He would probably have got away with it had the truck emptied the bin as normal that morning, which it would have done if Jim and Aileen Greatrex from Punslet had not set off for an early morning walk and let their social conscience get the better of their sense of hygiene. He had, incidentally, already been to the police to register Jasmine as missing. He said that she had not come home from work, that she had taken a job in a club called Paradise and that even if they did find her he didn’t want her back. He wasn’t the brightest of things wasn’t Jerry, Tommy or whoever he was.
Jerry made it half way to paradise every evening, but his Jasmine was going all the way. I never thought I’d make it into the Sunday papers.
Thirty Seven
I’m glad I met Win. Sounds funny... - Suzie recalls meeting a new friend called Winifred, who lived near the La Manca camp site where Rosie the Sundance is parked. Win tells her life story. Suzie is reminded of life’s true values.
I’m glad I met Win. Sounds funny: I won by meeting Win. She’s been something of a soul-mate for months. We meet when Donkey goes off walking, or riding his Raptor up the high sierra. We have coffee in the morning, take a stroll along the prom or browse the little shops in the old town. We’ve found acres of wonderful curtains, but of course Rosie the Sundance has no need of tasteful drapes hanging in their elegant folds. I keep telling Don that living inside Rosie feels like being a Pringle in a tin, rattling around, sometimes splintering at the edges. Isn’t it amazing how they find all those potatoes that are all exactly the same size and shape? Now Don and I are quite different, despite our years together, and that’s why we don’t fit well side by side in our little can. My home these days is my Castle.
Now I could live quite happily in Win’s place, thank you very much. I can remember the first time I stumbled into her garden, not knowing where I was. We are towards the boundary of the La Manca Park, near a hedge that’s thick, high and woody. It’s dense along most of its length, but there is one place just near our van where there’s a gap. It’s only a narrow gap, not something that’s going to cause the site’s owner to regard it as needing attention, but it’s perfectly large enough to allow someone like me to walk straight through. It was a day a few weeks after we’d arrived, maybe a month or two after we parked Rosie on our permanent plot. When we first arrived, we were a week in a temporary park, waiting for another van to leave.
I remember that Donkey went out exploring. It must have been quite soon after Mick offered him use of the Raptor. I don’t know what he finds to explore. I would have thought he had turned over every stone this side of Alicante by now, but still every day he says he’s going somewhere new. And remember, we’ve been here loads of times. He knew everywhere up and down the coast from Benidorm before the end of the nineteen sixties. I suppose the places have changed, but they are all still in the same place!
Anyway, Don was out that morning when I decided to do a bit of exploring of my own. I had a nose around the camp site and along the main road near Benidorm Palace. There’s a string of bars and clubs, a few shops and several camping equipment suppliers. Not surprising, really, since they are over the road from a camp site!
I came back to Rosie and realised I’d never tried going the other way, along the hedge at the back. I’d only gone a few steps from the van before I saw the gap. I went straight through without even thinking that I might be walking onto someone else’s property. On the other side, I found myself in a garden, a probate garden of a large white villa with its own pool, a big one, tiled in blue with a dolphin on the bottom. Beyond there was an orange grove with a dozen trees, laden so thickly with fruit that they looked more orange than green. There were some lemon trees with a mixture of green and yellow on show and next to them three palm trees, planted so close that their trunks looked like a wooden wall from where I stood. I felt I was intruding. I was about to turn back when I heard a voice.
“Hello there, love. Fancy a snifter?”
I looked around, but I couldn’t see any sign of life. There was a gentle breeze that day and the big trees to my left were making a hissing sound that seemed loud because everything else was so quiet. The sound seemed to bounce around and I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. When the voice spoke again, it was from behind the wall of palm trees that the words came and, after the first greeting, from where their speaker appeared.
“Hello, darling! I noticed someone had moved into the pitch through the hedge. I used to get on very well with the previous people. She was called Irene. She was a Belgian lady with a scrawny husband. His legs were just like matchsticks. They’ve moved on. They wanted to move further south. Been here for a couple of years. Her bloke, Jens, was a bit of a strange one. He was only ever sociable when he was drunk, and then he got a bit fresh. It usually ended up with him shouting at Irene, his wife, and they used to go back home and fight, so there was never a dull moment. I quite miss them already. How long are you staying? Are you permanent or just passing through?”
“We’ve come for good,” I answered. I was on auto-pilot. I’d answered almost before the question had properly registered. Her manner wasn’t just persuasive, it was commanding. Here was someone who wouldn’t suffer fools gladly.
