by Alexei Sayle
Later on that evening as Sue was sitting on the terrace of Noche Azul with Laurence, the pack again came lolloping past. She said, ‘Laurence, whose is that big dog? I haven’t seen it before.’ He straightened from his chair to take a look.
‘Nobody’s, it’s abandoned. Been here since the second night of the fiesta,’ replied Laurence. ‘It probably belonged to some Spaniards who are going down to the coast for the summer and don’t want to pay for kennels, or who didn’t realise how big it was going to grow, who knows? They often abandon their dogs on the highway or they leave them in this village because they know there are a lot of us British here and they think we’ll look after them.’
‘Will we?’
‘I’m not sure, I think everybody’s fully dogged up at the moment, but we’ll see.’
Through the week Sue began to look out for The Dog and became quite friendly with it, feeding it her unwanted tapas when the owners of Noche Azul weren’t watching and scratching it behind the ear as it lay asleep on the stone steps of the church.
It turned out to be a week for making new friends as her horoscope in the international edition of the Daily Express that somebody had left in the bar had told her it was going to be. For on the Friday of that week the Mayor, Don Paco, a man of at least seventy, wearing the strongest spectacles she’d ever seen, consisting of what appeared to be a pair of zoom lenses held in a thick black plastic frame on his head, came to see her in Noche Azul where she was having her morning coffee. He asked her to accompany him to the terrace of the villagers’ bar, which as far as she could tell didn’t have a name or indeed any furniture, being a big empty tiled room; its only decoration was a big photo display provided by the manufacturer of all the various ice creams that the bar didn’t stock.
Sue and Don Paco sat outside under a fig tree, on faded orange plastic stacking chairs placed at a wonky old green-baize card table. The local guy who ran the bar brought them coffees and for the Mayor a giant brandy in a fish bowl. She recalled what Laurence said about the cost of booze in these parts: ‘At these prices you can’t afford not to be drunk!’ Except the Spanish never ever seemed to get drunk, not in the fighting, spewing, brawling, boasting British way that she was used to from Saturday nights in Bolton and every night on the costa.
Don Paco obviously had something serious to say. ‘Here it comes,’ she thought. ‘Run out of town on a rail.’
But instead he spoke to her most formally. ‘Senorita Sue, I have heard from Antonio the truck driver that you did a little favour for him in return for a ride up here. I was wondering whether it would be possible, if you could perhaps do something similar for me. What it is, if I could put … mi pajaro, between your breasts which are coated with soap and you could squeeze them together, until well, you know what follows on from that. Perhaps once a week might be suitable? I would provide my own soap.
‘Hmm …’ She thought about it. ‘Weekly soapy tit wank. That’ll cost you, Mr Mayor.’
‘So be it, nothing is free in this life, we must pay in the end for everything. I had some little money set aside to buy an electric corn husker this autumn, but a soapy tit wank sounds like it would be better value.’
A few days later another old farmer called Ramon asked her to sit under the fig tree with him. ‘Senorita Sue, I have a little money, it was intended for my wife’s operation but you know she will die soon anyway, so…’
So that was a bi-weekly, non-penetrative butt fuck that he was after. Then there was an armpit wank for the bank manager, another soapy tit wank for the baker, hand jobs for innumerable old campasinos and ten thousand pesetas from the priest to let him watch her taking a piss in the orange groves.
Pretty soon she had quite a business going. The average age of her clients was seventy-two and all of them were old Spanish men from the village or the surrounding campo. Laurence told her that the younger men in the village either had girlfriends who let them have sex with them (though it was understood that this also meant marriage) or they visited the something like thirty brothels that lined the main roads between the village and the big city of Granada. These brothels were shabby breezeblock, tin-roofed buildings, always seemingly with a single dusty car parked outside, their neon signs hung dead in the daylight spelling out ‘Club Paradiso’ and ‘Club Splendido’. They were staffed, so it was said, by beautiful Argentinian girls.
