There was just a pause here, long enough for a shiver of disgust to ripple its way across her shoulders.
“She’s nice looking, you know, even though she’s in her forties now. She could still get the work if she wanted. There’s plenty of meat on her, but she carries it well, fills her jeans out well. Mine bulge all over the place nowadays, but it wasn’t always like that. I had a good figure for ages, but it went the way of all flesh in the last few years. I don’t do bad, though. There’s lots of Spaniards go for her type. They like them dark and bushy. I wasn’t like that, so I never got my derrière pinched, apart from by my dear mate José of course. He was another shopkeeper down in Rincon. He was one of those unshaven, surly, hefty, beefy blokes who in days gone by would have been humping a sack of whatever off the boats, or pulling tuna fish on billhooks across the harbour. But in my day he humped boxes of bras, knickers and camisoles out of the back of a van into his sex shop. Now I never did underwear. It was a bit too close to the bone, if you ask me, but he did a roaring trade. It was the thing to do for a while. People used to come on holiday in groups purely to have a sex week. They used to swap wives, exchange husbands, pick up local talent, go to the disco intent on taking someone back to the hotel with them. Well he did a roaring trade. The things he used to sell... Personally, I’ve never seen anything that size, not even on a donkey.” Suddenly she stopped. She looked at me. “You’re not saying a lot, are you?”
“No,” I said. “My husband’s called Donkey.”
It was a moment of confusion. She thought I had said my husband is a donkey. She ignored my words.
“Well he was a great bloke. And he showed me a trick or two when it came to dealing with the locals. You have to know which side they’re on. Did you know that? Round here, if they are this way inclined,” she leaned to one side, “then they are in with the big fellows with all the money. They get the money. They get the grants and the funding. They get special treatment and lots of favouritism. People say that it’s all corrupt, but it doesn’t just work through money and pay-offs. There’s a lot of favours, a lot of tit-for-tat, debts, gratitude and honour. You scratch mine and I’ll scratch yours. But if they are that way,” she leaned to the other side, “then they get their grants cut off and nobody wants to deal with them. José taught me all about it. So when I came round to selling off my two sites, both of which were desirable, to say the least, I knew who to approach, who to do business with, and who would pay what... It was a great help. I did all right, made a packet in fact. I saw José right as well. He deserved what I gave him in commission. I should have sold the third one as well at the time, but I decided to hold on. It came as close as this,” she held up a hand with a minute gap between middle finger and thumb, “and still I said no. It was a good price, far better than I would get now, of course, but I wanted to keep it for something to do, something to keep me busy. Those shops used to be my life. I couldn’t just ditch all three at one go. It was too much. It did mean, of course, that their big project couldn’t go ahead...” She paused again. “You all right, love?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I answered.
“But then you’d know all about that, I suppose, being in business in The Castle. They will have told you what’s been planned for that site...”
And that was the start of our friendship., a relationship that continued in much the same vain. She spoke, I listened and learned. She talked, I heard, I noted. I’ve visited her two or three times a week since that first morning. I’ve had the life story at least fifty times, and it’s the same every time and that’s reassuring. She has about four g’n’ts each time and I have a water or an orange juice. I’ve never had another drink since that first morning because later that day I had a bad time at The Castle. I made two or three mistakes, and so since then I’ve always had something soft. But otherwise the pattern has been the same. She talks and I listen. I’ve learned so much from her. She’s given me the most helpful advice on how to manage the local staff. Not that any of them are foreigners, of course. We don’t have any Spaniards at The Castle. And our punters are all Brits. We don’t even show Spanish football on the big screen.
I reckoned she was the same age as me, give or take a year or two. But it’s as if we were from different generations. The more I got to know her, the more Win became what I myself wanted to be. I didn’t want her failed marriages, her failed relationships with her daughters, but at least she had tried. At least she had done the things she wanted to do. And not everything can work out. Life doesn’t work like that. To have loved and lost is better than never to have loved at all. She’s made a pile of money out of being in business, got herself a beautiful house and a good income. But then she’s been married to three donkeys, not one of whom seems to have been a Donkey like mine. At least I have something to be thankful for. They were all hee-haws and now they’re all dead, whereas mine is still as bright as a button, if truth were told, and he’s still very much around.
