Rolling Fields

by David Trueba, Rahul Bery

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Hispanic & Latino

Synopsis

WINNER OF AN ENGLISH PEN AWARD

'Effortlessly readable and fizzing with energy, this novel is by turns quirky, funny and thoughtful' Mail on Sunday

Dani Mosca is 40 and his father has just died.

Fulfilling his father's last wishes, Dani embarks on a road trip back to his childhood village, a three-hour hearse journey from Madrid. Leaving behind the busy streets of the city for the deserted, archaic heart of Spain, Dani revisits the key junctions of his life: his conflicted relationship with a pragmatic and authoritarian father; the mystery of his birth; his school years in the repressed atmosphere of Catholic Spain; the origin of his band and its early successes; the emptiness left by a tragically lost friendship; his great loves.

Laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving and featuring an unforgettable cast of characters - from Ecuadorian drivers to Spanish Bowie lookalikes - Rolling Fields is a novel full of the grace and messiness of life: brave, exciting and completely irresistible.

Translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery

Release date: June 11, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

we all know how it ends

We all know how it ends and it doesn’t end happily. It’s a funny story, this one, because we all know the outcome but not the plot. We’re both all-seeing and blind, wise and ignorant. This is at the root of that melancholy we all share, the vague feeling that makes us weep on overcast days, that keeps us awake in the middle of the night and unsettles us when we have to wait too long for a loved one to return. It’s at the root of excessive human cruelty and unexpected human kindness. In a way, it’s at the root of everything: knowing the ending but not how we get there. This game has strange rules, rules no child would ever accept, because children don’t want you to tell them how the story ends: they don’t yet realise that knowing the ending is the only way to enjoy what comes before.

There’s a death car outside the house.

‘Papá.’ The word echoed deep inside the cave of my memories. ‘Papá.’ It was my voice. ‘Papá, wake up.’ And then it was my kids’ voices. ‘Oto, come on, wake up.’

I was asleep. And when you sleep you sink into a deep, dark well in which time is all time accumulated – you’re both child and adult, a complete and timeless self, and I become the pure essence of Dani Mosca. To wake up is to take your allotted place on the calendar, to return to your assigned position: no more hugging ghosts and driving down the invisible motorway of your dreams.

On my cheek, my son’s kisses. Ryo still kissed me, despite his age. He was nine and his kisses were those of all nine-year-olds: soft, wet, long. Maya sat down on the mattress; I could feel her weight by my feet. She no longer kissed me all that often – kisses had started to seem like kids’ stuff to her. And there’s nothing a twelve-year-old girl loathes more than kids’ stuff.

Why is it always this way, that when you’re a child you’re in such a hurry to grow up? Last summer I watched my children playing happily in the sand on the beach and I thought: when do we stop making castles by the sea? When do we make that mistake? When do we accept that this is something meant only for kids? But maybe we never stop making sandcastles by the sea, we just call it something else. Like how becoming a parent doesn’t mean you stop being someone else’s child.

It must have been 7.30 a.m. when I climbed into bed, making it abundantly clear that this morning and I weren’t meant for each other. And then, just moments after I’d shut my eyes, my children’s voices came into my ears. Oto, Oto. When they’re feeling affectionate they call me ‘Oto’, which is the Japanese way of saying ‘Daddy’.

They sleep on the far side of the garden, in what is now Kei’s house and theirs, and which was once ours. I ended up living in the studio, separated from them, on the other side of the overgrown patio, like a lodger. ‘That’s the way you bohemian types do divorce,’ says Petru, the pure-blooded, tattooed Romanian we call whenever we need a handyman. He’d installed a shower and a tiny kitchen in the studio, and created a more intimate sleeping area, cut off from the rest of the equipment: the mixing desk, the computer, the keyboard, the guitars, the cables. This is where I live now.

Bohemian is a word no one uses any more, but it’s a perfect way of describing a person who comes home after seven in the morning and goes to sleep in a music studio, on a futon that’s barely a foot off the floor. During the school holidays Ludivina, who’s every bit as Romanian as Petru, never let the children come over to my studio before I’d shown any sign of being awake. She never called me a bohemian. She made excuses for me. She knew that a single man is like a football no one kicks around any more.

