“Just a friend. I know them from The Castle.”
“You just missed them. They’ll have just gone off to work. So you know where to find them.”
“Oh what a pity,” I said, noting carefully her choice of tense. “I was given this note to deliver to Phil Matthews.” I held up a piece of paper I’d just torn from the pad I bought at the supermarket.
She looked confused. “You’ve got the wrong house, I think. There’s no Matthews here. He’s called Phil, all right, but his surname is Mason. They won’t be back until the early hours. They have a job in one of the pubs in Benidorm. They’re photographers.”
I tried to look surprised. “I was sure it was the Matthews that lived here. How long have the Masons been with you?”
“Only three weeks,” she said. “They’re new to the area, only just arrived from Britain.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I must have the wrong house.”
The minute I got home I did a little check of my own. Phil Matthews is from Bromaton. And there’s only one place in that town that sells Land Rovers. I concluded it must come from there because its British number plate had YK at the start. It was a good bet.
Now there’s a chap who lives in Kiddington, a middle-class type, with a house up West Lane. I did his computer for him a few times when he got in a tangle. He’s the showroom manager at Bromaton Motors. I did a quick call via my voice-over-internet-protocol software that allows me to telephone anywhere in Europe for a year at the same price it costs me to order a Chinese takeaway in Kiddington. Well, he wasn’t at home but I left a message on his answer phone. It was a simple message.
“Hi, Dale. Don Cottee here ringing from Spain. How’s it going? Long time no see. Just a quick one. Registration YK03XXX. Land Rover Discovery. Green. Any gen? Sorry to trouble. We’re doing all right, thanks. Suzie’s managing a club. How’s the wife? Cheers.”
He came back the next morning. It was clearly a priority call, because he phoned before he went to work. The car was bought new by a woman called Karen McEvoy from an address in Punslet. She made three hire purchase payments and then she and the car disappeared without trace. Bromaton Motors recovered the cost of the vehicle via the agreement’s insurance six months after the last payment, during which time the underwriters of the hire purchase had tried but failed to locate either YK03XXX or the signatory, one Karen McEvoy. I sent him an email telling him precisely where to find both the car and its purchaser.
Forty
There were some blokes on the radio... - Donald has been out in the hills again. He has found Paradise deserted on the way home. He muses on the nature of economics and evolution, seeing the former as a means of achieving the latter, but absurdly. He is attracted by a television report of serious events of much local significance. He is confused at first, but then clarifies the issue via a chat with a neighbour.
There were some blokes on the radio the other day arguing about evolution. Now that’s not surprising, given that we are experiencing the centenary of the Greatest Ape himself, Charles Darwin. The argument went like this.
Women, who are apparently immune from all aspects of spontaneous mutation, natural selection or indeed nocturnal emission, need criteria upon which to select their mates. My own popularity has never been great enough to afford me the luxury of selecting my mates, but then that’s equality for you. Women, it seems, are naturally influenced by strength, overtly expressed breeding potential and ability to hunt. This is why it’s best to go to the disco in a Michelin man suit, dressed as a gladiator and sporting a long sword and a codpiece, preferably not served with chips. This apparently made us humans successful. It does not explain, however, why most Kiddingtonians, male or female, are overweight wimps who could be out-run by a wingless mosquito. Or perhaps, on further analysis of the nature of success, it does.
Now what seems strange to me is that this analysis pertains. One contributor did ask the perfectly serious question of whether the classical rules of natural selection, in other words those described by Plato, still apply to a species that has antibiotics and the hydrogen bomb. I mean, why would spider A wait around for five million years until it develops red spots by chance one day so it can compete with the already successful and dominant yellow striped variety when it can nuke its way to complete dominance at any time?
What also presents a conundrum is why current thinking is still based on the long-outmoded social organisation of hunter gathering. After at least several thousand years, you would have thought that the question, “How straight is your furrow?” or indeed “How deep does your plough go?” might now have achieved greater priority in the considerations of any self-respecting hen-house of selecting females, rather than an advertised capability to knock a neighbour on the head. Indeed in the modern era, whose enlightenment might only be two hundred years old, one might assume that the size of his IQ would be the more relevant criterion. “How long are your qualifications, darling?” might have limited applicability as a chat-up line for ladies at hen parties, but the answer is surely more relevant to today’s needs than knowing when he last bagged a rabbit or did for a sheep.
In fact, if earnings potential married to the opportunity to screw the competitors is the more relevant modern indicator of the male’s ability to provide, then surely the most desirable breeders would be the high-earning graduates of elite universities, who have at least a first or a two one in the frame on the wall alongside a Master’s they didn’t have to work for. Unless, of course, the graduate is a woman and then, as we all know, she would never look at a male that did not already earn at least twice what she does. There is a market, after all.