Sue did not feel any guilt about what she was doing, she was providing a much-needed service at a reasonable price. She was aware that generally peasants did not have a very enlightened attitude to whores, yet when she passed them in the streets and lanes the old men would greet her in a courtly fashion even when they’d had their dick squeezed between her buttocks half an hour before, and even more surprisingly their wives were chatty and friendly when Sue encountered them in the village shop or when they queued at the bread van that came twice a day.
Sitting in Laurence’s courtyard with Miriam, Nige, Frank, Kirsten and Baz and the remains of a zarzuela de mariscos, Sue mentioned she was surprised that she hadn’t encountered any opprobrium from the Spanish for her activities. Laurence, as always, reckoned he had an explanation and because they were all too dozy and drunk to stop him he was able to launch into one of his lectures. ‘What you have to remember is that for nearly a thousand years, from 711, Andalucia was the most tolerant, literate, liberal, progressive place on the planet. Under the rule of the Moors it led the world in science, mathematics, poetry, gardening even. Jews, Christians, any religions were tolerated and encouraged to play a full part in society. Then after that black year, after 1492, after the so-called restoration when the Moors were driven out by Ferdinand and Isabella, it was the most repressive, intolerant, backwards looking and led the world maybe in torture techniques.’ Then he started to veer off his original course. ‘Typical, of course, that Torquemada was a convert, a Jew who became a persecutor of the Jews. Why does that happen so often, that converts become so much more fanatical than those born to the faith?’
Sue let him go on, she thought what a good thing it was that she was so in tune with other people’s feelings that she couldn’t find it in herself to show him up by letting all the others know what cock he was talking. She had a hard job holding herself in because it made her angry and sad at the same time, all this babble about kings and queens and caliphs and not one word, not one bloody word had he mentioned about angels! When everybody knew that until 1492 a quarter of the population of ancient Andalucia had been proved to be angels. There were loads of books about it: The Andalusian Prophecy, White Wings Over Spain, The Celestial Costa Connection. It was angels that had built the Alhambra, the signs were everywhere if you knew where to look, and every serious historian knew that the Inquisition had largely been aimed at destroying the power of angels.
The summer was the time for excursions and one Saturday a whole gang of them got in a flotilla of cars and drove away, the dogs saw them off, barking and nipping each other. They were all going to the fiesta in Lanjaron, which was the biggest fiesta in the whole valley. This spa town in the Alpujarras was where all the area’s mineral water came from. Massive petrol-tanker type trucks full of fizzy water ground up and down the narrow mountain roads, refusing ever to slow down or give way, forcing other drivers close to, and sometimes over, the crumbling edge in a b-cal carbonated version of the Wages of Fear.
For years the Lanjaron fiesta had been one that glorified the contrasting characteristics of ‘Fire and Water’ but even by Spanish standards there had been a few too many terrible burnings, so it had been remade as .a fiesta that celebrated the different qualities of ‘Ham and Water’ thus the damage incurred now, though severe, was primarily psychological. From early on the Saturday of the fiesta there was a parade of people dressed in aquatic costumes, scuba gear, sailors, mermaids, while others threw buckets of water down from their balconies and the fire department went around soaking celebrants with their hoses. The locals would walk up to a tourist with a big smile then throw a bowl of water i
n their face. In no time at all Sue’s T-shirt was soaked to transparency; naked but not naked, she felt tremendously sexy and would have gone to the toilets to bring herself off if they hadn’t been too busy and crowded.
The real horror though began after 1 p.m. Those in the know crowded into the bars which then locked their doors, leaving those outside trapped and running from doorway to doorway as they were repeatedly doused. At first they found it amusing but after a while the constant assault began to wear them down. The gang Sue was with laughed manically as a couple of Dutch tourists beat on the glass doors of the bar they were in while behind them a fire truck directed its hoses onto their backs, till they sank to the flooded ground and curled into a sodden ball, their tears adding to the pool in which they lay. Surreptitiously Sue rubbed herself against a corner of the bar as the Dutch couple were spun and battered to the ground by the gushing hoses of the firemen. She realised she needed a boyfriend, it was all very well being non-penetratively shagged up the arse by eighty-year-olds but she needed some cock of her own age.
