Counting

He looked down at his forearm. Each hair was enveloped by a tiny bead of sweat. Barely half a minute had passed since he'd rubbed the moisture away with the palm of his other hand. 27 times; 14 on the left, 13 on the right. You couldn’t wipe out of turn. That wouldn’t be right. The only other customer on the terrace looked away, finding something interesting in the deserted Camino de Malaga. Johnny Byng made it 28. Counting. He’d always counted. “Everything can be counted, except what really counts”. Who was that? Oh yeah, Billy Bragg. Someone at the bank had that song played in Spearmint one particularly raucous bonus day. Paid the guy on the decks. Peppermint Patty stopped gyrating for all of ten seconds and then busked as best as she could. Guy Threep threw a a bundle of notes on the stage and yelled it was “worth a monkey to see your monkey”. Badda heard Guy had gone in his late forties, a few years ago. Prostate cancer. Passed away whilst taking some pomegranate-diet miracle cure on Ibiza, perhaps he’d just tried it too late.

29. He looked at his watch. Just gone 3. A yellow Correos van buzzed by, a postman on his way out of town to have lunch in the gloomy interior of a roadside venta. Anything to get out of the heat. Johnny Byng took off his Wayfarer IIs, gave the other customer a stare. They looked away. A guiri then. Any Spaniard would have stared back. A local would have started a conversation – with the word for ‘and’.

“¿Y?”

You had to wonder why someone would sit on the sunny side of the street in the afternoon. The midday sun wasn’t what drained all but mad dogs and Englishmen in Spain. Two ‘til four was the time people stayed closeted behind lowered blinds and locked doors. “Dos a cuatro”: Byng had never heard that used in the same way the French did “Cinq à Sept”, but they could have, no doubt. He put the sunglasses back on, he’d worn them long before Tom did in “Rain Main”. Alec De Pfeffel tried to make that nickname stick among the traders, before “Badda”. He put a stop to it by setting fire to Alec’s blond mop. It had turned out to be a wig after all; ashes before anyone found the fire extinguisher. Guy Threep shouted out “Badda-Bing, Badda-Boom!’ and that at least had stayed.

30. Nearly missed. He’d give up at 60. that would half-an-hour measured out in something a little more substantial than coffee-spoons. A handful of hair. He remembered his hand in someone else’s hair. Remembered the glistening on coarser hairs a long time ago. Better not to think about things like that. Coffee came and went on Byng’s table and the other customer’s. Every one of the other four tables was both closer to Byng’s and empty. Definitely a guiri. Her back was to the street, but she had kept her sunglasses on. Looked like Aviator knock-offs, but she sat too far away to tell.

40 came and went. The woman looked desultarily at her phone, put it back in her bag rather than leave it on the table. Was she waiting for someone? At 55, she adjusted her position on the plastic chair and Byng almost forgot 56 when he thought she was getting up to leave. He wondered if she would speak, say the awkward “Hasta Luego” that all foreigners like them failed to pronounce completely correctly. Everyone says it, it’s not polite to leave a bar or even a shop without saying it. Just as it’s rude not to reply with the local corruption of “adios”, that is “A-nasal noise- ee-o”!

On 59 the woman stood up, she looked from side to side. There was something vaguely familiar. She was approaching Byng’s table. He forgot 60. The woman removed her sunglasses,

‘Mr Byng,’ she said. ‘I think you might be my father...’

******

Footnote: A guiri is what the Andalusians call a foreigner. It's about as disrespectful as they believe "Spaniard" to be, which is quite a lot.