The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations

by Paul Carr

  Alejo took three shot glasses off his shelf and set them down on the bar, filling each to the brim with the green goop. He drank the first himself and shuddered, before gesturing to the other two, and then to us. We did as we were told. Even after an entire night of drinking, I could feel the hit of the alcohol. It was like the end of level boss in a drinking game. But – ha! – we’d defeated it. Alejo put the bottle away and then put his hands together next to his face, miming sleep. Victory was ours! It was 5 a.m., and outside it was starting to get light.

  We staggered – crawled, really – out of the bar and into the street. There was no way on earth we were going to make it up the hill. According to Scott, who had to remind me of most of this the next day, I was lapsing in and out of consciousness.

  ‘Where now?’ I said.

  ‘Home?’ said Scott.

  ‘Lightweight,’ I said. Again, the word that came out of my mouth almost certainly didn’t sound like that.

  Just then we noticed two men standing by a white car on the other side of the road. They looked like hit men. They looked at us, and we looked back, and then they spoke.

  ‘Cocaine?’

  Another universal language.

  905

  I don’t do drugs.

  I’m not just saying that because I’m writing these words in a book and it would be monumentally stupid for me to admit to using illegal drugs in print. If you’ve got this far and not realised how monumentally stupid I’m capable of being, then you haven’t been paying attention.

  I’ve done drugs; it’s hard to live in London and not have at least once, but I don’t do drugs. Drink has always been my vice – and it’s served me perfectly well.

  The point is, even totally paralytic, I had no interest in buying cocaine from these people. I did have an interest, though, in getting a lift up the mountain in their car.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  They pointed vaguely up the mountain and said something that sounded like the Spanish for ‘at our house’.* There is no universe in which going with them was a good idea, whatever lay in store for us at their house. But then again there is no universe in which being this drunk and having to climb half a mountain is a good idea.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘This isn’t a good idea,’ said Scott.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ I said. My half-formed plan, I think, was to get further up the mountain and then tell them we’d changed our mind and then get out and walk the rest of the way. It simply didn’t occur to me that two hit men drug dealers might have any problem with this plan.

  We got into the car, Scott in the front and me in the back with the second hit man. There were no rear doors so I had to clamber in over the front seats. The drug dealer in the driver’s seat floored the accelerator and we began to race up the mountain. We must have been doing at least seventy miles an hour, screeching around blind corners and narrowly avoiding spinning off the road to our deaths, when I decided it was a good time for Scott and me to get out.

  ‘Stop the car!’ I said, in English. I wasn’t sure if the driver hadn’t understood my request or he didn’t care. Either way, he carried on driving, maybe even accelerating slightly.

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted, even louder this time. Scott was now shouting the same thing, but in actual Spanish. Still nothing. Having dismissed all other possibilities, I came to the conclusion that we were being kidnapped. Not simply that we were going to be forced to buy drugs, but rather that Scott and I were being driven to a mountain-top dungeon where we’d be held against our will and forced to perform unspeakable acts, in a combination of English and broken Spanish. Faced with this reality, there was only one sensible course of action. I reached forward between the two front seats and grabbed hold of the handbrake, pulling it up sharply with both hands.

  What happened next is exactly what you’d expect would happen next. The car jerked into a flat spin, gravel flying up as we slid, mercifully, away from the mountain edge – but towards a wall built of rocks. The hitman behind the wheel reacted with all the speed of a man with a head full of cocaine, slamming on the footbrake and trying to steer into the spin. We eventually came to a rest in a ditch. Had we spun in the other direction, we’d have fallen at least a hundred feet straight down the mountain into some trees.

  That’s when the shouting started, and the first punch – thrown by the hit man in the back – almost connected with the side of my face. The window on Scott’s passenger side was open and I decided to try to climb from the back, straight out through the window. Unfortunately Scott chose precisely that same moment to get the fuck out of the front of the car, swinging the door open. The result of our uncoordinated actions was that I was left hanging out through the window, swinging on an open door.

  Still inside the car, Scott grabbed my legs and pushed me the rest of the way forward, where I fell face first on to the road. The shouting continued as we started to run, scrambling over the ditch and down a small drop into a field. I landed awkwardly, twisting my ankle. Scott would tell me later that he carried me the rest of the way up the mountain back to the villa. Given the searing pain in my ankle for the next three days, and the fact that our clothes were covered in dirt and blood, I believed him.

  ‘Still,’ I said as I hobbled from my room the next morning, out on to the patio where Rob was soaking in the hot tub and Scott was trying to sleep off his hangover in the hammock, ‘you’ve got to admit, it’s a funny story.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Scott, ‘it’s a funny story if you don’t remember it, and if you don’t speak any Spanish. I actually know what they were shouting at you. They were saying that they were going to come back with a knife and stab you.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, making a note to include that detail when I wrote up the story for my blog.

  906

  It wasn’t long after what became known as ‘the drug dealer-attempted murder night’ that Robert and I decided we needed something other than all-day drinking to entertain us during the rest of our time up the mountain.

  Since I arrived in Spain, barely a day had passed without an email conversation with Hannah, who, having split up from her boyfriend, was now throwing herself into a combination of work and drinking. As was only right and proper.

