If you know my father, you know he has a habit of findinf hinself in the centre of the party- he has sparkling Irish blues eyes and an amazing head of jet black hair considering he’s 62 (“52 don’t you mean!” He’d yell at me) and will keep you entertained with various funny stories until sunrise (unless you’re related to him which means you’ve heard them all a fair few times, the repetition sending you to sleep.) His generosity in buying a round and making sure everyone in the establishment has a drink in their hand doesn’t seem to do his popularity any harm either (can’t say the same for his bank balance the following morning though..)
He’s visited Mil Palmeras a fair few times but usually when I’m not here. The last time we were both here at the same time was when I was living here with my ex-boyfriend four years ago. Dad took a particular interest in my ex’s little Jack Russell which amazed everyone since he will swear blind that he hates dogs. He got rather merry one night shall we say, took the little dog in his arms and climbed into the flower bed of one of the restaurants and danced with the dog in the window- the faces of those inside eating their dinner being somewhere between amusement and shock. My advice to anyone reading this young or old is- don’t waste energy being embarrassed by your parents- especially Irish parents- have a beer and watch the show, which is exactly what I did. I sat in the bar next door, watching my father dance in a flower bed with a very confused looking Jack Russell being jerked about.
The afternoon he arrives we take a stroll to the beach and several people say hello to him in the street- when I go to introduce him, I’m told, “We know Adrian, how are you mate?” To which my father just stands there looking slightly baffled, nodding politely.
“Who’s that then?” He asks me innocently when they leave. This is a regular occurrence during the week he’s here and I dread to think the alcahol consumption on his boys weekends over here since it seems to have blanked out any memory of meeting the locals. Whenever he has previously come to this little town, I’ve told him he can do what he likes, but specifically he is not allowed to tell anyone that we're related.
We eat in the steak restaurant in town, ordering two fillet steaks but when they arrive I nearly have a heart attack. I literally, have never seen a cut of steak so big on one plate. Whether the generous portion is due to him befriending ‘Paddy’ the Irish guy that runs the place is another question. The Irish are known for their ‘open arms’ mentality; put two Irish strangers together and within twenty minutes they’re best mates- suits me fine as I stare down at the mountain of meat on my plate. Funny enough, Paddy has lived in Essex at some point in his life- the Essex and the Irish get everywhere it seems…
The bar of this restaurant has a tradition where people write their names on the bar in marker ink, and Dad points out his name scrawled alongside various companions, one of which being ‘little Nick.’ Now little Nick wasn’t that little- he was my father's apprentice for many years, a really nice guy and came out here to Spain with my dad when they were painting the apartment a couple of years ago. He promptly fell in love with one of the waitresses from this particular restaurant, who to be fair, is particularly lovely- and little Nick sat at the bar goggle-eyed every night after they had finished painting. Dad told me how on the last night little Nick proceeded to get so drunk at the prospect of leaving in the morning, he fell off his bar stool and had to be carried home (he had to be carried to the airport and onto the plane pretty much too as a result of a head-splitting jaw-dropping hangover that ensued) never to see the beautiful waitress again.
Now if we’re talking about little Nick, there is one more story that has to be mentioned here. Nick used to walk with a bit of a limp- and Dad used to tease him, saying “Whoever gave you that leg, give it back.” He struggled with the ladders and the scaffolding slightly, but never complained and never said a word about my father’s teasing. Little Nick had been working for for about a year when he and his mother turned up at our door step. They were given a cup of tea and sat in the kitchen whereby little Nick’s mother solemnly said:
“We’re really sorry Adrian, we should have told you before, but the thing is, Nicks only got one leg.”
If I had one wish in this life, it would literally be to see my father’s face at that moment when Mrs-little Nick said that sentence.
It turns out that little Nick has had a prosthetic leg since he was born, but didn’t think it worth a mention when he took on a painting and decorating apprenticeship- up and down ladders, hopping around scaffolding. Perhaps an interesting profession to choose, perhaps not. Never the less, Dad didn’t stop the “give back that leg” jokes, in fact they took on new meaning and hilarity now that they were both in on the gag.
Anyway, back in España, we head off to the English bar after managing to tackle the huge steaks, and I decide to not mention the story of the burly bartenders that work here that paid me a 5am visit and scared the b-Jesus out of me. (See ‘Swedes and the Scantily Clad’…) He does however decide to wind up the burlier of the burley bartenders by asking for a coffee with his brandy. Now this may seem like quite a reasonable request, but if you have ever been a bartender, when you’ve taken that coffee machine apart, cleaned all the pieces and switched it off, it’s not going to make coffee for the Pope, let-alone my father. I’m not sure how the burlier of the burly bartenders is taking my father’s teasing as he goes on and on, using every coffee related joke, or worse, every lazy bartender and land-lord joke he knows- and I’m beginning to wonder whether he's going to receive a punch on the nose when I see him stumble off out the bar and down the road. Now before I have a chance to work out whether I’m supposed to follow him, he returns, with a plastic takeaway cup of coffee from another restaurant clutched triumphantly in his hand and sits at the bar with his brandy with a smile on his face. I watch the burlier of the burly bartenders to see if he is going to interpret his smile as smugness and therefore deliver him a flat nose. Dad proclaims loudly as he takes a sip; “aahhhh there’s nothing like a coffee with your brandy…mmmmm yum.” I resist the urge to punch him on the nose myself to save the burly bartender the trouble.
