His Spanish lawyer: another gay professional attending to Jeremy’s needs. But unlike Andrew, very simpático - all bovine eyes and gentle humour. ‘Oh.’
‘Worst of it is, I’ll have to miss the first two nights of the flamenco festival.’
‘Oh no…’
‘Stick out an olive branch and take Helen one night and Kirsty the other—’
‘No way.’
‘Have to be Emma then.’
‘I’ll ask. You’ll definitely be back for the rest of it, won’t you?’
‘Yes. But I’m going to have to start spending more time there, I’m afraid, the novel’s going to need a lot more research.’ He leaned forward, took my hand. ‘And you see… that’s another reason why I couldn’t say yes to…’
I’d assumed I’d be the one to bring it up again, after giving him time to think it over. It seemed that he already had. I searched his face for the slightest doubt.
‘You know I’ll help you as much as I can, of course… Anyone else you could ask?’
‘No.’
‘What about that line-dancing guy you went out with, had to relocate up North…?’
‘Steve.’
‘You said you were still in touch, emailed each other occasionally.’
‘A couple of lines each Christmas.’
‘Is he available these days?’
‘Doubt it. Anyway, he’s stuck in Manchester for good - he’s got a small role in Coronation Street.’
‘Really? Okay, but maybe he wouldn’t mind… donating.’
‘Oh I don’t know. Could be a bit complicated.’
‘Well, have you thought of going along to one of those clinics and—?’
My phone buzzed. ‘It’ll be Helen again.’ ‘Well reply then.’
I pulled it from my pocket. ‘No, it’s David. Helen must have called him. I won’t go on Saturday, if that helps. But I’d love to see you. Lunch soon? Please call. Four kisses.’
‘That’s kind of him. Perhaps you should.’
‘Should what?’ I snapped the phone shut. ‘Although, actually… it’s not a bad idea. I’m off the pill now…’
Our food arrived. Jeremy waited until the waitress had moved away. ‘What? That would be horrendously deceitful, I can’t believe you—’
‘He’s been horrendously deceitful—’
‘My God, you can’t really be thinking of becoming a sperm bandit.’
‘A what?’
‘Sperm bandit. That’s what they call women who trick men into fatherhood.’
‘Really?’ I grinned, seeing an image of myself pulling at David’s clothes with a scarf over my mouth. ‘I’m joking, you idiot!’
‘Hm. Look - you’re upset. You need time. Just leave this baby thing for a few months and concentrate on getting healthy, learning flamenco, feeling good about yourself. Then you’ll be able to think straight and make some decisions. Okay?’ He removed all the hated olives. ‘There you go.’
I read out my reply to David. ‘Thank you. Will call and have lunch in…’ How long is it going to take me to get my head together, d’you think?’
‘Working full-time at it? Well let’s see… three months? April. Spring. A fully-fledged flamenco bailora by then, dando la verdad, as they say. Giving the truth. Sounds about right, doesn’t it?’
It did. I reassured him. I reassured myself. But it was too late: the seed had already, somehow, been planted.
Chapter 3
flamenco adj (Mús) flamenco
Ángel. As in Angel Gabriel, but instead of just delivering the news, providing the very wherewithal for the Immaculate Conception. Or perhaps not so immaculate, because his selected Method of Insemination was ‘Flexible’, and according to his brief email, to be discussed. Or more likely, considered, because presumably there’d be women that he would be physically unable to oblige. And my profile didn’t include a photo.
But his did. Hair shorter than I liked, but deliciously dark. Face and shoulders suggesting he could have done with losing a stone, but then slim chefs are probably a rarity. A wide smile and large kind eyes. Far apart eyes - isn’t that meant to be a sign of honesty? Or was it generosity? He certainly had that: hobbies included working at a summer camp for disabled children and playing guitar for his mother’s Sunday school. And seeing his sister’s distress at being unable to conceive, he’d wanted to help women in a similar situation.
