Chapter 7 -Smells Like Fish-

SMELLS OF DEAD FISH

Was it June or December when Sandy left? Did I really smell the sea that morning or does my tendency to wrap reality in a poetic blanket shape what I remember? Did I add the tanginess of the Atlantic later or did it really smell of dead fish on that morning? I am not entirely certain. My family home was definitely ten metres away from the walls which separated Varyl Begg Estate from the waters of the Bay of Gibraltar. In that spot, the Atlantic takes a breather and rests amidst port cranes, trawler boats, barges, flatboats, oilers and other unpoetical forms of maritime transport. The blocks of flats which housed  our home were practically tiptoeing the ocean. There were days the morning air would bring strong wafts of the Atlantic but our nostrils were mostly occupied with the sweet, musky, slightly rancid smell of benzene. What did I smell that day? Does it matter? When I return to recreate the smell of dead fish, I am left dumbfounded because the sea is no longer there. After the reclamation of land in the early nineties by the Government of Gibraltar, our council flat is now more than two kilometres separated from the Bay. Whereas before I could immediately spot the patches of blue and mostly green sea from my bedroom window, now, all that my eyes can perceive are the concrete slabs which make up the more than twenty apartment blocks erected in front of us. It’s a load of poo. How can I remember properly who I am if they have moved the sea? How can I trust reality at all if there is only cement parading in front of my bedroom window? 

The new sea is a towering estate of tall cement blocks called Gib 5. It looks like a prison block. Why would they name it Gib5? Is there no poetry left in the urban planning commissions? It is heart-breaking. I feel I have been robbed of my memories but most importantly of the possibility of auditing them. Sometimes I wonder if the Atlantic was ever as near to our flat as I remember. What did I smell? Why is it important? Why does it feel like that particular morning has been extracted from my memory to be handed a special room in the house of my consciousness? What the hell happened? 

I am certain of one thing: that morning signified the end of Sandy’s residence at 1 Warspite House, Varyl Begg Estate, Gibraltar. 1 Warspite House was never the same. 1 Warspite House started its own new chapter in our minds and in the history of Gibraltar. A chapter where Sandy was gone together with Delia’s will to have him back. It was early morning. Of that I am sure. Seagulls were shrieking in the background as they often do in that part of the world, and certain items of luggage were discovered in the middle of the living room; an old chequered plastic suitcase and a few Lipton’s Supermarket bags full of clothes and personal objects. I have consulted these details with Delia and she concurs. The luggage was most certainly there and so were the Liptons bags. It was Saturday. I remember waking up late, after our usual late Friday TV session, and moving to the living room where Sandy stood motionless surrounded by the bags and the suitcase. I was wearing my cotton pyjamas. My grandmother had sewn my name on the front pocket. This has been proven. Delia showed me the pyjamas some years ago. She still has them. They are real. Delia said it was pretty early. Sandy had not slept at all. He had spent the night away and he looked ragged and dusty like an old bicycle forgotten in a shed. He was wearing a black leather jacket and Moroccan sandals. These items of clothings I recall. Though I am not sure whether I see Sandy now or the vision I have created in my mind after so many years of pining. I was only seven years old. How could I envisage the episode clearly? What is certain, to this very day, is that I felt anxious and bewildered; I knew something different was about to happen and it felt it would lead to nothing good. It was not a premonition. It was more like a dog had taken a bite in my chest. A sort of hole that opened in the upper area of the abdomen. I still feel it now as I write. Sandy drank coffee. His friend Abel was beside him, looking battered and absent. Their jeans smelt of ashtrays and stale beer. Their breath stank. Perhaps it was their breath I smelt that morning and not the dead fish. It is the acrid smell of dry beer and sulphur that I have confused in bars, sea-towns and old churches during my whole life. Perhaps that particular morning had its own unique and unrepeatable smell. I don’t know.  

‘Me voy,’ Sandy said in a deadpan, wrecked and noncommittal sort of way. 

