FLAMENCO BABY

by Radford, Cherry

  ‘What’s happened, Yolanda?’

  Since I’d last seen her, quite a lot: the near-death of my best friend, heartbreak, proximity to one of the best flamenco dancers in Spain. But despite the emotional intimacy of the lessons, we never discussed our lives.

  ‘You’re saying something at last, not just doing the steps. Continua.’

  I was in the hall when Nando emerged from a room full of energetic piano and spiky trumpets, the irresistible clatter of timbales and cowbells…

  ‘It was good, no?’

  ‘I don’t know how I’ve managed without it.’

  He grinned and started pulling me through the door. ‘No, I’m all sweaty, I need a—’

  ‘Just quickly, come. A little salsa, like pudín after meal flamenca. I know you have learnt with Jeremy.’

  He started twisting around in front of me to the bounce and lilt of the music, his shoulders and elbows probably too precise, but his hips…

  I looked away, my hand going to my face but taken from me, together with the other, to go into the setenta moves.

  ‘Relájate,’ he said, shaking my stiff arms.

  I let him follow the movement through until we were entwined.

  ‘This isn’t fair, my arms are killing me.’

  ‘Pues relájate, cede.’

  Relax and give in. Well, perhaps for a few minutes… I started to enjoy the flirtatious push and pull of the dance.

  ‘Olé Yoli! We must do this again, with Jeremy. I will show you how to dance as three.’ He hugged me. ‘Okay, bath. You want me to wash your hair?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Another time. Go now, we have to leave in a half hour.’

  I went back to my flat, started filling the bath. Checked my emails: nothing from Javi, but then it was much too soon. But one from Jeremy, late the previous night.

  ‘I hear you were a delicious little decoy at the stage door - I knew you could do it! And now you’re letting him support you at your father’s. So glad you two are getting closer, because it’s happened - he’s talking about me getting a place near him in Sevilla. That means you too, so re-start your Spanish! I’ve never known such happiness Yol, and I want to share it with you. So does he. I’ll be thinking of you tomorrow xxxxxx’

  Never known such happiness: after what he’d been through, and was offering me, he so deserved it. Seville. Sevilla. Our baby would be born there, with a hopefully adoring rather than horrified Spanish godfather.

  And just possibly an English-French-Dutch grandfather, depending on how it went with Mitch. Maybe there was nothing to worry about; it would all be about now, not then. I’d get to know Judy, ask about their cruise; I’d introduce Nando and he’d want to know about the Trio. We’d have lunch. Then it would be time to go.

  We arrived early, staring up at a white stucco-fronted pillared palace of a house that reminded me of the Saturday gig’s three-tiered wedding cake.

  ‘All of it? For two?’ Nando asked.

  ‘Well, there’s two doorbells.’

  ‘Even half of it?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Ah, we can sit in here, wait a little,’ he said, pushing at the gate of the square’s communal gardens but finding it locked.

  I looked back at the wedding cake mansion. ‘He’s really done it this time.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Found himself a rich lady. Latest in a long line.’

  ‘But you don’t know, maybe he loves her.’

  ‘He only really loves himself.’ I looked at my watch: fifteen minutes to go. I took his arm. ‘Shall we walk round the square a few times, I’m feeling a bit—’

  ‘Yolande?’ I turned and saw a petite brunette in a silk blouse, delicate glasses on her prominent nose. ‘Had to be you - gee, just like your Daddy! I’m Judy,’ she said, holding out a warm tiny hand. A soft American accent; they were often American, apparently. But usually described as glamorous.

  I said hello, introduced Nando.

  ‘Do come in, Mitch so can’t wait to see you!’

  We followed her into the hall and up a deeply carpeted staircase; my knees were weak, only the feel of Nando’s hand on my back was keeping me going upwards.

  ‘They’re he-re!’ she was calling up. It came to me that this would have been choreographed, this watching out for us and taking us up to Mitch’s Wizard of Oz.

  He was waiting for us in the drawing room, coincidentally wearing an Emerald City green polo shirt with his pressed cream trousers. A wide smile on his tanned and unnaturally taut round face, an unlikely amount of blonde in the fine silvery hair.

  ‘Yollette…’ He held my shoulders, kissed each cheek.

