Last Words (3 page)

For lunch we went out to this other place with Cristina and Derek, the Dutch guy. It was the first time I saw Cristina not in her pyjamas. Black jeans and a dark grey tank top. Her bracelets kept jangling about, so naturally, with her being an Italian, they jangled quite a lot. She also wore thick eyeliner so it looked like a wing on the side of each eye. Derek got a few compliments for wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I rocked up in a t-shirt and shorts, much like Rachel. It was too hot to bother looking presentable. This turned out to be a mistake as almost immediately the phones came out and now there are pictures of me on the Internet looking like I have just rolled out of bed on minimal sleep.

We went to a place down this small alley that Derek knew of. It was a tiny restaurant on the back of someone’s house. I could see right through to the family’s kitchen and dining room. The owner was the only one working there and he operated as the waiter, chef, and service extraordinaire. The most customers he would ever have at one time would be sixteen people. He brought out some paella, which is your typical rice and seafood mix. He also did some toasted bread thing which Rachel told me about and I have since forgotten the name of. Since everything is made in bulk the guy doesn’t need to hire anyone else. And guess what we also ordered? Two bottles of red wine. They were so nice I took a picture of the label so I can find them when I get back to London.

We did have a couple of weird guys come up to us as we were eating, trying to sell packets of tissues and flowers. The flower guy looked indignant that two strapping men would dine with two feisty ladies and refuse to buy flowers, but none of us are dating. Cristina told us she was bi and didn’t realise that was even an option until after she slept with her best friend from school. Derek said he was married when he was nineteen and divorced at twenty one. He is grateful that he got marriage out of his system at an early age. God knows what I said with two lots of half bottles of wine in me but I know it must have been awesomely embarrassing if I got a cheer and a high five from Derek and a weird look from Rachel.

Cristina and Derek were wondering about our situation and thought Rachel and I were a couple. How else could we explain me sleeping on the floor? But no, I’m just cashing in on an old favour. Rachel stayed at my place a couple of times during various troubles. We told them about her old roommate who got them all evicted. The stupid cow was too afraid to tell anyone what had happened. She knew for three weeks that they were getting evicted before she confessed. She was too embarrassed because the eviction was her fault and she wanted to avoid a confrontation with her friends. Rachel is still bitter about it. She stayed on my sofa until she found a new place, so now she’s repaying a favour. I was trying to remember when that happened when Rachel piped up.

“You had just started dating Alana.”

Sooooooooo … fuck. Did she think I was cheating on her at the start of our relationship?

Cristina and Derek got the condensed version of the story. Met through a friend at uni, both had opposite schedules and near misses, and we only really hooked up over a week-long ditch of classes by flying off to Greece where her cousin had a spare room for a few days.

Cristina spent most of the time peering at me inquisitively. “Did you think you were meant to be?”

“No, I thought she was interesting.”

Rachel had to run off to class and almost left her phone at the restaurant. I walked back through Sol for a while with Cristina and Derek, hoping to catch a few more Marilyn Monroe impersonations. No luck. We returned to the apartment and found Rachel there. Her class had been cancelled. The school are hoping to find a replacement teacher for tomorrow as their current one had to fly back home for an emergency. So one of the students who lives a five minute walk from the school took everyone’s number and will send them a message tomorrow if the class is still cancelled. As a result, I went to another afternoon lunch, this time with Rachel’s class. They are all from different parts of the world. One of the girl’s is from Cambodia and she’s been living in Madrid for years. She was supposed to be doing a business course here that got cancelled at the last minute so she had to find something to fulfil her student visa requirements as quickly as possible, so she’s breezing through the course because she’s already pretty fluent. Everyone wants her help to study Spanish but instead she shows them the cool parts of town, which is how we found this bar that does awesome sangria and those toasty things again. I found out why we got a discount on the food: the Cambodian girl is dating the owner and she always brings him more customers. As we were walking back through the twisting roads I noticed a couple of menus. Apparently our discounted bill is the normal price of the other restaurants. Apparently just saying, “The owner likes you so this is discounted,” is enough to earn a bigger tip.

