The Songs of Manolo Escobar (12 page)

A figure emerged from behind and marched past me towards Lugton, who didn't have time to look up before he felt the full
weight of a kick hard against his shin. There was a sickening crack and then another kick before Lugton had time to let out a scream. He rolled over on to the concrete surface, clutching his lower leg, and as he did so, another kick landed on the same spot.

I stood by pathetically as Max Miller then turned and marched purposefully towards Chaney, who threw Jorge free and backed away, raising his palms in submission. Jorge ran towards the lion and grabbed it, then started stuffing his belongings back into his schoolbag.

At that point, Mad Dog emerged from the direction of the car park, clutching his tattered leather briefcase and juggling a large pile of jotters. He ambled past the group, eyeing us up and down.

‘What's going on here, then?' he asked.

‘Nothing, sir,' Max Miller said.

We all shuffled nervously. Chaney looked edgy and panicked. Lugton was writhing on the ground, trying to hold back tears.

‘What's the matter with you, Chaney?' Mad Dog demanded.

‘Nothing, sir,' Chaney said, his voice strained with pain.

Mad Dog stood silently surveying the scene for a few moments and a thin smile appeared on his face.

‘All right, as you were,' he said before striding off towards the school building.

E
ver since my phone call with Connie I'd been preparing myself for the inevitable, and I knew before I opened the front door that Cheryl was gone. It was late afternoon and still light outside, but the hallway was unusually gloomy. The house felt cavernous and overwhelming, bringing to mind Cheryl's frequent complaints, when we were thinking about buying it that it was much too big for our needs. Even for London it was an impressively proportioned space – a detached Arts and Crafts conversion, with access to a shared garden. Its value would rocket, I'd assured her, and I was right, it was worth well over a million now. But Cheryl had a point. It
was
much too big – the three of us had been rattling around in it for several years, growing more and more distant from each other.

It felt odd standing there alone, like a stranger in my own home. Nothing was out of place, yet it seemed alien, as though someone had taken my mental image of the space and moved everything slightly to the left. Perhaps it was an unconscious realisation that this was the first day of my new life without Cheryl, a mental readjustment to the home that would no longer have her walking around in it.

I dropped my holdall on the floor and wandered across the hallway to the sound of my own footsteps. The kitchen was cold and tidy, with not an unwashed saucepan or mug in sight. Cheryl had obviously cleaned the house before leaving as a parting shot – it was my place now, to do with it as I wished – she was no longer answerable to my serial grievances about order and cleanliness.

I wandered through to the living-roonm, which had the same unlived-in feel, and I looked around for a note, but there was
nothing. I climbed the stairs with a growing feeling of loneliness and entered our bedroom – it too was immaculate, and I could tell that she hadn't slept there for several nights.

I opened the door of the large walk-in wardrobe that we shared. Some of her clothes remained, but the ones she wore regularly were gone. I looked up to the overhead shelves where we stored the suitcases. Two were missing. I wandered through to the bathroom – she'd taken away all her toiletries.

I walked back into the bedroom and my legs buckled. I don't know how long I lay on the bed, staring into space, the distant hum of the city and the rush of traffic on the street outside dancing around my ears. I had no idea what to do. The evening stretched out before me. Ben would be back, but I didn't know when. Suddenly I panicked: what if Ben didn't return? Perhaps he'd left as well. Perhaps that's why it was so tidy.

I forced myself to stand up and made my way along the hallway to his bedroom. My legs were heavy and slow, as if I was wearing rain-drenched trousers, and a light-headed nausea crept over me. I pushed open the door and switched on the light. It was its usual wasteland: randomly discarded clothes, surfaces cluttered with empty bottles and beer cans, empty food tins relieved of their cold contents with teaspoons, and coffee cups lined with green mould. Several large ashtrays, emblazoned with the logos of lager brands, were piled high with fag-ends and roaches spilling volcanically on to the floor. The carpet was shrouded in a thin blanket of dust and crumbs and other, unidentifiable detritus. Eerie wisps of cobwebs hung from lampshades and down the sides of the curtains that hadn't been opened for God knows how long.

