by Joe Cawley
‘Move back,’ I yelled, just as another loud crack and a gravelly crunch caused the slab of concrete they were standing on to rise up and start moving towards the edge of the slope like a family-sized surfboard.
Michael, Sheila, Justin’s mum, Frank and I jumped back as it too slid over the edge of our garden and into the barranco.
Through the dust I could see the white figure of Fugly weaving through the cacti and broom, ears and body low to the ground. What I couldn’t see was Justin.
Joy held my arm as I stepped onto the remaining rubble and peered into the abyss, where a huge slab of concrete now covered the space into which Justin had fallen.
‘Justin?’
There was no answer. I called again.
‘YES,’ shouted a voice in my ear.
I nearly fell down the slope. Justin was standing next to me, peering into the barranco. I peered at him, trying to work out his witchcraft.
‘SEE, THAT’S THE KIND OF EMERGENCY I WAS TALKING ABOUT.’
The collapse of the wall acted like a show finale and our guests, figuring that nothing else could top that spectacle, began to drift away.
Wayne and his mystery guest were the last to leave. ‘Want me to fix that?’ Wayne said, staring at the gap in our wall.
I nodded.
‘Tomorrow do you?’
I nodded again. They turned to leave.
‘Sorry, John,’ said Joy to the mystery man, ‘you’ve got to tell me where I know you from.’
‘Owns a chain of restaurants, don’t you, mucker?’ said Wayne. ‘Giving me a lift back in that Porsche, top of your drive.’
The man flashed a toothpaste-ad smile at us. ‘You really don’t remember me, do you?’
We both shook our heads.
Still smiling, he took himself by his collar and walked towards the door.
‘You can’t be!’ said Joy.
He winked. ‘Johan. King of Tenerife once more.’ He leant in. ‘But now king of property development, not of a wigwam on Spaghetti Beach.’
In our early days at the bar, Johan had been one of the first challenging customers we’d had to deal with. A scruffy, surfer-haired hippy, he would frequent the Smugglers dressed in his idiosyncratic style, which nearly always married ripped jeans and items more commonly associated with rubbish bins. Not content with drawing attention through his appearance, he would also elicit wary glances by singing loud choruses from Broadway musicals.
Tolerating his eccentricity proved to be far easier and less energy-consuming than enforcing any exclusion zone. So we put up with his musicality, his insistence that he was the King of Tenerife, and his inability to pay for the occasional meals and drinks he consumed.
During a brief period of flu-induced sobriety, we learned from Johan that when he’d left university his father had handed him a bundle of cash and told him to make something of himself. A spaced-out nomad was probably not what his dad had in mind.
However, we always found him to be deeply intelligent, as well as happy and relatively harmless (read the first book to find out why only ‘relatively’). In fact, when he eventually stopped coming to the bar, we assumed he was either dead or had straightened himself out and was following a path more in keeping with the one his dad had imagined.
That night, I lay in bed reliving the day. Some people, like Justin and Wayne, hadn’t changed at all. Others had lost their way – Brian, for one, his spark and confidence snuffed out now that he’d lost his perfect role.
I thought of Johan’s transformation, the way he had (literally) picked himself up by his collar and, from such a low launching pad, had hit great heights. It gave me hope.
CHAPTER NINE
Following brief but enjoyable careers in painting, and chauffeuring smiley celebrities, while hope stewed in the background, I secured another fill-in job with a friend who had started a marble-floor-polishing business. Marble tiles were the preferred floor covering in Tenerife for most households and this, plus the fact that there was little competition in the domestic field, ensured that the demand for Marbleman was phenomenal.
The polishing contraption comprised a motorbike grip attached to a motor that spun an eighteen-inch scouring pad at high speed. My brief training covered what chemicals to use and in what order to apply them so that the mirror-like sheen that had been blurred by high heels, furniture scratches or water stains could be restored. More importantly, my ‘driving’ instruction included how to tame the spinning beast so it didn’t career into furniture or gouge huge spurs out of the marble. Upon graduation, me and my 600-rpm friend were dropped off by a dusty van at private apartments and villas and let loose on their floors.