‘For the weekend, you mean, no? You're going for the weekend dad, no? It’s only for the weekend, right?’ 

Delia turned to me and hugged me as tightly as she could. She did not respond but her cold paralysing stare deserves its own trilogy of novels. I cannot describe it with precision but if you ever saw that stare you would know what lies under the words anger and despair. Abel, Sandy’s friend, started babbling nervously about the Eastern Winds and Sandy ordered him to shut up.

‘That’s it,’ he continued. ‘I am leaving.’ 

‘If you go, it’s because you don’t give a damn about anyone else!’

I translated Sandy’s and Delia’s words in my mind to make them more bearable I think. Spanish for a pre-millennial Gibraltarian is a language of feeling, family and hope. I have often felt afraid to love in the language of Cervantes just in case it all comes crashing down again like that morning in June or December. Delia can’t put her finger on it either. It took her years to speak about it again. About that morning when it all changed. Whatever I do, I must remember to keep the memory in English. This might just about make it bearable. 

‘The weekend,’ I kept interrupting. ‘You're going for the weekend, right?’

I could tell Sandy was not his usual confident abrasive self. My words had some effect and that is what I was hanging on to for all those years. My words had stopped him in his tracks and prevented him from lifting the chequered suitcase and the Lipton’s plastic bags. Perhaps there was an element of hope in the whole shocking affair. 

‘You return on Monday, dad. Abel, he will come back, no?’

Abel did not know where to look. I can see his eyes scanning our cement council flat living room for an object to fix his scattered eyes upon. A light bulb perhaps dangling from the ceiling from a single white wire. Or the tears in the beige plastic sofa. Why was the sofa upholstery torn? The tears looked like slashes. Was it a knife perhaps that tore it? Abel might have turned his attention to the dusty floor tiles or the picture of my parent’s wedding which was placed on the wooden shelf just above the TV. It was a good shot taken on a spring morning at The Alameda Gardens. The blue sky and the lush vegetation behind the young beautiful suntanned couple projected an image of brightness and happiness. Perhaps, like me, Abel wondered who had taken the photograph. Who had fixed in time and space that moment of hope and vitality? What happened to those love-drenched Mediterranean teenagers? 

‘No puedo mas,’ lamented Sandy, dropping his tone a little and hinting at the chance of exposing his justifications.

‘Harta toy de tu chalaura Sandy! De verdad, harta!’

‘Abel pick up the fucking suitcase!’ 

Abel stood motionless at the centre of the domestic debacle. I pity him now. I too often like a mackerel out of water. A stinking fish in the middle of a fucked-up break-up after an entire night of alcohol, prostitutes and cocaine. I know the hollow scratches in the stomach, the dry throat and the spiral of thoughts which seems to pull you inwards, towards the smallest version of yourself, so small, so small that if they left you to it, you would just disappear through the mail box and into the fathomless void. It’s the sensation of being an actor in someone else’s play, isn’t it? It’s the feeling that you don’t belong to the room, to the moment, to the stage. It’s that sensation of having landed a job in someone else’s melodrama. I still feel it now. Yes, sometimes I am Abel, scanning the living-room, trying to find an object to focus on, seeking something concrete that might string my mind to normality. Sometimes I feel like Abel searching for some kind of object that might hold my consciousness together because that was not the living room I was supposed to be in, and those people spreading anxiousness and dread are not my family nor my responsibility.  But maybe I am just projecting on the poor man. Maybe Abel did not give a shit. Maybe he was just waiting around for Sandy to end the domestic nonsense so they could get on with their drinking and their whoring. But I suspect not. I suspect Abel cared more than Sandy in a way; he was more perceptive, more empathetic, more human, more fatherly. 

‘Vete if that is what you want! A ver como te va con esas guarras!’

‘Monday dad. Monday please.’

