The Barcelona Project

This is a story my best mate wrote about us in the future, we are all immortalised in the story though under different identities, see if you can figure out which one I am :P :

The Barcelona Project

Once upon a time there lived a beautiful, intelligent, witty, thoughtful and talented young girl called Grace, who lived a life of luxury in a large flat in the south of France, with her wonderfully artistic mother, her good-humoured and sporty adoptive father, her two lively and vivacious younger sisters, and the Prince Charming, also known as Bob Lennon.

There was also a slightly younger, but equally beautiful, intelligent, witty, thoughtful and talented girl called Jasmine, who lived in north Manchester in her dream house with her strong and clever mother and her sweet comedian younger brother, and her faithful dog.

Despite living so far away, the two intelligent, witty, thoughtful and talented young girls were the best of friends and were like honourary sisters. They knew exactly what they were going to do with their lives: Jasmine was going to become a linguist, Grace a writer, and Bob was going to take over the world. They would all live in a villa in Spain, near Barcelona; which they would convert into a hotel run mostly by Jasmine, who would be able to speak five languages by then. This hotel-villa would include six large swimming pools, four night clubs, three cinema/theatre/concert halls; two restaurants, one large Irish pub; and would, in short, be the world’s first official doss house, whatever that may be in Spanish. Grace, for one, had always been extremely annoyed by her teachers in high school telling them that "this wasn’t a doss house", because it was just an expression; doss houses simply did not exist in those days. *cue gasps of horror from the reader/audience*

It seemed that nothing would be able to stand in their way to success. Not family (all close family members had already reserved permanent lodging in this wonderful piece of paradise), not friends (see family), and certainly not men, the lazy buggers. And what other problems could there be?

Finally the day came when they would fulfil their dream. Jasmine and Grace (accompanied by Bob) made their way to Spain and met in Barcelona, where friends of Grace’s dad had generously said they’d lend them their flat for the summer until they found their own place. They climbed six flights of stairs to get to the flat, since the lift was out of order, and collapsed exhausted on the sofa with the air conditioning of full blast, the windows shut against the heat. "Right," said Jas, "how are we gonna do this?"

"Erm," said Grace, who hadn’t actually thought of it up till now. "Well... We just, erm, find this bit of land in the mountains around Barcelona, and we buy it, and build our villa on it."

"Yes, but I need a few more precise answers. For instance, how are we going to find this piece of land? And how are we gonna buy it, since we’re broke? And the same problem applies to building our dream hotel."

"Yes... Erm..." Grace mumbled, wondering where her entire digestive system might have disappeared off to and pondering the paradoxical need to vomit that had taken it’s place. Jasmine sighed impatiently.

"You don’t know, do you? Honestly Grace, you’re supposed to be the older, more sensible experienced one here. Innit Bob? Oh, he's asleep. BOB!"

"C'meh?" mumbled Bob, waking up with a start and wondering what was going on. Grace mumbled something mutinous.

"Luckily for us, I have been thinking about this over the past few years" continued Jasmine, "ever since you sent me that hilarious story about our future where we ended up living happily ever after, and using ridiculous means to get there."

"It wasn’t ridiculous, it had the most comedy value of anything I’d ever written." Grace protested, sitting on Bob's stomach and nearly suffocating him.

"Yes, yes, it was a true work of art" Jasmine acknowledged impatiently, "I know, but I think we should make some money. Now, this is Barcelona, and there are two things that you find a lot of here."

"Heat and sexy men?" Suggested Grace, ignoring the indignant prod in the back from Bob.

"Yes. But there are two things that will help us to make money. And they are...?"

"Yeah, heat and sexy men."

"Grace!!" Bob and Jasmine said at the same time.

"I give up."

"Street players and restaurants. Now since you three don’t speak Spanish yet, we’ll have to go for the street thing first. I’ve already prepared a mime routine." She said, taking "The Imbecile’s Jumbo Guide To Mime" out of her back pocket and opening it on her knee.

"Yay!" Said Grace, although Bob, who had trouble keeping his mouth shut for very long, didn’t seem as enthusiastic.

