Last Days of the Bus Club

by Stewart, Chris

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, noncommittally.

  And so on to the Lords. These were the ones with bald necks like vultures, hideous to look at but a beast in the egg-laying department. We reckoned them marginally more interesting on screen than the Andalusian Blues; they seemed to have more charisma. At long last the credits began to roll on the Lords, too. Five minutes can be a long time. But whatever the longueurs of the videos, any chicken fancier worth their salt had to admit that the selection was truly impressive. Things had come a long way since a poultry van from Ciudad Real would come to Órgiva every Friday, stacked to the gunwales with partridges, quails, guinea fowl and chickens.

  We chose a couple of the Andalusian Blues, a couple of Lords, a couple of Prats (don’t ask me why), and a grey cock. After we pressed the appropriate keys, delivery would be by courier within twenty-four hours. We set about putting the final touches to the chicken run.

  Amazingly, the very next afternoon the chickens arrived in town. They came packed in two custom-made cardboard boxes in a little van. I drove them home and Ana and I gathered in the chicken run, having made a very heaven of it, to release them. As always with poultry, they lurked in the corner looking unutterably depressed. Ana suffers deep anguish about this, but I am more sanguine, and do not attribute to the humble hen either the limitless subtlety or the broad range of emotions that we higher beings enjoy. Poultry are either depressed or alright; there are no middling shades of grey. And I imagine that the experience of being grabbed and stuffed into a cardboard box and then shipped for four hours would tend towards the depressing rather than the uplifting. Until something positive occurred to convince them otherwise, they would remain depressed.

  So we went down to the farm in search of the sort of positive thing that we thought would make a chicken feel alright. It would have to be food because, along with sex, food is the only thing chickens are interested in, and these were too young to care much about sex, which was perhaps just as well, because the sort of sex that chickens have looks pretty ghastly, particularly for the poor hen.

  So we got them some Robinia pseudoacacia leaves, alfalfa, dandelions, vervain and chickweed. Fortunately the vegetable garden is always rich in greenery, and Ana knows exactly what chickens love and what they don’t like at all. Funny that they should love the Robinia, the black locust tree, because in order to check the spelling I looked it up on the Web, only to find that the leaves contain robin, a toxin that gives horses anorexia, depression, incontinence, colic, weakness and cardiac arrhythmia. It’s probably a question of dose.

  We lovingly arranged bunches of all these plants around the place, but the young chickens only looked at them with deepest suspicion … and now I know about the Robinia I’m not surprised. We tried them with oranges, apricots, plums and loquats, all the most delicious fruits in season, but even this failed to raise their enthusiasm.

  By now we had reinstated our old ‘chicken bucket’ to its pride of place on the kitchen counter and once more began to throw in all the leftovers that we believe chickens like: lettuce and carrots, cucumbers and parsley. These have to be chopped up into peck-sized pieces. Potato peelings have to be boiled a bit, but then they like them, along with rice and pasta. The detritus of prawns is popular with most chickens, too … but what really gets them going is, I’m afraid to say, chicken. It is by a long head their favourite thing. Urban friends and visitors are appalled to see us giving chicken scraps to the chickens, but only because they don’t know the score, the way things are in the country.

  Chicken and prawns are not something we eat that often, so the air of depression continued for some weeks, with the whole lot of them huddled miserably in a corner of the chicken run, until Ana went in to feed and water them, whereupon they would scatter in a terrified squawking panic. There was no sign of any eggs; they were too young for that. Soon the depression started to get to Ana.

  ‘I wonder about these chickens,’ she said. ‘They’re no fun at all and they don’t lay any eggs.’

  ‘Be patient, dear,’ I suggested. ‘All in its own sweet time.’

  As the weeks went by the chickens began to get big and beautiful; the lavish feeding routine was paying off. And then one day Ana returned ecstatically from the chicken run holding the first egg. After that the eggs came in veritable cascades; we were getting five a day and often a big double-yolker, for which, according to the chicken website, the Prats were famous. A sense of gladness pervaded our lives as the larder began to fill.

