Last Days of the Bus Club

by Stewart, Chris

  Chloé had just finished her first month on the festival circuit when Martin of Shepherds’ Ice Cream phoned. They had been unlucky with the weather: the rain had been torrential and ceaseless; the tents had been waterlogged; the vans had got bogged, and some of the bands had cancelled. ‘But Chloé was great,’ he told us. Apparently she had dealt with everything – the mud, the weariness, the occasional crazy customer – with good-natured efficiency and tact and, even after an all-night party, had turned up looking fresh as a daisy in the morning, acting as if her life’s sole ambition was to sell more ice cream. ‘She’s a terrific worker,’ Martin went on. ‘You should be proud. I’d have her back any year.’

  I was. To discover that your offspring has what it takes to earn an honest wage is a pleasing discovery indeed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A 4B PENCIL

  I HAVE NEVER BEEN MUCH OF A ONE for competition. My grandfather would try and instil some sense of the competitive spirit in me by looking at me earnestly (his name was actually Ernest, though he loathed and never used it) and saying, ‘Remember, Christopher: the race is always to the swift.’ But even as a nipper I thought this a peculiarly daft and unedifying piece of nonsense.

  First of all, life is not a race, or, if it was, then it would be more like Alice’s Caucus race, that great sporting event in Wonderland, where, at a given signal, all the competitors would start milling aimlessly about and, upon another signal, would stop where they were. Alice, if I remember rightly, was incensed at the futility of this, but to me a Caucus-race seems just the ticket. Instead of busting a gut in order to be first, it may be better just to mill about and enjoy the view and the pleasure of encounters with others. And if there’s a race to be run at all, then I’d much prefer to be jogging along at the back, with the idlers, the dreamers, the wanderers and philosophers.

  Yet there are times when we have no option but to gird our loins and join the fray, jostling shoulders with the pack hurtling swiftly along. And without exception these outbreaks of competitive zeal are spurred by, and entered on behalf of, our offspring. In this case the impetus was provided by the need to register Chloé for her university place. By some quirk of planning the enrolment for the Chinese part of the course was on a different day to the others, and it was a day on which Chloé happened to be in some muddy field of England selling ice cream. So at six o’clock on a July morning we sprang from the bed in order to get to the city in good time.

  El Palacio de las Columnas on Puentezuelas is where the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation at Granada University holds court, and at ten to eight Ana and I were standing outside the great door with its serpentine marble columns. We felt the tiniest bit intimidated, perhaps because neither of us had made it to university, but more because we knew with ghastly certainty that we would have failed in some infinitesimal particular of document-gathering and form-filling required by the faculty, and we would be upbraided by the administrative staff and made to feel the fools we feared we were.

  Registration did not start until nine, but even so we were not the first there. We sidled up and introduced ourselves to the smart blonde woman and her daughter, who had beaten us to first place in the queue. She was English, for heaven’s sake … it was to be a good half-hour before the first Spaniard turned up. We felt a little sheepish, being so early, and also being English… but we had somehow got wind of the fact that registration for the Chinese department was on a first come, first served basis, and there were only fifty places, a fact that not many others seemed to know.

  Ana is good at administrative stuff and had gathered all the required documentation and put it in a big file, which she was leafing through now, and asking me questions to which I did not know the answers. I was along for the bulk and body mass, in case it came to a scrimmage over who was attended to first.

  Soon the first Spaniards began to turn up and an amorphous melee began to surge up the steps and around the door. We kept tight to our preeminent spot. ‘Stick close to me and be ready to do as you’re told,’ ordered my wife.

  Under normal circumstances queuing is a most orderly business in Spain, although it may not appear so to the uninitiated. It’s like this: you enter the place where you’re going to do your queuing, look around and ask, somewhat bafflingly, ‘¿Quien hace las veces?’ (‘Who makes the times?’), whereupon the last person in the queue will turn to you, and say, ‘It’s me.’ So now all you have to do is keep an eye on one person; you can amble over to talk to a friend, find somewhere to sit, or even wander off for a bit, once you’ve made the time yourself. When the person who has ‘made the times’ for you makes a move, then you’re on next. This system works very well, but it doesn’t look good; it hasn’t the neatness of a good orderly line. And of course the whole shebang breaks down when there are foreigners involved who don’t know the score.

  But on the steps of the Palacio de las Columnas that morning, as the first hot rays of sunshine came pouring over the house tops and down into the street, the orderly queuing system was nowhere to be seen. The place was full of parents, all of them having clearly been laid on the line by their kids, and these parents were in pugnacious mode, ready to fight like rats for the furtherance of their children’s future.

  On the dot of nine the door opened and we were washed in on the head of the flood. Somehow we managed to present our documentation amongst the first half-dozen petitioners, but then we were all given new forms and told to come back when we had done so. They had to be filled in – and there were the direst of consequences for not complying with this order – with a 4B pencil.

  We ratched about in our bags, but neither of us had anything resembling a 4B pencil; I don’t think anybody did – after all, you don’t generally carry a 4B with you, do you? The flood of parents headed in dribs and drabs back out onto the street in search of the all-important utensil. We went to a bar in Plaza Trinidad and, while Ana ordered herself a coffee and started getting to grips with the new form, I was despatched to find a pencil.

