Tales of the Mantequero

Chapter 3

PART TWO: Mantequero

June stood at the edge of the precipice, the wind whipping at her clothes as she looked down into the crevasse. Far below, the river was a tiny silver snake. An eagle circled beneath her, its wings stained red with the light from the setting sun. What would it feel like? she wondered. What would it be like to just lean forward and launch yourself into the void? She imagined herself gliding on the warm air currents, floating, gradually going down, down... You would just have to flex your legs and arch your arms upwards into the air. Unconsciously, she flexed her legs.

"No!"Strong fingers gripped her shoulders and pulled her back from the edge.

She turned to look at her would-be saviour and smiled.

He was a young man, tall for a Spaniard, and pale, but with that arrogant beauty so many young Spaniards had. His eyes were so dark they were almost black below the sweeping lashes.

"Hello, Beautiful,"he said.

~ * ~

She could still hardly believe she'd done it. In all her life, she had never before gone on holiday on her own.

As a child, they had hardly ever had holidays. There had never been any money. Apart from the occasional day trip to the seaside, she could only remember one holiday - a disastrous stay in a caravan in Rhyl. It had rained for the entire week, and her father had paced about in the tiny space, consumed with suppressed rage, whilst she and her sisters sat in mute terror waiting for him to explode. One day there was a break in the weather and he marched them off to the beach, his mouth set in a grimace as he strode ahead at such a fast pace that the girls could only keep up by running. When they got to the beach he complained that they didn't appear to be enjoying themselves and he hadn't walked all this way so they could stand around and sulk. The sand was too wet to sit on and there was a cold wind blowing. The children shivered and wondered what they could do to look as if they were enjoying themselves.

In disgust, their father turned round and started marching back to the caravan site.

Not long after that, he left for good and there were no more holidays after that, ever.

When she left home to go to university, she'd barely had enough money to live on, certainly none for holidays. And when she finally got a job as a teacher, she had the money, but no-one to go with. So she'd gone on school trips, always getting a place because she was the modern languages teacher and could act as interpreter. She had been to Paris and Rome, Venice and Athens, taking gangs of unruly teenagers to cultural sites and spending all her energy keeping them in line and in the right bedrooms.

There'd been none of that for her when she was a teenager. June had been a fat child and had grown fatter as she grew older. She couldn't count the number of times that somebody had thought it funny to sing the opening lyrics to 'June is Bustin' Out All Over' as she entered the room.

She had had one short, glorious flowering when, at the age of twelve, she had developed breasts before anyone else in the class and had briefly received a lot of attention from boys who wanted to investigate them behind the bike sheds. She hadn't let them. She hadn't known then that it would be her only chance. That she would grow and grow like Topsy, only sideways, until she was as wide as she was tall and that no boy would want to kiss a girl as fat as that, even if she did have magnificent breasts.

Thank God at least she was now Miss Blacker and not June.

She was good at her job. She might never know love and marriage and children, but she was good at her job, and the kids respected her. Her form class was always the best-behaved in the school, and all her classes did well in exams. The only reason she had still not made Head of Department was that she was fat. Fat people didn't get promoted. Fat people were assumed to be lazy and stupid. She had now been passed over three times, and she had resigned herself to remaining at her present level. She didn't mind so much. Promotion meant more responsibility, more administration and less hands-on teaching. And after all, why had she become a teacher in the first place, if not to teach?

When she first became aware of how fat she was becoming, she had tried everything - diets, exercise, Weight Watchers. None of it made much difference. She might lose a few pounds, but as soon as she started eating normally the weight would begin creeping up again - slowly, inexorably - until she was way off the scale and had to buy all her clothes from Evans, the shop that specialised in large sizes. Eventually she decided she would rather be fat than be on a diet and miserable for the rest of her life. Her life had improved from then on.

Her sisters had not succumbed to the fatal fat. All three of them remained slim, despite having children. She used to rail at fate for giving her this peculiar metabolism that made her put on weight just thinking about food, when her sisters could apparently eat anything they liked without putting on an ounce. It was so unfair. Didn't they share the same genes?

But it was pointless wasting energy fuming about things she couldn't change, so she gave in gracefully to her fate and became the best auntie in the world, always available for baby-sitting and days out. She could enjoy her nieces and nephews and then hand them back at the end of the day. In many ways she had the perfect life, no one to worry about except herself. No need to explain or justify what she did. No problems.

She concentrated on the things that she was good at and she was, after a fashion, happy.

At least, she was happy until Patsy's birthday party.