She’d be sixty, I thought, if she wasn’t fifty-five... but then seventy-five wouldn’t have surprised me. She never told me her age, but my estimates weren’t wrong. There was a pain about her wrinkled chest, a fold of experience, full of stories. The breasts hung penduline below, fighting like ferrets inside her loose t-shirt as she walked. And there was a pain about her movement, a stiffness that was relieved with a great long “Aah” when she sat down. Arthritis.
“My name’s Win. Winifred Sylvester, as in Victor, the one who did all the dancing. Call me Win. I don’t, usually, but it boosts my confidence if I hear it often enough. And you are?”
I was taken aback. She didn’t ask my name. She asked who I was. “Suzie. Suzie Cottee,” I remember saying. It wasn’t inaccurate, but it didn’t seem right somehow. There was so much more to add, but it wasn’t there. And at the same time I realised that people don’t say, “What’s your name?” once they get beyond the age of six. I must have answered something similar thousands of times. Why this time did it stick in the crow?
“Well I’m pleased to meet you Suzie. We’re neighbours. That gap in the hedge has been there for years and isn’t about to go away. Pop through any time you like, dear.” She smiled as she spoke. It was a fixed smile, inviting, reassuring, but not because she was about to sell something or convert you to a religion; it was more of a smile of weakness, of acceptance that we would share the same fears. “Come and have a snifter. It’s nearly lunchtime, after all.”
She turned back towards the house and I followed. There was a long veranda by the pool, part of the house really, with stone pillars and terracotta tiles. She had a lounger set out, looking like it might have been there for a day or two. There was a long floral cushion a foot thick along its length and a low table at the side where an ashtray overflowing with dog-ends sent occasional wisps of ash into the breeze. I had a little laugh to myself when I realised it might be self-emptying. As she lowered herself into position, the whole contraption seemed to accommodate her, adjust its lie to something it knew well and could predict. As she lifted her loose-weave cotton shift to ease herself down, she exposed a pair of large, cellulite-rivered dark brown thighs that shook in little waves as she planted her ample behind into position and then swung to comfort, issuing that ever-near sigh of achieved relief. “There’s a trolley over there in the corner. Help yourself. You’ll find whatever you want. There’s mixers in the fridge.”
I crossed the twenty yards or so of terrace. When I reached the other end, I realised to get this distance from a visitor back home in Kiddington, she would have to be in the street and I would have to be at the end of the back garden. Here I was still by the pool. How the other half lives...
“The ice is always out, love. Doesn’t seem any point putting it back into the fridge. It gets used up so quickly it doesn’t have a chance to melt. There’s more inside when that’s finished.”
I opened the bucket. It was stainless steel with a pair of its own matching tongs. The bottles were laid out on a glass-topped trolley. The metal frame was all scrolls, loops and flowers, while the glass was a reassuring shade of pale brown, not that you could see much of the top, since it was stocked like a Spanish bar, with every concoction you could imagine. I poured myself a gin and tonic. Now I don’t usually, not at that time of the morning, but I could sense that this was going to be a special occasion, worthy of celebration, so I poured a good helping of spirit over the ragged column of cubes in a tall glass. There was hardly any space left for the tonic. As I turned back to make my way to the second lounger that seemed to be set out in anticipation of a guest, she spoke again.
“So you’re the one who’s taken The Castle?”
After living in Kiddington for forty years you would have thought I’d be used to other people knowing your business. But here I was, a stone’s throw from the Mediterranean in one of the biggest tourist resorts in Europe, a member of a thoroughly cosmopolitan residency and yet, just through the fence, there was a person I’d never met who knew what I’d had for breakfast.
“That’s me,” I said with pride.
