SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (2 page)

‘Eh?’

‘You’re
a Pisces, in their dreams Pisces travel into the past and bring secret messages
back. I thought you might have done the drawings after you came back to the
present.’

‘Do
they really? Umm … Well, I suppose that’s one explanation but I’m afraid the
real one is that I designed all those outfits. Yes, it was what I did before my
so-called retirement, I was a costume designer on films and TV.’

‘A
what?’

‘A
costume designer. Well, you know in movies and on the telly the clothes that
the actors wear are designed by someone. Then they’re made specially according
to the designs, my designs. Usually there’s several copies of course in case of
accidents or so the outfits seem fresh or when there’s a stunt—’

Sue
broke in. ‘Are you sure?’

‘What?’

‘Are
you sure about this?’

‘Of
course I’m sure, I did it for forty years.’

‘If you
say so,’ she said and they left it at that and talked about other things. She
wasn’t fooled about the drawings though. What a ridiculous idea, she reflected.
What was it he called himself again, ‘costume designator’? Yeah right. Maybe he
was ashamed of seeing visions of the past in his dreams and was trying to cover
it up. Yeah that was it, Pisces could be like that if their Venus was rising.

They
went down to Noche Azul for their lunch and had the Menu Del Dia. As they
walked through the high-walled skein of narrow alleys they had to step over
various dogs lying stretched out on the hot ground, and outside the bar lay,
scampered or sat panting in the backs of pick-up trucks all the dogs who
belonged to those inside. More or less the same crowd as last night were in
there, with a few additions and subtractions. These were the people she would
spend her summer with. There was ‘Nige’, a very tall dark-haired woman of about
forty years, a sculptor with a studio and living quarters right in the middle
of the village; she had two dogs, ‘Dexter’ and ‘Del Boy’, two big matching
yellow things. Frank, middle-aged cockney wide boy, doing up a house in the
next village and exporting antiques, owner of one wolf with a trace of dog in
it, name of Cohn. Kirsten, Dutch academic working on a doctorate for the next
six months, loosely attached to one nameless hound for the duration. Li Tang,
big house on the edge of the village, extremely vague about activities,
dogless. Janet, retired BBC executive, small village house, small pension,
small dog also called Janet (or more usually ‘Little Janet’). Baz, local
builder to the foreigners, four dogs of mixed size from giant to a tiny
creature that seemed to be half-dog half-squirrel, names Canello, Negrita,
General Franco and Macki. Miriam from Macclesfield, small cortijo in the woods
below the village, early retirement from the planning department on mental
health grounds, three-legged black female mongrel called ‘Coffee Table’ and,
fiercely protective of her, a male Doberman answering to the name of ‘Azul’. Malcolm,
writer, big house in the village, two little dogs, ‘Salvador’ and ‘Pablo’.

When
Sue and Laurence joined them the foreigners were having a conversation about
how much they the outsiders should get involved in village affairs. Miriam
said, ‘If they want us to take on some of the jobs for the Junta then they’ll
ask us. We shouldn’t push ourselves forward.’

‘This
is a timeless culture, we shouldn’t distort it by importing extrinsic influences,’
added the Dutch woman Kirsten in much better English than anyone else present.

‘My
taxes to the EC pay to keep it timeless … why shouldn’t I do what I want?’
said Frank.

Laurence
laughed. ‘When was the last time you paid any taxes?’

This
from Nige: ‘Well, I pay the amount of tax I paid in the UK. I reckon I bought
Domingo’s shiny new tractor.’

There
seemed a bit of needle between Nige and Laurence, and he said with some
asperity, ‘I’m sure he’d give you a ride on it, dear, if you asked him. Either
way you might have paid for it but you don’t own it.’

Malcolm
said, ‘Those of us with money could help in a non pushy way. During the winter
this place is often cut off for weeks. We could buy a snow plough and give it
to them. I couldn’t get into Granada last year to buy fresh memory cards for my
Sony Dreamcast.’

