Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  ‘There you go, two Naughty Normans, 500 pesetas for both.’ They looked awful. The next time Coventry came to the bar, he ordered two pints of lager.

  Then came the first food order.

  ‘Joe, two cheeseburgers, chips and salad and one pork chops, chips and salad. Table five.’

  I counted up to table five to see if they looked like the type who’d complain if poisoned. They did. It was a silent grey-haired couple sat with a heavily mascara’d girl of maybe 13 or 14. Both adults were sitting so unnaturally still, they seemed to be demonstrating to the girl how to sit up correctly at the table.

  Glad to be out of the spotlight, I threw two chops and two burgers onto the hot plate and with a woof of propane ignition and the whiff of singed hand-hair, the first meal that anybody had paid me to prepare was on its way. Whilst the meat hissed, salad garnishes were decoratively arranged and the frozen chips were placed into the basket ready to be lowered to their crispy death. Easy, I thought. Then the power went out. The diners let out a communal groan.

  All the trip switches behind the bar were still up so I ventured outside. The Altamira power was still working and inland I could see a cluster of lights blinking against the dark backdrop of the Adeje mountain range.

  Fortunately Mario was on his way into Smugglers to see how we were doing. ‘Follow me,’ he laughed.

  We walked in darkness along the outer footpath that circled the complex. At the far side, near our back garden, was a dull grey electricity box. Either its doors had been removed or the utility company hadn’t deemed it necessary to conceal the master trip switches for the whole complex. Mario flicked the main one back up and immediately El Beril came to life again.

  ‘Flicking island,’ he muttered. A wry smile suggested he found it amusing now this was no longer his problem.

  ‘Does that happen often?’ I asked.

  ‘Depends. Sometimes not for a week, other times it pops all night.’

  He’d conveniently forgotten to mention this defect when he sold us the business.

  Back in the kitchen I had to wait for the chip fryers to heat up again.

  Joy popped her head round the wall.

  ‘Two half chicken and chips, one no salad, and two chicken in wines, chips no salad.’

  The dreaded chicken in wines! When Mario had showed us how to make this creamy dish, his instructions were rather vague. A bit of this, a pinch of that, some of these, not too many of those. I suspect that it was his own recipe and he was reluctant to give away the exact ingredients, even to Joy and I who were now supposed to recreate it.

  It’s just a matter of timing, I told myself, trying to quell the nerves. I worked out which meal would take the longest to cook and began the preparation. This happened to be the chicken in wines. I tenderised the chicken fillets, coated them in flour and flopped them into a frying pan with a knob of butter. While they were gently cooking, using a large pair of dressmaking scissors, I cut a pre-roasted chicken in half and put the two parts in the microwave.

  Turning round to face the hot plate, I flipped over the meat, and turned the chicken fillets in the pan.

  ‘Steak medium to well, Canarians and salad, gammon and egg, chips and salad,’ came a voice from over my shoulder.

  I had stuck a large sheet of ‘write and wipe’ onto the huge fridge doors and added this order to the previous two. Now which would take longer between those two I wondered. I spun round as the aroma of burning chicken filled the air.

  The fillets had fastened themselves to the base of the frying pan and were releasing plumes of smoke into the extractor hood above. Damn. Peeling them off, I decided there was no chance of a resurrection and flung them bin-wards. One landed in the dustbin, the other hit the tiled wall and made a slow descent leaving a trail of burnt butter.

  I started again with the tenderising, a little more forceful with the hammer this time. I dipped them in flour and tossed them into a new pan with more butter. The electricity went off again. There was another group groan.

  ‘Mario!’ I shouted. I knew he was at the bar loving every minute of his freedom from such dilemmas.

  ‘I’m going,’ I could hear him chuckling.

  Within minutes the power was back on and the customers cheered. Once more I had to wait for the fryers to heat up. I thought about phoning David and Faith but decided against it. We had to get used to dealing with this kind of problem. It was already beginning to sink in that this island was no smooth-running machine.