The buffing involved shuffling methodically at a snail’s pace from one corner of the room to the other, slowly sweeping the machine from side to side to a monotone hum. A living room in a small apartment would take at least two hours to cover. It was mind-numbing but well paid, and the glass-like finish provided immense satisfaction to both operator and apartment owner.
My employer also happened to be a bass guitar player and was in the throes of getting a band together. Which was convenient. Within weeks we had a rehearsal space in his garage-cum-storeroom, where we met two nights a week. Days were spent sheening floors while plugged into a Walkman learning the drum patterns of new songs.
Julian the singer was an old hand on the Tenerife circuit and through his contacts it was easy to try out a few short, unpaid gigs at small, family-run bars. Our set list expanded in direct relation to the hours spent marble polishing and before long we had a big enough repertoire to play a full two-set gig. Which was just as well, as we’d been asked to play a regular Saturday-night spot at a nightclub on Golf del Sur, an estate of apartments and hotels sandwiched between a twenty-seven-hole golf course and the ocean, fifteen minutes’ drive from Playa de las Américas.
Being in a working band again was exhilarating. I hadn’t played a kit on stage since I’d guest drummed for Steve’s band, my friend-turned-foe who’d stabbed me in the back by having an affair with Joy during our bar career (see Book Two).
In the year 2000 there weren’t many full live bands working the circuit. Bar owners were, quite understandably, keener to pay for one man and his backing tracks than cough up thrice that for three alcohol-fuelled musicians. Westlife and the Backstreet Boys were in the charts, and not everybody wanted live rock. But in the words of Neil Young, ‘rock and roll can never die’, and there was, as ever, a niche audience fully appreciative of purist musical entertainment.
Julian was still doing one-man gigs, but thanks to his contacts, our group, the Joneses, was soon offered a three-night headline slot vacated by the former house band at the Soul Cellar (now Papagayo), one of the biggest clubs on the Veronicas nightlife strip. It was open-air and a big hit with groups of young holidaymakers corralled there by tour operators. Pub crawls involving up to two hundred revellers would converge at midnight and turn the moonlit dance floor into a writhing serpent of sunburnt limbs and flailing hair.
Party night for the band was every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday from midnight until 2am. We were plied with drinks, pointed towards a stage shrouded in dry ice and pulsating with light effects, and presented to an audience already high on ecstasy, speed, alcohol and holiday spirit. Most of them were happy with no more than a vaguely recognisable wall of sound to dance to, but Julian was a stickler for perfection and despite our intake of Jack Daniel’s, our reputation as the south’s best band grew. And we were getting paid!
Another highlight for me was that I could dip into the manic, neon-frenzied environment we’d left behind and then return to our new normality in the hills. It felt like a mini holiday. At 11.30pm I would leave the silence of Tejina in a taxi, whizzing past the darkened houses and empty streets. Within twenty minutes I was in a world just coming to life. Alighting at the top end of Troya Beach, each step along the seafront took me closer to the hum and sparkle of downtown Las Américas, through the cacophony of competing
bars and clubs and with the buzz of knowing I’d be on stage soon. When I took to my place behind the kit, quickly tightened the drum skins and adjusted the mics, my mood could not have been any brighter.
It was always going to come to an end though. For Jim and me, playing in a band was a hobby. The fact that we got paid was a bonus. For Julian, however, it was a career. This was how he paid his bills. Days were spent learning new songs and perfecting backing tracks for his solo and duo acts, evenings were about taking those songs to the stage. He was good, of that there was no question, an accomplished guitarist, singer and song arranger, but he was also greedy. Our gigs did not end with our flurry of chord striking, cymbal crashing and flashing lights, and then our ‘Thank you, you’ve been the best crowd ever.’ No, Julian always had one final task: a visit to the club manager to try and squeeze more money out of him for the next gig. ‘But look how many people we’ve brought in. If we weren’t on, you wouldn’t get half this crowd.’
