30 A Bombshell and a Puzzle
“It’s not easy to explain,” he said at last.
“Try, I’m listening.”
Still he said nothing, and my eyes searched his face for clues.
“Joe, talk to me. Is it money?”
He shook his head. “No. Well, maybe partly.”
“Are you tired of living in Spain?”
“Oh no, it’s not that!”
“Well, then what is it? Are you sick? Joe, you have to tell me.”
Joe looked down at my hand in his and traced a pattern on my palm with the tip of his finger. I held my breath.
“It’s a kind of mixture of things,” he said eventually. “I suppose mostly, it’s the children.”
“Children? What children? Our children? The Ufartes?”
“No, no. Not them. It’s children in general. And it’s to do with my birthday.”
Now I was really confused. “Joe, explain. I don’t understand.”
So Joe started explaining in detail, and slowly I began to understand.
“I’ve just had my 59th birthday, and now I’m racing toward my 60th. I love it here in El Hoyo, but I feel useless. It’s okay for you because you’re quite happy writing, but I want to do something constructive, too.” He paused and sighed again.
“Well, why don’t you start writing the book you always said you’d write?”
“No, that’s not enough. I want to go back to teaching, being with kids in the classroom one last time. Being useful.”
“But you haven’t taught in a school since 1989!”
“I know. I just feel now is my last chance. I’ll never get a teaching job when I’m sixty years old. But it’s not just that, it’s also because of money. My pension is just not stretching as far as it used to. We get a third less income every month since the Credit Crisis and the disastrous foreign exchange rates. We need more of an income to cope with the bills.”
“But where would you teach?” An icy hand had clutched my heart and a thousand questions crowded into my mind.
“I don’t know. Not England. Maybe China, or the Middle East? Somewhere where they pay well. You could stay here and write.”
“What? On my own?”
“Well, you don’t want to go back to teaching, do you?”
“No, but I don’t want to stay here alone.”
My hands were shaking. No! This couldn’t be happening. Joe leaving? Not now when life was so good.
“Well, you managed very well when we first came out here to Spain, remember? You were here for months on your own before I could come out. And the house was a mess then, no bathroom or kitchen, remember?”
“Yes, but...”
“I doubt I would get a teaching job anyway, at my age. It was just a thought...”
We talked through the night, not noticing that most of the guests had already left and the band had packed up. When we got home, we talked again. I slept fitfully.
In the morning, I felt lightheaded and agitated, but I had to set aside the hideous thoughts that plagued me because there were important jobs to do. We had an appointment with Sandra at the vet’s for all three kittens, plus MumCat. The kittens were successfully weaned and it was time for MumCat to be sterilised, ensuring she would bring no more unwanted kittens into the world. The kittens needed vaccinations and the vet would issue pet passports so that the girls could travel to their new homes in Germany. We wanted Chox to have a pet passport, too, in case he ever travelled with us.
I felt like a zombie going through the motions. Catch the kittens, put them in their crate. Catch MumCat, put her in her crate. Check they all had water. Lock the house and leave. Drive to the vet. It was like being on autopilot; my body worked but my mind was detached and churning.
As usual, Sandra had brought an assortment of other cats and kittens that needed attention, including a massive orange tomcat that bulged out of the crate he was being carried in. His name was Big Boy and he was being tested for diseases before they attempted to re-home him. Then it was our turn.
“Ah, I remember you,” said the vet to Chox. “You are Feet of Chocolate, no?”
Fortunately, this time, none of our kittens misbehaved and we left MumCat in the surgery to be operated on. One of Sandra’s cats was also being sterilised, so Sandra, Joe and I went to kill time in a nearby cafe. Sandra told us tales of all the latest cats she had rescued and the antics of her own.
Sandra and her husband lived in an apartment with a balcony, and one of their cats kept getting them into trouble. The people in the next apartment had plastic flowers and plastic trailing ivy on their balcony, and Sandra’s cat would systematically destroy the arrangements, much to their neighbour’s annoyance and Sandra’s embarrassment.
I listened, but wasn’t really paying attention. I kept stealing glances at Joe. Was he serious, or was this just a passing whim? Would he really leave me and Chox and our house and chickens to go and teach in some strange country? How would he manage on his own? How would I manage? An hour later, we returned to the vet who handed over a semi-conscious MumCat.
Back at home, I couldn’t settle. I tried to write but the kittens were being particularly naughty, as though they sensed some future upheaval in their lives. Chox decided he wanted to type, causing pages of Greek to appear on the monitor. Smut and Beauty squeezed behind my desk and began pulling on the cables, resulting in the computer and router sliding backwards away from me.
“Enough!” I said to the little monsters and banished them outside.
MumCat was still sleeping off her operation. She had a row of fearsome looking stitches in the centre of a bald patch down her side, where she’d been shaved. We had to keep her in solitary confinement, so shut her in the bathroom upstairs to give her time to recover. We’d been told to keep the kittens away from her for a few days.
When I’m anxious or preoccupied, I pace. I must have tramped several miles, pacing up and down the kitchen, trying to come to terms with Joe’s bombshell. Joe was in the garden, pretending to read a book. He’d been out there for over an hour, and I hadn’t yet seen him turn a single page.
To clear my head, I started writing one of my famous lists.