  ‘Two steaks, rare, chips and salad.’

  I hadn’t even started the first steak yet! In the meantime I had slammed our hotel reception-type bell to let Joy know there was an order ready. Try as she might Joy couldn’t arrange the large oval dinner plates so three could be carried at the same time. She rested one on her left wrist and held another in the same hand but couldn’t find the right balance.

  ‘Come back for the other one,’ I said, watching her struggle. It had seemed so simple when Mario managed to carry five at a time. Mind you, he did have hands like a couple of JCB buckets and thankfully Joy didn’t.

  Out with the hammer again, I bashed all three steaks and chucked them amongst the pork chops and burgers. I turned the chicken in the pan and turned the microwave on for the half chickens. The chips were plunged into the fryer, spluttering and spitting burning oil onto my hands and forearms.

  More garnishes were needed so I laid more plates onto the table and grabbed handfuls of tomato, cucumber and onion slices and chopped lettuce, dumping a pile onto each plate as the aroma of burnt chicken filled the air again.

  I snatched the pan from the heat and decided that this time they would have to be resuscitated so added some white wine, crushed garlic and sliced mushrooms and replaced the pan over the blue flame.

  The first order was nearly ready so slicing two burger buns in half, drawing only a little blood from my left palm, the buns were added to the hot plate. The microwave dinged and I felt to see if the chickens were hot. They were – painfully. The wine for the chicken dish was bubbling away and I added the cream and black pepper. Slices of cheese were slapped onto the now-shrivelling burgers. The buns started smoking. I picked them off the hot plate, burning fingertips in the process and hurled them bin-wards. One missed completely and rolled out of the kitchen into the main customer area. I noticed several moments later that someone had discreetly kicked it back in.

  ‘Half a chicken, chicken burger, mixed grill, two chicken in wines, all with chips and salad, oh, and a tuna salad. How you doing in here?’

  I raised two smoked eyebrows, a blooded palm and formed charred fingertips into a reversed victory sign.

  ‘Is that pork chop supposed to be on fire?’ Joy asked casually as the aroma of burnt pig filled the air for a change.

  I turned the microwave on and before the half chicken had time to complete its first twirl darkness descended once again.

  This time Mario asked me to follow him again. He reached behind the box for a short plank of wood and wedged it underneath the switch. ‘Now try and flicking pop,’ he warned the box. ‘Sometimes you just got to force the issue. But remember to hide the stick when you finished otherwise the bastards cut you off for good.’

  Unsurprisingly the power remained on for the rest of the night and by 11 p.m. I had sent out all 32 orders. Some people had to wait half an hour, some two hours. Fortunately Joy had a knack of making light of my inadequacy and the customers displayed that true British spirit of pulling together in a crisis. They knew it was our first night and they knew that we hadn’t a clue what we were doing. One customer, having sat patiently starving for an hour and a half whilst I fried, burnt, fried, burnt and fried again a simple plate of egg and chips even brought his own plate back into the kitchen and proceeded to wash up.

  ‘You’ll soon get the hang of it,’ he said sympathetically as another basketful of blackened chips was dumped into the bin.

  By 1.30 a.m., the dishes were washed, work surfaces wiped down and the gas ri
ngs and deep fat fryer were checked over and over again to make sure that they wouldn’t contribute to an early bath for our catering career. I estimated the meat we would need to defrost for the next day and scanned the shelves to compile a shopping list.

  The terrace had emptied except for two teenage lads attempting to impress the daughter from table five with their pool prowess. Her parents had left her with strict instructions to follow them across the car park to the hotel before midnight. With shoulders pressed back and pubescent chest thrust forward, she was obviously in no need of any posture advice and was lapping up the attention of the two pool sharks.

  Inside, Joy had her elbows on the bar, her head cupped in her hands as a couple kept her ‘entertained’. I switched off the kitchen light and went to join her for a much-needed nightcap.

  After pouring, drinking and pouring another pint of Dorada, Joy, whose eyes had long since glazed over, introduced me to the couple.