He was cocky, but that wasn’t unusual among the more successful acts in Tenerife, and in that circle, success on the island was measured by the fee commanded. Naturally, there was a limit to how much each bar or club owner was prepared to pay, and a limit to how long they would put up with Julian’s incessant badgering for more. At the Soul Cellar, this point arrived quicker than any of us had anticipated. After two months Julian announced that we wouldn’t be playing at the Soul Cellar anymore and that he would soon find us another gig.
The other gig never materialised. By the end of summer 2000, it was obvious that Tenerife as a low-cost tourist destination had passed its peak. TV programmes in the UK were focusing on the filth and depravity of the Veronicas strip, following groups of revellers as they drank, swore, shagged and vomited their way through a week of juvenile debauchery. The authorities decided that the island needed a new, more sustainable image.
They began with an iron-fisted clampdown on the scruffiest and noisiest nightlife venues. Where laws weren’t being broken, new ones were implemented which put the bars and clubs on the wrong side of legality. The rug was being pulled from Tenerife’s bread-and-butter tourism in ways that defied belief.
New rules, which might not seem outlandish these days but in the early 2000s were bank-balance breakers for many proprietors, included obligatory air-conditioning and emergency exits, no sandwich boards advertising entertainment or menus, no awnings that extended over the pavement, and no furniture on the pavement unless that space was owned by the bar.
In hindsight, these rules were quite reasonable, but until then the bars and clubs of Veronicas had operated without the need to comply with health and safety regulations. Many were ‘protected’ by organisations that had a foothold in both the underworld and the enforcement world. We had experienced this ourselves in our days as bar owners, both when uniformed police would walk in and happily be ‘distracted’ from our legal oversights if free beer was forthcoming, and from close encounters with local extortion gangs.
We saw the same thing play out in Veronicas, in a bar that was operated by a friend of the band’s. It was here that we would debrief after a gig with a table full of Dorada beer and tequila shots. Gary, the bar owner, would sit drinking with us but all the time looking over his shoulder at the two entrances. Even to those with zero knowledge of planning regulations, his bar clearly was not a legal entity. Gary had ‘bought’ a corridor between two clubs, deep in the depths of a Veronicas basement. It was kitted out with an assortment of chairs, stools and benches, a small, walkaround bar the central focus.
The owner of the clubs to either side didn’t mind this mini competition from Gary, mainly because the day after Gary bought it, the owner announced that he had sold both clubs to a Russian gangster, who we’ll call Psycho, for two reasons – because he was, and because that’s what everybody else in Veronicas called him.
Psycho’s vision was to combine both clubs into one mega-club. Naturally, he wasn’t too pleased that Gary’s hallway obstructed his plans, and no amount of subsequent ‘persuasion’ could make Gary give it up. Gary was stubborn to the point of stupid. He’d owned the bar for three months, during which time he’d been threatened on an almost daily basis and been hospitalised four times, twice by the police. Still he wouldn’t move.
‘Why?’ I often asked, after gigs.
It was always the same answer. ‘Because it’s my sodding bar. I’ve always wanted to have my own boozer. It’s my dream come true.’
I would look around at the shabby makeshift hallway, empty as usual. I would see the bruising from Gary’s latest battering fading into his drawn, anxious complexion, note his fingers drumming on the handle of the omnipresent baseball bat leaning against his chair. ‘This is your dream?’ I’d ask.
And then one night we were met with the charred remains of his dream. And Gary was gone.
One May breakfast-time a few months after Gary’s demise, a bulldozer driver sat waiting in his cab alongside the strip of late-night bars in Las Veronicas. As the last of the bemused club-goers emerged into the sunlight, shielding their dilated pupils like vampire zombies, the driver fired up the engine, sending tiny clouds of black into the big blue above. Police cars suddenly arrived, followed by men in hard hats who waved clipboards at the stragglers, shepherding them further away from the bars.
At 8.15am the bulldozer screamed as the driver released the brake. Its caterpillar tracks advanced, crunching the paving stones below as it ploughed through Veronicas’ oceanfront bars, clubs, late-night supermarkets and even later-night strip joints. Glass shattered, white plastic chairs and tables popped, and the metal poles that had propped up colourful canvas awnings clattered to the ground in domino fashion.
