Had Suzie been here, of course, we would have gone together on a number ten bus. But she is on a flying visit (no pun intended!) to Blighty. It’s been three years since her operation and these six monthly checks have now become something of a formality. The first two were pure hell, both in the experience and the anticipation. Fear of a recurrence of that tumour that wrecked her left side filled every moment of the two weeks that separated notice of the appointment and delivery of its results. But, by the time we had reached five wins on the trot, we began to live more easily with our shared prospects, especially after we accepted the possibility of the momentous decision to sell up in Kiddington, buy Rosie and head for the sun. As I said earlier, paradise exists only in its pursuit, its achievement merely defining new journeys towards the most gratifying goal. Who would have thought, even six months ago, that the Cottees would have relocated, re-established themselves and found a completely new, unpredicted career that would fulfil Suzie’s aspirations so perfectly that it would reignite her will to live? But speaking of igniting, I have to record just how momentous a day it has been.
Everything went fine until eight o’clock. My progress had been perfect, past the other caravan parks and then into Albir. But unnoticed until this morning, along the gentle rise up to the main road, I passed a couple of scruffy discos. I thought that such places were concentrated in Benidorm’s Yellow Brick Road, or along the strip that was the old Valencia road, or even maybe along the main road near the cluster of neon-lit girl shops by the roundabout. I had certainly not registered these two on the way down into Albir, or little Norway as we call it here. After all, I have only travelled these roads in the middle of the day and, in broad daylight and, like Paradise, these places are as noticeable as wasteland until they shout at you after dark.
But, as I found out this morning, nine o’clock marks the end of turning-out time and the two establishments were in the process of regurgitating what they had swallowed a few hours before. I was ambling, merely ambling, not really noticing anything, my mind firmly fixed on an imagined hospital waiting room countries away. I could picture Suzie in that crowded foyer of Ribthwaite Infirmary, the area into which the inadequate waiting rooms overspill. She was surely nervous, as ever, but no doubt confidently chatting to fellow aging Kiddingtonians about their ailments and respective tumours.
None of the shops or banks or offices were open, of course, because here ten is the time you expect business to start. So I was dawdling from one window to another, checking house prices, reading notices to practice my Spanish, wiling away some time because at the rate I was going I would arrive in Paradise long before my time.
There were just a couple of them at first, youngsters, Brits, all wearing black t-shirts with Dan’s Army printed in red across the front. By the time I had reached the double doors set in a recess to my right, however, another ten were spewing cacophonously forth from the black and violet interior. To a man, they were big, overweight and shaven-headed. Most had part-filled plastic beer glasses in the hands, the type that crinkle and easily crack in a grasp towards the lips. A couple carried bottles of rainbow-coloured ready-mix. They were trying to sing Here we go, Here we go, Here we go but they had forgotten the words.
Now why, at that particular instant, I should have suffered a vivid flashback to Mrs Brown’s and Mr Taylor’s classrooms in Kiddington Junior School I do not know. But what happened was quite instinctive. I did it without thinking, without even realising what was passing through my vocal chords. To say it was unplanned would be wrong, because it might imply that planning could have been a consideration. It was more of a waft at a fly nearby, or an involuntary poke at a momentary itch with a finger end. There, in front of me, was a flock of Mr Taylor’s sheep, perhaps on gardening class and thus parading outside the windows of Mrs Brown’s proudly academic interior. But now they were grown up, their predictability confirmed in their willingly adopted uniformity. Needless to say they were loud: their bleats filled the space outside, the road falling near silent between traffic-light changes. Apart from their shouted social murmurings, everything was so quiet that my instinctive reaction must have carried to within their earshot. All I did was repeat what we used to do when Mr Taylor’s lot walked past our window. I bleated like a sheep. “Baa,” I said at trill.
They were making noise of their own were Dan’s Army. They were all so drunk they could hardly stand. A couple of them had already sat at the kerb to hang their heads and mumble their moans into their sloshing drinks.