That afternoon they practiced their miming technique and by that night they were practically professionals. They went to sleep and the next day they went out into the town centre to join the street players.

"Wow, there’s loads of them!" Gasped Jasmine. "I don’t seem to remember there being this many."

"Them statue ones have an easy job, we should’ve gone for that." Said Grace.

"Grace, you can usually keep perfectly still for an average time of about three seconds." Balthazar pointed out.

"Yeah, and you can usually keep perfectly silent for about five." Grace retorted.

"It's more than Jas can," Bob protested. Grace ignored the injured puppy look for a total of four seconds and then gave in and hugged him. Jas was suddenly overcome with a huge coughing fit.

They eventually found a free space in the middle of the street between a budgie seller and a moving gold statue who kept shooting them all rather perverse glances, especially Bob. Jasmine got sick of this after about five minutes and gave him a large mouthful of cultured Spanish, every word of which even Bob understood. The poor statue looked shocked and blushed under his make-up, and never again was seen in that street.

"Nice one, Jas." Grace grinned.

"You probably shouldn’t have put on the skin-coloured catsuit." Bob mused, nodding towards Jasmine.

"I told you it was too hot for something so plastic." Grace reminded her.

"What about you, with the hawaiian grass skirt and that bikini top made entirely out of paper flowers?" Jasmine protested, pointing at them.

"Bobby picked them out for me," she said "therefore I am in no way responsible for the consequences of wearing them."

"You should’ve dressed like me..." Bob said, adjusting his heavy Louis 14th suit and obviously not feeling in the least uncomfortable in the heat that was nearly killing everyone else.

"Ok, ok, enough." Jasmine said. "We’re dressed fine as we are. At least we stand out." She added, not really noticing that actually they didn’t.

They mimed until lunchtime, and then Bob did a stand-up comedy that only the millions of French tourists must have understood, and that evening they went to a cheap café with the sign "Help Desperately Wanted" in nine different languages, none of which was English, and as Grace pointed out fussily, the French translation was badly spelt.

"How much money have we made so far?" Balthazar asked. Grace, who was good with figures since she’d worked in Mc Donald's and with kids in France (it’s harder than you think not to lose any, you have to count them every five minutes), had already counted the money twice.

"Between fifty and two hundred euros, in coppers." She said, frowning dubiously at what would later turn out to be a golden ring with strange, elfic runes traced on the inside. Bob sighed and began to count the money a third time.

"That’s not bad." Said Jasmine. "Reckon you three need another day in mime, or shall we apply for a job here?"

"I think I’m good enough in Spanish now to get a job here." Said Grace, who’d been revising in her breaks from the amusing little foreign language book that Jasmine had given her all those years ago.

Bob frowned and whispered to Jas that it was actually twenty-two euros and a plane ticket to Cuba four years out of date.

While Grace and Bob applied for a job, which they immediately got despite (or maybe because of) their costumes; Jasmine looked around the cafe. It was shabby and dirty, kind of a poor attempt at Americanism. The only thing that seemed to be keeping it going was the very succesful body piercing and tattooist next door; most of the customers were covered in metal.

A young, sexy Spanish bloke with only seven visible piercings and three tattoos caught her eye. He glanced over and grinned in a sexy Spanish way. She grinned back.

"What are you grinning in that goofy way at?" Asked Grace, who had just returned from behind the counter where she’d been negociating with the manager over pay.

"Huh?" Jasmine mumbled, coming regretfully back to the real world.

"You had that look on your face that you always used to accuse me of having when I saw Orlando Bloom or Tom Welling."

"Orlando is now the husband of your friend Caroline, you should've officially gone off him out of loyalty." Jasmine scolded, trying to change the subject.

"Stop trying to change the subject." Grace said shrewdly.

"There is a sexy Spanish bloke on that table over there." Said Jasmine.

"Does he look dodgy?"

"Erm..." Jasmine mumbled, and then she gasped because he was now sitting next to her. Grace looked surprised. He seemed to have got there without them seeing him.

"Hola." He said.

