‘None of my business, but isn’t it about time you gave your old dad your address?’
'Ma chère Yolette,
Do you still like ballet? I took Judy for a last night treat, but didn’t expect to enjoy it myself. We are back, a wonderful holiday in so many ways. I’ve enjoyed sending you the cards, sharing it a little with you. But now I hope you will call, that I will hear you voice soon! Will you come to lunch or dinner with us next week?
A bientôt. Affectueusement, Papa'
I’d have to ring tomorrow evening, after a day at school thinking about it too much…
‘I’m sorry but… have I got time for a quick call before we go?’
They smiled and nodded, left the room.
I got out my phone. Pressed Contacts. Add New. Name. Father? Papa? No, probably too late for that. It had to be Mitch. But Mitch was still Papa. Doors without keys. Sickly green light in a tent. Suitcases. Waiting for him at the living room window or watching him leave… I pressed Back, Back, Back. Tapped out the number and put the phone to my ear.
Why were mornings the hardest? Hitting the Snooze button again and again, lying staring at the phone - that low, gentle voice only seconds away. But it wasn’t his anymore; that Javi had gone.
I got up, stood under the shower. Wondered if I should ban emails too. Because really, how could I ever want to work on a piece with him again? It was bad enough having to rehearse one of the damn things at school. Despite my lack of response he’d patiently sent a version of Seville with an easier guitar part, and refinements to the other two. And another email with presumably further changes late the previous night, when surely Violeta would have been waiting for him. I’d left it unopened.
I got dressed, went through to the computer. Clicked on the email and then noticed - with a racing heart - that it didn’t have an attachment.
'Yoli, still no answer. I have finished all I can do now, I will wait for a new idea from you. Jeremy says you want me to leave you alone. I understand. But I hope we will be friends and make music again soon. Look after yourself. Con mucho cariño, Javi.'
So now no emails either. There was nothing more to say. I picked up my bag but hesitated by the calendar. Dinner with Mitch and Judy, a couple of big wedding gigs, Nando and the Paco Peña show, helping get Jeremy ready for Winchester: the month would march on regardless. I would recover, perhaps this time not completely, but enough. I lifted up a few pages, saw the tiny cartoon baby that Jeremy had drawn on the first of September and gave him a watery smile.
Chapter 30
sofá m couch
‘Thought I saw you looking weepy in the courtyard after lunch break,’ Emma said, handing me a coffee.
‘Just overcome by the way the girls had worked on the pieces, as if they…’
‘Don’t be daft, they just love the music. Poor old Yol, it’s going to take time.’ She reached over and patted my arm.
I was on the sun lounger on her roof garden. We called it the couch; many a heartache had been shared there.
‘Thought I saw you looking tactile with Jason in the staff room. You’re not…?’
‘No. Well… he misses me.’
‘Serves him right.’
‘He’s asked me to help him adapt a play he’s written that he wants to do next term.’
‘Oh God. Just don’t go jumping in there.’
‘Mm.’
I looked over. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Emma. Was that a good idea.’
‘It rather was.’
‘Yes, but you’re the one who always says that going back doesn’t work.’
‘That’s only if it wasn’t working before. Like you and Javi - wouldn’t you go back?’
‘Don’t. That’s not going to happen.’
‘At least you’ve got something to show for it. Those pieces - a musical gene fusion.’
Our flamenco babies. Destined, no doubt - like so many gitanos flamencos through history - for rejection. In their case by inundated publishers. A flamenco baby: what a ridiculous idea. Flamenco: bewitching music born of centuries of gypsy persecution - the tragic result of their refusal to adapt their ways. Songs - even the party bulerías essentially tinged with misery. It was time to disassociate flamenco from my longed-for child, or confine it to the exotic charms of his godfather, stepfather, or whatever Nando turned out to be. Assuming he didn’t put a stop to the whole plan in the first place.
‘Yolly?’
‘Oh, sorry…’
‘I said tell me more about you and Jeremy… I mean, how’s it going to work? And when will you start—?’
