‘The
usual Spanish thing. They’ll let it run round for the summer then one day,
after the hot months are over, The Dog Catcher comes … and deals with it.’
‘Takes
it to a dogs’ home?’
‘Silly
girl. Shoots it.
‘No!’
‘They
reckon they’re being kind, letting it have its summer. By their standards they
are.’ Then, appearing to change the subject. ‘Sue, tell me something. How did
you travel here, to Spain, in the first place?’
‘Plane.
Scallyjet from Liverpool airport to Malaga.’
‘Ah
yeah. Everybody comes by plane now but see, when I left my husband, left Devon,
I drove down here in an old post office van. I’ll never forget that trip. The
mountains and pastures of the Basque country, your senses tell you you’re in
Switzerland. La Mancha, the flat table lands that seem to go on forever, they
were once forest you know, they chopped it all down. South from Madrid, this
was before they built the highway, it was just a dead-straight road through a
desert. After the foothills of the Sierra Morena you eventually come to the
Gateway to Andalucia. It’s a pass through the mountains, a defile, a natural
cuffing. You know what its name is? “Despenaperros”, “Desfil de Despenaperros”,
literally in Spanish, “The Place for Throwing the Dogs off the Cliffs.” Some
say that the dogs referred to are infidels, foreigners, those who do not
belong. I believe the other explanation. That the bandits who certainly
infested this pass in the nineteenth century would pelt travellers with dogs
that they threw down from the high places.’
‘You’re
having me on,’ said Sue.
‘Not at
all. Whether it’s true or not, the name of the pass tells us two things about
the Spanish. One, that dogs are as plentiful as stones, as rocks, as dirt in
this part of the world; and two, that given a choice between throwing a dog or
a rock, then the Spaniard would choose to step to the edge and throw the dog. I
don’t know. Perhaps it had a practical purpose, I suppose it must have
disturbed the travellers mightily to find that the sky was suddenly full of
flying dogs but it never does to rule out pointless sadism in your dealings
with these here Spanish.’
They
were at the door to Nige’s place. Another studded gate in a blank white wall.
‘You
want to come in?’ she asked Sue.
‘Sure
why not.’ She had never seen inside Nige’s place. Nige opened the gate and they
stepped through. Unlike Laurence’s house they were not in an open courtyard but
instead in a high-ceilinged space that was Nige’s workshop. Her sculptures were
dotted around all over everywhere. Sue had been expecting something perhaps
oldee worldee, nice framed oil paintings, like they sold in the rastros of
Granada and Seville. Authentic studies of whitewashed cortijos with peasants
sitting outside on straw chairs, still lifes of pewter plates piled high with
Serrano ham and Andalucian figs, farmyards full of chickens, the plains of old
Castile as seen from Toledo. All the paintings signed ‘Chavez’ and ‘Milagro’
and ‘Romero’ and all of the paintings created by painting factories in Southern
China where, on a production line as regulated as the nearby Toyota van plant,
Chinese workers ground out studies of a country they had never seen and never
would see, each one specialising in a fragment of the painting, this one
concentrating on chickens, this one doing skies, this one the best sad donkey
eyes painter in all of Ghanzu province.
Nige’s
sculptures were nothing like that. It was a big room and it was hard to see
where the mess on the floor ended and the sculptures began; all over the hidden
ground, a foot deep in places, was soil, straw, clay, plaster, paint and rising
out of this derangement were figures compounded out of the same stuff. Dogs
snarling and snapping at each other, men with the heads of bulls and huge cocks
drooping in an arc, pigs, ducks, leaping fish, some white, some grey, some
stained with the dust of the mountains, some blood red, some midnight black.
Sue
stared for many minutes before speaking. She wove in and out of the figures
then she said, ‘This is fucked up. This is the most fucked-up thing that I have
ever fucking seen. You never, ever, know what is behind these fucking doors.’
Nige
laughed, she thought Sue was saying a good thing, which she might have been.
