A Search for Donald Cottee

by Philip Spires

  “We’ve got a couple of rooms on the top floor done out with more of Karen’s stuff,” said Mick, having noticed my interest in the décor.

  “You mean there’s another floor above the one we visited?” asked Suzie.

  “There’s another six rooms up there,” replied Mick, “some of them set up for special tastes and attracting a premium rate. We have twelve in all, not enough if the business was purely hotel trade, which it is, of course. But in the room rental business, twelve rooms is more than enough to generate quite a healthy balance sheet.”

  “And lots of valance sheets...” I said, without confidence.

  “The trouble with you, Donkey,” said Suzie, “is that you have got too clever for your own good. It’s all those stupid courses you’ve been doing. It’s about time you realised that we are just plain ordinary folk, not interested in those intellectual things that other classes might waste their time on. And as for your attempts at puns, the less said the better!” I think she didn’t find my comment funny. I sensed Mick Watson’s star on the rise again.

  We were again in the foyer, and then Mick led us behind the reception desk and through the door at the back. Behind it there was an office, clearly the nerve centre of the operation. It was not a big space, but clearly adequate to service the half-brained business that transpired on the other side of the door. Olga was there, behind one of the two desks that the rather cramped office could just accommodate. My eyes again were drawn. Mick opened the top drawer of a cabinet that stood next to the vacant desk and extracted a file. I noted with care the casual way he dropped the security card for the internal door into the space he had created, concluding that, if ever I might need it, then this was where it lived. He opened the yellow manila folder and placed four loose printed sheets side by side on the desk top.

  “These are the last quarter’s results,” he said. “Take a look.”

  Suzie and I glanced at the sheets. Mick pointed at a figure on the last of the pages and said, “That’s the bottom line. And that’s only what we declare. Remember that most places like this work mainly in cash.”

  The figure looked like a telephone number. I had only just finished counting the digits when Mick reached across his desk to a keypad placed near its right edge. This time there were seven digits in his code, making it more difficult for me to crack the sequence straight away. But he made the mistake of reaching for the buttons, meaning that his outstretched fingers tapped out their sequence more slowly than usual. The sequence revealed itself as XXXXXXX, again a pattern I could have predicted, because I know Mick and understand how his mind works.

  Another mock wall panel swung open. This time there was a safe behind, not a voided stairway to heaven. It was a large safe, its door-frame two feet square. He prodded at its combination, which was XXXXXX and used a standard Chubb key to turn its lock. There was something about the way in which his hand automatically reached for the key that suggested it might live there permanently, the assumption no doubt being that the code provided all the security that was needed.

  The cashbox he removed was conventional enough. He opened it to reveal a solid block of five hundred euro notes. “And that’s just our float,” he said, replacing it alongside the other boxes he carefully did not disturb, before closing the safe and entering the same seven digit pattern as before on his desk-top keypad to close the external door. “So, Suzie,” he said, as the mechanism clanked soundly shut, no melamine-coated plywood this time, “if you are going to make The Castle work, then you are going to have to start making that kind of money. Now can you see what The Castle is up against?”

  Suzie sighed, shrugged her shoulders and almost began to speak. But she stayed quiet, indicating to Mick that she would like to think over how she might respond. I, however, know her well enough to know that it was scepticism that stilled her tongue. Like me, she was taking everything in, but the associated pinches of salt were growing into handfuls.

  “What I don’t understand, Mick,” I said, “is that figure on your balance sheet. If your main business is renting rooms to self-employed ladies, then that figure divided by twelve, then by thirty and then by twenty-four makes one hell of an hourly rate.”

  “Plus drinks at twenty euros a round,” said Suzie.

  “Even so, it’s considerably above the minimum wage.”

  “I told you earlier,” said Mick, “that our clientele is slightly better heeled than the average Kiddingtonian on a package holiday. Hey big spender,” he sang, wobbling his ample chassis.

  “You sing like faeces,” said Olga without bothering to interrupt her concentration on the laptop that faced her.

  “But my talents lie elsewhere, my darling,” said Mick. “Come on, I’ll treat you to lunch. There’s a great cheap place for menu del día along the strip.”

  Phil Matthews dropped us off at The Castle at five o’clock. Suzie had taken the Porsche Cayenne Turbo very much for granted on the way back. She had been quiet ever since leaving Mick’s office, had barely picked at her lunch and had restricted her communication to mere mechanisms of eating throughout the meal.

  “Those numbers were unbelievable,” she said as she turned to enter her new fiefdom.

  I followed, silently applauding her choice of words.

  13 Write it in stone. It is increasingly difficult to decide if these terms are expletives or part of the text - ed

  Ten

  Well I’ve sat around like a pudding... - Suzie declares a new passion for life.

  Well I’ve sat around like a pudding for a month while Donkey has done his blogging. He takes it all very seriously, you know. He doesn’t just sit there and write like this. Oh no! He walks around with a retorter’s pad in one hand, pen in the other, making notes, researching on the internet, taking walks to find inspiration. Then he drafts his bit, paws over it like it was a new baby, looks up his special words, redrafts, types and then edits before he blogs. I wonder that he ever manages to let go of it. A still tongue makes a wise head, my mother used to say, but with Donkey it probably means he can’t think of anything to say.

