Thirty Two

I’m good at clearing cupboards. It’s one of my skills... - Suzie has a go at the cupboards upstairs in The Castle. She unearths some old photos and some old memories whose detail is filled out by Maureen. Suzie learns quite a lot about the past.

I’m good at clearing cupboards. It’s one of my skills, not that I’ve had many to do in my married life, because we’ve only moved the once, not counting the up and shift when we came here, of course. That was more of a chuck out, rather than clear out. Everything went. There were no decisions. And the only other time I’ve moved since I met Don was just half way across the village. It was easier to lift things from one house to the other than to throw them out, because there was less to argue about. But still, I’m good at clearing cupboards.

I suppose I did get in some practice before we came here. Sometimes it’s harder to throw things away than keep them. If it stays stuffed at the back of the wardrobe, then there’s no decision to make. You know it’s there. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. It might just come in useful one day. But if you even consider ditching it, you are forced to anticipate and imagine all the implausible ways you might want to use it. After that, the act of placing it in the dustbin is often impossible even to contemplate, let alone do. That’s why it’s probably better to put it back, but at least it has to be replaced in some kind of neatness, some order, that makes the place look like it’s that bit more under control. That’s my style of clearing.

And it’s always easier to clear Don’s things than my own. When we left Kiddington, so much of what we had kept was his, not mine. There didn’t seem to be much of me left to be honest. I had a field day. After all, we only had a mobile home to go into, so we couldn’t keep all those books and papers and files that Don had amassed during his interminable years of study. We had a good bonfire with all that paper and, though it might not have been on November the fifth, we did the proper thing, invited the neighbours, served parkin and roasted potatoes in the embers. But no-one stayed long, because people don’t know what’s in parkin these days and so won’t eat it and the idea of roasting a potato that didn’t come ready-roasted out of the freezer proved so novel that all we did was discuss it - we never got round to actually doing it. And if we had done it, the idea of eating something that had been near burning wood made most of the neighbours feel queezy.

But I was glad to see the back of all Don’s stuff. Out of sight... out of mind. At least that’s what I’d hoped. I should be so lucky. He’d spent half his waking hours for a generation doing those courses. He’d done art, politics, literature, transcendental manipulation, sociography, oligarchy, geospermatology, environment and hundreds of others. I’m surprised he didn’t finish up with a PhD in Fire Eating, or a Masters in Mistresses. At least that would have been useful. He could always have earned a living from a qualification like that. But when you’ve finished cosmology, you might be able to explain everything about the origins of the universe, but you still know nothing about the whereabouts of the tenner that was in my purse an hour ago, and your knowledge still doesn’t pay the gas bill!

And what’s so interesting about burning all the materials is that different subjects generate different kinds of flame. Art books, for instance, are full of colour printing and pictures. When you set them alight, they fizz and splutter, a bit like major critics when they discuss abstract expressionism. Philosophy, on the other hand, is pure, methodical and dry. The books are completely uniform and, when they burn, the pages seem to turn themselves one by one, as if to ensure they all get a fair chance to combust. The sociography books were more stratified. Some went fast, other lingered. All made a noise, none lasted very long. And when they’d all turned to ash, they arranged themselves into a pile to discuss the experience and how they related to oxidation. The politics books blew up, and then claimed they hadn’t. And as for the science, they refused to burn. It was the environment books that were the worst, though. Now you would have thought that they would be the ones that refused to accept consumption by fire. But all they did was sit around discussing their own fate while the rest just got on with it. And it was them, of course, that got my Don into all that trouble. So it’s good riddance to all that learning, I say. Watch out, ladies, if your man gets into lectuals. That’s what Don said he was pursuing, his inter lectuals, which presumably were ahead of the intro and before the advanced. Watch out, ladies! The cure might be worse than the disease.

But when it comes to clearing cupboards, you know, there is a real skill. It’s very similar to management and administration skills. Touch once, decide and act. TODA. Deal with todos TODA. Don’t dither over some sentimental trinket. Never say, “It’ll come in useful one day, and put it back onto the pile.” That’s how I used to behave, until I saw the light when I cleared out Donkey’s rubbish. Now I look at it and use it. If I can’t use it I chuck it. TODA really came into its own when we went through Don’s video collection. There was a whole set of them, and we were going to a place where he wouldn’t be able to use them any longer, so I chucked them. But I had Don picking this one up and picking that one up, and saying things like, “Suzie, you can’t throw away my video of Larry Grayson doing the last editions of the Generation Game in 1981. It has sentimental significance. What a gay day! Shut that door! It was so original... You never know when you might want to watch it again...” Well we did spare a couple, for old times sake, but the rest we ditched. Harry Secombe, Paul Daniels, Dick Emery, The Two Ronnies, Bruce Forsyth, Norman Wisdom, Frankie Vaughan, Norman Vaughan, Jimmy Tarbuck, they all went the same way, with no allowance for quality.

