The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (24 page)

‘Shall I take this one down to the fire?’ She reached for the completed spit.

‘No! Don’t touch that, it’s hot…!’

But too late: Ana had picked it up, yelped and dropped it. As it hit the ground it returned with a clatter to its earlier state as two separate pieces of iron.

‘Jeezus-Christ!!
Now
look what you’ve done,’ I shouted.

She gave me a withering look and flounced off to join the swelling multitude.

After another half-hour of cussing and swearing I decided to wire the wretched rods together. By the time I got down to the valley, the guests were all there, passing round the very last of the salads. They had cooked flatbread on the stones of the fire and with this they had polished off
the bucketfuls of Middle Eastern delicacies that we had prepared for them.

The only person who was hungry now was me. I felt justifiably a little piqued; it was, after all, my birthday and, while I was buggering about with the welder, I had missed the music and the puppetry and every last leaf and grain of the side dishes. To make matters worse, everyone was singing the praises of a fabulous dish of ‘sushi’ – a
delicately
spiced roll of mushed avocado and pickled vegetables rolled up in seaweed and sliced – that the crudo-vegans had brought. In their generosity they had saved me a few delicious mouthfuls, fending off hungry hordes to do so. I swallowed them in the worst possible grace.

It took a long time to cook the lambs, but, as the fragrance of the roasting meat mingled with the night air and I sipped from a bottle of sparkling Barranco Oscuro cava, I began to relax and luxuriate in the atmosphere of growing bonhomie. Most of the guests had gone, leaving my family, some guitar-playing friends and a few Spanish carnivores to group around the warmth of the fire. The moon rose over the Serreta and a pale mist from the river swirled amongst the tamarisks and the rocks as we sat murmuring and masticating into the night.

S
TEPS AND
W
ATERFALLS

T
HESE DAYS CHLOË NO LONGER
spends Saturday nights at home involved in edifying conversation with her parents. She goes to town, and often ends up staying the night there, with one of her coterie of schoolfriends. Town is where the action happens, and we have to drive her to and fro ever more frequently. Being unsure as to the exact nature of the ‘action’, and
seeking
to be the responsible parent, I asked her one evening, as we headed towards Órgiva, ‘Just what exactly is it that you and your friends do in town on a Saturday night?’

‘Oh nothing really…’ said Chloë. A silence while I mulled over this surprising information. She had told me that the previous weekend they had not gone to bed until three in the morning.

‘But you must do
something,
surely?’ I prompted. ‘I mean, you can’t spin nothing out till three a.m., can you?’

‘No, I suppose not.’ Chloë was playing with the buttons on her accursed mobile phone.

‘Then what?’ I continued my probe.

‘What
what?’

‘What do you do?’

‘Well, we… hang out…’

‘Where do you hang out?’  

A brief hiatus as she performed some tricky digital manoeuvre. ‘Just now our place is on the
peldaño
– the steps – of the bank.’  

‘Which one?’  

‘Banco del Espiritu Santo – up the Plaza. But we’re hoping to move somewhere closer to the centre.’

It all started to become clear. It was a phenomenon I had observed many times in Órgiva. As day turns to evening, the steps of the various shops and banks become occupied by gangs of teenage girls, who chew
pipas
– sunflower seeds – and gaze with regal detachment upon the world. The incumbents of each step receive visitors, mainly testosterone-sodden youths with space-monster haircuts and 49cc mopeds with the silencers removed. At times other gangs, or
pandillas
as they are called,
temporarily
forsake their own pitch to come and pay court to a rival, and then the pavement becomes impassable, blocked by the multitude of scantily clad girls, the shoal of
49ers
nudging the kerb, and the growing mounds of ejaculated
pipa
shells.  

Although I had registered this scene, I had never
imagined
it as being a part of Chloë’s life. It had all seemed a rather desperate business: the poor kids huddled in shop doorways in all weather, watching life – or what passes for life in a one-horse town like Órgiva – go by.

‘So where are you thinking of moving to?’ I continued my line of enquiry.

‘We’re hoping to get the shoe shop by the dentist, although I know that Claudia and her friends are after it, too. Mari and Lourdes are moving on. They’ve got one of the best
peldaños
of all – the driving school on the other side of the traffic lights. From there it’s only one step to the top place in town, the
peldaño de la chuchería,
the sweetshop steps.’

‘So how is it you all go moving round like this? Surely if one group has the best
peldaño
, then they’re not going to want to give it up to anybody else.’

Chloë gave me a withering look. ‘Oh, Dad, you don’t understand anything…’

‘Perhaps not, but I’d very much like to. I’m intrigued.’

‘Sandra and her friends – you know, the ones who hang out now on the
peldaño de la chuchería
– well they’re nearly old enough to be allowed into the
discoteca.’

‘So what do you do all night when you’re hanging out on a
peldaño?’
I wasn’t going to give up…

‘Charlamos
– we chat about stuff…’

‘What stuff?’

‘Oh, just stuff. You know… Hey, let’s play
adivinanzas…’

So we played
adivinanzas
– a guessing game in rhyme – for the rest of the journey. I had been given all the
information
I was going to get.

