The Songs of Manolo Escobar E-Book

Carlos Alba

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 359

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Suspicion had been fomenting within me for some time that our family was different. Why, for example, were Pablito, my elder brother, and I dark-haired with olive skin when the rest of my classmates were sandy and pale? Why did our family have a second way of speaking, which I didn't understand? Why was ours the only home I knew where the walls were dominated with pictures of men in spangly waistcoats and tight trousers?' For Antonio, growing up Spanish in Glasgow is a nightmare - one of shame and potential embarrassment on every front. But there is no hiding his ethnicity: his noisy, bullying father, even his gentle mother and her quest for olives and exotic meats, put paid to that. It is only as he grows older, and can see his father for what he is, a reluctant exile washed up on the cold shores of Scotland, that Antonio begins to understand what terrible forces drove his father to flee 40 years before. Unravelling his father's secret life piece by piece, Antonio discovers a truth that will shock and heal him.

Leseprobe

The Songs of Manolo Escobar

The Songs of Manolo Escobar

Carlos Alba

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

This ebook edition published in 2011 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2011 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Copyright © Carlos Alba 2011

The moral right of Carlos Alba to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ebook ISBN: 978-0-85790-050-0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

For my mum and dad

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank several people for helping with the research for this book: Emilio Silva at the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory; Valentina Montoya Martinez for sharing her experiences of coming to Britain from Chile as a child, following her country’s military coup in 1973; staff at La Biblioteca del Casino de Manresa; staff at the Rif Hotel and El Minzah Hotel in Tangier; and Dr Nathanial Gardner at the Glasgow University School of Modern Languages and Cultures.

1

I was five years old when I learned I was Spanish. I came home from school and told Mama I’d been pushed to the ground by a classmate for being a Paki.

‘You’re not a Pakistani, you’re a Spaniard,’ she informed me indignantly.

I returned to school the following day and proudly announced that I was from Spain. I was pushed to the ground by the same classmate for being a Dago.

Even so young, I’d suspected for some time that our family was different. Why, for example, were Pablito, my elder brother, and I dark-haired and tanned when the rest of my classmates had hair the colour of sand, with pale skin and freckles? Why did our family have a second way of speaking, which I didn’t understand? Why was ours the only home I knew where the walls were full of pictures of serious-faced men in waistcoats and tight trousers?

‘We come from another country, another culture,’ Mama told me, which at least helped to explain why my parents were a mama and a papa and not a ma and a da, why they sat glued to the BBC World Service every night with expectant looks on their faces and left in their wake the faint whiff of garlic and Aqua Velva.

Ours was not a neighbourhood that celebrated diversity. Difference was tolerated only if it conformed to expectations: Pakistanis were poor and they ran shops; Italians were well off and they ran cafés; Spaniards slept in the afternoons and lived in Spain. There was no reason for them to be in Mosspark, where there was no afternoon sun to be slept through and where the retail sector had already been sewn up by the Pakistanis and the Italians.

At primary school the teachers, all of them floral-frock-wearing spinsters, insisted on anglicising my name.

‘His name’s Antonio,’ Mama pointed out.

‘We prefer Anthony,’ my Primary One teacher replied with a dismissive tilt of her nose.

‘But his name’s Antonio,’ Mama insisted, a note of exasperation creeping into her voice.

Mosspark’s ignorance of all things Iberian was reflected in the unwanted nicknames that followed me around throughout my childhood – like Greaser or Dago, and, inevitably, Manuel, after the fictional waiter. At least he was actually Spanish. I was also likened to Speedy Gonzalez, the sombrero-wearing Mexican cartoon mouse; Rangi Ram, the Indian lackey from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum; and Idi Amin, the president of Uganda.

Coming to terms with being an outsider in my own country was hard, and the worst of it was I seemed to be alone. Pablito was happy enough to flaunt his foreignness, correcting friends when they mispronounced his name, peppering his sentences with Spanish words and eating Mama’s cooking without complaint.

But I didn’t want to be different. When I was about seven, I made a conscious effort not to learn any more Spanish, and I used that ignorance as a weapon against my parents. Although Mama was trying to learn English and was happy to practise with me, my stubborn refusal to speak or even allow myself to understand Spanish at home provoked a series of angry exchanges with Papa.

‘Habla español,’ he constantly ordered.

‘I don’t want to speak in Spanish,’ I replied.

‘En ese caso, no dicen nada,’ he said. ‘Then don’t say anything.’

I didn’t care. I wanted to be like my friends. I wanted to be Anthony, not Antonio. I wanted to eat sausages and fish suppers, not chorizo and pescaíto frito. I wanted to be normal.

