He looked confused. “Shoukhran,” he said. “Je suis de Maroc. You want internet?” I wish I understood - not to mention a Muslim bar owner... I left.
The Brit food place was just a bit further down the road. I always thought that L147, Modern European Languages, Their Development, Structure, Grammar And Context, would stand me in good stead in the era of pan-European integration, and now, in my new life, I have the opportunity to put my learned skills into action. Inside the shop I pointed in my best Spanish at the display and said, proudly, “Dos Cornish Pasty Sabor Pollo Tikka Massala Tradicional, por favor.”
I was initially gratified when the assistant did precisely what I asked. He then paused, my paper bag lunch suspended delicately between his sausage-like middle finger and thumb, the fingers of his left hand anticipating the microwave door release button. “D’yer wan ‘em warm, mate?” he asked in broadest Scouse.
“No,” I replied, keeping my Spanish accent.
It was only just after eleven so I decided to take a nostalgic detour. The pasties, after all, were for lunch, so I had at least an hour. I carried on towards the sea. It’s not too busy at the moment, probably because the schools aren’t on holiday yet, so all the travelling teachers are still at work.
As I walked past Benidorm Palace, I couldn’t help recalling the first time Suzie and I went there. It was quite soon after it opened, about thirty years ago. It’s changed a lot since then, but only on the outside. The show is probably the same. You can bank on lots of colour, well known songs, a plate-sized steak and a good night out with bare breasts, though men have to wear ties. It reminds me a lot of the famous Variety Club in Bromaton. It was built in the sixties next to Bromaton Quartet football ground. It opened in a blaze of highly selective celebrity glory with a jazz week. It was the era, of course, when BBC2 used to run live jazz prime time in the evenings, not because it was popular but because it was a fulfilment of a public service to an identifiable minority taste. Quaint, wasn’t it? We covered the development of the idea in S282 Post-War Public Service Broadcasting Ideals In Western European Democracies, contrasting it with the headlong pursuit of the lowest common denominator that emerged during the seventies and eighties. The history of the Variety Club anticipated the change. After its opening jazz, it concentrated on Sunday Night at the Palladium acts, the brand of variety that could sing or comic a star turn on television, relying heavily on names well known for their endorsement of cat food, carpets, car insurance or yogurt. I retract the last in the list because we had never heard of yogurt at the time.
It did well for a few years. Suzie and I used to go there regularly, as did a number of people from Kiddington. It was only a few miles away and it was on the bus route to Bromaton. People would save up so they could go out for a night of class every few weeks. While Reg with his organ used to fill in the gaps between the bingo in the Working Men’s Club, we used to sit with friends and compare lists of the star turns we had seen at the Variety Club. They did a special night on Sundays, with the acts, prawn cocktail, chicken in a basket and apple pie with custard for a fiver. In those days, of course, a fiver was a fiver. It was a tidy sum, a hundred shillings, or even one thousand two hundred pence in an era when a Penny Arrow actually cost a penny, before, that is, it got so small they had to change its name, because it had become too short to be called an arrow. But you didn’t get to eat your Penny Arrow watching Dickie Henderson, Vince Hill or Daisy May which is why the Variety Club cost a fiver. I can even remember speculating with my dad what kind of car each star might drive. We had to wait two hours by the stage door until Dickie Henderson came out. It was an Aston Martin. Class act.
But it was that holiday in 1981, the year of our first trip to Benidorm Palace, when Mick Watson reappeared in our lives yet again. I should rephrase that because he had already reappeared in Suzie’s life at least once per night that week. It was in one of those sophisticated cubicles that Suzie leaned across to shout in my ear, “I’m not going home.” Though the music was loud, Pete Crawshaw and his missus, Paula, both heard, though they did their best to convince us that they were still listening to the turn who was blasting out My Way at volume, with all the sincerity of a Sinatra. We had booked the table at the start of the week, some days before we had all stopped speaking to one another. I still think it was all Dulcie’s fault. She has always been a rebel, always tried to manipulate. She had started the minute we left home. She told me one thing, and then asked Suzie for the opposite. Thus we argued while she retreated to childhood’s safe ground to watch. We’d only reached the Tuesday when I left a Benidorm club early to take a sulking daughter back to the hotel, leaving Suzie at the mercy of a certain Mick Watson, whom we knew had taken over bar management in the establishment.
