TLO Chapter 3

 Chapter 3 

To say that the inheritance procedure was a mess doesn’t begin to cover all what it meant for us. Eusebio had put together all the money he still had and used it to pay for the documents and lawyers needed to donate me his house, its contents and his title. His will was quite clear; I could accept the donation or pass it over to any LGTB organisation of my choosing. 

At barely nineteen years old, I found myself the owner of a mammoth of a palace-house, a bookstore, some furniture and an ever-present headache. 

“There’s no way you’ll get the title. You will never be accepted by the other Grandees or the King,” told me Loyola. “It’s a lost battle. You have to yield the honour to the rightful heir; his nephew, Don Carlos. He’s of the blood.” 

“I know.” 

“This whole process will be worse than the Medina Sidonia’s, Eric.” 

“I know.” 

She was damn right but I couldn’t bring myself to reject the legacy and the title. It was something that was so Eusebio’s and he had given it to me, quietly, without saying a thing, that to refuse it, felt like flushing his personal papers and photos down the drain. 

“Can you even afford the taxes?” she asked me with a lot of common sense and that was true; I couldn’t pay for the Duchy nor the process to be recognised as a duke. No, the Duchess of Alba wouldn’t be asking me for tea anytime soon. 

“What are you going to do with this place?” She asked me once more and looked upset because I wasn’t paying any attention to her. 

“Is papa very mad at me?” I asked shyly. Loyola had been a great support, but her questioning and siding with the Rioduero family, was too much for me and I had never expected it. She was speaking about taxes, properties, estates and I don’t know what else while I was worrying because I only had a fabada can for dinner and didn’t know how to live my life without Eusebio’s gentle guidance. 

TLO Chapter 2

 Chapter 2 

I never phoned my sisters. I did mean to but I just couldn’t do it. The first week passed and then the second. A month, a season and I still didn’t feel like it. Around Christmas I had enrolled myself at the high school near Eusebio’s bookshop-house and he didn’t tell me anything. He never did, though his financial situation was way worse than ours, bordering on dire. 

Maybe that’s why I stayed with him. He was a very nice old man. Despite he had been a riot in his youth (hanging out with Almodovar, Macnamara and Alaska), he never asked me a thing or even judged me like everybody else used to do. 

I felt sorry for him. The years had not been kind to him. Most of his money was gone as a result of a “chain of unfortunate decisions” along with his friends. It’s not easy to grow old in such an environment where age is your worst enemy. The family hated him and waited for him to die and leave the last building he owned, right behind the Casa de las Conchas, to them. I mean, he only had a meagre state pension and that bookshop to keep a full palace alive. He could have turned it into a hotel or even a hostel but he hated the idea. 

As the antique books business wasn’t as buoyant as people might believe, I took a part time job at a pizza chain (lying a little about my age, but they didn’t really care) and every night I would deliver pizzas to university students. Erasmus kept them so busy studying that they couldn’t be bothered to cook and god bless them for being so lazy that they couldn’t move their asses down the street to the pizza parlour. 

The Lost Ones

 Chapter 1

When I was born, no fairy godmother or guardian angel bothered to show up. Instead, I got a pink elephant dressed in a fluffy tutu, and it peed on me. 

There’s no other logical explanation for my bad luck. The damn thing just pissed on me and the bad luck it brought joined me for life, just like a life-sentence with no parole. Whenever it look as if my luck would improve, very soon, sooner than you’d expect, my luck would turn for worse and I’d be royally screwed up. 

That’s my only comfort; that one day my bad luck will catch up with that bastard and ruin his life like he ruined mine. Even if I’m not there to see it, I certainly will enjoy his fall from the top. I definitively will.

Coming back to the pink elephant mojo. He started to work early on in my life; early as two days old -If I’m to believe the doctors and nurses at the hospital where I was brought in-. I was found in a heap of clothes on top of the compost recycle bin in a small town in Madrid. The dustman who picked me up, thinking that once again people were too lazy to walk to the “Humana” recycling container, suffered a heart attack when said bundle of clothes moved and it wasn’t a rat what was in there. The guy dropped me and I got a cut in the head -so the newspapers told-. While his colleague was busy trying to perform a CPR on the poor guy, the truck driver picked me up and dialled 112. 

I ended up in the hospital with hypothermia and a bump in my head and the poor guy in the morgue as the local dustman course didn’t include a real CPR training until that day. The news of my “miraculous” rescue aired in the evening news and people spoke about me for a while (two days? Maybe three?) There were some photos of me (blurred face, of course) in the press. If they would have published a good photo of me, maybe some more people would have been interested in me or my real mother would have shown up, but the news of a dead hero scares the hell out of good Samaritans and nobody really wanted to adopt me. 

The Lost Ones

There will be a The Substitute Book IV at some point in the future (by popular demand of five to ten people). 

But first, you will have to read another novel and pass a quiz at the end of it. 

We start the new ride on Easter Sunday. 

Love, 

Tionne