One wet Monday morning in the playground, Bobby Miller – known to all as Max – told me that I’d never be able to play football for Scotland.

‘But I was born here – that makes me Scottish,’ I protested.

‘Disnae work like that. It’s yer da that decides who you can play fur,’ Max Miller insisted. ‘Y’ill huv tae play fur the Dagos.’

It didn’t seem fair. I wanted to play for Scotland. I’d seen the footage of the oily, moustachioed Atlético Madrid players kicking wee Jimmy Johnstone up and down the park when they played Celtic in the European Cup, and, along with every other Scottish supporter, I was appalled.

When I consulted Mama on the matter, she said I could play for either country because I had dual nationality. This sounded like a disease. But if it meant I could play for Scotland, I was prepared to accept it.

‘I can play for Scotland. I have dual nationality,’ I told Max Miller the next day, enunciating the words slowly and deliberately.

This seemed to silence him, but worse was to come. The following week, he appeared in school brandishing a copy of The Victor which included a strip where Matt Braddock, VC and bar – the valiant British Second World War flying ace – single-handedly foiled a Nazi plot to smuggle arms to beastly Irish collaborators through the Iberian peninsula, assisted by equally beastly Spanish fascists. Braddock’s swashbuckling heroics were accompanied by speech bubbles containing imperatives such as ‘Take that, snivelling Nazi Quislings!’ and ‘Eat lead, Hitler-loving swine!’

‘You helped the Jerries in the war,’ Max Miller spat at me accusingly. ‘You cannae be on Britain’s side any more.’

‘What are you talking about? I always fight on Britain’s side,’ I protested. I didn’t want to be banished to fight alongside the friendless dunces who made up the German forces in our daily breaktime game of Commandos.

‘We cannae take the chance,’ he said through grinning teeth. ‘How dae we know you willnae give away secrets tae the Nazis?’

Max Miller had done his homework. He’d consulted with his Uncle Eddie, who’d informed him that thousands of Spanish soldiers and workers had flooded into Germany to help with the Nazi war effort.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Surely it couldn’t be true? Was I really descended from a nation of Nazi sympathisers? All the stiff-upper-lip values of straight-batted, battling-Jerry-for-Blighty honesty ingrained in my psyche from years of watching the on-screen exploits of Trevor Howard and Jack Hawkins seemed like a sick joke. I may have been a British subject, but I was a second-class British subject, I now realised – and, if Max Miller’s playground straw poll was anything to go by, I was only in Britain under sufferance.

‘Why you wanna know about the bloody war?’ Papa demanded angrily that evening as we ate dinner.

‘A boy in my class says Spain was on the same side as the Jerries.’

‘You tell yer friend tae mind his bloody business.’

‘But is it true?’ I asked desperately.

Papa stopped eating. He put down his fork and looked into my eyes. His face broke into a warm, reassuring smile.

‘Na, is nae true,’ he said, ruffling my hair. ‘You tell yer friend he talk a load a bloody rubbish.’

2

I made my way down an impossibly steep and narrow wooden staircase. On either side, walls were plastered with posters advertising obscure musical acts like Chainsaw Armageddon and Satan’s Rampant Fuckstick.

At the foot of the stairs a stiff door opened into a darkened, smoke-filled room where the unmistakable, musky stench of dope hung heavy in the air. A few shabby, wooden tables were populated by pale, gaunt men dressed mainly in black leather. Thumping, primal rhythms boomed from large speakers. If hell had bars, I felt sure they looked like this.

Is this what I’d spent five years at university and journalism college preparing for? I’d been asking myself this with increasing frequency of late. Earlier in the day I’d been in Bournemouth to interview Britain’s youngest mother, a sullen eleven-year-old who chain-smoked through our exchange while her lumpy-faced mother pored over the details of their contract with the paper. The putative father whom they’d promised I could meet failed to materialise. Why, as a political editor, I should be despatched on such a mission was beyond me. But then job titles didn’t seem to mean anything any more in our ever-dwindling pool of talent. You did what you had to do.

‘It’s got social repercussions,’ Kevin the so-called news editor had insisted. ‘It’s all about Broken Britain. That’s politics, isn’t it?’

After leaving the family to prepare for their imminent infamy, I was making my way back up to London to catch a train to Scotland to visit my parents when Kevin rang again. A reader had been in touch, claiming to have mobile-phone footage of Nigel Piers, the junior environment minister, fellating a Somali rent boy in a public toilet in Clapton. That was hardly news, I pointed out, but Kevin assured me that wasn’t the real story. Piers, the rent boy claimed, had later taken him to Petrus and told him to order what he liked as he’d be claiming the meal on expenses.

