PM Ms Voros...
MV Look, Pedro! Don’t look at me with that tone of voice. You asked me a question and I am trying to answer it. You asked me how I came to be where I am, here, in Spain, charring for Mick Watson and Susan Cottee, God rest their souls...
PM So you think they are dead?
Maureen took a long time to respond. Her voice, which, during her testimony, had become steadily stronger as she told her story, wavered, so that when she resumed, she began again in the same almost apologetic whisper with which she began. As she spoke, however, it followed the same pattern as before, with steadily increasing volume, speed and power, as if the words were first seeping out of a new leak before later rushing through an open fissure.
MV I don’t like to speak of death when it’s near. And I don’t like to say the names of the dead. It’s a thing for closed doors and curtains, a thing to be kept hidden, away from public view. Mourning is a separation from the living, like a confinement. You do your duty and then return to the world of the living, offer a smile and never ask for sympathy. You stand on your own two feet, if you’re lucky to have them intact. Unlike my dad, of course. His right leg was the death of him. That bullet wound was only a graze, but it found a weak spot and weakened it more. It finished him, if the truth were told. By the time he arrived in England he was already crocked. I reckon that’s why my mother left. She met him in 1957, sympathised with his cause rather than his person, married him almost as an act of charity, immediately bore his child and then realised she’d made a mistake. It was another six years before she finally admitted it and by then, of course, any action to compensate had to be drastic. So she left. She left him. She left me. She left her life. Where she went I do not know. He knew where she was, at least he had an idea, but he would never tell me. I used to ask him every day. Every morning over my cornflakes I used to say, “When’s my mama coming back?” I was about ten when I stopped asking. He never answered. I found out after I left school that she’d gone off with a director of a local firm. He had a chain of shops that sold bedding in Manchester, Stockport and some other places. He was probably on the board of a football club and met my mother through his dealings with dad. When he told her he was into bedding, her ears must have pricked up, because my dad clearly wasn’t by that time. Apparently she moved to a big house near Wilmslow. He was rolling in it. I never tried to get in touch with her. What was the point after all those years? After all, it’s the same distance from Wilmslow to Stockport as it is from Stockport to Wilmslow, and she never made an effort, at least that’s what my dad told me. Anyway, as I was saying, he had a heart attack. He’d done wonders for me. He had a steady job. It didn’t pay much, but it was at least regular. He was a football coach for amateur and semi-professional clubs, just part-time. And then in his spare hours he did coaching work in schools and the local sports centres. What he made up front stayed there and we lived off that. What he earned officially through the pay cheques went into the bank. When I left school at sixteen and took my job sorting beans, he let me settle down for a few months and then presented me with the deposit on a flat, in cash, straight out of the bank. He said he’d been saving it up so I could become a respectable, independent woman and, in any case, it wasn’t right that a man approaching his fifties should be sharing a house with a pretty little eighteen-year-old. I wasn’t eighteen yet, but I knew what he meant. He didn’t want people talking. I was never the most outgoing of girls. I always used to keep myself to myself. I had few friends. And the ones that I had tended to drop me after a while. I used to get chided at school because I lived with my dad and had no mother. They used to say stupid things about me and him. Don’t get me wrong. There was no reason for what they said. There was never any funny stuff going on in our house. I had a happy, normal childhood, except that I didn’t have a mother and my dad drank himself to sleep whenever he wasn’t working the next day so I had to put him to bed and clear up the mess. But isn’t that normal?
She paused, as if waiting for the question to be answered. Members of the bench and Maureen Voros stared at each other for half a minute or more. The clerks started to giggle.
PM I’m sorry Ms Voros. I thought that was rhetorical.
MV Don’t you call me that! It’s true. I came here this morning...
PM Ms Voros, please, please continue.
MV Well he gave me - in cash, mind you - a great big wad of notes. It was all in fivers. He said I should go down the road to the agent and put down a deposit on the flat in south Manchester I’d seen advertised in the paper. It was close to where I worked. It was in a poor area, but at least I could afford it. I still own it. I have it rented. It’s given me an income - not much - but at least something to tide me over ever since then. He said I should keep my head down, do as I was told, keep the pennies safe and then the pounds would look after themselves.
PM Ms Voros...
