OF COURSE, THEY’D SAID, Wally’ll be there to meet you. Don’t you worry about that. Wally’ll be there and waiting while you’re still up in the wild blue yonder. So don’t you worry about that. Once you’ve landed you’re on velvet.
When the plane lands and the doors are opened I stand as upright as is possible between my own seat and the back of the seat in front and wear the Dagenham family’s commotion while they get themselves sorted, holding up the flow behind them as they play pass the parcel with their Adidas bags. Finally, Christ knows how, they manage to get themselves in the aisle and the queue starts to move and eventually I’m let in and I get to the door and the stewardess smiles and hopes I’ve enjoyed my flight, and I nearly tell her, but I don’t.
Outside the sunshine’s like a multibarred electric fire. The dry heat tingles through my mohair and I can feel the warmth of the runway through the soles of my shoes. I adjust my sunglasses and the bunch of us weave our way towards the airport buildings, and inside we mix in with a crowd off an earlier flight, gathered round the oval conveyor belt, gazing at its monotonous emptiness. Of course, the Dagenham crowd have to show everybody they’ve been through it all before by making a production of settling themselves down to wait on some of the airport furniture. While they’re doing that I go to the sunlight end of the lounge and look out into the brightness and see if there are any signs of Wally. There’s a line of coaches and beyond the coaches a line of hoardings black against the sun, but no Wally, at any rate, not in my line of vision. I turn away and look round to see if there’s a bar or anything but there’s nothing and I begin to wish I’d brought some of the duty free stuff on the plane, to pass the time by keeping myself stoked up. And there’s some time to pass because the luggage from the first flight doesn’t spill out for over half an hour. The travellers pick out their luggage and move like moths towards the light at the end of the lounge and when they’re outside I watch them flutter some more as they sort out the relevant coaches. Inside, the lounge is relatively quiet again. Outside, a coach begins to move off, then another—revealing nothing, I look at my watch. I swear to myself and light another cigarette. I’m fucked if I’m going to have another look for Wally. Another twenty minutes goes by before the luggage from my flight begins to flop onto the conveyor belt. A new crowd collects and I join it and of course my case is among the last to appear. I grab it off the belt and walk across the lounge and out into the still sunshine. I put my case down and scan the forecourt. Nothing, except the stacking of the cases on the remaining coaches and the push and shove of the customers. Then they all get settled and the motor of the final coach starts up and somebody gets off the coach and starts walking towards me. She’s dressed in some green drag and there’s a badge on her lapel with her name on it. She gives me a thoroughly routine smile.
“Hello,” she says, “I’m Barbara, your Funbreak representative. Which hotel are you going to?”
“I’m not,” I tell her.
A slight frown.
“I’m sorry—”
She looks down her check list.
“You’re—”
“Carter. Jack Carter.”
She brightens again.
“That’s right,” she says. “Las Arenas. I thought we’d lost you.”
“I’m not going to a hotel.”
“But you must be. You’re on the list.”
“I know I’m on the list, darling,” I tell her. “But I’m not going to the hotel.”
She looks at me as though I’ve just told her the earth’s flat.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” she says.
“It’s paid for, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes—”
“So why worry?”
“Well I—”
“Tell you what,” I tell her. “You’ve got an empty room for a fortnight, right? But it’s paid for. Now I’m entitled to that room whenever I like, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Well I tell you what you do; you nip in there every night, warm up the sheets, all right? Part of the job, yes? Only, one night you’re warming it up, I might pop in to test the mattress, right? One of the perks of the job, O.K.?”
When it sinks in her face becomes a blank and then I get the total ignoration and she walks off back to the coach. “Hasta la vista,” I call after her, then I sit down on my case and light another cigarette. The buses rev up and move off in dusty convoy and when they’re gone all I’m left with is nothing apart from a distant group of Spanish porters, hands in pockets, talking about whatever Spanish porters talk about. Well, at least it won’t be Millwall, I think to myself.
The other thing I think to myself, while I’m staring unseeing at the blank hoarding, is stoicism. Why that word should drift back into my mind after all these years, I’ll never know, I can see the situation where I first heard the word, a dusty June classroom, old Henry explaining why this particular character in this play we were going through, why he’d just accepted the fate that was about to be dished out to him. None of us could figure it out. Why, he was asked, why should the guy just accept it, why didn’t he earhole the bastards that were out to get him, at least go down fighting? Henry’d smiled and agreed with the difficulty we’d had in accepting what the gut accepted. Only, he’d said, maybe twenty or thirty years from then, some of us might become stoics. No chance, the chorus’d been. Only, a couple of weeks later, I’d gone to the Star and seen this picture, The Killers, starring Burt Lancaster, and he’d been this guy, lying on a bed, and somebody’d come and warned him of two killers were coming up to see him off, and he’d just lay there relaxed on his bed, virtually saying, let them come. Let them do it. The rest of the picture had been in flashback, showing why he’d reached that stage, how Ava Gardner had helped him reach it.
