The awful tale...part 2

Today was the last day of my holiday. This morning I went to a quiet spot at the end of the beach and started to write the whole sordid tale into my diary, until in a sudden fit of rage and melodrama I stood up, drew back my arm and flung my diary out to sea as far as I could throw it. Only to watch it circle three times and then float happily off towards the beach jam-packed with all of The Irishman’s friends and acquaintances. Jesus H Christ.

Now I am sitting in the airport in a cafe called ARS.

The next night – the night after the one I described in my last entry - he ignored me. He stood right next to where I was sitting by the bar with my mother and her boyfriend and looked psychotically engaged with his Spanish friends, getting them drinks and asking them questions and utterly refusing to acknowledge my existence. I know this trick because I’ve done it a million times with my best friend in an attempt to get rid of men that we are not remotely interested in.

Oh shit. I hadn’t even thought of it like that.

He went off to play a set. The barmaid, who I had noticed is in love with The Irishman and looked aghast when I had been chatting to him the night before, was now doing a happy little dance behind the bar. Panic was rising in my chest. Once again I had ruined everything by leaving just as things were getting good. I was an idiot! It was a disaster!

Then his set was over and he was standing opposite me at the bar. Finally he looked over and gave me a shamefaced little shrug and lift of the hand. I stood up and walked round to him.
‘Where did you get to last night?’ he asked, warily.
I babbled some crap about it being his fault for getting me so drunk. He sighed.
‘One step up, two steps back.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing, it’s a Bruce Springsteen song. Never mind. Come and meet my friends.’

He led me to a group of people standing by the doorway and immediately fell into deep conversation with a guy with dreadlocks. (When I saw that he was friends with a white man with dreadlocks I should have known no good could possibly come from the situation). The Irishman’s back was turned to me. Perhaps this was a test, to see how sociable I was and how well I would get along with his friends! I beamed at a short, wizened man whose head was a few inches from my elbow.
‘Hello!’ I said. His face contorted in hatred.
‘Who der fuck are you?’
Perhaps not.

I stood there for some time at the edge of the group smiling benignly with my arms hanging, like some random imbecile that had just wandered over out of nowhere. My mother and her boyfriend watched in bewilderment through the dry ice. Suddenly I felt mightly pissed-off and went back to where they were sitting.

‘No-one treats me like that. Ha!’ I said imperiously, on a vodka wave of triumph. My mother grabbed my arm.
‘I think we should go...now!’
‘What? Why?’
‘Ssssshhhh!’ Her face was pure panic. She gets melodramatic after a few drinks. ‘I can’t tell you here...but... we must leave!’ She started edging me away from the bar. When we got to a dark corner she explained.
‘It’s the barmaid! SHE WANTS TO BEAT YOU UP! As soon as you went to talk to The Irishman she went like this to his friend!’ My mother pulled a deranged face and did a mad little punching and strangling pantomime. ‘WE MUST LEAVE!’
Ptooey! Why should I go meekly and let Psycho Barmaid sink her claws into The Irishman? I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said about Bruce Springsteen. Surely that meant he liked me? I herded my family out of the door and bought another drink just along the bar from him, taking an excruciating amount of time with my change so that he would have to walk past me. Eventually he touched my arm and said:
‘Come on, come and talk to my friends. They’re nice people.’

So I followed him again, and again he neglected to introduce me to anyone and I stood like a moron until I got talking to a kindly Dutchman with a mullet and told him all about my trip to Amsterdam and how I'd meant to visit Anne Frank's house but instead just ended up staring at many different-shaped dildos in the sex museum. He seemed quite interested. I was a social success! Finally The Irishman deigned to talk to me. He was nice at first, saying that he’d asked one of his friends about getting me a job out there, but then he suddenly turned moody and whinged on in a fake Bob Dylan voice about ‘havin’ left a big bag of fuckin’ weed in my friend’s fuckin’ car’ etc etc etc.

Then Wizened Dwarf rocked up again and it turned out that he was one of The Irishman’s very good mates. His face was packed with 100,000 years of the bitterness of all humanity. I made another doomed attempt to befriend him.
‘I durn understand yur fuckin accent,’ he snarled.
Then he and the Irishman imitated my voice for a while, which was just starting to get my hackles up when we somehow got onto the subject of whether or not I could speak Spanish.
‘I can say: “Me gusta queso!”’ I said happily. This was an unfortunate choice of phrase, but by this time my brain had left the building and the vodka was running the show.
‘I bet he could sort you out some cheese HUR HUR HUR!’ Wizened Dwarf said nastily, pointing at The Irishman. The Irishman shifted his shoulders around and looked embarrassed.
‘Ah, how did I know you’d say that!’ he said, and then he and Wizened Dwarf started hurhurhuring into some endless bonhomie in-joke that might have been in Gaelic or frigging Silbo Gomero for all the sense it made to me, but I could the feel evil vibes emanating off them in waves. I’d like to say that at that point I lifted my nose into the air, said: ‘Oh how utterly hilarious your Wizened Dwarf friend is!’ in a dead voice and stalked haughtily out into the night. But I did not.

Nah. Instead I stayed there for the band’s next set, was molested by an unshakable Nigerian holidaymaker whose idea of a pick-up line was to rub himself excitedly against my leg and whisper ‘Come dahnce! Come dahhhhnce!!!’for about half an hour, and was entirely ignored for the rest of the night by The Irishman, who was more interested in hanging out in his mate The DJ’s box. Anyone who had a brain at this point could see that our story was on a downward trajectory, but somehow I’d managed to believe that he was punishing me for leaving the night before, and that it was something I perhaps had to endure for humiliating him. Ah, what a pile of wank.

And then I went back to the hotel and sent him a drunken message on Facebook. Oh no. It said:

“What did you mean, one step up, two steps back?

I´m very sorry I left last night without saying goodbye, it was just that I was very drunk and you´d disappeared and the band hadn´t come on and I was getting chatted up by some random and it was becoming a bore. I did want to stay but I didn't.

I am now sitting in my hotel getting eaten by mosquitoes and tomorrow I will be in the evil clutches of the fiddler and it is all your fault.

Goodbye.”

Oh no.

From here on it gets worse. Then better. Then much, much worse. I will tell you tomorrow.