Rupert Thomson / Features / Untitled Books

"Jesus asks me what I'm doing for Easter. I have to go to London, I tell him."

Rupert Thomson

This Party's Got to Stop is Rupert Thomson's first venture into non-fiction, recalling the unsettling, anarchic months he shared a house with his brothers following the death of their father. Here he recalls a week in Barcelona.

Thursday

I wait at the bus-stop, next to the recycling bins. It's late March, and it should be warm in Barcelona by now, but there's a low grey sky and a scouring wind. I'm wearing five layers of clothing. Every day I take the bus up into the hills at the back of the city. I rent a small room on the ground floor of a dilapidated convent. The room backs on to bare rock, and there's no central heating, so it can be pretty damp in the winter. I have to keep my radiator on twenty-four hours a day, otherwise my books start to crinkle like those Viennetta cakes that were so fashionable in the seventies.

My bus arrives, with Jesus behind the wheel. I'm on first name terms with both the bus drivers - Jesus in the morning, Francisco in the afternoon. Jesus asks me what I'm doing for Easter. I have to go to London, I tell him. I've got a new book coming out. And then I say, I don't really do Easter. This makes Jesus chuckle.

Friday

All yesterday's clouds have gone. There's a bright blue sky, and the breeze has an edge of iron to it, a hint of snow. Sometimes you can smell the Pyrenees, even though they're two hours' drive away. I hang the washing out on our terrace. The light is so clear that the surrounding rooftops seem outlined in black. Two green parrots flash between the buildings.

At ten o'clock, when my wife returns from taking our daughter to school, we go and sit in the café by the church. Pollen from the plane trees drifts in clumps across the smooth paved square. In four months' time we will no longer be here. I'm trying not to think about that.

As I wait at the bus-stop, I realise my ticket is used up. The bus arrives. I tell Jesus that my T-10 has expired and start searching my pockets for change. Jesus waves my money away. Don't worry about it, he says.

Saturday

It's my turn to clean the common parts of our apartment building, a chore that comes round every five weeks or so. I clean the mirror and the window in the lift, and the glass in the front doors of the building, then I sweep and mop the lobby, and the stretch of pavement just outside the building. I start at eight in the morning, just after I get up. In Barcelona, people seem to love to see you cleaning - they nod approvingly as they walk by - and I feel oddly useful and worthwhile for the hour it takes.

Later, on my way to work, I notice that a door which is usually padlocked is standing open. The property stands on a fork in the road, so the garden is a triangle, with a view of the city beyond, and the sea in the distance, a deep dark purple-blue. I look inside. There's a small house, with green shutters and a low tiled roof. In the garden, which is a tangle of undergrowth, there are empty wine-carafes, and women's shoes, and cactuses in paint-pots. There's a ceramic table with a light above it, the lampshade a metal skeleton, the bulb long gone.

Out on the street again, I run into an old lady who lives nearby. She's wearing a turquoise dressing-gown and red slippers, and she's carrying newspapers for recycling. This whole area used to be like that, she says, looking over my shoulder. There weren't even proper roads, just tracks. Now there are new buildings going up every day. Cranes everywhere.

Sunday

A bag of cement fell off the back of a lorry in the night outside our building, and the narrow street is an inch deep in pale dust, like the surface of the moon.

On Sundays I leave the house early. I work from eight until midday. I love working on Sunday mornings. It's so quiet - especially now, just before holy week. It reminds me of August, when Barcelona empties out, and the area where I live - Sarria - is utterly deserted, like the beginning of the film, 'Open Your Eyes'.

At eleven, the bell begins to ring outside the chapel on the third floor. It rings perhaps one hundred times, with three deliberate rings, like punctuation, at the end. This happens again at a quarter past eleven, and then again at half past. People climb the brick stairs past my window. Later, just before midday, I hear the congregation singing up above, and as always, when I hear them singing, I seem to be writing something highly inappropriate - in this case, a man cutting a woman's pubic hair.

Just before leaving work, at one o'clock, I hear the eerie piped notes of the man who sharpens knives. He drives through the streets on a battered Vespa with a grindstone strapped to the back.

Monday

After lunch, on my way back to my office, I find a grey plastic elephant in the gutter. It has a piece of coarse string knotted round its neck, like a sort of lead. It looks old and worn, as if it was lost a long time ago. I add the elephant to the small collection of found objects I keep in my office. I already have one half of a rusty pair of scissors, a brass key, three Pokemon cards, and a brown plastic water-pistol that appears to have been squashed flat by a car. I've always loved found objects,. They're like little mysteries. The places where stories begin or end.

At seven o'clock I walk back down the hill. As I cut through Sarria, near the market, I pass two men and a woman arguing. I recognise one of the men. He works at the building materials supplier opposite my bus-stop. His hair is like thatch, and he has a lazy eye. The woman is prodding him in the chest, and the other man seems to be trying to intervene. The woman is in her sixties. She's wearing leopard-skin trousers and sunglasses, and has an enormous red shawl draped over her shoulders.

Tuesday

The wind hurtles out of the south west. On the terrace opposite ours, all the plants have blown over. As I leave our building, I have the feeling I always have - a slight expanding of the heart. I feel good in this city. It's the simple things: the quality of the light, the smile of a shop-keeper, the smell of the air. Such bright sunlight this morning: when I walk into the shadow beneath an underpass, the shadow looks blue.

As we pass the sports centre, Jesus has to brake sharply. Two rubbish bins on wheels have been blown out of position and are blocking the road. They trundle one way, then the other, and for a moment I see them both as bulls pawing the ground, preparing to charge.

Walking up to my office, I once again pass the abandoned property. The door is still propped open. The wild garden, the sweeping view: this would be a wonderful place to live and work. The euro is too strong against the pound, though, and my earnings have dipped, so we will be leaving Barcelona in the summer, and I don't know if we will ever come back.

On the bus home, I notice that the grey plastic tray where people put their money if they're paying in cash is filled to the brim with fresh mint. I ask Francisco where the mint came from. One of the regular bus-users, he says. An old guy who lives up in the hills. I don't think you know him. That's what I love about living here: the bus-driver with his change-tray stuffed with mint.

Wednesday

As usual on Wednesday I have lunch in Spanish with two architects, Merce and Marie-Eve. I tell them I'm going to be on the cover of a magazine at the weekend. Merce, who is also a photographer, and has just had an exhibition in downtown Barcelona, recently sent me an article about her that appeared in a Spanish paper. Now she reminds me, with a wry smile that she was on page 34. 'Today page 34,' I say optimistically. 'Tomorrow - Page 33,' says Marie-Eve.

After work, I hurry over to Gerbard, my local bar. It's the champion's league quarter-final, first leg, and Barcelona are away to Arsenal. The bar is already buzzing: people smoking and drinking, their eyes lifted to the screen. I squeeze on to a stool at the bar. Nacho reaches for a bottle of Albarino and lifts his eyebrows. I nod. For the first hour, Barcelona play their trademark one-touch football, so breathtakingly fast and fluent that the whole Arsenal team looks dizzy. Somehow, though, the score ends up being 2 - 2, which isn't a fair reflection of the game at all. Still the two away goals will help us in the second leg. I walk home exhilarated, smelling of wine and smoke.

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This Party's Got to Stop is published by Granta.

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Friday, 7 May, 2010