I shake my head. Funny, I should think of that right now. I look at my watch and fuck Gerald and Les from Bow to Bromley.
It’s only an hour, an hour and a quarter later, that something actually happens. And, as begins to seem usual round here, the happening is encased in a cloud of dust.
A car rounds the corner of the terminal building and draws up opposite me. The dust falls away like midges at sunset and a door opens and a Spaniard approaches. I remain seated. He smiles and stretches out his hand. He’s dumpy without being fat, he’s fortyish, and he’s got a very nice haircut.
“Mr. Carter?” he says.
I nod. The hand stays outstretched. I shake it. His grin widens. Then he goes into his act. I gather it’s all about why he’s here instead of Wally, why he’s late, and what’s wrong with the car. Only most of it’s in Spanish, but I don’t have to speak Spanish to gather there’s got to be something wrong with the car. Faulty plugs sound the same in any language.
So I get up and he takes my case and carries on with his soliloquy while I get in the back of the car, making my first mistake: there’s about enough knee room for one of Billy Smart’s midgets. I begin to try and signify that I’d rather sit in the front but it’s too late, the driver’s scraped in gear and off, u-turning across the forecourt, and a minute or two later we’re hammering along a stretch of motorway at thirty-five miles an hour. As I look around at the flanking scenery, I think to myself: they could have left Ealing Broadway out of it. Because that’s the impression I get: the architecture’s different, the climate’s different, but there’s the same anonymous scruffiness, the same feeling of characterless uniformity re-enforced by the office blocks that passed for hotels squeezing yards away on my right. But we’re only on the motorway for about ten minutes and then the driver turns off.
It may be just the angle I’m sitting at, or the vague positioning of the driver’s pointing arm, but I get the impression he’s aiming his finger not at any of the lower reaches of the range, but at the highest peaks, the ones reflecting most brilliantly the disappearing sunlight, and, if I’m right, that the villa’s as high as is possible. Knowing Gerald and Les it’s probably balanced on a peak like something out of Road Runner, liable to tip over the edge if you flush the lavatory a bit fierce.
About ten minutes later we get to a small town, the main road going straight through the middle, and this place has a completely different atmosphere to the sprawl we left half an hour ago: a real Spanish village, as Spanish as an English market town is English. The only thing about this place, set out to catch the passing tourists, is a leather-work shop with a lot of hide skins tacked up on the outside wall. I tap the driver on the shoulder and manage to get over that I want him to stop, which he does, and gets out of the car and runs round the back and opens the door for me, beaming all over his face. I struggle out, and when I’m out I stretch and try and de-crease my clothes and while I’m doing that he’s already half way across the road, making for the leather shop.
“Here,” I call after him.
He stops and looks at me. I shake my head and point to a bar on my side of the road.
“There,” I say to him.
His face falls a bit. No taxi-drop commission tonight. I walk across the broad pavement with the driver padding along behind me and we go into the bar.
The bar has a modern aluminium and glass frontage inset in the old shuttered structure of the building, a miniature version of the airport facade, and inside there are resonances of the airport, leatherette stools and booths, formica topping on the bar. Formica in Spain. I wonder how they pronounce it.
Some of the town’s top guys are sitting on the stools screwed into the floor along the front of the bar, eating sea-food from dainty saucers and drinking beer from bottles that look like they should have Schweppes Ginger Beer inside. You can tell they’re the town’s top guys. There are four of them and at least two of them are obviously brothers, but that apart, they’re all out of the same mould, short, portly, beautifully barbered greying hair, similar kinds of sportswear and slip-ons. Even the frames round their glasses seem to match. But the thing that tells you what they are is the atmosphere they have about them, an air of mild unease, dissatisfaction, only submerged when they are concentrating on their food. It’s an attitude I recognise from my adolescence, among the small builders and the chemists and the haulage contractors who used to gather at the bar of the Conservative Club in Scunthorpe; they all looked somehow disappointed by their success too.
“Vodka and tonic,” I said to the fifteen-year-old behind the bar.
“Vodka tonic,” he says, already half filling a glass with crushed ice. I turn to the driver who’s at my shoulder and I raise my eyebrows to let him know I’d like to know what he’d like. He beams and clears his throat and very carefully he says, “I would like a large gin and a tonic please.”
I smile to myself. When it comes down to essentials, the barman can understand what I want, and the driver can make himself understood. But Christ alone knows what a large gin’s like because the lad behind the bar’s still pouring my vodka. No measures, nothing. I motion for him to stop so’s there’s room for my tonic to go in and then I begin to tell him what the driver wants but he’s already started to take care of that so I just stand there and watch. When he’s finished he puts all the stuff on a tray and while the driver’s taking the stuff to a table I give the lad behind the bar a five hundred peseta note and he rings it up and very carefully counts the change out into my hand. I give him too much back as a tip and then I go and join the driver, who is splashing the tonic in both our drinks. I sit down and the driver raises his glass and downs half his drink as though he’s drinking lemonade.