The rent boy had demonstrated admirable resourcefulness in snapping the receipt with his phone while Piers was taking a piss, and he was willing to hand over all of the evidence for a price to be negotiated. I was told to meet him in this fetid dungeon in Canning Town and to go no higher than five grand.

A wall of lifeless eyes locked on to me, and I felt myself sweating coldly. I slipped open the top button of my shirt and loosened my tie. I became aware of someone standing in the doorway, immediately behind me, a little too close for comfort. It was the same figure I’d caught sight of outside in the street, minutes earlier. I’d only seen him from behind, but it had been enough for me to make a mental note that this was someone to avoid in a dark alley. He was tall, with greasy black hair tied in a ponytail. Daubed in white paint on the back of his leather biker’s jacket were the words ‘Cradle of Filth’. Dirty, ripped jeans hung loosely around his shapeless arse, their legs tucked into knee-length motorcycle boots. On each wrist he wore a black leather cuff, studded with chrome spikes.

It flashed through my mind that perhaps he’d followed me in. I looked away, trying to ignore him. He moved closer. I tensed as I felt his hand rest on my shoulder.

‘Dad, I thought it was you.’

‘Shit, what are you doing here?’ I demanded, overcome with relief and a less familiar sensation – genuine pleasure at seeing my teenage son.

‘I hang out here sometimes. What are you doing here?’

‘Work, believe it or not. Where the hell did you get these clothes?’ I asked.

‘Camden Market, mostly.’

‘I meant where did you get the money to pay for them?’

‘Gran gave me a couple of hundred for my birthday and Mum bought me the boots.’

‘Jesus, what are they thinking of, letting you walk the streets like that?’

‘I’ve had them for ages. You must have seen them before.’

I decided we should leave. I had no desire to spend another moment of what was supposed to be my free time seeking out the rent boy, least of all in the company of Ben. I’d tell Kevin he hadn’t shown up. If he was that desperate to land the story, he could send one of the bottom-feeders to do it. They were on little more than the minimum wage and, unlike me, had no professional dignity to sacrifice. Whereas I remembered a time when I actually enjoyed going to work in the morning. I thought about quitting the job most days now, but I knew that the way things were going, I’d never find another.

We moved out into the daylight and found a burger bar across the road. I ordered two coffees and carried them to a table where Ben was seated, fiddling with his iPhone. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d witnessed him conscious and vertical. Even when I was at home I barely saw him. He was never out of bed before midday, and in the evenings he was God knows where when he should have been locked away, studying for his A-levels.

‘So how are things?’ I asked.

‘Fine.’

‘Would you care to elaborate?’

He shrugged as he tore open a sachet of sugar, spilling the contents on to the table. He reached for another one, ripped off a corner and deposited the contents into his polystyrene cup.

‘What do you want me to say? Things are fine.’

‘Well, given that I haven’t seen you for over a week, I thought you might have some conversation. Why don’t we start with what you’ve been doing?’

He lifted a plastic stirrer and lethargically dragged it around the inside of his cup.

‘Oh, you know, the usual.’

I resisted the impulse to raise my voice. ‘No, I don’t know. What’s the usual?’

‘The usual – eating, sleeping, studying.’

‘So you are studying?’

‘Yes, I’m studying,’ he said, irritated.

‘Okay, don’t lose your temper.’

‘Well, how would you know whether I have nor not? You’re never around.’

I couldn’t think of a decent retort.

‘So are you and Mum getting a divorce?’ he asked casually.

Actually, it seemed more like a statement than a question, and I felt suddenly disengaged from my surroundings, as though I was coming round after a blow to the head. I was taken aback, not just by his comment, but how blithely he’d made it. I tried to say something, but I was lost, my mind filled with random abstractions – like how much we’d get for the house, who’d take the cat and whether I’d ever have sex again. I placed my hands on the table to steady myself. The bitter smell of cheap coffee was abhorrent, and a wave of nausea washed over me.

‘Is that what your mother said? Did she say that?’

‘No, I managed to figure it by myself.’

I couldn’t abide his cockiness – this was a new thing.

‘Well, don’t figure. Do you hear me? Don’t figure things that you know nothing about.’ I found myself jabbing a finger at his face, and my voice was loud enough to attract the attention of the cleaner at the opposite side of the restaurant.

‘Okay, chill out, you can’t blame me for thinking that. You and Mum hardly talk any more. And when you do, you’re at each other’s throats.’

I felt a strong desire to see Cheryl right then, to have it out with her, to hear her take on what was going on between us, to know precisely where I stood. I wished I hadn’t agreed to go to Glasgow that afternoon, but Mama’s voice on the phone had sounded so insistent, panicked even.