Kei was away doing concerts and she wouldn’t be back until Tuesday. But what day was it today? that was the question. Definitely late July. Definitely the summer holidays, because when the children have school, Ludivina makes their breakfast first, then sends them in to wake me up. And in August they’d be off to Japan with their mother, to spend three weeks with their grandparents in Okinawa, on the beaches of Motobu; with the prospect of their absence not far off, I wanted to enjoy their company as much as possible. Yes, it was definitely late July.

Ludivina has helped us with the kids for years; she shares her secrets with me and insists that one day Kei will forgive me for everything and I’ll be able to cross back over the garden and live in our home again. Nacho, who plays the sax and does most of the brass arrangements on our recordings, says that anyone who takes their kids to school in the morning is a fucking slave. But he’s wrong. Children in the morning are like freshly watered plants. Kei dreads early rising and prefers it when I take them. She knows I get up at dawn, that I no longer sleep like I used to. I’m afraid of sleeping too much, too deep.

For my daughter, Maya, arriving at school late is a total disaster, so we sometimes get a taxi for a journey that takes no more than fifteen minutes on foot. Ryo likes taxis, especially when they have a Spanish flag hanging from the rear-view mirror; every time Ryo sees a taxi driver with the flag he likes me to tell him the same story.

It’s the tale of a taxi driver who spends so many hours behind the wheel he suddenly forgets where he is, what city he’s in, and even who he is and what he does for a living. Then he looks at the passenger seat and sees them, Maya and Ryo, two Japanese children. In his state of alarm he becomes convinced he’s in Japan and the guy has no idea how to say a single word in Japanese. He becomes overwhelmed, because nothing is more overwhelming to a Spaniard than ceasing to be one entirely. Then all of a sudden – bam! – he sees the red-and-yellow flag hanging from the rear-view mirror and he says to himself, ‘Oh yeah, I’m Spanish. Phew! what a relief.’

Ryo had to be told this story every single time. He only had to point at the flag for me to kick into action: ‘Look, Papá, the mini Spanish flag.’ I’d speak in a very low voice so that the drivers couldn’t hear, though sometimes they’d notice my son’s laughter and try to figure out what we were talking about.

I like imagining my children when they’re older. Here’s hoping the child never disappears from their faces completely. It’s sad when you look at a person’s face and can’t see the child they once were, and sadder still to see children who already possess the face of the adult they will become. My son, Ryo, has a classmate with the face of a stockbroker; he even charges kids twenty cents to borrow his mobile. ‘Don’t even think about getting any bigger.’ That’s what I tell my daughter, Maya, every day at the school gates. ‘No matter what anyone says, don’t even think about getting bigger.’ I repeat it every time until she stares back at me with that forced look of reproach – Oh, Papá, you’re such a bore – before she gets swallowed up into the school.

Now, when they launch themselves onto my bed, they know full well that I don’t even open my eyes until I’ve had four kisses. It’s a security protocol to avoid being duped by children who aren’t mine, the combination to my safe. They still tolerate my games. Through clenched teeth, my daughter asks me, ‘When will you grow up, Dad?’

One, two, three and four – four kisses, there we have it.

‘Oto, wake up. Open your eyes. Papá, there’s a death car outside the house!’

a taste of old rags

Kisses after lovemaking leave a taste of old rags on the lips. That’s why I always get dressed and leave. After sex, every position is a compromising one: my arm under her head, her cheek on my chest, our backs turned away from each other. And these days I don’t want to spend the whole night sleeping next to anyone. Because the night belongs to those who love. And I don’t love. I prefer to be put through the ordeal of them watching me as I dress, exposing the skin that now lacks the weightlessness of desire as I search for a sock or for the underwear I abandoned on the floor, or put on the trainers with laces tied the previous morning.

‘Are you going?’ Carmela had asked, with her customary resentful sweetness.

It’s so nice when they’re still asleep and you can get dressed and then blow them a kiss, with one foot already out the door. But Carmela sat up to set the alarm on her phone, so the farewell was more laboured. Sitting up on the mattress, she moved like a cat, with that dishevelled hair that looks so good on women. They should pay hairdressers to mess it up like that. We kissed twice more, each kiss as dry and raspy as the hangover.

Carmela was a waitress at Bar de Quique and that was the seventh time we’d slept together. Such accuracy was entirely down to her.

