SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (3 page)

Sue let
him go on, she thought what a good thing it was that she was so in tune with
other people’s feelings that she couldn’t find it in herself to show him up by
letting all the others know what cock he was talking. She had a hard job
holding herself in because it made her angry and sad at the same time, all this
babble about kings and queens and caliphs and not one word, not one bloody word
had he mentioned about angels! When everybody knew that until 1492 a quarter of
the population of ancient Andalucia had been proved to be angels. There were
loads of books about it:
The Andalusian Prophecy, White Wings Over Spain,
The Celestial Costa Connection.
It was angels that had built the Alhambra,
the signs were everywhere if you knew where to look, and every serious
historian knew that the Inquisition had largely been aimed at destroying the
power of angels.

The
summer was the time for excursions and one Saturday a whole gang of them got in
a flotilla of cars and drove away, the dogs saw them off, barking and nipping
each other. They were all going to the fiesta in Lanjaron, which was the
biggest fiesta in the whole valley. This spa town in the Alpujarras was where
all the area’s mineral water came from. Massive petrol-tanker type trucks full
of fizzy water ground up and down the narrow mountain roads, refusing ever to
slow down or give way, forcing other drivers close to, and sometimes over, the
crumbling edge in a b-cal carbonated version of the
Wages of Fear.

For
years the Lanjaron fiesta had been one that glorified the contrasting
characteristics of ‘Fire and Water’ but even by Spanish standards there had
been a few too many terrible burnings, so it had been remade as .a fiesta that
celebrated the different qualities of ‘Ham and Water’ thus the damage incurred
now, though severe, was primarily psychological. From early on the Saturday of
the fiesta there was a parade of people dressed in aquatic costumes, scuba
gear, sailors, mermaids, while others threw buckets of water down from their
balconies and the fire department went around soaking celebrants with their
hoses. The locals would walk up to a tourist with a big smile then throw a bowl
of water in their face. In no time at all Sue’s T-shirt was soaked to
transparency; naked but not naked, she felt tremendously sexy and would have
gone to the toilets to bring herself off if they hadn’t been too busy and
crowded.

The
real horror though began after 1 p.m. Those in the know crowded into the bars
which then locked their doors, leaving those outside trapped and running from
doorway to doorway as they were repeatedly doused. At first they found it
amusing but after a while the constant assault began to wear them down. The
gang Sue was with laughed manically as a couple of Dutch tourists beat on the
glass doors of the bar they were in while behind them a fire truck directed its
hoses onto their backs, till they sank to the flooded ground and curled into a
sodden ball, their tears adding to the pool in which they lay. Surreptitiously
Sue rubbed herself against a corner of the bar as the Dutch couple were spun
and battered to the ground by the gushing hoses of the firemen. She realised
she needed a boyfriend, it was all very well being non-penetratively shagged up
the arse by eighty-year-olds but she needed some cock of her own age.

As
usual her own personal angel — who a psychic healer in Totnes had told her was
a Choctaw Indian by the name of ‘Lightning Dog’ who’d been killed at the Battle
of Bull Run — must have been listening, for on the Tuesday of the next week
there was a new car in the village. By now Sue knew everybody’s vehicle. Nige’s
beat-up old locally made Santana Landrover, Baz’s Japanese pick-up truck,
Laurence’s ancient Mini still on British plates, the little white vans with
seats in the back that all the local old boys had. The only cars that came and
went were the hire cars, bright little hatchbacks rented by the tourists who
leased for a couple of weeks the few villas that were available to let for the
summer.

This
big new silver Opel Omega with Madrid number plates stood out, just as the big
dog had when it had come to the valley. When Sue first saw it, the car was
parked outside the house of an old English guy called Max. She had met him once
when he had come out for a weekend. He was a retired engineer who seemed to
talk about nothing except the kinds of toast he had eaten throughout his long,
long life. Laurence said he came for the entire summer once he had got his
mother settled in a rest home in Coventry. The door of the house was open and a
young man of her own age came out, shading his eyes against the bright
sunlight. He took an old leather suitcase out of the car’s boot and was hauling
it into the house when he saw Sue looking at him.