But what I saw was a herd of sheep in matching fleece. They were willingly acting a role they were being force-fed. They consumed because capitalism told them to consume. They consumed to the point that their wallets were empty and their brains addled. They consumed what was funnelled down their throats, like a French duck in pursuit of a designer liver. They followed their leader, presumably Dan, questioning nothing and thus condemned to repeat the mistakes of themselves in particular and their class in general in order to secure lasting irrelevance, insignificance and anonymity. I don’t actually remember saying “Baa” like a sheep as I passed them. What I do remember is being suddenly transported back over fifty years into a classroom with Geoff Watson at my side, nudging me in the ribs to get my attention, and the two of us, as was our habit, offering sound effect to the flock passing silently by outside, led apologetically by Mr Taylor. As Mrs Brown’s goats, we were merely asserting our playground superiority over Mr Taylor’s sheep. My problem was that we were all in Albir fifty years later and Dan’s Army heeded my call.
“Did you hear what that discarnate curmudgeon over there just said?” I heard rising from within the babble. “Here, you short asinine, kerf off, you ugly coprolalia.”
“Good gentlemen of Yorkshire,” I shouted across the road. “I notice from your twang that you hail from the region of Punslet.” The moment seemed to call for the theatrical.
My sentence was not quite complete when the words, “Distend the spokeshave,” rose audibly above the rising anger.
Now in my somewhat younger days I could call upon considerable measures of speed in such circumstances. I was not especially fast, nor did I have great resources of endurance. But if chased by a hostile mob, I could be prompted to over-perform. I recall one particular Saturday afternoon when Gagstone Rovers had played Bromaton Quartet and lost. A flock of Rovers fans were walking home via Kiddington just after I had emerged from the family front door, having previously driven home from the game with my dad in the car. I was on my way to the shop, but my Quartet scarf still adorned my neck, unfortunately thus advertising my allegiance at the precise moment when anonymity would have been preferable. By the time I had seen them, there was no turning back. They chased me a full mile through the council estate, but I always kept ahead. I had never run either as fast or as determinedly. I had no choice. On the games field, perhaps with a ball in my hands, they would have overhauled me before half-way. With self-preservation replacing the try-line, I was uncatchable.
Just like this morning - I had no choice. I might be early retired, but early is a wholly relative term, especially when applied to sixty-four rather than sixty-five. My speed is no more, and they were on me before I’d even had a chance to start to run. The red and black horde was not only across the road, it was all about me as one body before I had taken three steps at pace. My legs at sixty-four are not what they used to be. A fourth step would have floored me and three took me nowhere. So I found myself surrounded by an army of black and red carnivorous sheep, all bleating for blood.
“Just who the blennophobic heresiarch do you think you are, granddad?” said one of the gentlemen. There was an array of scrap metal around and through his face.
“My name is Cottee, Don Cottee, from Kiddington.” It was a mumble, but a proud one.
“And do I gather, Mr Don Cottee of Kiddington, that you consider myself and my good mates here are nothing better than a flock of ovines? Was
that the implication carried in your projected animal noises?”
Now I have to admit that I apply reverse paraphrase in my report. My compatriot’s challenge was not actually uttered in these exact words. His manner was, let’s say, rather more direct, his vocabulary less considered, his phraseology considerably more succinct, even pithy. A more faithful rendition, given the e-word rule of the blogger, would have been unintelligible, something akin to, “You fulvous flabellate filibeg! Are you calling my mesognathic mackle mates a bunch of ovopyriform ovines?” So, in a spirit of journalism, I have taken the liberty of conveying his meaning in my own words.
“I meant no disrespect, kind Sir,” I said, valiantly gathering decorum to fill the cracks left by my quivering voice. “I am a frail old man, hanging on to life precariously by the vital memory-strings of a distant childhood to which I regularly return unwittingly and without warning. I apologise profusely. For a moment, I was a nine-year-old.”
