The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (8 page)

‘Chloë’s full of surprises, isn’t she,’ he commented, nodding down the track from where I could hear the sound of an engine gunning along in first gear. ‘Better watch out or she’ll be wanting that car for herself.’

I stopped and squinted in the direction of the sound. The Land-Rover burst into view, with Chloë peering anxiously over the top of the wheel. Cathy, I later discovered, had been a bit surprised when my daughter hopped onto the front seat and announced she was going to drive them up to the house, but thought she probably knew what she was up to. Cathy is one of those old-school feminists who would rather bite her tongue in two and swallow the other half than discourage a girl from showing a bit of initiative. Her son Juanito was simply impressed.

I panicked. The gate halfway up the hill was shut and Chloë wouldn’t have the slightest clue about the
complicated
parking manoeuvre required, and would either slam into the horizontal pole or slide off the terraces. I dropped the alfalfa and raced to get there first. Chloë hardly noticed me holding the fence open as she gunned past, eyes glued to the track ahead, teeth set in grim determination. At the
house Cathy and Juanito were climbing out of the car
looking
slightly aquiver. Chloë was still sitting in the driving seat, the engine running, her foot hard down on the brake pedal. I think she was just getting to grips with the
enormity
of what she had done.

‘Dad, the engine’s playing up again, and every time I take my foot off the pedal the car rolls backwards… what shall I do?’

I helped her sort out the problems and she clambered unsteadily out. ‘I think I might have had enough driving for now,’ she whispered, handing me the keys.

G
UESTS
W
ITHOUT
P
APERS

U
NLIKE MY SHEEP-SHEARING PARTNER
, José Guerrero, who makes his living travelling from flock to flock throughout the Alpujarras, my becoming a writer means that I can, these days, afford to be choosy about the work I take on. I’d hate to give up shearing entirely, and if a flock or its farmer or its patch of mountain appeals I’ll be off like a shot, but it must be said there is some pleasure in saying no to jobs you know will be nothing but drudgery. Which made it all the odder that there I was hauling myself out of the connubial bed at the crack of dawn to help José shear Paco López’s sheep.

Paco López is a notorious drunk who lives on a ramshackle farm high up in the Ilex forest above the Trevélez river valley. Frequently he would disappear for days,
abandoning
his sheep to whatever grazing they could find beneath the holm-oaks, and leaving them prey to the packs of wild
dogs that are such a disagreeable feature of the Spanish countryside. It had been almost two years since José and I had last sheared his flock and I remembered that we had made a solemn pact never, ever, to accept another job from him again.

‘Remind me just once more why we’re doing this,’ I bleated as we hurtled round the mountain bends in José’s little tin van, deafened by the Led Zeppelin tape that he insisted on playing at full volume through his tinny radio speakers.

‘
Parné, pasta, dinero
!’ José shouted with a bristly grin. ‘I need the money and I can’t do it on my own! Also, it’ll help you shake off those disgraceful rolls of flab! All that sitting on your arse with a pen in your mouth is doing you no good, Cristóbal.’

I supposed he had a point, and it is always hard to turn down work with José, who in spite of – or, perhaps, because of – his recent battle with cancer, remains one of the most cheerful and energetic people I have ever met. In the event, however, the job was worse than either of us could have anticipated. The past months had weighed heavily on poor Paco, who, ground down by the loneliness and the
harshness
of a mountain shepherd’s life, had been hitting the bottle hard. He had that pinched and distracted look of the serious imbiber, coupled with an evident querulousness about money. His sheep were no bundles of fun, either. They were bonier and thinner-skinned than ever and each one hosted a thriving colony of parasitical arachnids (ticks have eight legs so don’t qualify as insects).

We pitched in to the job with all the good humour we could muster, but it was a stretch even for José’s natural cheer. The air in Paco’s asbestos-roofed shed was baking,
and stagnant with the putrid stench of dung, and the ticks were making it almost impossible to get the wool off. Each stroke of the clippers left a livid trail of blood as it hacked through thirty or forty engorged bodies, and the cutters kept sticking, so we had to push and pull and tug and jab, while taking as much care as we could of the sheep’s protruding bones and thin skin. Time and again we nearly gave up, took down the machinery and went home. But something kept us going – perhaps the money, perhaps some imbued work ethic, or maybe just sympathy for a shepherd and his sheep. So we stuck it out and at last our constancy was rewarded. The end of the job was in sight.

