A Very Long Weekend in Barcelona
By: Mylo Wilkin
Tags: Barcelona, Travel, Fiction, Travelling, Social

I’m ashamed to say, this is true story:

The curtains, flimsy and close to see-through, did little to shut out the morning sunlight. I was awake by 8am, anguished and reluctant, tossing and turning for a full hour before I managed to doze off again into a weak sleep. By 10am Uber and Mac were awake, my roommates on this terrible trip, this wild, debaucherous frenzy of testosterone and depravity.

Uber — so named because he used to drive everyone around when he was a teenager, well before Uber was invented — and Mac — so named because his surname is McDonald — had slept better than I had, sharing a large double bed whilst I had the small single in the corner next to the window.

“Holy fuck,” Uber said eventually.

We all felt the same, but neither Mac nor I had the energy to speak.

“Food,” someone eventually said, and we put on shorts and t-shirts in a pained, tense silence and headed for the door.

The Barcelona sunshine was blinding. We stumbled around for a moment like newly-released battery chickens, someone in charge, but no-one entirely sure who. We walked towards Las Ramblas, the only part of the city we’d seen since arriving late last night. I was silent, ruminating inwardly in a strange muteness on the border of sulky or sullen.

There is a special kind of stupidity reserved for British men on long weekends in Europe. It’s the sun, I’ve always thought, the prospect of some actual heat, some life-giving rays on our pale skin, the beach, the sea, all combined to invoke an unreserved amount of wantonness and degeneracy.

And also because deep down we still think we own the world, that because we once colonised most of the planet, anyone who isn’t still under the Queen’s rule or doesn’t speak our language must somehow be inferior. That because of all these facts we can jet into foreign lands, other people’s countries, and treat it like our own playground, running around shouting and swearing and drinking in the streets. I cringed at our behaviour last night: the drinks at the airport, then more drinks on the plane, beers in the taxi, shots at the hotel, cocktails on the beach, more beers in the club. Never before have I heard the word cunt used more openly or with less context. No wonder the world hates us, I thought, sitting down at a beachfront café and sinking my head into my hands.

I tried to order coffee and an omelette in Spanish, but the words just wouldn’t come to me. I refused to speak English, so instead mimed “coffee” and “omelette”, which was probably ruder.

“Time you get in?” Mac asked once the poor waitress had eventually taken our orders, his Geordie accent thicker and even harder to understand through the deep layers of hangover.

“Four?” Uber said, looking to me.

“At least,” I replied. “4.30 I reckon.”

I mopped my sweating brow. My eyes were drooping, tiredness welling up inside me, overwhelming in the morning heat. But my heart was beating out of my chest; I was awake, but also asleep. Jaegerbombs, I thought, the source of all evil.

****

The dwarf’s name was Miguel and we were going to handcuff him to Matty, who was being sick in the loo for the fifth time this morning. As soon as he had run off to the lavatory in the lobby we had snuck Miguel in, sitting him in Matty’s seat, trying to get him to blend in amongst the crowd, despite the fact he was wearing a police uniform complete with truncheon and cap. And the fact he was less than four feet tall.

Matty was the reason we were all here in the Catalan capital. A trip to commemorate his upcoming wedding, to mark the end of a life without a wife; and hail the impending commencement of a life with a wife.

A celebration.

Why we therefore had to behave like debased degenerates for a whole weekend in a foreign city was still altogether a mystery, but no-one questioned it. In fact we seem to revel in it, the chance to be animals for a few days, to imbibe whole pints of Guinness with breakfast, to force people to drink double shots of neat gin, to walk barefoot through the streets, topless into bars, sport football shirts, pink singlets and wear giant Mexican sombreros (as Freddie, my younger brother did the whole weekend). But most essential, was to be loud. This was what most people on the trip seem to look forward to with almost unlimited fervour.

Matty came back, pale as a ghost. He could barely walk. Never has a man looked so hungover. He was in for a mighty surprise.

He was just about to pull his seat back when Miguel turned around. Our friend and groom-to-be jumped literal feet in the air. The laughter from the table was raucous and unhinged. People fell out of their chairs with merriment. Some were doubled up on the floor. Miguel leapt up and hit Matty playfully on his lower back with his truncheon, which I hoped was plastic rather than proper, but I never found out for sure.

“Tie him up Miguel!” someone shouted, and with that Miguel got his handcuffs out, locked one around his own wrist and the other around our fated friend.