‘Awright?’
he said to her.

‘Awright’
she replied. He was English and Northern, home-grown cock.

His
name was Tony and he was from the flat brown alluvial Lancashire farm country
inland from Blackpool Bay. Home-grown, organic, free-range cock.

They
started fucking that night.

Sue
introduced Tony to the crowd in Noche Azul the next lunchtime. Of course they
already knew he was there.

‘So,’
said Nige, ‘you’re staying at Max’s place — when will he be coming out to join
us?’

‘Oh he
won’t be,’ said Tony. ‘Not this year. He decided to stay at home … for the
cricket.’

‘Oh
shame,’ said Janet.

‘I’m a
sort of nephew of his.. He gave me the keys to his house; he wanted me to enjoy
it even if he couldn’t.’

‘Will
you be staying long?’ asked Miriam.

‘I’m
not sure, Miriam. I’m on the look-out for opportunities, perhaps here or on
the coast, so I thought I’d chill for a bit, see what happens.’

‘Did he
sort of give you his watch as well?’ drawled Laurence.

‘Did he
give you his watch? A Tag Heurer that his firm gave him after thirty years’
indentured slavery, you … you’re wearing it.’

Tony
looked at the watch. ‘Yeah, like I said he’s me favourite sort of uncle. He
likes to give me things.’

‘That’s
nice,’ said Laurence.

Sue had
been around dangerous men all her life, she knew this about them that they didn’t
bluster and shout, they didn’t issue funny threats like they did on the telly.
They didn’t say through gritted-together teeth: ‘If you do that again I’ll cut
your bollocks
off
and nail them to the letter box as a draught excluder!’
It was not the way of the violent to indulge in complex verbal linguistic
display. If they could indulge in complex verbal linguistic display they
probably wouldn’t be violent in the first place. And they didn’t issue warnings
like the weather forecast either; they didn’t say, ‘I’ll only tell you once,’
or ‘I’m warning you…’ or ‘I’m giving you one more chance but, I swear, if you
screw up again I’ll …’ They just did you right there and then with no prior
notice and no right of appeal. The only warning you might get is that sometimes
the situation they were in, like for instance it being their first day in a new
town, led them, occasionally, once in a while, to consider their actions. Sue
could see that Tony was thinking of doing Laurence right there and then with no
prior notice and she could also see that Laurence knew he was in danger of
being done and yet, strangely, Laurence didn’t seem frightened and he didn’t
seem bothered either. The old pouf went up in her estimation. Still, following
that, he stopped needling Tony and the danger passed.

Tony
never bothered much with the Noche Azul crowd after the first few days; in the
early weeks of June he spent a lot of time driving backwards and forwards to
the coast, in the big silver car. When she didn’t have a client Sue would go
with him and sometimes she would bring The Dog as well. It would lie panting on
the black leather of the back seat until they arrived in Malaga or Marbella or
Nerja. Then while Tony went off to have his meetings Sue and The Dog would go
for long walks. At first she felt uneasy being back on the coast but having The
Dog with her gave her courage. A couple of times she did see people who might
wish to do her harm but they never got close enough to recognise her; also, she
realised, her appearance had changed since she had been in the village. Her
hair had grown longer, her skin was darker from the time she had spent in the
campo and the muscles of her arms were a lot firmer from all the wanking that
she was doing.