‘It’s the seventh time we’ve slept together in four months,’ she told me. ‘We’re in danger of this becoming a chronic attachment.’ I just coughed.

‘I know your game, you only come here when you want to fuck,’ she’d said as I walked up to the bar the night before.

She was thirty-one, almost fifteen years younger than me, but she talked about her age as if it were an ailment she’d decided to get treatment for.

‘I need to do something,’ she always moaned. ‘I have to do something with my life. I have to find something different.’

I’ve heard this lament too many times and I always tended to dodge the issue to avoid getting caught up in the project myself.

‘It’s not what you think; I hardly ever go out at night. I can’t with the kids.’

I was telling her the truth. But I didn’t mention that I avoided Quique, my local, whenever I didn’t want to end the night with her.

‘You’ve gained a lover but lost a bar,’ Animal reprimanded me when I suggested we go elsewhere. ‘That’s serious. Lovers come and go, but a good bar is for life. Being in love means not being able to have another drink when you want to.’ These were the words of Animal, a man who’d lost all the bars in his life forever.

Animal says I’m impatient. He’s always available; he has loads of time for everything. I don’t; I’m anxious. They say the best test of your anxiety is if you flush the toilet before you’ve even finished pissing. That’s me. I’m always impatient with soundchecks. Even encores lose their appeal when they go on too long. Carmela would undress me in three strokes, in her ugly flat in Ventas, before taking off her own clothes like a man, not caring what she revealed. The first time I spoke to her, attracted by the pale eyes and fair skin underneath that black hair, she stopped me in my tracks.

‘I saw you once when I was at university in Clamores. My boyfriend took me; he loved your songs. He was an arsehole. His favourite one was ‘I’m Leaving’.’

That song was actually a description of orgasm:

I’m leaving

Tomorrow is here.

I was in, now I’m out

I’m not who I was

I’m leaving.

Many people, though, interpret it as a break-up song and I liked the ambiguity, which may well have been intentional, since I’ve always associated the erotic climax, the spilling of seed, with escape. When satiated, pleasure kicks open the door to the next bedroom, one of the many paradoxes that make living a truly dizzying experience.

Over the course of two or three nights at Quique, Carmela lowered her defences, so I invited her to have one for the road before closing time and she accepted.

‘You’re going to fuck a waitress. It’s such a classic rock ’n’ roll cliche, doesn’t it make you sick?’ she said as we stumbled, kissing, into her place that first night. ‘The musician who hooks up with the waitress.’

‘I have nothing but respect for the classics,’ I replied.

I walked from Carmela’s flat to my house. That morning, I was the guy caught by the dawn doing jobs that should have been done under cover of darkness. Red-handed. The sun was like the lamp glaring in my face in a police interrogation scene from a movie. My only response was to whistle. I like to whistle as I walk. There are certain places where songs are born. On the street, on the way home in the early hours, in bed before fully waking up, on aeroplanes. And in the shower.

The shower is an expensive and not very eco-friendly place to be inspired, but the songs it produces taste like rain. Besides, it’s a way of rebelling against my father’s stinginess. When I was living with him, he’d start banging on the bathroom door the moment he heard me turn on the shower.

‘You don’t need to use so much water for a shower! Turn the tap off when you’re putting on the soap!’

If you blew your nose under the stream of water he’d get really mad.

‘Man alive, do you know how much water you’re wasting?’ he’d reprimand me from behind the door. ‘You think your snot’s more important than water?’

Using water unnecessarily, leaving the lights on, keeping the fridge door open because you weren’t sure what to eat, not drawing the curtains when the heating was on at night, throwing away a jam jar unless it was completely spotless: these were all forms of wastefulness my father couldn’t tolerate. His favourite music was the rhythmic sound of a spoon hitting against the sides of an empty yoghurt pot as he went after every last bit. Scrape, scrape, clunk, scrape, scrape, clunk.

I wanted to finish the new album, so I enjoyed walking that morning, searching for a new melody. This one will be album number ten, not counting two greatest hits records. Ten albums in what’s approaching thirty years in the business is, I think, a reflection of my eagerness not to bore people too much with my presence. And not to bore myself in the process.

recently I’ve been thinking a lot about death

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about death. Still, it’s a big leap to go from that to literally waking up with a hearse outside your front door. Once my kids had managed to wake me, I looked out of the window. The driver had rung the bell several times, Ludivina explained.

