by Joe Cawley
Four months later, the UK owner ploughed in some extra funding, the magazine moved into a new office, and a full-time contract was provided for me, a graphic designer, an office manager and a sales manager. I was also allocated an editorial budget for commissioning writers and photographers. Other duties included coming up with monthly editorial schedules, developing new ideas for features series and working with the graphic designer on a new look for the magazine.
It was exciting and varied work and as I was still contributing articles it also gave me the opportunity to try new experiences in order to write about them – windsurfing, scuba diving and sailing among them. I introduced a new monthly section on Tenerife’s best spas, and partly due to the lack of editorial staff, but mainly because I was the editor and thus could choose the perks, I was invited to experience the delights of soft-handed caressing and the finest skin products money could buy.
On one such occasion, wearing nothing but paper pants and an air of curiosity, I was painted from head to toes in rich, smooth chocolate. I looked like a loose-limbed éclair.
‘What does it taste like?’ I asked my decorator.
‘Chocolate,’ she replied, rather obviously.
After scooping a fingerful off my stomach, I couldn’t disagree. It was essentially just like edible chocolate but without the butter and was supposed to stimulate mood-elevating endorphins and leave you feeling rejuvenated.
A lid was pulled down, encasing my torso like an iron lung. I was now a chocolate filling with a hard coating – an M&M perhaps. With just my head protruding, I watched the lights dim and listened to a succession of tinkly tunes and chants while the sweet stuff worked its magic. Inside the oven, I was steamed for twenty minutes. The aroma of warm chocolate was pleasant at first, but like when you turn immediately to the second layer of treats in a box, it soon brought on a touch of nausea.
Next on the menu of the day was a wine bath. Alleged therapeutic benefits included improved circulation. Regardless of whether that was true, any detox treatment that involved copious amounts of wine was okay by me, even if the red stuff did remain on the outside.
The tub that me and my disposable knickers were invited to sit in was no Armitage Shanks, toe-stuck-in-the-tap bath. A contoured oyster shell provided semi-horizontal relaxation in all the right places, while underwater jets gently manipulated every muscle. Again, thanks to the soft lighting and ambient piano notes, it was inevitable that sleep would follow. I had found my new calling – spa writer! Throw a litre of local red into the formula and the pearly gates had never seemed closer.
Being at the helm and having control of the magazine’s aesthetics and content was a new experience, but so was having to work hours that someone else dictated. I was also expected to attend press conferences, society events and dinners with local dignitaries, which meant I wasn’t returning home until late most days.
I would try to include Joy in my evening commitments, but she wasn’t keen. Having at last fully overcome the aversion to people that had plagued her in the immediate months following our bar sale, she was now itching to be sociable, but only with those she chose. Our bar days had shown us what a mixed bag of reprobates mingled with the decent folk in Tenerife. Worse than the pathological liars, fantasists and downright dodgy were the faux elite, the British snobs whose colonialist attitudes clung to them like colostomy bags.
Former Smugglers patrons and anyone who has met Joy in Tenerife can probably attest to the fact that she’s one of the friendliest, warmest and most amenable people on the planet. But put her anywhere near sharp instruments and island snobs and she’d happily embed one in the other. So it was no great surprise that when I invited her to an expats’ Wine Society do, she gave me a look that you rarely see outside maximum-security prisons.
However, hotel stays were her weak spot and subsequently proved to be the tipping point. An all-expenses-paid night in a five-star convinced her to put aside her loathing – and any sharp objects – and agree to accompany me. In hindsight, perhaps it would have been better if we’d both declined the invitation.
The evening started off well enough, with chocolates on the pillow, cava on ice, and beds sized for a party. It was the actual do that flattened the occasion.
Joy and I were seated at one of a dozen round tables in the hotel ballroom, sandwiched between a balding man in dandruff-speckled tuxedo and a starched lady with the steely glare of Margaret Thatcher and the pinched expression of an involuntary lemon sucker. She looked Joy up and down. ‘Where does one come from?’ she asked.
