A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

  These days Alpujarran shepherds have become pretty adept in the use of mobile phones, but this wasn’t the case when our phone was first installed. In those distant days, grappling with a telephone was considered a serious business, and was certainly not to be undertaken when sober.

  Typically a shepherd would wait until he had shut his flock in and done all the ancillary jobs before heading for the village and a bar with the necessary apparatus for making a telephone call. The flock would take a dim view of being shut in too long before nightfall; the jobs around the stable would take a good half an hour; the ride or walk to the village could be anything from one to three hours, and upon arrival at the bar, the shepherd would feel the need to fortify himself at length before embarking on the unfamiliar and alarming task at hand. So the early calls would start coming in round about midnight.

  When we picked up the receiver, the first thing we would hear would be the music and shouting of a bar, with perhaps the electronic burbling of the fruit machines. There would be a long silence from the other end.

  ‘It’s a shearing job,’ Ana would say, handing me the phone.

  I could imagine the character on the other end holding the handpiece at arm’s length, glaring at it with distaste and then shouting loudly at it. Of course when it spoke to them, they couldn’t possibly hear, because of the great distance between the diaphragm and the ear, and also the bedlam of noise around them in the bar. So the shepherd would shout at it angrily to speak up.

  ‘CRISTOBAL!’ I would hear as a faint and raucous bellow.

  ‘Yes, speak to me…’

  ‘CRISTOOOBAAL!’

  ‘Alright, I can hear you. Speak now…

  ‘CRIISTOOOBAAAL!!!’

  ‘YEES! WHAT DO YOU WANT?’

  A silence from the other end, as the shepherd digested the idea that the plastic thing with the wire he was shouting at, had actually shouted back at him.

  ‘CRISTOBAL. WHEN ARE YOU COMING TO SHEAR MY SHEEP?’

  ‘WHO ARE YOU?’

  ‘CRISTOOBAAL!’

  ‘YES, I CAN HEAR YOU, BUT I NEED TO KNOW WHO YOU ARE?

  This would produce a silence on the other end, then some muttering as the other incumbents of the bar were consulted and some advice offered.

  ‘CRISTOBAL…’

  ‘Look, I need to…’ but it was no good, my interlocutor had had enough and slammed the phone down.

  That was the way it was with the shepherds on the telephone, though little by little, as they became more adept with it, and picked up a few of the necessary social skills, things got better, until finally we got to a point where we could even exchange rudimentary pieces of information over the phone.

  Mistakes however remained inevitable. There was one evening, when Chloë answered the phone quite late at night. I noticed her move the earpiece sharply away from her ear to avoid being deafened by the raucous shout from the other end. ‘NO,’ she shouted back at the handset, ‘YOU CAN’T SPEAK TO MY HUSBAND BECAUSE I HAVEN’T GOT ONE. I’M ONLY SEVEN YEARS OLD!’ And she slammed the phone down.

  I couldn’t help but feel proud of my daughter showing a bit of spirit.

  And then, late one evening, the phone rang again. I picked it up and girded myself ready for the deafening shout.

  ‘Chris,’ it said softly. ‘Is that you?’

  It was a person who knew the telephone, a blessing indeed.

  ‘Boss!’ I cried. ‘Tell me, what news from the wider world?’

  ‘Well,’ said Nat, my editor in London, for it was she. ‘Are you sitting down? Because I’ve got some news for you?

  ‘No, I can’t sit down; I’m wedged into the corner by the telephone. That’s the way it is here. But I’ll lean on something instead.’

  ‘What I’m going to say,’ continued Nat in a soft tone, ‘is don’t get too excited — but Driving Over Lemons is going to be read on the radio, and it’s being ordered all over the place?

  I stared at the phone. None of us had expected anything like this. It was a bit like entering the local horticultural fete and finding you’ve won a rosette at the Chelsea Flower Show.

  LEAF OF THE MALE

  ‘THERE’S A MAN ON THE TELEPHONE,’ SAID ANA. ‘I THINK HE’S CALLED Leaf of the Male. He says he wants to speak to you.’