  I smiled but couldn’t meet his eyes for long, glanced round the vast white room with its colourful ornaments and paintings.

  ‘Can I…’ He tentatively drew me into his arms. Dense after-shave, peanuts.

  ‘This is my friend Nando,’ I said, drawing back.

  He looked him up and down with interest. ‘Nando?’

  ‘Fernando. He’s from Seville,’ I said, for something to say.

  They shook hands, Judy sat us down in a white sofa.

  ‘Just as I imagined your boyfriend would be,’ Mitch said.

  ‘He’s not—’

  ‘You know,’ he said, leaning over from his armchair towards Nando, ‘she was such a quiet little thing as a child, but only I knew she was daydreaming about being snatched away by Tarzan or becoming a Red Indian squaw. There was no way she was going to end up with a boring Englishman.’

  Nando smiled and nodded.

  ‘But he’s—’

  ‘So let me guess. You’re an actor?’

  ‘A dancer. Modern flamenco.’

  ‘Of course. What could be better!’ Mitch said, patting my knee.

  ‘How wonderful,’ Judy said, pouring the champagne. ‘We love flamenco.’

  They’d been to see Carmen during the Sadler’s Wells’ flamenco festival, so I told them if they’d gone one night earlier they would have seen Nando’s company.

  ‘Oh! So how did you two meet?’ Judy asked.

  Nando told her about the profiteroles at the reception. ‘Except my mother, no woman cares for me so well,’ he said, putting his hand on mine.

  I blushed; we appeared to have fallen into default decoy mode. Then Mitch wanted to hear about the Trio, and Nando told him about my compositions.

  ‘I knew it. I knew you’d be a musician.’

  ‘No you didn’t,’ I said. ‘You were forever telling me to stop playing the recorder. And said wind instruments were for people who wanted to sing but didn’t have a voice.’ Putting an end to me singing to myself in the back of the car.

  He laughed. ‘No! Did I? But you have to admit, it was a terrible sound.’

  ‘Not to me it wasn’t.’

  ‘I was only encouraging you to try something else.’

  ‘You didn’t encourage anything, you were almost never there.’

  The room fell large with silence. Mitch rubbed his chin.

  ‘He would have liked to be there more, Yolande. It’s something he really regrets,’ Judy said.

  ‘And maybe that is why we are here,’ Nando said quietly.

  ‘No,’ I said. No he hadn’t wanted to be there. He’d been fun when he was, but the fun was rather tinged by knowing that at any moment he could disappear.

  ‘I was trying to get my career together,’ Mitch said.

  ‘Getting it together. Yes, that’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘Yoli, no. You need to talk, but not like this,’ Nando said.

  ‘You don’t know how—’

  ‘Yoli is fine musician now, it happen anyway,’ Nando interrupted. ‘It was genético, you are musician too, no?’

  Mitch gave a smoothed over account of his years in the music business, and Judy, looking relieved that we seemed to be back on track, disappeared to the kitchen. I sank back into the sofa, Nando’s warm arm round my shoulders. Nowadays, we learnt, Mitch own
ed a recording studio but employed staff to run it; his days struggling in the music world were over. So was the destructive lifestyle that went with it, he said, as we sat down to lunch and he poured himself some apple-and-elderflower.

  An asparagus starter, cannelloni. Their love of all things Italian became clear: the Murano glass wine goblets and ornaments; the modern paintings of Venice; a bookshelf with The Italian Lakes and a huge green-and-red dictionary. They’d met in a deli somewhere between Mitch’s studio and the adoption agency where Judy worked part-time. And they were in the process of buying an apartment in Venice - as a wedding present to each other.

  I swallowed a ludicrous pang on Mum’s behalf. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘And we’re hoping that your Trio will play at the ceremony.’

  ‘Oh… We’re getting very booked up. When is it?’

  Mitch and Judy smiled at each other. ‘It’s whenever you can do it - we’ll have to look at our diaries.’

  ‘Yes, of course. So… have you got a big family?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Her smile faded. ‘And unfortunately some of them won’t come.’

  ‘Long way from the States.’

  ‘No, I’ve two sons in London and one in Cobham. You see, they don’t approve, they think it’s too soon after losing their father two years ago.’