‘So what kind of work were you doing in that place, anyway?’ Ben asked. ‘You never said.’

‘Oh, it’s not important.’

He nodded uninterertedly and looked away.

‘Will you be home tonight?’

‘I’m going to visit Abuela and Abuelo for a day or two,’ I explained.

‘Christ, what do they want?’

‘Don’t speak about them like that, they’re your grandparents.’

‘Sorry, it’s just that . . . well, there’s always something with them. What’s the crisis this time?’

‘There’s no crisis, they just want to see me, that’s all.’

As the train pulled away, I watched Ben grow smaller and smaller until he was little more than a gothic dot on the platform. I slumped into my seat and sighed, exhausted. I needed to relax. Everything seemed so frenzied and urgent all the time. I was glad I’d decided against flying to Glasgow, finally taking Cheryl’s advice and using the train. I had to admit it was an agreeable change. There was no queuing, no check-in, no security frisking, no X-ray machines.

Cheryl travelled everywhere by train that she couldn’t get to by bike or on foot. She was so infuriatingly virtuous and didn’t seem to understand that not everyone could be as socially responsible as her. What did she know about the demands of the real world, sitting in her municipal ivory tower, sniffly disapproving of my job as though it was some grubby, morally reprehensible pursuit? I agreed with her that global warming was a bad thing. I just didn’t see why it had to occupy such an increasing proportion of the decreasing number of conversations we had together. In our most recent exchange, I’d managed to drive her from the room simply by pointing out that I didn’t have time to worry about composting every time I peeled a banana. She was less than sympathetic. I seemed to have developed a knack of annoying her without trying. We’d lost the ability to talk without each sentence being unpicked for the slightest hint of ulterior motive. We didn’t converse any more, we negotiated emotional territory.

As the train swept through the countryside, my mind gradually emptied, and I succumbed to the hypnotic pull of the fleeting landscape and the rhythm of the train’s wheels rolling over the tracks. I fell into a deep, comforting sleep and, for the first time in ages, I had a proper dream.

I dreamed I was a child again, on one of our regular train journeys to sort out my parents’ immigration papers in Manchester, the closest city to Scotland that had a Spanish consulate. We were packed into a hot, smoky compartment. Mama had packed a tortilla, wrapped in tinfoil, and there was a crusty white loaf and a flask of coffee. She looked dowdy in a patterned print dress. She never had taken as much interest in her appearance as Papa, but then, as she pointed out, she was in the house all day, so who was going to see her? Her job, she said, was to make Papa look presentable to the outside world because he was the family’s ambassador in public. She was cutting into the omelette with a crucifix that normally stood in pride of place on our living-room mantelpiece, and then handing slices to everyone. Pablito was there too, but he was an adult, drinking whisky straight from a half-bottle and bragging about a girl he’d slept with the night before. Mama was pretending not to listen, but Papa was laughing and egging him on. He was sitting nearest the window, with shards of sunlight reflecting off his lustrous black, curly hair, and was dressed smartly in a dark, pure wool suit with a crisply starched white shirt, shiny cufflinks and a sober silk tie. In his right hand was an untipped Chesterfield.

I woke with a fright, groping helplessly through the fug of mid-dream state as the conductor stood over me, waiting for my ticket. From the dirty urban landscape I guessed we were somewhere in the West Midlands. As I searched my pockets, I suddenly felt gripped by panic and wondered if Ben was right. Were Cheryl and I really heading for a divorce? Even if neither of us had uttered the word, it was clearly something he’d picked up on.

There was no doubt she and I were going through a rocky patch, but I always felt the best way to tackle these problems was to ignore them. Marriages often hit on testing times, but that didn’t mean you gave up on them. You simply waited for the difficulties to fade in importance, as they inevitably did, and the irresistible grind of routine would reassert itself. I felt strongly about the importance of marriage – not that I was religious in any way, but it was one of the few values that had stayed with me from childhood. Mama and Papa believed family was everything. You supported it and stuck by it, no matter what. And that’s why they were still together.

It was also, I supposed, the reason why I was now heading north, responding to a cry for help from my beleaguered mother. She hadn’t told me what the problem was, but I knew it would have something to do with Papa. From previous experience I guessed it would involve some internecine dispute of baffling Iberian complexity. I also knew that my role, like that of a priest, would be pastoral and mediatory. There was every reason to believe I’d come and go with the substantial question still unresolved, but that my sober, anglosajón rationality would provide a calming influence.