There was now a certain level of acceptance from Matty. There was no struggle. This was the life you chose. You chose to find a woman you wanted to spend the rest of your life with; you chose to ask her to marry you; you chose to have us as your friends. And what amazing friends we were, giving up a weekend to fly to Barcelona with you, drink countless pints with you, and hire a Spanish dwarf to torture and torment you all afternoon.

****

Barcelona is one of the world’s great cities — there’s thousands of years of history, some of the best food in Europe, amazing weather, beautiful scenery, ancient stone buildings, rich cultural and heritage.

We saw none of this.

Instead, here we were, a ragtag bunch of pale Englishmen in neon swimming trunks and £2 Primark t-shirts, strutting through the city with our best mate handcuffed to a very small Spanish man. (It should probably be said here that Miguel was a very willing participant in the chaos, in fact he wanted to be here. This was his job. He enjoyed it, smiling and laughing all the way to the beach, a glint of madness in his eye — malice even — as he whipped Matty with his truncheon.)

“It’s time,” Beast said, as we arrived at the beach, a glorious stretch of sand filled with happy weekenders from all over the globe.

“For what?” said Baron.

“You know,” Beast replied.

“For the speedos?” Baron said, wide-eyed with joy.

“Yep. Miguel! Go and make Matty put these on.”

Beast handed Miguel a pair of speedos. A pair of leather speedos. If it was possible, Matty’s head sunk even lower. I wanted to remind him that he chose to do this…but now wasn’t the time.

Miguel led his unwilling handcuffee to a public lavatory, and minutes later they emerged, the leather speedos visible, but mainly covered by Matty’s t-shirt, much to our disappointment. Walking back towards us he hesitated for a moment, unable to go on, but the brutal dwarf hit him hard round the back of his legs. Matty was moments from snapping, from losing his rag, but what was the point? This was his life now.

“Miguel,” Beast said as they arrived back to howls of laughter, “Matty needs to go on a little… walk.”

“Si,” Miguel replied, “I think that’s a great idea.”

“What do you think Matty?” we asked.

“I think you should all fuck off,” he said, for which he promptly received a clip round the head from Miguel.

“Oh and Miguel,” Baron called out as they set off, “tell him to take his shirt off. We want to see those speedos in all their glory…”

Miguel dutifully obliged, but there was a brief struggle, Matty very much wanting to keep his t-shirt on. The dwarf was strong, and also had his truncheon to enforce order, with which he was repeating hitting Matty as he tried to keep his last remaining item of dignity on his back.

But in the end he relented, and Miguel pulled out his keys and unlocked the handcuffs so the t-shirt could be removed.

Matty suddenly sensed a chance to break for freedom. This was his moment. Now or never.

Briefly free from his tormentor he got up and ran down the beach away from Miguel. The dwarf policeman was momentarily stunned by the insubordination, but set off to give chase.

The rest of us were just sitting there on the sand, beers in hand, watching the spectacle from a safe distance. What we had in front of us was one of our best mates, acutely hungover from a 14-hour drinking session yesterday, who had been forced into a pair of leather speedos and was now being chased down the beach by a dwarf dressed as a policeman from whom he had recently escaped.

“I don’t think this could be going any better,” Beast said to Baron as they chinked beer bottles.

Where Matty was going we didn’t know. I think anywhere Miguel wasn’t had to have been the aim. He suddenly seemed to have a brainwave and headed towards the sea. Maybe dwarves couldn’t swim? I didn’t know if they could swim.

“Can dwarves swim?” I asked Freddie next to me.

“I think we’re about to find out,” he replied.

Unfortunately Matty’s plan was felled by a child’s sandcastle, which he hadn’t seen until it was too late, and in comic slow-motion tripped over it and fell to the wet sand. The little girl who had painstaking constructed the sand creation stared gobsmacked at the man in leather speedos who had destroyed her afternoon’s work, followed moments later by a little policeman who proceeded to start beating the first man as he lay cowering on the edge of the waves.

“They your mates?” a bunch of guys said to us.

“Yes,” we replied. “Well, the guy in the police uniform at least.”

They were a party of 10 rugby lads, also here “celebrating” one of their friends impending marriage. Their groom-to-be was wearing a flowery summer dress and didn’t look particularly happy about it, until he saw what was happening to Matty and was suddenly grateful he had gotten off so lightly.