‘But I refused to open it,’ she said. ‘It brings bad luck.’

When he saw me, the driver sounded his horn, with all the ease of a friend swinging by to pick you up. An ease you’d never expect from a hearse.

Sooner or later,’ Gus used to say, ‘all cars become hearses.’

OK, Gus, but this one here really is a hearse. With its tinted windows and spacious, box-shaped boot for transporting coffins, it was, unmistakably, the final limousine.

I don’t know why I’d been thinking about death so much recently. They say it’s age, the awareness that you and those around you have entered its zone of influence, its orbit. But in this instance it wasn’t so much a case of me thinking about death as it was death thinking about me. At various moments I’ve thought a great deal about sex, success, love, money, without ever waking up to find them parked outside my house. Maybe death is more powerful than any other idea: it always has the last laugh.

Seeing the hearse double-parked outside my house that morning made a great impression on me. It was summer, it was early, and luckily there were hardly any neighbours out and about, wondering who’d died, jumping to conclusions.

‘Gosh, he’s dead. Daniel, the singer. Or maybe someone in his family, or perhaps that Japanese woman who was living with him.’

I don’t believe there’s a soul on earth who doesn’t see a hearse and think, ‘it’s come for me’. Even if only for a split second. It’s like when someone opens a bottle of champagne and we’re always afraid the cork, however random its trajectory, will end up hitting us in the eye. Or is that just me?

‘Miss Raquel tried to find you,’ the driver screeched, popping his enormous skull out of the window. His head was so big it seemed impossible he’d manage to get it back inside the car.

Raquel’s my guardian angel. She’s the one who organises our diary. I always introduce her in the same way: ‘This is Raquel. She keeps my career afloat.’ She likes to say she’s not so much my guardian angel as my security guard. Raquel doesn’t have kids and so has made me into a kind of son, despite the fact I’m almost ten years older than her. She honours my commitments and her painstaking dedication to my schedule is proof – if proof were needed – that a mother really can be younger than her children.

Raquel didn’t mind dealing with my furniture deliveries, absurd bureaucratic tasks, my ever-increasing pile of paperwork, malfunctioning domestic items. ‘Speak to Raquel,’ I tell everyone. I feel much more confident with people speaking to Raquel than I would if they spoke with me.

Sometimes I tell Raquel about my personal problems, to see if she can resolve them in the same diligent way she deals with the rest of my day-to-day affairs. She always picks up the phone, whereas I forget it, put it away somewhere, ignore it, because there are times in my life when I need to exist without that thing nearby. I haven’t quite yet followed Animal’s extreme example of saving all of his contacts as simply No or Yes, so he knows whether or not to answer the call. But Raquel picks up every call and can even keep several conversations going at once.

I have friends who say that Raquel is actually in love with me, which is why she criticises every move I make on other women: ‘Since when do you like bimbos?’; ‘Are you sure you want this woman to have your number?’; ‘They’re getting younger and younger. Soon you’ll be asking your daughter for her contacts.’

When we first met I was drawn to how she dealt with a group we were playing a show with. We began working together and at one of our first concerts I drank enough to pluck up the courage to flirt with her. After my third raunchy look, she leant into my ear to restrain me.

‘Just so you know, I like girls, and you’re an inch away from making a fool of yourself.’

‘It’s your father’s . . .’ Raquel’s penetrating voice cut into me, despite how far away she was.

‘Of course. My father. Sorry.’ I sensed a slight delay as my voice travelled to her ear in Rio de Janeiro. ‘What time is it in Brazil?’

Raquel was on holiday there with a journalist she’d met at a gig we’d played in Montevideo a year back.

‘Don’t tell me you’d forgotten?’ she asked me. ‘Were you asleep? What day is it today, Dani?’

I felt the spurs of her caustic wit digging into my back.

‘Day? It can’t even be nine yet!’ I answered.

‘Are you with the driver? Is everything OK?’ she asked. ‘Tell me you can deal with it alone.’

