by Alexei Sayle
Tony gave Sue her savings back plus a big bonus after six weeks and then he went into Granada and bought a convertible BMW from the big dealership on the ring road.
One morning in July before the sun had begun to scour the white-painted alleys, Sue and Nige were walking back from Anna’s shop, they each had a carrier bag in both hands. It had taken them an hour and a half to buy their groceries, which was pretty good going given the lethargic pace of things during the hot months. As Nige talked her two dogs came running round the corner, tongues lolling from their mouths, pursued a few seconds later by a cloud of the other hounds with The Dog, at the centre of things, seeming to be directing operations. The whole furry storm shot past and disappeared down Calle Iglesias on their way to the church. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen my dogs in three days,’ said Nige. ‘That big one seems to have taken over the pack with its big city sophisticated ways.
‘Nobody’s taken it in though,’ said Sue.
‘No, and they won’t now, it’s too wild and flea-bitten.’
‘So what’ll happen to it?’
‘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.
Sue and The Dog stood trembling amongst the clay figures. She went up to Nige and hugged her.
‘Thank you, thank you, thank you. There’s somebody out there trying to kill me.’ Then, indicating The Dog, ‘Kill us.’
‘Yeah,’ said Nige. ‘It’s the Day of The Dog Catcher.’
‘But he shot Tony. Tony’s not a dog.’
‘Wasn’t he?’ said Nige. ‘You should pay more attention. I tried to tell you when I spoke about Despenaperros. They don’t distinguish between outsiders and dogs. If they’re a nuisance they get rid of both of them, when the time is right, on the appointed day. Half the kids in the valley are going to be doing cold turkey when the snows close them in this winter because of Tony. Tony was a mutt. Like I said, they let the dogs and the mutts run around for the summer and then The Dog Catcher comes on the day when The Dog Catcher has always come and deals with them both.’
‘What about the Guardia?’
‘You’ve seen the Guardia don’t count up here. It’s that strange mix of tolerance and cruelty, remember Laurence talked about it? And there’s also that thing that if you’re a local, a real local or a foreigner local, it doesn’t matter. Then you know when The Dog Catcher’s coming. You lock yourself and your dog inside and you’re safe.’
‘Shit Laurence, the bastard! He sent me out this morning. He knew The Dog Catcher was coming! And he sent me out, the old cunt!’
‘Well, you’re a mutt. If you keep a mutt away from The Dog Catcher then you have to be responsible for it. And you did steal his Rolex watch and you stopped paying rent. That wasn’t very nice. He took you in when you were obviously running away from something and you stole from him.’
Sue felt a momentary shame replace her self-righteous anger but it faded. Nige was going on again and getting on Sue’s nerves.
‘Let’s face it, you have done a few things this summer, Sue. If you keep a mutt and it kills sheep or steals or attacks a child or deals drugs, or turns tricks, then you, not the mutt, you have to answer for its bad behaviour, and the punishment is … well, you don’t want to know what the punishment is, they learnt some things from the Inquisition.’
‘Holy shit! But you took me in, you’ve saved me … Christ, thanks Nige… I won’t let you down, I mean not that I’ve really done anything bad anyway. So I’m alright as long as I’m locked inside when The Dog Catcher comes?’
‘Umm… Well, yes usually you would be alright, if you were locked inside when The Dog Catcher comes,’ said Nige rummaging in an Indian trunk.
‘Eh? What d’you mean, usually that I would be alright?’ said Sue.
‘Umm… What I mean is that usually you would be alright, fine, if you were locked inside, except, you see, I’m The Dog Catcher.’ Nige turned back from the trunk with a bolt action copy of a British Army Enfield .303 rifle, the kind that you can still buy in the gun markets of Peshawar, the kind that the Peshawaris called a ‘Britannia Mk 3’, held loosely in her hands. Nimbly she worked a round into the breech and raised the gun to her shoulder.
‘This is the first time they’ve allowed a foreigner to be The Dog Catcher. I don’t suppose you ever can understand what a tremendous honour that is because you simply do not comprehend what it is to be part of an ancient culture. I can’t afford to screw it up by letting dogs go now, can I? They’d think we weren’t serious about being here.’ And she shot Sue in the head, the round smashing through her pretty forehead and taking a chunk out of the wall behind. In the enclosed courtyard the concussion from the round was huge, Nige felt displaced air from the passage of the bullet smack her in the chest and rock her back on her heels.
As soon as the gun went off The Dog leapt up, mad with terror and raced round and round the rough stone walls, its ears back, urine streaming from its trembling flanks. Nige worked another cartridge into the breech and tried to draw a bead on the careering canine but it was impossible to get a good sight picture. Nige felt stupid and dizzy trying to aim with a rifle at a dog indoors. She was most likely to shoot one of her own sculptures so she simply lowered her weapon, cradled the rifle in her arms and stood still, waiting for the creature’s panic to subside. Eventually after fifteen minutes or so the beast slowed down and flopped, its legs too weak to hold it up, whimpering in a corner, its black eyes fixed pleadingly on Nige.
