Chapter Sixteen
The table for four sits well out into the teeming square. Away from the main entrance and yellow and black awning of the enduring Café Amarillo.
He wonders how it would play if another couple from today were actually parked at those very same places where the young couple sit so innocently. He can only guess that it would endow Will and Lu with some sort of weird double image – and that you wouldn’t see William for dust.
But how do you work out the rules for a situation that so totally transcends them?
The older couple walk slowly towards their young hosts, whilst their legs quietly inform them that they shouldn’t honestly be relied upon for much support in the imminent future.
“This man, he is my husband,” announces Lu proudly, as the older couple slump into their plastic chairs. Around them everything else seems totally normal, people drinking, laughing, constantly playing with their smartphones and tablets, which only serves to make the situation even creepier.
Wait until they see William and Luisa chatting to thin air.
“Hi, I’m Will?” says the young husband, a distinct question mark in his voice. He appears quite bemused by two extremely nervy-looking old farts plonking themselves down in front of him.
“Hi, I’m W—”
William stops himself just in time.
He is already hugely relieved – whilst also just a tiny bit irked – that the younger couple show absolutely no signs of recognition, or even the vaguest niggling unease, as they confront their older counterparts.
But for Will and Lu to hear their own names thrown back at them, by total strangers with similar accents, would be – at the very least – unsettling. Yet he finds himself at a total loss.
Until he spots a passing waiter deftly transporting a tray of drinks, on his way to a larger table. On the tray is a familiar brand of gin.
“Gordon!” he announces. “Yeah. Gordon. And this is my wife… er… er…”
Luisa is beyond stumped.
Helplessly, she follows her husband’s eyeline to the same moving tray. “Fanta!” she cries, with unwarranted exuberance. She can feel the younger couple’s eyes on her. William’s too. “I was orange when I was born,” she explains feebly. “Jaundice. You cannot call a child jaundice.”
The newlyweds just nod. Lu, being Spanish, doesn’t quite understand. Will, being British, doesn’t understand either.
William notices that the young couple sit very close together.
Hands constantly brushing, shoulder nudging shoulder, needing always to touch.
Every word spoken by the one absorbed with the eyes as well as the ears of the other.
He is also conscious that he and Luisa have set themselves down quite far apart, with bags of shoulder-room, eyes facing resolutely forward.
It would seem perverse to shuffle up now into snuggle mode, should he even wish to do so.
“You are on holiday here, yes?” asks Lu, now that the curious introductions are over.
“No,” responds William, then feels Luisa’s eyes on him. “Well, yes. Of sorts. Thirtieth anniversary. ‘Pearl’, isn’t it? That’s an oyster with a bit of grit. We were here on our honeymoon.”
The younger couple are beside themselves. “We are on OUR honeymoon!”
“NO!” cry William and Luisa, in a mock astonishment that, by rights, should fool no one.
“Hang on. More importantly,” says Will, “Rangers or Celtic?”
To Will’s delight, the older man begins to sing “Follow, Follow, we will follow Rangers” to the tune of a well-known hymn, even though William is well aware that they both, for their sins, support Partick Thistle.
But he knows that this is a standard Glaswegian test of religious affiliation rather than specific allegiance.
Within seconds, Will is joining in. He only stops when the shirt William is wearing begins to buzz and vibrate.
“What the hell is that?” asks the younger Presbyterian, pointing directly at William’s throbbing breast-pocket.
“It’s just his—”
“PACEMAKER!” announces William swiftly, cutting Luisa off and frantically thumping his bulging chest, until the unfortunate buzzing terminates of its own accord. “Anyone for a drink?” he croaks, through the pain. “Before I die.”
William rises to find a waiter. So does Will.
“I’ll get them,” insists the younger version.
“Away ye go!” says the older. “You’re on a budget… I imagine.”
“Away ye go!” responds Will. As they look at each other, he seems a bit perturbed, as if the older guy might think he is taking the piss. “I mean, it’s okay. Really.”
They both find themselves standing up to summon one of the busy waiters, each man waving competitively in a totally different direction.
“That’s our waiter,” exults Will. “Senor!”
Luisa, who isn’t as yet one hundred per cent in the loop or the loopiness but is catching on fast, momentarily wonders, amidst her barely controllable trembling, why Will is summoning a passing monk.
