Read Online More Ketchup Than Salsa - Confessions of a Tenerife Barman by Joe Cawley - Free Book Online Page B

it’s like when you’ve done a long day and you just want a drink by yourselves but you can’t get rid of the last people in the bar and they keep on talking to you like you’ve nothing better to do and no home to go to and you can’t get a word in so you’re stuck there listening and nodding and asleep on your feet just wishing they’d go away.’
    I looked at Joy and then back at the last two people in the bar, nodding as Betty continued.
    ‘We get it all the time, and we’d never do it to anyone else. We know how you feel, isn’t that right, Eric? Eric!’ She jolted him with a sharp elbow to the ribs. Eric tried to respond, then tried to look at his wife but failed on both accounts and contented himself with some more general lolling.
    ‘We’ll just have one more for the road. Cointreau and tonic and whisky and water.’ Betty waved a lipstick-smeared brandy glass at me. Every finger was decorated with gold and a spectrum of glimmering stones.
    I’d never met a Blackpool landlady before but Betty seemed to epitomise the fading holiday town – tastelessly decorated, depressing and dated. In the conversation that followed, it emerged that most of her family seemed to have either ripped her off or else befallen some tragic consequence after having spent time living and working in the guest house, or hotel as Betty preferred to call it. There were suicides, muggings, and attempted murders galore, not to mention all kinds of infidelity. I made a mental note never to visit Blackpool’s version of The Bates Motel.
    Eric, in a moment of extreme swaying, toppled backwards off his stool, narrowly missing the edge of a table.
    ‘I think he’s had enough now,’ said Betty as if this was her husband’s equivalent of fetching his coat.
    While Joy balanced the money against the till reading, I washed the remaining glasses and began to sweep and mop.
    ‘The reading might be a bit out,’ I shouted. ‘I think I cocked it up when I came out for a break.’ Indeed the till was out, by exactly one-hundred-and-fifty-million pesetas. ‘A simple error due to an over-sensitive ‘zero’ button,’ I explained.
    We switched off the lights and stood in the doorway surveying our bar. All the furniture, the upholstery, the ceiling fans, the bar pumps, the bottles, the kitchen equipment, the washing machine, the urinals. I’d never owned a urinal before. It felt good.
    But it still hadn’t fully sunk in that this was our business, and it was entirely up to the four of us whether we succeeded or failed. Last week we were minions of the fish market, this week we had entered the world of entrepreneurs. We had been brave enough to trade a comfortable, albeit uninspiring, life for a ‘new improved’ model in a land of eternal spring. We wanted to tell somebody, but at 3 a.m. as we walked home hand in hand, all was silent.
    Joy went straight to bed while I sat on the patio, beer in hand gazing at the most vivid sky I had ever seen. With no light pollution, the velvet black was awash with blinking stars. It seemed infinitely clearer, as though we had been looking at it through dirty glasses in England. This clarity extended further, though. We had now chosen a path and were actually on it rather than dreaming about it. This was a success in itself.
    Yes, we had made mistakes, some more than others, and yes, there was still a mountain to climb before we knew what we were doing, but we had made a start. Result – 32 people fed, zero poisoned.
    My mind was whirring with thoughts of what had gone on that night and what we had to do tomorrow. I started to make a mental list.
    I awoke to the sensation of beer racing down my leg, the bottle tilted on my lap. I left the warm night air and flopped on top of the sheets next to Joy. It seemed that within minutes the alarm was frantically trying to stir us both to life. For a moment my brain clicked into autopilot, preparing to go through the rituals of a normal market day: reluctantly