“Oh, we’re ready,” said Suzie, her voice lasciviously inviting. “No time like the present. You can spend your half an hour running us around in that. I’ll put my white gloves on so I can wave at the crowds.”
“They won’t see you through those tinted windows,” I said.
I expected Phil Matthews to put his foot down, to show off just a few of the five hundred brake horse power that threatened beneath his right foot, but on the contrary he was content to tootle along as if he were driving a Fiesta. I was prompted to joke about the possibility that the car was just an imitation plastic shell mounted above the sub-frame of a scrapped rust bucket, a bit like the way that authentic experience television shows mount false Ferrari look alike shells on top of impostors just for the cameras, or indeed, like Spitney Brears and her ilk might look like they are giving a concert when in fact you are listening to the same cd you could play at home, but I thought he might not take it well. Possibly a bit too close to the bone, I thought. Like Suzie, he seemed to be enjoying the auto-suggested celebrity the car encouraged. Even fumbling Phil was confident behind this wheel.
“It’s not that it makes you feel like you are somebody,” said Suzie after a few minutes of gentle glide past the caravan sites that run away from the Rincon, “you really are somebody.” She was silent again for a few seconds, but silent in the way that precedes further comment, the kind of silence that holds an audience. “You aren’t just one of the hoi polloi when you ride around in this,” she said. “It makes you something special.” Phil Matthews was smiling.
“Yes, Suzie, a bit like a clapped out black Matchless 350 to a sixteen-year-old...” I thought.
He turned right along the main road towards Altea. There was a lot of traffic, so again we ambled along. But we didn’t go far. After a couple of kilometres we came to a light industrial area, where both sides of the road were lined with an admixture of warehouses, car showrooms, furniture shops, hardware stores and a variety of anonymous services. Phil turned off into a service lane with parking on both sides, running parallel to the main road. He stopped to let us out after a hundred yards or so. He didn’t get out of the car, saying that he had errands to run. He pointed at a non-descript white building, that might, had it not been so scruffy on the outside, have been a flea-pit cinema in Bromaton about fifty years ago, the kind of place where short-trousered boys and stretch-panted girls might queue for a Saturday morning show before the peeling mock art deco frontage. To its right was a cavernous, half-opened roller shutter, behind which were copious supplies of wine and other booze. To its left, a smaller, almost pre-fabricated shack offered satellite television services in English, Dutch, German and French. There was not a word of Spanish in sight.
Paradise was just that, not El or The, not -o or -a, just a word strewn out in daylight-grey neon tubes, the concrete behind them slightly blackened in the way that failing electrics do. The door was closed, looking barred if anything, and, if pushed for opinion, I would have judged the place derelict. But, just as Phil Mathews drew away amidst the rumbling purr of the Porsche, the front door swung open to admit us. The entrance was only the width of a normal door, but it was covered by two half doors, one swinging left, the other right, like automatons with over-active servo-mechanisms. A closer inspection of the frontage as we walked towards the dark void of the interior, revealed no less than three security cameras up high. We were on Candid Camera all right.
The next surprise came inside. The outer doors closed behind us with a deep sucking clunk, as if we had been admitted to an air-lock. It was dark, not dim. It was black, apparently lightless. There was a delay before the second doors swung robotically open to reveal what looked like the lobby of an international hotel. It had seemed like entering the Tardis.
There was a fountain dead ahead, with an overflow trickle babbling across the room’s resonant quiet. Water fell in an even white sheet to the pool below, droplets, spectrally iridescent in the garish neon pond lights, collecting on the carpet of lily leaves at its edge. Beyond there was marble. There were marble floors, marble walls, marble pillars, marble benches and even a margaritaceous marble reception counter. The erotic statue above the central fountain was alabaster, and almost translucent. The pose was not exactly XXX, but it was as ecstatic as Bernini’s St. Teresa and distinctly less clad. The potted palms around the perimeter gave the lobby a feeling of space and volume that belied its moderate proportions.
“Alo,” said a blonde as she appeared from the door behind the reception desk. “Mr. Donkey, you are,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, grateful to have my existence so eloquently and so attractively confirmed. Now if truth be told, my reticence was born of more than politeness. The girl that called me Donkey was something so special she positively smacked my gob. Suddenly I was thrown forty years into my past. Before me stood a slight, slim, near-perfect reincarnation of a young Suzie Cottee. The head was almost round, a sphere of beauty. The long hair was pulled back in a wavy ponytail that hung loose across her left shoulder. She wore a black suit with trousers, a jacket cut short and tight, clearly designed never to fasten across the low-cut pink t-shirt, whose contents were obviously under-wired, but presented an eye-catching deep cleavage. This probably promised more than it could deliver, but only in quantitative terms. The quality was undeniable. I literally had to fight the urge to walk forward for a cuddle. But the sight took me back...
