twenty
He passed a highway sign for Vilafranca del Penedés—another forty minutes and he’d be back in Barcelona, that entire ephemeral utopian dream firmly in his rear-view mirror.
He wanted to rage, cry, bang the steering wheel, get into bed, pull the covers over his head and never emerge again.
He did none of the above, just kept driving, following the white line that glowed beneath his headlights.
The truth was he hadn’t even thought about getting in touch with Carme when David reappeared at her stables.
In the middle of the night! It hadn’t so much as crossed his mind, and he a policeman!
What was David doing there? Saying goodbye to Boira?
At midnight? In stables that were locked up?
And all Ramon had thought about was having sex with him.
Taking him down to the Delta to fuck and ride horses?
They’d said goodbye at a gas station. After returning Desdemona, thanking the owners, taking Ferro back to the masia and turning him loose in his paddock, throughout all of which they’d barely said a word to each other.
Then David grabbed his pack, and Ramon a few things he’d needed to take back to Barcelona.
He hadn’t asked where David was headed, just needed to fill up with gas, vaguely imagining that David would travel back to Barcelona with him.
Instead, he found him outside the pickup when he returned from paying for the gas, his pack on his back. Their farewell had been brief:
“You off?”
David nodded.
“Ah… thanks… for everything…. Sorry.”
Ramon just shook his head and climbed back into the pickup. Fuck romance. The last sight he saw of David was in his rear-view mirror, the boy’s golden hair shining almost orange under the gas station’s horrible lights. He accelerated onto the highway that would take him back to Barcelona.
And now he needed to forget him, wipe him from his mind, go on, be a good policeman the way he was trained, find some…
. No, no one else. He couldn’t imagine finding anyone else, not after this.
He was done with love. It just messed you up and left you hurting.
He didn’t want that anymore. He’d tried it, done his best, given it his best shot.
Men were unreliable. Perhaps he was as well.
No matter. He needed to get his mind on Estel and forget this whole episode.
This was actually a valuable lesson. He wouldn’t get caught again.
Now he was free to… live his life… how? Alone, self-sufficient, capable, invulnerable.
Maybe not happy, but who was happy nowadays anyway?
This world wasn’t a place where many people were happy.
The best you could hope for was to get by.
Damn, he was sick of driving though! Two and a half hours down to the Delta, the same back.
An hour each way to la Platja del Trabucador.
Finally he saw the offramp that would take him up and over the back of Montju?c, past the cemetery without having to head into the heart of Barcelona.
Ten minutes later, he was pulling into La Foixarda Stables.
Maria’s, Carme’s, and Ernest’s cars were all in the parking lot.
It was nearly ten at night. He went straight to the box where Estel was being kept and found them all there.
The horse was standing, but his leg was obviously swollen.
Ernest was just finishing applying a fresh dressing.
When Maria saw him her face fell and she began gushing:
“Ramon, I’m so sorry! I didn’t get the message. I was meant to be away climbing this weekend. I thought you knew?”
“No, don’t worry, it’s my fault,” he reassured her. “I sent the message late at night and then didn’t check that anyone had received it. Estel’s my responsibility, and I shouldn’t have left without getting confirmation that someone was looking after him.”
“I rushed back as soon as I heard.”
“Don’t worry, Maria,” he insisted. “Don’t ruin your weekend. Go back there. I’ll take care of it from here on.”
Throughout all this, Carme had been leaning against the wall of the box, watching Ernest work. She barely acknowledged Ramon’s entrance. Now she said:
“Yes, go, Maria. If you leave now you might get back before midnight and still get a decent day’s climbing in tomorrow. Take Monday morning off if you need it. I’ll muck out. Thanks for driving all the way back here for a horse that wasn’t your responsibility.”
As Maria said her goodbyes and left, Ramon felt the barb of Carme’s last comment. She still hadn’t looked at him.
“How’s Estel?” he asked Ernest.
“Well, I’ve given him another shot of antibiotic, cleaned and rebandaged the wound.