  This proved more taxing than one would have imagined, as there wasn’t a stationers to be seen for miles around. I wandered hither and thither, ducking fruitlessly in and out of shops that I thought with a little imagination might conceivably sell 4Bs … but no luck. Perhaps some rat had received advance information about the pencils, and had bought up all the stock within a three-kilometre radius of the faculty, and was even now, unctuous and alone, handing over the correctly filled-in form. People will sink pretty low.

  And then a cry, ‘Cristóbal! What are you doing here?’ I spun round. It was none other than Pinhole Johnny, so called because of his consummate artistry with the pinhole camera.

  ‘Hey, Johnny. Good to see you.’ I was really pleased to have bumped into him, hadn’t seen him for ages. There was a lot to talk about.

  ‘Shall we go for a coffee?’ he said.

  ‘Er … I can’t really, right now. I’m on a serious mission. You don’t happen to have a 4B pencil on you, do you?’

  He fumbled about in his bag. ‘Nope, no such luck. I’ve got an HB, oh, and a 2B even … will that do? Or how about two 2Bs stuck together?’

  ‘This is no time for facetiousness, Johnny. It’s got to be a 4B.’

  ‘I tell you what, there’s a printer around the corner; they do a lot of work for me and they’re bound to have one. Let’s go and see them.’

  So we went round to the printers and after a little negotiation they promised to lend Johnny their 4B pencil so long as he promised to bring it back. It appeared that the 4B was as scarce as hens’ teeth in this part of the city.

  By the time I got back to the bar with Johnny, Ana was in a state of some agitation. I think she felt that I was not taking the business seriously enough and had been off somewhere fooling around with Pinhole Johnny, as opposed to wearing the soles of my shoes to the bone in the search for that 4B pencil.

  Ana set to filling in the form while I ordered a couple more coffees. ‘Do you think we count as minors?’
she asked, her brow furrowed with wondering.

  This stumped me. It seemed an odd question: if you were still a minor at fifty-something, then who wasn’t one?

  ‘No, miners,’ she elucidated. ‘It seems there are certain advantages to be had if you’re employed down a mine.’

  ‘Who has to be the miner, Chloé or us?’

  ‘The parents, I should think, although it’s far from clear.’

  ‘Probably not, then. I think that might be swinging the lead a bit.’ And with that the form was filled in to the best of our ability and Johnny was sent back to the printers with the pencil, while we went back to the Palacio de las Columnas.

  The 4B pencil ruse had thinned out the crowd of parents, but you still had to claw and thump your way through just to be seen. At last, though, we were in sight of the final desk, behind which sat the bespectacled dragon of a woman who would have the final word over Chloé’s destiny. We stood before her, a respectable distance from the desk, and dithered a little, timidly proffering the 4B form, when suddenly a balding short-arsed man shot in front of us and sat himself down at the chair before the desk, spreading his documentation like a card sharp. I gaped like a dying cod, seeking the words of righteous indignation, but it was too late: the bastard, still panting slightly – he had clearly just shouldered his way through from the street – had launched into a carefully prepared peroration and was already in full flight, a full flight that we, with our inept country Spanish, would never be able to match. Why, I believe the dragon woman had already sized us up and was thinking, Oho, here’s a couple of half-witted foreigners and they won’t understand anything and they’ll have filled out the form all wrong, and they’ll barely speak Spanish. Heaven help us.

  She shot us a glance as the baldy rabbited ingratiatingly on. ‘I think you’ll find everything in order here, señora – I’ve filled out the form myself – I had to do it because my son is in Canada right now having won a scholarship to a prestigious language school in Montreal – he is a terrific linguist you see, speaks four languages, amongst them Hungarian, does it in his spare time for his own amusement – I know he’ll be a great credit to the …’

  The woman administrator peered at him owlishly as he delivered this torrent of codswallop, and then lowered her eyes to his impeccable form. She scanned it, then looked up at him and raised a finger. ‘Everything seems to be in order here, señor.’ She paused. ‘Except that it appears you have used an HB pencil for the form. I’m afraid our computer will not accept that. You’ll have to go over the little boxes with a 4B pencil, then come back and present the form once more.’ She gave him the most charming of smiles and handed back the form, then smiled at us and beckoned us to sit down.

  There used to be a bar in the university building, ostensibly for the students, but it was such a hell of a good bar that everybody in the neighbourhood soon got wind of it and packed the place out, and the poor students, who had the disadvantage of having from time to time to attend lectures, found themselves unable to get within even shouting distance of the bar … so they closed it down. This was a shame, as we would dearly have liked to buy that dragon woman a drink, especially when she said to us that we had made a terrific job of filling in the form and that Chloé was to present herself at the Faculty to commence her studies at the beginning of September.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  VIRTUAL CHICKENS

  FEW EXCITEMENTS IN LIFE CAN COMPARE with finding a new-laid egg nestling in the bright golden straw of a corner of the hen house. I’ve yet to meet a child unmoved by such a discovery, and even for adults, like myself, it’s pretty good. I would argue that the contemplation of the aesthetic beauty of an egg – the very acme of perfection and, if you happen to be an alligator, a turtle or a chicken, the cradle of existence – transports us to thoughts of the sublime.