‘Of course I can,’ I told Raquel. ‘It’s all good, I’m on it. I’ll deal with it.’

the first time I wanted to die

The first time I wanted to die – I mean really wanted to die, not just pretend I did because I was feeling sorry for myself – was when Oliva and I stopped being together. I hesitated there. I was going to write when she left me, or when we broke up, but with the passing of time the action itself becomes less significant than its consequence. We stopped being together. When that happened it felt, in a very cold and clinical way, as if dying wouldn’t be all that bad. You die and that’s the end of all the fear, the insecurity, the pain, all the cuts and scratches you carry inside. I felt it again sometime later, during another one of those unhappy moments when sadness wakes you in the night and digs its nails into your heart.

But that was different. All the subsequent times were different. I was older then, whereas I was only twenty-five the time Oliva cried as I stroked her hair and told her I’d always be by her side. Or perhaps it was she who said it to me, though both of us knew we’d never be by each other’s side again. And then, for the first time, in my life, I wanted to die, because death at least had an undeniable value: the gift of opportunity.

The end of love is the closest thing there is to death unless you’ve actually experienced death, which is of course the actual closest thing to death. Just before they die, the dead probably think, ‘Oh, right, so that’s what it’s like.’ But when love comes to an end, no one understands a thing and we ask ‘What’s going on? No one told me anything about this,’ because we can’t see that death has just delivered one of its instalments.

My father upped and died just after Kei and I decided to separate. My second, immense separation. Sometimes you turn on the bathroom light and see cockroaches scuttling to safety; well, one day we turned the light on in our relationship and saw a clear line leading to abject misery. As I put it in a song I wrote for her that I’ve hardly ever played to anyone: ‘Sometimes goodbye is a way of saying I love you.’ Being in love isn’t as perfect as we make out. There’s no shortage of murderers who claim to be in love with someone. The difficult thing about love is defining exactly what it is that you love. Not how much, or how, or how long, but what: when you say you love someone, what exactly is it that you love?

My father’s eyes would light up whenever he saw Kei and Oliva. He had good taste in women. Can you inherit something like that? I suspect the fact that these two women not only went out with me, but also actually lived with me, was the only reason my father didn’t consider his son to be a complete waste of space.

It hurts to think that he died just after Kei and I separated. For my father, marriage was the holy grail, yet there I was, clumsily spilling its contents everywhere. When I was a child my father would always say, ‘Why do you have to be so clumsy?’ whenever I knocked over my milk, or spilt soup from my bowl while placing it down on the tablecloth. I spilt my marriage everywhere too, and he barely got the chance to harangue me for it, because he died.

He called me from the hospital. ‘It’s Dad. I’m in the hospital.’ I later found out that he’d had to rush back home from his morning walk because he’d shat himself. ‘I shat myself,’ he announced when I saw him in the hospital corridor. Maybe shitting himself was my father’s natural reaction to death coming to find him: his intestine recognised death before he did. Even on the day he died, he still insisted that the doctors couldn’t discover what was wrong with him. ‘They’re useless. All they do is mess around with these tests and they still can’t find a thing.’

It wasn’t surprising that death met him while he was out walking. My father was always going for walks. He walked in the mornings, in the afternoons and sometimes at night, too. He walked at home, up and down the corridor. He even walked in bed. If I ever got to his house so late that he’d already gone to bed, it wasn’t at all uncommon to find him doing bicycle kicks on the mattress, or shaking out his legs as he talked to me. ‘You’ll go stiff if you don’t move,’ he’d say by way of explanation.

My father walked to escape death and old age. My father walked for the same reason I tour: to keep all of our plates spinning. Old age was hot on his heels and he kept on walking, but death sought him out intentionally, studied his routine and caught up with him on the allotted day. The pancreatic infection was so fierce that in just ten days it did away with this healthy, sinewy man, who was more rock than bone, tough in the way only country people are. A man who’d gone to A & E by himself, after taking a shower and changing – ‘I shat myself in broad daylight’ – taking two buses because he refused to pay for a taxi no matter how weak he felt: paying for a taxi was one affront too many. My father wasn’t going to take a taxi to his own death. He took not one, but two buses. That was his way.

I didn’t cry when my father died. I was with him in the room and the doctor warned me that the end was near. It was seven in the evening. My father was gasping for air, like a fish out of water, and I took his hand, which was constructed from the material hands used to be made from many years ago, when we were all peasants. A hand so firm and strong it was almost as if my own limp hand was the one being consoled. My father’s hand had spent its first twenty years labouring in the fields and then at war; mine had spent that same period wanking and playing the guitar.