But just like in the office, touch it once, do it and act. Either ditch the thing or file it pending future action, and only if that action is decided, recorded and scheduled, so that when it’s completed the item can then be ditched. And that’s precisely how I’ve managed to turn The Castle around. When I came in the place was on its knees. Now it’s bouncing up and down with so much life you’d think it had been reborn.

Goodness knows the place was in a mess when I took over. Exactly what Mick had been doing with his time only he knows. What he had not been doing, and that is absolutely clear, was putting it into The Castle. There were no records, no accounts, no stock books, no inventories, nothing in fact that might have constituted a useful piece of information about the place. Whatever Mick had been up to, it was at best ineffective and probably incompetent, utterly useless, as much good as a pork sausage at a circumcision.

I’ve had to set up new systems for everything from scratch. I’ve had to get all the staff on proper, legal contracts that the law actually demands. Don has already had his brush with the law, and, as I said to Mick, though he didn’t want to accept it, once you’ve had your fingers burnt, you don’t want to spend your life picking up hot coals. It was all under the counter with Mick, an area of geography where he had vast experience. It’s taken me months to get things straight, and now things are very much on an even keel, the first time they’ve ever been like that, if the experience of the staff is anything to go by. And now the bulk of the hard work is done, we can get on with running the business as a going concern, where we know what we are doing, when we are doing it and how long it will take. We are all singing from the same song sheet. It also means that from now on I will be able to spend more time doing my book on business reconstruction, which has been on a back burner for a while. There are still some things to be ironed out in The Castle, of course. There always are in a business, because businesses are always revolving. Even when you think it’s perfect, there’s always something you can do better.

I’ve come across some very good advice on the internet and some absolute rubbish. I read a piece the other day. Basically it said that there are four rules to business success. Rule one was be creative. Rule two was be creative. Rule three was that there was no rule three, and rule four was the same as rule two. I creatively binned it, despite the fact that the writer may or may not have been wholly serious. Whoever it was who said that inspiration was ninety percent perspiration should get a meddle. It’s a brilliant observation.

There was a term, you know, used by people who ran small businesses. It was especially favoured by market traders, some of whom were very good friends of my parents. These people had to cart their gear from town to town, leave home at four in the morning, set up in the dark most of the year, work all day, dismantle by five, by which time it was dark again, pack the van, drive home and then restock for the next day before dinner. That’s why they called it grafting, grafting for a living, and the traders were grafters. Now there was nothing white water about their grafting. There was no pleasure, just hard work. It would help some of the young of today if they remembered that word and learned to graft for a living.

Take our Dulcie, for example. She throws dirty clothes in the general direction of the washer, ready meals towards the freezer and then the microwave, and pots at the dishwasher. Then she complains when they come out broken. I couldn’t imagine her with her sleeves rolled up, bashing and stretching clothes across a washboard propped up in a boiler tub, or attacking the yellow bits on the front step with a scouring stone. She’d look at the job and ask, “Where’s the switch?” I doubt she’s raised a sweat since the last time she ran for a bus and she’s had a car since she was nineteen. Around her, it’s the fellahs who do the sweating. She certainly keeps them hard at work.

And clearing out cupboards is hard work. It’s grafting of a kind. The stuff isn’t going to get itself out, after all. It’s a good job, in some ways, that I’ve kept on Maureen. In some modern manager’s eyes, she would have been the prime candidate for redundance, the first and most obvious place to make a saving. When I started, she appeared to be completely thick, generally incompetent and, it has to be said, not the first in line when there was a queue for work. But I put that down to Mick. He always said she was so dependable and that he couldn’t imagine The Castle without her. Well it’s easy to be dependable when no-one ever asks you to do anything, which Mick never did. Maureen spent her time waving a mop around, or a duster, but nothing ever made contact with anything else. When she’d done the floor, I had to have someone else go over it because you couldn’t even see where she’d been. Well I gave her a chance, but only after I’d given her a good talking to. Maureen, I said, because that’s her name, Maureen you can’t slack. I won’t have it. If you’re going to be an employee of mine at The Castle I want an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. She asked what the conditions were for dishonesty, but I didn’t really understand that. I just told her that anything less than honesty was not acceptable. She said that she always had worked hard under Mick, had done everything he asked her to do and made herself available to him whenever he wanted. She also said that given half a chance she could have done a lot better, but when she suggested things to him, he didn’t agree and so wouldn’t do them. Anyway, that’s what I thought she said. She’s sometimes not so clear, isn’t Maureen. She tends to mumble and mutter and turn away when she talks. It’s almost as if she doesn’t want you to hear what she says. When we talked about her work for Mick, she mumbled something about getting even better. It might, to the uncultured ear have sounded like “better get even,” but that wouldn’t have made sense. I told her I would give her a chance to show just how much she could improve. A rising tide lifts all boats so I gave her a new roster. But I also told her that I expected to see an improvement and there would be no second chance.

