And yet, despite these thoughts, and their attendant performance anxiety issues, Eris’s visit was one of the highlights of my time in Spain. We’d agreed that casualness was the key—which made me feel less bad about Hannah, and her less bad about flirting outrageously every night with the waiter in the village’s only restaurant.
Scott had returned to the Valle for another visit and he, Robert, Eris and I had decided to head out for food and no small amount of wine. We’d opted to take the car down to the village so I was laying off the booze for one rare night, but the other three were more than making up for my temperance.
By the end of the meal both Eris and Robert were trashed, with Scott not far behind. Eris’s waiter-flirting had become increasingly obvious; she didn’t speak the language much more than Rob or I did, but apparently Spanish men aren’t as demanding on that front as Spanish women. Scott decided this would probably be a good time to head back to the villa to finish some work.
“I’ll come with you,” I said, in what I intended to be a study in nonchalance but which, as Robert quickly pointed out, came out more as a study in how to be a sulky hypocrite.
“Don’t be silly,” said Eris, “let’s go and have another drink at Carpe Diem.”
Grateful for any plan that got her away from—let’s call him—Juan, I agreed. Carpe Diem was empty—just me, Robert, Eris and the bartender.
“I’ll get the drinks,” I said, “you guys sit down.”
Having successfully separated Eris from Juan, it was time for plan B—stop her getting any more drunk so she wouldn’t go back and look for him. My plan was as simple as it was foolproof: instead of ordering
Eris a rum and Coke, I’d just get her a straight Coke and gamble on her being drunk enough not to notice. Apparently I’d moved on from sulky hypocrite to devious hypocrite.
As I stood at the bar waiting to be served, I considered the morality of what I was about to do. Spiking someone’s drink—especially a girl’s—is definitely, unequivocally, wrong. But unspiking a drink? Is that still bad?
No, I thought; if anything it’s the opposite of bad. Unspiking someone’s drink is good; a noble, generous act. I took the drinks back to the table, making sure to give Robert the Coke with the rum and Eris the non-alcoholic variation. It was all very Danny Kaye.
Eris was distracted, playing with her phone, as I sat down, so I whispered to Robert, explaining what I’d done. It was his round next and I was hoping he might help me out with my unspiking plan, what with him being my friend and all.
Apparently, though, being thrashed at the Google Maps Challenge had left Robert sporting a grudge.
“Errrrriiissss …” he sang across the table. I stared at him. Don’t you dare, you bastard.
Eris looked up from her phone.
“Paul seems to have deliberately got you a straight Coke so that you won’t get any more drunk and run off with”—let’s call him—“Juan.”
Eris looked puzzled for a second, and then picked up her glass and took a sip. She swilled the liquid around in her mouth, searching for any hint of alcohol. Then a smile started to play around the corner of her mouth, which was still full of Coke.
She leaned across the table towards me and pursed her lips into a small “o” shape … and then spat the entire mouthful—shooting like a black, sugary fountain—into my face. Robert collapsed into laughter. He laughed so hard in fact that he almost fell off his chair.
Eris, too, by now, was in hysterics. This was literally the funniest
thing either of them had ever seen; me, once smug with my unspiked drink plan, now covered with Coke, dripping from my hair and running down my nose. I started laughing too. I mean, it
was
funny. Of course, this was the exact moment, at the very height of my sugary comeuppance, that—let’s call him—Juan chose to walk into Carpe Diem, looking for an after-work drink.
Eris stood up, her face a picture of innocence, and walked over to him, before he’d even made it to the bar. “Hallo,” he said, apparently his only word of English. But he didn’t really need any other words, as Eris immediately grabbed both sides of his face and kissed him. For about twenty seconds.
This seemed like a good time for me to leave. I headed back up the mountain, leaving Robert and Eris to their full-strength rum and Cokes, and God knows what else.