  Before long we had reached that interesting state where production was beginning to exceed demand. It occurred to us that, just as we had needed the chickens to relieve us from the burden and waste of left-over food, we now needed Chloé back to relieve us from the glut. Neighbours were no help as they all had chickens themselves, and, although we could have fed the eggs to the dogs, it seemed excessive and a waste, because dogs don’t appreciate the qualities of a good egg. The occasional egg-and-home-produce run to Chloé’s Granada lodgings seemed like the best solution, and a fine, unobtrusive way to keep in touch.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BREAKFAST IN MEDINA SIDONIA

  THE PHONE – IT WAS MICHAEL. Michael being my good friend and travel companion Dr Michael Jacobs, art historian, author, stuttering raconteur and formidable cook, calling from his home in Frailes, a village not far to the north of us, near Jaén.

  ‘Ah, Chris … erm … I’ve got myself into a b-bit of a scrape. You see, Cuqui has asked me to be president of the jury at a concurso gastronómico in C-Conil. It’s tuna, the almadraba – the spring tuna harvest.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘Tuna is by a long head my favourite fish, although …’

  ‘Mine, too. But I can’t possibly do it.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I can’t possibly do it,’ he said again, with an unusual air of finality.

  ‘Why ever not?’ I expostulated. ‘You must be bonkers. It’ll be the best tuna you’ve ever eaten.’

  ‘Yes, but … well … I’m trying to get this wretched b-book written and so saying no to absolutely everything, and as you know I don’t drive, and going all the way to Conil on public transport will take me the best part of a week there and back. It’s out of the question. I’m not doing it.’

  I could tell what was coming next; sure enough it came:

  ‘Y-you don’t want to d-do it, do you?’

  ‘Come on, Michael. I couldn’t possibly be president of the jury at a concurso gastronómico …’

  ‘Of course you could; all you have to do is eat the tuna – admittedly rather a lot of tuna – and then say nice things about it. It’s easy as that. You could d-do it in your sleep.’

  ‘I really can’t, Michael. I’m trying to get a book finished too, and I’ve got the acequia to clean and the sheep to shear … I’m right up against it. I mean, it sounds very tempting but I really can’t. I’m sorry.’

  And so we said no more about it. And then I thought about it a bit and, as it got nearer supper time and as I began to feel a little bit peckish, the idea of that tuna began to seem more and more tempting. Also I was looking for material for an article or two, and it seemed likely that on a jaunt of this nature something worthy of an article or two would be bound to happen. Neither should one forget the old adage that ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’

  So I rang Michael and told him that I would do it.

  ‘That’s marvellous, Chris. I’ll ring Cuqui right away; she’ll be delighted.’

  Next there was a silence while a thought occurred to him …

  ‘You know what?’ he continued. ‘I’ve been thinking and I th-thought that if you’re going to go along, then p-perhaps I might c-come along too, and you could pick me up?’

  ‘Well, that would be lovely, Michael,’ I lied (for I had rather wanted to be the president of a jury, the first and probably the last time in my life that I would be president of anything). ‘But surely we can’t both be the president … can we?’

&nbs
p; Another silence, a short one. ‘You can be the p-president,’ he said, magnanimously.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly,’ I, with false modesty, replied.

  There was yet another pause while Michael pondered how best to put something.

  ‘Actually, I wasn’t telling the whole truth about the p-president. Neither of us will be p-president; in fact, there isn’t a president.’

  ‘But surely there has to be a president; you can’t have a jury without a president.’

  ‘Er … these sort of juries d-don’t actually have presidents. They don’t work like that. They’re different.’

  ‘Then why,’ I rounded on him, ’did you say you were going to be president?’

  ‘S-sometimes one says things to make things seem a b-bit more interesting than they really are. This was one of those. There is no president.’

  Michael was right about Conil being a long way away. I looked on the Internet and it seemed that by an unimaginably convoluted route it would be four hours and twenty-two minutes from Granada … and Granada is an hour and a half from home! Six hours driving west in the evening, squinting into the lowering sun, hunched over a wheel. I would barely be able to walk by the time we got there.

