The Songs of Manolo Escobar Read Free

didn’t seem to understand that not everyone could be as socially responsible as her. What did she know about the demands of the real world, sitting in her municipal ivory tower, sniffly disapproving of my job as though it was some grubby, morally reprehensible pursuit? I agreed with her that global warming was a bad thing. I just didn’t see why it had to occupy such an increasing proportion of the decreasing number of conversations we had together. In our most recent exchange, I’d managed to drive her from the room simply by pointing out that I didn’t have time to worry about composting every time I peeled a banana. She was less than sympathetic. I seemed to have developed a knack of annoying her without trying. We’d lost the ability to talk without eachsentence being unpicked for the slightest hint of ulterior motive. We didn’t converse any more, we negotiated emotional territory.
    As the train swept through the countryside, my mind gradually emptied, and I succumbed to the hypnotic pull of the fleeting landscape and the rhythm of the train’s wheels rolling over the tracks. I fell into a deep, comforting sleep and, for the first time in ages, I had a proper dream.
    I dreamed I was a child again, on one of our regular train journeys to sort out my parents’ immigration papers in Manchester, the closest city to Scotland that had a Spanish consulate. We were packed into a hot, smoky compartment. Mama had packed a
tortilla
, wrapped in tinfoil, and there was a crusty white loaf and a flask of coffee. She looked dowdy in a patterned print dress. She never had taken as much interest in her appearance as Papa, but then, as she pointed out, she was in the house all day, so who was going to see her? Her job, she said, was to make Papa look presentable to the outside world because he was the family’s ambassador in public. She was cutting into the omelette with a crucifix that normally stood in pride of place on our living-room mantelpiece, and then handing slices to everyone. Pablito was there too, but he was an adult, drinking whisky straight from a half-bottle and bragging about a girl he’d slept with the night before. Mama was pretending not to listen, but Papa was laughing and egging him on. He was sitting nearest the window, with shards of sunlight reflecting off his lustrous black, curly hair, and was dressed smartly in a dark, pure wool suit with a crisply starched white shirt, shiny cufflinks and a sober silk tie. In his right hand was an untipped Chesterfield.
    I woke with a fright, groping helplessly through the fug of mid-dream state as the conductor stood over me, waiting for my ticket. From the dirty urban landscape I guessed we were somewhere in the West Midlands. As I searched my pockets, I suddenly felt gripped by panic and wondered if Ben was right. Were Cheryl and I really heading for a divorce? Even if neither of us had uttered the word, it was clearly something he’d picked up on.
    There was no doubt she and I were going through a rocky patch, but I always felt the best way to tackle these problems was to ignore them. Marriages often hit on testing times, but that didn’t mean you gave up on them. You simply waited for the difficulties to fade in importance, as they inevitably did, and the irresistible grind of routine would reassert itself. I felt strongly about the importance of marriage – not that I was religious in any way, but it was one of the few values that had stayed with me from childhood. Mama and Papa believed family was everything. You supported it and stuck by it, no matter what. And that’s why they were still together.
    It was also, I supposed, the reason why I was now heading north, responding to a cry for help from my beleaguered mother. She hadn’t told me what the problem was, but I knew it would have something to do with Papa. From previous experience I guessed it would involve some internecine dispute of baffling Iberian