Sparks Fly in Seville

The taxi dropped me at the wrong door. Of course it did.

Twenty-four years old, three flights of stairs, two suitcases, and five hours of airports and recycled air in my lungs. I sat down on the first step and cursed my cousin Venus with real feeling.

She'd sold me on this swap with one text. "Seville. Free flat. Come find yourself babe." I'd been crawling out of my skin in Manchester anyway, six years of wiring houses for people who never said thank you, and I said yes before I even finished reading it.

So here I was. Whitewashed building, orange trees on the street, everything smelling sweet and fried at the same time. Very pretty. Very far from home.

I dragged myself up to the third floor and knocked. No answer. Knocked again. Then the door swung open and there was a woman standing there, and she was talking at me before I'd said a word.

Spanish. Rapid Spanish. Arms going like windmills.

She was maybe twenty-six, dark hair pinned up with a pencil, paint on one forearm, bare feet. Pretty. Very pretty. And completely incomprehensible.

"Sorry, sorry," I said, holding up a hand. "English. I only speak English, I'm..."

She frowned. Tried again, slower. I caught two words. Piso. Problema.

"Flat," I said. "Problem with the flat?"

She lit up. "Yes! Si, piso, problema!"

Well. Communication solved, sort of.

She stepped aside and waved me in, still talking, and I rolled my suitcases into the coolest, prettiest flat I'd ever stood in. White walls. Plants everywhere. A balcony sagging out over the street like it was tired of the whole arrangement. Tiles on the floor, old ones, blue ones.

This was Venus's idea of a swap? My cousin's shoebox in Salford, eleven hundred a month, for THIS?

The woman touched her chest. "Sunny."

"Isla," I said, doing the same. "Isla."

"Sunny. Isla." She nodded like we'd concluded an important treaty. Then she pointed at the kitchen wall and started up again, faster, and I caught "electricidad" and a sound like a small explosion made with her mouth.

"Ohhh," I said. "The electrics. Right."

She grabbed my wrist. Not in a romantic way, in a you're-my-last-hope way, and hauled me into the kitchen. There was a fuse box on the wall, an old plastic thing with a scorch mark above it that I did not love. She flipped a switch.

The lights came on. Then there was a pop, a flash of blue, and the whole flat went dark. Sunny screamed and jumped back and started talking very fast, and honestly I didn't blame her.

"Okay, okay, don't touch it," I said, hands out. "Don't touch anything."

I went back out to my suitcases in the dark, because apparently I am a professional even when jet lag has me by the throat, and found my tool bag. Multimeter. Screwdriver. Torch clamped in my teeth.

When I came back Sunny was standing in the middle of her kitchen with her hands over her mouth, watching me like I'd come back with a sword instead of a screwdriver.

I popped the cover off the fuse box. Torch in my mouth, which is a technique, thank you very much. Six old breakers, and one of them was black at the terminals. Burned. Loose, too, which explained the sparks and explained the pop.

"Right," I said around the torch. "Someone's been letting this wobble about for months."

She said something. I caught nothing. But her tone was very much "I understand you completely, hero."

I killed the main. Checked it dead with the meter, because I am not an idiot even at hour zero of a holiday. Swapped the breaker for a spare I'd brought, because yes, I travel with spare breakers, Venus makes fun of me for it and I have never once cared. Tightened the terminal. Tightened the other one next to it, which was also lazy. Cover back on. Main on.

The lights came up warm and gold, the fridge hummed, and Sunny made a noise like a kettle.

I turned around and she was staring at me. Not at the lights. At me. Arms folded, head tilted, this slow smile starting at one corner of her mouth.

"Uh," I said. "It was five minutes' work. Honestly. Someone should've done it ages ago."

She said a long sentence. Then she walked over, took the torch gently out of my hand, set it on the counter, and pressed both palms together like she was praying to me.

"It's nothing," I said, laughing. "You'd have done it yourself if you had a spare breaker and, you know, a death wish."

She pointed at the fuse box. Pointed at me. Pointed at herself. Then she made the mouth-explosion noise again, crossed her arms, and shook her head like a woman defeated.

"Yeah, you'd have exploded," I said. "Fair enough."

She laughed at that. I hadn't said anything funny, she couldn't have understood a word, but she laughed, this big open laugh that made me feel like I'd been living somewhere grey for years and just hadn't noticed.

Then the practical bit caught up with me. Because I'd done the maths on the flight and it wasn't adding up.

"Right," I said slowly, pointing between us. "You. This is... your flat?"

"Si! Mi piso."

"And Venus said... " I got my phone out. Signal, mercifully. I opened the group chat and read her last message out loud. "Swapped with my landlady, she's away all month, it's all arranged, don't ask questions."

"Landlady," Sunny repeated, frowning.

"Landlady. The woman who owns the flat." I pointed at her, then the floor. "Venus rented from YOU. Last spring."

Understanding dawned on her face in stages. Then it turned into something I'd describe as fury if fury could also be embarrassed. She snatched my phone, read the message, and said one word in Spanish that I did understand, because some words are universal.

Then she looked at me, and I looked at her, and we both came to the same conclusion at the same time.

Venus had lied to both of us. My cousin, who was currently on a beach in Thailand and still owed this woman a month's rent from last spring, had handed me the keys she'd never given back and told me the owner was "away."

I sat down on a kitchen chair. "I'm so sorry," I said. "I'll go. Tonight. I'll find a hostel, I..."

She said something sharp. Then she crossed the kitchen, put one finger up, wait, and disappeared into another room. Came back with her own phone and typed into a translate app with impressive speed. Turned the screen to me.

Stay. The sofa bed is comfortable. Venus owes us both money. We can be angry together.