‘Bolton,’ said Joy, in the strongest Lancashire accent she could muster.
‘Oh,’ said the lemon sucker, unimpressed. ‘Sounds frightful.’
I moved the cutlery out of Joy’s reach. ‘Have you travelled far?’ I asked the man with dandruff. He nodded sagely. But that was it.
I nodded back.
A portly man at the head table tapped a glass with his butter knife and stood up. Glancing around the room, I could see that Joy and I were half the age of every other diner.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ began the orator.
‘Shit!’ said Joy.
I turned around. She had spilled a full glass of red down her new cream dress, which was now crimson, the same as her face. The rest of the table looked on. Dandruff man nodded sagely. Nobody offered a napkin, or any other help.
‘Dab some fizzy water on it,’ I whispered.
‘Dab! I need to pour the whole flamin’ bottle over me. I’m covered!’
‘Shall we go back up to the room, try and get it off?’
Joy nodded. I gave her my jacket to hold in front and we apologised our way out of the room with the orator’s amplified quip filling the ballroom with chortles. ‘Early night for that lucky boy, eh?’
Joy had no other dress, and it was futile trying to clear the wine stains. ‘You go back down,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay up here and watch telly.’
I headed back down, and, mellowed by the wine – on the inside, rather than the outside this time – I endured the night and all its my-boat’s-bigger-than-your-boat boasting and general snobbishness.
The owner of the magazine had asked me to befriend the guest of honour, the British consul. ‘It would help to have friends in high places,’ he’d said. I duly sidled over to the consul and bagged the seat next to him at the first opportunity.
He was actually a very interesting character, slightly younger than the rest and full of amusing anecdotes about life in Scotland and his short time getting used to Tenerife. I felt we got along very well and was pleased with myself at having accomplished my mission.
‘I expected a consul to be more… stuffy,’ I said as we toasted our new friendship over crystal tumblers of fine single-malt whisky.
‘So did I,’ said the consul. ‘He seems okay, though.’
I paused, glass in air. ‘Who?’
‘Peter, the consul.’ He pointed his glass at a man saying his goodbyes at the ballroom door.
I shook my head and blinked hard. ‘So you’re not the consul?’
‘Me? Hell, no. I’m a teacher at the international school. I don’t think they’d want me in the diplomatic corps. Not with my background!’
And there began another round of stories and whiskies, which continued well into the night and then straight into one of the most horrendous hangovers I’d ever experienced. Still, the hotel bathroom was nice.
I guessed that all this networking for business would be required in pretty much any serious career in the UK, but working so hard for somebody else was beginning to grate. Added to that, my aim to be around for Molly as much as possible was being thwarted by the long and irregular hours demanded of a magazine editor.
The seeds of change had sprouted again. And unbeknownst to either Joy or me at the time, they weren’t the only seeds that were growing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
One of our regular pages in the monthly Living Tenerife magazine was reserved for reviewing books ab
out the island. Or at least that’s how it started. We soon discovered that English-language books about Tenerife were severely limited in number. There were the usual walking and travel guides, plus the odd tome about the wheezing gentry who’d frequented nineteenth-century Tenerife to take advantage of the island’s climate.
To continue the feature, we were going to have to broaden our horizons a bit. At first we extended the remit to include books about any of the Canary Islands, not just Tenerife; when those ran out, we accepted any books that contained even a passing reference to the archipelago. Finally, we allowed anything that included sun, sand or sea either in its title or in the image on the cover.
The postman often brought books from small presses with covering letters requesting that we write nice things about their author’s words. Very occasionally I would receive a preliminary phone call from the publicity department of said publishing house. It was during one such call that an opportunity arose, an opportunity that would change my career path again.
