by Alexei Sayle
The Dog Catcher
Alexei Sayle
THE DOG CATCHER
The woman came into the valley, whose Arabic name meant ‘happiness’, at the very start of the summer. She had hitchhiked up from the coast, along the highway that climbed twisting through the gorge into the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. In the wide delta there had been fields of sugar cane, banana palms, custard apple orchards and waving clumps of bamboo, later on as they climbed into the campo there were steep terraces of olive trees, oranges and lemons, then on the rocky mesas almond trees, their leaves a beautiful spring green and the fruit hanging half formed. Nowhere were there the gigantic sheets of plastic, covering chemical-drunk, sweating vegetables, that disfigured the growing lands further up the coast towards Almeria. There had been decent spring rains that year and the acequias, the irrigation channels that the Romans had built, ran fresh with icy water.
She wasn’t running away exactly but there were a number of men all along the Costa Tropical and Costa del Sol, one Latvian guy in particular, who it was better that she didn’t see for a while, for his sake really, all that shouting and threatening every time he saw her couldn’t be doing him any good. Some people just seemed to get so twisted around her, that was her opinion. She knew the reason for it, it was because she was too trusting, too giving, and individuals, guys especially, saw that as a green light to try and suck her dry. Aquarians were always taken advantage of, it was a scientific fact.
The woman’s name was Sue, she was from the North of England, that part of the North West where all the towns ran into each other along motorways and bombed-out high streets. She had come to Spain on a whim not knowing really where Spain was, with a bloke of course — Aquarians had a great need to give and receive love, repeated studies had proved it. A nice posh lad with money who she met in a club in Liverpool. They’d been going round together for a couple of weeks when he said he was going out to DJ on the costa, he paid for her plane ticket and he paid for the rented flat in a smart urbanisation. After a bit she asked him why he didn’t have any records or any turntables. He told her that he’d thought she understood that he was a conceptual DJ who played the music that he heard all the time in his head, straight into the heads of other people and the heads of cats and dogs too. Then he said he was also working on a machine to slow down time and reverse the flow of entropy. Then the Civil Guards came and took him away. Sometimes she tried to hear his music but she didn’t think she could.
The idea of going back to England was a non-starter, her husband and kids had made such a fuss and her own mother had gone on the TV show Kilroy to denounce her. They all had to understand that she wasn’t Thirty yet and let’s face it she was fantastic-looking so she had the absolute right to have a good time before it was too late. That’s what feminism had taught her.
So it was bar jobs in the town and other blokes after that and some of the blokes getting twisted. Then the Latvian trying to run her over and ploughing his Mercedes into the stack of butane canisters outside the supermercado. Once his burns healed she sensed he would come after her again so it was time to move on.
With her bag over her shoulder she walked to a big bar on the road out where the camionistas parked their trucks for one last brandy before slinging the rigs up the sinuous mountain roads. She asked around, looking for the perfect destination as if she were in a travel agent’s. The old man in the wheezing lorry loaded down with watermelons, whose name was Antonio, said he was going back to his home, one of the villages in the foothills of the mountains. One with a stout wall around it built by the Moors, with a single gate in and out; where the road ended, he said, and where you could see a car coming from five kilometres away. To her it sounded like it might be a safe place; he said he would take her up there for a blow job which she bartered down to a hand job and a feel of her tits, payment to be made at journey’s end.
They didn’t go on the highway but took the old road, first through the tourist towns, going so slowly that even car drivers towing caravans kept giving them the finger. Then Antonio swerved onto a narrow serpentine camino that bent up into the mountains, and the straining old truck seemed to be pushed up the slopes by the jets of thick black smoke that roared from its tailpipe. All the time Antonio spoke about his little town, its fine walls, its beautiful church, its lovely white-painted jumble of houses. And as if he had talked it into existence, suddenly, there it was above them, rising out of the orange groves, the red-tiled roofs of the houses poking above the thick stone walls.