  A month ago, when we first came here, he nagged me rotten to do this, and I said I would never - I repeat - never do anything of the sort. It seems to me to be altogether self-obsessed and introverted, and I wouldn’t like to see myself getting like that. He said I would need an interest to keep me occupied. Devil and idle hands, he said. Well, Donkey Cottee, both my mind and my time have been quite fully occupied, thank you, what with the cleaning, the washing, the shopping, the cooking, the ironing, the maintenance, the paperwork, learning enough Spanish so I can ask for potatoes at the market. I don’t have time to sally around doing my so-called intellectual thing. The last thing I need is another job, another thing to worry about. And what’s worrying about what you are doing is that you seem to be trying to create a new world entirely in your own image. If it doesn’t fit what you think, you either ignore it or criticise it. It’s all rather unhealthy, if you ask me.

  “So why am I now following suit?” I hear my vast blogging audience ask. Well, if there’s one thing we women do much better than men, it’s changing our minds. In this case, I have gone the whole hog. Having told Donkey I would never blog and that I couldn’t fit anything new into my life, I have now done both things. If this is the blog, then what is the other change of mind? Well, I have taken on a new job. A full time job. In for a penny... From today I am the new manageress of The Castle, once upon a time a famous Benidorm nightspot. Its fame spread all the way from Punslet to Ribthwaite and beyond, but in recent years it has fallen from flavour, become a mere memory of its old self. Now I’m in charge all that is going to change.

  I look on it as more of a challenge than a way of earning money. But my ideas and hard work are going to produce results. I am going to turn the place around. And exactly how I do it is going to be recorded in this blog, which will
become one of the best real life business stories ever written.

  So here, tonight, this is the start of the Suzie Blog, the Suzie Mullins Business blog. I’ve been a Cottee for more than forty years and at last, at least in cyberspace, I’m going to become again the Mullins that I was born, that perhaps I have always been.

  I’ve read Donkey’s nonsense about whether he ought to be this or that person, all of them idiots or twerps. So I did a search on my name and came up with artists, Hollywood celebrities and even estate agents. But who they are doesn’t interest me. All that matters is who I am, and I seem to be in some pretty good company with my name, not amongst people who do things to sheep, like my husband. But the real point is that I don’t have to worry about others, because my own project is going to make me famous. I am going to be my own woman. It’s never too late to mend. This is not going to be a rod for my own back: it’s going to be a way to make hay and the sun’s going to shine. Opportunity only knocks once.

  I am Susan Mullins, only child of a middle-class business family, famous for two generations as Bromaton’s only high-class milliner. For the first eighteen years of my life, Susan Mullins I stayed, Suzie to my friends, of course, daughter to Bert and Judy Mullins, pillars of the community, members of the Bromaton Chamber of Trade, perennial protectors against Sunday opening, despite their almost total lack of anything that could be advertised as religious conviction, save for my dad’s membership of The Rotary and The Masons.

  It was at eighteen that I married my Donkey, and it was also the year that Mullins The Milliners showed its first signs of decay. After that things went quickly downhill and, as a result, for the last forty-odd years I have been Susan Cottee, the adopted name evidence of foreign ownership of my person. To write a statement like that is a revolution. I have never said or written anything like that before. And now, having put it on paper, having expressed it, I suddenly can’t imagine how life can ever be the same again. It’s like spending all your life looking at the same flame-effect, imitation log fire in the living room and then, one day, the pattern in its plastic skin suddenly looks like a man with a beard, a Christ and, from then, you always see it. Your life has changed. The plastic face won’t leave you alone. Once in a lifetime might come often, but I’ve not been prepared. I’ve had the grease all along. Now I’ve found the squeaky wheel that needs it.

  I was going to inherit. It was a comfortable business. It made money. And there was no-one else, only me. When I was twelve, I had already given up on school. There was no point, was there? The world was already my oyster. The shop was successful and it would all be mine, because I was an only child. All I had to do was reach fifteen so I could leave school and then go in full time. I already knew how everything worked, because I used to help my mother whenever I was needed. But then by the time I got to fifteen, already people weren’t buying hats any more, so I stayed on at school to take some exams. I failed them, of course, because I had done nothing in those earlier years and I couldn’t catch up. I’d already burnt my bridges. At sixteen I had already taken up with Donkey. He made me laugh in those days, and he could help with my homework. He did it for me. By the time I was eighteen, the shop had started losing money. Eventually, we sold up to salvage whatever we could. Desperate times called for desperate measures. What little capital the sale raised went towards my dad’s retirement, so I married Donkey and we made our own way.