One
lunchtime back in the village towards the start of July an amazing thing happened:
the bar went quiet. Sue looked up from her newspaper to see in the doorway an
officer of the Guardia Civil. The Guardia, Franco’s semi-military rural police
were hated up here. During the civil war the village had been an anarchist
stronghold and the Guardia had been in charge of reprisals when the republic
was lost. They had shot seventeen of the village boys along the cemetery wall
and the village had not forgotten. The officer strode up to the bar and started
asking Armando something, she couldn’t quite hear what but it seemed to be
something to do with a car from Madrid. Getting nothing out of the sullen bar
owner the policeman soon turned and left, climbing back into his Nissan Patrol
and gunning it back down the mountain. A few days after that, Sue was taking a
pee in the campo, the padre a few metres away furiously pulling himself off
behind an ancient gnarled olive tree, when she heard a sudden ‘Whooph!’ At
first she thought it was the priest coming, some of those old campo boys she
had found went off like hand grenades. Then turning the other way she saw in a
distant ravine that a car had exploded and was now on fire, it looked like a
silver Opel Omega with Madrid plates.

Tony
said his car had been stolen while he was in Almunecar, but anyway he only
needed one more trip to the coast. He persuaded Sue to borrow Laurence’s Mini
for this trip south though Laurence lent it grudgingly.

In the
end she wasn’t able to go with him and Laurence went on and on saying that he’d
never get his poxy Mini back. But Tony did return. When he got back, after a
few days, he told Sue what his plan was. ‘See all the cocaine in dis country
comes in through Galicia, they’ve got great contact with South America for
obvious reasons, funny it’s the women who control the trade as well, once the
Guardia put all their husbands in jail. The dope, the blow, that comes through
here, the south of Spain, after all it’s only half an hour from Algeciras to
Africa by fast launch. Scag though, heroin, they ain’t got any of that, cos they
ain’t got any contacts with Turkey, Afghanistan, any of them places. Except now
on the costa there’s Russians and they’re looking to shift what they know,
scag, up here into the valleys and the mountains. Now I have an opportunity to
get a load at good prices and I reckon the kids up here would take to heroin
real well.’

Sue had
a question. ‘Have you got the money to do it?’

‘I got
some, that’s why I’m talking to you, though. I need more, as much as I can get.’

‘You’re
not worried about the locals?’

‘They’re
fucking divvies these people,’ said Tony. ‘They deserve to get fucking took. We
know that they don’t like the Guardia, so what the fuck are they going to do
about it? Even if they figure it’s me that’s dealing the gear. So you in or
what?’

Sue
gave him the money that she had saved up, plus she stole a watch from Laurence.
A Rolex with a gold strap that Tony got a thousand dollars for in Almunecar. He
wouldn’t miss it, a person could only wear one watch at a time after all (apart
from her DJ boyfriend who’d worn six) and she’d never seen him wearing this one
so he deserved to lose it really when you thought about it.

Pretty
soon all over the valley the Spanish kids were doing heroin. With drink they
had been brought up to understand its properties and its dangers but with scag
there was no bargain that could be made, no truce. Scag would not talk to the
hostage negotiator. The boy in the bakery who’d once been chatty and smiling
now stood for hours at a time, white-faced and spotty, with his arms buried up
to the elbows in a bowl of dough. In the next village the bar owner had to lock
the doors to keep out a rampaging gang, and in the orange groves a young boy
was found shot dead with his father’s hunting rifle.

Tony
gave Sue her savings back plus a big bonus after six weeks and then he went
into Granada and bought a convertible BMW from the big dealership on the ring
road.

One
morning in July before the sun had begun to scour the white-painted alleys, Sue
and Nige were walking back from Anna’s shop, they each had a carrier bag in
both hands. It had taken them an hour and a half to buy their groceries, which
was pretty good going given the lethargic pace of things during the hot months.
As Nige talked her two dogs came running round the corner, tongues lolling from
their mouths, pursued a few seconds later by a cloud of the other hounds with
The Dog, at the centre of things, seeming to be directing operations. The whole
furry storm shot past and disappeared down Calle Iglesias on their way to the
church. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen my dogs in three days,’ said Nige. ‘That
big one seems to have taken over the pack with its big city sophisticated ways.

‘Nobody’s
taken it in though,’ said Sue.

‘No,
and they won’t now, it’s too wild and flea-bitten.’

‘So what’ll
happen to it?’