According to one of the American books I’d ordered - there simply weren’t any British ones on the subject - most women want a donor who resembles themselves. To cut down the amount of questions about the father, they said, but it sounded like cloning to me. I felt my pale, vulnerable genes needed to be thoroughly contrasted. Anyway, I was strangely attracted to this man, and that seemed as good a basis for choice as any. He might not have good grammar and a university degree but surely these simpático Hispanic genes should be passed on. But I had to wait: he was helping another lady at the moment, he wrote with endearing fidelity, and might not be available until April or May. Spring. When, according to Jeremy, I’d be complete again and ready to make decisions.
Jeremy. So pleased with my progress, but unaware of how it was being achieved - the opioid Ángel-daydreams blocking out painful thoughts of David and the misery-making boyfriends of the past. And possibly the future, because if I had a child I’d no longer have to worry about where relationships were leading; the insistent body clock would be muted or even silenced for good. It was agonizing keeping my plans from Jeremy, but he was so irksomely protective; he would see my Ángel as a servant of the devil. I could just hear him: ‘Chef? Probably works for McDonalds. Sunday school? He’s going to want his child brought up a Catholic. Healthy? Let’s have a copy of the test results then. Natural insemination? That’s completely irresponsible…’
Meanwhile, Ángel and his baby inspired me: I started jogging again to get fitter before pregnancy; worked on a new teach-yourself Spanish book so that I could show Ángel that his child’s Hispanic blood would be respected.
Then there was the flamenco.
I’d booked a one-to-one lesson. I went along to what looked like a disused warehouse and followed signs until posters on the walls suggested I’d arrived. They showed Alicia where she’d probably rather be: on a stage - albeit in London rather than Granada or Seville - hoisting up a waterfall of white flounces, twisting and triumphant in spotted pink, scarily intense in sculpted red. Rasping guitar strums vibrated through the door, shortly joined by a complex stamping and clickety-clack of feet; I stifled a nervous giggle at the visceral passion of it - feeling too English, too blonde.
She took me in with a flash of black eyes, indicating the changing room door leading off from the side of the studio. Changing room? All I had to do was switch my shoes. Red: flashy for a beginner, but the only ones the shop had in my size. If I couldn’t get the shoes before the first lesson, Alicia had said on the phone in her disappointingly perfect English, I should just wear something with a heel. I didn’t have such a thing, I’d had to confess to shocked silence the other end. I put them on and teetered into the room.
‘So Yolande, this is your first flamenco lesson?’
‘Yes. Although I’ve watched it a lot… for years… in Spain and…’
She’d moved in, pulling at my shoulders. ‘We need to work at la postura. Abre el pecho, open the chest…’
‘And I speak Spanish - well, a bit.’
‘Ah, bien!’ she said with her first real smile. She looked up and down my body again. ‘Pompi - in,’ she said, pointing to my bottom. I pulled in my tummy, tilted my hips. ‘Mejor - but now again abre el pecho.’ She kept correcting each part of my collapsing body. ‘Eso es! That’s it! Look in the mirror! Ay, que guapa! How beautiful you look! Remember this all the time, practise wherever you are, not just in the lesson. And now we’ll start with some marcaje - marking steps. Bend the knees all the time… but la postura, la postura!’
‘I feel like a puppet with too many strings,’ I said, w
ondering how many lessons I could fit in before what could be a humiliating rather than self-affirming week in Granada.
She laughed.
‘It’s the same for everybody, don’t worry.’
Then she showed me another marcaje, one that had a step-in-front, step-behind pattern similar to something I’d once learnt in jazz, but with a strange rhythm to the changeover before you came back in the opposite direction. She put on some ponderous guitar music.
‘Y un dos TRES cuatro cinco SEIS siete OCHO nueve DIEZ un dos, un dos TRES… Eso es! Pero la postura!’
She went to switch off the CD and I waited for another lecture on my deportment.
‘Well done, Yoli! You have the compás - this is the most important element of flamenco - the rhythm. Are you a musician?’
I told her I was a flautist and she looked pleased; from that moment the round-shouldered English woman became a pupil slightly worth bothering with. She showed me how to rotate my wrists and work my fingers like the opening and closing of a flower; how to raise my arms like the wings of an eagle taking flight; how to use my toes, heels and feet to make rhythms and patterns on the floor, always a tierra, ‘into the earth’.