I upped her hours, which she was really grateful for. I asked for more cleaning, completed to a higher standard and didn’t she just respond? Now she’s one of the most dependable of all my staff. She’s so keen, she wants to help in every aspect of the business. Now there isn’t anything about The Castle that doesn’t interest her. She wants to be involved in everything. I couldn’t have asked for more. And she’s taken to the potato peeling like a duck to water. She’s perked up and delivered. And I’ve been utterly surprised by how much she seems to know about the business.

But it’s those two clowns upstairs in their studio that I can’t fathom, and never could, not from day one. They spend hour after hour in that IT room of theirs, do Phil Matthews and his missus Karen, and I’ve not the faintest idea what they do. She does a bit of bar work for me, and she does it well. She’s always on time, always well turned out, and she’s honest. But she isn’t half quiet. Never says a word to anybody. Maureen told me the other week that she was finalist in a Victoria Beckham look-alike competition run by a national newspaper in the nineties. She’s put on some weight since then. Now she’s got the feel of mutton dressed as lamb.

But it’s as if Karen’s mind’s not on the job in hand. She’s assessing all the time, observing, watching. It’s all this modern thinking that’s to blame. It’s one thing to appreciate the need for service, to understand how you relate to a senile role in relation to the served. It’s quite another thing to actually pull the pint and take the money, a task that often seems beyond her intellectual grasp. But when she’s upstairs with that gangly husband of hers, the door closes and you don’t see either of them for hours. They say they are doing their DTP, which probably means ‘don’t tell the proprietor’, because I certainly never see anything they’ve produced, except an odd leaflet or a menu that I could do myself in five minutes with Donkey’s laptop and a folder of clipart. I told Mick only last week that I wanted to have it out with him. He said I could have it out any time I liked, the mucky so-and-so!

What those two are supposed to do, of course, is take photos of the punters, mount them in key-rings and then sell them. Five euros each is what they are supposed to charge, but I think their last paying customer must have been sometime in the last century. But then they’ve not been employed here for that long, unlike Maureen, of course, who seems to have been at The Castle on and off for decades. I remember there was a Maureen all those years ago when I was last in Benidorm. I only met her once, but I heard a lot about her from Mick. She was tiny and had curly auburn hair. She was one of Mick’s forays into the feminine. She was a right one, he told me, and not trustworthy, which probably made two of them. It was eighty-one when I met that Maureen. It was when Mick and I... But this Maureen is quite different. She actually seems dependable and, unlike the other one, not a schemer.

Today was a perfect example. I told everyone I was going to come in early and have a go at the cupboards upstairs, the only place I haven’t gone through since I took over. As I said, now we’ve got the big jobs under control, it’s time to start attacking those little things that can be started and finished in an afternoon. I said it would take a couple of hours, that I would come in early at twelve and make a start. And who was it who turned up to help? It was Maureen, looking as ever as if she hadn’t had a bath for a week, that centre-parted jet black hair hanging in lank strands beside a face as long as a week, which was a week shorter than normal.

In the end, there wasn’t much in the cupboards. Most of it was pure junk, old newspapers, flattened cardboard boxes, a few pairs of smelly trainers and a jump suit. It all went straight in the bin. TODA.

There was something that took time, though, and that was an old photo album. In it we found pictures of all the stars that used to perform here. It went back years. The photos were all excellent, obviously taken by a proper professional and not a clumsy ha’peth like Phil Matthews.

There was one of Randy Sandy soon after she’d started. She was actually wearing clothes! She had a long white chiffon draped across, back, up, down, under, through and back again, tied in a giant bow at the front. It’s the most I’ve ever seen her wear. Eighty-three, it was dated, or there again, that might have been her age.

There was a lot of stuff, hundreds of pictures with singers, ventriloquists, comics, even an occasional musician. There was Spotty Joe and Spot, the talking dog. I remember seeing them back in the seventies. It was amazing how he got that dog to say ‘sausages’.