MV Just a minute, I haven’t finished. It was quite soon after then that I met Tony. I think he wanted an easy ride. After all, there weren’t many young women like me to be had, were there? I was young, pretty - I would never say beautiful, but I was a bit of a looker in my time - I had my own flat, I had a steady job and an income. And I was available. He was a bit of a spiv, a bit like our friend Mick Watson. He was a local wide boy, a big fish in a very small pond. I wasn’t sure how small the pond was until I came to Spain. That’s really when I started to live. It was, of course, a year after my dad died and Tony had threatened to walk out as well. As I was saying, my dad had a heart attack. He never felt he could support Hungary in 1966. I mean, 1966 and all that... He went to see them play, of course, but he just could not bring himself to say anything or proclaim his support in public. He missed the first game, because he was working. It’s a good job, perhaps, because they lost that one. But he went to Goodison to see them play Brazil. He never swore, my dad, at least he never swore away from a football pitch. But when he came home from that game, he was fired up. He was Farkas this and Farkas that. He was Bene, Bidi, Bici or something. He said that they should have kicked them over the stands and they did, but he thought they should have kicked them further. He was a passionate man, when it came to football. He went to Old Trafford to see them beat Bulgaria, came home just as fired up and then drank himself silly all night. I was only just turning nine years old, but I already knew how to move a drunk man, undress him and get him to bed, how to clear up a Technicolor yawn off a carpet, how to get stains out of loose covers and how to take my anger out on the bottles by smashing them to bits on the edge of the dustbin. But then he couldn’t travel as far as Sunderland for the next game. That was the quarter finals. He didn’t speak to anyone for about a week afterwards. They lost. They not only lost, they lost to the bloody Soviet Union, just about ten years to the day since the bloody Soviet Union had poked its nose into things in Poland and got things moving the wrong way for Hungary. Never before or since have I seen him so angry. That night, it was him who smashed the bottles after he’d emptied them. The mess took some clearing up, but I did it. I never complained. Never complained once. I never said a cross word, at least not in the house. I did have a habit of taking things out on my friends at school. I did get into quite a lot of trouble. It seemed to follow me around. But it was their own fault. People used to say stupid things about me. I’d give them one in the gob to shut them up and it usually worked. I got one in return from the teachers, so we were all square in the end.
PM The heart attack... your father’s heart attack?
MV That wasn’t in 1966. That was in 1978. They didn’t even qualify for 1970, you see, or 1974. Not that he would have anything to do with a tournament in Germany. In 1970 he supported England but surprised himself by admitting that Brazil were actually the best team in the tournament. In 1974 he didn’t speak to anyone for a month after Germany won, but when it came to 1978, he had the house decorated with red and green streamers. He was full of Hungary this and Hunga
ry that, though when you pushed him, he really didn’t think they had much chance. I can remember him getting himself set up for the game. He had rented a new television with a bigger screen especially for the occasion. He had a couple of bottles ready and he had invited me round to sit with him. I was living with Tony by then and he had wanted to watch the game as well, but my dad wouldn’t have him in the house. He’d gone off in a huff to the pub because I went home to Stockport for the evening. Anyway, dad was in his element. Football on the tele and, for the first time in over thirty years, he felt he was going to have something to shout about and something that was pure Hungary, pure him, somehow. Well, it started going wrong from the first minute - even before then. Everything was wrong. He started calling the South Americans cheats even before they had walked onto the pitch. He said that the referee should have called the game off. I distinctly remember him talking about snow. It was snow this and snow that, about how the referee and linesmen must be able to see the lines, about how even a sprinkling of snow would have the ground-staff out with brooms to clear spaces around all the lines. You see in Argentina they had this tradition of throwing bits of paper. And that was also Argentina’s first game in the tournament - and they were the hosts. The ground was packed and everybody seemed to have brought a sack of waste paper. He went on and on, but there wasn’t anything on the pitch. The lines were all clear, but still he went on about cheats this and cheats that. He was getting himself all worked up. And then Hungary scored. It was one-nil to Hungary and I thought he had gone ballistic. He quietened down a few minutes later when Luque equalised and was absolutely quiet for about the next hour, even all through half time. He hardly even seemed to pick up his glass. Now I knew him in this mood. It was always best to give him a wide berth. It was when he got like this that he was capable of going over the top in a tackle with the aim of breaking the centre forward’s leg. I went to the kitchen and sat there reading a magazine. If only I’d stayed in the front room with him. He’d got the sound turned up loud, so I could hear everything. I think the neighbours could hear it as well. It was in the eighty-third minute that Daniel Bertoni got Argentina’s winner. I heard the cheering on the tele and, at the same time, a great big groan, which I assumed must have come from my dad. I daren’t go in. I knew it wasn’t a goal for Hungary, because he wasn’t shouting and screaming. It was a groan, so it had to be a goal for them. I waited ten minutes or so and there was some more noise. By the time I had plucked up the courage to poke my nose into the front room, the game was almost over. The second Hungarian player to be sent off that night was just walking off the pitch. A few seconds later the referee blew the whistle and the score came up on the screen two-one to Argentina. It was only then that I glanced across to the settee to see him slumped over, blue in the face and gasping for breath. I did my best. I was used to shifting him when he was a dead weight, but not used to it when he was dead. He wasn’t actually dead at the time, he just felt like it. He was still taking breaths, but they weren’t his usual, noisy, wheezes, more like lead feathers falling. I called for an ambulance, and it took half an hour to arrive. It would have made no difference. They couldn’t have helped him. He had another attack when he got to the hospital. He was dead before the morning and I inherited all one thousand six hundred and thirty-seven pounds eighty-six pence that were in his savings account, plus a hefty profit after selling the house and paying off the mortgage he’d taken out before the end of the nineteen-sixties. He was buried before the final and I was on my own. I never did know if anyone had ever bothered to tell my mother.
