A Tale of Three Women

“Canna ashoo a queshoon?” I looked round to see a short, stubby woman lurching drunkenly towards me in the dingy fisherman’s bar near the river. “If you’rr marr’d, ah’m no’ intrresset.” Against the background of subdued Portuguese murmuring, the broad Glasgwegian accent was unmistakable, its rolling ‘r’s laced with spit.

Having already ordered a glass of red wine, I’d spotted her too late. Turning my back, in the hope she might go away, wasn’t going to work. Her hip bumping against my thigh was more than enough proof of that.

The scruffy little drinking hole behind the market in Tavira had become my favourite port of call. The only woman, and loud at that, Jan was impossible to miss in a bar full of hard-drinking males. Staggering from table to table, she’d been grabbing men’s hands, trying to get them to kiss her. One moment full of bonhomie the next full of aggression, it wasn’t behaviour the locals were used to. As for her colourful Glaswegian vernacular, it was probably best left as it was, concealed under a spit-speckled slur. The wide swings from wooing to cursing, having scant impression on her local prey, she’d moved on to me. Portuguese fishermen prefer to get drunk quietly. The only thing they did understand was that the foreign woman was completely plastered.

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