by Eddie Rock
Today’s the day of Lindsey’s wedding, and I know I’m missing out on a fantastic party. I wish I was back there now helping her celebrate the big day while eyeing up the talent at the reception, plus funky dancing in the disco later on and getting ripped, royally pissed, with all my good friends in a luxury stately home environment. But here I am in a dingy hotel bar all alone reading about Andy McNab in Iraq.
Could be worse I suppose?
Early next morning the rain is coming down at all angles as I march through the storm toward the bus station. I feel like SAS trooper Eddie McNab on a mission, my pack heavy with thousands of rounds of ammunition, hand grenades, and ration packs with an M16 rifle and grenade launcher ready to defeat Saddam. Mind you, on the news it said that Saddam had gone AWOL, missing in action. MIA.
I bet he’ll show up in England at some point claiming asylum and hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in handouts plus a four-bed semi in North London like that other one-eyed scrounging, hate-filled, hook-handed twat off the telly.
As I trip over a paving slab, I’m brought back to reality when the heavy pack jolts my spine. The tight, torturous straps cut deeply into unaccustomed tender flesh as a cold, wet wind blows through collar and cuff and my ribs are absolutely killing me.
McNab says always follow the rules of the seven Ps:
Proper, Preparation, and Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.
It feels like I’ve followed the last three! I honestly thought Spain would be boiling hot like on the holiday television programs, but I’m getting soaked to the bone in a force-ten gale, and I curse myself yet again as a wintry gust blows me into the bus station.
The pungent aromas of nicotine, piss, and diesel fill the damp air.
I notice a group of dodgy-looking winos gathered in a corner out of the cold, drinking from an array of mysterious bottles and tins. Their needy-pleady eyes meet mine as I pass by, reminding me to check my pockets for my passport and wallet.
Now all I need is a bus ticket and a platform number and I’m all set, so I prepare by learning a few useful words on my Franklin W7 Euro translator.
Eng: Ticket.
Esp: Billete.
I reckon before long I’ll have this language mastered. It seems you just add an “el” in front of a word or a vowel at the end of another word and you’re almost there! A lot of the words are the same as English, so I’ll have it sussed in no time! Armed with guidebook, phrase book, and Franklin, I approach the ticket booth ready for action.
“Hola. Buenos días, señor. Uno billete para Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, por favor. Muchos gracias,” I say politely.
For a brief moment I thought I’d solved the mystery of missing Saddam, but on closer inspection I can’t ever remember him being four foot tall. Nevertheless, little Saddam scratches his head and goes into spasm, bouncing around on his stool like an excited child while barking and panting like a small dog. All of a sudden he starts pointing outside at the rain, and, to make it worse, I find myself mimicking his actions as people behind me in the queue start sighing and barking too.
Little Saddam stops to breath for a split second, then resumes his high-pitched yakking and yapping while yet again pointing outside at the rain as if it somehow holds the key to my salvation. I can’t take any more.
Back out in the downpour I search for clues like Scooby-Doo. I even try asking some of the Spanish travelers, but they all shrug and bark at me too. In my guidebook, it says that Roncesvalles is pronounced Rons Cheese Valleys, so that’s settled, it should be easy?
Then one particular sentence gives me a fantastic idea.
“Spanish teenagers are amongst the best educated in Europe and most of them speak good English.”
“That’s it! That’s all I need to know!” So I scan the bus station for likely candidates. Unfortunately there are not many to choose from, but here goes. . . . She might look like a cross between opera singer Pavarotti and a small yeti, but she is nonetheless a Spanish teenager and hopefully well educated.
“Hola, Rons Cheese Valleys, por favour, señorita,” I say, smiling with my eyebrows raised in gleeful expectation. The girl begins to giggle demonically and in slow motion her head does a full 360 degree turn, thankfully followed by her body.
“Mmm,” she giggles again as foam and dribble appear at the corners of her mouth, her face bearing an uncanny resemblance to a heavy-metal-loving pirate I once knew. She takes the guidebook and studies it intently for well over a minute. I can almost hear the gears in motion inside her brain. Her mouth opens. . . .