  ‘Perhaps it would be better to wait?’

  ‘No,’ Nando said. ‘Don’t let the children direct this.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Mitch said, ‘because anyway, it’s not just the wedding, it’s us being together at all. We just have to keep reassuring them.’

  ‘At least one of them’s okay with it,’ Judy said. ‘But then we’re just too useful as sitters. Where else can they always leave their girls at short notice?’

  ‘The picture, it is of them?’ Nando asked, pointing to a frame on the sideboard showing two small girls with bushy brown hair in Alice-bands like their grandmother’s.

  ‘Yes. They adore Mitch, and I’m sure they remind him of you and Charlotte.’

  Mitch, an adored grandpapa. But should he be that?

  ‘Ice-cream with strawberries? I made it myself, Mitch told me you always chose strawberry as a little girl,’ Judy said.

  ‘Sounds lovely. I just need the…’

  ‘Of course. Up the stairs, on your right.’

  Mitch: sober and non-smoking, apparently in love with a woman who was obviously wealthy but pleasantly down-to-earth and not indecently younger than him. Who would have thought. A doting step-grandfather, and perhaps because of that, reminded of the fatherhood he left behind. No, not left behind, ruined.

  I used the bathroom, its white-and-turquoise elegance marred by a pink plastic box of gaudy bath toys, a Hello Kitty soap dispenser.

  Then back on the landing I wondered how I could have missed it: the door with two wooden signs saying Rachel and Rebecca. Laughter came up from below; I wouldn’t be missed for a few more minutes. I pushed it open.

  No wonder the girls liked it here: a huge bright room with every imaginable pink accessory, a pile of cuddly animals on each rosy bed, a Victorian doll’s house nearly as grand as the one in which they were staying. A keyboard, for God’s sake. And… I went over to the bookshelf built into the alcove, ran my finger along the shiny spines of the entire numbered collection of little hardback Noddy books that I’d craved…

  ‘Still like Noddy, eh?’ Mitch. Smiling in the doorway, then bending to pick up a tiny Playmobile pram and putting it on a bedside table.

  ‘Of course.’ I turned from him and went over to the window, where pink-painted metal bars would keep Rachel and Rebecca safe from falling onto the flowered but concrete balcony below.

  ‘They do remind me of you and Charlie, so much.’

  I folded my arms; was I supposed to be pleased about that?

  ‘We haven’t got the beach, the woods… but we go to the park and climb the trees…’

  Lifting them into the trees.

  ‘Look, I know I wasn’t there as much as I should have been, but we had some beautiful times together, we were good playmates, you and I.’

  ‘What about Charlotte?’

  Outside, the grey sky was finally letting go of its rain. I waited for him to answer.

  ‘Charlie was… her mother’s daughter. Confident, capable… She didn’t want to play with me.’

  ‘But she did.’

  ‘Well not—’

  I turned round. ‘She did play with you, that’s exactly what she did, what you made her do! And until you can—’

  ‘No Yollette, you don’t understand—’

  ‘I’ve understood since I was six!’

  ‘But understood what?’

  The laughter below had stopped, our raised voices echoing through all the white-walled space.

  ‘My God, you’re still not admitting it! I take it Judy doesn’t know, letting you take her grand-daughters to the park, reading to them in bed…’ I was trying to see the lock, but he was standing in front of it. ‘Is there a key in that door?’

  ‘Is there a…?’

  ‘Oh what’s the point!’ I tried to get past him, but he put his hands on my arms. ‘Get off me!’

  ‘Yollette! Listen—’

  ‘Get off, you filthy bastard!’ I said, pushing him away.

  Judy appeared, her eyes wide and shiny, followed by Nando.

  ‘You don’t know, do you?’ I said to her.

  ‘Yoli, this is not the way.’ Nando took my arm.

  ‘But he’s denying it! Watch, next he’ll say dreamy Yollette made it all up. I’m sorry Judy, but this isn’t going to work.’

  ‘No, he won’t say that!’ She came forward and looked up at me. ‘He’s told me about what happened with Charlotte, when he was out of his head… He’s told me. But it’s a long time ago, he’s a different man, a wonderful man… he wouldn’t hurt anybody now.’