  ‘Joe, this is Betty and Eric. They have a guesthouse in Blackpool,’ she said with feigned interest.

  I shook hands with them. Betty’s eyes were also glazed, but not through boredom. Her blonde beehive hairpiece had flopped to one side revealing grey strands. Eric rolled his head and attempted to say something but closed his mouth again and continued with the lolling. Betty tried to get me up to speed with the conversation.

  ‘I was just saying to Joan,’ she nodded her beehive at Joy, ‘how we know what it’s like when you’ve done a long day and you just want a drink by yourselves but you can’t get rid of the last people in the bar and they keep on talking to you like you’ve nothing better to do and no home to go to and you can’t get a word in so you’re stuck there listening and nodding and asleep on your feet, just wishing they’d go away.’

  I looked at Joy and then back at the two last people in the bar, nodding as Betty continued.

  ‘We get it all the time, and we’d never do it to anyone else. We know how you feel, isn’t that right Eric? Eric!’ She jolted him with a sharp elbow to the ribs. Eric tried to respond, then tried to look at his wife but failed on both accounts and contented himself with some more general lolling.

  ‘We’ll just have one more for the road. Cointreau and tonic and whisky and water.’ Betty waved a lipstick-smeared brandy glass at me. Every finger was decorated with gold and a spectrum of glimmering stones.

  I’d never met a Blackpool landlady before but Betty seemed to epitomise the fading holiday town – distastefully decorated, depressing and dated. In the conversation that followed, it emerged that most of her family seemed to have either ripped her off or else befallen some tragic consequence after having spent time living and working in the guest house, or hotel as Betty preferred to call it. There were suicides, muggings and attempted murders galore, not to mention all kinds of infidelity. I made a mental note never to visit Blackpool’s version of The Bates Motel.

  Eric, in a moment of extreme swaying, toppled backwards off his stool narrowly missing the edge of a table.

  ‘I think he’s had enough now,’ said Betty as if this was her husband’s equivalent of fetching his coat.

  Whilst Joy balanced the money against the till reading, I washed the remaining glasses and began to sweep and mop.

  ‘The reading might be a bit out,’ I shouted. ‘I think I cocked it up when I came out for a break.’ Indeed the till was out, by exactly one-hundred-and-fifty-million pesetas. ‘A simple error due to an over-sensitive “zero” button,’ I explained, but we both knew it was human error.

  We switched off the lights and stood in the doorway surveying our bar. All the furniture, the upholstery, the ceiling fans, the bar pumps, the bottles, the kitchen equipment, the washing machine, the urinals. I’d never owned a urinal before. It felt good.

  But it still hadn’t fully sunk in that this was our business, and it was entirely up to the four of us whether we succeeded or failed. Last week we were minions of the fish market, this week we had entered the world of entrepreneurs. We had been brave enough to trade a comfortable, albeit uninspiring, life for a ‘new improved’ model in a land of eternal spring. We wanted to tell somebody but at 3 a.m. as we walked home hand-in-hand all was silent.

  Joy went straight to bed whilst I sat on the patio, beer in hand gazing at the most vivid sky I had ever seen. With no light pollution, the velvet black was awash with blinking stars. It seemed infinitely clearer, as though we had been looking at it through dirty glasses in England. This clarity extended further though. We had now chosen a path and were actually on it rather than dreaming about it. This was a success on its own.

  Yes, we had made mistakes, some more than others, and yes, there was still a mountain to climb before we knew what we were doing but we had made a start. Result – 32 people fed, 0 poisoned.

  My mind was whirring with thoughts of what had gone on that night and what we had to do tomorrow. As I made a mental list, my bottle of beer began to slowly tilt in my lap and the luminosity above began to fade. Within seconds I was asleep. Even the last drop of icy beer running down my leg was not enough to wake me.