  It was the ruin of my dad, of course. It’s such a pity, because it wasn’t that the business actually failed. What happened is that people stopped wearing hats. My mother’s generation had the top of the wardrobe stuffed with them. My generation hadn’t even the need of one each. Business simply left us, whereas the costs didn’t. Before, ladies wanted their hats for weddings, for funerals, christenings, even for church on Sundays. Mullins The Milliners of Bromaton was not just a supplier of that essential commodity, it was the only quality milliner in the town. Buy the best, our motto rang, and you only cry once. My parents’ shop was in The Springs. It was a shop with a large sign - Mullins The Milliners - in blue and white across the double-fronted window. I used to serve in the shop in my spare time when I was younger, used to stand and chat with the high class women from Japedale or Yarnbury, even some from as far away as north Punslet. They used to come time and time again, because a label from our shop inside one of our hats really meant something in those parts. People would deliberately hang them on the back of hat-stands when they went to a restaurant so others could see the label inside. Mullins The Milliners of Bromaton, they proudly if quietly advertised.

  And a new hat meant the creation of a new person for many of those women. The pride they exuded as they strode their elegant stride down The Springs as they left the shop, usually carrying their new status in a ribbon-tied box, always used to impress me. “I want to be a woman like that one day,” I used to say as they swung their hips beneath their two-piece suits, the lines up the back of their stockings emphasising the shapeliness of their legs. Some of those women would try on the whole shop before they finally decided on feathers, on felt, on brim or net. They would stand for minutes on end looking at each one in the mirror, but I noticed early on that in fact they were looking only at themselves. Each time they tried something different, but each time the scrutiny of eyes in mirror rested firmly on the face, not the object of intended purchase. It was as if they knew that the new hat was reinventing their very person. They looked before leaping, perused before purchase.

  But then, suddenly, hats were out and poor Bert and Judy struggled. When they sold out, the new landlord let the shop to a building society. My dad only lasted five years into his early retirement. The cancer was virulent and took him quickly. But then he did smoke a lot. Judy lasted longer. She was always a strong, strapping woman. She wasn’t large, but in her prime she exuded a gritty determination that tolerated no fuss. Paradoxically, her patience was endless. She could wait all day for a miss in the shop to try on every item of stock if she felt it might lead to a sale. She was tolerant, patient and also methodical. She never rushed anything, never over-complicated, never pressured, just eased people towards the decisions she thought they would make anyway. She could talk the hind legs off a donkey, nineteen to the dozen. But in the shop she listened and business took care of itself. The customer was always right.

  She was also rarely wrong. Immediately she knew the difference between a serious punter and a browser. She never wasted her time. Procrastination is the fief of time, she used to say, so get on with it. But inactivity destroyed her. It was only a year after Bert died that the early-onset of Alzheimer’s began to show. She lasted another five years in the home, but never really recognised me again after the first two. Her death, morphine-assisted in a hospice, left me feeling completely alone, even betrayed. I still had Donkey, of course, and Dulcie as always was a handful, but my life seemed to fall apart for a while. I won’t evaporate...

  And now Donkey wants me to make a mark in hyperspace. But I will not do it in his way. He dwells too much on the past, a past that is probably more imagined than real. So when I do my blog, it will be a pointer to the future, at least a record of what went on in recent days. And that record is going to be essential when I write my book. And, unlike Donkey, I’m throwing caution to the wind. There’ll be no drafting, re-drafting and chucking for me. Suzie’s blog goes straight onto the screen and that’s that. Practice might make perfect, but then no-one’s perfect, so why practise? And I will practise what I preach, believe me. I was never one to beat about the bush, but, I warn you, my tryping never was any good.

  Anyway the past is behind us. It is finished. What’s the point in dwelling on something that’s gone and will never return? I never understood why anyone ever wanted to study history. It’s gone, done with, and won’t come back again. Teachers used to tell us it was so that people in the future could learn from the mistakes of the past. If you ask me, its only purpose is to classify past mistakes so they c
an be recognised when repeated by those who have studied history. Same meat, different gravy. Same trouble, different day. A lot of noise about nothing. Or, perhaps even more important, it gives those same incompetents a chance to talk.

  I’m a future type, always have been. Success is a journey, not a destination and the best is yet to come. What I intend to do is help other people avoid the pitbulls and mistakes that litter most people’s lives. I am going to create a formula for success, a one-way road to riches, a road that others can follow. Through the pages of this blog I am going to log my rise to success. You wait and see. And, once again, I will prove to my ever-doting and devoted husband that my innate business brain is still active. Though the start is never itself success, beginning is half done.

  I wouldn’t say that Donkey swept me off my feet. He’s not the sweeping type. No, Donkey is more like a gentle brush into the dustpan. He did promise me the earth, however. He used to tell me how he was going to get himself a trade, go into business and make loads of money. I could have whatever I wanted, he said. New kitchens, new clothes, cars, houses and foreign holidays all made his list. But while his mates and contemporaries got their motorbikes and old bangers, Donkey never got beyond a push-bike. I often wished he would splash out, but he’s not the splashing type. Well, I never got the earth. We’ve never been very well off, but I suppose we’ve never been poor either.

  But now I have my chance. I’ve not had the earth but now at least I am to have my Castle. Old skills I learned as a girl will be honed anew. I am going to make a success of this. I am going to take my chance and, more than that, I am going to keep a record of my success via this blog. So, a year or two hence, I will write the intimate business management book about how I turned around an ailing business and created one of the most successful tourist venues in Benidorm. Watch this space!