  ‘Seems an odd sort of name,’ I muttered, and we both looked at the telephone as if it might hold some sort of clue. But by the time I picked up the receiver, the line was dead. Then of course it dawned on me. It was the journalist — Leith of the Mail on Sunday. My book had just been published in England and, to Ana’s particular disbelief, had not disappeared without trace. In fact, on the back of a couple of nice reviews, and the reading on Radio Four, it had been charging up into the non-fiction book charts.

  It was then that Leith had phoned up and said he wanted to do a story — and he’d be coming out to talk to us at our home in Spain. ‘I’ll just get a car at Malaga,’ he had said, blithely dismissing my attempts to warn him of the perils in store. ‘And I’ll see you very soon.

  ‘He probably thinks he knows where we live because of that map in the front of the book,’ said Ana. ‘You know, the one that you drew?

  I began to feel a bit guilty about my handiwork: the drawings of eucalyptus and olive groves, where perhaps a track or turning might have been more descriptive. I hadn’t actually considered that anyone would use the map in the book. It had been more of a Swallows and Amazons sort of thing.

  In the event, Eugene the photographer and his assistant arrived first. They were smooth and hip and had hired a top-of-the-range silver Volvo at the paper’s expense to transport them and their equipment to El Valero. They first appeared racing along the rubbly track in a cloud of dust. Then they hurtled down the unspeakable hill to the river and whooshed straight through the ford — a deed normally attempted by only the most robust and high-slung of four-wheel-drivers.

  ‘It’s only a bloody hire car,’ drawled Eugene. ‘I mean, they don’t expect you to polish it outside your villa all week, do they?’ Eugene seemed a cool character.

  I hovered around the car as the photographers humped out their huge bags and boxes, their silver umbrellas and coloured screens, sun-lamps, chargers and tripods. I thought they were from another planet. ‘Last week we done Oasis an’ next week the Spice Girls,’ commented Eugene.

  ‘How nice,’ I said, shuffling my toes in the dust.

  ‘Great spread you got here,’ said Eugene, tucking into the chorizo and ham and olives we brought out to welcome them. ‘Wasn’t there supposed to be a journo comin’ too?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, that would be Leaf of the Male, but he hasn’t turned up yet. I think he’s lost?

  ‘Nothin’ would surprise me.’ Eugene squinted at the sun. ‘Right, let’s ‘ave a beer or two an’ then we’ll ‘ave you all sittin’ up there on that terrace.’

  The telephone rang. It was Leaf. He was lost. Ana took the call and gave him detailed instructions on how to find the road to the valley.

  It was a hot, hot July day and the sun was raging from a clear sky, as it always does in July. Andrew, Eugene’s assistant, was setting up a huge bank of floodlights below the terrace.

  ‘What the hell do you want with that lot on a day like this?’ I asked.

  ‘These pics ‘ye gotta be good,’ asserted Eugene as he added ever more invasive probosces to his camera. ‘I don’t like natural light; you can’t trust it. Your Mail reader don’t like to see things in a natural light anyway. Can you do something about your ‘air, Chris?’

  ‘Not really, no. It’s what’s called “flyaway hair” I believe, or what’s left of it is…’

  I mussed it up a bit with my fingers.

  ‘There, how’s that?’

  ‘I s’pose it’ll ‘ave to do. Now look just above the camera and see if you can raise a grin of some sort…’

  The telephone went again. Leaf… still lost.

  Eugene and Andrew pushed and pulled at Ana and Chloe and me, and contort
ed us in and out of all sorts of different positions and poses, and shoved us this way and the other as if we were a family of teddy-bears. Then they did the whole thing all over again but with different lenses and filters and umbrellas and screens, and holding different props and leaning against different things, and then eventually they had the three of us all standing and holding hands and jumping up and down in the river —’Just try and look natural like, you know, I want you in sort of everyday poses.’

  We felt like a family of half-wits, and that, when the photo came out later, was exactly what we looked like — muttonheads allowed out for the day from some sort of institution. Still, Eugene and Andrew were fun, and we all had a good laugh out of it — except of course when we were supposed to be laughing for the camera, when we just looked moronic.

  Leaf called several more times in the course of the morning, each time a little bit more lost. We all laughed about poor Leaf, who was apparently some sort of a hot-shot reporter.

  ‘Why would the Mail want to send us a hot-shot journo? Surely we’re not big news?’ I wondered.

