The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society Read Free Page A

eyes glaze over or rake the room for a distraction , and before I know it I’m either asleep with my head on the book cover or replacing the strings on my guitar and tuning them up. That night it was sleep that got me and at ten o’clock Chloë took pity and woke me with tea and an offer to test me on the differences between Almoravid and Almohad motifs. However, we soon gave it up for a bad job and went out to lock up the sheep and chickens instead.
    It was a beautiful night. Bumble and Big, our dogs, rocketed down to the river, barking the trail of a wild boar. The air was light and balmy and suffused with the summer scent of jasmine and wild lavender. It was a night for having not a care in the world and yet I was bowed down with foreboding. A feeling that returned with double intensity when I rose the next morning, slipped on my one respectable outfit and set off to Seville.

    The Hotel Alfonso XIII, I portentously explained to my car windscreen, is a somewhat overblown nineteenth-century building in the neo-Mauresque style – as evidenced by the blue tilework  juxtaposed with the fancy bricks. It is also one of the most expensive hotels in Spain, and as I pulled into the forecourt, and stated my purpose, I began to feel sweaty, sticky and distinctly out of place. All the more soas I walked around to the imposing front entrance, where a group of hoods in shades and dark suits milled around a fleet of black Mercedes with smoked windows, waiting for a meeting of Andalucían captains of industry to end.
    There seemed an edginess to this gathering – a visible hint of the murky underworld that supports the super-rich. Shuffling through them I was nearly at the steps when something small and white caught my eye. There on the ground, between two gleaming black Mercedes, lay a tiny white pigeon. Some of the hoods were peering down at the bird, not at all sure what to make of it. One of them fidgeted beneath his sharp suit jacket, perhaps itching to whip out his revolver and take a pot shot.
    Somehow the plight of the creature resonated with my own predicament, so I muscled my way nonchalantly in amongst the heavies and demanded to know what was going on.
    ‘It’s a baby. Fallen off a roof. Can’t fly.’
    ‘Well… what are you going to do about it?’ I asked, fixing the nearest hood with a stern eye.
    ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘The cats can get it, or Tonio can run it over for us when he pulls out.’ He sniggered nastily.
    ‘Oh, come on now!’ I expostulated. ‘Have you no hearts? Look at the poor little thing shivering with fear.’
    The hood looked nervously at his colleagues and shrugged, nonplussed perhaps as much by hearing a foreigner speak with a strong country accent as by my championing of the bird. I stooped to gather up the terrified creature in my cupped hands.
    ‘You really don’t want to do that,’ suggested one of the suits, who had crowded around, eager to see what was going on.
    ‘And why not?’ I proferred pugnaciously, holding up the bird so everyone could see. I felt pretty good – sort of heroic – amid this assembly of gangsters.
    ‘They got diseases – and fleas. Aerial rats they are, pigeons. And the little babies are just as bad.’
    ‘Nonsense,’ I said, but looked cautiously down at the tiny creature in my hands, all the same. Sure enough, on each wrist was an army of the most infinitesimal insects imaginable, swarming in their thousands up my wrists, heading for my shirt cuffs and the warmer parts of my body. I suppose they had figured that their previous host’s number was up and now would be a good time to jump ship. I yelped and ran over to the garden, where I dumped the pigeon in a flowerbed. Sure as hell the cats would get it there, but it was, after all, only an aerial rat, and I needed to get something done about these lice, and quick.
    I barged through the throng of sniggering hoods and raced up the marble stairs three at a time. The lice were moving faster now. I