Iron Curtains and Mini-Skirts

One night, in the apartment above mine, a group of young Russian women suddenly appeared as if from nowhere.

Two were sisters, and together with at least one other female housemate they kept vampiric hours: quiet as the dead during daylight hours, they would suddenly come to loud, heel-clacking life in the evening; before tottering sulkily out of the building on deathly high platform shoes – dramatic eye make-up and a slash of red lipstick finishing off their revealing party attire.

A noisy re-entry with the following morning’s dawn chorus was always an inevitability, and where the friendly Bolivians downstairs threw parties, the ferocious Russians instead threw plates.

And insults.

Or at least I presumed they were insults – I can’t imagine that a simple request to pass the Coco Pops would require that level of decibels, nor the accompanying crash of airborne crockery making abrupt contact with brickwork.

Anyway.

After about six months, the younger sister moved out to live with a greasy British man well over twice her age, the third housemate disappeared to destinations unknown, the oldest sister fell pregnant, and things got a lot more interesting for the ever-nosy Brit downstairs…

At some point during the pretty Russian’s pregnancy, she had been observed (by Cheli y Kirsty: Vigilancia Comunitaria Inc) to have exchanged the company of a tall, blond and seriously attractive Spaniard for that of a middle-aged and tubby Irishman.

But a few months after the baby was born, the Irishman was hoofed out as well, and shortly after that my mysterious Slavic neighbour came tap tap tapping on my door looking for Spanish lessons.

She had a small baby, so would I mind terribly if the lessons were held upstairs in her apartment during his nap time…

Never having been the type to turn down an opportunity for a nose, I accepted most gleefully.

Twenty-nine years old to my twenty-five, it transpired that the name of the remaining ceramic-abusing neighbour was Tania. Her tiny blond baby was called Daniel, and a prettier tot I had yet to see.

And as was so often the case with my students, what started out as language tutoring, soon turned into something bearing far more resemblance to therapy. Thus, bit by bit I discovered that the father of baby Daniel was in fact the tall, blond, seriously attractive Spanish man. He had promised to marry her and care for her and love para siempre bla bla bla but as soon as she got pregnant, he scarpered off back to his apparently forgiving Spanish wife and his innocent little Spanish children.

Heartbroken, Tania decided to give in to the advances of a besotted (and very wealthy) Irishman whose acquaintance she had previously made in one of her places of work.

So besotted was he, that he generously agreed to put his name on baby Daniel’s birth certificate and take responsibility for Tania’s rent, as well as all her other expenses, from that day forth.

However, when his new son was but a matter of months old, Handsome Spanish Rogue (HSR) made a brief but devastating reappearance in their lives; prompting Tania to demand the removal of Besotted Irishman’s (BI) name from the birth certificate, and put into practice his immediate banishment from her life.

It appears that it is not only iron curtains that are forged in the East, there are some ruthlessly ferric hearts produced there as well.

In typical me fashion, I somehow managed to find myself involved in the accompanying shenanigans: with BI banging drunkenly on my door, night and day, begging me to act as intermediary between himself and the Russian ice queen he alternately adored and hated.

“I love her, so I do!”

“They’ll surely put me away for lying on that certificate. You be sure to tell her I’ll be taking her down with me, the bitch!”

Needless to say, the whiff of scandal and responsibility soon had HSR disappearing once again, but by this time it was too late for BI to make a reappearance, and as Tania now found herself devoid of a male champion to finance her corner, she was forced to return to her nocturnal line of work.

Which is how Cheli and I ended up on regular babysitting duty – no great hardship as baby Daniel was a princelet among babies and as good as he was blond, dimply and beautiful.

He very nearly didn’t make his first birthday, though.

I was dog-walking at the top of a faraway hill one Sunday, when I got a telephone call from an almost incoherent and obviously terrified Tania.

She had left the tot in his plastic safety chair in the bathtub to go and answer her mobile, and when she returned less than a minute later, he had slipped under the water and stopped breathing.

There wasn’t a lot I could do from the top of a faraway hill, but luckily one of our other neighbours was entertaining a doctor friend for Sunday lunch, and he was able to save the day in the most spectacular and unexpected way during that otherwise boring lull between main course and pud.

Tania never left her son unattended again; bath or no bath, and I am pretty sure it will have stayed that way until he was well into his thirties…