By then, of course, we had already been here on holiday several times. We knew the ropes; we knew the clubs and the bars. We had also come across Mick Watson in a different role, as the manager of The Dog’s on Calle Lepanto. But the place was changing fast in a way that Kiddington was not. And by 1981, he had moved on from his little shop-front pub in the Europa Centre and had become a bar manager in a club. His star seemed to be on the rise. Perhaps that’s why Suzie wanted to stay. Perhaps, on the other hand, it was that fulgurant[6] Mick Watson’s smooth talk. For a second time, he promised her the earth. It was twenty years since our first visit to beautiful Benidorm, a place we had always associated with easy-going sophistication. And then, that evening, it became a black hole of despair for one Donkey Cottee, an end to life with the stunning Suzie. It had been so different that first time, back in the sixties.
They were years of change. We were convinced we had achieved a level of sophistication unknown in human history. We had mass media, record players, the Beatles, television soaps, cars and Cyril Lord carpets. We had even started to put green peppers into salads. We had already been abroad on holiday, and had our minds broadened enough for people like Suzie, my dearest wife, to wear a poncho as an everyday garment. It was, of course, a relationship of convenience, begun during our very first visit to Benidorm’s golden sands courtesy of Suzie’s parents, near the start of that swinging decade.
We were still scratting for a living even at the end of the sixties, mind you. Suzie and I were all right because I had a trade, or at least the start of one. But many of those who had been branded secondary and modern left school at fifteen with neither paper in hand nor knowledge in head. Pete Crawshaw was one such product of post-war British educational enlightenment. He had already worked through a handful of bit jobs when he landed a waiter’s job at the Variety Club, a position he thought would be a good earner. If people paid a fiver for their Variety Club chicken in a basket, what might the tips be?
We were still on good terms, despite having gone our separated educational ways at eleven. Pete had been a labourer for me for a few months after he got the boot from Empire Metals, where he had been packing brass right angles into wholesale-trade plain cardboard boxes. So when he got the waiter’s job at the Bromaton Variety Club, we had a few pints of Tetley’s to celebrate. I can remember saying, “Thanks for the pint, Pete. It’s the first time I have known your wallet come out without its padlock.”
“It’s all changed now, Don,” he said. And we both bolted half a pint in the next gulp. We said little else.
It took only a few weeks for the story to change. He invited me out again. This time, as usual, I paid.
“I’ve had a run in at work,” he said. I can remember his gloom. There was a white foam line of ale head across his upper lip. I remember thinking his face looked as long as Charlie Carolie’s.
“I’ll get my pointed hat and saxophone,” I said, pointing politely at my own mouth.
“I’m serious,” he said, wiping away the fast popping bubbles with the back of his free hand. “I don’t think it can last. It’s a matter of principle.”
“Pete, I’m that surprised I have precisely one hair s
tanding on end,” I thought. “So what’s gone off?” I asked, intentionally referring specifically to the Variety Club’s food.
“Trouble at t’mill,” he said.
“Sprocket’s dropped off t’mainbrace, then?”
“Aye, summat like that...”
I was willing him to be more forthcoming, but I took my time. I knew Pete had some of the characteristics of my own granddad, to whom he was distantly related by marriage. The old chap could make a ten minute speech with eight words. And Pete, like many Kiddington lads, measured his emotional intensity in pints. It was three later that the floodgates opened.
“The boss has got it in for me.”
“What have you done, lad?”
“It was a prawn cocktail. I took it back to the kitchen.”
“My God! For whatever reason?”
“There were no prawns in it.”