There was general noise, some shared mirth punctuated by guttural belches. “And by the time we have finished with you, Donald, my boy, you’ll be squealing like the infant you no doubt were a good eight years before that!”
As the group surrounded me and closed in to take multiple hold of the garments I had so carefully selected for my walk to Paradise, I remember issuing at least one giant roar. It was fear that drove it, but its full-lunged volume sounded like an assertion of raw aggression. It was a moment of sheer inspiration, and it achieved the perfect result.
Out of the corner of my eye, I had noticed, emerging from the brown mock-brickwork swing doors of the second disco establishment across the road a veritable bus-load of shaven-headed, pasty-skinned new arrivals, all wearing green and white hooped jerseys. Thus I screamed at full challenge my two carefully chosen words. “Catholic bar-stewards!”
Now the reaction was quicker than in most dinosaurs, but still took a second or two to develop. It was a moment when my assailants hesitated, apparently taken aback by the unexpected ferocity of my outburst. Their inaction, however, convinced the green-and-white that they were all with me, since I was positioned at their very centre. And, since Dan’s Army all instinctively turned to face the hoops, it appeared that they were awaiting a response to the challenge. Though delayed, the green-and-white advance, once begun, was decisive. Dan’s Army was hopelessly outnumbered. Initial resistance soon took on the nature of token as collectively they suddenly twigged the necessity to leg it.
In a moment of theatre, now exposed like a bedraggled flower stalk after its once-attached petals have shaken loose, I chose to wilt rather than scram, to go to ground clutching my temple as the angry mob surrounded. Adopting a strong Northern Ireland accent in an attempt to distance myself from the shouted outburst I wagered had been heard but not located, I uttered plaintively, “These Sassenachs set about me...” as I sank to my knees.
As a body, the green-and-white set off towards the fast-scattering Dan’s Army, all except one, that is, who offered me a hand along with, “Are you all right there, granddad?”
Not daring to speak again, lest my subterfuge be uncovered, I moaned a little, gasped and gave a wave of a hand.
“We had a run in with that lot yesterday,” he said as, luckily for me, he turned to seek reunification with his now disparate, pursuing flock.
Then, when he was twenty metres distant and still receding, I got to my feet and hailed a taxi that had conveniently appeared, its for hire light shining bright. The driver took one look at me, however, and concluded ‘auto-urinated Brit’ and drove on. Luckily most of the black-and reds and the green-and-whites were still engaged in their mutual pursuit, though a couple of the latter did notice my incongruous behaviour.
A second taxi did stop for me. I made it into the back seat just seconds before the approaching combined forces of black, white, red and green, now united in their pursuit of me, got within ten metres. The driver, sensing that the situation might not work out to his advantage, placed his foot firmly on his accelerator and took me to a safety beyond the roundabout at the end of the road. We had already progressed half a kilometre in the wrong direction before he thought to ask me where I wanted to go.
“Paradise,” I answered, “por favor.”
“That detritus-hole?” he answered in perfect English.
I shrugged confirmation.
Now Albir is one of those few places round here with a plethora of roundabouts. At the next one my driver did an about-face and began to retrace the path we had just taken, no doubt trusting that he could now approach from an opposite direction quite anonymously. It’s the shortest route, I thought, but it does go straight back to my sheep armies.
And sure enough, having reached the main road and turned right, there they were, now walking intermingled, allied even, displaying an air of collective wrong. They all saw me speeding past, of course, in the back of the car, despite my attempt to hide below the level of the window.. Red-and-black and green-and-white immediately pointed their recognition in my direction as if with a single mind.