We’ve talked a lot about husbands. Actually, Win has talked a lot about husbands. I don’t seem to have a lot to say. She’s had drink, abuse, neglect and I don’t know what from her blokes. She came home one day and found one of them in bed with the maid. Lucky so-and-so to have had a maid if you ask me. It makes me thankful that I have had my Donkey all these years. Better the devil you know... He’ll not light any bonfires, my Donkey, but he’ll also never go out. He’ll always be there, bless him. Which is more than can be said for Win.
It’s nearly a year since I first walked through that gap in the hedge. It was a different world through there. Cooped up in a mobile home where swinging a cat is more ambition than likelihood, you imagine space; you imagine a house with four bedrooms and a bathroom each, a lounge where you could play cricket and a garden where every corner is a private bliss. Who cares about the kitchen? The maid’s the only person who sees it. And besides, the laundry does all the washing.
But there’s one thing you can’t buy and that’s happiness. And on that score Win has always been a loser. She’s had just what she wanted, husbands, children, property, businesses, profits, plenty of money. But she has never found what she sought, which was peace. She was always striving, always succeeding, but never satisfied. We talked a lot. She talked a lot. All I did was drop in an occasional word, and often they would be names. And it wasn’t long before I mentioned Mick.
“He’s that lackey of a bar manager,” I can remember her saying. “Beer and Benidorm. Been here for years. He does a few things on the side as well, so I’m told.” She rubbed her fingers and thumb. It meant money, but only would apply to someone who had none. She grew more serious when I mentioned another name, Johnny Squibb.
“Now he’s one to watch,” she said. “He had some dealings with my last husband. He’s a lad with irons in the fire is our Johnny. I’ve not seen him in three years, but then I wouldn’t because I’m retired now. But he was involved in the project to redevelop the site in Rincon. He was one of those I disappointed when I wouldn’t sell. Johnny’s a fixer. He’s a gentleman, but not a gentle man. You want something fixed, and he fixes it. He asks the questions, but the answers are never ‘no’.”
“So how did you manage to get your own way?” I remember her smile. There was a complete story in that smile. It didn’t need any filling out with words.
“Johnny has his weaknesses. It’s just that most people don’t get close enough to find them.”
George and Elizabeth Jones were not names that meant anything to her. She would talk all morning about what Mick was not, or about what he never was or would not become. She knew more about him than she admitted. She would also fill an hour or two with the exploits of Johnny Squibb, but George and Elizabeth were complete unknowns.
“Phil Matthews and his wife, Karen?” I asked just once.
“Who? Never heard of them.”
I once mentioned that we had a local mayor involved in the ownership
of The Castle. I never mentioned it again because I didn’t understand most of what she said. She spoke for an hour. Pedro’s town is a small place, a name I had never even heard of when I came here on holiday. But it’s a place with plenty of land, and there’s been two or three large new housing developments in his area, most of the places built high on a hillside with a view of the sea. It’s all exclusive, with a lot of Russians and Bulgarians and the like. There’s even a footballer or two. Now the residents have enough power to block any further development, something that has angered many a powerful interest. There’s a sports harbour cum marina nearby and all the luxurious yachts you could imagine. Now Pedro is completely beholden to these people. They don’t elect him, but they keep him in beer, so to speak. But then there’s always the next catch if you’re a fisherman. The residents are so rich that one family has built a complete church for their own private use. Now there’s piety. They’ve had the place gilded and employ a small army of staff to keep it neat and tidy. And that’s probably out of the petty cash - or the unpaid tax.
Pedro has had problems though, Win told me, because his fellow councillors want to build on some land within the town boundaries but those people who fund Pedro will have nothing of it, so there’s frustration. He’s between a rock and a hard place. What he needs more than anything at the moment is another prime site that has planning permission. Then he might be able to do a deal. It’s like buying brands in the supermarket. You know the name, but you have no idea who is behind it, who the eventual owner might be. The name might be familiar, but that’s all it is, just a name.