As usual her own personal angel — who a psychic healer in Totnes had told her was a Choctaw Indian by the name of ‘Lightning Dog’ who’d been killed at the Battle of Bull Run — must have been listening, for on the Tuesday of the next week there was a new car in the village. By now Sue knew everybody’s vehicle. Nige’s beat-up old locally made Santana Landrover, Baz’s Japanese pick-up truck, Laurence’s ancient Mini still on British plates, the little white vans with seats in the back that all the local old boys had. The only cars that came and went were the hire cars, bright little hatchbacks rented by the tourists who leased for a couple of weeks the few villas that were available to let for the summer.
This big new silver Opel Omega with Madrid number plates stood out, just as the big dog had when it had come to the valley. When Sue first saw it, the car was parked outside the house of an old English guy called Max. She had met him once when he had come out for a weekend. He was a retired engineer who seemed to talk about nothing except the kinds of toast he had eaten throughout his long, long life. Laurence said he came for the entire summer once he had got his mother settled in a rest home in Coventry. The door of the house was open and a young man of her own age came out, shading his eyes against the bright sunlight. He took an old leather suitcase out of the car’s boot and was hauling it into the house when he saw Sue looking at him.
‘Awright?’ he said to her.
‘Awright’ she replied. He was English and Northern, home-grown cock.
His name was Tony and he was from the flat brown alluvial Lancashire farm country inland from Blackpool Bay. Home-grown, organic, free-range cock.
They started fucking that night.
Sue introduced Tony to the crowd in Noche Azul the next lunchtime. Of course they already knew he was there.
‘So,’ said Nige, ‘you’re staying at Max’s place — when will he be coming out to join us?’
‘Oh he won’t be,’ said Tony. ‘Not this year. He decided to stay at home … for the cricket.’
‘Oh shame,’ said Janet.
‘I’m a sort of nephew of his.. He gave me the keys to his house; he wanted me to enjoy it even if he couldn’t.’
‘Will you be staying long?’ asked Miriam.
‘I’m not sure, Miriam. I’m on the look-out for opportunities, perhaps here or on the coast, so I thought I’d chill for a bit, see what happens.’
‘Did he sort of give you his watch as well?’ drawled Laurence.
‘Did he give you his watch? A Tag Heurer that his firm gave him after thirty years’ indentured slavery, you … you’re wearing it.’
Tony looked at the watch. ‘Yeah, like I said he’s me favourite sort of uncle. He likes to give me things.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Laurence.
Sue had been around dangerous men all her life, she knew this about them that they didn’t bluster and shout, they didn’t issue funny threats like they did on the telly. They didn’t say through gritted-together teeth: ‘If you do that again I’ll cut your bollocks off and nail them to the letter box as a draught excluder!’ It was not the way of the violent to indulge in complex verbal linguistic display. If they could indulge in complex verbal linguistic display they probably wouldn’t be violent in the first place. And they didn’t issue warnings like the weather forecast either; they didn’t say, ‘I’ll only tell you once,’ or ‘I’m warning you…’ or ‘I’m giving you one more chance but, I swear, if you screw up again I’ll …’ They just did you right there and then with no prior notice and no right of appeal. The only warning you might get is that sometimes the situation they were in, like for instance it being their first day in a new town, led them, occasionally, once in a while, to consider their actions. Sue could see that Tony was thinking of doing Laurence right there and then with no prior notice and she could also see that Laurence knew he was in danger of being done and yet, strangely, Laurence didn’t seem frightened and he didn’t seem bothered either. The old pouf went up in her estimation. Still, following that, he stopped needling Tony and the danger passed.