“Cheers,” he says, smiling broadly.
“Cheers,” I say, and raise my own glass and take a long drink but not as long as his: it takes me all my time not to spit it out all over him because he’s given me the wrong fucking drink. He’s got the vodka and I’ve got the gin. And gin to me is like water to a Jock; it turns my stomach. The smell’s enough to make me throw up. The driver catches my expression and spreads his hands and raises his eyebrows to ask why? I push the glass over to him and get up and order another vodka and tonic and the lad behind the bar puts a glass and bottle on another tray and so I take the second tray back to the table and sit down again and by that time the driver’s finished his drink and started mine as if there’s no difference between the two drinks. Then we both stare out of the plate glass windows at the dusky pink evening. A bus draws up outside the leather shop opposite and unloads a load of tourists so that they can play a part in supporting cottage industries. The taxi driver makes a gesture at them and grins and I think to myself, yes, and wouldn’t you like the percentage.
The lad from behind the bar comes round to the jukebox which is about two feet away from my right ear and shoves in a coin and there is a whirring sound and then the bar is full of music, Spanish popular variety. I manage about two and a half sides of this Eurovision reject stuff before motioning to the driver it’s time for us to go. He looks disappointed. I wonder if he’s on commission from here too.
Outside it’s a little bit cooler than before. The tourists are still in the leather shop and the bus driver is talking to a representative of the local filth who looks like something out of Pirates of Penzance. No wonder they need shooters, with that clobber. Otherwise they’d die of embarrassment from all the verballing they got.
This time I get in the front seat and we’re out of town inside three minutes and making for the mountains again. I try and get out of the driver how long it’s going to take us to get to the villa but all he does is to keep looking at his watch and giving me the fucking time, so in the end I give up before he thinks I’ve gone round the twist.
We carry on in silence for a further twenty minutes until we reach the foothills and a place called Incas. On the outskirts there’s a walled set-up that looks as though it could be the local nick. The driver catches me looking at it and says one word.
“Cemetery,” he says.
I don’t say anything. He points at the walls.
“People, in there,” he says.
I look at him.
“See,” he says, then starts another charade. First he closes his eyes for a second then looks at me and makes a cut-throat gesture. I nod, then he takes his hands off the wheel and mimes digging. I nod. He shakes his head and digs again, and shakes his head and says, “No.” I nod. Then he points at the walls and looks at me. I nod. He takes his hands off the wheel again, mimes gripping something and pushing it away from him. This time I don’t nod. He sighs and points groundwards and shakes his head. I nod mine. He nods his. He points at the walls, then makes the gripping gesture again. This time I get it. He’s putting something in the walls. But although I am getting it I frown signifying my perplexity and now he beams and nods his head vigorously and goes through the gripping motions again and again points at the walls.
“People, in there,” he says.
I light a cigarette and turn my gaze to other pieces of local colour.
It takes us about ten minutes to get through Incas and then the road begins to rise even more steeply and there’s no choice but for the road to become a never-ending series of hairpin bends rising up and up into the dusk. At the first bend the driver indicates the nub of the corner and points upwards to the top of the mountains.
“One hundred twenty-four,” he says. “One hundred twenty-four.” Then he laughs and reaches down between his legs and comes up with half a bottle of Hine and shoves it in my direction. I look at him and remember the treble vodka and tonic and treble gin he’d knocked back and shake my head. He unscrews the top and takes a long pull and I don’t give a fuck whether there are one hundred twenty-four fucking bends just so long as we negotiate all of the bastards safely.
It’s like a location for a rotten movie. The road dog legs steeper and steeper and the drops get deeper and deeper and the brandy in the bottle gets lower and lower. I begin to look back to the hours spent on the plane almost with nostalgia as the car grinds round each new bend. At one point we meet a tourist coach head-on and so the taxi driver reverses back round one of the bends, faster than the speed he’d formerly gone round it. Then he pulls in against the slanting face and somehow manages to get a couple of wheels up on the slope. The bus manoeuvres by and the strains of “O Sole Mio” sung in about six different accents drifts through the evening air and finally rattles away into the distance with the slip-stream of the bus, but not before the taxi driver’s caught the melody and started sending his own version across the deepening purple of the canyons. Then, before he crashes back through the gears, he reaches for the bottle again but before he can start unscrewing the cap I take the bottle from him. He looks at me, surprised at first, then grins and gestures for me to take a drink but instead of doing that I take a couple of hundreds out of my wallet and press them into the driver’s hand. It’s time for him to look surprised again but not as surprised as when I roll my window down and hurl the bottle out into the spacious canyon. He begins to speak but I cut in on him.
“Incas?” I say to him.
He looks at me. I say it again.
“Incas?”
He frowns and nods.
“People in walls?”
Another frown, another nod.
I mime him drinking from the bottle and then I point to each of us.
“People in walls,” I say to him.
This time he just frowns. Then he turns away and takes it out of the gearbox and we’re off again. Faster than before. I shake my head and light another cigarette. You can’t win away from home.