More Ketchup Than Salsa - Confessions of a Tenerife Barman (25 page)

‘This man say he live here,’ said the officer, glancing up.

‘I’ve never seen him before in my life,’ answered Siobhan, her eyes fixed on Pedro’s. ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about. I live here. I arrived last night and found all this stuff outside my house. I was about to throw it away. I assumed it was rubbish.’

The policeman handed the stack of papers back to Siobhan, turned to Pedro and shrugged his shoulders. He said something in Spanish and then nodded at his partner before descending the stairs and walking off. Pedro was left at the top of the stairs with his hands on his hips, staring at the closed door. He began to knock but gave up after realising that Siobhan was not going to open it. He snapped something at the girl who was waiting at the bottom of the steps. She ran up and they grabbed two bin liners each before trudging back down the stairs and walking off dejectedly.

In Mrs Tanner’s apartment a cheer went out, perhaps a little too prematurely. Pedro looked up over his shoulder to see Wayne pressing his nose against the window giving a one-fingered farewell. It was over. I felt four stone lighter, and that was even after a fistful of homemade scones and chocolate biscuits.

In the bar that night, Joy was in party mood. The bad-tempered rants of some of our customers couldn’t shake her, nor could the protestations of Freidhelm who stabbed at his watch with a finger and wobbled his jowls disapprovingly. ‘Big problem,’ he croaked, but for us the big problem had finally gone and we could get back to our intended mission of trying to run a successful Tenerife bar.

CHAPTER
TWENTY

Having a job that doesn’t differentiate between weekdays and weekends means it’s difficult to mark the passing of time. It was only when we noticed that our local cash and carry seemed to be stacking an inordinate amount of sweets and nuts did we realise that Father Christmas had booked his flight and was halfway through packing. Panic set in as it dawned on us that we had made no preparations whatsoever with only three weeks to go.

Although in Tenerife British supermarkets are almost as prevalent as British bars, the ones we ransacked in order to buy traditional festive paraphernalia had either grossly underestimated the demand for tinsel
et al
, or were having as much difficulty as us in importing it.

The only Christmas crackers we could find were small, pink and embossed with the somewhat discomforting smirks of Barbie and her plastic sidekicks. We bought them anyway in the over-ambitious hope that we may be able to use Blue Peter skills to turn them into more adult-orientated decorations.

Party poppers, tree baubles, sage and onion stuffing, chipolatas, cranberry sauce, parsnips, Christmas puddings and chocolate logs were also proving to be elusive, which meant our hastily put together Christmas menu had to be hastily disassembled again. A sprig of holly on chicken and wine was looking a distinct possibility until David remembered that our cousin, Les, was coming to spend Christmas with us, and perhaps he might be able to bring over one or two items.

So it was that a fortnight before Christmas Joy, David and I were helping to bundle Les’s six cases onto two airport trolleys.

‘A hundred and forty-five pounds excess,’ Les chunnered as a red bauble fell out of one of the holdalls and shattered on the hard floor.

There appeared to be a lot more than we had asked him to bring, and that was without the two cartons of party poppers and four boxes of crackers that had been confiscated before they left British soil.

‘They’re explosives,’ the bag checker at Gatwick airport had countered as baby-faced Les pleaded for their liberty.

Although he was just nineteen, my cousin’s aspirations had already taken him into both my own and Joy’s spheres. He too was looking for an alternative to the nine-to-five and had had limited success as a thespian, his peak of stardom being the portrayal of a sublimely camp Judas in a university production of
Jesus Christ Superstar
, before opting for a musical career in baton waving and studying to be an orchestra conductor.

Spending Christmas with us in Tenerife was just a way of avoiding the commercial expectations of UK festivities, and also provided a way of ‘going against the grain’. But it was with some disdain that he found himself humping half of Christmas over to Tenerife with him in return for three weeks of winter sunshine.

Although the offer was actually to spend a little time with his cousins helping out here and there, it wasn’t long before he was drafted into full-time employment, such was our panic.

Even with Les’s imports, the bar still badly lacked festive cheer so our first mission was to find some more decorations. The four of us packed into the Renault 5 and headed up to the mountains to find the perfect tree.

The mercury was still loitering around the 75 mark when we left El Beril, but our geographical naivety bit us like a rabid Jack Frost as soon as we reached the fringe of greenery marking the start of Teide National Park.

‘Whoa, that’s cold,’ said Les, winding the window up as an icy, pine-scented gust breezed through the car.

The view until now had been one of stark ruggedness. The road had climbed through fields of sharp, black rock, a legacy of the frequent occasions when Mother Nature had decided to redecorate the island in hues of ash black and fiery red. Petrified rivers of grey tumbled over terraced ledges. Here and there, green cacti and mountain broom punctuated the apocalyptic vision, bursting resolute from the tiniest of fissures.