  The finest way we can express this is by elaborately preparing them for our consumption. And of all the wonderful ways there are, you can do no better than fry them. An egg fried in hot, deep spitting olive oil with the brown, crispy bits around the edges and the rich deep-yellow yolk still liquid but with just a hint of viscosity and barely covered with a pale film of heated albumen … well, this is about as near an approximation of felicity as you can get. Scrambled eggs come hot on the heels of the fried ones, and it’s a marvellous way to get rid of a glut of eggs. Two of you ought to be able to deal with five of them. Make perfect golden toast and put it on a plate. If you live north roughly of the 45th parallel, then you’ll want some butter on the toast; anywhere south of that and you’re better off with olive oil. Break four of the eggs in a bowl and just the yolk of the fifth; this makes it a bit yellower. Beat ’em up a bit and tip into a pan in which you have heated some butter and oil. Cook slowly and don’t stop stirring with a wooden spoon even for a minute. Take the pan off the heat while the eggs are still shiny and runny; they’ll keep on cooking. Tip the mix onto the toast and shave with a potato peeler some smoked cod’s roe on top, a hint of tabasco and a big pinch of pepper and maybe a peck of parsley.

  Now what you need for eggs is, of course, chickens. Unfortunately at El Valero we had lost the chickens when the chicken-run wall collapsed and the fox got in and wolfed – in a manner of speaking – the lot. Ana and I were desolate, and we felt the impact of this loss all the more acutely when Chloé left home at the start of the university term to move into a flat in Granada. If getting Chloé up and out to catch the school bus was the great imperative that got us rolling in the morning, then feeding the chooks ran it a close second and for a time we lived a rudderless existence.

  Added to this, we had no reason now to save the scraps of food that we used to put aside so assiduously, knowing that they were not mere leftovers but tasty ingredients of a future meal. It takes a lot of the fun and dash out of cooking when you know there’s no margin left for error; no chickens to polish off the unpalatable bits, the failed experiments or the portions excess to requirements that remain in the bottom of the pan. It offended our frugal country habits and natural inclination towards recycling, but most of all it pained us that we had no eggs to send to Chloé, who, having shown little interest in farm produce while living at home, had developed a passion for home-grown fruit and vegetables as soon as she moved away. She was on a mission, she told us, to buck up her flatmates’ ideas about healthy eating and impress upon them the sound economy of relying on nature’s own larder rather than waste good partying money on the ready-made muck sold at the local supermercado.

  To return to our chicken-led way of life, I needed to repair their run, and this time it would have to be the sort of run that would last them, and us, for the rest of our days. Time was marching on and the last thing I wanted to be doing in ten years’ time was to start all over again on the poultry. A good solid chicken run ought to take the place of the pensions and insurances that we have always seen fit to avoid.

  So I built the chicken run and I built it well, adopting a nice compromise between art and fortification. The next step was to people it with chickens. Quite by chance, Ana had come across a superlative poultry website on the Internet and jotted down the address. We booted up her horrible old computer, a thing with no R nor P nor apostrophe on it, and launched ourselves into the World Wide Web. There was the webpage and they had every sort of chicken and fowl you could dream of. There were photos of them and descriptions of their qualities and advantages, and, lo and behold, in some cases, they even had them starring in their own videos. We could audition our chickens online.

  First of all we decided to check out the Andalusian Blue. It was represented in a five-minute video clip. We clicked the right arrow and waited with excitement for the film to upload. Ah yes, there it was, a real stonker of a chicken. It was standing on some beaten earth near a cornfield. We watched as it stared in a desultory manner at the camera and then turned its head to look to the left for a while. Then, getting bored with that, it looked to the right. There was an atmospheric soundtrack that consisted of some water
dripping and crickets doing their stuff. After a while the chicken decided to look straight ahead again, giving us an excellent view of its beak.

  I looked at Ana, then back at the screen. The chicken was still looking straight ahead. Ana then looked at me. I was looking at the screen. I was still enjoying the video, although I had to admit that it was a bit short on action. You sort of felt that something was going to come along and grab the chicken, a scenario with which we were only too horribly familiar, but one which you couldn’t help feel would add something to the plot. Nothing came along to grab the chicken, though. It shifted its weight and looked down at the ground, a bit bashfully, I thought.

  ‘Christ, it’s like watching an Ingmar Bergman film,’ I said.

  ‘Ssh,’ Ana admonished. ‘I think something’s happening.’

  The chicken looked up again and twitched. There were a few wisps of dried grass on the ground. I believe the chicken was thinking about pecking them. Occasionally they shifted a little as some infinitesimal zephyr passed. The chicken looked down at them again. I looked at Ana again. I like Ana; I’ve lived with her for a long time. It was a hot evening and she was wearing one of those strappy little tops. I was starting to get bored with the film and just a little amorous. I slipped my arm round her shoulders. She turned and frowned at me.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘We’re supposed to be choosing chickens. What do you think of the Andalusian Blue?’