The Malaganese Fairy Queen

Years later, I’d awake to a newspaper clipping of Stella being marched off to spend her golden years in an Andalusian prison cell.

But when I knew her, she was the fairy godmother of that conflicted city.

Slinging coke in those sunburnt streets as charmingly as if she was flogging lemonade to the weary passers-by. Bereft of shame as she sat there, queen among the gypsies and the vagrants.

Shotting whiskey and croaking at us between golden teeth.

A hideous shrapnel from a lifetime of cheap Andalusian cigarettes and even cheaper Andalusian men who had frequented the hovels she had spent her nocturnal life slinking around.

Stella was eternally caught between dancing flamenco brashly and being pursued by all the colourful people of that freak town who came from all over Malaga to buy the coke she kept in coiled plastic tucked behind her sweaty pink bra.

It was the sweat that made her coke so good.

So the locals used to remark, as their afternoon cervezas, unconvincingly emptied to avoid the harsh southern sun, began to transfuse into a montage of humid trips to the windowless bathroom where the men pissed in a seat-less toilet, and then on the ground when the game needed a real shake-up, and the Moroccan hash started to blur their internal compass on all things of which their old-world fathers and uncles would have firmly stood their ground nobly.

It was a madhouse.

A cacophony of misfits and artists. Drug addicts and well-to-do-curiosities. A psych ward on those warm piss-stained pavements, where the doctor seemed only to administer frequent dosings of beer and orujo. The nurse insisting you really ought to snort, or smoke, or dance.

Or just do something, man, don’t fucking sit there!

And if mad Andrew’s frequent outbursts of vulgarity didn’t shock you to the core, you were more seasoned than you thought. As he bellowed the words whore and cunt in the same breath towards any woman who had a half-decent body and two legs.

You just sitting there watching Stella hold court, caught between wonder and disgust.

High with the absurdity of it all trying to discern if the thing dangling from the Italian woman’s ear, who had breasts like Aphrodite, really was a loaded condom, and if the toothless chicka with the Chinese fan next to you wanted to ride you,

or rob you,

or both.