by Joe Cawley
‘They’ll let me know either way later this week,’ continued Alison. She shot back inside her apartment, leaving me nodding at the ocean with an appropriate expression of feigned excitement.
Alison was no different to most of us treading water in our lives. She was desperate for someone to throw her a curveball, something that would sweep her out of her humdrum existence and into that fantasy world inhabited by the chosen few. Magazines, newspapers and TV shows offered glimpses into lives less ordinary, lives with celebrity trappings, lives that inspired public envy and private elation. While many were resigned to watching from afar, Alison saw no reason why she couldn’t be part of it. Neither did I.
Maybe we’d had similarly encouraging upbringings. Maybe we’d both seen through the artificial barriers that divided the populace into ‘them’ and ‘us’. Maybe we both understood that the celebrated and famous were, on the whole, just people like us who’d had that lucky break. We knew that luck most often befell those who put themselves in positions where, if opportunity was to rain down from a silver-lined cloud, they’d be the ones standing directly underneath with a large bucket.
My own dreams were a little hazy. I wanted to be well known, admired, even, but not famous for the sake of it. I wanted to prove to myself that I was just as good and worthy as those I read about and watched in the media. In part, I guess I wanted to prove my own theory that in the developed world we are all born equal and life is what you make of it. Sure, there are those born into less advantaged backgrounds, but for the sake of simplicity I’m assuming a level playing field.
If Joy and I hadn’t recklessly swapped a career in entrails and giblets on Bolton fish market for life as British bar owners abroad, we would never have become the ‘local celebrities’ of El Beril. And as small a sea as that may be, for seven years we were still considered big fish in that one holiday complex.
The difference now was that Alison was still active in her pursuit of a lucky break, and I wasn’t. If just one of her optimistic applications came off, she would be privileged with a sneak peek behind the curtains of fame, even if it was only for a fleeting moment.
Two days later and that curtain started twitching as she got a thumbs-up from Changing Rooms. Unfortunately, Alison would soon come to realise that being in front of the cameras was not all it was cracked up to be.
In exceptional cases, Changing Rooms would spend a small fortune on converting a plain shoebox of a room into a child’s fantasy world; for the most part, however, production costs on the programme were kept to a piggy-bank proportions. Never more so than when the entire crew and cast had to be shipped overseas. The producer had asked Alison over the phone if she could find locals to fill various menial roles at low cost, which is how I became Miss Smillie’s chauffeur for the four-day shoot.
It struck me after my first couple of days with Carol, collecting her from the hotel in Playa de las Américas at seven thirty in the morning and dropping her back there at seven at night, that Carol was very much like Joy had been before life at the Smugglers Tavern took its toll. We were on first-name terms now of course – well, I was; Carol kept forgetting my name, but in her defence, she probably had a lot on her mind.
Both Carol and Joy took a genuine interest in every new person they met, bright eyes widening further with every minute detail extracted from whoever they were talking to. Both radiated an energy that was almost palpable, boosting those around them with instant feelgood like a nuclear battery charger. It was this quality that had endeared Joy to the customers in the bar, many of whom believed they’d found a new best friend in her. Although Joy naturally saw everybody as a potential friend, her warmth and conviviality eventually became her downfall. The sheer quantity of ‘best friends’ demanding her attention was exhausting, especially while running a business that afforded no time for real relationships. Ours included.
Both women were also very pretty, with shining, wondrous eyes, wide-open smiles that held nothing back, and understated curves that whispered suggestively rather than screamed for attention.
By the time I dropped her off at the airport with a parting kiss, I don’t mind admitting I had become a little smitten with Smillie. She handed me a bottle of wine with words of gratitude for ‘going the extra mile’. The wine became a prized possession and would never be consumed. I still have it now.
While I basked in the sunshine of the presenter’s appreciation, two doors away, Alison and Stuart were less enamoured with their Carol Smillie experience. The conversion of the kitchen/living room in their El Beril apartment had left Alison in tears – bad for them, great for TV.
In their individual pre-makeover interviews, Alison had been adamant that she didn’t want anything too modern or ‘out there’. The bleep machine went into overdrive when the TV team’s efforts at a ‘spaceship interior’ were revealed. While Stuart feigned approval, Alison told them in no uncertain words where they could stick the tinfoil effect on the coffee table, and in what orifice they could put the garish purple and silver sticky tape that striped their walls.
What made it worse was that the crew only had time to complete the refurb on those parts of the room that the camera would see. The NASA-meets-Poundstretcher effect stopped abruptly halfway down the walls of the kitchen area. The remaining three feet of off-white walls and honey-coloured pine door panels were concealed from a million TV eyes but not from the eyes of the two people who had to live with it.
It was half a job, and half a job done cheaply, and the day after the TV crew left, Joy, Alison, Stuart and I removed the stapling and sticky tape that held their fifteen minutes of fame together and tried to return the room to its original state. But the damage had been done. Alison felt her home had been violated beyond repair.
Later that month, we helped them relocate to a semi-dilapidated house in Tejina de Isora, a hillside village near the west coast, twenty minutes’ drive from Playa de las Américas.