Here comes the answer, here comes the answer. Anytime now . . .
“Cheeeeee,” she lisps through her clenched metal teeth, covering my page with spit and foam.
“Cheeeeee.” She giggles again, fluttering her eyelids and juggling her mono brow, then finishing her performance with a ballet twirl and a blank stare.
I’m still none the wiser, but now she’s holding the book and doesn’t seem to want to let go. I pull, she pulls, we both pull. But as I try wrestling it from her, she digs her fingers in even harder. She’s surprisingly strong.
Luckily, a stern-looking gentleman hurries over to us, balling and barking as the girl loosens her grip and starts to cry.
As he drags her off across the station floor, she keeps looking back at me like it’s somehow all my fault. She’s then thrown in with a group of even odder-looking children, all looking back at me strangely.
One of them has a special helmet, while another ticks violently, shouting at an unseen force. I watch as they all scuttle off holding hands, all still staring at me, followed up by a matronly lady wearing an apron.
I can’t believe it.
My next attempt at ticket purchase descends quickly into a strange game of charades against an old lady with one tooth. This time I find myself pretending to drive a bus and saying Ron Cheese Valleys a lot. As I go through the gears she barks and grunts while I struggle to suppress the urge to fling my guidebook across the concourse like a Frisbee and shout “fucking hell” at the top of my voice as Basque Jeremy Beadle appears dressed as a bus conductor and the whole place erupts into laughter.
The rain is somehow the clue. I cool off outside again but still find nothing. So in my notepad I draw a stickman with rucksack, a large bus, and a mountain and have written the name “RONCESVALLES” in great big letters. Now even a child would understand it, not that I’m going to ask one mind you, although . . . let’s not rule that one out just yet!
Third time lucky, I approach cautiously. This time the booth is manned or should I say womaned by a ferocious-looking person with jet-black hair and bloodred lips, with her eyebrows missing from the normal place but now drawn on with thick black marker pen farther up her forehead, giving her both a look of surprise and outrage. The last time I saw a face this scary it was tattooed on the back of a Japanese yakuza gangster I made friends with while staying in one of Her Majesty’s detention houses in Perth, Australia, 1994.
The water demon growls as I approach. I fearfully show her my guidebook and hand her the drawing.
“Hoy,” she barks!
“Hoy,” I bark back, not knowing what the hell she’s on about.
She holds up two fingers, a V for victory maybe? Finally things are looking up as she stamps one of the tickets and slides it under the counter, still barking while I bow out backward like a royal subject. “Yes, I did it!”
So, with the ticket firmly in my grasp, it’s now time to get to my next challenge—to find “the platform.”
After half an hour of more charades, pointing, barking, clapping and almost having a fist fight with a drunken tramp, a small nun kindly tells me that the only bus goes from platform six at six o’clock. Now it’s eleven thirty in the morning—well, at least I haven’t missed it.
I’m in two minds whether or not to go back into town and hit the theme bars for a few hours, but I take one look at the downpour and I’m straight back in the station bar with McNab, coffee con leche, and
cigarettes, keeping a keen eye on platform six for any kind of action, hoping to spot my first pilgrim.
* * * *
At close to 5:00 p.m., platform six comes to life with the arrival of a gang of rowdy Gore-Tex-clad gray-haired pensioners, then a ZZ Top look-alike with a fat druid covered in seashells. Next on the scene is a small cowboy wearing a poncho and Wellingtons, followed by a fat red-faced German man in a safari outfit. Then a medieval wizard arrives in a thick brown cloak. But where are the pilgrims in the stovepipe hats and buckledy shoes?
Maybe I’ve got it all wrong as usual? The whole scene looks like some kind of bizarre Hieronymus Bosch nightmare on LSD.
Anxiety hits me again. The nun must be wrong. I’m at the wrong platform! Where are all the hippie girls and the cool dudes with guitars? Where are all the Suzies, Siobhans, Sarahs, and Maries?
In a panic I enquire at the front of the queue just to finally make sure I’m in the right place.