  I must have come round enough to take myself off to bed at some stage because the alarm stirred us both to life. For a moment my brain clicked into autopilot, preparing to go through the rituals of a normal market day: reluctantly pushing off the thick quilt followed by a rapid dash to the cold bathroom; standing at the sink with my hands in hot water to warm up; flattening down my errant hair; piling on layer upon layer of warm clothes before unwillingly leaving the relative shelter of the house and dashing out into the pouring rain; watching in disgust as the first bus of the day pulled away from the bus stop.

  Only there was no quilt. In fact, there were no bedclothes at all. They had been kicked off the bed during the night. This chink in the chain was enough to create a rapid appraisal of the surroundings and the elation of last night was replaced with the heavy heart of knowing there was another long and stressful day ahead of us.

  CHAPTER 5

  David and Faith were drinking coffee at the bar when we arrived at 8.30 the following morning. ‘Sorry we’re late,’ I said, ‘Long night.’

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Faith. We filled them in on the problems with the electricity and the difficulty of timing the food right. They listened intently, the fact that we had succeeded of sorts merely added to the stress they were facing on their first night.

  ‘It wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be,’ I lied. ‘You’ll be fine. How’s Mal, by the way?’

  ‘He’s hiding in the wardrobe, won’t come out,’ said David.

  ‘He’s in a bad way, poor thing,’ added Faith, ‘we shouldn’t have made him come.’

  ‘I bet he’s hot in that fur coat,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to shave him.’

  ‘He’s getting rid of it himself,’ said David. ‘He left half his hair in the cage at the airport.’ It seemed we weren’t the only ones to be anxious about the move. According to Faith, Mal was a victim of stress-related alopecia and was currently quivering behind David’s shoes in their wardrobe, unable to cope with the challenge of a new beginning. No prizes for guessing which parent he took after there.

  Whether it was down to the constant smell of burning food and the inordinate amount of time it took for said food to be passed to waiting tables or merely a coincidence, the second night was worryingly quiet. Worrying on a financial basis but a blessing for David and Faith, who had a mere 18 meals ordered and only a small crowd of drinkers but at least their first night passed without incident.

  We had listed a number of jobs that urgently needed doing to improve the overall look of the place and allocated ourselves the various tasks. On the fourth day, whilst David and Faith carried on with the daily chores of shopping, preparing food and readying the bar, Joy and I began the first of these, cleaning up the bar terrace. After all, it was the first thing that potential customers judged us on. Even though we had the monopoly on British food and drink within a two-mile radius, the present state of the exteri
or would still put some people off.

  Only four days into our illustrious careers as catering entrepreneurs and Joy and I could be found on all fours, dressed in yellow Marigolds, scrubbing the outside floor tiles. Even though it was barely mid-morning the heat sapped all our energy within minutes of toil. The sun had risen just high enough to pull back the shadows from the Smugglers’ terrace. Beads of sweat dripped onto the small mosaic tiles as we frantically brushed. The original speckled white pattern slowly emerged through beer stains, cigarette burns, splattered cockroaches and dried bits of food but progress was painstakingly slow.

  The ‘energy spent to surface area cleaned’ ratio was not impressive and after two-and-a-half hours we had only completed around two square metres. At this rate it was going to take days to restore all the tiles to something like their former glory. ‘Why don’t you ask the technico if you can borrow his floor machine?’ suggested Patricia, the supermarket owner. She had been watching us with her arms folded for several minutes now that the morning rush for papers, milk and bread was over. ‘That’s what the rest of us do.’

  Every residential complex has either one or a team of maintenance people. Owners of property on that complex pay community fees, which includes the wages for these technicos, as they’re referred to. They’re responsible for the communal garden areas, swimming pools, garages and general tidying duties. Like most of the Canarians their workday is divided between a 9.30-to-1.30 stint in the morning followed by a 4–to-7 shift in the afternoon. Outside of these hours, most are happy to forsake their siesta and lunchtime for the chance to earn a bit extra on private jobs for the owners. This can be anything from installing a new water heater to tending a private garden. Or in this case renting out one of the community machines for a small backhander.