But I told you, he needed to be walked twice a day to get his circulation going and reduce the edema.
The walking is painful for him, but it needs to be done two times a day without fail, controlled and gentle. I wasn’t joking about that.”
“I’m sorry, that was my fault,” he said. “We had a miscommunication.”
“Well, you’re renting the box here,” Carme interjected, “but I don’t remember giving you the run of my employees. Maria had the weekend off. This wasn’t her responsibility. Why wasn’t this passed by me?”
Ramon turned to her:
“I’m sorry, that was my fault. It was late and I wanted to get down to the Delta. I’d been neglecting Ferro…”
“With David? One of my employees who’s just buggered off without giving me notice?”
“OK, I’m done here,” Ernest said quickly. “I’ll send the invoice through and be back tomorrow. Remember, keep walking him.” And, sensing a storm that was about to break, he exited at the speed of light.
Then it was just Carme and Ramon, facing each other on either side of Estel, who was starting to get scrappy at having so many humans in his stall.
“Let’s move this outside,” he suggested. “Estel’s getting worked up.”
Carme said nothing but walked out of the box.
“OK, I’m sorry, I made a bad call,” he said, once he’d closed the stall door behind them. “It was late. I thought Maria could walk him. It’s not the money. I’ll happily pay her wages for the time she puts in…”
“You’re damn right it’s not the money. It’s you treating my stables and my employees like your own personal playground, without bothering to say a thing to me, not even having the courtesy to tell me what’s going on.
And we haven’t even got on to David, and believe me, you’re not getting off the hook on that one! ”
Rarely had Ramon seen Carme so furious. Where to start? With his own agony? He knew she’d give him short shrift on that score.
“So you’ve been seeing David behind my back?” she went on. “After he absconded from my stables? Wasn’t it you who told me he wasn’t trustworthy?”
“He is!” But was he? Ramon had no idea anymore.
“Is he?”
Ramon shrugged.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I thought so, but… he’s got secrets…”
“But how did this even happen?”
“We met… by chance.”
“By chance?”
“It wasn’t planned.”
“I know what ‘by chance’ means!”
“I was just getting my pickup to go down to the Delta. He was there. I invited him down, just a spur of the moment thing…”
“He was here, hanging around the stables?”
“No,” Ramon lied. “My car was parked in the car park beside the MNAC.”
“Something else I need to show you,” Carme said, in a voice like sharpened steel.
She stalked toward the entrance, and showed him the stables outer gate, where the lock had been busted.
Ramon hadn’t noticed it as he came in. “My office was broken into as well, and the tool room. He took a tablet, but there was nothing else of value there. My computer’s only worth anything as a museum piece. ”
“Have the police been round?”
She nodded. “It was the guy from the security firm who noticed the break-in, caught him in the act, and called the police. Apart from the tablet, he’d taken some tools, bolt-cutters and stuff.
He was loaded down with them when the police arrived, so they got him fair and square.
” She paused. “That’s actually how I came across your horse.
I was doing the rounds of the stables afterward and saw the swelling.
“Tools? So he must have known what he was after.” David had also been snooping around the stables after leaving the job. He didn’t want to think about it. There was clearly no connection.
“Funny thing,” Carme went on, the burglar was English. What’s your professional opinion of that?”
Ramon’s heart sank into the pit of his stomach. A coincidence, that’s what it was. Anyway, Davey was with him down at the Delta when it happened. He had the perfect alibi…. Ramon didn’t even want to think about what the consequences of that were.
“OK,” Carme said, her voice steely and controlled. “Tomorrow, Monday at the latest, you get your horse out of my stables. He should never have been here anyway. He should have been floated out to the police stables as soon as he could walk.”
“I’m sorry, Carme, I wasn’t trying to go behind your back or lie to you. The situation just happened without us thinking about it.”
“You’re right,” she replied. “I can one hundred percent believe that neither you nor he was doing much thinking.” As she walked away, she tossed over her shoulder: “It’s late, I’m going home. And first thing Monday morning I’m getting security cameras fitted here.”