Jasmine chatted to him in Spanish and discovered that he was, to her great disappointment, gay. She later guessed she should have realised, what with the plastic pink sandals and the sparkly pink flower tattoo on his shoulder. He was also working next door in the piercing shop and had overheard their conversation from all the way across the crowded room and miraculously worked out that they must be looking for a bit of land around Barcelona in the mountains to build the world’s first official doss house. At that point Bob swayed back from the mens’ room looking a bit green, and no less in need to relieve himself than before. Jasmine filled him in as he sat down at his place.

"I will help you." The mysterious stranger told them, after introducing himself as Alberto Rodriguez Gonzales and placing a caring arm over Bob's shoulders. Grace tensed but Jasmine kicked her under the table. "I happen to be the son of a multi-millionnaire..."

Grace and Jasmine’s jaws hit the floor. The colour suddenly returned to Bob's cheeks, he stopped clutching his stomach and turned to look at Alberto with new interest.

"...but she disowned me when I was thirteen because I didn’t want to become a funeral director." Alberto finished, a tear sparkling in his eye. Jasmine sighed dreamily and then winced and scowled as Grace kicked her back under the table.

"You don’t look miserable enough to be a funeral director." Bob said comfortingly, handing him a tissue and a dozen different business cards, all his.

That evening they made an action plan in the cafe. With Jasmine’s logic, Bob's financial genius, Alberto’s streetwise knowledge of Barcelona and Grace’s fascinating imagination, they were bound to succeed.

The next day Grace came into the cafe and started working as a waitress. She had forgotten to take off the Hawaiian skirt and top, having collapsed fully dressed onto her matress the night before, but neither the manager nor the customers seemed to mind. It was a lot better than working in Mc Donald's, she concluded, apart from the smell.

Jasmine had found the catsuit melted into a sticky, plasticky pool on the balcony, having gotten up at ten in a heatwave, and today was wearing an aqua bikini top and a tie-dye wrap-around skirt borrowed from Grace. Bob had chosen a winter woat to go over his Louis 14th suit.

Jasmine went to work persuading the manager to let her redecorate the cafe. He eventually agreed as long as the customers didn’t have to move. Jasmine thought that this was totally unreasonable (Grace didn’t. Most of the customers looked as though they inhaled paint, glue and sissors on a regular basis anyway). She yelled in frustration at the manager, who ran screaming from the cafe and was found atop one of Gaudi’s towers a week later in the lotus position, claiming he’d been enlightened, and made millions giving divine wisdom courses, something which later inspired another of Bob's unneeded get-rich-quick scams, but that's another story.

"That’s him out of the way then." Grace commented, handing out poison-in-a-cup, otherwise known as French coffee, at table 3. Jasmine dusted off her hands and rolled up her sleeves with a Look in her eye that meant she meant business. Bob, seeing this, dived under a table and cowered there, trembling.

"Right, everyone, we’re redecorating here, y’all get a free coffee and then out by half one!" she told the room. "Bob, get out from under there, you don't know what you might catch."

A few half-hearted, disgruntled nods and mistrusting mutters on the subject of the free coffee that Grace was now handing out in silver cups, and which you really needed a silver fork to consume, since the steel ones seemed to dissolve after a couple of seconds. One man in a leather jacket covered in badges (the man, not the jacket) turned his cup upside-down to see if it spilled; when it didn’t, grunted approvingly, swallowed it whole, and had to be taken to hospital for major surgery. Luckily Grace, having lived in France (with her dad) for several years, had thought to hand out warnings with the coffee so people couldn’t sue them.

At about half one, they closed the cafe and Alberto came round to help, followed by Bob, who was taking great care not to let Alberto walk behind him, but wouldn't let him out of his sight either.

"Now, how are we gonna do this?" Asked Jasmine. "I was thinking a nice, posh Trafford Centre-type thing..."

"What??!" Cried Alberto, scandalised. "Noone will come! The people who come here like it because it’s cheap and punky."

"Why don’t we just cover it in posters? Save money on paint." Suggested Grace, yawning.

"Good idea, Gracie." Jasmine agreed. "Though I don't think we can do without paint. We could do it in the theme of a rocky bedroom kinda thing."

