An extract of this story was featured in Issue One of M9S – The Place Issue. This is the story in full.
***
When I got laid off by the bank I went to Spain. It was something I’d wanted to do for a while: live in another country, learn the language, eat the food, drink the beer, just relax. I had a bit of money and was in no hurry to get another job – even if there’d been another job to get – so I threw some stuff in my middle-sized suitcase and bought a plane ticket to Granada.
It didn’t take me long to find a place to live. I answered an ad and two days after landing I was moving into an apartment off the Gran Via, sharing with the gorgeous Anna.
Anna worked in some office doing something she couldn’t quite explain or I couldn’t quite understand. Every morning she’d blow-dry her wild dark hair in the kitchen, because Europeans have some sort mass paranoia about using electrical devices in the bathroom. Anna always had a faraway look on her face when she was using blow drier. Her eyes could be focused on me, or on her coffee cup, or on the door, but I could always tell her mind was someplace else entirely.
Anna pretty much ruined my love life that summer, for two reasons. The first was that although we’d sometimes hang out, and have our morning coffee together after she was done drying her hair, or catch a beer or some tapas after work, she never once showed any interest in taking it even half a step beyond that. Meanwhile I was more or less in love with her. Her smell – damp hair, expensive hair products, fresh flowers – permeated the place. It drove me crazy.
And in addition to not reciprocating my crush, her mere proximity made me hopeless with other women. Every time I managed to convince a girl to come back to the apartment – okay, so it only happened twice – I felt almost like I was performing for her, whether she was sleeping in the next room, or more likely not sleeping in the next room and wishing we’d get it over with and shut up, or most likely out of the house entirely at some bar or club.
I wanted the reaction of the girls I brought back – one a college girl from London, the other a local waitress – to be a direct message to my roommate: “Here’s what you’re missing Anna! I’m really great in bed! Wouldn’t you like to know!” And of course thinking like that while you’re in the throes is going to totally ruin your concentration and impress absolutely nobody involved.
“Well,” the English girl said, afterwards. “It was lovely to meet you.”
It was kind of a shame because she was really cute, she went to Oxford, and she was around for the rest of the summer, so you never know, something might have happened. The waitress was neither cute nor Oxford-educated, but her opinion of my bedroom abilities was pretty much the same.
Other than the lovely Anna, British people were the bane of my otherwise satisfying life in Granada. There were so many of them and they seemed everywhere, particularly right out front in every bar up and down the Alcazaba, even when it was like a hundred degrees outside and the air was all clogged up with that weird dust-smog that the city was afflicted on hot days with and anyone even venturing outside should have been arrested and locked up in a freezer for 48 hours.
They talked funny, they used weird slang words, but there were so many of them around that you had to learn some British if you wanted to have a hope of following an expat conversation. None of them really cared to speak Spanish, even the ones at my language school. Sometimes I deliberately refused to speak English, just to – watch this now – nark them off.
I had to deal with the Brits and they had to deal with me, but even when I was a bit grouchy and hungover I was nothing compared to Sami.
Sami was our instructor, a small Moroccan who was affable and a nice guy but could also scare the hell out of you if it was clear you weren’t prepared for class. He did this in a way that was polite and straightforward but left the students in no doubt about what was happening and how bad they should feel. He’d pick on them, start talking exclusively Spanish to them, and then even after they started stuttering and um-ing and ah-ing he’d continue the conversation, and then he’d take it just a bit too far, and further still, and 20 minutes later the poor person would be sitting in a puddle of tepid sweat, still stuttering away, and Sami would have that big grin on his tiny face, and he’d just be repeating the same question again and again.
But Sami was also funny and generous and like I say a pretty nice guy. He warned us that even though he’d been in the country for 30 years, he still didn’t speak “correctly.”
“Copy my accent in class,” he said, “but don’t listen to me outside of class. It’s like the child. Do what I say, not what I do.”
Under Sami’s tutelage I soon found out that I was a lot better at Spanish than I had remembered. In a couple weeks I could participate in a pretty full-on complicated and meandering conversation, even over loud bar music or Anna’s hairdryer. I was a really quick learner. In exchange for a few extra euros I stayed on after class and Sami would give me some extra Español talk time. It got to the point where he asked whether I wanted to start studying some really tough stuff like literary novels or business phrases, or whether I just wanted to keep practicing the everyday stuff and keep expanding my vocab. The everyday stuff was cool with me, so instead of new tenses and poems and financial terms he just kept feeding me words – Spanish but also a bit of Arabic, which I must admit was a lot tougher than I’d thought.