  ‘They’re treating you like a big one,’ Eugene reassured us. ‘Not perhaps as big as the Spice Girls, but big nonetheless. So they’re sending you Leaf?

  William Leith turned up just before lunch. He was hot and just about as flustered and bothered as I’ve ever seen a man. He had flyaway hair too, and it was drenched in sweat from the walk up the hill, and his glasses were sticky with dust and muck and he was shaking like a… like a leaf. He reeled into the house and slumped into a chair.

  ‘I’m William,’ he said huskily, then smacked his dry lips together. ‘Any chance of a beer?’

  I brought a bottle — one of those small Spanish ones that wouldn’t really register if you poured the contents into a pint glass. William sat back in his chair. Eugene and Andrew looked at each other, then at us. We looked quizzically at Andrew and Eugene. Ana gave me a look. William downed his bottle in one, and then, looking up, noticed that some of us — those of us who weren’t looking at each other — were looking at him.

  ‘Lord!’ he said. ‘Any more where that came from?’

  He stayed slumped in his chair with the second bottle, looking like some organism that has somehow got into the wrong element — a deep-sea creature in a bingo-hall, for example. We all stared at him, wondering what he was going to say next. Only when he had finished three beers was he able to communicate.

  ‘Lord God! That road! I have never been so terrified in my life! And then that assault course DIY bridge! I thought I would die… honest to God, look at me; I’m still quaking. Where’s the bathroom?’

  We assumed that the awfulness of Leaf’s experience with the road and the bridge might have loosened his bowels, and ushered him hurriedly to the bathroom. But he didn’t shut the door, and as we all peered across we could see him going through the potions and lotions in the cupboards and on the shelves, picking each one up, turning it round and reading the directions for use.

  ‘He’s a journo,’ explained Andrew. ‘That’s what they do. They can’t help it.’

  ‘He’ll be in your knicker-drawer in a minute!’ sniggered Eugene.

  Sure enough, when William had done his stuff in the bathroom, he wandered out and into the bedroom.

  ‘You wanted to be a famous writer, said Andrew, ‘well, this is what it’s all about!’

  I wasn’t altogether sure that I ever had wanted to be a famous writer, but as we settled down to lunch, William recovered from the traumas of his journey and turned out to be excellent company. We all drank a little more wine than was really good for us and then William got his notebook out and the interview began.

  He asked us all sorts of questions — good incisive ones that made Ana and I think a bit — and I warmed to him, and started seeing our life as potentially quite an amusing Sunday newspaper article. I told William everything he asked, cutting short only once when Ana shot me a warning look, and happily spun off into a treatise on the merits of organic farming versus agribusiness, which William politely heard out. Then he turned to me and opened a new page of his notebook.

  ‘It says on the back of your book,’ he announced, ‘that you were one of the founder members of Genesis. Is there any truth in that?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said, a little sheepishly. ‘But it was a hell of a long time ago, and it lasted less than a year, and to be truthful there’s not a lot I can remember about it.’

  ‘Then tell me exactly what you do remember about it,’ William insisted…

  FROM GENESIS TO THE BIG TOP

  THE ODD THING — I FOUND MYSELF TELLING WILLIAM — IS THAT IT all began with Cliff Richard. At the age of thirteen I had one great ambition in life: I was going to be Cliff. I don’t mean that I was just going to imitate the man (who, I should stress, was then still a heathen rocker) but I was actually going to become him. It seemed to me that to be Cliff Richard would give you everything life had got to give. Now thirty-five years or so later, I realise that I may have been mistaken, but the arguments would not have cut any ice with my star-struck teenage self. Still, as luck would have it, reality soon caught up. I couldn’t sing — and the dreams were clearly not to be. So I settled instead on a future as Cliff’s guitarist, Hank Marvin.

  Of course, being Hank Marvin was no steal, either. God, in his wisdom, had thrown a few obstacles in the way by arranging to have me born tone deaf and by giving me the worst fingernails a guitarist could hope to have. And not just that. These nails extended not from the slender fingers of an aesthete, but from the ham-like mitts of a fitter’s mate.