“I am Olga. Moment,” she said and disappeared again, leaving us alone with the echoing trickle. My sight fixed on the void of the doorway through which she disappeared. Almost immediately she reappeared with Mick Watson at her side.
“Hello there, you two, welcome to Paradise. It’s the place to be when you want to be ... entertained!”
“Appearances might deceive, but looks such a dump from outside,” said Suzie, diplomatic as ever.
“All these places do, Suzie dear, especially in warm light of day”, said Mick as he kissed her lengthily on the cheek. “We try not to attract attention during daylight. After dark, we are multicoloured and unmissable. Come and look.”
He turned and headed for a blank marble wall. We followed, confused. Not quite behind a pot plant, Mick located a wall-mounted magnetic strip scanner with the free fingers of his left hand while thumb and pinkie in practised coordination inserted a previously unnoticed credit card or equivalent into the slot. An exaggeratedly fast index and middle finger combination then pushed at the buttons below and caused what looked like a slab of marble to give into what lay beyond.
This marble, of course, was melamine-coated plywood. I can vouch for the authenticity of the rest, because I went round the foyer and kicked at it on the way out. The number Mick used to get in, incidentally, was XXXX. (You don’t think I would rupestrally publish that on the internet do you?[13])
The course I227, The Formal Analysis Of Cybernetics And Informatic Behavioural Patterns For Anyone Who Has Past First Level IT, was thoroughly effective in identifying how human beings consciously compromise themselves. Mick’s keypad was on his left, thus forcing him to use his left hand to press the buttons. But I227 taught me that, when he initially programmed the code, being right-handed, he used his right hand to establish its pattern and its obligatory deliberated verification by repetition. The movement pattern demanded of the left hand, therefore, was abnormal, non-intuitive and, no matter how many times applied, never learned. Gleaning Mick’s four-digit entrance code, therefore, as he fumbled with index and middle finger of his left hand, was a piece of pismire. I would have known the numbers anyway, could easily have predicted them, but it was gratifying to know I was right on both counts. Just inside the jamb, again left-handed, Mick fumbled for and found the light switch which made the definite click of a fitting that has not been replaced in ten years.
‘Stairway to Heaven’, said the sign that lit up above the short flight of marble now illuminated before us. Stairway To Heaven is
what Mick sang as we ascended to another door that, thankfully, opened merely by mechanical means. “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold and she’s buying a stairway to heaven. When she gets there she knows if the stores are all closed with a word she can get what she came for. Ooh, ooh, and she’s buying a stairway to heaven,” were the words that accompanied our ascent, but they were sung definitively in Suzie’s direction, not mine.
There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold
And she’s making a stairway to heaven
When she gets there she knows, if the bars are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for
Ooh, ooh, and she’s making a stairway to heaven
There’s a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure
‘Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings
In a club by the road, there’s a tenant who sings
Sometimes all of our acts are misguided
Ooh, it makes me wonder
Ooh, it makes me wonder
There’s a feeling I get when I look to the sea
And my spirit is crying for leaving
In my thoughts I have seen clouds of smoke in the bars
And the voices of those who stand looking
and it makes me wonder
really makes me wonder
And it’s whispered that soon if we all call the tune
Then the tenant will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the clubroom will echo with laughter
If there’s a rustle on your barstool, don’t be alarmed now,
It’s just a spring clean for the new Queen
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on
Ooh, it makes me wonder
Ooh, Ooh, it makes me wonder
Your head is humming and it won’t go, in case you don’t know
The singer’s calling you to join him
Dear lady, can’t you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all is one and one is all, yeah
To be a rock and not to roll.
And she’s making the stairway to heaven
Beyond was another bar. It was not large, but not small either. It was low-ceilinged, built on an alcove per table principle, each den seating a maximum of four. There were ten or twelve tables, each with a five watt table light and a ten watt downlighter above. It was mostly red and black with velvet predominating. The marble was behind us. This was all medium density fibre with emulsion paint spat around. But it was too dark to tell, so it could be whatever a punter imagined.
“A drink?” asked Mick, following with, “margarita, pina colada, screwdriver, dirty bull, pumpkin divine, mary widow, napoleon, cocomacoque, Tahiti club, paloma, toreador, midnight cowboy, bourbon swizzle...?” before either of us could answer.
“I’d like a sherry,” said Suzie, her choice clearly influenced by the hangover from the Porsche trip.
“Pint,” I mumbled, as an anonymous body appeared in the dim recesses behind the bar. I had hardly finished my monosyllable before a gas guzzling spigot began to gargle out my amber nectar from a tap that clearly hadn’t been opened since last night. It wasn’t Olga behind the bar. To my surprise it was another dyed and over-dressed lady who, having placed our drinks before us, automatically rang them into a touch-screen cash register, whose display only came alive when she summoned it with a gentle flick of her fingers.