Thinking about that conversation on the way back to the farm, I began to see the business of the steps a little more from Chloë’s perspective. What had appeared to me
a dismal waste of time, sitting about with nothing to do and nowhere to go, was looking at things with blinkered English eyes, entirely forgetting that Spain has an outdoor and gregarious culture. The nights are usually warm,
everyone’s
up late and, in adult life, you’re expected to drift around the local bars together, endlessly joining and
rejoining
your friends. Hanging out in doorways and on steps with a few bags of sunflower seeds is just the way that a young Spanish teenager starts off.

Of course, I reflected, there are worries that the bags of
pipas
might one day get substituted for stronger substances, which are pretty rife even in the mountain villages of the Alpujarras. But there was no sign that any of Chloë’s crew were going off those particular rails. And, being a small town, there’s always someone looking out for you; it would be a reckless teenager who tried to give Chloë trouble, knowing that Manolo and his friends were in town. All in all, it seemed a definite improvement on the more intense and debauched teenage party scene in England. And it was certainly an improvement on my own upbringing. Packed off to boarding school on the first day I could tie my own shoelaces, I was confined to a lonely existence in the holidays, with no friends within a thirty-mile radius of my home. It was only by the merest stroke of luck that I managed to get a leg up into the business of mating.

Of course, there would be more worries ahead as Chloë grew older and hanging out on the
peldaños
gave way to
discotecas
– and a whole set of new baggage. But, right now, the
peldaños
seemed comfortingly benign and, in their way, they seemed a peculiarly graphic illustration of the stages of independent life. First the steps, then the discos, then the bars.

 And then?

It dawned upon me that there was another
peldaño,
oddly close in spirit to the young teenage phenomenon. At the entrance and exit of every small town and village in Spain, you will see sitting on a bench a gaggle of old men with their sticks and hats. There they sit all morning, discussing the local issues of the day and watching the world as it passes. At lunchtime they rise slowly to their three feet and totter home. They sleep away the hot hours of the afternoon and, as the evening starts to cool, they return and remain there through the freshening hours of the night.

For the seventeen years I have lived in Spain, I have viewed these old folks with a certain detachment: a thing inconceivably far away in time and of no concern to me. But it seemed to me, as I reflected on the sweetshop steps and
discotecas
and benches, that the business of ageing is not a continuous process, like a river flowing steadily down to the sea. It’s more a succession of waterfalls, some
cataclysmic
, some almost inconsequential, with peaceful stretches of flat water in between.

Not long ago I felt the pull of one of those falls, easing me ever downwards towards the latter
peldaños
of life. The plan for the day – and it was a hot summer day – had been for Ana, myself, Chloë and her cousin Lauren, who was over from London, to drive off to Granada and there improve our understanding of the universe by visiting the Parque de las Ciencias, a sort of high-class theme park devoted to the wonders of science. This could have been pretty exciting – at my stage in life, this is one of the few sorts of theme park you can get enthusiastic about – had the excursion not inexorably degenerated into a day-long shopping trip. I played along as best I could, but it soon became impossible
to hide my dejection at being dragged along upon this most fatuous and detestable of human activities.

At some stage my increasing moroseness became
intolerable
to my shopping companions, and I was given a dispensation to slip off and sit in a bar. I found the right sort of bar in a shady corner near the Paseo del Salón, and sat down outside with a coffee. I had just managed to get my newspaper properly folded for a read when a doddery old boy shuffled in and asked if he might sit in the only remaining chair, which was next to mine. He was one of those urban Andalusians who wear a grey three-piece suit and matching
cordobés
hat even on the most blistering-hot summer day, and he brandished an elegant wild olivewood cane. ‘You’re most welcome,’ I said, with the
patronising
smile one dishes out to the extremely aged, and then returned to my paper.

After a certain amount of huffing and puffing, he leaned over to me and announced, in the way that such people will, ‘I’m ninety-five years old, you know.’

I looked at him critically for a moment, then said, in order to make him feel better about things, ‘Well I never would have believed it; you’re looking good, though.’

He didn’t look too good, as a matter of fact. He was pudgy about the face and there wasn’t a lot of hair on the top of his head; there was a wart on the side of his nose, and he wheezed a bit. But then, I suppose, at ninety-five – and here was a person who, if memory serves, would have been around not long after the second Carlist war – you’re lucky to be here at all. ‘Oh, I do what I can to keep myself going,’ he informed me.

By now I realised that I wasn’t going to get any more reading done, so I stuffed the newspaper back into my bag
and eased my chair round so I was half-facing him. He peered at me with a quizzical look.

‘You’re not one of us, are you? I can tell from your accent. Where are you from?’

‘I’m English,’ I replied.

‘Oh,’ he said, nodding his head and peering at me. ‘Retired out here, have you?’  

That hit me a bit in one of the places where it hurts, but I decided to humour the old fool.  

‘Well, yes, in a sense I have, I suppose. Although I seem to do more work now than…’  

‘Your wife still alive?’ the crap-noddled old boggart
interrupted
.

‘Well, she certainly was when I last saw her,’ I replied, getting a bit cross now.  

‘Got a family, have you, then?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact I have,’ I said testily. ‘I have a fourteen-year-old daughter.’  

At this he drew back in astonishment and stared hard at me. I could see him mentally subtracting fourteen from ninety-five and coming up with the figure of eighty-one, and wondering how the hell I could have managed at such an advanced age to get it up.  

I paid for my coffee and got up to leave.

‘It’s been very nice talking to you,’ I hissed, and hurried off to rejoin the
pandilla
of shopping womenfolk, with my ego just the tiniest bit bruised.