So mornings I’d spend in class, and when the siesta came I’d go to the air-conditioned library, then back to the language school in the afternoon until about four. After the class the routine was to go to the Mano de Dios on the Calle Elvira. When I say “the routine” I mean “my routine.” Some of the time I’d persuade some of my classmates to come, some of the time I wouldn’t, and some of the time I didn’t bother. A couple of times I asked Sami if he wanted to come have a drink but he always declined.
*
The Mano didn’t impress people who were after trendy cocktail bars or Spanish authenticity, and the tapas were nothing to write home about, but still I liked it. It had a decent jukebox and cold beer. Alejandro the bartender talked to me in his native tongue, and best of all, the crowd was chilled, a good mix, not too local, not too foreign, just a blend of real characters and real people, like any good bar should have.
One of the other regulars was a guy named Rod (British, of course). He followed that limey custom of buying a drink, then expecting you to get the next one, but as he was a borderline alcoholic he’d always end up forgetting who’s round it was and end up buying the next one himself, so over the long run I made out big time. However – in exchange for his largess I had to listen to his adventure stories, which were not only boring but pretty blatantly fictional. At various times he claimed to be ex-Royal Marine, ex-SAS, ex-French Foreign Legion, ex-mercenary, ex-African coup and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t even clock.
“Kinda reminds me of this one time, mate,” he’d start to say, and that was the big red flag tipping me off to start looking around for someone else to talk to. Rod was a guy who was carrying around at least 250 pounds, and who sighed and groaned every time he hoisted himself off his barstool to go take a piss – you could just tell he’d never been in any kind of physical shape. My guess was he had really just pulled off a minor bank heist in Aberdeen or wherever it was he came from, and was sitting here living off the proceeds. The only really interesting unknown about him was why he ended up in Granada instead of some quiet village on the coast.
Alejandro, though, he was a decent guy. Sometimes we talked about sports even though I wasn’t a huge soccer fan, but more often we’d trade details about the girls who came into the Mano, or about what everyone got up to after the bar closed last night, or sometimes about life in the good old Estados Unidos.
“I want to spend some time there, but only when I can get a job that gives me enough money to buy a Cadillac,” Al would say, proving I guess that funny ideas of America even infect the brains of Europeans who you’d think would know better.
Al had a decent record collection and personally swapped the CDs in the jukebox in and out, and so we could talk about music too. He was big into British punk and heavy metal, whereas I was a devotee of college rock from my rapidly receding youth. Plus if that weren’t enough, at that time there’d just been elections in Spain and the big one was coming up in the homeland, so we chewed the fat about politics.
Whenever we’d get into it, arguing about bands or politicians or this and that, Rod would butt in, in English. “What, whatcha talking about?” The guy’d lived there 10 years, knew about 20 words of Spanish. Annoying.
By late August I realized I had both thoroughly settled in and that I had no intention of staying past the summer. But instead of panicking and trying to plan for whatever was coming next in my life, I thought I’d just relax and enjoy it and pretty much keep going as per usual.
One night, a Sunday, Anna and I were sitting around, drinking beer, wordlessly watching some inane shit on television, when she turned to me and said:
“I wanna go out.”
We walked into the Alcazaba and gazed up at the Alhambra up above us, all lit up like it always was, like something out of a nativity scene. I followed Anna up one of the narrower, steeper streets, and she let me into a dark doorway, beyond which was a bar that I’d never really noticed before, all dripping candles and dark wood and ancient sticky bottles of liquor. Anna ordered two of something called agua de Valencia.
“Do you have a girlfriend, back in America?” she asked, after the drinks arrived and the bartender was gone.
Finally, I thought. This is it. My way in. I sipped my drink and tried to make a joke of it.
“A girlfriend who would let me live with an attractive Spanish woman for the summer, and wouldn’t even call or visit? What do you think?”
She ignored my comment and sighed, and looked at all the bottles behind the bar, and when she started talking again I realized she was just using a gambit to enable her to talk about all her troubles with men. Specifically, a certain man she’d been seeing, a married guy who lived in a village on the outskirts of the city with his wife and kids. This guy worked in her office, not quite her boss but definitely a level or two above her on the corporate ladder. They weren’t sleeping together, she emphasized, twice, but they spent an awful lot of time with each other, inside and outside of work, and she could just feel that there was a deep bond between them, and she didn’t know what to do about it, and she wanted to know what I thought.
More than ever it was clear that a me-her thing was just not going to happen, that the possibility was not even registering on her radar. Anna, oh Anna. She just had no idea what she was doing to me.
The next night I was sitting there in the Mano, telling this story to Al, who like good bartenders all around the globe was sympathizing with one eye and surveying the premises with the other, when somebody tapped me on the shoulder – Rod.
“You’d better come outside for a second,” he said.