913
Two hours later, Robert and Eris finally made it back to the villa, which, given their state, was just as much of a miracle as it was every night that I’d managed it. I was sitting on the patio when they arrived, sharing a bottle of rum with Scott. Robert sat down to join us while Eris headed off, I assumed, to bed.
“Have you forgiven me, darling?” asked Robert, still not having quite finished laughing.
“Fuck off,” I said, filling his glass half with rum. He explained that, after I’d left, Juan had disengaged himself from Eris’s mouth and immediately started to panic, trying, in broken English, to apologize to Robert for “keesing the lady of your friend.”
To his credit, Robert had made the man feel as guilty as their mutual lack of communication skills would allow, suggesting through
rudimentary hand gestures that this might be the end of our nightly trips to his restaurant. The fact that we only had a few days left in Spain having more to do with this than anything else.
They’d all had a few more drinks before deciding to call it a night, having served me right for my amateur womanizing and my stupid jealousy.
“Shhhh …” Scott held up his hand, “what’s that … ?”
We could hear a crunching sound coming from the front of the house. Someone was walking down the gravel driveway. And the sound was getting quieter; further away.
“Where’s Eris?” asked Rob.
“I thought she’d gone to bed,” I said.
“Yeah, I think you thought wrong.”
“Well, I’m not going after her,” I said, pouring the remainder of the rum from the bottle into my glass. Then I put the glass down, sighed as loudly as I could—in the hope that Eris would hear it, despite being well on her way down the mountain by now—and trudged round to the front of the house.
I finally caught up with her halfway down the first big hill of the mountain road. “Where are you going?” I asked, redundantly.
“To find”—let’s …—“Juan,” she slurred.
Dear God, she was nearly as drunk as I usually was.
“Don’t be silly,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder in the hope that it might at least stop her walking. Which it did, but only for a second. Which was the time she needed to turn around and punch me, as hard as she could, in the face. And then off she ran, down the mountain, back towards the village. It was 3 a.m.
“Fine,” I shouted after her, “I’m not chasing after you.”
And I didn’t. I turned around and walked back to the house.
“Fuck her,” I said as I stormed back into the patio. “I’m not her keeper.”
Scott—now the least drunk of us—wasn’t entirely convinced.
“We can’t just let her run off down the mountain at this time of night. What if she slips—or gets hit by a car?”
I was worried, too, now that I’d got off my high horse about someone else behaving idiotically while drunk.
“We’ll have to go and find her,” said Rob.
“That’s going to be interesting in the dark,” I said.
There were no streetlights on the mountain road and seeing more than a few feet ahead was impossible; I’d lost count of the number of times one or other of us had nearly fallen to our deaths on the way home.
“We’ll take the car. Which of us is least drunk?”
Given that I’d just finished the last of a bottle of rum, the answer clearly wasn’t me. Robert had sobered up a fair amount, but was hindered by the fact that he hasn’t driven a car in his life. Which just left …
“Fuck sake,” said Scott. “OK, come on.”
The three of us piled into the rental car, Scott and me in the front and Robert in the back. The person who can’t drive has to sit in the back; that’s the rule. Scott drove slowly down the mountain; hitting Eris with the car would have been counter-productive.
Robert and I scoured each side of the road for any sign that she’d veered off into a field or fallen in a ditch. By the time we arrived at the outskirts of the village, still with no sign of Eris, I was starting to get frantic. Why hadn’t I followed her? Just because I was in a sulk and my ego wouldn’t allow me to beg her to come back to the villa, and safety?
“Look!” shouted Scott, pointing over the steering wheel, towards the village square. And there she was, standing right in the middle of the square, looking completely lost. Scott switched off the headlights and began to creep the car slowly towards the square.
We knew there was every chance she’d set off running again if she saw us, probably down one of the four or five narrow, car-proof alleyways that lead off the square. The car reached the edge of the square, which is when Eris spotted us. She stared at us, or at least toward the dark outline of the car, presumably trying to figure out if it was us or not; we stared back.
