Barcelona 03 - The Sound of One Hand Killing by Teresa Solana, Peter Bush

leave the meditation centre and take it with me.”
    â€œAnd where will you hide it?”
    â€œIn my flat, I suppose. At least, until I can think of somewhere better…”
    â€œDo you know what? I have just lost the little appetite I had.”
    â€œMe too.”
    Even so, we had lunch in the restaurant. Borja gradually recovered his sangfroid and by the time the second course had arrived he had convinced me it was all a wheeze tofrighten him and prepare the ground to pay him less money than he’d agreed with the antiquarian. While we were drinking our coffees, he took the mobile out and put it on the table.
    â€œIt’s not what you’d call the latest model, is it?” he remarked with a smile. In fact, I hadn’t seen a model like that in a long, long time.
    â€œSo what are we going to do?”
    â€œNothing much. Wait for them to call,” Borja replied, shrugging his shoulders.
    â€œBut mobiles are banned from the meditation centre,” I retorted. “I left mine at home…”
    â€œYou’re a real baby! I don’t expect you can smoke either, but I don’t intend going three days without a smoke.”
    â€œAnd what if they catch you?”
    â€œEduard, we’re big boys now. This chakra and cosmic-harmony business is baloney to soak the rich, can’t you see that? And what’s more, we’re going of our free will and paying a fortune for the ride. I intend on smoking the odd cigarette. Whatever they may say,” he added, shrugging his shoulders yet again.
    â€œKnow what? I’ll be back in a second,” I said, getting up from the table. “I’m off to buy a packet of cigarettes.”

Alícia Cendra had long since given up trying to pick up boyfriends in bars. That was the past. Now she was about to hit fifty, the only men who approached with a saucy glint in their eyes when they spotted her sitting with only a glass for company were solitary seventy-year-olds with the stink of alcohol on their breath and a box of Viagra in their pocket. She no longer interested men, or at least the ones she fancied, so no need to lose any sleep over it. As the women’s magazines that she read at work or the hairdresser’s explained, she had simply become invisible. The hint of cellulite her clothes revealed and the incipient crow’s feet no cream could erase disabled her from competing against the skinny, soft-fleshed bodies of the young girls who marked out the night-time territory to the lilt of the latest hit song. No, picking men up in bars was no longer an option for her. She had gradually been forced to resign herself to that sad fact.
    Winning the love of a man was a slow, painstaking task in this new pre-menopausal stage in her life. A long-term project that required time, patience and hours in the beauty parlour and, above all, planning. Alícia Cendra had assumed by now that going out at night in the hope of coming across a second Prince Charming – her first had been the husband who’d abandoned her for one ofthose silly young things – meant coming home drunk and depressed, and, worst of all, alone. Consequently, on the rare occasions when she did go to a bar for a drink, she did so without high hopes, only to sip one of her favourite cocktails, and, jostled by a noisy crowd, she would fantasize secretly about the man who had recently become the great love of her life, Dr Horaci Bou.
    When she left the cinema that night, she decided to go to the Dry Martini for a drink before going to bed. She felt like a margarita. Nobody was expecting her home, apart from her cat, and, even though she’d have to be up early in the morning to go to work, it wasn’t that late. Now spring was in the air and longer days were here, she found home oppressive. She had few women friends, and those she did still have had husbands and better things to do on a Thursday night than go out with a divorcee who lived absorbed