‘It needs a bit of work,’ said Alison as we placed cardboard boxes and black bin liners on the dusty white-tiled floor.
Joy and I surveyed the mess. If restoring their El Beril apartment to its pre-Changing Rooms state had proved too much work, I couldn’t imagine the toil they faced to turn this half-house into a cosy home.
The space and isolation were the key factors for Alison and Stuart though, or more precisely for their two Alsatians. To me, it seemed like moving to another country. In El Beril we had a supermarket, a choice of restaurants, a beach, a communal swimming pool, tennis courts, street lighting and immaculate tarmac roads. Up there in Tejina, they had cacti, dust and a twenty-minute walk to civilisation. It felt dirty, lonely and a step back in time.
When we returned to El Beril that evening, I was glad to get back to the modern comforts of polished marble, straight walls, and windows and doors that didn’t resist being opened and closed. Joy, however, had a different take on it, perhaps because she was still the (unwanted) centre of attention from ex-customers.
‘I’m jealous,’ she announced when we landed at El Beril.
‘Of what?’ I asked. ‘Mould, mess and isolation?’
‘Of the views, the peace, the privacy.’
‘You’d move to somewhere like that?’ My tone had risen a few octaves.
‘I’d certainly think about it. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Erm, no thanks. I’m quite happy here.’
But as soon as I’d said it, doubts arose. A change of scenery! Something to shake us from this lethargy! Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. Trouble was, I was too apathetic to do anything about it. We’d moved apartments five times during our bar days. Moving was hard work. And so was house-hunting. The opportunity would have to come to me.
CHAPTER SIX
First, though, I was on a mission to house-hunt for someone else, namely Nan, who had now been ‘detained’ in hospital for two weeks on doctor’s orders. It was either keep her in hospital or have her transferred to the nearest available nursing home, which was over forty m
iles from her house, and, more inconveniently, from David’s house in Clitheroe.
The doctor had insisted that it wasn’t safe to have her live on her own given that she was so unsteady on her feet. She was also plagued with a cluster of infections and medical complaints that refused to budge even in the face of heavy-duty remedies or her own steely denial that there was ‘owt’ wrong.
Investigations revealed that the sunshine isles weren’t exactly overrun with sunshine retirement homes, which came as something of a surprise. A good dose of Tenerife warmth had been prescribed to the UK’s ill and afflicted since the late nineteenth century. In fact, it was this medical tourism that eventually opened the floodgates of Canary Island holidays for north Europeans with less wholesome desires.
Whereas in the last decades of the 1800s people came to Tenerife to improve their health, ironically, since the mid-1980s, the quality of a fortnight abroad has often been judged by how ill you’ve been able to get, a phenomenon not exclusive to Tenerife but one still extolled in last-night outings and post-holiday tales back home. The conversations in resort bars invariably go something like this:
‘Going home tomorrow.’ Said with a glum face over a pint of lager and a whisky shot.
‘How’s it been?’
‘Brilliant! Been rough as a badger’s arse every morning.’
‘Fantastic.’
‘Thrown up three times in a week!’
‘Doesn’t get much better than that, does it?’
‘S’been magic. Well… the bits I remember, anyway.’
‘Good to hear. ’Nother pint and chaser?’
‘Is the Pope Catholic?’
With such a switch in holidaymakers’ aspirations, it should have come as no surprise that on Tenerife there was a lot more effort focused on making people ill than making people better.
There were plenty of hotels that drew the older crowd for a fortnight or slightly longer, and lots of self-catering apartments that Tenerife’s ‘swallows’ reserved for the winter months years in advance. What there wasn’t was a choice of residential complexes specifically geared to the expat silver set with on-site carers and bingo on-demand – a sure gap in the market, if any entrepreneurial readers are looking for a Tenerife niche. There was one, however. And it needed checking out.
Housed in a finca (farmhouse) in the western hills of the island, the cluster of single-storied buildings that made up this care home looked like an unfinished construction project from the outside. It wasn’t much different inside.
In the nursing home David and I had visited in Clitheroe, typed notes and door locks ensured no illegal entries – or exits. Here, every corridor and doorway had waist-level childproof gates. It was like Alcatraz for the height-impaired.
From the reception area – a drab waiting room with exposed breeze-block walls – I was escorted down a steep stone staircase. Small bungalows the size of single-car garages surrounded an empty swimming pool that was awash with algae. Weeds sprouted from cracked floor tiles, and bits of broken furniture were piled in one corner. I expected an apology for the state of the place, or at least an explanation, but none was forthcoming, and the receptionist continued the tour seemingly blind to the decrepitude.
On a raised terrace overlooking the drained pool, four residents sat in the sun on plastic chairs, penned in on plastic grass that curled up at the edges like Aladdin’s slippers. There was no shade and even though it was winter, the subtropical rays were still formidable. As we continued through the garden, it began to feel familiar. I was sure I’d seen the central pool when it was swimmable, not sprouting weeds, and at the back of my mind I knew I had sat in the communal lounge area, though probably not in such shabby seats.