The sculptress led Sue into a dark side room, its walls of rough-cast plaster
hung with beaten copper plates, the tiled floor piled high with oriental
cushions, a dim light spilling from coloured-glass-studded Arab lamps.
‘This
is almost normal,’ said Sue as she dropped straight down into the cushions.
Nige landed next to her.
‘I
bought all this stuff when I was backpacking in Northern Pakistan and
Afghanistan. Then I shipped it back. The markets in Peshawar are just
unbelievable.’
Nige
reached behind her into a carved box and drew out dope and skins. She began to
roll a joint and kept talking.
‘You
can buy, like, literally anything there, stolen Range Rovers from Britain, any
drugs you want, they hand-make copies of any kind of gun in the world,
gold-plated Purdey shotguns, Kalashnikovs, Ml6s, pirated Snoop, Doggy Dog CDs,
all this next to the most beautiful, timeless, local handicrafts, rugs, lamps.’
Nige lit the joint and took a luxurious pull, languorously exhaled and passed
it to Sue.
The
younger woman drew in the smoke. Before she could breathe out Nige placed her
wide open mouth over the other woman’s lips. Sue expelled the smoke and Nige
took it down into her own lungs, then they both flopped back against the
cushions, laughing.
Sue
leant forward and began kissing Nige’s long neck, while her hand crept down and
unbuttoned the older woman’s jeans. She slid her fingers inside and began to
stroke between Nige’s legs. After a while, with all their clothes off, it was
hard to tell where Sue began and Nige ended.
August
in the frying pan of Spain, all the villas were rented and it was too hot to go
out at night before eleven. It was so hot that Don Paco even took his cardigan
off and he didn’t need to bring his soap along to the orange groves as the
sweat between Sue’s breasts was all the lubricant that they needed.
Heroin
continued to seep down into the valley like the water that ran along the
acequias from the high Sierra Nevadas. Though entirely without conscience,
empathy or kindness, Tony thought himself to be a good man who only did what
had to be done to get by. He thought that in other circumstances he might have
been a doctor or a fireman, helping people instead of poisoning the youth of a
valley with narcotics. Partly to prove his decency to himself he would be good
almost at random. He was good to Sue, for example, he gave her a regular cut of
his earnings even though he was self-financing by now. And he suggested that
she could give up servicing the old boys if she wanted to and she could move
into Max’s house with him.
Sue
declined. She said her work with the old men made her feel that she was
providing a vital service to the village. The wives of the old men were as
polite to her as they were to any foreign woman so there did not seem to be any
anger against her, though she did not delude herself that everybody didn’t know
what was going on. Plus she was enjoying what she did, giving the old boys a
thrill, and she was even picking up a fair bit of farming knowledge from her
clients, for example they were all very insistent that things, tasks, had to be
carried out on a specific day, or during a specific short period: vines had to
be pruned on 25 January and, most important of all, the Matanza, the day of
pig-killing, absolutely had to be done between Christmas and New Year. Maybe
she’d become a farmer one day, Aquarians were very good at farming.
September
came and the hot weather ran away like a coward that owed money. The tourists
went and all the crops were gathered in. As Sue walked down to the bar she
could hear the sound of Paco swearing as he noisily husked corn by hand-cranked
machine.
The
village already seemed to be drawing in on itself for the winter, the bus had
stopped coming from Granada two days ago, the locals no longer drove or walked
as often down into the valley.
One day
Laurence asked her if she would go to the shop to get him some stamps. Sue didn’t
really feel like it but she hadn’t paid him any rent for six weeks and she wasn’t
in the mood for a row so she grumpily pulled her boots on and stomped out of
the gate, into the shaded alley.
When
Sue got to where Anna’s, the village shop, was, for a moment she thought it had
gone, that it had somehow taken off into the air like the spaceships disguised
as houses that the angels sometimes used, or it had vanished in some other way.