Now Paradise is just a few hundred metres along that road. And the road is undeviatingly straight. An initial spurt in my direction from the armies of pursuers as I sped past soon fizzled to nothing as I in my car receded to distance. But when my driver did as he was bidden and turned off at the next junction into the service road that ran before the shop-fronts, my pursuers realised I was again within range and thus found new breath and taste for the chase. As we left the main road, a lean across to one side from my seat in the rear afforded a glimpse, via a wing-mirror, of my multi-coloured assailants sprinting along the hard shoulder. Paradise was one of the first establishments along the strip, so even the brake lights shone bright in the eyes of my ovine pursuers as my driver anticipated an early set-down. They knew I was at the end of my road.
The taxi stopped. I got out and ran to my haven’s door.
“’Ere, mate,” said the driver. “That’s ten euros.”
“Ten euros? I’ve only been in the car five minutes!”
For a few seconds, various Spanish words flowed in my direction. As I took out my wallet, I realised that I had only brought five euros in total, just enough for a coffee and a gob-stuffer. “Momento,” I squawked, as I set off towards the club and, I hoped, rescuing funds.
The door, of course, was locked, and there was no-one inside. Repeated presses of the doorbell generated the expected loop of renditions of Auld Lang Syne that the chimes reproduced, but elicited no response. I was still early, after all. There I stood brandishing my only weapon, a creased five euro note, as a raving driver regaled me in foreign phrases and an ovine army arrived en masse, bleating for my blood. They had reached the turning off the main road, just thirty metres away from where I sensed powerlessness.
But suddenly they had themselves to give way, to pause to assess their position. A loud blast of a horn scattered them to right and left as a large black Lexus four-wheel drive with tinted windows pulled off the main road and demanded right of passage along the carriageway, whose width the advancing ovines had occupied. The taxi driver reached an arm towards me, snatched my five euro note and set off at a speed unbecoming for a service road. I felt that he might know something I didn’t.
Much to my surprise, the large black vehicle drew gently up beside me and parked, its nose pointing in towards the plate glass windows of the swimming pool shop two doors up from Paradise. All four Lexus doors opened together and, much to my further surprise, I was confronted with Johnny and Mil, the couple Suzie and I had met at Mick’s place. From the rear seats, two extremely large bouncer types, both wearing black suits and white shirts, accompanied. They might have walked straight off a Benidorm cabaret stage.
“Hello, Don,” chirped Johnny, his voice synthesis implant sounding even more parrot-like than I recalled. “What’s going on?”
His words were cut short by the arrival of
my pursuers, all pant and rave. But Johnny’s two friends were clearly well trained. They had done this before. When they turned to face the approaching lads, it was as if they had cut the power to the armies’ motors. Anger immediately transformed to self-preservation. The two guys did nothing. They said nothing. All they did was stand and look at the twenty or so black-and-red and green-and-white and, to a lad, they all stopped, collected their thoughts, and, but a moment later, concluded that elsewhere provided better opportunities. They were gone in an instant.
“Don’t worry, Don. Johnny’s boys will look after you,” said Mil in her grating baritone. Images of frying pans sitting uncomfortably on fires filled my mind.
There were no questions asked, no confused prods to elicit what might or might not be happening. Trouble was assessed and trouble was duly dealt with, almost as if trouble were to be expected as an ever-present aspect of life, in every place and at all times, a mere sideline to the seriousness of the main thrust. I was even more surprised when Johnny took a huge bunch of keys from his trouser pocket and proceeded to open the doors of Paradise. I’d assumed he might be involved, but had never considered him as central.
He went inside and Mil followed. At the threshold she turned to beckon me in. “We’re only staying for a few minutes,” she said. “We just called in to pick up a few things for our meeting with Pedro. Olga will arrive soon and Mick will not be long after her. Just make yourself at home. Have a coffee - instant only, I’m afraid until someone starts up the machine - and relax. Keep the latch on the door. Olga and Mick will come in with their keys.”
I followed her inside to discover that Johnny had already let himself into the office. Mil went no further than the foyer bar. She offered me a stool and then went round the other side of the counter, filled a kettle at the sink and switched it on. “Take sugar?” she growled.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 17