I laughed. He didn’t. Al shrugged, as if to say “beats me.” I asked him to save my seat and pour me another beer, and then I followed Rod outside.
“I got to tell you something,” Rod said, lighting a cigarette. Just then, though, three kids pulled up on motorbikes, those really loud crotch rockets that for some unknown reason haven’t yet been banned by the European Union.
One of the kids got off his bike and came over to me and grabbed my arm.
It was weird; nobody said anything, the kid just grabbed me. I looked at Rod, hoping that his fake SAS training or whatever he learned in prison would suddenly kick in, but he just stood there, smoking. Thinking back on it today, it seemed like more than he was just scared – it was almost like he was complicit in the whole thing.
“I guess you’d better go,” Rod said.
By this time the other kids were off their bikes and it was dawning on me that this was becoming a situation. I had about thirty euros in my wallet and a credit card, and I’d seen enough bar fights to know to cover my head. It wouldn’t be fun, but hopefully I wouldn’t get hurt too bad, so I tried to keep calm. Instead of robbing me, though, the kid grabbing my arm yanked me towards the bike.
“Get on,” he said. He tried to bark it but he had a reedy adolescent voice. The kids were big, but still only 15, maybe 16. It was hard to take them too seriously.
I looked back at Rod but still he was blank-faced, smoking. Asshole.
Seeing no real option, but not a whole lot of danger either, I got on the back of the kid’s bike and held on to the seat as our little mini-convoy zipped away. We went through the tangle of streets to the north and soon we were out of the center of the city. At one point the bike I was on got a bit ahead of the others and then stopped at a red light.
I was getting an idea of what small-timers I was dealing with here – they had no problem kidnapping a guy, but they stopped for red lights. I was just about to make a run for it when the other bikes screamed around the corner, and I had to abandon the escape plan.
It was a pretty nice night; not too hot, and the mountains were pale and shadowy in front of us, reflecting a bit of light from the city. I wouldn’t say I was enjoying myself, but I’m guessing most abductees had it worse than I did. The one thing was that the kids were awful, as all kids are, at driving, and I was actually more scared of getting in a crash or falling off the bike than getting murdered.
Eventually they stopped at a bit of wasteland high above the city. The driver of the bike I was on ordered me to go first down the hill, and they all pushed their bikes behind. We ended up in a little spot where people threw old mattresses and tires and other garbage. The moon was fairly bright but it was the kind of out of the way road to nowhere where there was about one car an hour, and at this point I was started to get a bit scared, and starting to wonder if I’d meet my end in this sad little wasteland, and who would find my body, and when.
“Dinero,” the littlest kid said. I held out my thirty euros and maybe like five more in change. They divvied it up precisely. I mean like down to the cent. They didn’t seem too interested in my credit cards or grocery store receipts, or even my wallet, which was probably worth more than 35 euros.
After they took the money they started talking amongst themselves openly. I guess they just assumed I couldn’t understand the language, when in reality I was clocking their whole pathetic conversation.
“Let’s just leave him here.”
“No way. What if he can identify us?”
“We’ll beat him up, then.”
“No, just leave him here, he’ll find his way back somehow, we’ll be long gone.”
“Let’s kill him.”
“With what?”
“A rock.”
“You’re crazy. We’d go to jail.”
“If we let him live, we’re going go to jail anyway.”
“Quit talking crazy, you idiot.”
The one advocating murder was the little one, the runt of the party – and he certainly wasn’t going to be killing anybody tonight.
Just then there was a rustling in the bushes that was pretty clearly man- or animal-made, given the windless night.
The three kids just scattered. They didn’t even bother to check it out; they just ran their bikes up the hill and motored off. From a path through the bushes emerged a man, a woman, two little kids. I looked at the man, and he blinked back, and we looked at each other for a minute and then he said something I didn’t understand, and I said something (I can’t remember what, exactly) which apparently he didn’t understand, and after a little while of this back-and-forth he gestured at me to follow him, and so I did.
We hiked for about half an hour, mostly uphill, into the mountains, and just before I started to get worried – as in, how was I ever going to get back? – we stopped and ducked into an opening, and inside there was a cave. More than a cave actually, really a big room where this family was obviously living. It had beds, furniture, rugs, a stove with a chimney pipe, everything you’d expect in a house except maybe windows.
We tried to communicate for a while but the family spoke some sort of strange dialect or language I didn’t understand. My Spanish was obviously not hitting the mark. I tried out some Arabic, but I only really knew the Arabic for words like “girl” and “book” and “pencil” so that wasn’t much help. The man gestured at me to sit down at the table, which I did, and he rummaged around and found a cell phone and made a call, again speaking the language I didn’t understand, and when he hung up he turned to me and made a gesture with his hands like “everything’s going to be fine.”
