Jago Rackham

---

That Time After Dinner
.

~

The next day I was very sick, throwing up. “It was that tortilla at that horrible restaurant,” said my mother, angry with my father. “I hope not, otherwise that grandmother’s probably dead.” Father wore a beige linen jacket and in its breast pocket sat a pencil. He held a book, which he had been reading in a shady part of the garden, while my mother took care of me.

~

That night I had no clean pyjamas and my mother told me I should just wear a t-shirt. I dreamt that I was at school, wearing only this t-shirt, embarrassed by my nudity. Waking, I was revolted to feel sweaty thigh upon thigh, thick linen sheet against my penis. Later, I was angry with her and she walked off, toward the garden gate. “You can tell your father, or anyone else, that I’m off to buy cigarettes!”

~

“It’s your birthday tomorrow,” said my mother. “Did you know the Jesuits say ‘Give me a child before the age of seven and he’ll be mine forever?’” “Who are the Jesuits?” “Priests.” “Oh.” She tousled my hair. “Thank god you’ve met none.”

~

We were staying in the house of the parents’ of one of my father’s colleague’s. It was lined with cool marble – wall, floor – and was gloomy, its windows shuttered against the sun. I did not like the gloom of the large rooms, whose white walls glowed with ghostly luminescence, sucking in the little light cast through the shutters. During siesta the house would fall into a grand, somnolent silence and I would tiptoe from room to room, trying to catch a glimpse of a ghost, my head aching a little from the heat.

The colleague’s father, a radio presenter, spoke English with a slight Spanish accent, giving his vowels a baroque grandeur, pedantic, slightly off. “Let me show you my studio,” motioning for me to follow. A small room, lined with light brown lacquered wood and a desk fitted with microphones, black knobs, dials, sliders. On the walls framed photographs of black and white men, ribbons, a boxed medal, a crest bearing the bundled sticks and sword of the Guardia Civil. It smelt of his aftershave, cedar wood, and also of beeswax polish, a little sickening.

“Have you interviewed anyone important?”

An Iberian pause, then “Important can be many things. Your parents are important, my wife is important, you are important.” Irritated, I replied “I mean, like, important people, famous.” “Well” he shrugged, not indifferent, “prime ministers, politicians, writers, yes.” I imagined Tony Blair, the first man I recognised on TV, grinning his maniac grin at this large grey man.

~

I was sleeping in the same room as my little brother, and when I woke, scared, his breathing would calm me – consistent, calm, animal. In the day I would be unkind to him, as, I have been told, older siblings are. Of my unkindness I remember very little, almost nothing at all.

~

We sat outside in the evenings, on the veranda beneath a sloped roof which held strip lights. The table was long, a trestle table, and each night a fresh cast would assemble – people from the town, from elsewhere in Spain, their cars spilling off the drive and onto the lawn, bumpers nosing terracotta pots. The older women wore pearls, the younger thin gold chains.

“I don’t know how she does so much,” said my mother, picking at the skin beside her nail, “just one of those dinners would leave me wiped out for the week.”

~

It was decided that I should have a haircut on my birthday.

My father took me to find the barbershop recommended by his colleague’s father, at which he had been having his hair cut since his first barbershop closed, after the owner’s death. “Thirty years, almost, and still a shock. But, he’s my man now and I better get used to it.”

The streets were dusty but not unclean, and everywhere seemed to sit under a heavy quiet, broken by motors, far-off shouts. The sky shone an acid blue, its sun hidden by the tall flats on either side, their uniformity broken only by clothes hanging from balconies, not quite still in the faint breeze.

The barber shop was on a wide street, on a corner block. Its windows were covered in the brownish yellowish film used to keep out the glare in hot countries. Outside two old men sat, smoking, their faces craggy, mouths underfull of teeth, skin the colour of the window behind them. Inside, more men, sitting, smoking, standing, two barbers in white doctor’s coats presiding over them.

I began to cry, refusing to walk forward. “What’s wrong?” said my father, bemused. “I don’t want to go in there.” “It’s ok, I’ll come with you.” “No. I’m not going to. I don’t want to.” After a few more half-hearted attempts and bribes my father took me home, where I cried to my mother and my father’s colleague’s mother, who had brassy strawberry blonde hair and a soft perfumed bosom, where she lay my head. “Niño, shhh.”