“What’s a sherry?” she stalled momentarily, her Yorkshire twang asking Mick to confirm in intelligible speech what she should press on the till. “Ah yes,” she continued, reassuringly, well before Mick had even begun to react, “I remember. Jerez. A bill of twenty euros appeared in the payment window.”
“It’s on the house, Reece, darling,” said Mick.
“Mick Watson,” I said, immediately relieved, “the last time I heard you say that you were talking to your mother.”
Mick looked confused. “I never called my mother darling,” he said, brow furrowed.
“I know that. I was talking about ‘on the house’. It was in the Bromaton Variety Club in nineteen seventy six, just before you hopped it over here for the first time. And,” I continued without pause to indicate my change of subject, “since when did a pint and a Bristol Cream rush twenty euros?”
“The best things in life are free...” sang Mick, trying to avoid an answer.
“That may be true, but under this roof they’ve all been left at the door. There’s not much in here that’s free, if you ask me.”
“Tha’s not wrong,” said Mick, using the surreally exaggerated vernacular and understatement to emphasise his point. “Bring your drinks with you. I’ll show you round.”
He set off past the bar, wafting a light curtain to the side to reveal another staircase. But where the first seemed ample and even slightly opulent, this was narrow and too dimly lit to allow a proper view of the décor. It was dark, and that’s all I can say about it. It was so dark and the risers were so tall and irregular that both Suzie and I stumbled on the way up.
“Hey, Mick,” I said, “your punters could do themselves serious injury coming up here. They could knock themselves out.”
“That’s precisely what we want, Don,” said Mick in a low mumble.
At the top of the landing there was a narrow corridor, also dark, where some seconds of exposure solidified a half a dozen doors along its length, three on each side. Mick opened the first and showed us into what looked like the interior of a cherry ripple ice cream. Everything was pink and cerise. You could lose badgers in the carpet pile and the heart-shaped bed looked like a magnified liquorice all-sort, one of those squidgy ones coated with crunchy sugar pellets that were always left in the bottom of the box when everything else had been eaten.
Mick flicked switches. Music started, showers began to steam, a television came alive with a copulating couple alongside a fellatio friend amidst a group of gangsters. Lights dimmed, perfume wafted, hydraulics raised the head-end of the bed and massage modules along its length began to ripple, making it look like the whole thing was infested with beavers. It probably would be.
“We have a certain class of punter here,” said Mick, as he selectively and carefully extinguished each special effect in turn. “They are willing to pay for a class service.”
“Underclass being extra, I suppose,” I said.
“Under, over, nose to tail, conventional, unconventional, front, back, back to front, front to back, in, out, in and out, out and in, round the house and back again - it’s up to you. What you want we have and none of it is anything to do with us. We are a hotel with permanent guests, and that’s all. Our ladies are our residents. What you agree with one of the residents of Paradise is your business and her business, not our business. We sell hotel rooms on long leases and short-term drinks at the bar.”
“...at twenty euros a couple...”
“...often more...”
“...must be a good business...”
“...excellent...”
“...hardly mass market, though...”
“...we measure mass in a different way...”
“...turnover...”
“...as the Bishop said to the actress...”
“...as the
accountant said to the pimp...”
“Now steady on. Don’t get all moral with me, you juvenescent turdiform! I’m in the hotel business. I rent rooms and run a bar and that’s all.”
“And you’d like The Castle down in town to operate like this?”
“I never suggested anything of the sort, Suzie. The Castle is a tourist pub. It’s a simple, no-nonsense concept, just a sing-along karaoke bingo-hall cum cabaret night-club aimed at hen parties with Sunday roasts, satellite tv football and video games seven days a week. It’s nowhere near as complicated a venture as Paradise. Come and see...”
And with that he set off back down the stairs. We followed, now noticing the details we had missed on the way up, our eyes having got used to the dark. At first, we thought the staircase walls were painted, but definitely not with white emulsion or even colour mix special satin finish. We now saw the detail. The surfaces were a mass of fleshy females, all posed, posing, interposed and poised. There were some that were clearly copies of photos, the ladies perhaps touched up by Phil Matthews in his studio above The Castle and then printed on high quality paper before being stuck onto the wall. But there were also others that had more of an intellectual, even artistic air. There was a naked Mona Lisa, for instance, her neck and head placed neatly on the torso of an anonymous, decapitated, seated nude. But the combination was inventive, apparently carefully attached to the original. Some of the copies were straight. One was Bronzino’s Allegory With Venus And Cupid, its Renaissance blue iridescent through the dimness. Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus had been doctored a little, her cupping hand having been edited slightly to her left to reveal something of an eponymous mound. Goya’s Naked Maja was also there, but in her case taste had been violated because various things had been added to her surroundings, various dominatrix appliances that her ostensibly submissive pose attempted to ignore. The montage was quite brilliant, even creative in its irony.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 9