  Perhaps it’s because I was spending my whole days getting drunk in a hammock, but I was worried about how hard she was working: spending long hours finishing an important new project. No matter what time she emailed – day or night – she seemed to be still in the office. One morning, on a whim, I sent her an email.

  From: Paul

  To: Hannah

  Hey – you should come out to Spain this weekend. If you’re going to work hard, you should at least do it from a hammock.

  I mean, I knew she’d say no – that she was too busy – but I also knew there was no harm in planting seeds.

  A few minutes later she replied.

  From: Hannah

  To: Paul

  You mean it?! I’d love to come out and see you guys. I really need a weekend away from it all, lounging around in a bikini, or less. Lemme check flights, ok?

  I stared at the email, assuming I was missing a ‘but’. But I wasn’t.

  ‘Rob!’ I shouted. ‘You will not fucking believe what just happened.’

  Robert looked up from his laptop. ‘From the way you’re squealing like a fucking girl, I’d say Hannah replied to your email and is coming out this weekend.’ He paused. ‘You should invite Eris to come over the weekend after. You’re on a roll.’

  I laughed. Flying from London is one thing but San Francisco is a bit of a way to fly for a weekend. I did email Eris, though. ‘Robert says you should come to Spain next week. x’

  An hour or so later, as California woke up and Eris arrived at her desk, she read my email and sent her reply.

  I stared at my screen again, trying to decide if I was misunderstanding the list of plane times. I wasn’t.

  ‘Rob!’

  ‘You’re fucking kidding me.’<
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  907

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ Robert said, ‘this weekend, Hannah, the girl you have an enormous crush on but haven’t actually done anything with is flying out to see you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then after she leaves, Eris, the girl who you have actually done stuff with, but decided you were cooling things off with because she lives in San Francisco, is flying out to see you.’

  ‘Well, technically she’s flying to see us. She had some holiday time and wants to spend it doing something different. Apparently our nomad lifestyle has inspired her. She says she’s interested in being the third King of the Road.’

  Robert laughed. ‘Everything about this is ridiculous.’

  Try as I might to remain cool, I spent the rest of the week unable to think – or talk – about anything other than Hannah’s visit.

  ‘I just can’t understand why she’d said yes.’

  ‘Uh, she likes you, you fucking idiot,’ said Rob.

  That couldn’t be it. Until just a few weeks ago she’d thought I was a drunken dick. Surely discovering that I could occasionally write a funny email or a blog post couldn’t have changed that. I started to worry that I’d misinterpreted her trip. Maybe she wasn’t interested at all; maybe she really did just want to sit in the sun. Oh God, what should I do about beds? Should I give her the spare bed – in which case would she think I wasn’t interested? Or should I assume she’d want to share with me, which could lead to all kinds of embarrassment if I was wrong?

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Robert, ‘this is typical you. You treat every other girl like total crap, which of course makes them fall madly in love with you. And then Michelle and I have to pick up the pieces and explain that you’re not a total bastard, just ‘emotionally unavailable ’, which we all know is a euphemism for ‘a total cunt’. But then the moment you meet a girl you actually like, you totally lose your shit and turn into a quivering virgin.’

  ‘It’s just that Hannah’s … I dunno … different,’ I said.

  ‘Virgin,’ said Rob. ‘Quivering emo virgin.’

  ‘That’s actually going to be the title of my second album,’ I said.

  By the time I drove to the airport to pick Hannah up, I’d decided that Robert was right. Faint heart never won fair Canadian. If I’d got the wrong end of the stick then I’d just have to live with the embarrassment – there was always the spare room for one of us to sleep in.

  To make things more interesting, Robert had invited a girl over as well. Her name was Sally – a South African who had until recently dated Michael. ‘Does Michael know she’s coming out?’ I asked Rob.

  ‘Not entirely,’ said Robert, ‘best not to write about her.’*

  We’d convinced the girls to take the same flight so we’d only have to drive to the airport once. This seemed like a brilliant idea until – on the way to the airport – we realised that there was a chance that they’d have met on the plane and started comparing notes. I’d told Hannah some of the indiscreet things Robert had said about his date, and I was pretty sure he’d told Sally about my gibbering excitement over Hannah. These were not details that needed to be exchanged. Fortunately, even though they came through arrivals at almost exactly the same time, it seemed that neither had realised who the other was.

  Robert pulled Sally into a long hug before kissing her firmly on the mouth. ‘Hello, darling,’ he said. I hesitated for a second before hugging Hannah and awkwardly kissing her cheek. I looked into her eyes for clues. Had she been expecting a kiss? No, of course not, that would be weird. I took her bag and we headed back to the car.

  We’d been in the villa long enough now to have mastered the art of barbecuing and the girls were, we thought, suitably impressed by our skills at making fire and grilling meat. After dinner Robert suggested that we get into the hot tub, and he and Sally headed off to their room to ‘get changed’. This was the moment of truth; the moment where, surely, I was going to make a total fucking fool of myself, and probably get stabbed in the eye with a barbecue fork. Hell, this was the girl who had pushed me across a room for accusing her of being American.