It was in the anthropology course A 102, Simian Household Interactions Theory: Beginning Appropriate Groundwork that I first appreciated the relevance of the football term, ‘give and go’, to the analysis of inter-human interaction. To unearth its true significance I had to bear in mind the overall philosophy of another course, an economics unit, E999, Economics And Reality Amid Changing Human Environments, in which the dismal science became truly soporific. It concentrated on theories of that Scottish shop-owner, replaced all references to ‘God’ with the word ‘market’ and claimed ‘competition’ as its prophet. The outmoded phrase ‘God willing’ simply became ‘the market will decide’, with nature no longer admitting any force other than the professedly competitive.
But it was this prophet, competition, that really interested me. Competition, I learned, always identifies the optimal solution. Prophets, after all, know how to achieve the best results and invite both assessment and judgment on the basis of profit achieved. There’s no place in capitalism for a prophet whose predictions prove inaccurate and thus generate no profit. There is simply no room for error, otherwise the supreme being that employed such a prophet on the sales team would have a status little beyond the weather forecaster, and they aren’t even on presenter’s contracts. This of course assumes that the supreme being was not on megabucks for the couple of years that could not be meaningfully evaluated before then legging it just as the entire strategy crashed. The only option then is to the kill the messenger. Goodbye prophet.
On reading the predictions of this prophet, however, I began to suspect a certain falseness, an inflation of argument whose price increases marginalise producers and promise more than they deliver. The word specious came to mind, thus linking the entire argument with the theory of evolution where I started. Darwin’s Origin Of The Specious clearly had much to say about the role of competition in defining the genetic characteristics of living organisms, which is why honing one’s skills in the pursuit of bushbucks in the Kalahari runs on a continuous thread to going to the disco dressed as a gladiator with a long sword and a codpiece. And, as you can see, the role of joined-up thinking is crucial.
But considering competition and the origins of specious in a single thought led me to football and breakdowns in reverse order. Now, I used to own an Austin Alleg
ro. As a car, the Allegro was not only a non troppo, it often never sustained an adagio, despite being largo than a Metro, which was largely suburban. I was thankful when my Allegro managed allegretto, and certainly never expected da capo al fine. In five years it hit con brio about twice and on several occasions its metronome ran right down, the tempo giusto of its working becoming distinctively rubato. Its ownership, however, was obbligato, since my ensemble at the time was limited to strings, shoestrings.
I remember one particular occasion when I, along with Pete Crawshaw, had been to the Kiddington Hotel for a pint. We were on our way home, having just turned left off the main road opposite the corner of the common. A cough and a splutter brought us to a halt. The Allegro’s engine stopped as well.
I had offered Pete a lift home. I hadn’t intended to purchase his labour. But, as usual, his wallet had been on the light side all evening and I had stood him a couple. I therefore had no hesitation in asking him to get out and push. I knew the fault. It was all in the electrics. A quick spray with WD40 and a few bashes with the edge of a spanner, an English key, on the battery contacts and the fuse box would do the trick, but I had left the spray can at home after a spring clean of the boot that afternoon.
“Pete,” I said, “give us a push down the road until we get to the next junction. I can freewheel from there down the hill.” There was no other traffic through the estate at that hour. I shoved on the door column by the driver’s seat so I could steer at the same time and Pete went round the back. Lo and behold, the said task was completed in just a minute or two. Silicone spray was duly located and applied, the fault remedied and thus Pete’s promised lift home was delivered.
But if I had been a proper prophet of market forces capitalism, I would surely have invoked my colleague, competition, as my guide. In that case my comment ought to have been, “Oh dastardly thing, Pete, the Allegro has gone non troppo again! Why don’t you go round the back and give it a push? Meanwhile, I’ll go to the front and push in the opposite direction. Thus we will compete and thereby automatically identify the most efficient solution to our problem.” I can suddenly hear all you politically right-handed people scoffing at my naiveté and pointing out that the car had been built by socialists. But what you are ignoring, my friends, is ‘give and go’.
I accept that football is competitive. I accept that sometimes there’s a winner. But football is essentially a team game, not an individualist’s park. ‘Give and go’ indicates that the best way to skin a cat might be to release from your possession the prime object of your desire - actually let someone else have the ball, for market’s sake! - and then, unselfishly, break into a run so that you might occupy an area of the pitch which is currently vacant. There are economic opportunities in innovation, it seems.
