Houlihan's Wake

  #1

  Hamish disburses his allotted notes,

  thrills to the skill of the tenor sax beside him,

  follows his bandleader’s instructions to stick to the score.

  #2

  Hamish glimpses Dolores. Has she changed?

  Hair bleached to a lighter charcoal,

  self-composed, at ease in town clothes,

  she slips beyond his vision.

  #3.

  Hamish's notes slide into urgency,

  playing for Dolores,

  calling her to his orbit.

  #4

  Hamish has become technique,

  Dolores forgotten.

  Now the drummer plays off him,

  indulging in riffs unheard.

  Band members swap expectant looks,

  Hamish oblivious.

  #5,6,7.

  The players urge each other on

  with twists of improvisation.

  Tenor sax dives deeper into the music and leads it

  to places new. Hamish follows him,

  and then is following no-one,

  rearranging the tropes of the genre to outline new possibilities and then explore them: no longer technique

  but raw feeling.

  Their music stops rather than ends. Applause takes its place.

  The musicians stare

  at each other,

  exhausted,

  elated,

  astonished.

  Hamish threads his way to Dolores. She is not alone.

  He takes her aside, implores her.

  She snaps.

  Sorry. Just not my type.

  The world stops turning.

  His blood has frozen in his veins.

  His liver has turned to lead.

  His head hurts.

  The bandleader approaches Hamish

  like a business-touting Charon.

  Hell to pay for disobedience.

  We have to talk.

  Hell’s gondolier beams.

  Let’s get us some beer,

  fix you some solo time

  for our Oaxaca gig.

  Hamish is back, in a world that turns

  towards light.

  Dolores

  He knows she is there.

  The air is heavy with the aroma of coastal flowers and the Pacific humidity he associates with Dolores. The guitar awakes to Hamish's touch as he tunes it. The audience looks bigger than those he is used to.

  Hamish felt very lucky when the leader told the band they would be playing the Jazz Festival at Zuntema, just along the coast from Playa Chisme, where he had met Dolores. He was sure she would come, for the rare treat of live jazz, if not for him. She had captivated Hamish by her easy sociability, by her height, which matched his, by her being at home in her own skin even amongst the lost souls of Playa Chisme.

  Hamish, though, failed to prise Dolores away from the surfer. Four long months have passed since then: plenty of time for Dolores to have grown out of him, or tired of him.

  The act before the Oaxaca Jazz Ensemble is playing. Its music barely creeps into Hamish’s awareness. He thinks of the music the Ensemble is to play, and suffuses it into his mind with the essence and the allure of Dolores.

  Now it is they who are playing. Hamish produces his allotted notes. He would love to follow the tenor sax beside him into the heights and beyond them, but his instructions are to stick to the score and not try to show off his technical skills. Those skills had brought him invitations first to jam with the Ensemble and then to join them, an honour for a musician barely out of his teens that recognised his Oaxaqueno status despite frozen-north birth and features. Hamish is happy to do what they tell him.

  At the end of their second number, he catches sight of Dolores. Has she changed? Her hair has bleached to a lighter brown. She is as self-composed as ever, at ease in town clothes. She slips out of his vision amongst the families replenishing plates and glasses.

  Into their third number; his playing takes on an urgency. He is playing for Dolores, of course, calling to her, urging her into his orbit. By the fourth number, he is not showcasing his technique, he is his technique. Dolores is forgotten. The drummer starts to play off him, echoing Hamish’s chords in new riffs. Expectant looks are exchanged amongst the band, though Hamish is oblivious to them. They urge each other on with flickers of improvisation. The tenor sax dives deeper into the music and leads it in a new direction. Hamish follows him and then is following no-one, rearranging the tropes of the genre to outline new possibilities and then explore them. This is no longer technique but raw feeling.

  The music stops rather than ends. Applause takes its place. The band stare at each other, exhausted, elated, astonished.

