs in street.'

Suzi Quatro came running towards the van as it pulled away and hammered her fists on the driver's side window.

‘Gie's ma sleepin bag, ya fuckin greasy cunt,' she demanded.

The van halted abruptly.

‘Give her this bag,' Papa shouted angrily.

Pablo leaned over and grabbed the bag from under me. He opened the door and threw it out on to the ground then Papa slammed his foot on the accelerator and the van tore off at speed, back to the fishing spot.

I woke first the next morning. I didn't know what time it was, but it was light and the birds were singing. I spent some time playing at the lochside, whittling sticks and throwing stones into the water before Papa and Pablito emerged from the tent looking groggy and sheepish. Papa boiled some hot water over the
Primus to make tea, and then he announced that we were going home. There was to be no more fishing.

The journey was almost entirely silent, except when we stopped at a public toilet in Tarbert. As the three of us stood at the urinals, I saw Papa catch Pablito's eye and motion his head towards me. Papa then said he was going to buy cigarettes and left. As I was drying my hands, Pablito took me by the arm.

‘You know that what happens on fishing trips stays on fishing trips,' he said, staring me in the eye.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean we don't talk about it, like to Mama for instance.'

‘Of course not.'

I knew it was wrong but I couldn't help feeling a surge of pride. I'd been taken into Papa and Pablito's confidence.

I
hadn't heard from Cheryl for weeks and I was desperate to see her, to stand in front of her, to find out who she was with and what she was doing. It was like an itch I needed to scratch, that consumed me day and night, dragging me down, making me unable to function properly. At work I found I couldn't concentrate on anything for longer than a few minutes. In bed I lay tortured, conceiving alternative pasts for myself – if only I'd acted differently at particular junctures – and different possible futures too, speculating what lay ahead depending on the choices I could make. I couldn't eat or sleep, and I had no energy. Even the most mundane task that took me out of my routine – such as collecting shirts from the laundry or finding somewhere to buy a tube of toothpaste – seemed like a monumental effort.

Cheryl filled my every thought. I called her at work repeatedly and left messages on her voicemail, all of which went unanswered. I texted and emailed her without response. I called her friends and colleagues, but none had seen or head from her. Ben and Corrie claimed not to have had any contact with her, which I doubted, but I didn't press them, especially Ben, who was only a few weeks away from his mock A-levels.

Max Miller insisted he too hadn't heard from her. I tried to gauge from the tone of his voice whether he was being truthful. He sounded sympathetic enough, but was it the tenor of deceit? I felt sure he'd never forgiven me for stealing Cheryl from him at university, and perhaps now, after all these years, he was exacting revenge. But no matter how hard I tried to convince myself of that possibility, I couldn't make it ring true. Max Miller wasn't like
that: he was principled and honourable. Surely he wouldn't steal my wife? It just wasn't possible. Was it?

I was about to embark on a crucial period at work; I was facing what I anticipated would be a captious and emotionally demanding divorce; and my father was dying. What I needed least at this time was the distraction of a wild goose chase going back seven decades into a corner of a country whose language and customs I barely knew. And yet, as though waking suddenly from a dream, I found myself back in Alguaire.

Despite having spent only a few hours there when rescuing Papa from the police station, I sensed that it held clues about what made my father who he was. Somehow, I felt, by returning there I would have a clearer understanding of him. There was no point trying to explain something like that to Kevin, so I told him I had flu and wouldn't be at work for a couple of days. He sighed with resigned disapproval. In the decade I'd worked with him I couldn't remember him being off sick for a single day. A broken leg, pneumonia and rampant gastroenteritis – which involved clearing a runway from his desk to facilitate his routine shuttle sprints to the bog – had all failed to dent his untiring work ethic.

I took a budget-airline flight to Barcelona and drove to Alguaire in a hire car. I parked on the edge of the village. The streets were cool and eerily quiet with a hint of morning mist. I wandered into the main square and sat outside at the pavement café. The only other customer was an old man, I guessed in his eighties or early nineties, wire-thin with tough, leathery skin and gun-dog eyes. He sat nursing a small glass of black coffee, smoking strong, toasted cigarettes, and greeted anyone who passed with a friendly ‘
¿Qué tal
?' He reserved his most cheerful smiles for the pretty young mothers, dressed in colourful skirts, who meandered across the square with their children in pushchairs. A few migrant workers were congregated outside the telegraph office opposite. Occasionally one or two of them crossed the road and teased the old man about this or that, and he accepted their attentions with good humour.

I wondered about his past, how long he'd lived in Alguaire and how he'd survived the war. Perhaps he'd known my grandparents; perhaps he was one of the villagers who'd betrayed them to the Falangists; perhaps he'd pointed to my grandmother and said, ‘She deserves to die.' Perhaps he was one of the villagers who'd written to the Ajuntamente, objecting to Papa's request to recover his parents' remains from the field where they'd lain buried for the past seventy years.

I left the café and wandered through the streets to the outer edge of the village, where I found a steep set of narrow steps leading on to a promontory on which a stone statue of Christ was perched, his extended arms seeming to embrace the village and the countryside beyond. On the side of the hill was a series of loudspeakers from which municipal messages were being relayed to villagers – times and dates of meetings and community events, I guessed.

I climbed to the top and looked across the landscape, beyond the chaotic cluster of terracotta roofs below me, the olive and nectarine groves, and over the undulating plains. The green valleys, bordered by headlands of lime and red, marly sandstone, were interrupted occasionally by islets of yellow, parched scrub. In the distance, the craggy mountain range stood like a bold artistic statement. This was what had been fought over.

Below, I saw the building with the bell tower that had caught my attention on my previous visit. From this distance it was even more unsightly than up close. No one, it seemed, was prepared to do anything about its ruin. No one wanted to talk about the war: the building remained scarred and the dead lay where they were buried, untouched.

The thought made me suddenly and fiercely angry, and I wanted to do something about it. On my way back to the car I noticed the Ajuntamente office was open, so I went inside. It was attended by a pair of female clerks, attractive and smartly dressed, neither of whom had been there when I'd visited with Mama and Pablito. They both greeted me with a smile. I asked
in faltering Spanish if there was someone around who might be able to answer some questions about the building opposite. They looked at me, puzzled.