I dozed intermittently, and, in no time it seemed, the train was crossing the border into Scotland. We pulled through the barren hills of the southern uplands and entered the post-industrial wasteland of South Lanarkshire, passing through the drab continuum of high-rises, chaotic undergrowth and deserted goods yards. Gone were the steelworks and the mines that had peppered the countryside of my childhood; in their place sat a few modern housing estates and the occasional recently built factory, now closed, that had, for a spell, churned out mobile phones and semiconductors. Mostly it was just acres of nothingness, and I felt the first pangs of anxiety that I knew would increase exponentially the closer I got to my father.

As I stepped on to the platform at Glasgow Central Station he was the first person I saw, standing on the concourse. In the monochrome photographs from my youth, he’d had the flawless, sculpted profile of a matinée idol, but his looks had faded, and he no longer turned heads. He was simply conspicuous rather than striking. As a child I’d thought he was tall, but now I towered over him – and it didn’t help that he was beginning to stoop. His hair was still thick, but it had turned a metallic grey, and it sat on his head like a clump of fraying wire wool.

We embraced and exchanged a fleeting brush of lips on cheeks. It was an involuntary gesture to him, as instinctive as breathing, but it never felt natural to me, kissing another man – even my father – in public.

‘You like da cheapskin?’ he asked.

His accent threw me. It always happened when I’d been away for a long time and my ears weren’t tuned properly to his lazy, pidgin diction of short Spanish vowels mugged by a flat Glaswegian drawl. I knew from his reaction to my hesitation that he was irritated. He liked to think he was clearly understood.

‘Da cheapskin? Dae you like da cheapskin?’

‘I know what you said. Yes, I like your coat, it’s very nice.’

I didn’t tell him I was trying to ignore it – this fur-trimmed, other-era garment, with its cash-up-front showiness.

‘How much cost?’ he demanded.

I hated it when he did that.

‘You tell me, how much cost?’

‘I don’t know, Papa.’

He threw up his hands dismissively.

‘I know you nae know, I ask you guess. You guess how much.’

‘I really have no idea. Four hundred,’ I ventured, deliberately high.

A look of unalloyed triumph washed over his face.

‘Nae four hundred, nae even close. One hundred thirty. Only one hundred thirty quid. I get from this guy in, wha you call it?’

‘Land of Leather,’ I said.

He’d been buying his coats from the same Bangladeshi supplier for years.

‘Si, in Land a Leather, in Barrhead. I get you one. You give me your size, I get you one.’

‘I don’t want one.’

‘Wha you mean, you nae want? Only one hundred thirty quid, you nae get cheaper nowhere.’

‘Really Papa, I don’t want one. I’ve got plenty of coats.’

‘Ach, I nae understand you, this is bargain, this cheapskin,’ he said as he turned on his heel and marched off.

As winter’s early darkness fell, we chugged along Mosspark Drive to the reassuringly benign putt-putt sound of Papa’s Volkswagon Beetle, past the shops and the achingly familiar sight of the old swingpark, where I learned to ride a bike and smoked my first cigarette.

I noticed how the passage of time had taken its toll on the neighbourhood, whose council-estate uniformity had been replaced with a surfeit of satellite dishes, stone-cladding and driveways populated with garish customised cars. The family-run shops were gone, closed and shuttered, replaced by a single mini-market with grilled windows covered in adverts for low-cost energy drinks and cigarettes.

The car pulled up outside the compact, two-bedroom house in which I’d grown up. It hadn’t changed in any significant way since my youth. My parents were among the few residents who still rented from the council. ‘Why I wanna buy a bloody house?’ Papa demanded testily whenever I tried to point out the financial benefits of owning property. ‘If I wanna fix roof or windows, I phone the council. If I buy a house, I dae myself.’

Mama had heard the car’s rasping engine and was standing on the doorstep, ready with a smile and a needy embrace.

‘How is my boy?’ she asked, her accent as much Glaswegian as it was Spanish.

‘I’m doing fine, Mama.’

She eyed me sceptically. ‘You don’t look fine, are you eating?’

‘I’m eating.’

‘But are you eating properly?’

There was pathos in her concern that made me feel slightly sad – that I was in my mid-forties, with a family of my own, that I earned in a month what she and Papa lived on for a year, and yet she still felt responsible for my welfare.

I stepped into the hallway and was met by the smell of lambs’ kidneys braising in sherry. I made my way upstairs to my old bedroom, which hadn’t changed since I’d shared it with Pablito thirty years before.

I’d kept urging Mama to redecorate it, even offering her the money, but she said she didn’t have the heart. It retained the imprint of teenage boyhood, with fading posters of rock bands hanging limply from the walls, along with occasional cut-outs of footballers from Spanish magazines, with their 1970s mullets and sideburns. Neither Pablito nor I ever saw them play, but we pretended we idolised them to humour Papa.