She paid for her ride in the parking lot of the orange cooperative, a large modern shed built on a rock plateau just outside the single gateway that led into the shaded web of alleys and lanes that was the little town. He was a fit old boy, she had to give him that; the tit fondling would have gone on all night if she hadn’t called time after half an hour, still he seemed very grateful. Afterwards he dropped her at one of the two bars in the village, the one where he said all the English drank.
The place was called Bar Noche Azul. You could tell it was a foreigners’ bar because there were chairs on its vine-covered terrace though it was only May with the thermometer reading twenty-nine centigrade. The Spanish did not begin sitting outside until later on in the summer when the temperature started pushing into the high thirties.
She stepped inside the bar and dumped her bag on the littered floor. There was the usual battle of the giant noises going on. Two TVs, one behind the bar and another monster, wide-screen one in the corner, both were turned on and both were tuned to different channels. Over that there was a stereo playing Spanish pop and a fruit machine clonging away to itself. The bar was of course tiled, traditional patterns rendered in acid, factory colours on floors, walls and ceiling so the racket bounced and ballooned back on itself. The place was also quite full of people and everybody had to shout to make themselves heard. Sue went to the bar and ordered the smallest beer, a canya, and took it to a vacant table. After a while the barman came over and chucked a big piece of chorizo on a hunk of bread onto the table. In the traditional Andalucian way tapas were given free up here if you bought wine or beer. If you bought a much more expensive drink like twelve-year-old brandy or imported Malibu you didn’t get anything.
Though none paid the slightest attention to her she knew she had been noticed, first because she always got noticed, she was that kind of girl, but in a place as small as this a new arrival, no matter how self-effacing, would be clocked by the inhabitants. She studied the ones she knew were the British. There were several clumps of them, mostly older than her, in their forties and fifties. These British didn’t seem anything like the ones on the coast. On the coast you got your tweed-coated Nazis, or your gold-dripping cockney villains or your pulling-their-trousers-down fat lumps, being sick in the streets and calling the Spanish ‘Pakis’. This lot in Noche Azul spoke English amongst themselves, like on the coast in a variety of accents you’d never hear conversing to each other back home:
High Church Knightsbridge talking to Thick Birmingham talking to California talking to Camp Old-fashioned Queen but the difference was that when they ordered drinks from the bar staff or threw some comment to the younger locals who also seemed to hang in this bar they did it incredibly, unbelievably in Spanish! Good Spanish, too. She couldn’t remember a British person on the coast ever speaking Spanish, they didn’t need to, they lived in a bubble of Britishness, radio stations, newspapers, bars; up here it was obviously different, they had to fit in.
One of the English, an old queen who’d been at the centre of a shrieking group, came over and sat down at the table opposite Sue. ‘And whose little girl are you?’
Sue smiled up at him. ‘I’m just passing through.’
‘To where, darling? There’s no through,
to pass through to.
He held out his hand. ‘Laurence Leahy…’
‘Sue,’ she said and shook hands.
‘Another drink?’
‘Yeah, why not?’
He shouted over to the barman who quickly brought more drinks and more food.
‘So “Passing Through Sue”, where do you plan to stay tonight? There’s no hotel in our little town.’
‘Somebody usually rents rooms …
‘By an incredible coincidence I happen to do that.’
‘How much?’
‘Umm … twenty thousand pesetas a week.’
‘Eighteen thousand two hundred and sixty-five.’
The odd number threw him, as it was meant to. When haggling for anything Sue always did this for that reason. ‘Yes erm . . alright, eighteen thousand and whatever it was.’
He indicated the crowd he’d been with. ‘Come and meet everyone.
Laurence led her over to the gaggle of foreigners he had been with and introduced her around, still calling her ‘Passing Through Sue’.
They were mostly British with a couple of Belgians and Dutch (who were sort of foreign British people anyway) and a Europhile Singaporean. The whole lot of them stayed in the bar till about 1 a.m. then Laurence led her to his house; he didn’t offer to carry Sue’s bag. In the dark it was hard to tell from the outside the size of Laurence’s place, only that she entered through a small door set in a huge studded Arabic gate that was the only portal breaking the run of a long white wall.