PM That was the year before you first came to Spain?
MV It was. Almost exactly a year. They always say that it takes a year for it to sink in.
PM Sink in?
Death, I said. Pérez Molino made a note of my mis-translation.
MV When my dad died, I was still with Tony Jackson, but he was as much use as a bacon sandwich at a Jewish wedding. Whenever I needed help, just a little shoulder to lean on, he would be off elsewhere. Anything that meant he had to give something sent him scurrying off. I was bored and fed up. I had some money in my pocket. It took a few weeks for me to see the light, but I knew I needed a change, so I booked a two-week package to Benidorm. It was still in the era when you booked yourself onto a holiday weeks, if not months in advance. You didn’t just get on a computer and buy a ticket. It meant going into town, seeing a travel agent, thumbing through brochures, choosing your hotel from the hundreds on show, all of which were white concrete with a swimming pool against blue sky, and then getting tickets. I made my mind up to go soon after Christmas, but I didn’t go on holiday until the following June. It worked. I met a few fellahs, and did what twenty-one-year-olds do when they meet a bit of all right in a disco. I got to the end of the two weeks and decided I was staying. I did a Shirley Valentine ten years before she did it. I got a job in the disco where I had been most nights and I have been there on and off ever since.
PM Shirley Valentine?
He looked across towards me. A film, I said, where a woman goes on holiday, has an affair and decides to stay because her life at home is boring and unhappy. It was set on a Greek Island.
PM Anything to do with the famous case on Zakynthos?
He had addressed the question to me. I was taken aback and didn’t answer for a minute or so. No, I replied, you are confused, Señor Pérez. I realise that you keep abreast of legal issues that arise out of tourism. I recognise that is your speciality. But the film was set in Greece and was made in 1989. The incident to which you are referring, where nine British women on holiday were arrested for taking part in an oral sex competition in a bar, happened only just over a year ago. Shirley Valentine had an affair with a hotel owner and it was a work of fiction.
MV And that was when I first got myself laid by Mick Watson, who was running a pub in 1979. But it wasn’t him that kept me in Spain. It was just the right place for me to be, and so I stayed. I remember it well. It was the summer of seventy-nine. It was my first trip abroad. I had to get a bus all the way to Luton to get the flight to Alicante. They made you feel like a celebrity in those days. You got a meal on the plane, and you even got a choice of main courses. There was a proper bus to pick you up at the airport and take you to your hotel. You weren’t just herded like so many cattle like today. I stayed at the Rio Park and walked down to the beach every morning. I wasn’t into staying out late at night in those days. I had just never done it. I did like to go out for a drink before dinner in the hotel, which was served in the evening, not in the middle of the day. On the plane I’d got friendly with a couple who had been to Benidorm before and they showed me around for the first couple of days. They showed me around, took me to different places. I was on my own and usually couples don’t like a single woman tagging along, but these two weren’t worried. I can remember it like it was yesterday. Every bar was playing Holiday by Boney M. There was Village People, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor and the Bee Gees. It was like being surrounded with disco, and I’d never really done anything like that before. I realised I’d lived a very sheltered life looking after my dad. All the new experiences really got me in the mood. I was determined to have a good time and threw caution to the wind. It was a year after my dad had died. I was ready to break loose. I remember we arrived on a Saturday. Almost everything changes over on a Saturday in this town. It took me until the Tuesday to really get into the swing. The couple I met on the plane showed me a few places, and on the Tuesday they took me to the Dogs for the first time...
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 53