Things That Happen to You in Barcelona When You're Thirty by Llucia Ramis

Author:Llucia Ramis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barcelona Digital Editions
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Expulsion

You know your life has changed when, after spending all day trying to put off going home, you arrive outside your apartment after ten at night and check whether there’s still a light on. The light is on. Shit, you say to yourself. And you plod slowly up the stairs in the hope that the magician might have accidentally left the light on before he went out. I would have given anything for the magician not to have been there. But I’m not even through the door when he asks me, “Where have you been all day? Your mother was worried!”

My mother? I drop my keys in the hall and I plug in my cell phone to charge it. It has run out of battery after the phone call with Andreu.

“My mother?” I ask out loud with not much enthusiasm.

“Yes, she called you twice.”

This can’t be happening. I can’t believe the magician answered the landline. My parents call me religiously every Sunday night; one of them uses the phone in the lounge and the other uses the phone in the hall, and we have a three-way conversation. They usually call around nine or nine thirty. It is now ten twenty. I grab the cordless phone from the lounge and dial my parents’ number without even looking at him. He’s only been here three days and he already has the nerve to answer the phone and chat to my parents.

As if he was reading my thoughts, he tries to justify himself as I wait for my mum to pick up the phone. “I picked up the phone the second time it rang because I thought it might be important. It sounded very insistent.”

“It sounded insistent because that is the ring tone it has,” I say. Meanwhile, my mother has picked up the phone on the other end.

“What?” she says.

“No, sorry I wasn’t talking to you. How’s it going?” I say, as I take the phone into my bedroom.

“Were you talking to the boy who answered the phone before?”

“Yes.” Great. The magician has been holed up at home all day and he hasn’t even made the bed.

“Who is he?”

“Just a guy.” I say as I close my bedroom door.

“Just a guy who happens to live with you?” I can see that I’m not going to get out of this easily.

“Kind of.”

“Do we know him?”

“No, mum, you don’t know him. But it doesn’t matter. How is everything going?”

“What’s his name?”

“It really isn’t important.”

My dad, who has been listening from the other phone without saying anything, intervenes. “Of course it’s important. If he is living with you and answers the phone from time to time, it would be nice to know who we’re talking to.”

“Hi, dad.”

“Hello, sweetheart, how are you doing?”

“I’m good. Tired and working a lot, but I’m OK. How about you two?”

“What does he do? Is he a journalist as well?” asks my mum.

I collapse onto the bed with my arm covering my face.

“No, he’s not a journalist.”

“You really do sound tired,” my dad says.

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