I read it twice. "Are you sure? I can sleep anywhere, I literally sleep on scaffolding for fun..."

She typed again. Do you know anything about ovens? Mine is possessed.

I laughed so hard I nearly choked. "An oven. Yeah, I can do an oven."

She smiled, typed, showed me. Then we are both lucky. And she went to put the kettle on, which is the most English thing that's happened to me all day, in a flat in Spain, belonging to a woman who speaks no English and just watched me fix her electrics in under five minutes.

I sat there with my tea, because she'd guessed tea, and thought about the last six months in Manchester. The grey. The same jobs, the same pubs, the same men and women I'd dated casually since I was twenty-one and never once felt a spark worth naming. I'd told everyone I was going to Spain to find myself.

Turns out I'd found a fuse box and a woman with a pencil in her hair.

Not bad for day one.

* * *

The next morning I woke on the sofa bed to the smell of coffee and the sound of Sunny singing in the kitchen. Something fast and sharp, flamenco-adjacent, hips doing half the singing for her while she stirred a pan.

I lay there and watched from the doorway for a second before she spotted me. She stopped mid-verse, didn't look embarrassed at all, and pointed at a chair.

"Sit. Breakfast," she said, and then a flood of Spanish about eggs, I assume.

"Eggs, yeah," I said, sitting. "Brilliant."

I could get used to not understanding a word and knowing everything anyway.

A week went by like that. I'm not exaggerating. Seven days.

Mornings she cooked, I fixed things. The oven, possessed, turned out to be a dead element and a knob that had slipped its spline. The balcony light was just full of dead moths. The bathroom tap took me an hour and a set of knuckles I skinned on the pipe wrench.

The rest of the time we talked. Sort of.

Google Translate did a lot of the lifting. She'd type fast, thumb flying, and turn the screen to me like a teacher presenting evidence. I'd type back in English and she'd squint at the Spanish like it had personally insulted her.

"Your accent is terrible," she told me one afternoon, tapping the speaker icon so the robot voice mangled a sentence about groceries.

"Your robot voice is terrible," I said. "We match."

She laughed. She typed. My robot voice and your mouth are both hopeless. We will use yours.

"Cheers."

Then she pointed at me, then at a battered notebook on the shelf, and typed something longer. Turned the screen around.

A deal. You fix my flat, I teach you Spanish. Real Spanish, not robot Spanish. One hour a day. And if we are bored in the evenings, we can be bored together, it is better than being bored alone.

I read it twice. "Bored together," I said. "Is that a euphemism?"

She shrugged. It was a very good shrug. The kind of shrug that carries a whole paragraph.

"Right," I said. "Deal. But I'm holding you to the Spanish bit. I can't keep pointing at bread forever."

"Pan," she said.

"Pan. See, learning already."

She smiled and went back to her wheel, and I sat there with my tea thinking about how I'd flown a thousand miles to avoid making decisions, and somehow I'd made the biggest one of the year by nodding at a phone screen.

* * *

The Spanish lessons were chaos. She'd point at things and make me say the words until they stopped feeling like stones in my mouth. Agua. Luz. Cuchara. She was merciless about my r's, which refused to roll, and she'd make this face, half disgusted, half delighted, every time I failed.

"Perro," she said.

"Pero."

"No. Perro. The tongue does this!" She made a rapid fluttering motion with her finger against her bottom lip.

I tried again. Failed again. She fell back in her chair laughing, and I threw a cushion at her, and she caught it and hugged it, and something in my chest did a thing I decided not to name yet.

It was Thursday, day nine, when the dancing happened.

She'd been restless all afternoon, glancing at her feet, humming. Around six she shoved the table back, cleared a space on the blue tiles, and stood there in bare feet like she was about to arm wrestle the floor.

"Flamenco," she said. Then a stream of Spanish I caught maybe a tenth of.

"Show me," I said.

She did. God, she did.

I've seen dancers on telly. It's not the same. It's not the same at all, because on telly there's a screen between you and the sound a heel makes hitting tile two metres from your face. She stamped and turned and her arms moved like they had their own opinions, and her hips did this thing, this rolling thing, and I sat on the sofa with my tea going cold and forgot to breathe twice.

Then she stopped, breathing hard, and beckoned at me.

"No," I said. "No no no. I've got the rhythm of a wardrobe."

She beckoned again. Typed on her phone without looking away from me. It is only walking with anger.

"Walking with anger," I said. "Fine. I can walk angry. I'm from Manchester."

She laughed and positioned me. Straightened my back with one flat hand between my shoulder blades. Tapped my heel with her foot to show me where it went. Then she stepped back and counted, uno dos tres, and I stamped like an angry wardrobe and she clapped and corrected and clapped again.

The turn was the problem. The turn with the hips.

"Like this." She took my hands, put them at her own waist, and demonstrated the roll from the inside. My hands were on her waist. Warm through the cotton. She didn't move them away. She demonstrated again, slower, and I felt the motion travel up through my palms and into my arms and honestly into places that had no business joining a dance lesson.

"Right," I said, voice gone slightly wrong. "Got it. Maybe."

She looked up at me. We were close. Closer than a dance lesson requires. The pencil was still in her hair, which seemed impossible given everything those hips had been doing.

She typed one-handed. You are stiff like English weather.

"And you're showing off," I said.

Si, she typed. Then deleted it. Then typed it again.

I let go of her waist. My hands didn't know what to do after that, so I put them in my pockets like a dickhead, and she went to make dinner, and the whole flat felt charged, like the air before a storm in August.

* * *

That night we ended up on the balcony. It was past eleven. The Alameda was still noisy somewhere below, scooters and laughter, and the orange trees along the street made the whole air smell sweet. She brought out two small glasses of sherry without being asked. Fino