Natasha

By Esteban Navarro Soriano

Sabino falls in love with Natalia, a girl he meets on the bus. The two start going out together, but every time Sabino accompanies her to her street she refuses to let him follow her round a corner where she carries on alone.

            A few weeks later, Natalia dies in a fatal traffic accident. When Sabino finds out, he discovers that she was not travelling alone and that her companion was a man nicknamed El Turco, (The Turk) who also died. The police take Sabino's statement and he learns that the girl was not who she said she was. To begin with, her name was not even Natalia

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Jul 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667456324

Book preview

To Ester. To Raúl.

Love is so short and oblivion so long... Pablo Neruda

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events or facts are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to reality is merely coincidental.

Index

Chapter 1 Page 3 

Chapter 2 Page 5

Chapter 3 Page 7

Chapter 4 Page 10

Chapter 5 Page 13

Chapter 6 Page 17

Chapter 7 Page 21

Chapter 8 Page 25

Chapter 9 Page 29

Chapter 10 Page 33

Chapter 11 Page 35

Chapter 12 Page 38

Chapter 13 Page 42

Chapter 14 Page 46

Chapter 15 Page 50

Chapter 16 Page 54

Chapter 17 Page 57

Chapter 18 Page 60

Chapter 19 Page 63

Chapter 20 Page 66

Chapter 21 Page 69

Chapter 22 Page 72

Chapter 23 Page 75

Chapter 24 Page 78

Chapter 25 Page 81

Chapter 26 Page 83

Chapter 27 Page 85

Chapter 28 Page 88

Chapter 1

The last few days before discovering the truth were awful, I remember.  On the last Friday afternoon that we saw each other, the teacher at the English college where I had recently enrolled told me I was looking miserable.  As you would expect from an English teacher, he said it to me in English.

—What a face you are making, Sabino —he smiled.

Assuming an even grumpier expression than the one I had before his unfortunate remark, I replied in Spanish,

—It’s been a very long week, sir.

—In English, Sabino.

—It has been a week very long, teacher.

I left the classroom before he could criticize my terrible pronunciation.

It was my mother's idea to call me Sabino, and it was she who finally decided on my name. When I turned ten both parents told me that choosing my name had been a difficult and complicated decision. As far as I can remember they never mentioned the other option, but seeing as they went for the less onerous of the two, I guess the second choice must have been a very unusual name.

On my way home after leaving the English college, I passed a taxi driver without a taxi. The fellow was standing in the middle of the street holding a cigarette in one hand while shouting angrily at another man and gesticulating with both hands, the smoke from his cigarette drifting across the silver-grey sky. I noticed straightaway that they were both taxi drivers and were arguing about a customer who stood a few metres away holding a mobile phone. As I drove away I passed an Uber and became aware of some leaden grey clouds trying to block out a hesitant sun struggling to emerge from behind some mountains I had never noticed before.

—Have you seen the mountains behind our apartment building?—I asked my mother as soon as I entered the living room.

—Sabino —she called out, — don’t talk nonsense.

Then she disappeared into the kitchen to cry. The kitchen, where it all happened... That is, since the accident, it was my mother's favourite refuge to avoid crying in front of me. I felt guilty because I thought I contributed very little, very little indeed, to ensure the whole unfortunate incident was forgotten.

— How hard it is to forget for those of us who don’t want to — I groaned quietly so she was unable to hear me.

The relative calm of the room was shattered when my father burst through the door into the apartment. I listened as he stomped through in those huge worn-out lorry driver's boots. I could smell his sweat. The sweat of a man who works twelve hours a day in a country where it is forbidden to work more than eight hours at a time.

—You still here? — He asked me from the doorway, though it sounded like an affirmation.

He stood still, not daring to enter the room, resting his broad hand on the doorknob and looking me straight in the eye.

—Your mother’s crying, isn’t she? — He asked in the affirmative, letting out a quiet sob. —Yes. —I hung my head a little.

Then I retreated into my room: Also to cry.

Chapter 2

The three of us, my mother, my father and myself, were living in a comfortable flat in the heart of Madrid. By the heart I mean a central neighbourhood, for the city has grown so much that the centre no longer exists, and nobody knows exactly where it is. The poorer areas are now called 'working-class neighbourhoods', indicating that the workers are poor. In fact, nobody knows where anything is anymore, because our world is not this world, which was once called 'the real world', but the real world is now the internet. I, who am now twenty-five years old, coexist among those who live on social networks, which, to make my point, are the least sociable networks there are. In my parents' day, when they were my age, being social, or sociable, meant that you socialised. Meaning that you associated not only with those who were like you, but also with those who looked like you, with those who shared your age, work, studies and concerns. My father told me they used meet in all sorts of places: a bar, a cafe, a friend's house, a quiet public space, an abandoned warehouse or under a bridge. Back then, in those years of buoyant happiness, youngsters had no mobile phones or internet or computers or anything like that. They had nothing, but they were happier. I have never liked social media; I would be lying if I said otherwise. I always thought Facebook was a playground for busybodies who peer in to gossip about what other people are doing. How can somewhere where you cannot say you dislike something be truthful? I objected when... well, when she told me that.

— On Facebook you can only say if you like something —she explained.

—What if you don’t like it? —I asked her.

—If you don’t like it, you’re screwed —came her reply.

Natalia had an indefinable accent that could have been French, English or Russian, but her language was more like that of a truck driver, and that turned me on, a lot. Now all I have of her is her laptop. It is a brand new i7 with four CPU cores and plenty of RAM, which she bought in instalments under my name at a shop in Alcobendas. When we met, she told me she needed a computer to manage her social networking. That laptop was her backpack, her home, her family and her memories. It was as if her whole life was contained inside that small item, as my mother called it, and when that computer disappeared then she would also disappear from every vestige of our memory. Once the laptop no longer existed, it would be as if she herself had never existed.

—Shall I make you something for supper? —I heard my mother say from the other side of the door.

—No, Mum —I declined. — It’s been a long hard day, and now I’m quite tired. Things didn't go well at the office, and then at the English academy I wasn't listening properly and forgot some words, as if I was a kid on his first day at school. I’m sorry, Mum —I repeated—, but I don’t want any supper tonight.

I realised I had been talking to myself, because my mother asked me if I was going to have supper  while she was walking past my bedroom door on her way to the bathroom. As usual, she did not even stop to listen to my answer. She carried on because she and I and my father all know she would ask me again. It was like the film, ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’, but in a version where an old school Mum keeps asking you if you want any dinner or food until finally, so as not to argue, you say yes.

—Yes Mum, I’ll have something quick and cold.

—Hurry up before it gets cold then — her voice was lost in the depths of the corridor before the muffled sound reached my room. Then her voice was like a distorted moan drifting through a deep, previously undiscovered tunnel. 

— How the hell