“Effing dive that place became... I hear you’re doing a spiffing job.” She looked at me. It was a look I remember well. She was vulnerable was Win, as vulnerable as me, but she also broadcast a defiance, almost a challenge, a challenge that said, “If you know more than I am telling you, then speak up, because I’m all ears. If you know more than I am telling you and you keep it yourself, then we will never be friends.” I didn’t answer. She spoke again. “Winnie Sylvester, darling. That’s my name. Been in business in Benidorm for twenty-five years. I’ve got through three husbands and each one got through me more times than I care to recall. One divorced, later died, two others died incumbent, so to speak, died before they got kicked out. That’s how I got my money, I hear you saying. That’s what everyone thinks. But not on your Nellie! It was me who was the breadwinner. All three of them were easy riders. They rode me easily while I did the work, believe you me. I had clothes shops - three of them. One was in the Old Town and the other two were in Rincon. I was here all through the eighties when the place was packed all year round. We did beach wear, sarongs, sandals and the like and then t-shirts and later we got into the fancy stuff, the glitter and gold and straps and things. That was when people started dressing up to go to the discos. They proved to be good lines. The margin on them was really good and people started to compete with one another on how much they’d spent on their outfits. I did really well out of those tarty little things. People are like that, you know. They’re insecure. They feel they’re somebody, but they don’t know who. And, if you have no idea who you are, you can never even recognise yourself, let alone be satisfied with who you meet when you search for yourself. So people buy things to hang around themselves. They tart themselves up into something they think they recognise, something they can identify with. Usually that means they try to be like someone else, a celebrity or a model or a pop star. People don’t have personalities, they have images. They stand in front of the mirror and when they look they don’t see themselves, they only see who they think they ought to be. And so quite often they try to change. They go out and buy a new person to be themselves, and that lasts until they get tired of it, when they do the whole thing over again. When you’re in the trade, the trick is to persuade them they need to do it often and that the more they spend, the more they’ll like themselves. As it turned out, I must have been pretty good at it. But then it all turned sour a couple of years ago. Business fell off. I got out just at the right time. I sold off two shops lock, stock and barrel. I got good prices, just before the property market collapsed. I made a packet on those sales. If I’d kept them I wouldn’t get half of what I got then. So now I just have the one place, the smallest of the three. I kept it thinking I’d need something to keep myself busy in retirement, but now it costs me just to keep it open. There’s staff to pay, costs, taxes and everything else. I’m looking for a buyer, but there’s no chance of that these days, of course, but then it doesn’t really matter. I’ve plenty in the bank so I can sit and wait a while until prices pick up. Not that cash in the bank is worth a bee’s prick at the moment with interest rates where they are... But as you can see I’m well set up here. I don’t have a mortgage. All this is mine and no-one else’s, so I can’t complain. How about you, love? Did you know we were neighbours?”
“No. It’s the first time I’ve wandered around away from the van. I didn’t even know there was anything on the other side of that hedge...”
“I didn’t mean here, darling. I meant down town, down on the Rincon. We are neighbours there. Have you never noticed me walking past The Castle? I often do it twice a day.”
I took a long look at her. She invited it. She wanted me to scrutinise her, and I sensed that the way I did it would tell her much about me, and would determine how much of herself she shared. Now I like a good chat. But I do like the occasional chance to say something. I was about to speak when...
“I’m at the end of your road. It’s my shop on the corner. We pass each other almost every day along the Calle and never say hello or even acknowledge one another. And yet here you are on your day off, and here we are chatting. I had two daughters and they were never ones for a chat. They’re both above me now. The first was by that dollop of primordial my first husband and the second came from the second before he had his heart attack. It certainly wasn’t after it! I didn’t produce from the third one because I had a complete flush out after the second. Two was enough, I thought. Lizzie, the older one, she’s thirty-five now. She’s married with three kids, two boys and a girl. She’s a barrister, has her own practice. She went to university. Her father was resolved she would do well and she did. He had a bob or two did my Joe. He was into women’s underwear. Better than shoes, I suppose.” There was a joke here, but she offered no pause for a titter. “He sent her to public school. Cost a fortune. But didn’t she do well! She makes over a hundred thousand a year now, and seems to have enough time to have a full family life as well. Her husband’s the same. He earns as much himself. They live in an absolute mansion down south. Worth a mint! Not that Joe left me anything from his fortune. He didn’t cut me out, don’t get me wrong, but by the time I got my hands on it he’d spent it all. We divorced after ten years of marriage. I got fed up with his fooling around. He had his fill of me whenever he wanted it, but he couldn’t even walk past a piece of tail in the street without staring at it for the next five minutes. I kicked him out. He married three times more after me and had families with all of them, so what there was when he went got shared out between us - and shared four times it didn’t amount to much. Laura’s the younger one. She’s only twenty-seven and hasn’t grown up yet. Now her father, Davie, he was just the same. He had ants in his pants, couldn’t sit still for a minute. He always had something on the go, some project that was going to be the answer to everything, would make a fortune, would make him famous or both. Nothing ever came of anything, of course. Drank as well. Drank all the time he wasn’t planning something. He had ants in his pants, that one. And they’d eaten his thingy by the time he was fifty. He smoked like a chimney. Half of what I earned went up in smoke between his lips. And when things didn’t work out for him, he used to take it out on me. He’d hit me without warning. He used to take out his frustrations with himself on me. He died of lung cancer. Can’t say I was displeased to see him go. Now Laura takes after him. He was a right layabout when I think back, but he was good