Paco didn’t seem to share our relief, though, and was moving morosely around the flock, counting anxiously under his breath, as he appeared from the pen with another creature for me to shear. I grabbed hold of it, flexed my shearing arm ready to make the first blow and then stopped. ‘Bloody hell! Paco,’ I called above the
buzzing
of my partner’s shears, ‘I can’t shear this one. Take it away!’

‘Why, what’s the matter with it?’ he muttered,

‘It’s a goat, man. I’m not going to shear your goat!’

Paco looked – and there is no other word here – sheepish, then rallied. ‘No, Cristóbal, that’s no goat,’ he insisted, fixing me with a bloodshot look. ‘That’s a sheep.’

It wasn’t, of course. Goats
can
look a bit like sheep and some even have a certain ovine demeanour, a sheepish gait that at a distance – say, peering from one mountainside across to another – can lead to confusion. But there was no confusion at all about the particular specimen that was
standing right before me. This wasn’t just your run-of-
the-mill
, undistinguished goat; it was a goat’s goat, with horns and a beard and all.

Paco reluctantly led the goat away and returned with another animal.

‘Paco, what the hell are you up to? I’m not shearing that!’

‘Why not?’ asked Paco sulkily. ‘It’s a sheep, isn’t it? Even you’ve got to admit that.’

‘Yes, it is a sheep, Paco – but it hasn’t a stitch of wool on it. I sheared this one half an hour ago!’ We examined the naked sheep, with trail marks from the shears on its flanks, standing forlornly in front of me, and I cast a glance at José, who had let his last sheep wander off and was rocking helpless with laughter. ‘It’s the numbers, Cristóbal,’ he gasped. ‘Haven’t you been counting?’

Of course: once you get beyond two-hundred-and-fifty sheep the price per animal goes down by a small
percentage
which has quite a significant effect on the whole day’s pay. One or two short and the shepherd misses out on the price drop, while one or two over means that the shearers take the hit. It might seem a rough way to cost things, but that’s how it’s always been. Astute shepherds often borrow extra sheep to take them over the threshold, but poor Paco, who was almost a dozen sheep short of a discount, probably hadn’t a clue that he’d lost so many of his charges until he brought them out for shearing.

In fairness, it is tricky to know where you are, numerically speaking, with sheep. Cows are easy to count, but not so sheep. With all that wool you get an impression of a numberless mass, and then, although I hesitate to say this within earshot of the animal, they are somewhat…
dispensable. If you have a big flock you can lose half a dozen without even knowing it. Sheep are very prone to dying of one thing or another –
The Diseases of Sheep
is by some way the thickest book in our library – as well as getting lost or straying into another flock. Of course, the converse is also true, and if you’re lucky you may actually benefit from strays who unwittingly – and unwitting is the way of sheep – swell the numbers of your flock. Or you may get prodigal sheep that return to the flock: a ewe may lamb alone out on the hill somewhere, and trot back to the flock months later with her lamb in tow. All of which is to say that counting sheep is far from being an exact science.

I placed my shears back on the board and turned to face Paco. ‘Look, let’s split the difference,’ I said. I might on another day have offered the full discount, but the heat and exhaustion and the farce of the goats and shorn sheep had got to me. And, for this day, at least, I had had more than enough.

Normally, at the end of a run of shearing, you can throw yourself down in the pile of wool and there subside limp and drained, contemplating a job well done. But we couldn’t do that here, not in the tick-infested wool we had just shorn, so instead we had to sit on a stone in the hot evening sun. Paco begrudgingly handed each of us a tin of warm beer, which we sipped while watching him count, with trembling hands, the notes he owed us.

With a beer inside us, I revived enough to dismantle the machinery and pack up, while José cleaned off the combs and cutters and set up the grinding wheel. At which moment a tough, dapper little man with short grey hair appeared panting through the woods, followed by a couple
of beautiful and very woolly Pyrenean mountain dogs. ‘Are you… the shearers?’ he gasped, wiping his face with a crisp, white cloth.