  Mitch was staring at the floor, breathing heavily.

  Judy took his arm. ‘It’s okay Mitch. She’s not going to leave, are you, Yolande?’

  Nando held me and shook his head. ‘No more running from this, or you can never—’

  ‘Start again,’ Mitch said. Out of breath, almost a whisper. From this shaken old man. Papa. As in, we’re meeting Papa for lunch. It came back to me, Mum saying that, and the joyful jumping up and down that went with it that I’d long ago decided to forget.

  ‘I think I might be ready for some of that ice-cream now Judy, if that’s okay.’

  ‘Yoli.’ Stroking my hair.

  I opened my eyes. I was in his arms on the sofa.

  ‘I need to go soon.’

  ‘Sorry, trapped you.’

  ‘Is okay, I talked with Jeremy.’

  ‘What did he say?’ I’d completely overridden his stepby-step advice.

  ‘He understands. It was the best, you can’t relax, you and your papá, until you talk about these things.’

  I sat up.

  ‘Listen, you are very tired. You don’t have to come to the show. You can rest and I have chocolate with you later, no? Any-way, you will come with Jeremy tomorrow night.’

  Jeremy, linking arms with me and whispering comments into my ear. ‘I’ve missed him,’ I found myself saying. I needed the normality of having him here; this girlfriend role-playing and falling asleep in his lover’s arms was all too weird.

  Nando nodded. ‘But not long now. So you sleep, or come to the show?’

  ‘Of course I’m coming. Can I fix you something before you go?’

  ‘No, no. I’ll have something small later at the theatre.’

  ‘In the Stage Door cafe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought I’d… Can I join you there?’

  ‘Of course! I already ask you. At six, vale?’

  I went back to my flat, revived myself with a bath. Tried on the black floral skirt and found that it fitted again; weight loss was always an additional consolation prize for my heartbreaks. But heartbreak, at that moment, was not on my mind. I fo
und a white blouse that I’d bought on a rare shopping trip with Emma and never worn. A bit low cut, with two pieces of fabric that you had to tie in a bow: too barmaidy. But I was dressing for my role, and a flamenco dancer’s girlfriend would be proud of her tetas, however small. I looked in the mirror and remembered Alicia’s ‘La postura!’

  Six o’clock. But he wasn’t there. I bought an orange juice and sat down where I could see the stage door. Wondering what I was doing there, not the least bit hungry, and feeling rather buzzily unwell. Otherwise known as feeling nervous. What? I was having a snack with Nando - now a good friend, and one whose t-shirts and boxers were hanging up to dry over my boiler. And a bunch of amiable and non-English speaking Venezuelans who were hardly likely to tax my acting skills.

  Then he was there, wearing the white shirt that made him Indian-dark, tall in his heeled flamenco boots, fidgety, his feet clacking on the stone floor. Chatting in consonant-light Spanish with the hook-nosed tocaor, the black Venezuelan singer with the huge grin and the sweet-faced dancer who I’d hoped was the guy’s girlfriend.

  ‘Yoli!’ A small beckoning hand gesture that his mujer would obey; I got up and went over to him. An arm round me. A kiss. An exchange of greetings with his fellow performers, the tocaor staring at me with disapproval but eventually giving a nod and a half-smile.

  Nando smiled proudly as I translated the ingredients of the two hot dishes for the Venezuelans. Then we took a school-like bench table, Nando and I sitting opposite the others. They were discussing English food, Nando commenting in slowed down Spanish that he’d managed well on mine. I pointed out that I’d mostly given him Greek or Italian dishes, having been worried about him having an English food intolerancia, like Camarón.

  They laughed, and Nando looked pleased with my Spanish, or perhaps my knowledge of the flamenco hero, and put a warm hand on my lap. A boyfriend gesture that would surely go unnoticed, off-stage under the table. Although not by me, his firm thumb stroking my inner thigh and sending shockwaves up my leg that prevented any further involvement in the conversation. I pushed the hand towards my knee, preparing to lift it off altogether, but it took hold of mine and brought it to his mouth for a kiss. The others had moved on from in-flight meals to what sounded like experiences with various South American airlines. Then Dayana asked whether I’d be with Nando for the Venezuelan part of his South American tour.