LITMIR.BIZ

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now,’ he said. ‘We’ll be locking up in five minutes. There’s nothing left to do here…you should go home.’

      ‘That man who was here earlier, one of the waiters said he was outside. Are you sure he’s gone?’

      ‘I’m sure,’ said the manager.

      ‘I’ll let myself out of the side door,’ she said, giving him one of her hard, professional looks.

      He backed off. Consuelo was sorry. He was a good man, who knew when a person needed help and also when that help was unacceptable. What was going on inside Consuelo was too personal to be sorted out in an after-hours chat between proprietor and manager. This wasn’t about unpaid bills or difficult clients. This was about…everything.

      She went back to the card. It belonged to a clinical psychologist called Alicia Aguado. Over the last eighteen months Consuelo had made six appointments with this woman and failed to turn up for any of them. She’d given a different name each time she’d made these appointments, but Alicia Aguado had recognized her voice from the first call. Of course she would. She was blind, and the blind develop other senses. On the last two occasions Alicia Aguado had said: ‘If ever you have to see me, you must call. I will fit you in whenever—early morning or late at night. You must realize that I am always here when you need me.’ That had shocked Consuelo. Alicia Aguado knew. Even Consuelo’s iciest professional tone had betrayed her need for help.

      The hand reached for the bottle and refilled the glass. The whisky vaporized into her mind. She also knew why she wanted to see this particular psychologist: Alicia Aguado had treated Javier Falcón. When she’d run into him in the street, it had been like a reminder. But a reminder of what? The ‘fling’ she’d had with him? She only called it a fling because that’s what it looked like from the outside—some days of dinners and wild sex. But she’d broken it off because…She writhed in her chair at the memory. What reason had she given him? Because she was hopeless when in love? She turned into somebody else when she got into a relationship? Whatever it was, she’d invented something unanswerable, refused to see him or answer his calls. And now he was back like an extra motivation.

      She hadn’t been able to ignore a recent and more worrying psychological development, which had started to occur in the brief moments when she wasn’t working with her usual fierce, almost manic, drive. When distracted or tired at the end of the day sex would come into her mind, but like a midnight intruder. She imagined herself having new and vital affairs with strangers. Her fantasies drifted towards rough, possibly dangerous men and assumed pornographic dimensions, with herself at the centre of almost unimaginable goings on. She’d always hated porn, had found it both disgustingly biological and boring, but now, however much she tried to fight it with her intelligence, she was aware of her arousal: saliva in her mouth, the constriction of her throat. And it was happening again, now, even with her mind apparently engaged. She kicked back her chair, tossed Aguado’s card into the gaping hole of her handbag, lunged at her cigarettes, lit up and paced the office floor, smoking too fast and hard.

      These imaginings disgusted her. Why was she thinking about such trash? Why not think about her children? Her three darling boys—Ricardo, Matías and Darío—asleep at home in the care of a nanny. In the care of a nanny! She had promised that she would never do that. After Raúl, her husband, their father, had been murdered she had been determined to give them all her attention so that they would never feel the lack of a parent. And look at her now—thinking of fucking while they were at home in another person’s care. She didn’t deserve to be a mother. She tore her handbag off the desk. Javier’s card fluttered to the floor.

      She wanted to be out in the open, breathing the rain-rinsed air. The five or six shots of The Macallan she’d drunk meant that she had to walk up to the Basilica Macarena to get a taxi. To do this she had to pass the Plaza del Pumarejo, where a bunch of drunks and addicts hung out all day, every day, and well into the night. The plaza, under a canopy of trees still dripping from the earlier storm, had a raised platform with a closed kiosk at one end and at the other, near the shuttered Bodega de Gamacho, a group of a dozen or so burntout cases.

      The air was cool around Consuelo’s bare legs, which were numbed by the whisky. She had not considered how obtrusive her peach-coloured satin suit would be under the street lamps. She walked behind the kiosk and along the pavement by the old Palacio del Pumarejo. Some of the group were standing and boozing, gathered around a man who was talking, while others slumped on benches in a stupor.

      The wiry central figure in a black shirt open to the waist was familiar to Consuelo. His talk to this unsavoury audience was more of an oration, because he had a politician’s way with words. He had long black hair, eyebrows angled sharply into his nose and a lean, hard, pockmarked face. She knew why the group around him hung on his words and it had nothing to do with the content. It was because under those satanic eyebrows he had very bright, light green eyes, which stared out of his dark face, alarming whoever they settled on. They gave the powerful impression of a man who had quick access to a blade. He drank from a bottle of cheap wine, which hung by his side with his forefinger plugged into its neck.

      A month ago, while Consuelo was waiting to cross the road at a traffic light, he’d approached her from behind and muttered words of such obscenity that they’d entered her mind like a shiv. Consuelo had remonstrated loudly when it happened. But, unlike the usual perpetrators, who would slink off into the crowds of shoppers, ignoring her, he’d got up close and silenced her with those green eyes and a quick wink, that made her think he knew something about her that she, herself, did not.

      ‘I know your sort,’ he’d said, and touched the corner of his mouth with the point of his tongue.

      His bravado had paralysed her vocal cords. That and the horrible little kiss he’d blown her, which found its way to her neck like a horsefly.

      Consuelo, distracted by these memories, had slowed to a halt. A member of the group spotted her and jerked his head in her direction. The orator stepped towards the railing holding the bottle up, letting it dangle from his forefinger.

      ‘Fancy a drink?’ he said. ‘We haven’t got any glasses, but I’ll let you suck it off my finger if you want.’

      A low, gurgling laugh came from the group, which included some women. Startled, Consuelo began walking again. The man jumped off the raised platform. The steel tips on the heels of his boots hammered the cobbles. He blocked her path and started to dance an extremely suggestive Sevillana, with much pelvic thrusting. The group backed him up with some flamenco clapping.

      ‘Come on, Doña Consuelo,’ he said. ‘Let’s see you move. You look as if you’ve got a decent pair of legs on you.’

      She was shocked to hear him use her name. Terror slashed through her insides, tugging something strangely exciting behind it. Muscles quivered in the backs of her thighs. Disparate thoughts barged into each other in her mind. Why the hell had she put herself in such a position? She wondered how rough his hands would be. He looked strong—potentially violent.

      The sheer perversity of these thoughts jolted her back to the reality. She had to get away from him. She veered off down a side street, walking as fast as her kitten heels would permit on the cobbles. He was behind her, steel tips leisurely clicking.

      ‘Fucking hell, Doña Consuelo, I only asked you for a dance,’ he shouted after her, a mocking inflexion on her title. ‘Now you’re leading me astray down this dark alley. For God’s sake, have some self-respect, woman. Don’t go showing your eagerness so early on. We’ve barely met, we haven’t even danced.’

      Consuelo kept going, breathing fast. All she had to do was get to the end of the street, turn left and she’d be at the gates of the old city and there would be traffic and people…a taxi back to her real life at home in Santa Clara. An alley appeared on her left, she saw the lights of the main road through the buildings leaning into each other. She darted down it. Shit, the cobbles were wet and all over the place. It was too dark and her heels were slipping. She wanted to scream when his hand finally landed on her shoulder, but it was like in those dreams where the need to yell the neighbourhood awake produced only a strangled whimper. He pushed her towards the wall,

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