Tony never bothered much with the Noche Azul crowd after the first few days; in the early weeks of June he spent a lot of time driving backwards and forwards to the coast, in the big silver car. When she didn’t have a client Sue would go with him and sometimes she would bring The Dog as well. It would lie panting on the black leather of the back seat until they arrived in Malaga or Marbella or Nerja. Then while Tony went off to have his meetings Sue and The Dog would go for long walks. At first she felt uneasy being back on the coast but having The Dog with her gave her courage. A couple of times she did see people who might wish to do her harm but they never got close enough to recognise her; also, she realised, her appearance had changed since she had been in the village. Her hair had grown longer, her skin was darker from the time she had spent in the campo and the muscles of her arms were a lot firmer from all the wanking that she was doing.
One lunchtime back in the village towards the start of July an amazing thing happened: the bar went quiet. Sue looked up from her newspaper to see in the doorway an officer of the Guardia Civil. The Guardia, Franco’s semi-military rural police were hated up here. During the civil war the village had been an anarchist stronghold and the Guardia had been in charge of reprisals when the republic was lost. They had shot seventeen of the village boys along the cemetery wall and the village had not forgotten. The officer strode up to the bar and started asking Armando something, she couldn’t quite hear what but it seemed to be something to do with a car from Madrid. Getting nothing out of the sullen bar owner the policeman soon turned and left, climbing back into his Nissan Patrol and gunning it back down the mountain. A few days after that, Sue was taking a pee in the campo, the padre a few metres away furiously pulling himself off behind an ancient gnarled olive tree, when she heard a sudden ‘Whooph!’ At first she thought it was the priest coming, some of those old campo boys she had found went off like hand grenades. Then turning the other way she saw in a distant ravine that a car had exploded and was now on fire, it looked like a silver Opel Omega with Madrid plates.
Tony said his car had been stolen while he was in Almunecar, but anyway he only needed one more trip to the coast. He persuaded Sue to borrow Laurence’s Mini for this trip south though Laurence lent it grudgingly.
In the end she wasn’t able to go with him and Laurence went on and on saying that he’d never get his poxy Mini back. But Tony did return. When he got back, after a few days, he told Sue what his plan was. ‘See all the cocaine in dis country comes in through Galicia, they’ve got great contact with South America for obvious reasons, funny it’s the women who control the trade as well, once the Guardia put all their husbands in jail. The dope, the blow, that comes through here, the south of Spain, after all it’s only half an hour from Algeciras to Africa by fast launch. Scag though, heroin, they ain’t got any of that, cos they ain’t got any contacts with Turkey, Afghanistan, any of them places. Exc
ept now on the costa there’s Russians and they’re looking to shift what they know, scag, up here into the valleys and the mountains. Now I have an opportunity to get a load at good prices and I reckon the kids up here would take to heroin real well.’
Sue had a question. ‘Have you got the money to do it?’
‘I got some, that’s why I’m talking to you, though. I need more, as much as I can get.’
‘You’re not worried about the locals?’
‘They’re fucking divvies these people,’ said Tony. ‘They deserve to get fucking took. We know that they don’t like the Guardia, so what the fuck are they going to do about it? Even if they figure it’s me that’s dealing the gear. So you in or what?’
Sue gave him the money that she had saved up, plus she stole a watch from Laurence. A Rolex with a gold strap that Tony got a thousand dollars for in Almunecar. He wouldn’t miss it, a person could only wear one watch at a time after all (apart from her DJ boyfriend who’d worn six) and she’d never seen him wearing this one so he deserved to lose it really when you thought about it.
Pretty soon all over the valley the Spanish kids were doing heroin. With drink they had been brought up to understand its properties and its dangers but with scag there was no bargain that could be made, no truce. Scag would not talk to the hostage negotiator. The boy in the bakery who’d once been chatty and smiling now stood for hours at a time, white-faced and spotty, with his arms buried up to the elbows in a bowl of dough. In the next village the bar owner had to lock the doors to keep out a rampaging gang, and in the orange groves a young boy was found shot dead with his father’s hunting rifle.