And there was a moment when, returning to the marcaje to put arms with it, something inside me took over and I had a sense of inner strength and release - understanding a tiny fraction of what generations of persecuted gitanas might have felt.
‘Eso es, Yoli!’ exclaimed Alicia afterwards, but in my shock-sudden emotional state I just bent down and picked up my water bottle and fussed with the sports lid.
Returning from the changing room, flat-heeled and English but trying to maintain my posture at least until I left, I booked three more lessons before Granada. But I knew it wouldn’t stop there.
‘So you didn’t find anyone for either night?’ Jeremy asked.
‘No. Emma was busy and the others… well, people don’t seem to want to go to flamenco unless they’re on holiday. Are you having a nice time there?’
‘How couldn’t I? Vicente sends you kisses and says David’s an idiot. And he’s sorry he’s dragged me away from you. But the usual crowd will be there - it’s not like you’ve got nobody to chat to all evening.’ He obviously hadn’t noticed that when we went to the patrons’ receptions it was he that did most of the talking - all that appraisal of the choreography and comparisons between dancers and productions. ‘You could try out your toddler Spanish on some of the performers.’
‘I am second book now, much work!’ I said in indignant Spanish. He was laughing. ‘No ríes.’
‘It’s no te rí-as. If you’re going to tell people not to do things you have to use the subjunctive tense. I’ll call you tomorrow. Enjoy it for both of us, okay?’
‘Yolande! No Jeremy?’ Sarah the balletomane banker, coming over to the theatre entrance as if she’d been waiting for us.
‘Had to go to Spain.’
‘Come on up then, what are you doing down here with les autres?’ People like me who couldn’t possibly afford to be a patron without an over-generous friend.
‘Well I’ve got to see the box office about something… I’ll see you later.’ I got into the queue until she’d floated upstairs and then took a seat round the corner. I wasn’t ready for the patron people. Frankly I was in a bit of a mood: Ángel had sent a brief email telling me I would have to wait until at least June or July; he was going to be away for a month visiting relatives in Argentina. Did that mean he was Argentinian? It didn’t matter really, but it would have been nice to know. It would have been nice to know a lot of things, but it seemed like he couldn’t interact with more than one potential recipient at a time.
I studied the programme: the impossibly handsome Molino and Morales - all seventies-style shaggy hair and tight black trousers - with ten or so other dancers and a group of musicians. Their show, they explained in a dual interview, drew on their contemporary dance as well as flamenco backgrounds… and would explore the nature of love and caress in movement. Christ. But then weren’t most dance performances about that? I was sure Jeremy would have agreed.
Meanwhile, the reception area was filling up: the usual mixture of old and young, the fashionable and the jeans-clad, with the odd dancer or celebrity. I spotted the very tall guy from Strictly Come Dancing. But there were also a lot of dark-haired Spaniards. Well, Hispanics. Shame I couldn’t have invited Ángel along.
Jeremy had booked the front row as usual; last year, a bailaora had blown him a kiss during the applause. The lights dimmed - late, as we were clearly on Spanish time - and the rough but intricately modulated tones of a cantaor singer filled the auditorium.
A flamenco man in a pool of light: the M with the adorable boy-band face. Now transformed into the very image of concentrated despair, his feet stroking the floor with the cries of the singer, then giving in to a shudder of impetuous footwork.
Another pool of light: the other M. More typically flamenco, with his black hair, Roman nose, and wide-set frightening eyes. Similar anguish, but somehow a release rather than a transformation. The spot-lit dancing alternated between them as the rest of the band was heard, until they danced their thundering taconeo in perfect unison - as if the pain of loneliness were universal, the same for all.