He meets a rather intoxicated fellow from Belfast who joins our ever -growing group, informing us that this evening, he has drank 27 pints. We are all suitable impressed at this statement. The Belfast accent is rather irritating with its distinctive twang- my dad has lived in England since he was a teenager so has lost the sharpness of it. This fellow, sadly has not.
I’m cleaning the bar at 7.30am but my father, being an even bigger party host than me, decides to invite everybody back to our apartment for an after party- there being a crate of beer in the fridge, although it’s probably important to mention here that it didn’t actually belong to either of us- my friend ‘trimmed’ had planted it there since he pretty much lives at mine and had decided by bringing a crate and leaving it in the fridge, my apartment was therefore more hospitable and ready for him any time of the day or night.
I’m not feeling the after-party and I tell Dad and his band of merry men that he’s collected like the pied piper on his way home from the pub, that regrettably I’m going to retire for the evening… Trimmed and my beautiful South African friend make a similarly sharp exit from the patio as my father and his Belfast buddy are beyond the point of being able to hold a coherent conversation.
My friends go off to the beach and told me the next day that they saw my father and his Belfast buddy stumbling along the beach- stopping to draw stuff in the sand. (!?) I probe him the next day and he’s quite indignant: “I wanted to go on the fecking walk on my tod.” Translation- he didn’t want company.
Dads told me before that he likes to go on evening beach walks (drunken beach stumbling perhaps a better description.) but I find it endearing for more than just comic reasons- my parents are divorced and me and my brothers always laugh incredulously at the fact we cannot imagine what they could have ever had in common in the first place- they’re so opposite. But hearing him talk about his love for an evening beach walk, how it makes him feel, I realize I’ve heard this speech before. My mum when she’s out here gets up every morning before any of us stir and goes for a long beach walk. And there it is- a perfect metaphor; they do walk on the same sand, but not at the same time, polar opposite, but there’s something there that connected them, however long ago it was.
Sometimes liking the same sand between your toes isn’t enough when you’re not walking on the same beach any more.
Then arrives my last night working on the beach bar. I have loved this job all summer and am actually sad that it’s the end of the season. Sitting on the sand before my shift I get a bit confused as to why I’m coming home- I’ve been offered work in two others bars and places to stay with friends because I hate staying on my own so if I want to stay, really I can. People say to me- why go home? You’ve finished uni, what have you got to go back for? I think it’s because for me, this place is a suspended reality- it doesn’t feel like real life. I don’t know whether that actually makes sense to anyone, but this town is a place that I speak a different language, I live barefoot or in flip flops, my make up bag disappears, I don’t have a pair of straighteners out here, people give me keys to bars and responsibility, I haven’t been clothes shopping all summer, eaten MacDonalds or even really seen any other franchise restaurant. I don’t think I particularly miss any of those things, but it’s a different life, and I like that I can go between the two.
So it’s my last night- and everybody comes down to the bar- I do my cocktail making thing and have the music really loud, I even have a request- from my father- “Melly, play that one, you know, ‘we do not speak English’ or something.”
"You mean 'We No Speak Americano' dad?”
"Yesss! That’s the one kido! Stick that record on for us."
It’s a usb stick, not a record but I digress. A fair few “la Melodia” cocktails are handed out and ‘We No Speak Americano’ played probably too many times but hey, everyone is dancing, and I’m looking around thinking one day, I’m going to have my own beach bar. And I mean it.
I close up around 3.30am and head to the English bar where some sort of lock-in is ensuing. Actually it’s not a lock-in but more of the-customers-won’t-go-home-so-I’m-still-here look on the burly bar tender’s face. Dad asks for a coffee and brandy. I wait for the black eye.
Luckily for him suddenly everyone think that’s a good idea and being outnumbered, the coffee machine is switched on- victory! We sit in the bar until 5.30am whereby my father invites everyone round to our apartment. Again. What amazes me is how everyone intends to drive there. Now this is a tiny Spanish village at nearly 6am, but driving when you can’t count the fingers in front of your eyes is a very very bad idea. (Also the fact that our apartment is a 45 seconds walk away slightly confuses me as to why everyone needed to drive there.) Any way, the usually Miller's Villa shenanigans ensue and I fall asleep after another, and one of the last, sunrises I will see in this beautiful town for a while…
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