My father didn’t realise that it was death tugging at him and I wanted him to know.

‘You should be happy, Dad, you’ve had a full life. Be at peace.’

‘Don’t say that,’ he quietly scolded me.

Those were his last words. He never spoke again; he died arguing with me, which had always been our habitual mode of communication. ‘Don’t say that.’

He’d already stopped speaking by the time the hospital chaplain slipped into the room to pray for him. A few days earlier, when he’d first come into the room to start his nonsense about preparing to leave this world, my father had told him, ‘I’m as clean as a whistle.’ The priest went to work on him quickly, with the skill and speed of a true professional. He applied the holy oils like a mechanic checking a car’s tyre pressure.

I didn’t cry as I watched my father die. In fact, I started laughing because a relative from his village, Aunt Dorina, showed up. She popped her head through the door in a way that was both funny and ridiculous. ‘May I?’

Aunt Dorina came to Madrid often to see her daughter, Dori, a dermatologist in that same hospital. My cousin, Dori, had filled her mother in as to the severity of my father’s condition after she’d come up from her consulting room one day, all smiles, to see how he was. While there, she’d offered to remove a mole from my neck.

‘I’ll remove it for you, if you want. Moles after forty . . .’ And she stopped there.

Stop being decorative and become signs of death, I thought.

‘And I know you’re forty-four, because my mother told me we were born the same year,’ Dori added.

I laughed because, just moments after my father had died, Aunt Dori had popped in to ask, from the door, if she’d come at a bad time. I gave her the same look I’d give to a supermarket delivery driver asking where to leave the shopping while the house is burning down. I laughed because I couldn’t cry, and because her ill-timed visit jump-started all that morbid machinery, the endless phone calls and formalities. The whole process that means a man can’t abandon protocols even after leaving life itself behind. My friend Vicente always used to warn me: ‘You know what happens after death?’ he’d say, ‘Paperwork.’

I was flooded with responsibilities. Suddenly, I had lots of things to do, and you can’t cry when you’ve got things to do. Many years ago, I’d written in a song:

The day you went away

I couldn’t die, though I was willing

I had to see the dentist

For a filling.

But back then everything was light-hearted, or at least I had the energy to make it into something funny, or to make it into a song, which is basically the same thing. I closed my father’s eyes, those beautiful honey-coloured eyes I’d been lucky enough to inherit. His mouth was hanging wide open in what was obviously life’s final cruel trick, or death’s first. I tried to close it so that no one would notice the lack of false teeth, his last flirtation with vanity.

As with witnessing the birth of my kids, being present at my father’s death helped me to get rid of any mystical inclinations: dying, like being born, is just an arduous, messy physiological process. If, as he firmly believed, my father was going to be travelling straight from that place to the Kingdom of the Just, then that was no longer any of my business.

but I shed deferred tears

But I shed deferred tears for my father’s death. It happened three months later, in Barajas airport. I was taking my kids to spend a long weekend in Mallorca, at the seaside house where Bocanegra, my protector at the label for many years, always let me stay. It was the holiday weekend in May and the check-in queue had trumped even my worst expectations. The machines were all broken and we ended up missing our flight.

The attendant told me to try to change the tickets at the customer service desk, which was also flooded with passengers in similarly tight spots. I decided to join the queue in an attempt to avoid completely ruining the plans I’d made for my children. It was our first trip together since the split with their mother and I wanted it to have that foundational value that even small details have when you’re entering a new era.

‘I don’t think there are any spaces left on the flight that leaves in a few hours,’ the attendant said. She stared at her computer without looking up. ‘I’m sorry; it’s fully booked because of the holiday.’

The look of disappointment on the face of my daughter, Maya, who was fully tuned in to all the complications, infected her brother, Ryo, who had up to that point been finding the whole thing rather amusing.

‘Does this mean we can’t go, Dad?’ she asked.

‘Will the plane leave without us?’ he added.

‘I don’t know, kids, I don’t know.’

The attendant looked up from behind the desk, already seeking out the next person in line. For the first time, she looked straight at me, somewhat surprised.

‘You’re the singer, right? Dani Mosca?’

I nodded. Sometimes being moderately well known can bring moderate advantages. Would this be one of those occasions? Her body language changed and she seemed much warmer now as she went back to fiddling with her keyb