I remember contemplating the scenario. Here’s a punter that’s paid a good, sweat-earned fiver for a night out to see Harry Secombe. The plumbeous proplasm[7] of supporting acts is currently playing to chattering indifference. And so, no doubt doing their utmost to ignore the palmyric phenomenology of the material, they tuck into their five quid’s worth of locally up-market menu, specialities by resident chef Gordon Bloo. With mouths slobbering at the anticipation of chicken in a basket, the perfunctory starter, the prawn cocktail, arrives. Pete Crawshaw, the proud, employed waiter, himself slobbering at the promise of tips, delivers the pink and green concoction, as it streaks its way down the inside of a wine glass, a glass that will look completely out of place next to the pint jars on the table. A minute later, the unsuspecting Pete is called back.
“’Ere, there’s no deleterious prawns in this endocrine cocktail. It’s just a few strips of stentorian lettuce and a spoon of frangible pink sauce!”[8]
“So I took them back to the kitchen,” said Pete after another deep swig of Tetley’s had gone part way to alleviating his obvious despair. “That’s when the boss went for me. ‘Don’t neo-platonically tell me that there’s no deleterious prawns in the endocrine prawn cocktails, you leukopotomous squirt! It’s the meretricious new house rules now! The owners say they can’t nomothetically afford any more deleterious prawns. The parsimonious place is losing money! And you are paid to serve the detritus, not comment on its flaming validity! Now take the pre-Cambrian things back and tell the artichokes what I’ve said. Tell ‘em to eat what they’re blunging given!’” Pete took another swig of Tetley’s to lubricate his vocal chords. The last time he spoke so long at one go was probably saying the Lord’s Prayer in primary school assembly. “It’s not going to last, Don.”
And then, more than a decade after our advice session in the pub, there we were in 1981, communally experiencing the new international tourist attraction, the Benidorm Palace, an imitation surely not of the Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergère, but of Bromaton Variety Club and its celebrity prawnless prawn cocktails. We were having a holiday together. But Dulcie had been a pain in the tintinnabulation all week, moaning about the food, saying she was bored, getting the runs and then sulking in her room. Suzie had spent more time with Mick Watson than with me, despite the fact that we didn’t even run into him in his new bar at the Rincon end until the Tuesday afternoon. We had fallen out with Pete and Paula, because they wanted to do things together and the Cottees couldn’t be assembled. And, to put the Dutch cap on opportunity, Suzie announces that she is not going home. I had made things up with Pete and Paula by the end of the following week. With Suzie it took longer. If only Suzie and I had turned around out of shoat creek as quickly. As I passed The Palace this morning, drifting, I began to hum ‘Memories are made of this.’
5 Boring elderly flatulence - ed.
6 Implying flashy - ed
7 Lead casting - ed
8 Hard and tough and harmful to the body - ed
Four
Our first trip to this place... - Don recalls his first package holiday. Suzie and Mick have an accident.
Our first trip to this place was not long after it opened in the early 1960s. Mayor Pedro Zaragoza had made his long march via his Vespa scooter to consult with El Caudillo some years before. Fearful that naked ladies lying on his beaches would prompt some Monsignor to cut off his addendum, the mid-twentieth century visionary decided to pre-empt all possible objections by going straight to the top, over God’s head, thus placing him ex-communicado.
So by the time Suzie and I made our very first trip to the golden sands, over a decade and a half before the Palace opened, the resort was starting to build up, a direction it was to favour over coming generations. In an era when Kiddingtonians still aspired to a club week in September at the Chanzapool lights, Suzie’s parents, being well-heeled business types, were already flying off to the Med for their holidays. Suzie and I had already been going steady for a couple of years, so it seemed quite natural for her parents to invite me along on their annual pilgrimage to the sun. But the year of our first visit was special for other reasons. My invitation was more than recognition of my status as Suzie’s bloke. In fact, it was more of a deliberate attempt by her parents to weld us together, perhaps to wed us.