I knew from this fetid abyss that I hadn't been abandoned. Ben would be back – his mother would never have allowed him to leave me with this much ammunition. As I stared into the apocalyptic scene of post-pubescent filth I tried to laugh, but ended up choking on my tears.

I needed a distraction, so I returned to the coldness of the lounge, turned my laptop on, and Googled Alguaire. Despite other preoccupations, I'd been unable to stop thinking about the village and what Papa had told me about his family. It was mentioned only in the context of a cycling trail and a new regional airport being proposed nearby to serve Lerida. If, as Papa told me, it had for a short time represented a tiny strategic lifeline to those fighting for the Republic – a lifeline for which my grandparents paid with their lives – why should it fail to merit even a mention?

I typed in ‘Lerida and Spanish Civil War', which produced more hits, but they were virtually all tourism websites mentioning in passing that the town had fallen to insurgent forces in 1938 after Franco had ordered a push from Saragossa towards the Mediterranean. A photojournalism website included a collection of black-and-white stills of desperate street fighting following the Nationalist bombardment. Buildings were pockmarked and ruined after being shelled and shot up, and men lay in the streets surrounded by fallen masonry. One of the pictures featured a soldier falling backwards after being wounded, with La Seu Vella, the town's elevated medieval cathedral, in the background. I recognised the street in which they were fighting – it was only a few yards from the bar where Papa and I had eaten a few nights before.

Another website included an account of the aerial bombardment of the town by the German Condor Legion. Despite a public profession of neutrality, it said, Hitler had put the flagship unit of the Luftwaffe at Franco's disposal. As well as supporting a common cause, this allowed the Nazi air force to hone the military strategies it would use to bomb Allied cities during the Second World War. The depleted and under-resourced Republican defences could hold out for only so long. Their troops were holed up in a series of defensive, flat-topped ridges that ran along the western edge of the town. At the start of April, a squadron of German dive-bombers, nicknamed
angelitos
by the Spaniards,
closed in on the town. At first the Republican machine-gunners held their positions, restricting the aircraft to a height of around a thousand metres, but soon the order came for the pilots to dive, and in a series of strafing runs they picked off the gunners one by one. Among them, according to my father's account, was my Uncle Pepe.

I must have drifted off, because I woke to the sound of the front door slamming shut. I looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece – it was shortly after midnight. I'd been sleeping with my mouth open, and my throat was dry and sore. My body ached. I sucked my tongue hard to build up some moisture in my mouth and sat upright too quickly, feeling a sharp, piercing pain above my eyes.

Ben walked into the room, dressed in the same black leather ensemble he'd been wearing the last time I'd seen him. He now appeared to be wearing black eye make-up as well.

‘Where have you been?' he asked.

‘I was in Spain with your grandparents.'

‘Blimey. Spain. I thought Abuelo was allergic to Spain.'

‘Where have you been so late?' I asked, remembering my parental responsibilities.

‘I was at Natalie's.'

‘Who's Natalie?'

‘She's my girlfriend.'

‘I didn't know you had a girlfriend.'

‘You don't know much about me.'

‘How long has all of this been going on, then?'

‘Six months – and don't make it sound like I've been dealing drugs. Why does a conversation with you always end in confrontation?'

‘Don't talk rubbish,' I said.

‘It's true. You do it effortlessly with Mum and now you're doing it with me. Why can't we just have a normal chat without you blaming me for something?'

I didn't want to have an argument with Ben. I was sick of arguments. I wanted to calm things down. ‘There's something I've
been meaning to tell you about Abuelo, but I didn't know when the right time was,' I said.

‘Oh yeah?'

‘I'm afraid he's not very well.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean he's dying. Of cancer.'

He frowned and his face reddened. Even with all that aggressive leather clothing, he still looked touchingly young.

‘Shit.'

‘Yes, it is shit.'

‘I'll go and see him.'

‘Okay, but you'd better not leave it too long.'

‘How long has he got?' he asked, his voice husky.

‘I don't know, not long.'

