THEO, SNORING LIKE A WOUNDED BUFFALO, has dislodged a couple of tiles from the roof of the nunnery, also dislodging a few more of my brain cells in the process. We leave Santo Domingo behind and continue down the strange road to Saint James. Our conversation this morning is one of Camino walking songs.
“Walk like an Egyptian!” shouts Cocker rather appropriately.
“Walking back to happiness—who ha oh yeah,” I sing.
“This ain’t no technological breakdown oh no, this is the road to hell.”
“Chris Rea. I know that one,” says Cocker.
“I’m on a highway to hell. AC/DC!” I love that song.
“Come on, Belen, sing us a song,” we plead.
She acts all shy and coy and her pretty face goes crimson.
“Yeah, come on, sing us a song,” Cocker pleads.
“Please, Belen.”
She starts a little cautiously but then breaks into the most beautiful Spanish ballad I’ve ever heard and we clap our hands, delighted. It was worth all this pain just to hear her sing. Unfortunately, the game starts to take a turn for the worse with Cocker’s version of “Walk This Way” by Aerosmith when farm dogs in a nearby yard begin to howl like wolves, thus signaling the end of our morning’s entertainment.
Yet again our pace gets slower and slower, with Cocker staring at his antique watch, tying his laces every two minutes, and our jolly conversations having ceased. I get the message, though—two’s company, three’s a crowd!
I bid them a good day and hightail it down the hillside, coming to rest beside a deserted farmhouse. I roll down my knee support bandage and apply some deep heat relief cream to my ailing knee before rejoining the road.
I’m alone again, with no one in sight, and I’m busting for a leak.
A minute later I’m happy again, but alas only briefly, as a strange burning sensation in my shorts begins to gain momentum. At first I give it a rub and hope it goes away, but instead it gets worse and worse and worse. My penis feels like it’s on fire, so I throw off my pack and whip down my shorts to investigate the unpleasant sensations. Now, in addition to administering deep heat relief cream to my injured knee, I have also managed to administer a smear of the phosphorus-like fire lotion directly on to my own bellend.
It burns like napalm, and no amount of water will wash it off. So I take my towel from my pack and rub the wet corner on the affected area while doing a war dance. With my shorts around my ankles, I’m rubbing frantically just as two gargoyle-faced crones come past.
“Hola, buen . . .” They stop midsentence with their mouths wide open. Caught red-handed! Or red-helmeted, as the case may be.
As more people come up behind me, I pull up my shorts and press on in agony, bringing back a painful childhood memory. My friend James Lewis told me that if you put aftershave on your willy it would make it bigger, and being twelve years old, I believed him.
I remember the pain and the smell of Hai Karate aftershave as I relive the moment on this Spanish hillside.
To take my mind off the pain, my repetitive song syndrome kicks in, and today’s song is the ever-popular Trevor and Simon classic:
“Old woman, old woman, are you fond of dancing?”
“Yes sir, yes sir, I am fond of dancing!”
Over and over again the lines of that loopy song play like a broken record, and as the pain subsides in my shorts, I begin a series of violent sadistic fantasies about what I would do to someone I caught stealing my motorcycle. I arrive at the hostel in Belorado in a bad mood with a scuffed helmet.
Today some bright spark has formulated an anti-stampede queuing system, and I’m told that I’m twenty-second in line by a highly obnoxious pilgrim. So I either stand in the queue and wait or I can leave my pack with a yellow Post-it note with number twenty-two stuck on it. “Fuck that!”
So I light a cigarette in the shade and drift into a murderous fantasy.
* * * *
An army truck pulls slowly into the square, reverses, and kills the engine. The pilgrims look across, getting excited while pushing, shoving, and cursing each other in the frenzy.
“Ya, at last, ze ostel owner comes to let us in and I am first!” shouts Dagmar, elbowing Christophe hard in the ribs.
“Last one inside is a nincompoop!” laughs Pierre.
“Women and children first!” shouts the round Irish lady.
“Fuck the women and children!” shouts the rude Frenchman.
“Have we got time for that?” says the fat Belgian, gleaming.
Two evil-looking soldiers climb out of the truck and walk casually around to the back. One of them smirks as the other flicks the butt of his cigarette and spits in the direction of the pilgrims as they drop the tailgate and throw back the heavy flaps.
Suddenly the pilgrims break rank, and the Irish lady is trampled in the pandemonium.
Clunk! Click!
Five long bursts of automatic fire spit venomously from the back of the truck, scything down the unruly rabble. For a second the plaza falls silent as the two soldiers pull out their luger pistols and stroll across to finish off the dying and wounded.
As fantasy returns back to reality, Dagmar is screaming, clutching her pack, frantic and fearful.
“I am not pushing in your silly queue; I am only reading what it says on the noticeboard, you stupid woman,” says Swiss John, laughing in frustration. He sees me and walks across in amazement.
“I was only reading what it said on the noticeboard,” he whines.
Across from the main hostel is an open door to one of the dormitories, and we decide to have a quick look in the room.
“I’m not staying here,” says Swiss John, turning on his heel.
For the first time in my life, I see bunk beds three stories high, and I would put my life savings (if I had any!) on the fact that I would be allocated a top bunk, with bunkmates the fat Belgian and Dagmar.
“Let’s get out of here!”
We hit the road expecting another few hours of painful walking, but just a block away we arrive at a quiet hostel with hardly a soul in sight. It’s too good to be true. Our host is a very jovial chap called Javier, who proudly shows us around the spotless kitchen, washroom, and laundry room. Inside, the spacious dormitory has brand-new, modestly spaced two-story bunk beds made from solid pine. I have a lovely hot shower, and I even manage a nice little siesta without the need for earplugs.
