The King of Spain

by Robert Ford

  ‘You look ridiculous,’ said Hal, wincing as his stomach cramped once more.

  ‘Have you looked in a mirror?’ Sam wriggled, tired and uncomfortable.

  Across the room, Hal scraped the back of his hand across the alarming sheaf of hair that protruded from his nostrils.

  ‘This stuff’ll fall out in twelve hours, so they say. It’s my arse I’m worried about. Feels like I’m sitting on broken glass.’ Hal shifted between cheeks in an attempt to alleviate the sensation.

  ‘I hope this is a dream... I think I’ll wake up now...How do I wake up?’ Sam muttered to himself.

  ‘The problem is the Finns. They’ve taken over most of Central Africa. And do you know what their main industry is there?’

  Sam shook his head, lost.

  ‘Gibbons. Or more particularly, their shit. Gibbon guano. They collect the stuff and send it back to Helsinki. Then they pack it up and sell it on to the highest bidder - for use in the chemical production of food, in factories and what not. And that’s how all these things start.’

  ‘Gibbons?’ Sam asked, a little confused.

  ‘The manipulation of nature, you arse. Larking about with what one oughtn’t to.’ Hal shifted again as he considered the topic at hand. ‘So in a sense, you’re right. Everything starts with a gibbon.’

  ‘Is that true?

  ‘What?’

  ‘The gibbon shit? Surely a gibbon is a monkey. Not an ape?’

  ‘No. Wrong. And what is more, everyone knows how awful the Finns can be - it is acknowledged. I have no doubt that there is truth in it, yes. Of course... then you have the fascists.’

  ‘What fascists?’

  Hal’s face clouded.

  ‘What fascists? Are you taking the piss?’

  Sam thought about this for a second, for a moment thrown.

  ‘Umm. No. But... I didn’t think they existed anymore. I mean, not really.’

  ‘No fascists? They’re everywhere... everyday they try to sabotage me... no more sodding fascists, I don’t believe...’ Hal’s stomach contracted, forcing him to lunge over the side of the bed towards the bucket on the floor next to him.

  ‘Shitting Finns...’ Hal mumbled from within the bright red plastic receptacle.

  Sam settled back into the starched fabric of the infirmary linen and let his mind wander, imagining the earth from the air, travelling over the seas and the land to the heart of Africa, a dense, jungled landscape filled with large pale men collecting faeces from great pens full of angry, staring gibbons.

  The day drifted by, time crawling, gelatinous, everything soaked in a calm that was dislocated from the world, a casual make-believe. Sleep was not easily procured and so in between fretful, sweat-laced naps, Sam huffed and puffed and wriggled and wormed, his buttocks enlarged and increasingly sore.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Hal peered over at him.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I said, do you mind not shifting about to such a degree.’ Hal feigned politeness. ‘It is annoying beyond measure.’

  Sam stopped moving and stared back at Hal.

  ‘Yeah, alright, keep your voice down. The fascists’ll hear you.’

  Hal shot upright in bed, an impressive feat given his diminished physical capabilities. ‘What! You little shit!’ he managed to splutter, before collapsing onto his back, panting, exhausted.

  ‘I was meaning to ask. Last night. Some of the other handlers seemed to call you the Spaniard. What’s the link? I mean, why?’

  Silence.

  For a second, Sam thought that perhaps he was stepping over the line here; after all, he didn’t know Hal all that well, but the collision of tedium and curiosity had got the better of him. Rolling over, Sam propped himself up on an elbow so that he could see Hal, who in fact had done the same and was now glaring back at him across the room.

  ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘Well... I guess it’s really none of my business. Just thought it was unusual, that’s all - I mean you, not being Spanish and everything.’

  ‘What the -’ Hal was apoplectic with rage, a curious and amusing spectacle given the extraneous hair and debilitating nausea. Now was not the time for a fight. ‘Not Spanish! Are you trying to kill me? Are you trying to give me an aneurism or something?’

  Hal lunged back towards the bucket - no matter how vitriolic he became, how furious his mind, his body for the time being was at the whim of the virus. Hal righted himself and for a time they sat in silence, the atmosphere unresolved.