Then I remembered – the nursing home used to be a restaurant and we’d eaten there at least twice. The dining area had hardly changed at all. Exposed stonework had threatened diners’ legs even back then and was no less of a hazard today. The coarse stone could easily slice through the tissue-thin skin of calves and thighs if senior diners slipped off the cushions protecting them from the raw edges.
I also remembered that Nan had dined there with us one night, and that even then access to the bathrooms was far from easy for someone with mobility problems. Everything seemed to have been built on different levels, and you couldn’t walk more than a few paces before your progress was halted by yet another set of stone steps.
If there was ever a place wholly unsuitable for use as a nursing home, it was this former restaurant in the hills. Yes, residents had no chance of fleeing without first navigating several flights of stairs, but they also had no chance of moving around the place without risking a serious stumble down lethal stone steps. It was a definite no-go. Back to the drawing board.
CHAPTER SEVEN
As Tenerife ambled towards twenty-first-century tourism, in March 2000 my wish to break free of our jingoistic surroundings was granted as, ironically, Joy and I took a step back into the previous century.
Two months after moving from El Beril into the hills of Tejina de Isora, Stuart had decided that he no longer cared for rural life, or indeed for Alison. He moved back to ‘civilisation’, sharing an apartment with a mate amidst the bars and clubs of Playa de las Américas, leaving Alison alone in the village with the two dogs.
Unable to drive, Alison was restricted to travelling by moped. With two large Alsatians in tow, this was no easy task. It wasn’t long before the isolation became a burden. When the dark of night closed in on Tejina, she found restful sleep hard to come by as she lay in bed listening to the scuttling of lizards and the creaking of haphazardly built walls. Desperate to move back to a less lonely and more accessible location, she asked if we knew of any apartments available to rent in El Beril. Joy’s eyes lit up.
Our complex, El Beril, had served a purpose and served it well. When we had the bar, we were only 178 paces from home (188 for Joy, who has shorter legs), which was just about all we could muster at the end of a busy night. The apartment was small, therefore easy to maintain with barely more than a flick of a duster and a couple of mop swishes in each direction. The complex was pretty, too, with its sprays of violet bougainvillea against whitewashed walls, and it allowed easy access to the treasures that life in a hot climate requires – a beach and a choice of watering holes.
To most people El Beril was, and still is, a pleasant place to spend your holidays. But being a resident in one of its 120 adjoining bungalows and two-storey apartments was like living in a goldfish bowl. Joy and I couldn’t go anywhere without other El Berilians craning over the crisscrossed wooden beams of their balcony terraces to inquire where we were headed, where we’d been and what we’d had for lunch that day.
This problem wasn’t exclusive to ventures beyond our front door. Our garden fence bordered a footpath that circumnavigated the complex. As we lay in the sunshine, minding our business, at least once an hour somebody would shatter the calm with inane conversation, interrupting Joy’s afternoon doze. She would have to scramble to cover up from topless sunbathing while the strollers quipped how it was ‘alright for some’, or ‘you’ve got a good life’. Or, worse still, ‘you don’t need to cover up for me, love’ from a worryingly regular ‘passer-by’. A small bulge in his fading speedos raised suspicions that he had been leaning on our fence longer than we deemed appropriate.
So, when Joy suggested a house swap whereby Alison would come back to live in El Beril and we would escape to the hills of Tejina, we were packed up and moved within the week. Naturally, this put an end to any plans we had of shipping Nan over from the UK to spend her final years with us. Her increasing ability to fall over even the tiniest of obstacles would be a challenge too far in a half-finished house on an uneven patch of Tenerife hillside.
The house in Tejina was on the edge of a barranco (ravine), one of hundreds of vertiginous drops that carve the island into slices of crusty pie. The building itself looked distinctly like it was still a work-in-progress. The two-storey cube had one too
few coats of pale yellow paint over a rendered, whitewashed base. In places, the rendering had broken off, leaving patches of grey breeze-block. It looked like a decaying molar. But its location was its glory.
Perched alone above the unassuming agricultural village of Tejina de Isora, there were no impediments to a 180-degree view of the Atlantic some four miles away. Nature had done a fine job of turning what at first seemed like a lifeless plateau into a gorgeous meadow of ethereal beauty. Giant fingers of cacti swelled from clusters of euphorbia on either side of the barranco (ravine), while orange and black butterflies hovered above clumps of broom and lavender that freckled the surrounding plain with yellow and purple. Apart from a handful of detached properties stretching up the hill behind us, the only evidence of human intervention were the six long lines of cabbages, tomatoes and other less recognisable crops the landlord tended below the concrete patio that skirted the house on two sides.
As we placed the first of our cardboard boxes inside, it was evident that the troubles between Alison and Stuart had set in early. They clearly hadn’t properly settled in, and the place still looked a lot like a storeroom. In a small box room off the living area, black irrigation tubing coiled around errant breeze-blocks like a plague of snakes. A solitary lightbulb dangled from a long cable poking through the plasterboard ceiling. In the far corner, a high stone step led to a doll’s-house door. Through this lay another long, dark room that stretched almost the full length of the house. Inside, bales of straw and bags of chicken feed were piled on a raw concrete floor. An eyebrow-height ceiling added an Alice in Wonderland surrealism.