‘September, when Nando goes off to South America for months. And it gives me time to get emotionally and physically in top form.’
‘Oh yes - how did it go at the VD clinic?’
‘Sexual health clinic, Emma, please.’ I shook my head and chuckled. ‘Jeremy insisted on the Premier Female Screening Package, no less. But it was okay, I just took my iPod and tried to forget it was me, focussed on Jeremy’s promise of Thai Elephant dinner that night if I went through with it all. He now admits he was quite worried, what with Violeta and her drugs. And you know how persuasive he can be. He even managed to get Nando to go along to a similar place in Madrid.’
‘So they must be going all the way, or however they’d call it,’ Emma said. ‘How lovely. But oh, what a waste - for us poor women - of two divine male bodies.’
I looked over.
‘I Googled Fernando Morales - good God, Yol. Just hot chocolate with him? But then I suppose - we now realise - that was all that was on offer.’
I shrugged. The couch wasn’t going to make me give up that secret.
‘Anyway, at least one of them’s going to reproduce. But Jeremy - nappies, noise. I can’t quite—’
‘He says he’s not having the child plonked in a playpen in his room while he’s trying to write. Strictly minimal sole charge. No surprise, really.’
‘It sounds like he’s entirely doing it for you. Has he never had any paternal urges?’
‘His books are his babies.’
‘But look at him with Pavlova… Once there’s a real little person - blonde, arty, completely useless with anything remotely technical…’
A sudden throb of pain in the right side of my head; I covered my eyes. Too much sun. Caffeine. The curdling of adjacent misery and euphoria.
‘I’ll get you some sunglasses,’ Emma said, and disappeared indoors.
My mobile spouted some kind of a tango; Jeremy had been fiddling with it again.
‘Where are you? Nando’s here after his rehearsal with some flowers for you.’
‘Oh… I’m at Emma’s - I’ll come and see you later.’
He was counting the days - now just two - until Nando could leave Paco’s and come and stay. The thudding intensified, jolting my head with each blow. I lay back with my cardigan over my face. Nando. That was it. How could Jeremy be so sure that Nando would be happy for him to be a parent? And how could I be so sure that I would conceive anyway…
Jeremy was looking out for me. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I had to tell Nando about your father. We were in your kitchen putting the flowers in a vase when I heard Mitch leaving a message. They can’t do tomorrow because Judy’s not well, so they want you to come for lunch next week. I’m sorry Yol, could Emma go with you? I can’t leave Winchester.’
‘She’ll be busy with the play… I’ll go on my own, it’ll be fine.’
‘Nando said he’d come with you.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Why not? You said he was a wonderful support when I was in hospital. He was very interested, very sympathetic. He understands why you’ve kept away, but has such a strong sense of family - very traditional.’
Chapter 31
novia f girlfriend, fiancée
It just came to me, when I was putting a cauliflower in the trolley next to the lump of cheese then lifting it out again as I remembered how flamenco legend Camarón de la Isla had apparently complained th
at English food made him vomit. So maybe I’d been thinking about Nando. But earlier, Javi. Mitch. Who knows? But I stood in the car park wanting to just leave the trolley, dash home and play this tune.
But then Nando arrived, giving me his promised abrazos, and Jeremy was thanking me for the chewy chocolate brownies I’d made. I left them alone - after a peep at them kissing and laughing together in the garden - and went to the computer to get the main theme down before it evaporated.
I added the bracketed staves for the piano accomp… No. It wasn’t going to have an accompaniment. That was the point. The flute was an independent singleton. I could leave it like that, a new Syrinx for the twenty-first century - were it ever to get published. But it was more interesting to have this loner playing against an out-of-step partner - just as in flamenco, Javi had told me, the bailaor and the tocaor are in the same compás but with differently accented beats. The piano would comment and challenge, sometimes sympathise, at one point deserting altogether, and then nonchalantly arrive at a final unison.