~

It was decided my hair would be cut at the mall instead. The women said I would enjoy it, that they wouldn’t like to have their hair cut at the barbers either, with its swearing men, cigarette smell, rough hands. I nodded, but did not say what I knew then, and they did not, that I would have died in that barbershop.

I am taken by my mother and my father’s colleague’s mother, who drives her sports car very quickly, its roof down. Outside yellow, orange and pink apartment buildings give way to sparse fields, stony, dry, with only a few signs of life in them and, for a minute or so, a pig farm, squalid, cramped, frightening, gigantic. Where was their mud?

~

The mall is blue and cold. I have not been cold since we came to Spain and I shiver. I am given a scarf to wrap myself in, since my mother did not bring me a jumper. “I didn’t think it would be so cold!” She slides her sunglasses onto the crown of her head, shiny black eyes within her black hair, the gold hinges like small horns.

I think the hairdresser is very pretty, her nose upturned, eyes brown. She squats in front of me and says hello in English, before speaking in Spanish, her fingers running through my hair, quick, expert.

“She asks what you want.” I’ve been reading the Tintin comics and am enamoured. “I want Tintin hair.” Afterwards, the hairdresser holds up a mirror. “You like?” I nod, serious.

~

We stop at a bakery. In the window are three cakes, on three levels, each white and round and topped with glossy fruit and squeezes of cream. It smells of sugar and of aerosol, and behind the counter a large woman smiles below her soft moustache. I have not had a birthday cake from a shop before and am excited, told to choose whichever I would like. My mother pays with the crisp pesetas still in their Post Office envelope. Walking back to the car we pass a limping dog, a greyhound, its side a muzzy mass of matted fur and mange.

~

A woman walks beside the road to the house, in the sun, her cotton dress unshapely. Our host swears and winds the window down beside her, speaks first as if to a child, and, after the woman responds, as if to a dog. She winds the window up and apologises to my mother.

The gate swings open with a pleasing mechanical burr.

~

The garden brims with apricot trees, who drop their rotting fruit onto the ground where they are devoured by ants. I am alone, having escaped my siesta. Squatting, I inspect the ants, marvelling at their spiteful bodies. I find a stick and with its point kill one, then another, then another. I play this game until I hear my mother’s voice from the house, calling my name.

~

After dinner, my cake is brought out with seven pink candles. Happy birthday is sung in English and then in Spanish, followed by clapping and shouting. After blowing out the candles I am handed a large knife, with which I sloppily make one cut, before my hand is swatted away. The cake is very sweet, its sponge a synthetic tasting softness shot through with raspberry syrup, its cream melts to nothing on the tongue.

Everyone is sitting at the table drinking, smoking, talking. Jamon is brought on a white plate, laid out in a circle. I love its sweet saltiness and pull the plate toward me,   eating until it’s all gone. “Would you like some more?” asks our hostess, smiling. I nod. More is bought and I eat this too. “More?” Says the hostess, her eyes comically large.

My mother turned to me after the mistress had left, “You’ll eat all her jamon!” A cold sweat of embarrassment slicks my forehead and I say nothing. When more jamon is bought I don’t eat it, though I would like to. My brother sleeps on a large wicker chair in the corner, his small hand in his mouth, and I feel a stab of jealousy.

~

In the night I wake, go downstairs, to the veranda, to see if any jamon has been left. The table is uncleared, a mess of plates, dirty glasses, overflowing ashtrays, but no jamon.

~

In the morning I get up early to piss. It is cool, and the coolness is pleasant and empty, not like the heat, which is full. Downstairs the shutters have not yet been closed, and the house sits in the stark brightness that means time has stopped.

On the veranda the woman in the ill-fitting dress is stacking the plates from the night before, scraping left-over food, cigarette ash, crumpled paper napkins into a bin she has brought into the room and placed beside the table. In the corner a small portable radio sings in Spanish, crackly, fuzzy. The scent of stale tobacco hangs in the air, married to the scent of apricot trees. When I strain to listen, I hear that the woman is humming along to the radio, tunelessly.
.
.
.
Jago Rackham is a cook and writer based in London. See his food @ecstasy_cookbook and follow his Substack, Greed.