Eventually the road began to level off and lone stragglers were replaced by clumps, then a whole forest of Canary Pine. Small patches of snow began to appear under rocky overhangs.

Travelling along a rare straight stretch of tarmac, the freshly painted centre lines rushed ahead. Then suddenly they disappeared as a swirling wall of cloud rolled across the mountain road. We slowed down, visibility reduced to little past the rusty red bonnet of our car. Then, as quickly as the scenery had vanished, it burst forth again as we drove out of the other side and back into brilliant, sharp sunshine.

Ahead of us, the towering pinnacle of Mount Teide soared into the sky. To its right, the jagged rim of Pico Viejo serrated the bright blue. Side by side, the pair stood ominous, threatening future cataclysms. In front of them lesser volcanic cones poked out from the black landscape like minions of destruction, softened with smooth slopes of loose ash and basalt.

We pulled to the side of the road and parked on a carpet of fallen pine needles. None of us had had the foresight to bring warm clothes. Joy was the least appropriately dressed, in shorts and T-shirt, but was the first to venture out. She hugged herself and blew into her hands. While she gathered pine cones from the side of the road, Les, David and I ventured deeper into the forest in search of a suitable tree. We all took turns at sawing and dragged it back to the car, removing a handful of branches so it would fit in the back.

We knew it was an offence to cut down trees in the national park and raced back down the mountain, hoping we wouldn’t be seen. Les and Joy, the smallest of the group lay in the back, arms draped over the kidnapped pine in a token effort to hide its presence. Fortunately, we fled unhindered by the strong arm of the park rangers, and the Smugglers Christmas tree was planted in its new home, a sturdy potato pan festooned in bright foil wrapping paper.

The bookings for Christmas dinner were going well. Our biggest dilemma was the seating arrangements. A number of unexpected single reservations had thrown a spanner into the logistics. We had come to realize that the tens of thousands of British tourists who chose to escape the slush and sleet of Britain for sunnier climes over the festive period were not all happy holidaymakers. A number of individuals were also trying to escape from the cruel reality that Christmas was a time for family get-togethers and communal merriment.

For those unfortunate few who had lost their family and were drifting towards the end of their days in joyless isolation, the last thing they needed was to be surrounded by exaggerated mirth and the painful reminders that this particular time of year can inflict. Thus, a dash to a foreign land where at least the commercial pressure and the foreboding weather are far from mind was the preferred choice for those less jubilant. Plus there was Friedhelm. His closest relations were the scantily clad staff of Cleopatras, his favourite brothel, and it was highly unlikely that they would be joining him for a turkey dinner. Seating Friedhelm was the biggest problem. His English language skills were limited to ‘big problem’ ‘big beer’ and ‘fucky-fucky’, hardly the vocabulary necessary to kindle riveting conversation with fellow festive diners.

To sit him entirely on his own would be too cruel; cracker pulling is a two-man sport after all. To sit him at another party’s table would conversely be too unfair on them. It was therefore after a lot of name-tag swapping that we arranged to squeeze all three of our lone diners on barrel tables, just close enough to each other so that introductions could be made, yet just far enough away to make room for the cold shoulder approach should it be preferred.

Despite the anxiety of cooking a five-course meal for 62 people for the very first time, I awoke on the 25th feeling strangely content, mainly because it was another break in the routine. Also, there was an element of personal pride in the fact that all of these people had decided that they wanted to spend Christmas day with us, and were willing to pay a small fortune for the privilege.

Six months previously, such demanding situations would have caused a barrel-f of consternation and acute hair loss. Now we knew that the worst that could happen is that people get hungry, poisoned or pissed off – and occasionally all three. So apprehension was not one of the overriding emotions.

David, Les and I had spent the previous evening preparing the festive fare while Joy took care of the front of house business. Because of this advance preparation, the four of us took the liberty of opening some sparkling wine at ten in the morning. In hindsight this was not such a wise idea. Instead of double-checking that everything was on track, alcoholic complacency beset us all and we all managed to overlook one important element of Christmas dinner.

Joy and David were leisurely laying out the tables with green and red serviettes, Christmas crackers and scrawled name cards. Les and I were in the kitchen arranging where to place all the items that were to be plated up, shoved in the oven and heated to scalding point.

‘Put the chipolatas, bacon and pastry cases for the cranberry sauce on the chest freezer,’ said Les, clearing away two empty bottles of champagne from the surface. Because every single work surface was occupied with pre-prepared accompaniments, we had to implement a two-tier system on the freezer so that we could fit everything on. Tupperware boxes were precariously stacked two-high, overlapping the containers below. The plates were stacked three-deep on the square, wooden table in the centre of the kitchen, waiting to be filled for the first orders. The wipe board on the fridge doors had been sectioned so we could tick off which course each table had been served. And the homemade French onion soup had started to gurgle atop one of the rings, waiting for a dash of champagne before being ladled into bowls and topped with slices of fresh crusty bread.