“¿Roncesvalles, por favor?” I ask the hatchet-faced crone.
She turns to me with cold dark eyes, devoid of emotion, and then brays at me like a mule while pointing harshly to the back of the queue.
“I should definitely have gone to Ibiza.” I sigh to myself as I drag my heavy pack through the diesel and cigarette butts, wishing I was on a beach now with a cold beer, watching the girls go by instead of this utter madness.
I watch with grim expectation as a jolly young man approaches and politely asks the same crone with a great big smile, “¿Roncesvalles?”
The drunks in the corner look up from their booze as another mule-like bray echoes around the station. Now the not-so-jolly young man has a big frown on his face, probably thinking the same thing as me.
At the back of the queue he wipes the rain from his glasses and we exchange looks of bewilderment, eyeing each other suspiciously.
“Excuse me, are you going to Roncesvalles by any chance?” he asks in a clipped Oxbridge accent, but our introductions are cut short as the bus pulls up and all hell breaks loose!
All of a sudden the excited fat German and ZZ Top begin to squabble like children, and in the fracas ZZ stamps hard on the foot of an old Dutch lady, who kicks him in the shins, tugs his beard, and shoves him back into the fat German, who throws a wobbler, almost blinding two small ladies with the dangerous trekking poles on his pack!
Brazilian voices start up like chainsaws as the druid and the cowboy seize the moment and charge for the door like a pair of human wind chimes—closely followed by fat safari suit, ZZ Top, and the Dutch lady, all with packs on and all trying to squeeze onto the bus at the same time.
“Manners maketh man!” I shout down the queue.
“Quite frightening, aren’t they?” says the posh fellow.
“I’ve seen better behaved football hooligans, Cigarette?” I ask him.
“No thanks,” he says, sighing. “I only smoke Silk Cut. . . . Rob,” he adds, extending a cold, wet flannel of a hand.
“Eddie. Nice to meet you,” I say. “Bloody foreigners! Eh.”
We’re last on board and there are still plenty of places to sit. I don’t know what all the fuss was about!
The bus pulls out into the pouring rain, and I wipe the condensation from the window to stare out onto the pleasant green land.
“I thought the rain in Spain fell mainly on the plain,” I say gloomily to my new friend.
“Looks more like wet Wales to me,” says Rob cheerily.
I look across at him and he looks strangely familiar, reminding me a lot of Jarvis Cocker from the Sheffield-based indie band Pulp or Charles Hawtrey from the Carry On films crossed with a poorly equipped member of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series.
Whatever the weather, he certainly looks a proper bobby dazzler in his national health glasses, with the obligatory piece of sticking plaster holding them together. A 1950s backpack by his side, with an old-fashioned watch on his wrist, and thick woolly socks and Jesus sandals on his feet! I wonder for a moment if he’s just been left all this shit in a will. On his paper-thin cagoule, an array of badges and pins catches my eye. One of them is the famous Blue Peter badge, but it’s upside down—no doubt some anarchistic studenty thing. I make a mental note never to ask him about it, as I’m sure the reply will be a long, drawn-out tale of double-sided sticky tape and used toilet rolls, all without parental permission.
Cocker, as I now decide to call him, tells me his plans.
Firstly, he’s going to walk the Camino for ten days. Then he’ll take a bus to Madrid to meet his parents for a small break, after which he hopes to rejoin the Camino farther down the road, and time permitting, will be in Santiago de Compostela before the month’s out.
“That’s the plan anyway,” he says with a shrug and a shake.
I shiver too, feeling a dramatic change in temperature as the bus climbs higher into the cloudy mountains. As the light quickly fades, we eventually pull up in the darkness.
“Well, this must be it,” I say, rubbing my hands excitedly together, but just what I’m excited about I’m not quite sure. It certainly isn’t the company or the weather, that’s a fact!
I double-check with the driver that we are, in fact, in Roncesvalles and not Ron-says-bollocks, and we step off the bus into the eye of the hurricane.