I could see what was coming. Goats, shorn sheep, dogs: it was becoming a theme of the day.

‘Yes,’ we said noncommittally.

‘I… I’m… so glad I caught you,’ he continued, still
panting
. ‘Could you… take the wool off these… dogs for me?’  

‘I’m sorry,’ said José, ‘but we’ve taken down all the gear and…’

‘But look here, I’ve just climbed all the way up here from the village to get these dogs sheared…’

‘We don’t do dogs,’ I said matter-of-factly.

‘What do you mean, you don’t do dogs?’ He was getting heated and a little aggressive. ‘You’re the shearers, aren’t you? These dogs need shearing and I’ve just busted a gut getting all the way up here. How dare you tell me you don’t do dogs!’

José had his head in his box, packing his gear.

‘Look, it’s simple,’ I repeated. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble but it’s hardly any fault of ours and, as I said, we don’t do dogs. This gear isn’t designed for…’

‘Hey, you,’ he snarled, looking at me with narrowed eyes. ‘You’re not one of us. Where are you from? What are you doing here?’

‘I’m from England but I live here,’ I answered blithely, unscrewing the head of my machine.

‘Oh, so you’re one of those bloody foreigners then, are you?’

‘Well,’ I said brightly, ‘I’ve lived here for a long time but I wasn’t born here so I guess that makes me a foreigner, but my daughter was born here so she’s a native…’

‘You foreigners – you come here and pollute our culture – what you ought to be doing is do your job then fuck off back where you came from. We don’t need you here taking the homes and land away from honest farmers!’

This was irresistible and I leapt gleefully into the fray. ‘Pollute your culture? If you know anything about your culture at all, you’d know it’s been enriched by foreigners for centuries and would be a shrivelled and half-arsed thing without them.’

Our new friend’s eyes nearly burst out of their sockets at this, and he seemed almost to hop with rage. He turned towards José, who kept his head down, bent over the
sharpening
wheel. ‘Who is this… this… person?’ he spluttered.

‘Oh,’ said José, still intent upon the fast spinning wheel. ‘I shear with him, he’s a friend of mine.’

The little man stood between us, breathing deeply,
looking
from me, sitting in the sun cradling my shears, to José crouched over the grinding wheel. Finally he calmed down a bit and said with just a touch of a whine: ‘Look, I really need to get these dogs clipped, and…’

‘I already said’ – I interrupted – ‘we don’t do dogs.’

‘I’m not talking to you!’ he snapped.

‘I’m sorry,’ said José standing up and stretching. ‘But the foreigner’s the boss. I do what he tells me, and it looks like he doesn’t want us to shear your dogs.’ He smiled
pleasantly
, trying to bring the argument down a gear.

‘Right,’ snarled the little man as he thumped back down the track into the woods. ‘I’ll not forget this. You’ll be
hearing
from me.’ And, so saying, he disappeared amongst the trees.

‘He was a laugh, wasn’t he?’ I said to José, as we watched him out of sight.

 ‘No, he wasn’t – he was serious. I know that man a little bit, and I certainly know the type. He’s one of those
hijo de puta
ham barons from Trevélez. People like that expect to get what they want; and when they don’t get it, they get nasty.’

‘Lord, I thought he was just messing about…’

‘No, not a bit of it; that’s the way those people are. Up here, they run things. They do exactly as they like and they don’t let people stand in their way, especially not foreigners. They’re the bastards who tip their used salt into the river instead of loading it up and taking it down to the sea.’

‘Well, a bit of salt in the water’s not too much of a threat. I’m not going to be shaking in my boots about that.’

‘I would be – they tip dozens of tons in, and the water of the Trevélez River is high in salts anyway. My father lost a whole orchard of apricot trees because these bastards tipped their waste salt into the river. A small trick like that could lay your farm to waste.’

All in all, it hadn’t been the best of days.

The heat of July grew more and more intense, the short nights barely giving respite to the burning air, as one long stultifying day rolled into another. July and August are the hardest months to bear in the Alpujarras, as the swelling heat is given voice by the ceaseless screaming of the cicadas, and even the smallest task drains you of all your energy. It’s a time when all right-minded people cave in after lunch and take a long, deep siesta.