For
Probably Joe’s last chance to work
Satisfy Joe’s wish to feel useful and work with kids
Earn some money
Against
Don’t want to live on my own
Will miss him desperately
I chewed the end of my pencil. Lists normally come naturally to me, but this one was not flowing. I looked out over the mountains and imagined not being able call Joe to grab the binoculars to watch mountain goats, or an eagle in the sky. I silently cursed him. Why did you have to turn our lives upside down when we’re so happy and comfortable here? I knew I could just put my foot down, say no, refuse to go along with it, but the damage had been done. Joe had poured his heart out to me, and I had to make the right decision. Let him go, or what? Selfish, selfish, selfish, a voice kept repeating in my head. Joe had come to Spain to please me. Wasn’t it time I did something to please him?
I marched outside. “Joe?”
“Uh huh?”
“I think you should go and search on the Internet. See if you can find any teaching jobs abroad.”
Slowly, Joe closed his book and locked me in a steady gaze.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Perhaps you can find a job somewhere warm. A temporary contract just for six months or so, I think I could manage that long without you if I had to. I’ll just get on with writing the Chickens sequel. I’ll be okay. It isn’t forever.”
“Right!”
Secretly, I doubted there were any jobs to be found. In fact I was banking on that.
The kittens were growing fast and were the picture of health. My Facebook and Twitter friends looked at photos I’d posted up and told me that Smut and Beauty looked like Snowshoe cats, a term I hadn’t heard before. Their fur was longer than Chox’s and silkier, and their colouring was unusual. They were mostly white, but had beige streaks, brown ears and tails and beautiful powder-blue eyes.
Choccy-Paws, once the runt of the litter, had made up for lost time and was now just as big as his sisters. He had the same huge blue eyes, but his markings were all Siamese. He was by far the calmest of the three and the most affectionate. Wherever I went, Chox came too, even just to sit under the grapevine, or to hang clothes on the washing line.
All three were becoming very independent, and the fact that MumCat was locked in the upstairs bathroom, recovering from her operation, didn’t seem to bother them at all.
Smut was the only kitten who had learned to climb over the bucket I’d fixed to the grapevine trunk, and she was now able to leave the garden at will. Beauty and Chox would sit side by side, staring up into the canopy, watching her, but they hadn’t yet succeeded in negotiating the bucket obstacle.
I was forever worried that a villager might catch Smut and carry her away, but there was nothing I could do to prevent it. My niece Becky had given all three kittens sparkly collars that I hoped would indicate that our kittens were owned, if found. But being so small, Smut slipped out of her new collar immediately, and short of confining her to the house, I’d run out of ideas to stop her escaping the garden.
In August, our grapevine was a thick thatch of bright green, so dense that the sun could not penetrate it. When in full leaf, it provided shade and privacy, and even The Boys standing on their roof terrace looking down into our garden couldn’t see us. Thanks to Uncle Felix and his pruning expertise, and Joe with his sulphur, massive bunches of grapes hung down, heavy and delicious. Each bunch was the size of a rugby ball, packed with more purple, delicious grapes than we could ever eat.
Our grapevine provided a leafy roof that stretched from the kitchen door to the barbecue area. We set out a long table and chairs beneath, allowing us to sit outside even on the hottest of days.
We wove lengths of fairy lights through the grapevine and on a hot summer night, the tiny lights twinkled through the leaves and reflected off the purple grapes. For me, it was the perfect place to enjoy a meal, better than any restaurant in the world, particularly if Joe had barbecued and I didn’t need to cook.
The kittens enjoyed barbecues as much as we did. When Joe opened the cupboard under the barbecue where the kittens were raised, and pulled out the sack of coals, the kittens appeared from nowhere. As he poured out the coals, they would sit and watch, ears pricked, eyes huge. They knew that before long, some delicious fishy or meaty morsels would be coming their way.
But now, we didn’t have a barbecue planned. All three kittens were safely asleep on one of the living room chairs. Joe was busy working on his résumé. He hadn’t needed to provide a C.V. for many, many years, so it was taking quite a long time to put one together. I didn’t mind; any delay was welcome.
I went outside and looked up at the grapes. Most had already blushed from green to deep purple and I thought that they might now be ready to eat. Something caught my eye amongst the leaves. It wasn’t green or purple, this thing was black.
Puzzled, I climbed onto a chair, reached up and pulled it down. It was a wispy bit of nothing, a little piece of gossamer fabric. I held it up to examine it. It was a thong.
I inspected it further and marvelled. Had I ever worn anything quite so small and wispy when I was young? Embroidered in tiny fancy letters was the word Lunes, the Spanish word for ‘Monday’, but apart from that, there were no clues.
How had it got there? Whose undergarment was it? I hooked it over one finger and carried it in to Joe, who was poring over his computer. He looked up.
“What’s that?” he asked, swivelling his chair round and leaning forward to look. “It’s a thong, isn’t it? Very nice! Go and put it on, I can finish this C.V. later...”
“Don’t be ridiculous! It’s not mine!”
“Well, whose is it then?”
“I don’t know! I found it in the branches of the grapevine.”
“What? How did it get there?”
“I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Do you think the wind blew it there?”
“That’s possible, I suppose. I don’t know how else it could have got there.”
Joe stood up. “Show me where you found it,” he said.
I led him outside and pointed. He squinted up into the branches.
“What’s that?” he said. “Good gracious! I think it’s another one!”