One last summer

We journey along the coast, mountains poetically blue in the distance, hillsides brittle and brown up close. Everything parched, including me. Should have bought water at the airport. Forty-eight years old and still the basics of self-care elude me. The cab is air-conditioned, but that is temporary comfort – the heat is out there, waiting to mug us all. Four hours ago I was in London, rain loud on the roofs like distant applause. Now this alternative reality, where to shower is futile and underarms drip like rain-forest canopies.

I lean back into the cool leathery seat, note the sickly orange scent of air freshener, and the cab driver’s dark-lashed eyes on me in the mirror. ”¿Usted viene de vacaciones?”. At least that’s what I think he says. I ask him to repeat. The Andalusian accent is puzzling to the unattuned ear, words with bites taken out of them. I put it down to the local love of eating – even the consonants aren’t safe. Yes, my mother lives here, I say – the truth wilting in the heat.

I gaze out the window. It’s the sort of ride where you have no choice, the view yanking your head in its direction at every moment. The ocean is a preposterous blue. If it were a child’s drawing you’d smile at the simplistic rendering. But no, this is the Mediterranean in June, a shimmering expanse of deepest turquoise with darker folds here and there like a lightly rumpled sheet. Away in the distance hotels and apartment complexes stud the horizon, white edifices of varying heights. If you squinted, they could almost be a series of headstones.

The driver gestures to the radio. “Le molesta si escucha el partido?” Of course not, I say. I want to ask which teams are playing, but feel I should already know, so say nothing. He leans forward and conjures into our shared space a feverishly excited voice and the roar and singing of a crowd. Thirty thousand Spanish soccer fans, a cab driver, a fictitious parent and me. It’s getting crowded in here.

The driver listens, I only hear. Suddenly he punches the steering wheel with a ‘Hijole!!’ Someone on the pitch evidently screwed up.

After some 15 minutes, it looms up on the hillside – the bull-shaped billboard advertising Osbourne’s famous brandy, the giant black silhouette signalling that we are near.

The car leaves the coast road, the sweeping panorama replaced by smaller details I know so well. The zig-zag overhead walkway to the train station, the car rental store, the bakery, the old tapas bar on the corner. A cast of extras in the background; new shops and high-rises I don’t recognise.

The streets have just awakened from siesta, the stores stretching out their awnings and yawning open their doors. As the locals emerge from their cool, curtain-drawn living rooms, the beach-weary tourists – siesta agnostics every last one – return to their time-shares and hotel rooms to apply aftersun. Sales reps from Bristol and data analysts from Croydon with calves the colour of weak tea, all determined to return to England ‘brown’.

I ask to be deposited on the paseo, so I can walk for a while and exchange the cool, fruit-scented cocoon of the taxi for the taste of salt air and a gentle sea breeze. Crossing over to the stretch of cafes and shops selling souvenirs and flip flops, the nose-scape changes once again. The oily scent of fried fish, the occasional trace of sun lotion and a faint tang of sweat, the cloying aroma of cinnamon roasted nuts wafting from a street vendor’s stall, the dark earthiness of coffee beans….

“My mother lives here”. Was it just laziness, that I couldn’t be bothered with the past tense on such a sweltering afternoon, not having spoken Spanish these past two years? Or was it that and denial too, not quite ready to conjugate her into oblivion?

Through shaded alleyways, a brief respite, then out again into the blinding day - the whitewashed walls shooting the sun straight into my eyes, not quick enough on the draw, sunglasses still holstered.

More new shops, two apartment buildings in mid-construction – a pair of chalky concrete skeletons wedged between hotels with bright beach towels draped over balconies. A new karaoke bar, a stand with e-bikes for hire. So much has been added. And yet.

Out now onto the high street, opposite me the church square, fringed by orange trees and bars, the store selling churros and chocolate. It’s been haunting me, all the way here. Something is not right.

