Chapter 2

I bolt the door and lean my head against it, taking deep breaths. I will the memories to go away, but it doesn’t work, it never works.

Images of Valery play through my head like an old family movie and I know there’s nothing I can do but let it run. Memories of the time we met, that carefree summer when life was full of light and love, along with sea and sand. When we dreamed big and loved even bigger. When I would have followed Valery to the ends of the earth, long before he went somewhere I couldn’t follow him.

I push off from the door and go back to the table. A part of me says to put the rum back on the shelf, but I know how this will play out—the same way it always does—so I pour another glass and sit down, lighting another cigarette.

The images are replaced by those of us building our life here in Barcelona. Valery working in bars and me singing in them, being careful with our money, saving everything we have. The evenings off when we’d walk the streets, usually making our way here. Valery would always stop and look up at the old three-storey building for a while before turning to me with a light in his eyes, and declaring that this would be ours someday. The day I asked him to marry me, on my knees on the dragon stairway at the Park Güell, a place we visited often. I believed myself to be the luckiest man that had ever lived when he said yes.

The last set of memories are the ones which bring the most pain. Valery becoming sick, and the useless hope we clung to that everything would be well, that it was a short-term illness, until the day of the diagnosis. We married shortly after, foolishly thinking that the universe couldn’t split up two people as in love as we were, that it couldn’t be that cruel. But life doesn’t work that way. I close my eyes to blot out what I know is coming next, but it just heightens the tightness in my chest. It hurts too much, the loneliness and the loss of a future we will never get to have. You’d have thought that after ten years, the pain would have diminished, and in a way it has, as these days I can draw breath without the loss stabbing me through the heart. But sometimes, when I talk about Valery, it brings it all back up.

Smoke hazes round me as I pour another two fingers of rum. I knock this one back, the scorching in my throat matching the sears on my soul.

A flash of annoyance that the memories had been evoked plays through my thoughts, but I tamp that down. It wasn’t the guy’s fault, he was just being polite.

Why did I invite him to stay and drink? That’s the curious part of all this. I’m not in the habit of asking people to drink with me. In fact, in all the years since I opened the bar, I’ve only done it on a handful of occasions when the thought of being alone became too much to bear, and then they were usually staff, musicians, or acquaintances. Never with a stranger. Admittedly, he was a very handsome stranger. If his light brown hair and pale skin didn’t mark him as northern European, his awkwardness and politeness did. His English accent had sent shivers up my spine. He looked serious, a scholar or academic maybe, though not nerdy or delicate. But none of this explains why I targeted him. Why, when the bar was closing, did I grab a bottle of my finest rum and invite him to stay?

Maybe it was something in the way he tilted his head that drew my attention as I glanced across the room. Or it could’ve been the look in his eyes: as if life had beaten him, and he was sure there was more to come but couldn’t do a damn thing about it. I don’t know if these can properly describe the pull I felt tonight, the need to connect with him somehow. Not that it worked, as I ended up practically kicking him out, and now here I am, drinking alone and wallowing in self-pity.

I know from experience that no good can come of this, so I stub out my cigarette and stand. It’s time to go to bed.

Habit ensures that I empty and clean the ashtray so the smell doesn’t linger. Smoking isn’t allowed in public places, but I figure that with it being after hours, it isn’t public anymore. I leave cleaning the glasses until the morning, though.

I lock up and take the stairs to the two-storey apartment above the bar. My home. Technically, it has two floors, but the upper one, a sizable loft space, is largely storage and I rarely go up there. It was going to be our bedroom... mine and Valery’s. Another project he had grand plans for. One day, after he’d decided this was our building, but before it had come on the market, he’d talked the previous owner into letting us have a look around. He’d stood in the large loft and, with his usual ebullience, described exactly how we should have it. A plan that was refined over the following months until I knew every detail. When I finally secured the building, a year after Valery left me alone in this world, the bar I could create for him—that part of his vision I could do. But not the bedroom. I was unable to stand the oppressive weight of sleeping alone every night in a space where we were supposed to celebrate our love. So, I remain living all on one level and sleeping in a smaller bedroom.

I run the tap for a glass of water, hoping it means I won’t wake up feeling like I’ve drunk several glasses of rum. The pipes grumble, a reminder I need to get the plumbing looked at, especially as the damp patch on the wall seems to have grown slightly. Maybe tomorrow.

As I pull my T-shirt over my head, the stranger’s handsome face comes back to me, or rather, how his honeyed eyes had looked like liquid gold when he’d told me that running the bar was romantic.

I have no idea what he meant by that, but the way he said it stirred up memories I needed to be alone for. We only get one chance at love in this life, and I don’t need a reminder that I’ve had my turn.

I slip between the sheets, enjoying the coolness, just perfect now in spring, before the heat of the summer renders sleep almost impossible. There was a lost look in his eyes, and I wonder if there’s more to his story than he told me. As I drift off to sleep, I wonder if he’ll come back to the bar again. The thought fosters a small seed of hope that he will. After all, I never got to ask his name.