“There’s big money around here,” she said just a few days ago. “And there’s some big money around that place of yours.” To this day I’ve no idea whether she meant The Castle, Paradise, both or neither, or something else, like our camp site, or some project in Pedro’s town, or perhaps all of them. I didn’t pursue it at the time. And now I’ll never know. But on balance she had to mean The Castle because it’s a prime site in the centre of town.
I went through the hedge again yesterday. The place was quiet. The ice bucket was empty, melted.
Thirty Eight
When the cracks start to show, it’s time to act, time to stand in the doorway... - Donald reflects on how to survive earthquakes and lists the consequences for his home village. He then reveals the principle and previously unstated reason that persuaded the Cottees to seek their new life.
When the cracks start to show, it’s time to act, time to stand in the doorway and hope for the best. It was in E327, Survival Comes Home In Seismic Movements that I was first introduced to the potential safety of the lintel. After many years of DIY and minor building projects in my spare time, during which I regularly trapped my fingers under the tectonic things trying to get them into place, I suddenly saw them in a new, protecting light. The best thing you can do, it seems, once news of an earthquake on the way has reached you over the radio, is to put down your knife and fork, dab the egg yolk off your lips, replace the folded napkin next to your plate and adopt a standing position in an open doorway. It is, I am assured, essential that you open the door first. In earthquakes it’s the falling debris that crushes you and the theory is that the strong lintel across the door frame stops such material from hitting you as you descend eight storeys to the ground. As long as you stay in the doorway you are safe. Windows work the same way, but if you stand in the window, of course, there’s a chance that you’ll fall out. But it remains the case that while the building cracks to rubble around you, the lintel above your head will hit you in one piece.
Cracks of other kinds used to plague Kiddington. Seismic movements in West Yorkshire are rarely paradigm shifts, being usually much more subtle, clandestine, even infinitesimal adjustments. A president of Argentina was once asked what preparations he had made for seismic movements. He answered that he had nothing in place, but if they existed he would have them rounded up and shot. Now you can’t do that with plain common or garden subsidence.
There’s been mining in and around Kiddington for hundreds of years. The deep mine where I used to work didn’t open until the second half of the nineteenth century. Others nearby were established around the same time, their foundation driven by a new technology that could sink, maintain and service shafts, winding gear, ventilation and everything else that had to work if the getters were to survive. Looking back, it’s hard to accept that the large-scale industry only lasted for just over a hundred years. For us in the village, it was a form of permanence we hardly ever thought to question. Coal fuelled the industrial expansion of the age, made steel, powered ships, fired the empire. Demand was limitless, and the troglodytes that mined the stuff dug it out in every direction wherever they found it.
In the old days, new workings were shored up by carpenters. They would install props to hold up the roof and sometimes panels to hold back any loose scree. The structures they built were all tied together. They weren’t permanent, of course. It was often wet down there and we all know that wood and water don’t mix, so everything was in a state of constant renewal. But the structures they built could stand up for themselves and that’s a pretty good indication that, even if things change, they won’t easily fall down.
But in later mining, in the mechanical era after the War, we used hydraulic jacks instead of wooden props and they were mobile. When we worked an area out, we would move the props on to the next production area, knowing that the seams we were leaving behind had run out of their supply of our precious fossil fuel. And no props means no support. We left the old workings to collapse.
Now usually this was not a sudden fall. After all, we had taken a few metres depth over a very small area. There were hundreds of metres of earth above us, varied strata, some of which was rocky and so had its own internal structure, and the whole lot was surrounded by millions of tons of soil, sandstone, shale and other things that was pushing everything in from the sides.
But a hundred years of mining in a part of the planet where there’s a pit every few miles produces a complete world of workings underground. There’s tunnels, shafts, common or garden roads and everything else that contributes to the job. Down there, the earth was a honeycomb of air space. It’s not exactly a Crunchie Bar, but it might be an Aero. And then, when the workings start to strain and later crack, sag and collapse, the earth above moves a little, perhaps seismically.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 45