Some days I imagine a hug preceding Sandy’s exit. Delia says there was no hug. A bang on the door and Abel making excuses was all she could uncover from her memory. I don’t remember much from the episode either. What returns is the smell of dead fish again and a mist. A mist that engulfs the whole of the rock and its surrounding residences when the mix of cold seas and warm air merge to blind the inhabitants of the colony. The mist is called la neblina, an entity which appears now and again and paralyses the workings of the town. Everything changed that morning and I was left with the mist, I think. I think I was left with the mist, though even of the mist I am no longer sure. 

‘Natalie, the concert will be terrible. I can feel it,’ I whimpered as I refused to get out of bed. 

‘It’s in your head,’ whispered Natalie calmly. It's all in your head.She sat on the armchair in our bedroom reading a book on radical feminism. She was waiting for me to get up. 

‘It hurts. I promise.’ 

‘What's the gig anyways?’

‘Folklore thing with Jez at The Green Note.’ 

Natalie stopped reading her book and looked at me with scientific interest. It felt as if she was observing an endangered insect species with a magnifying glass. 

‘The Green Note?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘You have played there a million times. What’s the fuss?’  

‘I know. It’s different this time.

Do you know Amanda Palmer?

'Not personally,’

‘What does she have to do with anything?’

‘Nothing, I suppose. It’s me. I feel my hands are going to fall off,’ I lamented as I turned over in bed and covered my head with the pillow.’

‘There’s anti-inflammatory cream in the bathroom cabinet,’ sentenced Natalie nonchalantly as she returned to her book. 

‘I once met a man who could give himself a heart attack by thinking about it,’ I interjected from under the sheets. ‘Really Natalie. I am not kidding.’ 

‘Gardening Mark. My nan used to say, 'when it gets too much, trim the bloody bushes,’ said Natalie without taking her eyes off the pages of the book. 

‘The guy smoked about 5 packets a day,’ I continued. 

‘Gardens and brooms.’ 

‘I don’t know what happened to him in the end.’

Natalie stopped reading again. This time she dropped the book on the bedsit table with a loud thump and turned her neck to look at me straight in the face. 

‘Look Mark, this is not a hotel,’ she qualmed . ‘You can’t just turn up, tell stories and eat cream crackers ’ 

‘He was a handsome one, that Johnny,’ I continued from the bed. ‘A real ladies man.’ 

‘Tidy men are much more interesting, if you ask me.’

‘What about Bukowski?’ 

‘The wife-beater, you mean?’  

‘He wanted to murder mediocrity! That’s why he wrote like he wrote.’

‘I am tired Mark. Does everyone from Gibraltar speak like they are in a surrealist novel?!’ said Natalie as she got up from the armchair in a strop. 

‘Bukoswki was interesting. He was definitely interesting,’ I insisted. 

‘Was he now?’

Natalie put her hands over her hips and towered over me. 

‘Natalie.’

‘What? What the hell do you want?!’

‘I have met someone.’ 

Natalie squinted her eyes and stared at me again. 

‘Have you? 

‘I have met someone interesting. Someone inspiring, a wild and beautiful girl. She wrestles the night. She punches boredom.’ 

Natalie laughed and then returned to her armchair and her book, ‘Good for you,’ she replied half-mockingly. ‘Does she like gardening? Maybe you could invite her to be interesting here and sort the lawn out!

‘It’s not fair!’I screamed.

‘What?’

‘The whole of it. Sometimes I wish I was Johnny Lima!’ I sighed. ‘He lived in his head and he liked it there. How can I come up with a song fit for Cohen while I empty the bin and think of the colour of the tiles?!’  

‘You would be surprised what a man can achieve when he stops whining.’ 

‘I don’t think I can perform tomorrow.’

‘Wash the bloody dishes then.’ 

‘I don't clean dishes properly.’

‘Nor speak English. We say wash here, Mark. What the hell do they teach you in that rock of yours? And seeing as your mother tongue is Spanish, you could perhaps teach your son, right? Dante can only say luna and luz. What the hell Mark? It’s been three years! You have not even tried. 