  ‘My parents were Spanish... to answer your question,’ he said at long last.

  Sam rested tantalisingly on the lip of sleep, but hearing Hal’s croaked confession he popped open a large, blue bleary eye.

  ‘That’s very... nice.’

  From across the room came the sound of more retching. ‘Nice?’

  ‘Well... that’s marvellous. You don’t have an accent, that’s all. That’s why I came to wonder.’

  ‘Listen, sonny. Just because I don’t go round lisping all day doesn’t mean I’m not a Spaniard. I’m more a Spaniard than you could imagine. I am Spain!’

  Despite himself, Sam laughed. It just popped out, surprising him to the extent that he clasped his hand across his mouth to guard against any such repetition.

  Throwing back the sheets, Hal leaped out of bed. ‘You dare laugh at me! I’ll run you through! I’ll stab you!’

  Hal made only a couple of shaky steps before the strength in his legs failed, collapsing him onto the laminate floor.

  Sam covered his mouth with his hands, his torso shaking as tears began to stream from his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he said, holding his hand up by way of an apology.

  Growling, Hal managed to turn and crawl back up onto bed, his large swollen rump swaying proudly behind him as he went. ‘You shouldn’t... mock... the afflicted,’ he called back between breaths as he lay sprawled on the sheets, breathing hard from the exertion.

  Sam’s mirth was short-lived, as another great wave of nausea caused him to make use of his own bucket. ‘Quite,’ he said as he sat upright again. ‘I’m sorry, Hal, really.’

  ‘Piss off,’ Hal muttered, an element of cheer returning to his voice.

  ‘So whereabouts in Spain are you from?’

  ‘Why on earth would I discuss this with you? You could be a fascist for all I know.’

  ‘Well, I’m not. Thanks.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what I’d expect you to say if you were a fascist.’

  Sam tutted. ‘OK. This is ridiculous. I am a fascist. You got me.’

  ‘Ah! See! There you go!’

  ‘There you go what?’

  ‘You’ve been found out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll have to report you to the appropriate authorities of course.’

  ‘Which authorities? Honestly I wish I’d never asked...’

  Hal propped himself up, wincing as his weight was transferred to the tender flesh of his backside. Leaning back against a large pillow he allowed himself a chuckle, happy to have riled Sam - some slight revenge.

  From beneath his pillows Hal produced a packet of cigarettes. He lit up then threw the pack across the room to Sam.

  ‘Are we allowed to smoke in here?’ Sam looked up at the several small smoke alarms dotted about the ceiling. ‘Won’t they go off or something?’

  ‘Had Fell disable them. I tend to come here now and then to... recuperate. Take stock. You know how it is. And it’s a bit of a bore if you can’t smoke. Bit of a bore even if you can, but you know what I mean.’

  Sam shrugged his shoulders and lit up, the plume of smoke unfurling through the air above him, against the light from the window.

  ‘Seville. That’s where my family come from. An amazing place, a noble people and the true royal seat of Spain.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Have you been?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should go.’

  ‘One day,’ said Sam, staring at hi
s hands, down at the white linen and then back towards Hal’s side of the ward, avoiding eye contact. ‘So why did your parents leave?’

  Hal shifted about, uncomfortable. ‘It was my father’s decision. He was a very fine man in his own way but... he felt the burden of history, was subject to it. It was too much for him and so he took my mother and me, and we moved to England.’

  ‘What was the burden? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  Hal paused for a moment, weighing Sam up. ‘And you say you’re not a fascist?’

  Sam laughed. ‘No. No, I’m really not.’

  ‘Well, good, then.’ Hal he leant forward and rearranged the wall of rumpled pillows behind him. Content with their formation, he settled back. Ready. ‘It all started back in the 1500s. My ancestors had been traders, purveyors of fabric, textiles, that sort of thing. And over the years they married these abilities with a keen sense for business, rising though the mercantile ranks...’