  Hamish is back in his own head. He remembers Dolores. Now is the time to find her. He sets his instrument down at the edge of the stage and takes the steps that lead off it. High-fives and back-slaps mark his passage through the crowd. He has never experienced a reception like it. But where is Dolores?

  The next band is tuning up when he spots her. She is not alone. Hamish recognises four of the group from the Playa Chisme summer. The surfer is not amongst them. Tomas waves him over. Greetings are effusive, congratulations sincere. But it is an age before he can get Dolores to one side, out of earshot of the others. He asks her to come to Playa Chisme with him, alone, now. She can’t. He insists. She won’t. He cannot believe her reluctance. He entreats her.

  “Look, Hamish, you’re a nice guy but you’re just not my type.”

  Hamish’s world stops turning. His blood has frozen in his veins. His liver has turned to lead. His head hurts.

  The figure of Julio comes into Hamish’s peripheral vision. Now he is going to get hell for his disobedience. Julio nods at Dolores.

  “Hamish,” he says, “we have to talk”.

  But the band leader is beaming.

  “Let’s get some beer and fix you some solo time for the gig in Puerto Desaparecido.”

  Hamish is back in a turning world. He is starting to feel good.

  [end]

  Dog Day Sundown

  Far from winter and work, the sun still sets

  on a perfect, dog-free bay in southern Mexico.

  Filaments of eye-candy cloud

  squeeze the horizon into layers,

  then part the curtain on the evening’s stars:

  Mars and Venus, crescent waxing moon.

  A watcher on the beach sifts sand,

  peers at what thoughtless fingers raise:

  a leather collar, cut sharp, stained dark,

  a name engraved - “Tigre, Posada Las Americas”.

  Inside the town, once clouds reclaim the night,

  the mayor sleeps deep and sound.

  She’s paved the road outside her house, raised taxes,

  “cleansed” the beach. A second term may come.

  Mushrooms

  The Bulgarian Army is on the brink of making its first killing in Mexico, and I am the designated victim.

  Goran has me pinned against the outside wall of the hut. I feel his military knife pressing on my neck. Both of us are shaking. His pungent odour is exacerbated by the heat of the morning and by his anger. He is not one of our country's new, deodorant-using generation.

  “You mafia-ridden lot,” he yells, “think you can buy anyone: referees, players, journalists … It’s all money with you, Ivaylo Ivanov and your dirty Levski team! Filthy money! No honour, no tradition!”

  Even in my precarious position, there is no way I am going to let that pass.

  “What?! Your team belongs to the army that never won a war! What kind of tradition is that? Where’s the honour in breaking your opponents’ legs, eh?”

  Goran’s knife presses harder against my neck, so I shut up. Goran has not sharpened the knife recently.

  The silence is filled by Beethoven played at full volume on the sound system.

  A door slams.


  “What on earth are you doing, killing each other before breakfast? How can I afford to pay a cook to make the best chilaquiles on Playa Chisme if you’re dead before you can buy them?”

  The calm voice comes out of a short, slim woman who has emerged from the kitchen hut on to the sand. The aroma of sun lotion and grilling peppers comes with her. Milena shakes her blonde curls and fixes her green eyes on us.

  “Sit down and eat something before I lose my temper. And stop arguing about bleeding football!”

  She pushes past us to the tiny computer that controls the sound system, and tries without success to turn the music up.

  Goran’s eyes bulge like a puffer fish out of water. Nevertheless, he finally moves the knife away from my neck, turns away from me. Then he turns back, grabs the hem of my Levski Sofia replica shirt and slashes a tear into it.

  I stare at him with even more hatred than usual. He smirks as he saunters to a table under an awning over the sand, and sits down with two other breakfast regulars, Stanko and Yulia. He looks at the skinny man of indeterminate age.

  “Don’t you start,” he warns.

  Yulia laughs. She gestures enquiringly toward Milena.

  “Botev Plovdiv,” says Goran, “Second Division”.

  The two of them laugh again. After a few seconds, Stanko joins in.

  Milena comes back from serving customers on the beach to find me standing transfixed outside the kitchen door, glaring at Goran’s thick back.