As the bus pulls away, ZZ Top, the wizard, fat safari, and the entire rabble suddenly vanish off the face of the earth as we stand in the pouring rain getting wetter by the second. First we run toward a streetlight and an old stone building with the word “Hotel” on the side.
I squint across the expanse of potholed tarmac, seeing in the distance the illuminated sign “Bar,” so all’s not lost. I hand my guidebook to Cocker and light a cigarette. He may as well be of some use.
The monastery stands before us, silhouetted against an angry black sky looking more like something of a horror film and not the Spain I had imagined at all. We’re still getting wetter and wetter, and any ideas of catching a bus or taxi from here to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port have been blown straight out of the water.
I’m tempted just to head straight to the bar, but the bad weather has us running for cover into a large stone barn, where most of the people from the bus queue, including fat safari, ZZ Top, and the wizard have joined other Bosch-faced erberts to form a new, unruly gathering around the only exit and entry point to the building. I can’t believe it.
So we turn on our heels and run back out, into the rain across no-man’s-land to Dracula’s castle as a flash of lightning illuminates the night sky and a crack of thunder rattles my bones and brain.
“Some weather we’re having,” I say to a wretched soul.
“Huh, rain,” he laughs, looking at the sky as his squinting face gets a flurry of hailstone.
As we run through the tempest, my ribs are totally killing me and Cocker plays leapfrog with the deep puddles in a futile attempt to keep his feet dry. In the porch he wipes his glasses, reminding me a bit of Velma from Scooby-Doo when she loses her glasses, “Maybe there’s a better place to sleep here in the monastery?” I ask.
“It doesn’t say anything about it here,” he says, staring into the book.
We follow the herd into a large room, and the odor of sanctity hits us as opposed to the odor of insanity back at the barn.
Thankfully, it looks like we’ve come to the right place. On the big oak table before us are the fabled Pilgrim’s Passports, the credentials that will enable us to enter all the hostels or pilgrim shelters along the way. At the end of the table sits a stern-looking priest with half-moon glasses perched on a long nose with immaculate Brylcreem hair.
He checks, stamps, and views all passports with an unnerving glare. His presence alone has put the anchors on any ill behavior from the pepper-pot hooligan posse.
I fill in my name, address, passport number, and next of kin.
“Next of kin?” I say. “It’s not exactly base camp Himalayas, is it?”
On foot, on horse, on bicycle? is the next question.
“On foot,” I write. That was easy.
Reason for pilgrimage?
Now this is a tricky one, considering my misfortune of late: Get fit, walking holiday perhaps? I fought the law and I lost?
“Hey, what are you putting for that one?” I nudge Cocker.
“Mmm, I don’t know,” he says, spying on the next person.
“Spiritual,” he secretly whispers before handing his new passport to the wise old priest. The priest looks puzzled, then looks back at Cocker, then at his passport, and then down at his sandals.
“A pie?” says the puzzled priest.
“A pie,” says an equally puzzled Cocker.
The priest shrugs and stamps his passport, wishing him well, his transformation from pillock to pilgrim now finally complete, and now it’s my turn.
“Mmm.” He looks me up and down and then at my new credentials.
“Irlanda, Catholic, hmmm?”
“Yes.” I nod with a cherubic smile as he looks straight into my soul.
The priest looks puzzled yet again.
“What means this? Reason for pilgrimage . . . for the . . . how do you say this . . . craic? What is craic?” He frowns with piercing eyes.
Suddenly I feel myself shrinking like Alice in Wonderland and wish I’d have just wrote spiritual like everyone else.
Think, man!
“It’s Irish for God,” I squeak from the floor.
“Ah, spiritual,” he says, happily stamping my new passport and ticking the box.
“Buen camino,” he says, handing it back.
“And a buen camino to you too, Father,” I say, feeling immediately idiotic, as it’s highly unlikely that the Holy Father will be donning his Berghaus in the morning.
Cocker and guidebook have now established that the only place to sleep around here is in “that barn,” which is free, or in the hotel for thirty euros, thus translating from pocket to brain that there is thirty euros’ worth of drinking tokens available for tonight.