  And so it was, without too much in the way of prompting, that Hal embarked upon the tale of his family’s history and in particular the sequence of calamitous events upon which rested his claim, a claim that was made in all seriousness, a claim to the Spanish throne, to be the King of Spain. All in all he spoke for over an hour, pausing only to light another cigarette or to throw the pack over to Sam. The story was vast and complex; an oral history stretching back hundreds of years, rambling yet hugely detailed and quite unlike anything Sam had ever heard before. His own family history covered one generation, if that, consisting of the meagre scraps of information that could be gleamed from his mother’s foul-mouthed rants, declaring his father a “nefarious sod, a charlatan”, a man who disappeared one night leaving behind him a pair of threadbare underpants and a half-empty packet of Drum rolling tobacco. And Sam. And his mother.

  Although the sheer weight of information was hard to process, especially given the torpidity brought on by the Ape Flu, Hal spoke with an incredible energy and verve as he relayed an intricate web of births, deaths and marriages, of political instability, corruption and skulduggery, of rogue bishops, errant knights and artful courtiers. As Sam listened he could almost picture Hal as a young boy, sitting wide-eyed as his father recounted the tale, over and over and over, the history as a fulcrum of exchange through the years as Hal grew up and became a man, while his father reclined into old age and infirmity, the retrograde orbits of father and son.

  Reading between the lines, Sam managed to garner this: that through a series of plagues, disputes and illegitimacies during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Hal’s family had been catapulted into a position within the political framework of Spain where it looked as if Hal’s ancestor, Ernesto, might have acceded to the throne. Might have. In the way that JFK might have run for another term, if he had not been shot. That kind of might, a might built on an abject platform of misplaced hope, of nonsense.

  Ernesto’s health failed, his wife died, and the baronial support on which his claim was based disappeared. It was a case of so close and yet so far, of what might have been. And as such, the history had been passed down though the generations, carrying with it a sense of great injustice, of missed opportunity, a sense of the cruel, arbitrary nature of existence, all born of this meagre royal hope.

  As the story reached its end, Hal veered away from the arcane political history, instead speaking about his own father. Gone was the arm waving, the fervour with which he had delivered the majority of his speech, replaced instead by a tenderness, a longing almost, that took Sam quite by surprise. He described his father as a simple man, a gentle soul who felt the weight of the world more keenly than most, an artisan who revelled in the specificity of the work that he did as a master stonemason. But at the same time, he recognised that he was a dying breed, that his skills were fast becoming redundant. And before long he was forced to relocate himself and his family to England where he hoped to find more substantial work. Unfortunately the English appeared to need stonemasons even less than the Spanish, and as such he could only find employment as a sales assistant, forced to eke out a living selling awful tat to ungrateful tourists on the drizzled shores of the Channel at Brighton beach.

  Such was the ignobility of this job that he felt humiliated, punished almost. The world had conspired against him, and it was this sense of injustice that led him to scour the archives, becoming more and more obsessed with the past and the various intricacies of his family tree. And the more he looked, the more he felt that history was simply repeating, that the inequity with which fate had dealt with him was a follow-on from what his ancestors had had to contend with - not only was he a master craftsman denied the opportunity to practise his art, he was in fact a man of royal lineage, selling items that no one needed to people that didn’t want them.

  It was difficult for Sam to quite know how to take this epic tale, this steady stream of delusion. But he had to admire the energy and commitment to his family, and particularly his father, that Hal demonstrated. And more than anything, he felt sad that he could not summon such memories himself.

  ‘Your father sounds like a good man,’ said Sam.

  ‘Good? I don’t know if I would call him good exactly. But yes, I liked him, and he took care of us.’

  ‘I never knew my Dad. He... well, I guess he ran off. It’s funny, listening to your story. You seem to have such a clear idea of who you are, where you’re from. And I think that’s fantastic. Because I guess I’ve just never known how to... to get my bearings in the world, somehow. Does that make any sense at all?’

  Hal nodded, grunting.

  ‘Life is so strange. It feels like I’ve been made old by the world, because I don’t understand it, because I feel off kilter. Guess maybe that’s why I came here, to Edge Hill. To try and find, you know, myself. To pin it down. Me, I mean. As a man.’