Laurence
disagreed. ‘No, that’s one area where we shouldn’t mess with the balance. It’s
part of the ecology of the village that nobody can get in or out from time to
time in the cold months, it is a beneficial quarantine, the snows purify the
village.’ Which seemed to Sue a pretty whacky thing to say, yet maybe everyone
felt the same way for discussion moved on to other matters.

Through
the rest of that week Sue, via Laurence’s sponsorship, found herself easily
worked into the fabric of the little group of foreigners. It wasn’t hard, a
group of highly intelligent urbanites such as these living amongst peasants
would naturally hunger for new stories and Sue had a whole pack of new stories,
even accounting for the forty per cent she had to hold back for what might be
termed legal reasons.

That
weekend, as if to celebrate her arrival, it was the village fiesta. All along
the valley every weekend one village or another would have its fiesta. The saints
would be taken out of the church and paraded around. The old women would crawl
around on their knees as if auditioning to play dwarves in a panto, the men
would get drunk, there would be bands and dancing, paella for a thousand given
away free at 4 a.m. for those still standing (which was more or less
everybody), there would be a theme of some kind and always the most dangerous
possible use of fireworks. In Sue’s village the men would hold formidable
rockets in their hands, then casually light them from the cigarettes that were
draped from their bottom lips. As the flame beat on their arms they would hang
on to them looking nonchalant with an ‘Oh do I have a rocket in my hand?’
expression on their faces, then they would release the sticks letting the rockets
swoop into the howling air, where they would explode with an immense
concussion.

A pair
of recovering Welsh bulimics had rented the house next to the plaza, the very
seismic epicentre of the fiesta. Used to France they had thought that a village
in Spain would be similarly quiet. At 5 a.m. they came out in their nightgowns
to ask Paco the Mayor if he could turn the noise down but he couldn’t hear
them. They left the next day.

On the
Monday the few Spanish who were about walked with the shuffling steps of
chemotherapy patients, the plaza was still littered with fragments of exploded
rocket and other bits of firework.

As Sue
was crossing the square a pack of dogs came skittering round the corner in a
happy mood. She recognised most of the canine gang, Cohn, Little Janet, Azul,
Salvador and Pablo, General Franco, Canello plus three of the effete little
yappy dogs that the peasants surprisingly favoured, with Coffee Table
unsteadily bringing up the rear. However, bounding and leaping at the centre of
the group was the most magnificent dog she had ever seen, the size of a small
cow it was, with lustrous grey black fur, and a long intelligent head set with
jet-black eyes. The Dog appeared to have been much better groomed and fed than
any of the local pack of hounds, and Sue thought it might perhaps be some sort
of a pedigree.

Later
on that evening as Sue was sitting on the terrace of Noche Azul with Laurence,
the pack again came lolloping past. She said, ‘Laurence, whose is that big dog?
I haven’t seen it before.’ He straightened from his chair to take a look.

‘Nobody’s,
it’s abandoned. Been here since the second night of the fiesta,’ replied
Laurence. ‘It probably belonged to some Spaniards who are going down to the
coast for the summer and don’t want to pay for kennels, or who didn’t realise
how big it was going to grow, who knows? They often abandon their dogs on the
highway or they leave them in this village because they know there are a lot of
us British here and they think we’ll look after them.’

‘Will
we?’

‘I’m
not sure, I think everybody’s fully dogged up at the moment, but we’ll see.’

Through
the week Sue began to look out for The Dog and became quite friendly with it,
feeding it her unwanted tapas when the owners of Noche Azul weren’t watching
and scratching it behind the ear as it lay asleep on the stone steps of the
church.

It
turned out to be a week for making new friends as her horoscope in the
international edition of the
Daily Express
that somebody had left in the
bar had told her it was going to be. For on the Friday of that week the Mayor,
Don Paco, a man of at least seventy, wearing the strongest spectacles she’d
ever seen, consisting of what appeared to be a pair of zoom lenses held in a
thick black plastic frame on his head, came to see her in Noche Azul where she
was having her morning coffee. He asked her to accompany him to the terrace of
the villagers’ bar, which as far as she could tell didn’t have a name or indeed
any furniture, being a big empty tiled room; its only decoration was a big photo
display provided by the manufacturer of all the various ice creams that the bar
didn’t stock.