‘I think we’re ready,’ I said as Joy and David came to join us for one last drink before the rush.

‘Cheers,’ said David, raising a glass. ‘Happy Christmas.’

‘Happy Christmas,’ we all reiterated, and took a slurp. The kitchen looked highly organised and we still had half an hour to spare before the diners arrived. We were feeling rather pleased with ourselves.

‘Doddle,’ said Les.

‘We could have catered for a hundred,’ added David.

‘It’s all gone too smoothly,’ I said.

‘Er… just one thing,’ said Joy. Her eyes were scanning the worktops. ‘Where’s the turkey?’

Les and I looked at each other.

‘SHIT!’

I began to frantically dismantle our Tupperware terrace on the freezer. We had forgotten to take it out last night. It was still frozen.

David looked at his watch and gulped down another glass of wine. As I held the lid open Les reached into the chest freezer, leaning across the plastic containers of Brussels sprouts, mashed and roasted potatoes, sliced carrots and other foodstuffs that were now spilling onto the tiled floor.

Thankfully we had cooked and sliced the humongous bird three days earlier, but the frozen breezeblock of white poultry that Les pulled out was like a block of super-glued Lego.

‘We’ll never defrost it in time,’ I said as I chiselled at it with a meat cleaver and rolling pin.

‘Stick it in the microwave,’ suggested David.

‘It won’t fit in,’ said Les, who had taken to beating the disassembled bird with a meat tenderiser.

Finally, after the four of us had taken turns at assaulting it with various culinary implements the block fell apart, but only in half.

‘Stick one half in this microwave and take the other to our apartment,’ said Joy. ‘We’ll have to defrost them separately.’

I threw the turkey into a smaller Tupperware, concealing it with a festive tea towel, one of a set bought by David for the occasion, and raced out of the doors. As I did, the first of our lone diners was making his way down the steps towards the bar.

‘You shouldn’t have,’ said the man, indicating the ‘present’ in my hands. I laughed and ran past him.

‘We’ll be with you in a minute,’ I shouted over my shoulder.

By the time I returned, half of the tables were occupied. As I rushed through the doors a hand grabbed my arm and the Tupperware of turkey almost fell to the floor. It was Friedhelm.

‘Joe,’ he started. ‘J-o-e…’ His eyes were closed, his mind searching for the words in English. He shook his head, annoyed with himself, but before he could fully release his grip in defeat he clenched my forearm tightly again. ‘Joe…’ he repeated again, even more slowly. His heavy eyelids lifted wearily like ageing window blinds. ‘Happ-y Chrim-stas.’

‘Yes, happy Christmas, Friedhelm,’ I repeated, trying to release his grip.

In the kitchen, Les had also had similar success with the microwave and apart from one of two extraneous pieces that the radiation had morphed into shoe leather, the turkey was ready to serve.

Pleasantly buoyed on sparkling wine, we managed to convey a festive atmosphere. After our initial struggle, we’d completely overstocked on decorations and the bar resembled a grotto with green, red and gold tinsel and beads strung between every available stanchion. The tree was cloaked with strings of lights, small gifts and the few remaining baubles that Buster had not managed to bat off.

Inside, the windows’ fake snow had been sprayed into drifts on the ledge. Outside the sun beat down from an azure sky. Some people had sat down in T-shirts and shorts, others had dressed up for the occasion. Friedhelm was even sporting a blazer, and sweating profusely underneath it.

After the first course, Les and Joy began a chorus of Christmas carols, which unfortunately dissolved prematurely when both of them realised they didn’t know any words beyond the first verses.

Frank’s token of merriment was to don begrudgingly the paper hat that fell from his cracker, much to the amusement of Danny and Sam. The two kids were obviously enjoying the party atmosphere, particularly as their dad was getting more drunk by the minute. The meal included a free bottle of wine per table, but we’d already slipped Frank his third by the time the Christmas pudding had been served.

Save for a spell of post mince pie blubbering from Friedhelm, overawed with the attention that was being lavished on him in benevolent festive cheer, the paying guests were pleasantly surprised, stuffed and pie-eyed, though not necessarily in that order. We had also surprised ourselves. A little over six months ago I would have considered boiling an egg a
fait accompli
. Now I was standing in front of the washing-up for 62 people. These 62 had entrusted three people, who half a year ago couldn’t tell a spatula from a cocktail twirler, to conjure up five courses of festive fare and lay on a congenial party for fifteen tables of relative strangers.