Then there was Grosse Fugue from Die Vaterland. He was a great big bloke from Scotland who made out he was German and said things in a funny voice. His act was based on his having eaten nothing but beans and sauerkraut for a week before the evening of the performance. He let one or two tasty ones go in the first part of his act and that in itself would bring the house down. It never failed. People laughed so much he hardly needed any more material to occupy a whole session. When he got the chance, he would cue the bloke with the organ who would play Beethoven’s fifth and then Grosse Fugue would flatulate it, in time and in control. He claimed his act was in a long tradition of the music hall, mentioning someone called Pujol, who I thought was a footballer. Same thing. All I can say is, funny as it was, folk have been doing other things out of the same orifice for a lot longer, but it’s not something you would pay to watch. But then there’s no accounting for taste.

Maureen really lit up when we uncovered a big and flattering photo of Tatiana the Tightrope Walker. Maureen told me the whole story. She was here during the nineteen seventies and eighties. I was surprised, because Don and I were here quite often in that decade. We certainly never saw her perform. But then Maureen told me that Tatiana, being totally clean and just a little bit talented, could only perform early doors, before ten o’clock in the evening. Don and I, of course, in our time would never have decanted to the club until after ten, because we’d have been in the pub watching the football or the rugby league until then. Apparently, Tatiana liked to work the early shift because she ran a home business in the later and earlier hours. Maureen called her Tanyushka, because they were close at one time until the Russian lady became the destination of a majority of Mick’s interest. This development was not in the least bit surprising since, like most of that gender, she had two at the front and one up and in between, everything needed to guarantee Mick Watson’s concentration, unlike myself these days, of course, who’s now somewhat lacking in this essential equipment. She first appeared in Benidorm in the mid-nineteen-seventies, when The Original Official Russian State Circus visited the Costa Blanca. Tanya on the tightrope was one of the star turns, a young, beautiful blonde woman, elegant and graceful, skilled and trained but unfortunately for her Soviet managers, both ambitious and utterly selfish. She deflected, ran away from the circus. I laughed, saying that usually young women seeking adventure made the change the other way round.

Tatiana had a friend, it seems, a pen-pal who lived in Benidorm. And that friend was none other than the woman who soon afterwards started calling herself Randy Sandy. She used to call herself La Bruja and made her name by doing some rather strange things with Coca Cola bottles introduced to various parts of her anatomy. Imagine being able to open a bottle of San Miguel with your... She couldn’t do the litre bottles, however, because she couldn’t cope with the screw cap, even Dutch ones. And to think the lady has made a lifetime of earnings out of her skills. Each to his own.

Anyway when the circus got to Benidorm, Tatiana deflected and La Bruja hid her for a couple of months until the brouhaha died down. All those years ago, of course, a deflecting Russian circus artist was automatically granted asylum and Tatiana even got full Spanish papers after a year or two. It seems that she and La Bruja had communicated over a couple of years and Tatiana had learned how much money she could make from exploiting her talents in a tourist centre. Though the Benidorm clubs at the time were probably not crying out for a tightrope walker, one with near celebrity status was assured of work for a while, which is precisely what she achieved.

Tatiana gave auditions and she got her work, including with The Castle, where she was a regular until the end of the eighties, always playing the early evening. At the end of the decade, she surprised everyone by correctly anticipating the changes afoot in Russia and returning, without telling anyone, to her homeland. She had lived in the same block as La Bruja, who was called Randy Sandy by then, Maureen told me. The arrangement worked well because Randy, of course, was a late night act, while Tatiana’s tight rope was always early, because in public it was always perfectly clean. When Randy went to work, Tatiana was just arriving home, bringing with her the employment task she had picked up along the way. This home-based business was Tatiana’s main earner, apparently. She used to single out punters from the early club goers. She used to parade through the bar in her sequined leopard-skin leotard with those perfectly proportioned muscular legs which were on view all the way from cut-away hips to toe. She was extremely beautiful and could charge the highest rates for her services which, of course, she could begin to minister immediately she got home because her flatmate was just going off to work to open her bottles. Their personal and professional lives were thus perfectly coordinated.

Tatiana’s act usually involved juggling balls or dumbbells while dancing along a tightrope. And that’s how she lived her life. Maureen tells me that she was so popular that Mick paid her rent for a time, as long as she did a show cut price wherever he worked. No doubt he was a customer as well. No doubt Mick Watson managed to secure all sorts of performances for her and I bet all of them were cut price.

But unfortunately Tatiana fell into drugs and became dependent. By the end of the decade, she’d got no work left, either on her rope or her back. The years take their toll on the working woman, it seems. And that’s why she went back to Russia, or not Russia - Maureen wasn’t sure of her geography. She seemed to think that Russia was in eastern Germany...