They were from Newcastle and looked tough, with a plethora of tattoos on their upper bodies, some of which were in Latin and some of which were matching. They had recent-looking haircuts, manicured beards and ripped, almost-hairless bodies, soaking up the Spanish sunshine and waiting for sunset when they could go out and try and impress some ladies in the beachfront bars.

“I’ve seen some nasty shit in my life but I’ve never seen anything as dark as that,” one of them said to us, pointing to Matty, who had now had his shirt removed and been re-handcuffed to Miguel.

The little girl whose sandcastle had been reduced to ruins was in tears, now telling her sympathetic father what had happened: It was them daddy, the short man. Yes the one in the leather speedos. And also the child with a beard in the police uniform. Do something about it, daddy. I don’t care if he looks like a savage, he needs to be punished!

Now we’d had approval from the tough rugby lads we all felt very good about ourselves. Miguel led Matty on a slow lap of the beach — there was lots of pointing, plenty of shocked faces, mothers covering their children’s eyes, others snapping photographs on smartphones to Instagram later on. Some even wanted selfies, and Miguel would smile brightly whilst beating Matty with his truncheon.

“Should we stop him now?” Baron said to Beast.

“Nah. A little more. He’ll thank us for this one day.”

I wasn’t sure what day he was talking about, but didn’t bother to point it out.

****

Reinforcements arrived at Happy Hour. Once Beast and Baron had finally relented and asked Miguel to unlock Matty, we had walked back to the hotel and jumped straight in the pool. Fifteen Englishmen, six hours of drinking already down and one hotel swimming pool — it got loud, it got wet, and it got impressively out of hand.

First it was the swearing, which was unacceptably raucous at the best of times, but it is only when there are kids around that you really notice how offensive and distasteful it is. Some of it was decidedly sadistic, and soon a parent stepped in and told us we were “hooligans”.

Unfortunately this only encouraged us, and after at least three sunbathers had been hit in the face with our makeshift volleyball (a football we had found on the beach), we discovered the entire pool area totally deserted apart from us. We now felt we had succeeded in our mission and could properly relax.

Miguel had taken such a shine to us and our particular level of brutality that he had decided to join us for a few hours drinking before his “night shift”. It turns out our new Spanish friend was actually a rather successful nightclub DJ in Barcelona.

“Everyone said to go into acting, but I just don’t have the face for it,” he joked to me before chugging down his third tequila in as many minutes.

“This handcuffing shit, that’s just part-time, keeps me busy during the day.”

He then pretended to hit me with his truncheon and I quickly ran away. “Don’t trust the dwarf,” Matty said to me quietly before jumping into the pool.

We invited Miguel to play our strange, rowdy version of water-polo/volleyball, but he said that he wouldn’t be able to stand up in the pool, so just sat on a sunlounger drinking whilst we continued to annoy every guest at the hotel.

Then the rest of the party turned up — Sammy, Vish, Raj, Thos, Mits, Hawky — this was the one-night-only troop, wise old heads who knew they would only be able to handle a single evening of drinking. They would fly in, party till dawn, sleep until midday and then fly back their lives in London. Most of them had kids, proper jobs, important jobs, so it was a bit like being on day-release from prison for them. They had ordered a bottle of champagne and three pitchers of mojitos before they’d even come to find us in the pool.

We had been on the beers since 11am and this break in proceedings to greet the new arrivals was just what we all needed. I went up to my room to have a shower and when I came out Mac and Uber were chopping up lines of cocaine on a small mirror. For one night only we can be rockstars, I thought to myself, before thinking that’s the exact opposite of what a rockstar would say.

****

Before leaving the hotel, Miguel had told us he’d book us a table at his nightclub for dinner.

“We really have made an impression on him,” I said to Beast as we assembled in the lobby.

“I think it was the speedos,” he said back.

“Were we too harsh on him?” Baron said.

“If anything, we weren’t harsh enough…” Beast replied. He had been married for at least five years, safe in the knowledge that anything he did to Matty on this trip wouldn’t come back to haunt him later on in life.

Baron, very single and about as far from marriage as anyone could be, knew that when his big day came, Matty would remember every one of those beatings Miguel had handed out.

We arrived fashionably late for dinner at Miguel’s restaurant, a very fancy place called Carpe Diem, with dangerously low levels of lighting and Japanese writing in red neon on many of the walls. Until 10 it was a bar/restaurant, then afterwards it became one of the beachfront’s most exclusive nightclubs.