Sue and
Don Paco sat outside under a fig tree, on faded orange plastic stacking chairs
placed at a wonky old green-baize card table. The local guy who ran the bar
brought them coffees and for the Mayor a giant brandy in a fish bowl. She
recalled what Laurence said about the cost of booze in these parts: ‘At these
prices you can’t afford not to be drunk!’ Except the Spanish never ever seemed
to get drunk, not in the fighting, spewing, brawling, boasting British way that
she was used to from Saturday nights in Bolton and every night on the costa.

Don
Paco obviously had something serious to say. ‘Here it comes,’ she thought. ‘Run
out of town on a rail.’

But
instead he spoke to her most formally. ‘Senorita Sue, I have heard from Antonio
the truck driver that you did a little favour for him in return for a ride up
here. I was wondering whether it would be possible, if you could perhaps do
something similar for me. What it is, if I could put … mi pajaro, between
your breasts which are coated with soap and you could squeeze them together,
until well, you know what follows on from that. Perhaps once a week might be
suitable? I would provide my own soap.

‘Hmm
…’ She thought about it. ‘Weekly soapy tit wank. That’ll cost you, Mr Mayor.’

‘So be
it, nothing is free in this life, we must pay in the end for everything. I had
some little money set aside to buy an electric corn husker this autumn, but a
soapy tit wank sounds like it would be better value.’

A few
days later another old farmer called Ramon asked her to sit under the fig tree
with him. ‘Senorita Sue, I have a little money, it was intended for my wife’s
operation but you know she will die soon anyway, so…’

So that
was a bi-weekly, non-penetrative butt fuck that he was after. Then there was an
armpit wank for the bank manager, another soapy tit wank for the baker, hand
jobs for innumerable old campasinos and ten thousand pesetas from the priest to
let him watch her taking a piss in the orange groves.

Pretty
soon she had quite a business going. The average age of her clients was
seventy-two and all of them were old Spanish men from the village or the
surrounding campo. Laurence told her that the younger men in the village either
had girlfriends who let them have sex with them (though it was understood that
this also meant marriage) or they visited the something like thirty brothels
that lined the main roads between the village and the big city of Granada.
These brothels were shabby breezeblock, tin-roofed buildings, always seemingly
with a single dusty car parked outside, their neon signs hung dead in the
daylight spelling out ‘Club Paradiso’ and ‘Club Splendido’. They were staffed,
so it was said, by beautiful Argentinian girls.

Sue did
not feel any guilt about what she was doing, she was providing a much-needed
service at a reasonable price. She was aware that generally peasants did not
have a very enlightened attitude to whores, yet when she passed them in the
streets and lanes the old men would greet her in a courtly fashion even when
they’d had their dick squeezed between her buttocks half an hour before, and
even more surprisingly their wives were chatty and friendly when Sue
encountered them in the village shop or when they queued at the bread van that
came twice a day.

Sitting
in Laurence’s courtyard with Miriam, Nige, Frank, Kirsten and Baz and the
remains of a zarzuela de mariscos, Sue mentioned she was surprised that she
hadn’t encountered any opprobrium from the Spanish for her activities.
Laurence, as always, reckoned he had an explanation and because they were all
too dozy and drunk to stop him he was able to launch into one of his lectures. ‘What
you have to remember is that for nearly a thousand years, from 711, Andalucia
was the most tolerant, literate, liberal, progressive place on the planet.
Under the rule of the Moors it led the world in science, mathematics, poetry,
gardening even. Jews, Christians, any religions were tolerated and encouraged
to play a full part in society. Then after that black year, after 1492, after
the so-called restoration when the Moors were driven out by Ferdinand and
Isabella, it was the most repressive, intolerant, backwards looking and led the
world maybe in torture techniques.’ Then he started to veer off his original
course. ‘Typical, of course, that Torquemada was a convert, a Jew who became a
persecutor of the Jews. Why does that happen so often, that converts become so
much more fanatical than those born to the faith?’