in bed for a good few years before he went limp. He was full of ideas, but there was never any work alongside them. She’s the same. She never did anything at school, never even took an interest. By then I’d started making a few bob, so maybe she thought she would get anything she wanted from my side. Well she had another think coming. We were only together for eight years, me and Dave, but we certainly packed a lot in. I couldn’t get enough of him when he was on song. With Laura, it’s always the next thing that’s going to work. She’s tried acting, she’s tried singing. She’s even done a couple of things I wouldn’t want to publicise. She’s into chemicals, she says. They help her find the real path to meaning and all that nonsense. She’s on the phone for money all the time, but I’ve told her umpteen times she’s not having a penny more, not until she settles down, gets a job and a bloke and set’s her feet on the ground. Funding her is like filling a bottomless well. And Dave was older than me, quite a lot older. He’d been married before as well and had another family. We were going to separate and he was going back to his ex. But he was ill by then, of course, and had to take to his bed. He got steadily worse and died a couple of months later. And then I had ten years with number three, but as I said I was past having kids by then. I made sure of that after number two. But he was a real sweetie was Bob. If you shop around you’re going to find something that fits. He was kind, considerate, supportive and quiet. I wanted a quiet life and so did he. It was a perfect match at the time. I couldn’t have done with him those years earlier when my juices were running, but by the time we met being friends was more important to both of us and it worked. I do miss him. He was older than me as well. He was never going to sweep any woman off her feet, wasn’t Bob, but he was a dependable soul. What he did for me was amazing. He made the space for me to do what I wanted and offered help whenever I needed it. That’s when things started to go really well for me and my business. That’s when things really took off. He was always there, whether you needed him or not. And when you did need him, you didn’t need to look to find him. There he was, right on cue, never intruding, but always on hand. He had a stroke two years ago, God rest his soul. He was gone before I could say goodbye. He was over there, cutting that orange tree. He was standing with the loppers in his hands one minute, reaching up for a branch. ‘I’ll just take care of this dead one’, he said... Now I’ll never forget those words, because I turned round to pour another drink and just then I heard him drop. I thought it was the branch off the tree, but it was him. He was on the ground, gasping like a fish. By the time I got over there he was quiet. And this is where I’ve been ever since. He didn’t live to see the downturn, though I’d decided to sell those two places before he went. In fact it had all been his idea, so we could have more free time to travel and do things together. Funny how things work out, isn’t it? Well I got the free time he wanted. I have a girl come in three times a week to do for me. In times gone by I was out seven days a week at the shops. I had staff, of course, but you’ve got to keep them on their toes. But then you’d know all about that already, being in business for yourself... And then things turned sour, I had more time on my hands, but I’ve still kept on my girl. She’s been doing for me for nearly twenty years. She gets a good wage out of me. Her husband’s a waiter in town, so he’s comfortable, but they never have anything to spare. She gets cash in hand from me and it’s helped them over the years. It’s a lot less than I’d have to pay back home, of course, but then she is from Guatemala. And the cost of living is so much lower, isn’t it? Mind you she does have to travel to get here, I suppose. She gets the number ten from Albir every morning. I’m surprised she can afford to live there, given what’s happened to prices since all those Norwegians arrived. She keeps the ice-bucket stocked, does the washing, cooks most of my meals - I never eat out these days - far too much trouble, faffing around with this and that, parking the car - and she does through the house and even some of the garden. She’s a real Godsend. Suits me. Suits her. And she wants to do it. I pay her cash. In the early days I’m sure she did a bit of how’s your father in the evenings to make a little extra, but then she got married and all that stopped, thank goodness. She’s still got contacts in the area, though, and meets some of the professionals for a chat every now and then. She has some real stories to tell sometimes. You would not believe what goes on... Some of those places along the main road, some of the ones with the flashing neon signs, they are real dives. You can buy whatever you want in those places, you know. You name it and someone will do it. Just come up with the readies. And there’s lots of readies in this area, ready for anything, some of them. Have you ever counted how many of those places there are just near here? Now they don’t exist for the good of their health. There must be a trade. And there’s as many as fifty women in each one of the big ones, you know. The smaller ones might only have a few, but it still means that a good proportion of the male population hereabouts buys some sort of service on a regular basis.”
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 44