I’m a great believer in making your own luck. That’s not to say luck never visits uninvited. It does, and it’s during those unexpected house calls that you need to sit luck down, offer it a nice cup of tea and make polite conversation until you find out just why luck pressed your doorbell instead of your neighbour’s.
Put a less cosy way, it’s all about recognising an opportunity, grabbing it unceremoniously by the cojones and only releasing it if you’re sure it can bear no fruit.
‘Hello, this is Amy Cartwright from Made-Up-Name Publishing House. We have just published a wonderful book, Random Waffle from an Ex-Fleet Street Hack, by the very talented author, Notsaying Hisname. Have you heard of him?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Pretentious Book Title? Flowery Tome? “The Never Heard Of It” series?’
‘Nope. Sorry.’
Pause. ‘Anyway, could I send you a review copy?’
‘Well, to be honest, we try to only feature books with a Canary Islands angle, or at least a vague association.’
‘Oh, okay. Never mind. Thanks for your time.’
And then I blurted out a blatant lie.
‘I’ve written a book.’
‘Oh. Have you,’ sighed the voice.
‘Yes. It’s very good.’
‘Is it really!’
‘Can I send it you?’
‘Err… I guess so.’
She gave me the address of the commissioning editor and I promised to forward my book as soon as possible. Brilliant! A foot in with a publisher. I was feeling very pleased with myself despite there being one tiny detail absent. I didn’t have a book.
What I did have were copious notes from our bar days, scrawled in a dog-eared journal and on loose pieces of paper, serviettes and the backs of peeled beer mats. I couldn’t remember why I’d written so many things down, except that it probably provided some sort of cathartic relief from the frustrations of bar life. By putting it down on paper (or beer mat), I could better process the idiocy of some of our customers and resident expats. My run-ins with the gun-toting, the deranged and the merely daft-beyond-belief were not cruel tricks of my overworked mind and exhausted body – my scribblings proved that they had really happened.
When we’d cleared out all our belongings from the bar after it was sold, I had herded these stray notations into a manila folder. I also had a vague notion that one weekend when I was bored I’d assembled them into some kind of order in what could loosely be described as three chapters. What I couldn’t recollect was what I’d done with them next.
Thanks to the zealotry of the island’s bureaucrats, we had amassed stacks of paperwork, all neatly suited in matching manila then shoved into any spare space or box in our tiny apartment. I distinctly remembered Joy commanding that we be brutal with what was kept and what was discarded from our lives, a sacrificial cleansing of our past, a past that had broken our relationship (nearly irreparably) and challenged us with one nonsensical calamity after another.
Then I remembered. We had lit a bonfire on the waste ground. Lots of smoke. Lots of manila. Damn! I was pretty sure all the folders had been cremated, which meant no book, no notes and no authorial fame. I would have one more look when I got home.
At home, Fugly had gone AWOL. She’d not been seen since the day before. We were both beginning to get worried.
‘Have you checked outside?’ asked Joy.
There weren’t many hiding places around the cacti, concrete or volcanic gravel, but our house in the hills did come with a garage. When I say garage, I mean a corrugated roof propped up on three sides by a medley of stones and breeze-blocks. It had become the dumping ground for anything that had even the remotest possibility of being needed in the future, such as plastic sheets, dusty shot glasses and bits of string.
Being male, it didn’t take much to distract me from my initial purpose and I began to flick through the reams of paper and box files containing bar invoices and receipts, instruction manuals for electronic equipment we no longer owned, and legal documents for a car we had sold over three years ago.
Of more interest was a shabby cardboard box that contained a manila folder. I was even more impressed that the manila folder held an assembly of pages that looked suspiciously like a work-in-progress.
I sat on the concrete floor and began to flick through the papers detailing stories about Fugly’s predecessor, Buster the dog-cat, our trauma with the squatters, the numerous dealings with ridiculous bureaucrats, and the catastrophic bar fumigation that temporarily wiped out our entire customer base.