We had been both steady and unsteady throughout that year. It was the year that Mick Watson made his first mark on her life, an act that left a ranging red streak that ran down her upper arm from the shoulder, a scar that would disfigure her left side for the rest of her life. But more deeply, it re-drew her self-image. Strangely enough, Suzie had always been a petite girl, despite her father being both heavily-built and plump, and her mother being both tall and solid, but without a hint of excess. Suzie was already five feet two and never grew any taller. She filled out a little after then, of course, but only in the right places, her frame never growing larger than slender. She had her mother’s blonde hair and her determination. But as a child, Suzie had never wanted for anything: she was used to getting her own way and positively demanded choice. I hoped, even prayed, she would choose me. I worshipped her, no less.
We’d had an argument in the September of the previous year. She had just come back from holiday. They’d been to Majorca for the second time and hadn’t enjoyed it, resolving to make a change for their next trip. There had been too many noisy Brits on the beach front along the Arenal, perhaps, in those days, a hundred or so. Suzie seemed to embrace the idea of change for change’s sake and decided that she needed a new bloke to go along with the declared transformation of holiday venue.
We’d been cool, on and off for several weeks. I knew she had her eyes on Mick Watson. She picked fights with me and, when I responded, usually trying to claim innocence, she blamed the whole thing on me, went cold and played hard to get. Every time Mick came down the street she gave him a smile, even when she had just turned aside from a scowl aimed at me. And you could always tell when Mick was approaching, because he had become the proud owner of decibels in the form of a Matchless.
It was October before she told me outright that she had taken up with him, that they had already shared four dates and that she was finishing with me. I’ll never forget her put down. She said Mick had a Matchless between his legs, that it throbbed between her own in a way that my clapped out Bullnose couldn’t, especially since it wouldn’t even go most of the time. In simple, clear language, she advised me to sling my hook. I can remember the length and sickly loneliness of the darkening nights that autumn when Suzie surgically cut me out of her life.
December and January seemed to pass, their short days apparently longer than their eternal dark nights. February came and went. The decibels that pop-popped along Kiddington’s streets mapped out in sound where the slow revving Matchless made its progress, and thus fixed for the benefit of my imagination precisely where its bulk chose to occupy the space between Suzie’s thighs.
There was a cold snap in March that year, but it was nothing specia
l, since we had been frozen up for months. At the very start of the month there was a sudden thaw, followed immediately by an abrupt return to heavy frost. Mick always blamed the black ice, the re-frozen water that never had time to evaporate. The police put it down to his speed. The fastuous cachalot[9] was doing sixty miles an hour down Oakenshaw Hill and couldn’t take the bend at the bottom. The bike slid from under them. They were on their way home from the pictures, where they had been to see a new film featuring someone called Bond. Mick said it made him randy, so he was rushing home with his Matchless throbbing.
But it wasn’t an addendum that throbbed that night, it was whatever came into contact with solid objects as Mick and Suzie bounced along the road. Luckily, there was no traffic at that time, since most sensible people had stayed at home. Mick Watson, the flabby dipsomaniac, slid on his padded leather arsinotherium and came up with only bruises and a sprained ankle to remind him of his escapade. Suzie, however, catapulted over the top and took one bounce to find the ditch, where her upper arm encountered an unyielding solidity at the base of an unforgiving hawthorn.
She spent a month in hospital with her rebuilt arm resting horizontal on a scaffold. She barely slept, especially when they confirmed it would scar. Suzie’s parents banned Mick Watson from the ward, of course, but I went to visit every night after work. She couldn’t move it until late June, her first two-handed act being the ceremonial ripping up of all evidence of Mick Watson she could find. Her parents, you will appreciate, wanted above anything else to get the two of us back together, and the invitation to come to Benidorm was part of their plan. The stitch marks were still fraying red buttonholes on either side of the angry red seam that zipped up her left arm, and so beaches and swimming were definitely out. But at least I was back in the picture.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 3
