by Carlos Alba
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 ha
dn’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.
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‘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.’