SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher

THE DOG CATCHER

The woman came into the
valley, whose Arabic name meant ‘happiness’, at the very start of the summer.
She had hitchhiked up from the coast, along the highway that climbed twisting
through the gorge into the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. In the wide delta
there had been fields of sugar cane, banana palms, custard apple orchards and
waving clumps of bamboo, later on as they climbed into the campo there were
steep terraces of olive trees, oranges and lemons, then on the rocky mesas
almond trees, their leaves a beautiful spring green and the fruit hanging half
formed. Nowhere were there the gigantic sheets of plastic, covering
chemical-drunk, sweating vegetables, that disfigured the growing lands further
up the coast towards Almeria. There had been decent spring rains that year and
the acequias, the irrigation channels that the Romans had built, ran fresh with
icy water.

She
wasn’t running away exactly but there were a number of men all along the Costa
Tropical and Costa del Sol, one Latvian guy in particular, who it was better
that she didn’t see for a while, for his sake really, all that shouting and
threatening every time he saw her couldn’t be doing him any good. Some people
just seemed to get so twisted around her, that was her opinion. She knew the
reason for it, it was because she was too trusting, too giving, and
individuals, guys especially, saw that as a green light to try and suck her
dry. Aquarians were always taken advantage of, it was a scientific fact.

The
woman’s name was Sue, she was from the North of England, that part of the North
West where all the towns ran into each other along motorways and bombed-out
high streets. She had come to Spain on a whim not knowing really where Spain was,
with a bloke of course — Aquarians had a great need to give and receive love,
repeated studies had proved it. A nice posh lad with money who she met in a
club in Liverpool. They’d been going round together for a couple of weeks when
he said he was going out to DJ on the costa, he paid for her plane ticket and
he paid for the rented flat in a smart urbanisation. After a bit she asked him
why he didn’t have any records or any turntables. He told her that he’d thought
she understood that he was a conceptual DJ who played the music that he heard
all the time in his head, straight into the heads of other people and the heads
of cats and dogs too. Then he said he was also working on a machine to slow
down time and reverse the flow of entropy. Then the Civil Guards came and took
him away. Sometimes she tried to hear his music but she didn’t think she could.

The
idea of going back to England was a non-starter, her husband and kids had made
such a fuss and her own mother had gone on the TV show
Kilroy
to
denounce her. They all had to understand that she wasn’t Thirty yet and let’s
face it she was fantastic-looking so she had the absolute right to have a good
time before it was too late. That’s what feminism had taught her.

So it
was bar jobs in the town and other blokes after that and some of the blokes
getting twisted. Then the Latvian trying to run her over and ploughing his
Mercedes into the stack of butane canisters outside the supermercado. Once his
burns healed she sensed he would come after her again so it was time to move
on.

With
her bag over her shoulder she walked to a big bar on the road out where the
camionistas parked their trucks for one last brandy before slinging the rigs up
the sinuous mountain roads. She asked around, looking for the perfect destination
as if she were in a travel agent’s. The old man in the wheezing lorry loaded
down with watermelons, whose name was Antonio, said he was going back to his
home, one of the villages in the foothills of the mountains. One with a stout
wall around it built by the Moors, with a single gate in and out; where the
road ended, he said, and where you could see a car coming from five kilometres
away. To her it sounded like it might be a safe place; he said he would take
her up there for a blow job which she bartered down to a hand job and a feel of
her tits, payment to be made at journey’s end.

They
didn’t go on the highway but took the old road, first through the tourist
towns, going so slowly that even car drivers towing caravans kept giving them
the finger. Then Antonio swerved onto a narrow serpentine camino that bent up
into the mountains, and the straining old truck seemed to be pushed up the
slopes by the jets of thick black smoke that roared from its tailpipe. All the
time Antonio spoke about his little town, its fine walls, its beautiful church,
its lovely white-painted jumble of houses. And as if he had talked it into
existence, suddenly, there it was above them, rising out of the orange groves,
the red-tiled roofs of the houses poking above the thick stone walls.

She
paid for her ride in the parking lot of the orange cooperative, a large modern
shed built on a rock plateau just outside the single gateway that led into the
shaded web of alleys and lanes that was the little town. He was a fit old boy,
she had to give him that; the tit fondling would have gone on all night if she
hadn’t called time after half an hour, still he seemed very grateful.
Afterwards he dropped her at one of the two bars in the village, the one where
he said all the English drank.

The
place was called Bar Noche Azul. You could tell it was a foreigners’ bar
because there were chairs on its vine-covered terrace though it was only May
with the thermometer reading twenty-nine centigrade. The Spanish did not begin
sitting outside until later on in the summer when the temperature started
pushing into the high thirties.