Two years ago I walked these same streets and she was everywhere. Even in those first days after the funeral, she remained - not grey-ghostly but vibrant still. Sitting outside the cafe with her cappuccino, shawl elegantly draped, menthol cigarette in one hand, throwing her head back laughing. Browsing the stands selling knock-off designer handbags. Walking towards me, all heels and attitude - diminutive yet powerful - a bunch of carnations thrust forward. “For my hija,” she says. With her grand-daughter, my child, one year old, small chubby legs dangling as my mother held her aloft like a trophy. I could still see her, even then, even having delivered a eulogy in terrible Spanish and returned to her empty flat.

But now she flickers in and out. She is harder to evoke. And because of this, the place I knew is no longer the same. Soon it will be gone altogether. Oh it will still be here, in an objective sense, of course. It will go on sending office workers home to England with burnt shoulders, it will continue to serve up piña coladas to rowdy hen parties, to fill Sunday families with paella, to disgorge coachloads of Scandinavians into hotel foyers. It will go on making happy memories for others. But for me, even now, it is becoming a facsimile of a place I once loved. Just as the favourite haunt that embraced you on every visit turns cold and uncaring when the man you came to meet tells you, from across the table, that he doesn’t love you any more.

The church, without her inside arranging flowers and rehearsing with the choir, is simply a slab of cement with windows. The high street, without the promise of her bursting from a doorway at any moment, is just a car-honking commercial thoroughfare like any other. The tapas bar where we ate patatas bravas and riñones al jerez is now merely a piece of real estate populated by formica tables. The sun loungers on the beach – once old friends who welcomed us as we flopped, sea-dripping and famished, to unwrap our lunch of home-made tortilla, her greeting every passer-by – are now simply planks of wood nailed together.

I walk towards a flower bed on the high street edge of the square, where a small bronze plaque bears her name. I bend to brush away some leaves and the stub of a cigarette, then take out the cloth I have brought and polish the smooth surface.

“Is that someone famous, dear?” A pink-faced lady with a Scottish accent, holding an inflatable unicorn, a small child attached to her other hand.

“No, I mean, yes… sort of locally famous.” I laugh. “My mum. She used to live here.” And there it is. The past tense. Perhaps no excuse now, English being my native tongue. No messy verb endings to grapple with, no need to say anything but the truth. "She died two year ago."

“Oh that’s sad. But nice she has such a lovely place for her plaque. Bye dear.”

I glance at my phone and realise it’s time. I have come here to meet the soon-to-be-owners of my mother’s apartment, empty these past two years. He a retired insurance salesman, she a former teacher of English at the local school. Lovely people. I was to deliver the bad news, dreading it. Sorry, we can’t sell. The apartment has too much meaning attached.

But now approaching the cafe, where they will be sitting perhaps with a cold beer or an iced tea, I adjust the prepared sentence in my head. Funny how a simple rearrangement of words can determine an entire future. Lives altered through tense changes and a few extra syllables. Almost imperceptible, yet immense. Like when one person stops breathing, and nothing is the same ever again.

When we first came here, me aged 17 and my parents still both very much alive, we rented a small whitewashed fisherman’s cottage a stone’s throw from the seafront. It was a blazing hot summer, and life stretched before us. Before me and my mother anyway. My father died just four years later. They loved it all, vowing to retire here, which she eventually did. The elderly cottage owner, Antonia, met us outside to hand over the keys. She moved like a small black punctuation mark, hunched and still dressed in mourning, her voice whispy and faint like it was losing the will to live. Her husband had died aged 25, shortly after they wed. A fisherman, swallowed up by the ocean that was his livelihood. She had remained in the house alone all these decades, surrounded by old sofas and sadness. I haven’t been to the beach since he drowned, she told us, her eyes watery with the sorrow that pooled there. Or perhaps that is just how old eyes look, pink and permanently moist.

But I am not Antonia. I have a choice. And if I don’t sell the apartment and I keep returning summer after summer, my mother’s colours will fade like beach towels left too long in the sun. The unrelenting forward march of this place, its new inhabitants and fresh constructions, these will all drown her out. They will overlay the memory of what was. And though that may happen anyway, over time, I prefer not to hasten the process. I want to keep it all fresh in my mind. Even now, at this age, I am not ready to lose my mother. To forfeit the joy and safety of feeling that at any moment she might walk towards me, and I will take the flowers from her hand.