I’d got it down, with some of the piano ideas sketched in, but needed to play it. Jeremy liked to spend time in the settings of important scenes in his novels, said he had to be there to know; I now completely understood what he meant. I needed to feel it in my fingers, breathe out the melody and hear it bounce back to me from the walls. Consummate it. But how could I wail this out while Nando and Jeremy were happily enjoying their love in the garden, or even, by now, consummating it? I had to wait.
And wait. A day of school. Some after-school pupils. An invitation to join Jeremy and Nando for pizza in front of the Spain-Chile match...
‘No, you sit in the middle,’ I said to Jeremy.
‘No, you.’
‘Actually, Nando should.’
‘Me?’
‘Because you’re the least likely to get up and fetch anything from the kitchen.’
He gave a vaguely indignant shrug and sat down between us.
‘Difficult,’ Nando said over the pre-match analysis, ‘I love the chilenos, have friends I will see in September - but of course Spain makes football into a dance and deserve to win. You know, Villa and Iniesta, in Spain people say… ay, qué dice este hombre?’
‘You can’t expect us to translate if you talk over the commentary,’ Jeremy said.
‘I thought that you would like hear Spanish point-of-view, to give sabor… flavour to this experience…’
And so the evening went on, lots of teasing and pushing between the three of us, screams and hugs after the goals and Spanish victory.
I was about to say goodnight when Nando put his hand on my shoulder.
‘Yoli, I have forgot to ask you, Paco has invited me to dinner tomorrow and asked that I bring my girlfriend. You will be back from the wedding before seven?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You come as girlfriend, he not know about Jeremy, claro, so I was having to say—’
‘You were going to stay with your girlfriend, yes I get it.’
I looked at Jeremy, but he was grinning and nodding as if I’d just won a golden ticket.
‘You will like him, very easy to talk - and we will speak English. His wife is from Holland and his daughters are…’
I was shaking my head.
‘Why not Yol, you’ll easily be back by then,’ Jeremy said. ‘You’ll have a wonderful evening.’
‘Sorry, no. I’m no good at lying.’
‘But is not lying, not really,’ Nando said. I looked at him in alarm. ‘We are good friends, I give you many abrazos all the time, like a girlfriend, it will not be difficult. Why you will not come, I don’t understand.’
Because I’m nobody’s girlfriend, won’t be one for the foreseeable future and certainly don’t want to have an insight into what it would have been like to be yours… Not that that matters now.
‘Anyway, I’m busy tomorrow evening. I want to work on my composition.’
‘With Javi?’ Nando asked with disbelief.
‘No. On my own. I know it sounds stupid, and it’s probably pretentious crap, but I’m desperate to get on with it.’ Jeremy swept off to the kitchen with our plates but Nando nodded slowly. I liked the way he seemed to understand. ‘But perhaps I’ll meet Paco at the Stage Door next week, I could briefly be your decoy girlfriend then.’
‘De-coy?’
‘I’ll let Jeremy explain. Better get to bed, we’ve got early starts.’
Jeremy was cursing and clattering around in the dishwasher.
‘I don’t know why you’re in such a grump,’ I said to him.
‘You’re so stubborn, Yol. A right donkey.’
Nando stood behind me and gave me some arm-ears and realistic burro braying.
‘But come through in the morning and I’ll do your mane for you.’
Nando opened the door, showered and wide awake even though he had several hours before his rehearsal.
‘You look like… bride.’
I walked past him. ‘These white outfits are ridiculous. But Helen decided we’d offer ourselves in a selection of shades, so now we wear whichever the client wants.’
He didn’t seem to be listening. Just looked me up and down and then ran his hand along the contour of my dress in a way that was flattering but not quite right.
‘Scrubs up well, doesn’t she?’ Jeremy said to Nando. ‘Sit down then, Yol.’ I handed him the tin of grips.
He brushed my hair then started winding and twisting it.
‘Por Dios, how you learned to do this?’ Nando asked.
‘One of the top London hairdressers,’ I said, but noticed a cloud come over Nando’s face. ‘Ages ago.’