She
stepped inside the bar and dumped her bag on the littered floor. There was the
usual battle of the giant noises going on. Two TVs, one behind the bar and
another monster, wide-screen one in the corner, both were turned on and both
were tuned to different channels. Over that there was a stereo playing Spanish
pop and a fruit machine clonging away to itself. The bar was of course tiled,
traditional patterns rendered in acid, factory colours on floors, walls and
ceiling so the racket bounced and ballooned back on itself. The place was also
quite full of people and everybody had to shout to make themselves heard. Sue
went to the bar and ordered the smallest beer, a canya, and took it to a vacant
table. After a while the barman came over and chucked a big piece of chorizo on
a hunk of bread onto the table. In the traditional Andalucian way tapas were
given free up here if you bought wine or beer. If you bought a much more expensive
drink like twelve-year-old brandy or imported Malibu you didn’t get anything.

Though
none paid the slightest attention to her she knew she had been noticed, first
because she always got noticed, she was that kind of girl, but in a place as
small as this a new arrival, no matter how self-effacing, would be clocked by
the inhabitants. She studied the ones she knew were the British. There were
several clumps of them, mostly older than her, in their forties and fifties.
These British didn’t seem anything like the ones on the coast. On the coast you
got your tweed-coated Nazis, or your gold-dripping cockney villains or your
pulling-their-trousers-down fat lumps, being sick in the streets and calling
the Spanish ‘Pakis’. This lot in Noche Azul spoke English amongst themselves,
like on the coast in a variety of accents you’d never hear conversing to each
other back home:

High
Church Knightsbridge talking to Thick Birmingham talking to California talking
to Camp Old-fashioned Queen but the difference was that when they ordered
drinks from the bar staff or threw some comment to the younger locals who also
seemed to hang in this bar they did it incredibly, unbelievably in Spanish!
Good Spanish, too. She couldn’t remember a British person on the coast ever
speaking Spanish, they didn’t need to, they lived in a bubble of Britishness,
radio stations, newspapers, bars; up here it was obviously different, they had
to fit in.

One of
the English, an old queen who’d been at the centre of a shrieking group, came
over and sat down at the table opposite Sue. ‘And whose little girl are you?’

Sue
smiled up at him. ‘I’m just passing through.’

‘To
where, darling? There’s no through, to pass through to.

He held
out his hand. ‘Laurence Leahy…’

‘Sue,’
she said and shook hands.

‘Another
drink?’

‘Yeah,
why not?’

He
shouted over to the barman who quickly brought more drinks and more food.

‘So “Passing
Through Sue”, where do you plan to stay tonight? There’s no hotel in our little
town.’

‘Somebody
usually rents rooms …

‘By an
incredible coincidence I happen to do that.’

‘How
much?’

‘Umm
… twenty thousand pesetas a week.’

‘Eighteen
thousand two hundred and sixty-five.’

The odd
number threw him, as it was meant to. When haggling for anything Sue always did
this for that reason. ‘Yes erm . . alright, eighteen thousand and whatever it
was.’

He
indicated the crowd he’d been with. ‘Come and meet everyone.

Laurence
led her over to the gaggle of foreigners he had been with and introduced her
around, still calling her ‘Passing Through Sue’.

They were
mostly British with a couple of Belgians and Dutch (who were sort of foreign
British people anyway) and a Europhile Singaporean. The whole lot of them
stayed in the bar till about 1 a.m. then Laurence led her to his house; he didn’t
offer to carry Sue’s bag. In the dark it was hard to tell from the outside the
size of Laurence’s place, only that she entered through a small door set in a
huge studded Arabic gate that was the only portal breaking the run of a long
white wall.

Stepping
through the gate brought her into a secret courtyard, this was the first of an
uncountable number of hidden places she would step into over that summer. She
stood and stared in amazement, up at the abundant stars that lit the hidden
garden, then at the tall palms that shaded the starlight, then at the orange
and lemon trees, their fruit hanging as copious as the stars. Laurence waited,
enjoying her astonishment. ‘Not bad, eh?’ he said.

‘It’s
fantastic.’

‘Glad
you like it because it costs me a bloody fortune, I’m being drained like a pig.
This is supposed to be my retirement, I tell you I’ve never been more distracted
.

Come
and see the rest of it. Fucking thing.’ He led her through a door into the
house and flipped on a light. It was like one of those houses you see in
magazines, not the trashy ones in
Hello!
either, not comedians’ places
in Henley or Formula One drivers’ serviced apartments in Monaco but one of the
houses in the magazines that are just about houses and show you how you could
live, if you had money, taste and about a thousand years.

Laurence
whisked her round the place. ‘Living room, you can use that; kitchen, you can
use that but clean up after you; my office, stay out of there; my bedroom, stay
out unless invited; your bedroom, same goes for Laurence.’

The next
morning she didn’t wake up until ten. She could hear Laurence crashing about in
the kitchen. The sun was bleaching the stones of the patio and he had laid
breakfast out on a long table under a white awning.

‘Is
there work around here?’ she asked him.

‘Cleaning
some of the houses the tourists rent. Bar work maybe but it’s all at Spanish rates
…

‘Well,
I’ll hang about to see what opportunities there are.

Sue had
noticed that in the living room there were a lot of framed sketches round the
walls of men and women in costumes: Cavaliers, Battle of Britain pilots,
milkmaids, Victorian nurses, all signed L.L. She asked him, ‘All them pictures
on the wall that you did of people from history do you see them in visions or
something?’