Stepping through the gate brought her into a secret courtyard, this was the first of an uncountable number of hidden places she would step into over that summer. She stood and stared in amazement, up at the abundant stars that lit the hidden garden, then at the tall palms that shaded the starlight, then at the orange and lemon trees, their fruit hanging as copious as the stars. Laurence waited, enjoying her astonishment. ‘Not bad, eh?’ he said.
‘It’s fantastic.’
‘Glad you like it because it costs me a bloody fortune, I’m being drained like a pig. This is supposed to be my retirement, I tell you I’ve never been more distracted .
Come and see the rest of it. Fucking thing.’ He led her through a door into the house and flipped on a light. It was like one of those houses you see in magazines, not the trashy ones in Hello! either, not comedians’ places in Henley or Formula One drivers’ serviced apartments in Monaco but one of the houses in the magazines that are just about houses and show you how you could live, if you had money, taste and about a thousand years.
Laurence whisked her round the place. ‘Living room, you can use that; kitchen, you can use that but clean up after you; my office, stay out of there; my bedroom, stay out unless invited; your bedroom, same goes for Laurence.’
The next morning she didn’t wake up until ten. She could hear Laurence crashing about in the kitchen. The sun was bleaching the stones of the patio and he had laid breakfast out on a long table under a white awning.
‘Is there work around here?’ she asked him.
‘Cleaning some of the houses the tourists rent. Bar work maybe but it’s all at Spanish rates …
‘Well, I’ll hang about to see what opportunities there are.
Sue had noticed that in the living room there were a lot of framed sketches round the walls of men and women in costumes: Cavaliers, Battle of Britain pilots, milkmaids, Victorian nurses, all signed L.L. She asked him, ‘All them pictures on the wall that you did of people from history do you see them in visions or something?’
‘Eh?’
‘You’re a Pisces, in their dreams Pisces travel into the past and bring secret messages back. I thought you might have done the drawings after you came back to the present.’
‘Do they really? Umm … Well, I suppose that’s one explanation but I’m afraid the real one is that I designed all those outfits. Yes, it was what I did before my so-called retirement, I was a costume designer on films and TV.’
‘A what?’
‘A costume designer. Well, you know in movies and on the telly the clothes that the actors wear are designed by someone. Then they’re made specially according to the designs, my designs. Usually there’s several copies of course in case of accidents or so the outfits seem fresh or when there’s a stunt—’
Sue broke in. ‘Are you sure?’
‘What?’
‘Are you sure about this?’
‘Of course I’m sure, I did it for forty years.’
‘If you say so,’ she said and they left it at that and talked about other things. She wasn’t fooled about the drawings though. What a ridiculous idea, she reflected. What was it he called himself again, ‘costume designator’? Yeah right. Maybe he was ashamed of seeing visions of the past in his dreams and was trying to cover it up. Yeah that was it, Pisces could be like that if their Venus was rising.
They went down to Noche Azul for their lunch and had the Menu Del Dia. As they walked through the high-walled skein of narrow alleys they had to step over various dogs lying stretched out on the hot ground, and outside the bar lay, scampered or sat panting in the backs of pick-up trucks all the dogs who belonged to those inside. More or less the same crowd as last night were in there, with a few additions and subtractions. These were the people she would spend her summer with. There was ‘Nige’, a very tall dark-haired woman of about forty years, a sculptor with a studio and living quarters right in the middle of the village; she had two dogs, ‘Dexter’ and ‘Del Boy’, two big matching yellow things. Frank, middle-aged cockney wide boy, doing up a house in the next village and exporting antiques, owner of one wolf with a trace of dog in it, name of Cohn. Kirsten, Dutch academic working on a doctorate for the next six months, loosely attached to one nameless hound for the duration. Li Tang, big house on the edge of the village, extremely vague about activities, dogless. Janet, retired BBC executive, small village house, small pension, small dog also called Janet (or more usually ‘Little Janet’). Baz, local builder to the foreigners, four dogs of mixed size from giant to a tiny creature that seemed to be half-dog half-squirrel, names Canello, Negrita, General Franco and Macki. Miriam from Macclesfield, small cortijo in the woods below the village, early retirement from the planning department on mental health grounds, three-legged black female mongrel called ‘Coffee Table’ and, fiercely protective of her, a male Doberman answering to the name of ‘Azul’. Malcolm, writer, big house in the village, two little dogs, ‘Salvador’ and ‘Pablo’.