"I like it!" Alberto enthused enthusiastically.

"Right, I’ll get out all my old rock posters and you can get the rest of the mosher, goth, punk and metal bands things later, I didn’t bring many. Bob, go and get your video game stuff." Grace told them. "I’ll start cleaning the kitchen up with Bob. Jas, you go and buy the paint, get some dark blue or purple or black. Alberto, you can clear up around here. And give them jobs." She pointed at the two thirteen-year-old boys called Pequeño and Chiquito who had been the other waiters before, and who were staring at them from the corner like they were all mad.

They all got to work in fast mode and by Thurday they could reopen. The walls were black and covered in gothic posters, the menu had been altered slightly, and a few more waiters and waitresses had been employed; they loved the job because it was well-paid and the uniform wasn’t too bad; at least two visible piercings and one tattoo, and if you had hair you had to have it long, and if you didn’t have it, you had to really not have it. The new changes attracted so many new customers that within two months they had half a million saved up.

"Right, now we can buy our land!" Jasmine said cheerfully one morning, counting the half a million in the cash box, while Alberto tried a new coffee that Grace’s dad had invented which was so strong it had to be kept in a platinum safe and be chopped up with a very sharp platinum knife, and you could only drink it if you had a certain platinum tongue piercing developed by Alberto, and also Alberto’s new boyfriend, Antonio, who Bob approved of a lot.

"What was that?" Asked Grace, hitting Alberto between the shoulder blades as he wretched and flames poured out of his mouth.

"We’ve got more than enough to buy our bit of land now and start constructing." Jasmine beamed.

"Really? Ooh, fab." Grace grinned, now pouring ice over Alberto’s head, which seemed to be smoking around the nostril area. "We’ll just have to find the land now."

"Right, let’s get the lads and go for a walk." Said Jasmine. "Alberto, you can take over for the day." She added to Alberto, who seemed to have no more pupils and was now sliding down the wall to the floor with an ecstatic grin on his face, vibrating in time to the radio which was playing the latest KYO song. "C’mon, Gracie, let’s go find some land."

"I don’t feel like walking outside in that heat for hours." Grace grumbled.

"We’ll take the car then." Bob grinned, coming out from the bathroom which he had redesigned himself.

"What car? We don’t have a car. Or a driver’s licence, for that matter." Jasmine reminded him.

"Damn, left mine at home..." Said Bob.

So they went out to the street corner, spent 50€ on a quality fake driver’s licence with Grace’s name on it, and then off they went to the car shop.

"Why does it have your name on it? You know we can’t trust you behind a wheel. And why can't Bob drive it? He's actually got a license." Jasmine complained as they bought a technicolour sports car, ignoring Bob’s protest that he wanted a khaki monster truck.

"Yeah, why can't I...?" Bob started.

"Because I'm the eldest and it's about time I learned." said Grace.

"In a country you barely know, on them steep, rocky mountain paths? And why did she put your name as 'Garce'?"

"I dunno, she wasn’t speaking Spanish, she was speaking Catalan I think." Grace replied.

"She was a he, for a start. And how are we gonna get there with you panicking at the wheel?"

"With my trusty ‘Imbecile’s Jumbo Guide To Driving’" said Grace, and whipped it out of her shirt pocket.

"That’s not ‘The Imbecile’s Jumbo Guide To Driving’! That’s ‘The Imbecile’s Jumbo Guide To Mime’!" Jasmine said, pointing. Grace looked at it.

"Oh yeah. What do you know. I wondered where that’d gone."

"Now what are we gonna do?" Jasmine cried frustratedly. "Bob, was this really a good time to forget your license?"

"Have you got your lap top with you?" Grace asked Bob.

"Oh yeah!" Jasmine said, brightening, as he slid it out from behind his ear. He handed it to Jasmine, who logged onto the internet, searched "instant subliminal driving lessons", and passed it to Grace.

Twenty minutes later they were cruising down the highway with the top of the car open and the air conditioning and radio on full blast.