We saw the police in action again, this time actually chasing down some of the street vendors.

There are more prostitutes than I thought possible. There must have been a hundred of them on one of the main roads heading towards Sol. It was still early in the afternoon so I can’t wait to see what it’s like this evening. We’re all going out to a club later on. Rachel warned me that we’ll only just be arriving at 1am. If we arrive any later we’ll have to pay to get in. Even so, the clubs won’t start getting busy until 2am. I need a shirt so I can roll my sleeves up.

Michael, the German guy, said if I spend more than five minutes in the gay area I can get a free blow job, no questions asked (not by Michael, but from one of the locals). I got into trouble when I said, “He better be very charming and look ridiculously good in a dress.” Michael said, “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

Last night was bitchingly hot. I know Madrid is surrounded by a desert and we’re in the summer but last night was just fucking awful. I knew Rachel was awake from the heat, as were most of the housemates. It was four in the morning and everyone was dripping with sweat. Those with private rooms could sleep naked and with the window wide open. This morning Rachel came back from the shower and told me if it gets that hot again she’s going to strip and not care about it. I don’t think she will. I’ve known her for a long time and she doesn’t seem like the type. But sleep deprivation can do the wacky on the unsuspecting mind.

Okay, some of the weirdness from today. And yesterday. The Internet is very slow. Cristina said the government had recently introduced a filter to monitor various websites, including email. Wonderful. No doubt it’s to stop kiddie porn and those evil music downloaders. That explains why it has been slow, despite the government’s assurances that the speed decrease would be unnoticeable. Yesterday … there was very little Internet. Very little for today as well.

The news said the Internet company is working on the problem and the heat has affected something or other, and as such we can expect outages in various parts of the country. They explained in detail but I don’t speak Spanish. The news channels aren’t all that bothered that the entirety of our porn supply has suddenly dried up. No, they’re just blaming the heat. Exhibit A points to the blindingly obvious fact that Spain gets hot in the summer. Exhibit B points to every summer before this one when the heat did NOT melt some cable terminal thing.

If the Internet is back up to full speed by tomorrow then I can book the rest of my trip through Spain. None of the housemates here have been to the south so I can’t really ask their opinions on where to go. Still not sure where to go after that. Maybe Portugal, maybe Ibiza. Cristina recommended Sardinia and Corsica. Not sure if I’ll have the time or money. I figure I have about three more weeks in continental Europe before I hit up Ireland and Scotland, then train it back to London by the end of August. Depending on how broke I am I might have to skip Ireland altogether.

Do you know what isn’t ‘down’? The phone lines. Michael called home last night and said the Internet was acting a little weird there as well. Some sites were blocked. The ones in particular were Eastern European and Russian sites. So, the Internet has ‘melted’ here, is slow in Germany, and is ‘down’ in Russia and The Ukraine.

The Russian girl (I still can’t remember her name, but man alive is she gorgeous. She’s tall and slinky, speaks spectacular English, has a double degree, and is the kind of girl I would drop down on one knee for, she also seems to be stuck on super-dork mode and wears several of those coloured wristbands made from twine). Anyway, she said there was a problem in St. Petersberg and the airports were closed due to a ‘credible’ terrorist threat. She actually said ‘credible’.

I keep seeing this fluff ball of a cat walking through the courtyard downstairs. I swear that thing must be melting in this heat. I gave him a little cuddle earlier. Made me think of Basil.

Oh, not surprisingly, Clint’s being a dick. He keeps placing Basil in precarious situations around the flat, taking a picture and posting it online. He had a butcher’s knife with ketchup along the blade, slid that under Basil while he was asleep, and captioned it with, ‘They’ll never find Mark again. Not after his ‘accident.’’ Mum doesn’t quite get Clint’s sense of humour. She called me while I was in Paris asking if I was okay and if I had to go to hospital. I had no idea what she was talking about. You would think that a cat with a knife covered in ketchup in London was not going to cause an accident to someone who was backpacking in Paris. Maybe Mum is on full-blown panic mode now that I’m travelling through Europe alone like a social leper. When I first announced my trip she asked if it was because of Alana. I mean, Jesus, does everyone have to keep bringing her up?

