The Songs of Manolo Escobar (2 page)

‘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?'