Her current husband’s muttering under his breath “A pint of Benedictine” doesn’t really help.
Nor does it ease her growing nausea when the men suddenly click and stretch their necks, backs and heads in an almost identically choreographed routine, like two robots of differing generations who both love Michael Jackson.
Meantime the waiter goes off, clearly in search of richer pickings.
Luisa takes a deep breath, stretches a smile across her face that looks as natural as a child bride’s at a forced wedding and wades into the madness. “So – Will – you look like married life, it is suiting you. Yes?”
“Ask me again in thirty years, Fanta! But, hey, way too spooky. Two Glasgow lads and we each marry a Spaniard!”
William and Luisa are in there like bullets, intent on dispelling any more hints of creepy coincidence. Unfortunately, not with the same faked history. Luisa proudly claims herself an Argentinian, just as William is rooting his exotic wife in sunny Puerto Rico.
“And Argentinian!” continues her biographer bravely. “Moved to Buenos Aires as a wee baby. Her mum did Evita’s hair.” He dare not even look at Luisa now. But he can hear the familiar sighs kicking in.
Lu, bless her, is totally fascinated by this. “Aaah! I think your children they must have the interesting blood.”
The young woman can’t fail to notice that the hitherto twitchy older couple seem suddenly very still. Their faces appear in an instant to have softened and jointly sagged, the rabbit-in-the-headlights look replaced by something more profound, its roots far deeper.
“Oh. Perdón,” she apologises, on the cusp of mortification. “Perhaps you are not – do not have – lo siento!”
“Is fine!”
Luisa is swift to ease the poor young woman’s discomfort, the pangs of which she feels, not unnaturally, as if they are her own.
“We have a beautiful daughter. Her name is Claire. Sí. We adopt her, from a children’s home – when she is three years old. And now she is married lady.”
Luisa Sutherland can’t believe that she is sitting there in her old café telling herself her own future, yet at the same time it feels strangely natural. She looks at William, as if to convey “how weird is this?” But his full attention is fixed on Lu.
“And now our nest is empty,” says William, with a sad smile. “She used to tweet such a lot.”
The young couple stare at him as he realises just how baffling this wordplay must sound.
“I miss her so much,” adds Luisa, moving them all swiftly on.
“We both miss her, Fanta!”
“They give us this whole holiday!”
Luisa is suddenly lightening up, as if she has resolved to park the gargantuan madness of this entire grotesque situation.
Just until she can be somewhere safe, in which to collapse, scream, vomit or simply lie down and die.
“I tell Claire that many years ago, on our honeymoon, we make this promise. To come back again to Sevilla after thirty years! But young couples they make these promises—”
Luisa can tell that the younger woman is clearly moved by this.
It would appear to resonate quite neatly with her own romantic thinking.
As indeed it would, she concludes, since it was her that thought it.
Yet when Lu responds, idly playing with the cross on a silver chain around her neck, Luisa realises that the past still has its ability to catch her unawares.
“Ah! Will and me, we want many ninos. Then they will give us many holidays!”
Luisa finds herself unable to speak. She simply gazes into the younger woman’s luminescent face, absorbing the hope and wonder in those tender chestnut eyes. Until she is interrupted by a dismissive laugh from the brash young man with the shock of red hair.
“And many bloody bills!”
It’s almost a snort, the distinctive timbre of which Luisa recognises, to the extent that it makes her want to smack him. Or at the very least take the young fool publicly to task.
Fortunately the voice of what can only be a New Yorker breaks in.
“Thank God – two vacant seats!”
William and Luisa stare up at the newcomers in horror.
The two middle-aged ladies, each adorned with ornate, baroque sunglasses on glittery strings and festooned with guidebooks, point professionally decorated fingers at the one remaining table in Seville with two seats still unoccupied.
The first lady, the larger of the two but only just, elects herself spokesperson. “We spotted you guys at our hotel. The Herrera? The city’s like a can of sardines tonight. And those processions!”
Her partner (and William, at least, has formed the view that they probably are partners, berating himself at the same time for the assumption) picks up the conversation, whilst looking dangerously as if she is about to sit on Lu.
“But once you realise the guys are just plain folks and not the Klan – okay if we join you?”
“NO!”