  “Will you have some coffee, then?”

  I don't answer.

  “Take the weight off your feet, and I’ll fix you some breakfast.”

  She leads me to the main table, where the other Bulgarians are sitting. I fall into a chair, reach for Stanko’s packet of cigarettes, take one, settle it in my mouth and look around for matches.

  Goran proffers his lighter. I snatch it and light my cigarette.

  We sit and watch the day grow hotter.

  Brahms is drowning the noise of the surf beating on the beach when Milena brings a plate of tacos to our table.

  “What’s inside these?” Goran asks.

  “Minced beef in half of them,” Milena answers, “potato in the others.”

  “Any mushrooms?” Yulia asks, opening the one on the top of the pile.

  “No,” says Milena, “not the season.”

  “It’s the season at home,” Goran says.

  Stanko swats Yulia’s probing fingers away from the pile of tacos, then from his thigh, sets out the four plates Milena has brought, and divides the food among them.

  “I know the best place for mushrooms,” says Yulia, licking a finger and gazing at Stanko. “A certain wood in a field on the slopes of Mt. Vitosha.”

  I set her straight.

  “Vitosha’s rubbish for mushrooms.”

  Then I turn my attention to Stanko. “Why have you given Yulia the extra taco? I’m the one with the right to be hungry.”

  Back to setting Yulia straight: “Everyone knows you’ve got to get well away from the city to find decent mushrooms.”

  Stanko ignores my comment about the tacos.

  “When my brother was mayor of Plovdiv,” he says, looking disinterestedly at Yulia's weighty breasts, “the best mushrooms were in the hills near there. These days the ones on Vitosha are better.”

  We have all heard about Stanko’s brother before.

  “Since when do you know anything about mushrooms?” Goran bellows at him. “Before you came to Mexico, you’d never been outside a city!”

  Goran turns his hard eyes on Yulia, then grins.

  “Give Ivaylo the extra taco, Yulia. It’ll save you putting on any more weight. And listen to what he has to say about mushrooms. The fool doesn’t know much about anything worthwhile, but he knows a lot about mushrooms.”

  That is my cue. I tell them in detail how to recognise the poisonous ones, and what the poison each one contains will do to the human body. They should know by now; I've told them often enough.

  The aroma of coffee is strong. Yulia gets up and waddles into the hut to see what has happened to it.

  I tell them about the recipes my mother and my mother's mother have made over the years with the mushrooms I have picked for them.

  Stanko gets up and goes into the hut to see what has happened to the coffee and to Yulia.

  I have barely started explaining the role of mushrooms in Bulgarian history when there is a commotion.

  Stanko backs out of the kitchen with a bottle of mescal in one hand. He uses the other hand to protect his face from the slaps Yulia is aiming at him.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, as though I cannot see. Why do they have to interrupt me now?

  Yulia turns to me, pointing at Stanko. “This bastard,” she says, “was pouring mescal into your coffee.”

  “Very kind of him.” It doesn't happen often.

  Yulia turns to the others.

  “For heaven’s sake, we’re having breakfast. Everyone knows Ivaylo can’t take liquor at breakfast.”

  “Who says I can’t?”

  “I just wanted to divert his attention from mushrooms. You know, shut him up a bit. Give us all a rest.”

  “Give him liver failure, more like it.”

  “Why do you drink that stuff anyway?” Goran cuts in. “Tastes like lighter fuel. What’s wrong with rakia?”

  “Yeah, right,” spits Yulia. “Where in Mexico is he going to get Bulgarian liquor? Never mind in a village in the State of Acaxao? It’s not exactly the centre of the world, is it?”

  “Never heard of air carriers?” asks Stanko. “My brother keeps me supplied, and Ivaylo can buy a few bottles off me any time he wants.”

  “Like I do,” says Goran. His large hands move instinctively to lay over his money belt.

