Chapter Fifty-Six
“Cumpleanos Feliz, Cumpleanos Feliz, Te Deseamos Todo, Cumpleanos Feliz.”
The indomitable troupe bellow their version of Happy Birthday as the delighted instigator screams out “SORPRESA!”, like the Senora didn’t know.
William can only watch in panic.
The surprisers are clearly about to “work” the room and an all-too-brief moment later he sees Senor Barbadillo merrily pointing him out. Why not just crucify me now? thinks William, which he knows is sacrilegious but at least not untimely.
William turns back to the young couple and tries to block out the sounds of a dozen professionally disdainful and probably paid-by-the-hour Andalusians stamping their arrogant, Cuban-heeled feet, as if crushing a sudden outbreak of cockroaches, in rhythm to a repeated chanting of what he fears might be the The More Soon You Than Me!
signature tune. It is hardly Malaguena but it appears to please the crowd.
Closing his weary eyes, William attempts with commendable futility to block them all out, as they make a foot-stomping beeline for his apparently empty table.
He prays, in a way he never has before, that having imprinted their presence on the shuddering floor of the roof terrace, they will feel sufficiently spent and creatively sated to return to their host’s table for thoroughly justified refreshment.
No such luck.
They decide to dance, stomp, sing and play around him.
All around him.
As close to him as they can possibly get.
They are, of course, as he has to keep reminding himself, totally invisible to Will and Lu. Unfortunately, William’s reaction couldn’t be more in the young couple’s faces if it were projected onto a state-of-the-art cinema screen lowered from the merciless heavens.
All that Will and Lu can see is a bizarre assortment of pissed-off twitches and despairing twists from a solitary and increasingly peculiar Scot. Whilst all William can think is that, if Spaniards are noisy when they’re talking, you should hear them when they bloody dance.
It is when one over-exuberant bailaor tries to remove William’s hat and he, not unnaturally, resists that he notices Will and Lu’s eyes open wider than alcohol usually permits.
Their jaws drop in unison, like characters in a cartoon.
William soon computes that to them his hat appears to be wobbling right around his head entirely of its own volition.
“How the hell do you do that?” asks Will, not unreasonably.
“I used to be in a circus. Now, as I was trying to say—”
He moves his chair out of the orbit of the dancers, which proves totally fruitless, as they appear as determined as a swarm of locusts to go with him. So he has to make his impassioned address on the move, as the young couple’s eyes follow his weird trajectory with undisguised wonder.
“The thing is, guys – the thing is—” What is the sodding thing, William? “Well, I’m afraid that sometimes—” okay, go for it, pal, “—sometimes older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser. It just means – less young.”
You think?
He knows that he is talking in platitudes – in fact, he knows that what he is saying would give platitudes a bad name – but he simply can’t get a handle on it. The dancers aren’t necessarily the cause, but they certainly don’t help.
He gazes around the terrace, his current discomfort zone, which is rapidly filling up with excited patrons enjoying the free entertainment. Including the involvement of the poor stooge in the Panama hat. Some of them even applaud him.
As he squirms around, to avoid the plague of hat-snatching flamenco bastards, the room begins to spin.
It can’t be alcohol – he hasn’t had any.
And he isn’t twirling nearly fast enough to induce the dizziness he feels.
So perhaps he has finally succumbed to full-blown mental disintegration.
A condition he recognises as having been in development long before he ever landed in Seville.
And suddenly the only thing William can think of doing is to laugh.
Not just a giggle or a vaguely disquieting titter.
He is talking full-throttled, big-bellied, frame-rattling laughter.
Laughter at the madness of it all. The sort of mirth-suffused, booming roar that comes from the gut and the heart and the soul and can float high over a balcony and resound way into the flame-filled, Iberian night.
Laughter that he was born with and that is everyone’s birthright.
Laughter that sings with the innocence of youth, soars with the what-the-hellishness of age.
No stiffness. No resistance. No worries, pal.
“AWAY YE GO!” he bellows, in his new-found glee.
“He likes to shout,” explains Lu, who has some history here.