He leaned over and grabbed my wrist, over my sleeve, and held it for a couple of seconds.

‘I'm sorry. I'll go and see him.'

I felt like crying for the second time that day. My head was pounding and I needed to be in bed, alone and in the dark. I stood up slowly and balanced my weight on the back of the chair until I was confident that my legs weren't going to buckle.

‘Have you spoken to your mother?' I asked.

He sighed. ‘Let's talk about it in the morning.'

I knew we wouldn't.

‘I'm not going to go chasing after her. I only want to know where she is.'

He looked up and smiled. ‘We'll talk about it another time, Dad.'

I was too weary to argue.

I
was woken by the piercing ring of my mobile phone. The display said it was half past six. It was Kevin was calling to say that The Editor wanted to see me in his office later in the morning. He imparted the news, as he did most information, without comment or favour, simply with an expectation of compliance.

‘Is this about my trip to Spain?' I asked Kevin, a little too anxiously.

‘Don't know.'

‘Because it was a family emergency, not a holiday. I explained that to you.'

‘I know.'

‘Did you not tell that to Prowse?'

‘Yes.'

‘So why does he want to see me?'

He hung up.

I'd worked with Kevin for ten years, and I doubted there was a single item of personal information about him I could relate. Like many news editors, he didn't have any ambition beyond a caffeine-fuelled, dead-eyed, single-minded commitment to filling pages with print. His appearance was shabby-corporate, as though he'd been dressed in the dark by a party of drunken middle-managers. He seemed to take no interest in his image because, I suspected, his head was crammed to bursting point with other priorities – page leads, drop intros, secondary sources, direct quotes, balancing quotes, standfrsts, affidavits, WOB headlines, cuttings searches, hidden mikes, snatch photos, vox pops, timelines, cold type, column inches, wire copy, banner ads, baseline shifts, butting heads, column rules, hammer heads,
hanging indents, standalone pictures, summary decks, white space, widows and orphans.

Perhaps it was the industry's relentless demand for more that made him the way he was. There was no room for reflection, congratulation or remorse in his world, because whatever went before was in the past, and he was already on to the next thing. There wasn't a conversation I could remember having with him that wasn't conducted in the tight, primary-colour parameters of tabloid certainty. Reality for him was a series of rigid opposites – good or bad, success or failure, boom or bust, smart or stupid, tart or virgin, saint or sinner.

He had an unambiguous disregard for the conventions of human interaction. He didn't speak much, but he listened to everything, assimilating its implications, calculating its possibilities. Despite his lack of social graces, he was fearsomely good at his job, and that made him, within his narrow professional ambit, untouchable.

I didn't even know if Kevin was married. I wondered if he had some kin – an elderly mother, perhaps, with whom he still lived, who brushed stray items of breakfast from his clothing before he left for work. I thought he might be gay, non-practising and sexually repressed of course, telling anyone prurient enough to inquire that he was still playing the field, or that he just hadn't met the right girl.

He was one of the few members of staff who referred to Clive Prowse by his first name, a practice that carried an implicit entitlement, like they were friends who just happened to work together. In reality Prowse had no friends, or none prosaic enough to work for him. Most people in the building called him by his surname, spitting it through pursed lips, or they referred to him simply as The Editor. The very mention of his name was enough to instil fear, more so in recent weeks when any brush with senior management carried with it the threat of redundancy.

Prowse's office was large and, by comparison with the rest of the utilitarian concrete-and-glass building, absurdly plush, with its dark wood furniture and deep bordello-red decor. He ushered
me in and introduced me to Uli, who shook my hand from a seated position. I'd met him once before, during his guided tour of the newsroom shortly after his company, Bayerische Zeitungsherausgeber, had bought out the Mercury Group titles, but I had no expectation of him remembering me. He'd tried to ingratiate himself with the staff then by demonstrating his encyclopaedic knowledge of vintage British comedy – according to his Wikipedia entry, he had the world's largest collection of Norman Wisdom memorabilia – but it had fallen embarrassingly flat, as few people could make out what he was talking about through his thick German accent.