Other than twin single beds, the only item of furniture was a cheap mock-pine chest of drawers purchased from an industrial estate in Renfrew. On top of it sat a couple of well-thumbed Alistair MacLean novels and a clutch of dusty, scratched cassette cases.

I dumped my holdall on the floor and collapsed on to the bed, lurching precariously to one side as the loosely-sprung mattress sagged beneath my weight. I felt a sudden urge to speak to Cheryl. I pulled out my mobile phone and dialled our home number, but the moment I heard it click on to voicemail, I wished I hadn’t.

‘Hi, I’m just checking in, to see if you’re all right,’ I said, trying to sound casual and breezy. ‘Just thought I’d touch base.’

Touch base? What the hell did that mean? I hated making these phone calls, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Even if she’d answered, we’d have had a few moments of unsatisfying, directionless conversation, then I’d probably have spent the rest of the night worrying, rehearsing in my head every syllable she’d spoken, every pause, searching for clues as to what she was really thinking.

I felt trapped inside my aching body. I changed into a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. I trudged into the bathroom and threw some cold water over my face, rubbing my eyes to dislodge the crumbs of sleep that had built up on the train journey.

At the bottom of the staircase was a large bag of dirty laundry. Mama had told me on the phone that Pablito might be eating with us, although she wasn’t certain he’d definitely make it because of his work schedule. He’d promised to ‘pull some strings’, she said. He’d recently switched jobs – again – his latest designation being in what he referred to as ‘petroleum retail’.

I entered the living room and found him and Papa kneeling in front of the television set, crouched over some sort of electrical item.

‘Hey hermano, how’s it going?’ I asked nonchalantly.

Pablito looked up and managed a less than convincing smile, then continued his conversation with Papa.

‘. . . so I said, “Don’t be an arsehole, Brian. You may be senior retail executive but I’ve got a lifetime of experience in sales, and I know the consumer mindset.”’

Papa watched him transfixed.

‘Brian said, “Don’t talk to me like that, Pablito, I am your boss, remember.” So I looked at him, and I said, “Well, behave like a boss and don’t talk such fucking shite.”’

They both laughed.

‘How is the petrol station, Pablito?’ I asked.

He eyed me uncertainly.

‘It’s fine.’

There was a short silence before Papa intervened.

‘This is just temporary job for Pablito. He go work for big firm to sell, how you say, conservations?’

‘Conservatories,’ Pablito said.

‘Oh right, conservatories“ I said more cynically than I’d intended. ‘What, you mean like for a double-glazing firm?’

‘They do double-glazing as well, but I’ll be focusing more on the conservatory side of the business,’ he replied defensively. ‘It’s a growth industry.’

‘This is good job. He earn two thousand pound every week,’ Papa said enthusiastically. ‘Two thousand pound,’ he repeated, to emphasise the vastness of the figure.

Pablito looked embarrassed.

‘Two grand, wow. Is that basic?’ I asked him.

‘Eh, no, that’s with commission, but that would mean only having to sell a couple of conservatories a week.’

They continued with their technical collusion, holding up the ends of wires, speculating where they might go. I took a proper look at the item. It was a crude metal box with a series of red and green lights on the fascia, with wires protruding from the back. There appeared to be no writing on it to indicate who had produced it or what it was for.

‘What is that?’ I asked.

Neither of them answered.

‘Okay, ignore me, I don’t want to know.’

‘Is satellite TV,’ Papa said without looking up.

‘Satellite TV?’

‘Si.’

‘And where’s the satellite dish?’ I asked.

‘Is in garden.’

I went into the kitchen, where Mama was cooking, and looked out of the window. The dish occupied my entire field of vision – a large, battleship-grey installation, supported on either side by two rusting metal poles.

‘Where the fuck did you get that thing?’ I shouted.

Papa looked up.

‘Eh, you nae swear in front of your Mama. You show some respect.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to. It’s just that . . . Christ, where did you get that thing? It looks like it fell off a Soviet space station in 1972 and landed in the garden. You could use it as a paddling pool.’

‘Pablito. He get it from one of his clients,’ Papa explained.

‘One of his clients?’ I said, trying not to laugh. ‘What, you mean one of the dodgy customers at the petrol station?’

‘It’s not stolen, if that’s what you’re getting at,’ Pablito said. ‘It’s perfectly legitimate.’

‘I’m not worried about it being stolen, I’m worried about it bringing down a 747 while you’re trying to get Blackadder on UK Gold.’