  Still, the sky was a hazy blue and the northern slopes of the Sierra Nevada were white with thick snow that shone in the afternoon sunlight as I pulled into the bus station of Granada to pick up my friend.

  ‘Ay, Andalucía,’ he exclaimed. ‘What a paradise!’ And it was: out towards Santa Fe the River Genil was rushing full and clear amongst the great groves of whispering poplars that seem like armies laying siege to the city from the west. As we raced along towards Loja and Antequera the land began to roll with hills of asparagus and corn, still green and shot with scarlet seams of poppies.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Michael.

  ‘Aah,’ I concurred.

  A little later, as we spun past the lorries lumbering up the Cuesta Blanca near Salinas, we each gasped anew at the great pinnacles of bare rock that burst from the fertile earth of the valleys of the Montes de Málaga.

  ‘D’you know what that one’s called?’ asked Michael, indicating an extravagantly shaped colossus of rock soaring to the south of the motorway. I didn’t, or I’d forgotten; one or the other. ‘It’s El Peñón de los Enamorados – Lovers’ Cliff – and of course there’s a cock-and-bull story that goes with it, the usual thing of a Moorish princess and a Christian prince whose love was impossible and so they threw themselves in the time-honoured fashion off the cliff and were dashed together on the rocks below. And, predictably enough, in the popular imagination the shape of the rock is that of the princess, lying down, or her h-head, at any rate.’

  We pondered this singular phenomenon together. ‘Can’t you see it?’ said Michael.

  I couldn’t. The rock resembled nothing so much as an amorphous lump of rock. But as we zoomed past, it did indeed begin to change shape … and suddenly I saw it. ‘She has a hooked nose like a beak, and a receding forehead, like a Cro-Magnon hag on a bad day. It seems unlikely your Christian prince would fall for a girl who looked like that.’

  ‘Ah yes, but you’ve missed it. A minute ago, while you were overtaking those lorries, she was perfection itself – the ideal f-feminine physiognomy.’

  For a while we wondered at the transience of beauty, but at our age it wasn’t a subject that we particularly wished to dwell upon.

  ‘Th-there’s a slight p-problem with the judging of the tuna competition,’ began Michael.

  I began to smell a rat. I knew there would be a rat; there always is.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, you know there are two c-categories: the innovative and the tr-traditional.’

  ‘Yes, you said that. I want to judge the innovative category, and seeing as how I’m not going to be president, then I think I ought to be granted that little whim. I like raw tuna best and I think that it’ll be less likely to have had the living daylights boiled out of it in the innovatory line, no?’

  ‘Y-yes, b-but you can’t,’ said Michael, a little defensively, I thought.

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘B-because I shall be j-judging the innovators and you’ll b-be with the traditionals.’

  This seemed manifestly unjust, but I waited for an explanation.

  ‘You see, C-Cuqui is submitting a dish in the traditional and I’ve known Cuqui for a long long time and so I will feel it inc-cumbent on me to make sure she wins … out of f-friendship you understand. And so because everybody knows that I know Cuqui – and I’ve known Cuqui for thirty years – I’m not allowed to judge the category she’s in. It’s b-bad enough my even b-being here, but then it was Cuqui herself who g-got me the g-gig.’

  ‘Gig’ is not a word that Michael uses that much.

  We had left the autovía now and were zooming along a long straight road between fields of garlic and cotton on the way to Campillos. Michael, as always on such occasions, was watching me with admiration and bewilderment as, nonchalantly and almost unconsciously, I controlled the headlong flight of the great steel beast in which we were so comfortably cocooned. Michael has never learned to drive. To impress him I casually switched on the windscreen wipers and sprayed the screen, ostensibly to clear the thick film of insects that had seen fit to immolate themselves against our hurtling juggernaut. It was easy, just an almost imperceptible flick of a finger. ‘I may not know much about art history,’ I enthused, ‘but after all these years I sure know how to drive a car.’

