That’s how I met Sergio and Eeva-Lina. He was Spanish, from the interior. She was a Finn who went on holiday, fell for him and stayed. Ingratiated myself by becoming their one regular for a week. A right funny pair, seeing as she was topping six foot and he was nearer the five foot mark. She was a strapping long-legged ex-model with scraggy bottle-blonde hair and two-inch black roots, who wore foundation as subtle as hardened cement. Her teeth were a state. Heavy smokers. Both were. Eeva-Lina carried herself like a Viking goddess (what doesn’t know she’s gone to pot) and had that desperate expression of fading beauties craving admiration in the gaze of others. Sergio had the kind of moustache that’d put you off kissing a man ’cos you’d be wondering what hatchlings lurked inside it.

I’d exhausted myself trudging around the fringes of Marbella, seeking out little bars and restaurants in need of a good shake-up, and came across these two, desperate for business – my last shot. I appeared to them as a fairy godmother (my speciality) when I said I’d cook up a storm and turn their run-down café into a culinary establishment and cabaret bar. Eeva-Lina had named the place El Smorgasbord, in spite of any evidence that she’d ever sliced a salami, let alone sold one. A marketing gimmick, she explained, over-enunciating as if English were my second tongue, and ruffling her hair, carelessly blowing smoke in my face like she was Greta Garbo returned from the ball and I was Hattie McDaniel waiting patiently to take her fur stole. It’s clearly worked, hasn’t it, I refrained from saying, casting my eyes at the empty chairs. Instead I pitched forth, ‘Mama Hortense’s Singing Kitchen, right? Let’s start afresh.’

They looked affronted, which made me push my cards further up the table. ‘Give me licence to make changes. Are we agreed?’ They shifted uncomfortably and sneaked the kind of coded glances at each other that a blind five-year-old could decipher. I collected my bag and jacket and got up to leave. ‘Or I’ll find somewhere else.’

That forced them to nod. Sergio’s was two beats behind Eeva-Lina’s, as he’d had three bottles of beer since I’d arrived an hour earlier and was breaking open the fourth with his teeth. ‘We’ll specialize in Caribbean cuisine,’ I stated. (Who’s to know any different around here.) That made them twitch excitedly, and Eeva-Lina suddenly clicked pretend castanets in the air and shouted, ‘Carmen Miranda! Josephine Baker and her swinging bananas. Olé!’

I let it pass.

‘I’ll rustle up a kaftan, make a bandanna, big silver loop earrings, bangles, ruby lips and guess what? Big Mama’s in the house!’

Sergio smiled, revealing his muddy pearlies. I wished he wouldn’t.

I added, ‘After the overheads, we’ll split it forty–sixty.’