Swansea Review

the tapas machine

he thought it odd, but if the woman wanted him to take the cd player out of her car & replace it with a tapas machine, then who was he to argue?

it had taken him hours on the computer tracking down such a device. he had spilt his tea all over the mouse pad & had scalded the cat when eventually he found a company in tijuana specialising in auto catering customisation service & repair. he had the necessary equipment flown over urgent express, carried as hand luggage by a company engineer–essential he come too, to co-ordinate the delicate installation of the hardware, the wiring, the fuse.

‘eet will be,’ the clean-shaven white-shirted eager-beaver of an engineer on his first trip abroad declared proudly, ‘the first of its kind in yow country!’ but he couldn’t understand why anyone would want such a sublime & mexi-decadent machine–that he himself had been instrumental in designing–installed in a two-year-old factory-standard ford focus diesel.

he agreed to the deal through default, when the garage owner proclaimed, ‘this media crowd are so addicted to kudos they don’t really know what they want, as long as it makes their associates go “ooh” & “aah!” believe me, they’re dancing on clouds, daft sods...’

the engineer shrugged. he flew back to tijuana a contented man, with a tequila on his fold-out table, a mouth full of cashew nuts, a freshly signed & correctly dated cheque in his pocket & a pile of napkins detailing scribbled export calculations, profit margins & various job titles the bosses would bestow on him once he came back with the news of his remarkable result. a vast new market & he broke it. one very happy mexican in the stewardess’ hands.

meanwhile, the garage owner couldn’t understand why the woman from the bbc should go so crazy after all the effort he put in. he re-read the phone message written by his nephew who had taken the call. not the boy’s fault he had caught the dyslexia, the school said so. besides, she should be proud to have the first onboard tapas-producing dashboard in wales, britain, europe, this side of the pond; god-damn, it’s a first! she should be over the moon–her friends will be impressed; she should get hours & hours of dinner party chat out of such an occurrence such a machine such a boon to her driving experience she could hold her dinner parties in the back of her car–imagine the delights of the school run from now on! imagine the peripheries the add-on’s the velcro tabasco sauce bottle holders tortilla folders brandname visors stickers mudflaps flip-up gearstick knobs doubling up as dipping sauce bowls ashtrays replaced by auto-refilling spinning trays of those nasty cardboard crisps they can only sell in off-licences that you only eat out of boredom when you’re pissed or posh, tubes of the pricey ones attached to the seatbelts miniature lazy susans attached to the arm rest & dumbwaiters connected to the trunk. hole in the market or what! profit margin profit margin profit margin! we’ll go public & sell stocks!

he picked up the brochure left by his new intercontinental compadre & business partner, considered the flush inbuilt multidisc tortilla filler & a backshelf full of bassbins, eyed up the fifteen-year-old two-tone red nissan bluebird up on the ramp, one hundred thou’ on the clock, three bald tyres, a month on the tax, giggling hippy dave welding the sills & singing along to seventies rock. ‘perhaps...’ he mulled, ‘perhaps we can sell multi-valve hydraulic clark’s pie dispensers both sides of the panama canal, whadja reckon, cat? “meow?” what kind of an answer’s that? that’s the problem with this country: nobody gives credit to the thoughts of a working man. no imagination see, you lot...’

Lloyd Robson is a writer and tv/radio broadcaster from Cardiff. His latest book, Oh Dad! A Search for Robert Mitchum (Parthian, ISBN 978-1-905762-13-2) is out now.