From her own perspective and that of Will, there are just a few guests on the roof with them, quietly drinking and enjoying the view.
Along with one extremely loud, perma-tanned, Panama-hatted, jacketless, watchless, elderly, laughing lunatic, who came here on his honeymoon way back in 1965 and apparently hasn’t matured much since.
So, when Senora Barbadillo herself rises gracefully from her family table and stamps towards him, making the classic movement of doves with her thickening but still nimble fingers, encouraging him to stop being British, if only for this milestone night, he can see just one way to proceed.
He rises from his chair and begins to dance.
William Sutherland, uptight and stuffy Scot, captive to a throbbing beat that could have been womb music had the womb in question not belonged to an illiterate factory worker from Greenock.
Willo S himself, sashaying on a cool Spanish terrace, in the lush April evening, with a seductive local celebrity whose age is no longer a secret and whose special day this is.
Seeming to one fascinated, but justifiably wary, young couple as if he is dancing with absolutely no one, to absolutely no music at all.
And not terribly well.
William begins to shout even louder above the clamour, reminding Lu once more of yesterday morning’s hitherto quiet jewellery store.
“What was it the late, lamented John Lennon sang, before he died forty-five years ago?” Why are they both staring at him like that?
“Fifteen! Fifteen years ago!” He moves to the rhythm.
Or at least he hears the rhythm and moves.
“‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy – doing other stuff – making plans’. Or something like—”
He stops, as if frozen into a dramatic pose.
Had he been a professional dancer, this might have been the stunning yet natural conclusion to a performance and the music would have reached a similarly exhilarating end.
But, whilst he is clearly and surprising game, the man is no mover – in this or any incarnation – and to at least two members of his audience, there is no music at hand to be inspiring any sort of climax.
Yet no one watching this terpsichorean display, from either era, could fail to note the glorious sense of revelation that suddenly bathes the weary face of this middle-aged man, like those scintillating coloured lights that magically illuminate the old city facades as darkness begins to fall.
And William knows that his young couple are totally attentive.
If for no other reason than the sight of a hitherto respectable, weirdly-tanned, suspiciously unbalding man losing his grip on sanity – or at the very least on self-control – can’t be anything other than horribly fascinating.
“For once in my life,” he cries, “I’ve run out of bloody plans!”
As he laughs uproariously once again, he notices that Senora Barbadillo and her little troupe are laughing with him. Perhaps because they feel it is safest to do so or maybe they’re just happy. And laughter – even that of a balmy, barmy Brit – is infectious.
“Not a spreadsheet or an agenda or a Window to my name!” he continues. Then adds, “Or a production schedule,” in deference to his current calling.
He holds out a bronzed hand to Lu. “So I’ll just have to go – wherever the music takes me.”
Lu doesn’t rise immediately, so he beckons her upwards, gently and with a warmly avuncular smile. Nothing to fear here.
She looks at Will, who shrugs. Humour the old loon. So she nods and rises gracefully from her chair.
Like a young woman at her first formal event, Lu Sutherland moves with a shy smile to join William on what wasn’t, until now, a dance floor. The only music in her ears the drumbeat echoes of a final procession way down below.
Yet, when his lovely young wife begins to dance unaccompanied, her lithe body swaying like a willowy sapling in the breeze, her delicate feet tapping in the flimsiest brown pumps, the grace and beauty of it almost breaks the older man’s heart.
He drinks in her glowing-eyed, innocent warmth, like the cocktail he doesn’t dare order, and tries not to tell himself that all this will be lost to young Will in just two years, as it is lost to older William now.
A loss he feels in every cell of his body, but especially those that still contain his most precious memories.
He attempts to match her movements, so effortless in their elegance, which of course is futile. Especially as the beat in Lu’s head is most probably so very different from that of the musicians practically in his face.
And then he senses a different, more powerful movement directly behind him.
Senora Barbadillo has decided that she too will dance with William Sutherland. It would be impolite, she reasons, to allow this famous, successful, blouson-less and rather ridiculous man in the ill-fitting hat to writhe and contort all on his ownsome.