Sunflower Seeds
Everyone in Lorca knows Jose Joaquim. He stands in the bar, happy among his laughing posse. This place, this ancient Spanish town of golden stone, where he was born and where he will die, is his world. He knows and wants no other. He has taught half the people here, the other half know him anyway.
He wears the clothes of a man ten years older: a battered brown suede jacket sagging over bony shoulders and a thin blue V-necked sweater, with the shabby grey flannel trousers he wore for that morning’s lessons.
His fingers curl around his drink. The floor is sticky with its carpet of tissues, toothpicks and the shells of hundreds of tossed away sunflower seeds and cigarette ends. The detritus of a hard evening of what the locals call marcha. How to translate? It's the craic, the fun, but it is more than that. No English word comes close.
It is 3am, and in a couple of hours tonight will be thrown away like a sunflower seed shell. For June evenings like this one are as plentiful as sunflower seeds in Lorca.
Outside, it is dark, a thick, Spanish night, its intense claustrophobia mirroring life in Lorca, where your evening’s sneeze is discussed at length next morning by old men wheezing over their first coffees of the day.
Jose Joaquin’s once luxuriant dark hair has begun its backward march from his forehead. One hand wipes it briefly, mid-gesture.
His eyes, dark as coffee, blaze with animation, the eyebrows above working his forehead. He throws back his head at a joke.
That summer’s hits, to be forgotten by the fist tremble of autumn, rage from the jukebox. In one corner, a couple has started to dance. The air groans with its raft of mingling scents –perspiring bodies and an alcoholic sweetness jostle with aromas from the bakery across the road and its hot bread slippery with pulped tomatoes.
Some drinkers have spilled onto the street, where the glow of streetlights is more forgiving than the harshly striplit Bar Alambique.
Suddenly I realise that all this is over. These friends, this bar, the endless milky coffees, the flat, the students I have tried to teach.
This is the fag-end of my year in small-town Spain, just as these final two hours before dawn are the fag-end of the long night. For the others, there will be other evenings, but not for me. I am unwilling to let it slip away, savouring every sight and sound, every scent.
I think of Jose Joaquin, who met me when I arrived, bewildered and sitting on my suitcase at the station, adrift on the sun-swept morning. His memory will not be thrown away so easily. I will remember him in England, in a city that will seem empty and strange.
I go up to him and kiss him on both cheeks. He touches my shoulder lightly, and we say goodbye. We both know we will not see each other again.
• Juliet England was bitten by a monkey belonging to the writer Arthur C Clarke in Sri Lanka when she was a child but has since recovered from the experience.