And by then, Tatiana had a daughter, Maureen said, and she took her back as well, even though the little girl had never lived anywhere else but Spain. The girl was just seven years old, had gone to school in Benidorm, had Spanish friends and spoke fluent Spanish, though her mother had taught her Russian at home as well. Apparently she’s now doing translation work. It defeats me how Maureen, who after all is still in Benidorm and has come and gone back and forth to the UK over the years as well, might know such things in such detail. There’s more to her than meets the eye.

People’s stories are amazing, aren’t they? To think that you have a Russian woman, a little girl born in Spain, no doubt as a result of poor availability of birth control to a father who was a paying customer, facilitated by pesetas paid by British tourists on their nights out, supported by an eventually successful flatmate who made her living by opening bottles with a part of her anatomy that is usually reserved for religious observance, who had deflected, and then gone back to Russia and then... and then... Who knows? Thirty years in a sentence.

I am so grateful to Maureen for having shared some of these stories about the past. We agreed, when we had finished going through the photos, that we’d have Phil and Karen blow several of them up so we could frame them and hang them on the walls of The Castle. It’s our heritage, after all. I think it would also be interesting to put captions underneath telling the stories. The punters would like that. Maybe the bloke who fathered Tatiana’s little girl might put to and two together. There’s so many stories to tell and my friend Maureen seems to know most of them!

Then she let something slip that stopped me dead. I thought I heard her correctly, but I was so stunned I couldn’t react. She went on, but I stopped her in mid-flow because my mind was still toying with those few words, sifting them, sorting them, rearranging them. I had to speak.

But the problem with Maureen is that she never answers a question, except with another question. If you ask, “Is that all right with you?” she’ll answer, “Is it for you?” She’ll tell you something, you’ll ask for a simple confirmation and all you will get is another question that this time seems to question the truth of what she just said. Then she moves on, as if nothing was ever said in the first place. You can never pin her down. At first I thought it was because she had a few screws loose upstairs, Now I am beginning to think that she might know quite precisely what she is doing. An old dog fights with an aim.

We were talking about Tatiana and her living conditions. I don’t really remember how we arrived at that subject, but we did. The idea that Mick was paying the rent on her flat for all those years was a shock, but hardly a surprise, if you see what I mean. Before that sank in, however, Maureen had already described Tatiana as a drug addict and then calmly tacked on the end that Mick was her supplier. Strangely, none of that took me by surprise. After all I’d had some first-hand experience of the way Mick operated in this town, and I’d had my suspicions about his line of business going right back to the early eighties. There’s nothing about Mick that would surprise me, I thought. I was wrong.

“He’s bankrupt now, as well,” she said. “Hasn’t got a penny...”

Now that was news. How on earth had I finished up running a business for a bankrupt? And how could I possibly...

“... and he’s HYV.”

...be running a club called The Castle for Mick Watson, on the understanding that ...

I was momentarily nonplussed. It took several seconds for the message to sink in and I still didn’t believe it. “He’s what?” I asked.

“Bankrupt?” she said. It was another question.

“Yes. I heard that...”

“He hasn’t got two pennies to scratch his sphincter,” she confirmed. “Hasn’t he said anything to you about it?”

“No...”

“Well he is. He’s bankrupt. It’s those other people who run everything, isn’t it?”

“Who? Those two upstairs, Phil Matthews and Karen?”

“No,” she scoffed, “not those two skivers. The others. It’s the others who have all the say. All Mick does is their dirty work. Well, some of it. Mick only does the bits that aren’t very dirty. Haven’t you met them?”

“Who?”

“The others.”

“Which others?”

“The big guys! The ones with all the money. Have you never noticed them come in and walk around The Castle to see what’s going on?”

I racked my memory, but I couldn’t recall ever having been introduced to anyone in particular. But it was those other words that had to come out.

“What did you say about Mick?”

“He’s bankrupt.”

“No the other thing...”

“What, that he’s HGV?”

I had no idea how to react. Initially, I was not sure what she meant. Let me rephrase that. Of course I knew what she meant, but I wasn’t sure whether she meant he was dying, seriously ill or something else.

“For how long?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “At least two or three years... He has to have drugs, and not the sort he usually provides for other people. Hasn’t he mentioned anything to you?”

It wasn’t self-interest. My relations with Mick ended years ago, but my mind filled with names of other people who might have been infected either along with or by him. There was Olga for a start. And, I ask you, how unlikely is that partnership? Makes you think. Misery loves company.