Ginny arrived. ‘Look at you!’
‘Don’t. Jeremy, did you pack your pills? Just in case—’
‘Yes.’ He patted my shoulder. ‘There you go.’
‘Glasses?’
‘Oh.’ He went off to the bedroom.
‘I think I saw…’ Nando followed him.
‘He’s so much better, but…’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after him,’ Ginny whispered. ‘You ready? Certainly look like you are. He did tell you we’re dropping you off at Helen’s on the way?’
‘Oh! No he didn’t, that’s great. I’ll just get my stuff…’
We heard laughter and some excited Spanish from the bedroom.
‘What’s he doing?’ Ginny said. ‘But then it can’t be easy leaving that gorgeous creature behind.’
At last. Drained from the wedding - but finally alone and free to try it.
It sang. I played it again, refining it. And again. Yes, me dice, as they’d say in flamenco, it speaks to me. I allowed myself one more play. I wondered what Nando had said to Paco about his girlfriend’s no-show. His girlfriend: damn cheek of it. But I couldn’t waste time thinking about that, not when I only had a couple of hours before he’d get back, knock on my door, tell me about what I’d missed. What I hadn’t missed.
I went back to the computer to adjust the flute part. Started on the piano. The beginning was easy: a chasing of the melody, with unexpected harmonies casting a shadow over the flute’s folky song. The last section fell in to place as planned. But the middle: nothing worked.
Jeremy once told me he plans his plots with mathematical detail, but then the characters turn up and do what the fuck they like with it. I loved the idea of that, but my characters were just folding their arms and staring at each other.
Bowl of cereal, cup of tea. No, still not working. I went back to the kitchen and considered opening a bottle of wine: no, that would just make it even harder to resist the expected. I glared with resentment at the wedding repertoire I’d slung on top of the piano. I couldn’t fend off the four-square traditional harmonies, the ingrained dictates of form; they were inching their way in like water finding a level.
I went back to the computer and played what I’d done. Despite the very unflamenco melody and the sound of the piano, that’s how it felt: flamenco. Something about the rhythms
, the abruptness of feeling. Perhaps that’s why I felt there was only one person who could possibly help… I clicked on email, attached the file.
‘It’s not flamenco, but I think you might understand what I’m trying to do. Don’t worry if you don’t, I just wondered. Hope the festival’s going well. Yoli.’
Send/Receive Complete. Not for me it wasn’t. But then he’d probably had a late night show and was sleeping in. Lying there mouth slightly open, floppy hair over his face, his arm coming over… No, no, no. Have to forget. Gone. Over. Just need his music, and chances are he’ll fail me there too.
A knock on the door. ‘Yoli - que haces? Monos, elefantes, jirafas… Come on, we go now.’ He’d decided to spend his day off taking me to the zoo.
I opened the door. He was wearing a white t-shirt and denim shorts. As I was.
‘We look like…’
‘Novios. You see? I said this.’
‘I just need to… make a call. I’ll come through in about ten minutes?’
He groaned but smiled and disappeared, pulling his mobile out of his pocket.
Back to the computer, just one more time. Well, for ten minutes.
Receiving message 1 of 1… Oh God.
‘Yoli! What beautiful surprise! And the piece, extraordinario. But you understand it is very busy time for me, I don’t know when I can work with it. Besos, Javi.’
Reply. ‘Don’t worry if you’re too busy.’
Receiving… ‘It is not that I not want to do it.’
Reply. ‘Forget it.’
‘Is okay I call?’
Reply. What should I reply? My heart was banging away stupidly; speaking to him wasn’t going to make any difference, surely I knew that now. But it might help the piece.
‘Yes.’
I just had time to fetch the glass of water from my bedside table. The box of tissues, just in case.
‘Yoli?’
‘Hello.’
‘I… we are talking again, this is good.’
My throat constricted painfully.
‘I will try this when I can. It is beautiful, very special, tells me many things… But I don’t want to work too fast, I need time to think, you know?’
FLAMENCO BABY Page 26