  These factors might have quashed my musical career early on had it not been for my best mate Duncan. He was a cool friend to have — lively and wild and a little shifty — and he stood apart from the rest of us at the boarding school where my parents had despatched me. While we young degenerates would bicycle off to some pub to drink and smoke, Duncan would stay behind and put in his regular three hours a day of guitar practice. He was a prodigy and in the holidays had lessons with John Williams.

  One summer, experimenting together at being fifteen, Duncan and I met a couple of girls whose pursuit kept us occupied for the whole holiday. One of them — a tall, willowy blonde who could knock the breath out of you with one glance and a swish of her waist-length hair — really was called Eve. Her friend was, by contrast, dowdy-looking, with a lank brown fringe that she continually checked for split ends. I can’t remember what she was called, though I do recall a rather sweet smile on the rare moments I looked her way. But my attention was entirely taken up with scrambling over Duncan to get the seat beside Eve, or edging him off the dancefloor, or racking my brains for some witty remark that would prompt Eve’s gaze in my direction.

  We carried on thus for several gruelling weeks, with sometimes Duncan and sometimes myself gaining a fleeting ascendancy, and Eve playing it for all it was worth. And then one day Duncan brought along his guitar to an evening at Eve’s house, when her parents had gone up to London. As he played a series of pieces cunningly selected to win the heart of a fifteen-year-old girl, he stared deep into Eve’s eyes, and I knew that I had lost.

  Eve’s friend knew it was time for both of us to go. In a humane gesture that might well have saved my life, she guided me towards the bus stop, chatting away as the sound of Duncan’s guitar faded, and when her bus came she made me look her in the eye and promise that I’d cycle straight home. I pedalled slowly through the streets of Haywards Heath, past the bowling alley and along by the Rose and Crown, sobbing into the night drizzle, blankly following the path home, hoping for death. It feels pretty bad when you’re fifteen.

  Back at school, miraculously still alive, I set about combating a future of celibacy. I bought an old guitar from Duncan, with the promise of a few lessons thrown in. I fingered it with awe —the most potent weapon of seduction I could imagine — and set about trying to tune it. It was then that I realised I was tone deaf. Music teachers will tell you there is no such thing as
‘tone deaf’ but there is, and I was it. Not only was I unable to tune the wretched guitar, but I couldn’t tell when it was way out of tune. I would blithely stumble through ‘House of the Rising Sun’ with no idea why corridors were clearing and study doors slamming.

  But I stuck with it. Once a week Duncan would tune the guitar for me and I would practice till my fingers cried. My progress was barely perceptible; I would achieve in three months’ relentless practice what most players would do in a week. However, by the end of term I had achieved mastery over the chords of E minor and A major and the changes between them. That’s not much. There was an ocean of music out there for me to navigate, and I had barely got the boat out of the harbour. Still, I figured that there was a certain seductive pathos to those two chords, and intelligently deployed, who could say what I might not achieve?

  The next summer I went on a school trip to Austria to try and learn German. Among our group was a boy called Skinner, an arrogant, spiteful bit of work, who was rich, good looking and could (as we all tried to at the time) sing and strum Beatles songs rather brilliantly. On a long train-ride to Salzburg, Skinner delighted an entire girl’s school contingent with his performance, only to dampen the effect by rolling his eyes and sneering pointedly whenever anyone had the temerity to join in.

  Sensing I had nothing to lose I waited until I identified from the position of his fingers an A or an E minor, and then plucked and strummed along, making my tentative display seem more like musical shyness than incompetence. Oddly enough it had the desired effect. Margie, the glittering prize from the girl’s school contingent, egged me on to ever greater two-chord triumphs, before deciding that proficiency with the plectrum was not the whole story. For the next three years, until she left me for a louche and handsome poet, Margie eclipsed my world.

  At my boarding school, Charterhouse, it was obligatory to be a member of the Corps — the boys’ army unit — and this involved two afternoons a week, and even the occasional weekend, of the most unmitigated silliness: square-bashing, polishing kit and learning things that were not of the least interest to anyone other than a homicidal half-wit. There were a few ploys, though, by which you could improve your lot. The best was to join the ‘Band and Drums’, for which you either had to play some sort of brass instrument (and polish it) or bang a drum — an occupation for which my musical talent fitted me well.