  The further west we travelled the more the beautiful blue Echium took over from the poppies. We oohed and aahed all the more as we wound among whole hillsides of deep blue. Michael, out of academic interest, was plotting our course on his accursèd iPhone, which was unnecessary as a) I knew the way, b) I had a printed route description off the internet, and c) it was signposted.

  ‘We’ll be in Olvera before long,’ he said, fingering the wretched device.

  ‘I know; I’m looking at it, on that hill up ahead.’

  In a similar vein, without actually looking at it, Michael announced our imminent arrival at Medina Sidonia.

  ‘I think it’s my favourite town in all of Spain,’ he continued. ‘It’s exquisitely beautiful, and there’s a bar that’s the most perfect bar and it does the perfect breakfast.’

  ‘Well, I’ve never been there, so perhaps we can have breakfast there on the way home on Wednesday morning.’ This, I figured, would be a useful gambit to get Michael on the move early so that we could each arrive home in time to put in a respectable showing on the respective books we were supposedly writing.

  ‘Yes, that would be good; we can get an early morning hit of pig fat.’

  The mere mention of the pig fat made us both think how hungry we were. It was getting on for that time of day. The last rays of the sun were setting over the sea as we pulled into Conil. I staggered from the car, shook myself and delved in the back for my needments: the beloved Marrakech Medina leather man-bag containing on this occasion the single necessary item for spending the night in places other than my own dear bed – that is, an ageing blue toothbrush. I also had with me a rather disgusting Panama hat with a brown sweat stain oozing from the hatband at the front, and a cherished pale corduroy jacket, part of the only suit I have ever owned. I bought it over thirty-five years ago and, although it costs me dear to squeeze the lower half of my person into the trouser, the jacket still fits – so long as I hold my breath and stand up straight – like the proverbial glove.

  Michael emerged from behind the car. To my surprise and delight, he was dressed almost identically: Panama hat, beige jacket, black jeans and leather man-bag. He stopped and looked at me in consternation.

  ‘God,’ he said. ‘We look like a couple of old, gay ice-cream salesmen.’

  I had to admit that he was right. I bristled a little, though, at the slight to my jacket. ‘This jacket, I’ll have you know, Michael, is proper class,’ and I held it open so that he could admire the prestigious if r
ather frayed label on the inside pocket. ‘It dates from the days when things were made well; I’ve had it for over thirty-five years …’

  ‘It certainly looks like it,’ he observed.

  Following the directions suggested by Michael’s telephone, we entered the labyrinth of the town, looking for the hotel that the Tourist Board had booked us into. I had been to Conil once before, with Ana on the way to Cádiz, if I remember rightly. It was round about lunchtime and the Wife’s blood sugar levels were hitting the floor, so we stopped and installed ourselves at a restaurant on the front. We decided, for some reason which escapes me now, on a large plate of Ortigas de Mar, which the menu translated as ‘Sea Nettles’. They are actually sea anemones, or the particular type of sea anemone that has its being off the coast of Conil. There was a strong hint of mucus about them and a certain amount of sand, but they smelt of the sea and that was enough for me. Having guzzled a plateful of the anemones we continued our journey to Cádiz without giving Conil even half a chance.

  It seemed we missed a trick, for Conil really is a very pretty little town and we were in good spirits as we made our way to our tuna jurors’ hotel. The woman at reception was German and her Spanish was not too good. Michael and I have only the shakiest of German between us. With some effort we managed to make her understand that we had been booked in by the Tourist Board. She looked at us suspiciously – perhaps thinking that we were about to try and sell her some ice cream. Eventually we established that a room had been booked for us. The budget was tight and so we had to share, but the good Dr Jacobs and I had over the years travelled together through Peru in conditions of the most outrageous intimacy, and a couple of nights in a Spanish seaside hotel without the privacy of individual rooms would do us no more harm.

  ‘Dere iss a liff if you vont,’ said the woman, giving us a look of distaste.