Seagulls in My Soup Read Free

time over a tiny cup of thick, treacly, black coffee, until the Dragon of Devon, the English games-mistress, had completed her ablutions.
    As I traipsed away, breakfastless, through the persistent rain along the town quay, I heard the soft, gentle patter of Nelson’s three-paw steps astern of me. I didn’t need to turn around to know it was he, nor did I need to look at his eye or the droop of his old head to know that his senses of virtue and modesty, instilled in him by his old master, my first sailing skipper, Tansy Lee (1866–1958), had been deeply offended by Sissie’s divesting herself of her oil-filthy vestments before he’d had a chance to reach the companionway ladder. Nothing if not Victorian, was Nelson.
    An hour later the rain had stopped. Through the low front door of the dim bodega I gazed over the still half-full tiny cup of coffee, over the berets of the usual assembly of a dozen or so sad-eyed fishermen, too old now to do anything much more than dream of past catches and criticize the tight pants of their offspring, and dote over the tiny offspring of the loins displayed by the very tight pants they criticized. Over their heads, which were silhouetted against the bright shafts of sunlight shining through the miasma of early-morning harbor mist, I saw Sissie’s form marching along the jetty. She strode into the bodega like a Grenadier guardsman. She had, I observed, changed her British Army socks and brogue boots for a pair of calf-length black seaboots, while her torso was again resplendent in her dark blue English games-mistress gym slip, the skirts of which reached almost halfway down her dimpled thighs, which quivered as she weaved her way, smiling benignly, through the assembly of septua-, octo-, and nonagenarians—all of whom, without exception, glanced at her haunches lasciviously and held their breath until she had squeezed her way past their crowded tables.
    Sissie’s lips pursed until they looked like bicycle pedals. Her blue eyes gleamed with the fondness of freshly burnished bayonets. She plonked herself down opposite me. For a moment there was silence as the Ibizan fishermen recovered their collective breath.
    â€œCoffee?” I asked her.
    â€œOh,
dahling
Tristan,” she gushed, laying one calloused hand on my sunburned arm, “oh, golly, that
would
be supah . . . but you’ve not had your
brekky.”
    I pointed my thumb at a round wooden box lying on the stone floor of the bodega. It was a quarter-full of dried codfish, set out neatly, their mahogany-colored bodies overlapping each other, all looking extremely sorry for themselves. “We can have some yellow peril here.” Dried cod was about the cheapest food in Spain at the time—about five cents per whole bony corpse.
    â€œOh, that
will
be nice,” said Sissie as Antonio, the ancient proprietor, in shirtsleeves, his grubby white apron drooping all the way down to his ankles, approached our table.
    I ordered our breakfast, then, and Antonio shuffled away in his incredibly tattered carpet slippers. I looked at my watch. “By the time we’ve finished this little lot it will be time to go to the post office. Why don’t you come with me?”
    Again Sissie’s hand descended gently on my forearm. “Oh,
dahling,
thet
will
be supah. Oh, goody,
goody
gum-drops,” she chortled. Then, after a moment’s reflection, which she signified by staring into mid-space, her North Sea eyes opened as wide as she could manage, she said, “Ai say, Skippah, what
terrific
cheps they are onboard the catamaran. They told me they are to stay in Ibiza for several days . . .”
    â€œThen why didn’t you go onboard their boat for a shower and use their bloody fresh water instead of ours?” I queried.
    â€œOh, dahling, I simply couldn’t jolly-well go onboard a boat alone with
two cheps 
. . .”
    â€œOh, well . . . only