Even More Ketchup than Salsa: The Final Dollop by Cawley Joe

Author:Cawley, Joe [Cawley, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joe Cawley
Published: 2013-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

February is Carnival season in Tenerife, a time when half the island participates in the giant parades, all-day and all-night drinking and incessant partying, and the other half complains about the noise and lack of productivity. February 1995 saw Joy and me in no frame of mind to party. Joy’s mood was sullen. She had long given up on Steve making good on his promise to summon her back for a life in the UK – God knows how many other girls he’d been with since he’d left our sub-tropical shores. My spirits were clouded too: even though she had stopped waiting for Steve, there still didn’t feel like a whole lot of hope for a reunion between Joy and me.

One shiny ray of light was that Wayne was back with us again, our pot-smoking, gas engineer who in our early days at the Smugglers had come to our rescue after Frank’s potentially disastrous tinkering with the gas tank. Wayne wanted nothing more out of life than a smooth path and a laugh with his mates. He had no aspirations, no self-delusion and called a spade whatever he damn well wanted to call it.

Since the last time he’d been over, he’d dumped his girlfriend and had decided to meander between Wolverhampton and El Beril as the mood took him. Pushy yet sociable, he always found some sort of work, be it fixing expats’ cars, mending household appliances or even taming explosive gas canisters.

In his infinite wisdom, and as is the way with boys, Wayne had decided that all I needed to get out of the doldrums was a good night out. Carnival was the obvious opportunity, but his plans involved one element that worried me. He’d also decided that a night out was what Joy needed too and so he’d arranged for Joy and Sammy to meet us when we got there. The prospect of seeing Joy dancing or being hit on by someone else was not overly appealing but I realised it was something I was going to have to get used to.

Wayne had made no effort to hide his sadness when Joy and I split up and although we’d now been apart for almost ten months he’d not given up in his campaign to get us back together. I, however, considered it a very remote possibility. Naturally, Joy was upset that her plans for an easy life with Steve in his English mansion had fallen through, but there had been no signs that she wanted to try and continue where we’d left off, even though she had been decidedly more friendly with me recently, and I with her.

There was another major drawback to Wayne’s plan. It involved fancy dress, which was pretty much compulsory for anybody attending Carnival. I have never seen the appeal of dressing up as something you’re not, then trying to remain in that role for hours at a time. Yes, I know you call this theatre, but being a contented introvert, my place

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