I finally got up from the bed and walked to the toilet. I did not have words to defend myself.  Natalie's comments hurt. She was right. I was failing miserably at teaching my child Spanish. Everyone kept reminding me I should be doing it. My friends insisted the first three years are the best time for a toddler to start absorbing a new language. Teachers at his nursery claimed that this inference of information would shape his neurological synapses allowing him to develop a more flexible and competent brain. I suppose I kind of agree with them but how could I? Spanish is a language for the sun. It is hard to go around rainy London babbling nonsense in the tongue of Cervantes. I felt like a fraud. I wanted an arid landscape, a dry mountain, an olive tree, a bar on the beach where sardines are fizzling languidly on the grill, and a fat man sweating on a communal porch. Words like crepusculo sounded fake in England. By teaching him these words I was detaching my son from his environment and forcing him to partake of a reality he had never experienced.

Every language is a philosophy of life or so they say but can you perceive this vision of the world when the words are severed from the land which infused them? Some days I thought I should escape with my child to Salamanca, hang around in its streets of red clay or inhabit the insomniac terraces of Madrid where fried calamari and vino tinto make for the spirit of the landscape. The two of us against the spectre of Englishness, absorbing more than a thousand years of overexcited bulls and aromatic bay leaves. I would then teach my son to say sardina or laurel. Perhaps our accents might change. I would point to the slice of cheese and say manchego without breaking into laughter. The Spanish cheese they sell in Asda is an insult to humanity. It should not even be called cheese. But I knew inside of me that my friends and Delia were right. I was missing the chance to expand my child’s consciousness. I had failed to open a window for him to alternate realities. I had prevented him from developing a more advanced perception of the world. Jez also condemned me from the beginning. He claimed I was committing a crime by failing to teach Dante Spanish. He said that my neglect should be punishable by law. I told him his parents should be handcuffed too for not teaching him the first thing about humanity. But this was just a defence I know, He was right. In truth, the theme of language and parenthood was making me act irrationally with everyone, including myself. My guilt was doing the talking in the matter. I had to consider the possibility that I was a deficient father, a shoddy excuse for a parent. The drinking was one thing but to rob him of a tongue was a deplorable affair. The boy had done nothing but expand my sense of self and the bulwarks of my consciousness. 

I needed to redeem myself. I wanted to write songs for him; for his tiny swollen feet, for his yellow straw hair and the turquoise stones encrusted in his eye-balls. I wished I could paint him with words. He eluded me. In both my languages. All my preconceptions vanished; I had told myself I did not want to meet a child until it developed the capacity to speak. I was a pedantic fool. I thought my vision of the truth would not be altered by a wordless tadpole but Dante was always fascinating; even when he was a little pink ball of sparkly plasticine hovering over the cavity of my chest. I wish I could describe the conversation between his heart-beat and mine. I wish I could recount the faint sound of his petrol-pump pounding against my skin. It was more informative than a BA hons in Comparative literature. It showed me what it meant to exist. Like when he threw the remote control to my forehead in the cheap airbnb before moving to the Deptford maisonette. He was telling me, dad you incompetent fool, where is my bed? Or the time he crawled out of the holiday bed in Devon and sat in the kitchen for minutes without saying a word. I discovered him on the red chair with his white nappy and his black Nirvana t-shirt and could not stop laughing. I was cracking up for days. In a way I was healing the relationship with my absent father through him. I felt I was cleansing generations of drunken progenitors and disheartened mothers, victims of night clubs and whore houses, casualties of men’s obsession with power. I was purging centuries of sluggishness, frustration, dark existential awakenings. For men have loved and resented their children since time primordial. The infant is both the symbol of their perpetuation in time and of their imminent end. With the birth of the prince, the future of the kingdom is assured. Men rejoice at their validation as procreators and at the same time ponder at the prospect of being usurped by their own offshoot. The king is dead! Long live the king! To make matters worse; the consummation of marriage and family denotes an expectation for the king to settle and stop chasing women and cheap thrills. Kings  have not dealt kindly with this predicament.