  “As a matter of fact, you have a slight debt towards me in that respect. You owe me for thirty-seven bottles of the finest Bulgarian rakia.” Stanko's lips offer a smug smile over his bared teeth. He knows he doesn't have the physique to take on Goran. None of us does.

  “It just so happens,” I enunciate, since I know they can be slow, “I prefer mescal.”

  Goran backs me up. “Better taste, better immediate effect, less awful after-effect. Plus you don’t have to pay through the nose for it to someone who thinks he’s doing you a favour.”

  “And since we’re in Mexico,” Yulia points out, “we might as well drink what the Mexicans drink.”

  “And since we’re in the European Union, I suppose we have to eat over-cooked vegetables and plastic bread?” Goran has worked in Britain.

  “We’re in Mexico now, not the European Union,” I point out.

  This does not wash with Stanko. “Bulgaria is in the European Union. That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it? To get away from all that.”

  “All what?” asks Yulia, stroking her left nipple.

  “All that commercialism,” Stanko retorts, looking her in the eyes. “The rat race. The pursuit of money at all costs.”

  “I’m just here to have a good time,” I tell them, as though anyone could have any other reason. Apart from spiritual development, of course.

  “Stanko is right. Bulgaria isn’t what it was.” Yulia sounds homesick, timesick.

  Goran taunts her. “Yeah. It’s no longer poor, backward and isolated. Damned good thing.”

  I can't let him get away with that. “Isolated was good. We didn’t have all those foreigners.”

  “Oh, no? Only the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks, the Germans, the Russians, and whoever else chose to subjugate us from time to time.”

  I can feel my spirits recovering. “Those people taught us things. This lot …”

  “Which lot?” Goran senses another stimulating row brewing under the Pacific sun.

  “Asians, Africans … they take our jobs and they don’t want to work.”

  “Was that why you left Bulgaria?”

  “No. I gave up my job so I could come here and pursue my sp
iritual path. And they try and steal our women.”

  “Who was that lady I saw you with last night? Margarita? Carmencita?”

  “What time, precisely?” It could have been either.

  “Never mind.”

  “Anyway, they’re dirty. And they have different beliefs. You people have been away so long you probably don’t know that some Vietnamese wanted to build a temple. Can you imagine that? A Hindu temple in the middle of Sofia?”

  “Buddhist, maybe. Anyway, now that we’re in the European Union, we have to respect freedom of religion.” Goran can be really infuriating.

  Stanko chips in. “What about freedom from religion?”

  Yulia is with him on that. “Yeah. Who needs gods?” Apart from her.

  I'm not going to let them divert me. “No, I mean freedom from their religion. There’s nothing wrong with ours!”

  “We’re lucky the Mexicans don’t care too much what we believe.” So can Stanko.

  “If Montezuma and that lot hadn’t let those Spaniards just walk in, they’d still be running the show!”

  Goran thinks he's being funny.

  “Look, joking apart – ”

  “Who’s joking?”

  Stanko starts to lecture. “Once the dictatorship collapsed, our fellow citizens went abroad in droves, in search of a better life. They worked like crazy and in return got treated like dirt.”

  “Exactly. So we’ve got to show the foreign scum in our own country that we are the masters now.” That was telling them.

  “No. We’ve got to treat them the way we wish we’d been treated.” Goran is going to hurt himself if he falls off that high horse.

  “Rubbish! Some of them can’t even speak Bulgarian. What can they ask for?”

  “You heartless swine!”

  “Blind fool!”

  “Fascist!”

  “Traitor!”

  It's obvious to everyone that I am right, but Goran’s hands are around my throat, pressing. I have a nasty sense of dejà-vu. His face is crimson, his eyes seem about to launch themselves out of his head. He moves one hand from my aching throat to his own chest. His pupils roll backwards to leave only the whites of his eyes visible. Then the lids close over them. No sound comes from him as he falls to the sand.

  Milena’s scream rises above Beethoven. For the first time in several days, she turns the music off.

  Stanko bends over Goran and tugs at his CSKA shirt. Yulia’s voice stops him.

  “Leave him alone!”