I wondered what had happened to people like Duncan from the market. Was he still alive? Was he still being chased and teased by Bolton’s bullet-headed bullies? What about Pat, our ex-boss on the fish stall. Was he still flogging the same ‘lemsy’ (smelly) chicken and dubious trays of fish at three for a fiver?
And Friedhelm, our loyal German patron with perennial ‘big problems’. Was he still visiting brothels, choking on Marlboros and sitting forlornly at a barrel table in another bar? If so, I hoped they were treating him well.
Some people had undoubtedly moved on. Things changed. Blimey – our lives certainly had. Now we were three. Three and three quarters, if you counted the bits of Fugly that hadn’t been amputated.
I’d also finally found my mojo, via writing – not the typical career progression of a pub landlord, it had to be said. But it was something I knew I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. It was my thing.
In my office the next day, I typed the chapters into a Word document and emailed them to the publisher. I then called Joy at the house to see if Fugly had shown up. She hadn’t. Joy had scoured the wasteland below our house, but there was no sign.
Three days later and we’d come to the sad conclusion that Fugly had taken herself off to die. Apparently, it’s not uncommon for animals to do this. Disregarding the comforts of home, they prefer solace and isolation when the end beckons. Despite her flaws, and this natural urge, Fugly was still part of our family and the thought of her dying alone and in pain was difficult to accept.
More demands were being put on me at work, and although the money was okay, I didn’t believe I was being paid enough for the hours, responsibility and time away from my daughter. Molly was developing without me. That had definitely not been the plan. With Joy still working part-time, our daughter was spending most of her days at a childminder’s. There was no doubt she was happy, but it felt like we weren’t giving her enough of ourselves. I summoned all my courage and asked for a pay rise. The management summoned all their authority and turned it down.
I needed time to think, a break away with Joy. Although the travel commissions had stopped, I had one more trip to take for the Sunday Times that I’d committed to several months earlier. It was a piece on the carnival in La Palma, one of the neighbouring islands. It involved a one-night stay and Joy was going to come with me.
It would prove to be a real strain leaving Molly overnight with the child
minder, but the time away would give us the chance to think, regroup and figure out how to get our family life back on track.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Canarian celebrations are often outlandish affairs, but none is more bizarre than carnaval on La Palma. For most of the year the islanders quietly work the green upland terraces for bananas and tobacco. But in February they head down from their hillside hamlets to the pocket-sized capital, Santa Cruz, where on Carnival Monday the colonial-style town turns into a war zone.
On this day the island goes pale beneath an orgy of hand-to-hand combatants employing nothing more sinister than squeezy bottles of baby softener. Over 10,000 pounds of ammunition is discharged in powder-puff clashes during the batalla de polvos de talco (talcum powder battle). A couple of pounds had just been dumped on our two heads.
Unlike in other wars, each round of artillery fire was followed by friendly hugs and good-humoured apologies. It was during these interactions that my suspicions were raised. I could see Joy squirming with each cuddle.
‘You okay?’ I asked through blinking, minstrel eyes.
‘My boobs really hurt,’ said Joy, wincing.
‘You pregnant again?’ I said through the melee, laughing.
Joy’s face was serious. ‘I think I might be.’
Before I could respond, a thunder of drumbeats exploded around us and we were swept along, separately, in a tide of revellers. A band of forty drummers had struck up a Brazilian beat and the powdery fog increased proportionately with the cacophony, talc bouncing off drum skins with every forceful accent.
We came together again at a pharmacy doorway, where a middle-aged English couple were jigging awkwardly to the beat of the approaching band. The husband ‘danced’ into the street to allow us to pass into the shop. ‘Derek, come over here, out the way,’ called the woman. But the man in pressed slacks was trapped in the human current. The samba beat erupted around him and he must have just caught sight of a rush of white faces before he looked up, spluttering in a cloud of perfumed dust. ‘Derek!’ admonished the woman. ‘I wanted you to wear those trousers tomorrow.’