Clint even made a little Mariachi sombrero for Basil. “Dos cervezas por favor.” The last time I went away he managed to set a new high score on
Need For Speed
, only it reads ‘MarksPenis.’ Had to reset the whole fucking game and start again.

Anyway, clubbing tonight! And hopefully not a lot of drinking. Rachel gave me a spare key and wished me luck in finding a guy to go home with, so har fucking har. If I come back any later than 4am I’m not to wake Rachel up under any circumstance.

I was talking to the Turkish guy a few minutes ago. I mentioned I was thinking of buying some weed off the Frenchies but he warned me against it. “They’re teenagers, they don’t know good shit from bad,” he said. He told me what they were smoking was definitely the bad shit. He said it was legal to own three marijuana plants in Spain so getting it isn’t all that difficult. That kinda takes the fun out of it. Unfortunately Rachel is against it. She’s doing me a favour by letting me crash here for a few days so I’ll behave unless a really good opportunity arises.

14 July

This morning the Spanish President addressed the nation and everyone in the apartment missed it. We were all hung over, stoned, asleep or just not watching the TV. It wasn’t until the evening news where we finally got the story. And … I was right! The St. Petersberg airports and no-Internet is connected!

There’s another bird flu outbreak, like SARS or swine flu. Rachel called her folks and they told her the full story. It was hard to figure out because it was a Russian acronym for the virus that was translated into Spanish by the news, which Rachel then tried to translate into English. There have been six fatalities in St. Petersberg. They closed the airport to stop it from spreading. Unfortunately, a couple of ‘isolated’ cases in the rest of Europe have popped up and are ‘being contained’. Either the Spanish news people are lazy or run by the government because no one reported this over the last few days. The President said the Internet problem was not caused by Spain and he had no knowledge of it. I don’t believe him. Not that I speak the language or was even watching, no. I got the news second hand from other people who thought the limited news from Russia was to stop the spread of panic due of the new flu, because that’s what we civilians like to do: panic.

But there you go: bird flu and no Internet. And you know what? The Spanish don’t seem to give a fuck. Restaurants are still open, bars and clubs are still doing business, and the ladies on the street are still calling me ‘Guapo’.

The club last night was pretty good. I got dancing with this girl from somewhere and she was shaking her ass into my crotch. I offered to buy her a drink and she said yes. I came back to the dance floor and couldn’t find her. Rachel was there for a bit, left at 2, but she saw my epic fail with little Miss Booty. She took one of the drinks for herself, saying that it must be pretty easy to get a drink out of me if all she has to do is press her butt up against me. I decided not to say anything about her sizeable rear, but it’s true, I’m a quick purchaser of drinks.

There was no class for Rachel today. She said she was going out for a bit, which was good because I was still trying to sleep through the heat. I couldn’t, so Michael and I were watching some French comedy with subtitles about an assassin chasing another assassin. There were lots of boobs, which is always good for the French to do. Then, get this: the French girl who lives just next to Rachel’s bedroom walked in through the front door wearing three things: sandals, a bikini g-string, and a towel around the back of her neck, hanging down over her chest. She went to her room for a moment and came out again with a book and some sunscreen lotion, then she headed back out the front door.

At this point Michael and I realised that none of the girls were home. There was only one place where they could have gone to: the roof. And holy shit balls did I feel like a tosser. All this time I was downstairs when I could have been up here. Let me just say, it wasn’t just the girls up there, it was everyone from almost every building, all spread out on the rooftops under giant umbrellas, relaxing in the shade and wearing nothing. The French girl had managed to lose her bikini g-string and had found a deck chair. Rachel, too, was thoroughly European. Some were wearing board shorts. Some should’ve. I stood on the rooftop looking all along Gran Vía. I’ve never seen so much bush.