“This is the kind of place footballers probably come,” Uber shouted to me over the dull thud of bass. He was right, it was very upmarket, with men in expensive-looking suits trying to impress women in tight dresses and stupidly high heels.

We were the least likely group of people to be eating here, but we knew Miguel, and I looked around for that crazy dwarf. But I couldn’t see him. That’s not to say he wasn’t in here — if he was standing anywhere other than right in front of us we wouldn’t have been able to see him. In fact he could have been standing on a chair and he would still have been almost impossible to spot.

We were led to the back of the club where the restaurant was. Whatever deal Beast and Baron had struck with Miguel seemed to be a good one — Spanish women in black kimonos served us a whole range of Asian tapas, which was all delicious.

Other women — these in blue kimonos — would sporadically turn up and offer massages while we were eating. The going rate seemed to be €10 for 10 minutes, but even if it had been free it would have been an extravagance too far. For me at least — some of the guys were more than happy to indulge. I was sitting next to Rish, who finished his massage before asking me to borrow €10.

“You’ll never see that €10 again,” JD said to me across the table.

Half an hour later Rish was having another massage, and was complaining to the woman that he felt she wasn’t “putting her all into it.” I walked away before he demanded more money off me.

After dinner we were politely asked to leave.

This was it, I thought, we’ve pushed our luck in this city too far. The pool, the swearing, the football, the drinking, the drugs on mirrors, the leather speedos, Miguel. We were being run out of town, banned probably. I never even got to see the Sagrada Familia.

“We need trousers,” Uber shouted.

“What?” I replied, still convinced that our immediate expulsion from the city was being exacted.

“For the club. We need to put trousers on.”

“Oh! That’s much better than being deported!”

“What? Who’s getting deported?”

“Hopefully none of us. But I wouldn’t bet against it.”

So we headed back to the hotel to change. On the way back we decided to stop in at one of the beachfront bars for a while. This was where the serious drinking started, as if the last 36 hours of near constant boozing had just been a warm-up.

Uber came back from the loos and slipped me our little bag of white sin. I went in and found that none of the doors to the cubicles locked properly. This was a major setback, so I shut a door and sat on the floor with my back against the door. I pulled out the white powder and a €20 note. Actually, there’s no point lying, it was a €10 note. I then used my library card to crush up the powder and cut it into a line. If that isn’t rockstar then I don’t know what is.

Someone pushed the door, trying to get in. Some of the powder got knocked and went on my jeans. I hastily cleaned it off and tried to get the rest done before it happened again. I’ve probably been in worse toilets in my life, but sitting on the floor trying to snort cheap Spanish coke whilst people outside hammered on the door was a new low, and in that moment I thought: your mother would be disgusted.

We left the bar and made it back in to Carpe Diem, which had filled up considerably since we’d been politely ejected for being underdressed. I felt like I was 18 again and walking into overpriced Oxford Street clubs because that’s what we all thought actual adults did on weekends. The air was cold, whiffs of aftershave and perfume only just masking the smell of spilt drinks and body odour. We didn’t fit in here, but I was too wired to care.

“Where the fuck is Miguel?” I shouted above the music.

We couldn’t find him.

Until we heard him.

His voice came out across the packed nightclub and we turned to see our small best friend on the stage behind a set of DJ decks. I’m pretty sure he was standing on a chair or some sort of low table. “Carpe Diiiiiiiiem!” he hollered into a mic. The crowd roared. DJ Miguel was very popular it seemed.

Unfortunately, 10 minutes into his set, Mac was thrown out, two meaty bouncers dressed head-to-toe in black holding his arms behind his back as they frogmarched him towards the exit. His t-shirt was wet. “Beer,” Uber said, smelling him.

A tanned girl with a short yellow dress and overly elaborate fake eyelashes was following closely behind the bouncers, shouting at him in angry Spanish. “Estupido gilipollas! La madre que te pario!” She too was soaked in what we assumed was also beer. What had gone on here? I wondered. It looked messy. I thought about asking the girl for the story, but she was angry and had general bad vibes so I steered clear. Besides, she was too busy calling him a motherfucker too answer with any coherence or clarity.