Then she realised what the sense of dislocation was: the shop hadn’t gone it
was just that the door to the shop was closed! Previously Sue never knew that
Anna’s even possessed a door! Up to that point, in all the time she had been in
the village, the entrance had always been covered solely by the coloured strips
of a plastic fly screen; now suddenly a peeling but substantial, ancient olive
wood door barred the gap. She slammed on the door a few times with the heel of
her palm but there was no reply. Vaguely confused she turned away and headed
back to Laurence’s. There was something missing, a vacancy, an omission she
hadn’t been able to put her finger on at first, but now it suddenly struck her
what it was. There were no dogs! Jackie, Salvador, Pablo, Little Janet, they
were nowhere about. Their absence made the village seem strangely empty.
Up
ahead of her Tony was standing in the middle of the little plaza at the corner
of Calle Solana and Calle Santiago looking bewildered.
‘Alright
Sue,’ he said. A tone of uncertainty she’d never heard before in his voice. ‘I
don’t understand this, Noche Azul’s closed. I’ve never seen it closed in all
the time I’ve been here, it’s always been open day and night. Laurence said he
wanted to meet me here at eleven to discuss something really important, when
fuck me I finds it’s fuckin’ cerrado and that old pouf nowhere to be found.’
Sue was
about to tell him both that Laurence was back at home and that Anna’s had also
been shut when, very close, perhaps two streets over, they heard a sudden loud
crack, the sound amplified twenty times, cannoning off the white stone walls.
Tony jumped. ‘What the fuck was that?’ He yelped.
‘Must
be a firework or a rocket, you know what they’re like,’ said Sue.
‘I
guess,’ said Tony.
Just
then a little yellow dog that used to run with the pack came racing across the
square. Another firework went off, nearer this time and the little yellow dog
did a somersault and then flopped onto its back with its legs wide open, the
way it did when it wanted to be stroked, except when it wanted to be stroked it
wriggled about in the dust in a rather disgusting way and this time it was
lying still.
Sue and
Tony went slowly over to where the little dog lay, the right half of its head
was missing and thick tarry dog blood seeped slowly into the dust.
‘The
Dog Catcher,’ said Sue. ‘The Dog Catcher must be here.’
‘You
what?’ said Tony.
‘It
must be the day for The Dog Catcher. Haven’t you heard of him? The Dog Catcher
comes at the end of the summer and shoots all the stray dogs. I thought he’d
take them away somewhere to do it. That’s why everybody’s locked their doors!
They must be keeping their dogs in, away from The Dog Catcher.’
‘Shittin’
‘ell, it’s a bit much that he shoots them right ‘ere in the street. That’s
fucking dangerous, that is. The ‘ealth and Safety wouldn’t allow that back in
England I can tell you.’
‘Well
you know what they’re like, the Spanish and danger. Macho isn’t a Spanish word
for nothing. They probably think it’s great, bullets flying about. Danger and
killing animals, I’m surprised they haven’t brought their kids out to watch.’
She
looked up and down the deserted lane. ‘Come on. Let’s get back to Laurence’s
house.’
So they
hustled down the lanes to Casa Laurence but when they got there the little door
in the big studded gate was shut and bolted from the inside.
‘Oi,
Lorenzo mate, lerrus in!’ shouted Tony and kicked the door.
Suddenly
there was another explosion, even closer this time.
‘Christ!’
said Sue. ‘This is gettin’ a bit bleeding silly.’
But
Tony wasn’t listening to her, he was looking down at a hole that had appeared
in his stomach. ‘Sue, I think I been … I think I been…’ Another bang and
where his lips had been there was a pulpy mass.
Sue
took off, running. Turning skidding into Calle Santiago she saw The Dog coming
the other way, its ears flat against its head, it tail low in terror between
its legs. As she flew past it The Dog turned and followed her. Together they
bounded down one lane and up another, cutting across squares, racketing off the
high mute walls and finding no sanctuary. The church was shut and barred, the
gates in the fortified wall locked and immovable. They cut back into the
centre, the woman and the dog.
Suddenly
as she fled down a lane a familiar door opened in a wall and a voice called to
them, ‘Quick, inside.’
They
both leapt through. They were in Nige’s workshop. Hastily she slammed the door
and bolted it.