But the show was about love - including much of the flamenco type with all its jealousy and tragedy - and dancers in various combinations shared every aspect of it. They seldom touched - a hand following the air-drawn contour of a bailaora’s dress, a woman reaching to a man’s cheek - but the glances between them, with the sensuality of their rhythms and movements, were more than caresses. Most beautiful of all was the inclusion of the musicians: a bewitched bailaora weaving around a passionate violinist and nuzzling her head to his chest beneath his bowing arm; the dark M so expressive in his dancing as he responded to a heartrending but untranslatable song from a cantaora.
A rousing finale with a few touches of humour brought the show to an end, and then the entire company was in a line at the front of the stage, grinning and commenting to each other as they bowed to the clamorous applause.
I sat in my seat, stunned. Let everyone inch past me. I needed Jeremy: his inevitably outrageous prurient speculation about Molino and Morales - whose attractions he would describe as torturously unfair - followed by a hilarious whispered invented backstory for each that would have me giggling all the way up the stairs. I eventually climbed them alone; after all, it would be letting Jeremy down not to go and have a look at them at the reception.
‘Yolande! Thought you’d gone,’ Sarah said. ‘Let’s ask her,’ she said to her ex-dancer friend Miranda. ‘The lads, what d’you think?’ She jerked her wine glass towards the other side of the room. There they were, now in tight jeans and jumpers and looking even more like time-travellers from the seventies, laughing and nudging each other.
‘Amazing. And such contrasting—’
‘Yes, yes, but are they… you know, an item?’
‘Course not. The Spanish are very tactile, and they’re old friends…’
‘The Brad Pitt one’s got a slight lisp, and the dark one’s eyes are just too pretty…’ Miranda was saying. They seemed to have forgotten all about the dancing - it obviously didn’t reach them in the way ballet did. I also felt indignant on the dancers’ behalf; under Jeremy’s tutoring I’d developed a sensitive gay-dar, and it was registering a strong double zero.
‘Probably just didn’t get all his stage make-up off. Who cares? Thing is, why’s nobody talking to them?’
‘They are. But not for long - probably a language problem. Shame Jeremy’s not here to translate.’
He’d like the dark, intense one. Broad-shouldered but lithe and slim: a photographic negative of himself.
Perhaps that’s why the guy seemed strangely familiar while at the same time a scary, exotic bird of a man.
Sarah leaned over. ‘Go over and talk to him, he won’t bite.’
I blushed, realising that she’d been watching me stare at
him. But then the cantaora with the hauntingly sad song walked past.
‘Excuse me,’ I said in Spanish. ‘I want to say… I like the song a lot. It makes me cry. Many thanks.’ She gave me a smile, a rapid burst of Spanish and a pat on my shoulder before she moved on.
‘You see?’ I said to them. ‘Tactile and friendly.’
‘Not having any stroganoff?’ Sarah asked.
‘Don’t fancy it. Think I’ll polish off all the orange juice instead.’
I went off to a waiter with a tray of drinks, and chatted with a disgruntled patron of the Royal Ballet asking what was all that about, and the shy greasy-haired guy that Jeremy and I called Stu-the-Stalker who seemed to be in an Oedipal trance over the mature flamenco dancer with the long bata de cola dress.
I wanted to sneak another look at the dark dancer, but the two men seemed to have disappeared. I suddenly felt hungry after all, so I made my way through to the dessert table.
‘Just one left,’ the waiter said, picking up a bowl of profiteroles. I put my hand out to take it, but it was being passed behind me to someone else.
‘Ay, perdón.’ A very low, gentle voice. A faint smell of musky shower gel.
I turned and met his eyes: black, beautiful. Yes, possibly some residual eyeliner. A little frightening. But then he broke into a lopsided grin.
‘Sorry.’ I thought he was being gentlemanly and offering it to me.
‘No, take it, you danced,’ I said in a rather breathless Spanish.
‘Claro,’ he said; he’d obviously already considered that, and was digging his spoon in. I watched him put it in his mouth, close his eyes. Then he suddenly waved his spoon at the waiter to get attention, pointed it at the bowl and then at me. The waiter said something in Spanish and disappeared.
‘Is good. You must take. He go to find, for you.’
‘Oh… thanks.’ My heart fluttered.
FLAMENCO BABY Page 3