We all decided to leave with him, in solidarity. The club literally spilled right out onto the beach and the first pale rays of dawn were just about visible on the eastern horizon, a new day ahead, a fresh start. But no-one here was ready for the beginning of Sunday. Here it was very much still Saturday. The beach was pure carnage: There were people everywhere, drinking, singing, playing, dancing. I could count at least three couples having sex right there on the sand. Someone had a small fire going. It felt lawless. What was this city? I thought to myself I stood there taking in the scene. None of this made it into any guidebook I’d read.

I wanted to stay, to walk along the sand, to dive into the sea and try and wash some of the dirt of the weekend off me, but the others were already walking back to the hotel and I certainly couldn’t be alone here. Oh no, that would have been too much, trapped and vulnerable on this godforsaken strip of beach, where people did whatever the fuck they wanted with seemingly no consequences. I mean, where in the world can you righteously handcuff someone to a dwarf for crying out loud! No, this was a very dark place, and being alone here would be too much to handle and I chased after the others.

When I got back to our room JD was in our bath. “Hello,” he said with a smile as I entered. He had a glass of red wine in his hand and his phone was playing mellow house music out of its tinny speakers, perched precariously on the edge of the bath.

“Is this…your room?” I asked, very confused.

“No, yours,” he replied. “Freddie is asleep and I didn’t want to wake him.”

It made perfect sense.

“Go up to Baron’s room. That’s where the others are,” he said, closing his eyes and leaning his head back. Some of the red wine spilled into the bath, suspended for a moment like a drop of blood, before turning into water. Like a reverse Jesus.

“Just watch out for the hookers,” JD added.

“The what?”

“There’s some hookers around. Apparently. Rish brought them back. He’ll probably ask you for money for them if you’re not careful.” He raised his glass to me, but didn’t open his eyes. “Turn the light off when you leave, thanks.”

I went out and closed the door quietly behind me. Should I just leave him in the bath? I thought. Surely he’ll be okay…and besides, I had hookers to watch out for. Hookers, plural? This was pure madness, it was all too much for me. I was drained from the day, from the night. I felt I had lived three days in one, and I yearned for my bed, for sleep. But I had a drunk man in my bath.

I knocked on the door of Baron and Matty’s room on the top floor, but Uber came to the door. “Is this…our room?” I said, still confused.

“No, Baron’s room. Come in.”

There was a drunk man in Baron’s bath too. Except it wasn’t a bath, it was a hot tub. An actual hot tub. The Honeymoon Suite. Mac was in it, an empty bottle of tequila perched on the edge of the tub.

Baron was jumping on the bed like a child. A 6-foot-5 child. He saw me and hopped down, nearly falling over into the hot tub. “Come into my office,” he said to me before I had even had a chance to fully absorb the scene. He had wild eyes, and I thought it best to obey, a big hand on my shoulder leading me into a giant walk-in wardrobe.

“Pick one,” he said, gesturing to three differing-sized lines of white powder.

“What is it?” I said.

“Oh just coke. And MDMA. Mixed together. Pick one.”

Before I had a chance he stopped me and snorted both the smallest and the medium-sized lines.

“Pick one,” he said again.

“I guess I have no choice…”

“Correct.”

It was at least 5am, a bad time to be doing this I thought as I staggered out of Baron’s office. Dawn was already leaking in through the curtains and the new day was well and truly upon us while we were still making the most of the old day.

I was a little shaky on my feet, which clearly Mac could sense. “Get in the tub,” he suggested. So I took off my jeans and shirt and got in the tub. For hours we sat in the hot water and talked nonsense whilst we should have been asleep.

At 7.30 the hot tub was still bubbling away, but I suddenly had a thought…

“Where is Matty? Why isn’t he in his bed?”

“He’s asleep,” said Baron.

“Where?” I replied, looking over at his empty bed once again to make sure I wasn’t just being stupid.

“Down there,” said Baron, pointing to the window.

I got out of the tub.

“Can you see him?” Baron said, pointing down towards the pool, just about visible from the window. On one of the sunloungers I could see a man covered in a towel, sleeping in the foetal position.

“I see him. What time did he go to sleep?”

“Oh, I brought him back at about 8.30,” Baron said.

He’d missed his own party. It had all been too much for Matty, who was probably sound asleep there on the sunlounger, dreaming of happier times in his future where no-one ordered him into pairs of leather speedos or remorselessly forced him to drink shots of gin. There was a silver lining though, I thought: he would probably wake up in about an hour and feel totally fine, apart from the bruises from Miguel’s truncheon of course.