"Bloody internet." Grace muttered from the passenger seat, not really sounding that concerned because there was a rainbow limosine next to them with a group of dark young men in shorts, and Bob had to concentrate on the road.

"Oh, it’s not the internet," Jasmine replied airily, pretending not to spy on the rainbow limosine, "you just have to know how to follow these courses. They’re really good actually, I did a self-defense one last year, I feel so much safer now. You know, maybe you should do the first aid one, we nearly lost Antonio last week with that new decaff your dad sent. It it hadn’t been for Alberto knowing mouth-to-mouth..."

"...then they’d never have got together." Grace finished. "Do you have a pen?"

"Press one of the buttons on that accessory panel there, you’ll probably find one. Why?"

"The tall green-eyed lad in the limosine wants your number, Jas. Bob, could you try and keep level with them?" She pressed the little button with a pen on it and a little drawer opened with a selection of coloured gel pens and paper.

"Hey, we’re getting into the countryside now." Jasmine commented as Grace scribbled the number. "We should be looking around a bit."

"Wait till we’re more in the mountains," said Grace, grinning as Jasmine's new friend blew her a kiss. "Here it’s all flat."

Five minutes later they were in the mountains, but they needed somewhere level to build on and they couldn’t find anywhere.

"Maybe we should build on the flat countryside we went past earlier." Grace said as they screeched to a halt at the top of the fourteenth mountain.

"We’ll find somewhere, don’t worry." Said Jasmine "Right now we need to stop for lunch."

"Right" said Grace, reaching behind her and taking her (other) little black shoulder bag from the back seat. Then she got out of the car and took out a small stove, a bottle of champers and water for Bob (who was starting to regret being the only one who could drive), three crystal glasses and some food and plates and started making the lunch.

"Ah, this is the LIFE!" Jasmine yawned, lying back on Grace's seat and switching on the wide-screen satellite TV next to the dashboard with her toe. "Where’s the remote to this thing?"

"You press the little button that says ‘remote’" Grace replied, flipping pancakes. "Wanna crack open the bottle, Bob? I’ll spill it." Jasmine took the bottle of champagne and opened it in a very professional way which would’ve made Grace’s dad proud. Bob growled something along the lines of "I-cudda-dunnit" and whined that he wanted some, which the girls ignored.

"Reckon we’ll find our little bit of land today?" Jasmine asked, pouring three glasses and putting them on a little pull-out table from under the dashboard.

"What about that bit there?" Grace said, pointing with the frying pan, which now had a Spanish omlette in it, to Bob's disgust. Jasmine looked and saw on the next mountain a large, flat, sunny ridge with a ‘for sale’ sign stuck right in the middle of it.

"Ooh, perfect. See, I knew we’d find it somehow."

They ate lunch (pancakes, Spanish omlette, champers, and a mix of galaxy chocolate, skittles, malteasers and dime Mc Flurries professionally made by Grace for afters) and then off they went to the next mountain.

"Wow, you can see all of Barcelona from here." Grace gasped.

"There’s a number, look" Jasmine pointed at the bottom of the ‘for sale’ sign.

"You got your mobile?" Grace asked. Jasmine shook her head. "Never mind, there’s probably one in the car."

Sure enough, when they looked in the car there was a phone button and the latest Nokia shot out from under the driver’s seat. Grace took it and dialled the number.

"Hello? We’d like to buy a bit of land on this here mountain." She said. "How much?"

"10€" replied a Spanish bloke from the other end.

"10€???!" Grace shrieked, causing a small avalanche on the next mountain. Bob took the phone. "Er, we mean, yes, certainly we’ll take it. It’s a bit of a stretch though, we wouldn’t pay a peseta more..."

"We use cents now, Bob." Jasmine told him as he hung up and Grace jumped up and down with glee.

"I think we should get someone to check out the land if it's only 10€," Bob said "there must be a catch."

So they went to a professional "land checker person" as Grace called him, and got him to look up the history of the mountain, eventually finding out that it was supposed to be haunted by the ghost of Andy Garcia.

"And why are people scared of this ghost? What does he do?" Jasmine asked sceptically.