When Sue and Laurence joined them the foreigners were having a conversation about how much they the outsiders should get involved in village affairs. Miriam said, ‘If they want us to take on some of the jobs for the Junta then they’ll ask us. We shouldn’t push ourselves forward.’
‘This is a timeless culture, we shouldn’t distort it by importing extrinsic influences,’ added the Dutch woman Kirsten in much better English than anyone else present.
‘My taxes to the EC pay to keep it timeless … why shouldn’t I do what I want?’ said Frank.
Laurence laughed. ‘When was the last time you paid any taxes?’
This from Nige: ‘Well, I pay the amount of tax I paid in the UK. I reckon I bought Domingo’s shiny new tractor.’
There seemed a bit of needle between Nige and Laurence, and he said with some asperity, ‘I’m sure he’d give you a ride on it, dear, if you asked him. Either way you might have paid for it but you don’t own it.’
Malcolm said, ‘Those of us with money could help in a non pushy way. During the winter this place is often cut off for weeks. We could buy a snow plough and give it to them. I couldn’t get into Granada last year to buy fresh memory cards for my Sony Dreamcast.’
Laurence disagreed. ‘No, that’s one area where we shouldn’t mess with the balance. It’s part of the ecology of the village that nobody can get in or out from time to time in the cold months, it is a beneficial quarantine, the snows purify the village.’ Which seemed to Sue a pretty whacky thing to say, yet maybe ever
yone felt the same way for discussion moved on to other matters.
Through the rest of that week Sue, via Laurence’s sponsorship, found herself easily worked into the fabric of the little group of foreigners. It wasn’t hard, a group of highly intelligent urbanites such as these living amongst peasants would naturally hunger for new stories and Sue had a whole pack of new stories, even accounting for the forty per cent she had to hold back for what might be termed legal reasons.
That weekend, as if to celebrate her arrival, it was the village fiesta. All along the valley every weekend one village or another would have its fiesta. The saints would be taken out of the church and paraded around. The old women would crawl around on their knees as if auditioning to play dwarves in a panto, the men would get drunk, there would be bands and dancing, paella for a thousand given away free at 4 a.m. for those still standing (which was more or less everybody), there would be a theme of some kind and always the most dangerous possible use of fireworks. In Sue’s village the men would hold formidable rockets in their hands, then casually light them from the cigarettes that were draped from their bottom lips. As the flame beat on their arms they would hang on to them looking nonchalant with an ‘Oh do I have a rocket in my hand?’ expression on their faces, then they would release the sticks letting the rockets swoop into the howling air, where they would explode with an immense concussion.
A pair of recovering Welsh bulimics had rented the house next to the plaza, the very seismic epicentre of the fiesta. Used to France they had thought that a village in Spain would be similarly quiet. At 5 a.m. they came out in their nightgowns to ask Paco the Mayor if he could turn the noise down but he couldn’t hear them. They left the next day.
On the Monday the few Spanish who were about walked with the shuffling steps of chemotherapy patients, the plaza was still littered with fragments of exploded rocket and other bits of firework.
As Sue was crossing the square a pack of dogs came skittering round the corner in a happy mood. She recognised most of the canine gang, Cohn, Little Janet, Azul, Salvador and Pablo, General Franco, Canello plus three of the effete little yappy dogs that the peasants surprisingly favoured, with Coffee Table unsteadily bringing up the rear. However, bounding and leaping at the centre of the group was the most magnificent dog she had ever seen, the size of a small cow it was, with lustrous grey black fur, and a long intelligent head set with jet-black eyes. The Dog appeared to have been much better groomed and fed than any of the local pack of hounds, and Sue thought it might perhaps be some sort of a pedigree.