  I turned to Hannah. She spoke first.

  ‘So,’ she said.

  ‘So,’ I replied. And then I kissed her.

  The barbecue fork remained on the table.

  ‘About fucking time,’ she said. ‘Which one’s our room?’

  908

  The day after Hannah flew back to London I walked – floated, really, on a cushion of happiness – into the kitchen to find Robert scribbling on a notepad.

  ‘Working hard?’ I asked.

  ‘Fourteen thousand miles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fourteen thousand miles. That’s the total distance – including return trips – that women will have flown in order to sleep with you in Spain, once Eris gets here.’

  ‘First of all, Robert, it’s horrible that you worked that out,’ I said. ‘I mean, I take no small amount of pleasure in the number – but it’s horrible that you’ve actually worked it out.’

  ‘Oh, it’s worse than that. I was actually going to suggest a game – ‘the Google Maps Challenge’ – to see if I could beat your total by the end of the trip.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you thought better of it.’

  ‘Actually, I just realised that to win I’d need to find five girls willing to fly here, just to cancel out Eris.’

  ‘Well, in that case, I accept your surrender. Good game, Rob.’ I patted him on the back, and headed to the fridge for a celebratory beer.

  Eris’s flight arrived at Málaga airport at five o’clock, and we decided to make the most of the sun by heading down to the beach. Eris had been intrigued by the concept of Eurotrash, and we could think of no better place to explain it than the playground of the rich and most wanted: Puerto Banus.

  The Ocean Club in Puerto Banus describes itself as ‘the most exclusive and impressive setting on the Costa del Sol’, a sort of outdoor daytime nightclub, with topless women sunbathing by a gigantic pool, which backs right on to the beach. Access to the bar is limited to models, playboys and their playthings – which meant there was no way Rob, Eris and I were going to get in. Unless, that is, we pulled the lunch trick.

  ‘Hello, there are four of us for lunch.’

  The door person – a tanned male model in a black suit and a white t-shirt – looked us up and down. For a start, there were only three of us. And, also, we certainly didn’t look like people who were going to spend fifty euros on a plate of Tempur de Gambas Agrudulce. Good eye, door person. But who can tell these days? We might be dot com millionaires; they always dress like scum.

  ‘Do you have reservations?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Rob, affecting his best playboy-on-shore-leave tone, ‘we weren’t expecting to moor for another week. Will it be a problem to walk in?’

  ‘No, no, for lunch that will be fine,’ said the door person.

  ‘Thank you. We’re expecting one more person before we sit down. If we wait in the bar, can you let us know when they arrive?’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  Of course, our nonexistent friend would never show, leaving us to drink with supermodels for the rest of the day. We sat at the bar and Robert called over a barman.

  ‘Three piña coladas, please.’ Robert’s playboy impression was taking a turn for the Derek Trotter, but ‘in for a euro, in for …’

  ‘Thirty-six euros, please. Would you like to open a tab?’ Jesus Christ. I gave the barman my card and he began mixing the piña coladas, pouring them into small tumblers.

  ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ said Robert, ‘what do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘This is how we serve piña coladas,’ said the bartender.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Robert, ‘piña coladas are served in those big piña colada glasses.’ Glasses which just so happen to be twice the size of the tumblers.

  The bartender sighed. ‘We don’t have any piña colada glasses, sir.’

/>   ‘Well, that’s not good enough,’ said Robert, ‘but I suppose we can make do with brandy snifters. They’re close enough. Honestly – who serves piña coladas in a tumbler?’

  ‘Our … clientele … prefer it that way, sir.’ He said the word clientele in such a way as to make clear that we did not fall within the narrow borders of his definition. Rob just shrugged; the customer is always right. Grudgingly, the bartender decanted two of the tumblers into a single brandy snifter and slid it over to Robert before skulking off to make two more very large piña coladas for Eris and me.

  Robert called after him. ‘And a little paper umbrella, please.’

  The three of us had only taken the smallest sip from our drinks – with little paper umbrellas – when a stunning blonde with an all-over tan and no bikini top came and stood next to where we were sitting.

  ‘What are those?’ she asked, in a heavy German accent.

  ‘Piña coladas,’ said Rob.

  ‘Nocheinen, bitte,’ she said to the bartender, pointing at our glasses. Robert grinned his victory at the bartender.

  ‘With a little umbrella,’ said Rob.

  ‘Ja, miteinen Regenschirm,’ confirmed the German woman.

  Twenty minutes later we looked around the bar. ‘This is freaking hilarious,’ said Eris. And she was right: at least a dozen of the Ocean Club’s clientele were strolling around sipping piña coladas in brandy snifters, each replete with brightly coloured umbrella.

  Our work there was done.

  909

  ‘Hey, Paul, don’t drink this.’

  Eris was unpacking her suitcase in our bedroom. I’d taken every possible precaution to remove any trace of Hannah from the room, but still, every time Eris opened a cupboard, a small wave of panic washed over me in case I’d missed a tell-tale hair clip or suchlike.

  In Eris’s hand was a silver hipflask with an inscription beautifully engraved across the whole of one side. From across the room I couldn’t make out what it said, but clearly the contents were important.