We can’t believe our luck. With all my clothes in the washing machine and Swiss John asleep, I venture back up the road. In a side street I even stumble across not one but two very dingy and dilapidated Irish theme bars, within spitting distance of each other and both . . . unfortunately closed. In the plaza I see Cocker wandering around like a pinball trying to read his Pablo Coolio and Belen wandering about with a cell phone stuck in her ear—probably the elderly boyfriend balancing on a barrel with a noose around his neck by the look on her face. Cocker sees me and strolls over. He’s wearing a great big plant-pot-shaped hat with a seashell sewn on the front.
“What the fuck do you look like?” I ask him.
He sits down beside me and takes it off.
“Belen bought it for me, to say goodbye,” he says sadly.
I’d totally forgotten he was leaving; tomorrow he’s taking a bus down to Madrid to meet the Fockers. I mean Cockers.
I notice he has a lot of scratches all over his chest, and he lifts his T-shirt and shows me his stomach. Some of them are quite severe.
“I fell down a riverbank when we were having a picnic,” he says.
“Rolling around with Belen more like,” I jest. “What’s wrong with her, anyway?” I ask him.
Cocker tells me that poor-old Belen is not actually on the phone to her elderly suicidal boyfriend as I suspected, but to her father back in Salamanca. Her brother who suffers from a learning disability had gone missing and has resurfaced in Magaluf. Belen has been given the task of bringing him home again safely, leaving me quietly disappointed, as I was secretly hoping to introduce one Bellend to the other at some point after Cocker’s departure.
We arrange to meet later, and he goes back to support Belen. I watch as they walk off, arm in arm into the madhouse of a hostel. I can safely say they are, without a doubt, the oddest-looking couple I have ever seen in my life, even beating the other oddest couple I ever saw: Rastafarian gentleman and burka-clad Muslim lady I once spotted in a very dodgy part of Rotterdam one evening.
In his haste to console Belen, he has left his silly book on the stone step wrapped tightly in a large elastic band, so I pick it up and take it with me until I see him later.
On the way back to our pristine and erbert-free hostel, I spend fifty euros on different rash creams and painkillers, including white cotton gloves and a fifteen-euro lilac headscarf to protect my sun blistered neck and ears. I may look like a total pillock, but as long as I’m not itching, I’m not bothered. I report back to Swiss John and find my washing neatly folded on the bed as I take my time to apply the correct creams to the correct areas and manage yet another refreshing siesta.
That evening we meet up in the restaurant, and being hungry is an understatement, so I’ve cleverly managed to seat myself in between Cocker and Manuel in case there is any mix-up with vegetarian requirements or weight-loss issues. We are joined by the insanely jovial Swiss John, Theo, and Whilamena. Jan and Sarah sit across at another table, as does the kinky Dutch teacher and his student lover.
The donkey guy wanders in, looking a bit dusty, followed by Dagmar, Delacroix, Christophe, the nice Irish lady, and the rude Frenchman.
This being Cocker’s last night for a while, I intend to give him a good-old sending off, as we’ve been through a lot in our short time together. So we start the evening with a couple of double brandies to celebrate, and everyone is having a really good time, but poor-old Cocker gets a bout of melancholia because he’s missing Belen.
“Don’t worry. I bet you’ll see her again.”
“I won’t,” he cries. “She’s got back with her boyfriend.”
“Oh, never mind, have some more wine,” I tell him.
“Plenty more fish in the sea!” says Swiss John, laughing.
Poor Cocker, he makes up for it by drinking more and more, until halfway through our main course he slurs to a halt and almost slides off the table onto the floor. As I help him up, he gets all stroppy and argumentative, followed by happy, then sad, as emotion and alcohol take over. He laughs again about doing the Camino on a “pie.” Then his eyes begin to close a little, and he announces that he wants to go back to the hostel.
“I need to fucking kip!” he slurs loudly.
Whilamena and Theo look puzzled at our inebriated friend. A kip in Dutch means chicken, opposed to English slang for a kip, which means sleep. I shrug and order a strong coffee for my friend in an attempt at sobering him up a bit, and he takes one of my cigarettes and balks.
“Bleurgh!” he yaks as the nicotine spins his drunken mind.
“Oh yeah, you only smoke those silk whatchamacallits?” I say.
“Cut!” he shouts angrily.
“What?” I feign deafness.
“Cut!” he shouts again, even angrier.
“Silk what again?” I ask, hammering another nail in his coffin.
“Silk fucking Cut!” He bangs his fist down on the table, knocking over an empty wine bottle and sending a spoon and napkin flying.
Unfortunately for Cocker, kut in Dutch means cunt, and the kinky underpants-wearing Dutch teacher stands and turns to Theo and says in English, “Kindly tell your friend to mind his filthy language!”
Then Theo and Whilamena have a heated discussion in Dutch with the disgruntled teacher about a chicken, a kut, and a ball-sack apparently! As 10:00 p.m. approaches, we leave the restaurant and bid a final farewell to our drunken friend. We hope to see him again as he hobbles out of sight, but never out of mind.
“Do you think . . . err, he and the girl, did they . . . ?” asks Swiss John, dismissing the notion with a shake of his head.
“No, I don’t reckon so!” I tell him.
“And what was the matter with the Dutch people tonight?”
“I have no idea.”