It was a defining moment in Tenerife’s tourism history. Like myself, the island was passing from reckless adolescence into adulthood. From then on, new licences were drawn up and ruthlessly enforced, covering everything from live entertainment to catering, safety regulations to advertising. Bars and clubs were faced with huge bills for complying with the necessary reforms, additional licence fees for putting on music of any kind, and massive fines for flouting any of the new laws, all of which resulted in the top DJs and the most expensive entertainers being laid off. In pursuit of the high fees they were used to, the DJs moved off Tenerife and on to emerging hotspots like Ayia Napa in Cyprus, San Antonio in Ibiza and the Black Sea resorts of the new kid on the block, Bulgaria. The reign of Playa de las Américas as Europe’s number-one party destination had come to an end.
To fill the gap, an overseas promotional campaign was launched, its brief to tempt the UK market with ‘the other side of Tenerife’. The tropical foliage of Tenerife’s lush northern slopes flashed promises of green exotica on the rain-stained sides of London’s double-decker buses. It was time for me to explore the other side, too.
CHAPTER TEN
Even though we’d moved out of the tourist enclave when we came to Tejina, that didn’t mean we immediately became immersed in village life. The main problem, of course, was our lack of proficiency with the Spanish language. This severely limited our social, cultural and entertainment opportunities. Although we had picked up plenty of bar and restaurant Spanish, beyond that, we were stumped. And because of this, we weren’t able to feel part of the local scene, which meant we knew very little about the real Tenerife.
We had adopted nothing of the Canarian lifestyle except drinking Dorada beer and succumbing to a daily siesta between the hours of two and four. It was hardly what you could call a cultural conversion.
It was time to integrate more. Until our move into the yonder, we had kept to our own, like many of the island’s expats, enjoying our little England in the sun. We had lived in a holiday resort, mixed with other British people, watched Coronation Street and EastEnders, and continued to be drawn to the supermarket shelves stocked with HP Sauce, Custard Cream biscuits and Campbell’s Chunky Soup.
The more I thought about it, the more ashamed I felt. To have lived in a foreign environm
ent for almost nine years, cocooned inside a bubble of homeland patriotism, felt uncomfortable, arrogant, even. It was like gate-crashing a party, blanking the host and sitting in a corner refusing to join in any of the arranged fun and games. Perhaps it was an intrinsic part of the British psyche, a kind of colonialism in miniature – invade a place, ignore its cultural identity and pursue your own way of living.
Joy and I had begun having Spanish lessons at home once a week, but it was slow going. The countless verb endings and the concept of gendered nouns were difficult to grasp, but it was a start. And one that I hoped would enable me to solve the mystery of our reclusive upstairs neighbours.
Rigsby merely ignored my questions or pretended that he didn’t understand whenever I quizzed him about them. So, armed with a smattering of new vocabulary and a Smugglers-style apple pie that Joy had baked, I knocked on their door again. I knew they were home. The car was parked outside, and with an ear cupped to the door, I could hear a television at whisper volume.
The first tentative knocks brought no response.
‘Tengo una tarta para ti,’ I pressed. (I have a cake for you.) I continued knocking.
After sixty seconds of continual rapping on the varnished door, it suddenly opened, just a couple of inches on a safety chain but enough to reveal a silver-haired lady dressed in ankle-length black. Her hair was tousled like she hadn’t brushed it in weeks, and her skin was etched with deep lines that conveyed a sense of perpetual worry.
I heard a soft girl’s voice from behind her. ‘Quién es?’ (Who is it?)
The silver-haired lady turned her head and hissed, ‘Cállate!’ (Shut up!) She turned back and looked from my face to the pie and back again, waiting for an explanation.
I dug deep into the weeks of lessons with Miguel, our Spanish teacher. ‘I’m a Joe, it’s neighbour.’ I smiled. ‘That is a cake of apple for yours.’ I extended my arm towards the gap in the door. Clearly the pie was not going to fit. The lady eyed it suspiciously. One of us had to concede. The door closed, and I heard the safety chain jangle.