"He is said to seduce young women until the one with his name will come and exorcize him."

Everyone turned to look at Grace.

Several weeks of psychic training on Grace's part later, they bought the piece of land on Grace’s credit goldcard and hired the builders and the architects to build their villa, and Grace did a formal exorcision, a talent they hadn't known she possessed (haha, geddit? possessed? ah, never mind). Within a year they’d had it built and now all they had to do was open it. Unfortunately, they’d run out of money.

"Now what are we gonna do?" Grace moaned, as Jasmine stared hopelessly into the empty cashbox.

"I dunno, something unrealistic as usual. Contact Alberto’s mother or something." Bob said, handing Grace a cinnamon and banoffee ice cream and ignoring the jealous look from Mario, Antonio’s straight brother who worked in the lingerie shop opposite. They’d discovered that the limosine guy (Pablo) only gave her his number to find out Bob’s, and he was hoping that after some disappointment Mario would find comfort in the arms of Jasmine and they would live together in blissful Catalan existence in a bungalow near the Miro museum.

Jasmine jumped to her feet excitedly, surprising Bob out of his musings.

"Perfect! We’ll contact his mother!"

"Who’s?" Asked Alberto, coming into the room hand in hand with Antonio, who had turned a bit orange since drinking that morning’s coffee.

"Yours."

"Oh, she’s dead, I got a call from my English brother a month ago." He said unconcernedly.

"You have an English brother??! And you never told us???!!!!" Jasmine squeaked.

"Yes, he’s called Alan and he lives in a town called Bolton. He got the funeral director job."

Jasmine was staring with her mouth open, then something came back to her and she said "Wasn’t it Alan Thingy who played that funeral director in Oliv...?" But she shut up then because Grace was mouthing "NO! NO!" And making "shut up" gestures.

"What do you mean, play? Mother wanted me to really be a funeral director... I think. She sent me to acting classes to learn to be sad for the customers and everything."

"Er... Right... Yeah. Sounds horrible. Anyway... Got anything in the way of inheritance?"

"Yes, all from my father, he was very generous. About two million fourteen thousand and fifty three euros seventy two cents, more or less."

"Fancy lending us some?"

"Of course. I don’t know what I’ll do with it anyway. You can have half a million and I’m giving a million to charity, and then I’ll retire to Minorca for the rest of my days with Antonio." He turned and smiled sweetly at Antonio, who smiled sweetly back. Grace, Jasmine and Bob were doing a victory dance and didn’t notice. Chiquito, Pequeño and Chiquita, the waiters, realised this meant they would inherit the cafe and jumped for joy.

One year later Grace, who was lying on a lilo in the middle of one of the world’s biggest swimming pools (and the biggest one in the doss house), looked up and squinted in the Spanish sunlight. There was a figure standing at the edge of the pool with a smaller, four-legged figure next to it. It took her a moment to recognise who it was.

"Oh my GOD... DAD??!!!!"

Grace’s dad smiled. Sparky the dog wagged his tail and drooled. His master now had blackened teeth from all that poisonous coffee.

"I decided to come and watch the match between France and Ireland on your cinema screen." He said. "I’m very proud of you. But there’s one thing missing in this doss house."

"What is it?" She asked.

"A gym."

"What do we want a gym for?" Asked Jasmine, coming out from the lobby arm in arm with someone called Phil and wearing an engagement ring on her finger. "It’s a doss house. You’re not meant to work."

"Ah, but I don’t see gym as work." He said. Thus started another animated debate on the subject of exercise and whether or not it counted as work. A week later a massive multigym opened in the dosshouse, along with a gift shop called El Coluseum that sold much in the way of windchimes, dreamcatchers, incense, Emily Strange items and Grace’s mum’s mirrors, right next to the enormous video games complex owned by Bob.

All that was left was the wedding. Phil and Jasmine got married in Gaudi’s church, spent their honeymoon in Manchester (they were getting a bit sick of all that sun) and came back. And, apart from a few petty arguments and Jasmine getting horrifically sunburnt one summer about six years after the opening of the doss house, they all lived happily ever after.

The End.