I left them to it and remained in the kitchen with Mama to help her prepare the meal. I wanted to get her on her own so that I could quiz her on the supposed emergency that had hastened my journey north. I closed the door so that Papa couldn’t hear what we were saying.

I remembered the kitchen from my youth as a pristine beacon of technology, but it hadn’t aged well. Paint was flaking from the walls, and the cupboard doors were scratched and fading. Its surfaces were cluttered with freakishly large electric juicers, peelers, dicers and mixers like props from an old episode of Dr Who. A tarnished chrome microwave dominated, with its giant clockwork dials and luminous green LEDs. All of these things that Papa had bought Mama as Christmas presents through advertisements on the back page of the Daily Express had simply gathered dust. She only ever seemed to use three kitchen items – her pressure cooker, her ageing, blackened griddle pan and a large terracotta cazuela.

She handed me a large Cos lettuce to wash and separate while she got on with other things.

‘So what’s the crisis?’ I asked.

She stopped chopping a large onion and looked at me.

‘It’s your Papa.’

‘Who else would it be?’

‘He’s decided he wants to go back to Spain.’

I stopped what I was doing and laughed. Papa hadn’t been to Spain for almost seventy years.

‘You mean for a holiday?’

She nodded.

‘Well, that’s good news, isn’t it? It’s what we’ve been pressing him to do for years, to visit the places where he grew up, see old friends.’

‘It’s not as simple as that. He’s been writing to the Ajuntamente in Lerida.’

‘To the what?’

‘The local council.’

Lerida was the town in Catalonia where his family came from. That much I knew about his background. That was pretty much all I knew. None of his family had survived the Civil War, and he’d always insisted Spain was a part of his life that was behind him. The last time he’d even come close to returning was more than twenty-five years before, when he and Mama had thought about going there to live, but there was an attempted coup d’état and everything changed. It was then that Mama resolved they would end their days in Britain. She was, she said, tired of feeling rootless and uncertain, and Glasgow was to be their home.

‘What does he want with the local council?’ I asked.

‘Oh, he has a bee in his bonnet about something or other and he’s got into an argument with them over it.’

‘Why is he arguing with officials in a country he hasn’t visited for so long?’

‘He won’t tell me. His writing is very poor, which is making him frustrated, but he won’t let me help.’

Papa and Pablito came in, and we took our places at the table. Papa began with a starter of lettuce leaves sprinkled with a little salt, eating with a knife and fork as we watched. This was the ritual with which we’d started every family meal since I could remember. I never understood why it existed. I had once asked Mama about it as a child, and she simply said ‘Papa likes his lettuce.’

When I asked why I couldn’t have any, she laughed. ‘You think I can afford lettuce every day for a whole family?’ she asked.

I’d bought a bottle of Rioja at the train station but I knew I’d have to wait until later to open it. Papa wouldn’t allow anyone to drink alcohol in his presence, and he became infuriated if he caught the smell of it. Even now, middle-aged, I didn’t want to risk his disapproval.

‘So, how’s Carlitos?’ I asked Pablito breezily as Papa munched through his lettuce.

I was the only member of the family who still asked my brother about his son, principally because I knew it annoyed him so much. If I’d really wanted to know about my nephew’s welfare, the last person I’d have asked was his father. He eyed me guardedly and his bottom lip quivered, as though he wanted desperately to reply with something caustic but his brain couldn’t keep up. He couldn’t be certain I was inquiring out of anything but genuine concern, and that’s what riled him so much.

‘He’s good,’ he snapped.

‘He must have left university by now,’ I said. ‘What’s he going to do?’

‘Eh, I don’t know, I think he’s looking for a job. His mother never answers her phone.’

Mama served up plates of plump kidney pieces in a rich brown sauce, served on a bed of fluffy rice flavoured with saffron. There was a tension in the air, an implicit sense that everyone knew why we were there and that we had things to discuss, but that no one was willing to break the silence. I decided it would have to be me.

‘So, Mama tells me you want to go to Spain.’

Papa looked up from his plate.

‘Si, I go Spain,’ he said quietly.

Silence resumed. I was waiting for him to elaborate but he continued eating.

‘Do you want to explain why?’ I asked.

‘I nae explain. I go, this is all.’

‘And you don’t think that suddenly deciding to return, at the age of eighty-three, to a country you’ve spent the past seventy-odd years avoiding deserves a bit more explanation than that?’

‘I think it’s a good idea for him to go,’ Pablito chipped in.

‘Oh, Christ, that’s all we need,’ I said.

Pablito threw his fork down on his plate.

‘Well, why not, if that’s what he wants to do. I’ve said for a long time he should go back.’