And then she was running. Scott—and I still don’t know where he learned to do any of what followed—slammed his foot on the accelerator and the car surged forward, overtaking Eris in a second, just before she had the chance to make it to the alley. Then, with a deft twist of the steering wheel and a little help from the handbrake, Scott spun the front of the car ninety degrees, blocking the space between her and the alley. Before we’d even come to a stop, I jumped out of the front door, grabbed Eris around her waist and threw her—I mean, physically threw her—through the back door that Robert had swung open.
I jumped back in the car, Robert took over the grabbing and we were away. It took a full twenty minutes of cajoling back at the villa before we finally convinced Eris that going to bed would be a much better use of her time than running back down the mountain to see a Spanish waiter who had probably been in bed for hours.
Calm restored to the Valle de Abdajalis, I went back to the patio, saw the empty bottle of rum and sighed. “Don’t worry,” said Scott, following behind me and reading my mind, “I saved a spare bottle in my room, just for this kind of eventuality. You want me to go and get it?”
“
Por favor
,” I said.
“You know,” said Robert, as Scott headed off to recover his emergency booze supply, “I still don’t know what that means.”
“What what means?” I asked. “
Por favor
? How can you not know what that means, you must hear me say it a dozen times a day, everywhere we go … It means ‘please.’ As in ‘
Uno San Miguel
,
por favor
.’ Come to think of it, I’ve heard you use it too.”
“Oh,” said Robert, “I just assumed it meant ‘for me.’”
Eight weeks in Valle de Abdajalis—an entirely non-English-speaking village—and Robert hadn’t learned a single word of Spanish. Which might make things difficult for him when the police inevitably turn up tomorrow to interview us about the very loud kidnapping we had just staged in the middle of the village square.
Scott returned with the last bottle of rum of the trip as the sun started to rise over the top of the mountain.
Chapter 1000
Like I’ve Never Been Away
I
t felt funny arriving at Gatwick airport as a visitor. Previously, I’d always associated the immigration halls at London airports with homecoming. Finally being able to climb back into my own bed, and to catch up with all my friends.
But this time it was just another airport; another taxi journey to another hotel. After two months of preparation—responding to questions from libel lawyers, checking final proofs and hyping the hell out of myself on my new site—the month of publication had arrived.
The first copies of the book were due to appear in stores on the last Friday of July and I’d flown back to London to conduct some more video interviews with “characters” from its pages, as well as to organize my own book launch party.
One of the things that first-time authors most look forward to when they get a book deal is the glamorous launch party to mark the day of publication. In fact, due to the vast numbers of books that large publishing houses churn out each year, there’s almost never a budget for anything more than a nice lunch for the author.
Throughout the writing process, though, I’d been using the promise of an invitation to the launch party as a bribe for friends to allow me to write embarrassing stories about them. “You’ll be guest of honor,” I promised about a hundred people, including at least two cab drivers.
Fortunately, as it turns out, the same trick works for venues. I looked through the book manuscript and made a list of all the bars I’d written about. There were a lot, and most of them were in central London. I sent them all the same email, just dropping them a line to let them know that they were “the key location” in my new book and wondering if, by any chance, they’d like to host the launch party.
What I hadn’t realized was that two of the venues—the International Bar
35
on Trafalgar Square and the Gardening Club
36
in Covent Garden were both owned by the same company, and therefore had the same PR person, who got the same email from me twice. Fortunately, though, he had a sense of humor about my blatant, and clumsy, attempt to blag a free party venue. He offered the International for the party itself, and guest list entry to the Gardening Club for the after-party.
The latter being easily the best place in London to pick up American student girls, it wasn’t a difficult offer to accept. A month back in London also fitted perfectly with my nomadic experiment. I had always planned to spend at least some time “back home” during the year—to catch up with friends as well as sorting out silly administrative things like going to the dentist and catching up with my bank manager. I’d managed to free myself of most bills when I left my apartment behind, but there were still some things that needed face-to-face attention.