  Hal couldn’t help himself chuckle at such cod, a laugh that sat between thick rasping coughs.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Sam, a little crestfallen.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ Hal held up his hand. ‘I shouldn’t have laughed. And I do know what you mean. A father’s advice can sometimes seem like some aid to navigation, that without this influence the future is frightful, something that can only be groped towards. Or some such bollocks. But this influence carries an inflection, an accent, there’s no denying it. And so while these sentiments hang about our ears the world is set to change; what seemed clear and right to them is not so to us, and is lost in the untangling of the new and the strange and the everyday. What you’re talking about, I think, is hope, and with hope, the flexibility and purpose to move forward. To inherit.’

  Hal paused, pulling long on his cigarette.

  ‘So whether you’ll find what you’re looking for here, at this facility... I’m not so sure. Freaks and alcoholics on the other hand - we have in spades.’

  As the afternoon unfolded both men began to recuperate. The Ape Flu’s symptoms were severe but they were also short-lived. The swelling in their buttocks had eased somewhat and the aural and nasal hair had begun to fall out in thick clumps. Even the vomiting abated.

  That night they both slept in fits, waking early to a splendid, sun-filled morning. Sam, now free from the extraneous hair, stretched his long limbs out across the bed, while outside the birds chorused, charmed by the unseasonable weather.

  It was Hal’s voice that first came to Sam from across the room.

  ‘Oh God, it’s the Rawalpindi Express.’

  Propping himself up on an elbow, Sam followed Hal’s gaze to a bed a little way down the ward in which sat Ted, bolt upright, a bucket clutched to his midriff, the tell-tale ape hair protruding from his nose and ears.

  ‘I’m from Calcutta,’ snapped Ted before unloading into the bucket.

  ‘Yes, of course you are, Teddy Boy, of course, of course.’

  Hal knew it was coming, knew that Ted was one of life’s great moaners and so it was that over the course of the morning no element of the ward was spared comment, from
the sheets to the decor and the hygiene standards to the uncomfortable swelling of his buttocks which he reasoned was like being “inflated and spanked at the same time”.

  At first this patter was amusing, but after a couple of hours his camp warblings lurched from a damning appraisal of the air-conditioning system straight into a teary-eyed recollection of the halcyon days spent with his beloved Dirk in New York City.

  Sam looked over at Hal, who was threatening to garrotte himself with a spare pillowcase - anything to alleviate the tedium of Ted’s self-indulgences.

  Nightgowns billowing, Sam and Hal scampered out from the annexe and along the narrow corridor that led to the east, to the area reserved for SRC (Specific Reconstructive Care). Here they wandered, snooping. With nowhere else to go, nowhere to be, they took their time, stopping independently to stare through the circular windows of the adjoining doors, into rooms filled with the gleaming, state-of-the-art technologies which the medical staff used to fix the residents as and when parts of their bodies malfunctioned. Sam was transfixed - compared with the rudimentary analogue of his mother’s set-up the facilities were dazzling, but at the same time there was something obscene about these rooms; naked, functional places.

  ‘Hey, Dickie, look.’

  Sam moved a couple of doors down to where Hal stood on toe ends, peering through the window.

  The room was lit from above by a great circular lamp. Below this was an operating table upon which lay a male resident, a tall man with sandy hair, dressed in the long white gown identical to those worn by Sam and Hal. He seemed to be anaesthetised, but in any case was strapped to the table both at the wrist and ankle, while above him, two sleek, white robotic arms traced graceful arcs, their thick plastic limbs tapering to slender metallic wrists, at the end of which were delicate humanoid hands, complete with thin agile fingers and a realistic polymer skin. The arms were running an automated procedure that seemed to involve the replacement of a lens. Sam watched as one hand held open the resident’s eye, while the other made an insertion so as to remove the old. Although the procedure was common, even outside the elite facilities of Edge Hill, Sam couldn’t help but think that this there was something horrific in the easy, robotic application of these perfect appendages, in a way a reaction that was not dissimilar to the first time he encountered the residents in the dining hall.