The woman made some coffee and gave me a cup and a little pitcher of some odd-smelling milk, probably from a goat. I poured a splash in just to be polite.
I figured I’d probably have to wait out the night here so I settled down and drank the grainy coffee, and the guy brought out a set of checkers and we played a few games. There wasn’t any TV or radio that I could see, and the rest of the family just watched us play checkers, the two little kids with their big bulbous brown eyes peering over the table, the woman cradling her coffee in her hands, a slight smile on her face. The man took the first two games but I adapted to his strategy and I beat him in the third.
I was faking a yawn, hoping that everyone’d be ready to go to bed, when there was a clatter outside the cave, and the guy shouted out and the kids scattered and the woman leapt towards the coffee pot.
Two policemen came in. They took the guy aside and had a mumbled conversation.
“We’ll take him from here,” was about all I heard one of the cops say. Then they started talking the strange dialect.
After they were done and everyone had downed a cup of coffee, the cops gestured for me to follow them, and I thanked the guy and his family and everyone shook hands and waved and we left the cave. I followed the police and we walked 15 minutes down the hill to where their car was parked, and we were back in the city in less than half an hour.
At the police station they gave me another coffee and asked me some basic questions, like how much was stolen, what the criminals looked like, what kind of bikes they were riding, that kind of thing. I was kind of embarrassed that I hadn’t gotten their license plate numbers, even though I had plenty of chances to memorize them if I’d just been paying attention. The cop behind the desk looked kind of bored with the whole thing.
“I’ll type up these notes,” he said. “We’ll give you a ride home, and we’ll call you if you need anything else.”
Back at the house I couldn’t get to sleep. I guess I was a bit freaked out, but I had also drunk too much caffeine. I thought about creeping down the hall and waking Anna up but I wasn’t sure if she was in or out or at her married soulmate’s secret apartment or whatever, and I didn’t really want to find out one way or the other.
The next day I went back to the Mano where Al bought me a beer and gave me a couple media raciónes on the house and even “forgot” to charge me for what I had drunk the previous night, before I was abducted. In exchange, I told him all about it.
“That’s one hell of a story,” Al said. “You hear about those gypsies, up there in the caves, but I’ve never seen them. Sounds like you lucked out.”
That Friday was my last day at the language school. I asked Sami if he wanted to have a drink and to my surprise he accepted the invitation. We went to a café down the street where I had a beer and he had a black tea. The café was on a noisy dusty corner and people were rushing by on their way home from work, but the outdoor tables were set a few feet lower than street level, and there were some plants dotted around for shade, so we were slightly cooler than the outside world, and we sat and chatted and watched people’s legs go by over our heads.
“I’ll be sad to see you go,” Sami said. “You were one of my best students. That’s not saying a lot, but I mean it. Give me a call when you’re next in Granada.”
“Thanks Sami. That’s nice of you to say.” And I meant it. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure. I can’t guarantee you I’ll know the answer though.”
“I’m just wondering. Do you ever miss home? I mean Morocco? I mean, do you think you’d ever go back to live?”
Sami seemed to think about it a bit as he sipped his tea. After a while he looked up at the calves and the ankles walking past.
“You’ve stumped me. That’s a question I ask myself every day,” he said. “Every single day.”
The next night we had something of a party in the Mano. A couple of the English people I could tolerate from the language school came along, and a bunch of the bar regulars were there like they always were. Rod wasn’t around – in fact I didn’t see him again after the night I was abducted – but that was probably a good thing.
Alejandro was pouring out liberal amounts of brandy, and he had even bought me an almond cake as a farewell present. My presents to him were a Red Sox cap and a big fat tip.
“Without you around amigo, we’re in trouble,” he joked. “I’m going to have to find some other rich American to prop up our bottom line.”
I got really drunk and ended up spending even more cash than I thought I would. I bought multiple rounds and constantly fed the jukebox, and though a lot of the latter part of the night was hazy, in general it was a fantastic sendoff.
Back at home the next morning I wasn’t so much hungover as still a bit drunk. I finished packing my things and made one last stumbling check around the apartment. Anna gave me warm kisses on both cheeks, which was pretty much the maximum affection I got from her all summer, and in light of my fragile state she carried my bag downstairs, where the taxi was ready to take me to the airport. An hour later I was on the plane, ready to fly back to Boston.
***
MIKE WENDLING is a past winner of the London Writers’ Award and was shortlisted for last year’s Bridport Prize. Originally from the US, he now lives in London and works as a radio producer for the BBC and later this year he plans to launch a new audio fiction website, fourthirtythree.com.
Minus 9 Online 