‘We’ve all said for a long time he should go back, and he’s always refused, so what’s changed?’

‘Well, he’s decided he wants to go, and I think he needs our support, not your negativity.’

‘He’s eighty-fucking-three years old.’

‘Hey, you watcha yer mouth,’ Papa growled.

‘He’s eighty-three. Mama’s seventy-nine, and he suddenly wants to jet off to sip sangria on the Costas. Don’t you think that’s a bit strange?’

I turned to Papa.

‘What about the dangers?’

He ignored me and carried on eating.

‘What about the army generals waiting to seize power, the old scores waiting to be settled, the murderers still walking the streets, the Falangist agents in the Guardia Civil – all the things that have stopped you going back for most of your life?’

Still he ignored me.

‘Have you asked Mama what she thinks of the idea?’

‘She is okay,’ he whispered defiantly.

‘Have you asked her if she’s okay?’

Mama had been sitting silently, her reddened face following the conversation back and forth as though she was watching a tennis match.

‘That’s just so like you, Papa, to assume that Mama will do whatever you say.’

I put my cutlery down but Papa continued to eat.

‘She is my wife, she dae wha I say,’ he said blithely, chewing on a piece of kidney.

Mama shifted uncomfortably.

‘Let’s just drop it,’ she implored. ‘We can discuss it another time.’

We finished eating in silence. After the meal, Papa and Pablito returned to the living room where, I was astonished to see, they had managed to tune in their satellite contraption to a Spanish football match. Mama prepared a pot of tea for them and laid out a plate of toasted, sugar-glazed almonds before returning to me in the kitchen.

I couldn’t help noticing how tired she looked. She’d always appeared older than her years, but she’d lost weight recently, and her hair had turned silvery white. A network of lines had appeared, pinched around her mouth, making her face look like it was drawing in on itself.

We washed and dried the dishes and then sat down at the table, chatting about a number of peripheral issues, all except the important matter at hand.

When the football match ended, Pablito said his goodbyes and left to return to the studio flat in Docklands where he’d lived since his divorce eight years before. Papa walked slowly upstairs and retired to bed.

I needed a drink, so I retrieved the wine from my holdall and opened it, promising Mama I’d put the empty bottle out with the rubbish. She looked on uneasily, but when she was sure Papa was in bed and asleep, she joined me in a glass and immediately appeared more relaxed.

Although Pablito was older than me, I was the one in whom Mama confided. There were always certain areas where we never ventured, principally her relationship with Papa. I knew how devoted to him she was and how much loyalty she gave him.

‘Well, whatever it is that he’s up to, and clearly he’s not saying, at least you’ll get a holiday out of it,’ I said.

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ she replied.

‘Whatever it is, it’s manageable. If he wants to write to town clerks, let him do it. Go on holiday, enjoy it, and keep him away from Lerida.’

‘No, you don’t understand. He’s dying,’ she said.

It was said almost as an aside, and I had to get her to repeat it to make sure I hadn’t misheard.

‘It’s true, he is dying.’

I was increasingly aware of my parents’ mortality, and I’d often wondered how I would learn that either of them was dying or had died. I reached for a packet of cigarettes Papa had left lying on the kitchen table. I hadn’t smoked for years, and the moment I lit one I realised it wasn’t going to help. I stubbed it out.

‘What is it?’

‘Cancer,’ Mama said.

It wasn’t a complete surprise. He’d experienced severe back pain the previous year, which he’d put down to a slipped disc until it had spread to his stomach. I’d been getting regular updates on his health from Mama until about six months before, when they’d stopped. I hadn’t pressed her for details because I’d figured that, if the news was positive, she’d have volunteered it.

‘He doesn’t know,’ Mama said, doing her best to hold back the tears.

‘How can he not know?’

‘The doctor thought it would be best coming from me but I don’t have the strength to tell him.’

‘Does he suspect?’

‘Yes, he must.’

‘Hence the sudden desire to return to Spain?’

‘I’ve said too much. I promised him I wouldn’t talk to you about it.’

‘To me?’ I asked, surprised that I’d been singled out for such censorship.

‘To anyone.’

I knew she wouldn’t say any more. She never willingly spoke about Papa behind his back. She had no choice but to tell me he was dying, but I could see that the pain was almost unbearable for her. Anything more would be a betrayal too far.

‘Does Pablito know?’

‘No, he’ll take it very badly.’

I wondered whether to be offended at the implication that I’d take the news less badly, but I forgave her. We both knew things were more complicated than that. I also knew that Pablito would have to be told.

‘How long has Papa got?’ I asked her.

‘Not long,’ she replied.