The tactic will work not only to the mutual advantage of yourself and your team-mate, but also for your team as a whole. It can only work, however, if the cretin you pass to can control the ball and then deliver to the space you find, his skills thus complementing your vision. The Scottish shopkeeper, no doubt, would have advocated that each one of the eleven on the team should take turns to see if they could individually dribble through the entire opposing team, since that would identify the one person who was the best option to use in future in order to pursue the same tactic. And so this brings me right back to the Origins Of The Specious, because if there’s anything that earmarks any human endeavour specifically as human then it’s the ability to cooperate, not compete. Ah, it’s the two teams on the pitch that compete, I hear you say. No, I answer, it’s the seventy-two thousand watching cooperators that have paid an arm and a leg each to spectate that create the spectacle.
That’s why the concept of solidarity arose within the old left. United we stand, divided we fall. The workers, united, will never be defeated, especially if you say it in Spanish. Don’t explain the world, change it. Organise! It was in this area that the Neo-Anarchist Trotskyite wing of the True Socialist Party of Kiddington (Non-Affiliated) was so strong. Our analysis was superb, our funds limited. We had all the arguments, but no pennies. Our delegates to the regional conference in Punslet would surely have changed the Party’s national manifesto if only we could have agreed to club together for the bus fare. Thus an opportunity literally went begging when we tried to raise the funds along the market side in Bromaton one Saturday. We didn’t succeed, most shoppers not donating, preferring to tell us to go to Russia, or words to that effect. When we told them that we were more into the thoughts of Mao Tse Tung, they became more interested, a good number of people actually asking what channel it was on.
Consideration of economic interest, competition, market forces and natural selection are at the forefront of my own thoughts tonight. I have spent an afternoon up and down the mountains. I have stencilled rock after rock with my No Molesta windmill. I have paused for a beer in my bar by the gates of Paradise and watched the early evening comings and goings. But tonight I have come home to Rosie and my blog in a completely different frame of mind from anything I have experienced before. All I can say is twelve inches. Something’s afoot. Tonight, unlike any other early evening casual surveillance of those who enter Paradise, drew a complete blank. The world, apparently in its entirety, was damned, the gates of Paradise remaining closed to all. Not a soul entered or left. I even stayed for a second beer before letting myself in for a quick nose around. And inside, I found the place as empty as my observation had predicted. Paradise was closed. Twelve inches, I thought.
It was later than usual when I arrived home, of course, but then Suzie would have gone off to The Castle by five at the latest. She had left half a pizza that fit exactly in the microwave and I tried hard not to compete with the three beers that were left in the fridge, the last of which I had just opened post-pizza with a snap, not in the anatomical manner habitually employed by Randy Sandy, and settled down to watch the news.
My thoughts were elsewhere as I began to watch. I was still troubled at finding Paradise deserted. I had grown used to the continued absence of my goal, whom I had not seen anywhere since that chance half-sighting with her hands on Pedro’s wheel in Benidorm. But Paradise going dark was a completely different proposition, an event that surely had much greater than merely local significance. So it was with a mixture of troubled thoughts and potentially injured pride that I waited for the television to come alive with España Directo. The troubles were all centred on Paradise, while the pride emanated from the fact that my Spanish has now achieved a level good enough to understand the headlines on the news, as long, of course, that there’s a full set of pictures alongside to offer a little context.
Now Suzie had clearly been at the old films again during the afternoon. She had left the channel selector set to something up in the hundreds, on a slot surrounded by broadcasts offering kitchen appliances, things to reduce your waist, increase the length of your todger or clean your bowels. There was travel, various aspects of paradise, all of which involved blue sea, sunshine, concrete hotels and palm trees, and a sports broadcast where the competitors had to ride quad bikes over old pianos whilst making spaghetti and singing Blue Moon, a game that can only be played on Thursdays. Apparently it’s going to be in the Olympics next time round. It was then that my remote hit a channel I don’t normally watch, because it’s in one of those funny languages I can’t understand. It’s broadcast from a local town just down the road. Normally, it’s a channel that features local bazaars, festivals, fiestas and reports from the pensioners’ club, and it habitually sounds like the copy was edited in someone’s bathroom. Tonight, however, was different.
I was already past the channel and pursuing my anticipated dose of domestic violence, weather reports and cooking that make up the daily fare of my usual evening magazine programme when something registered. “I know that place,” I said to myself. “I recognise that hefty stone wall across the front of the compound. I know that sea view. I know those palms set so close together
that their fronds tangle.” I swiftly flicked back up the channel numbers.
I was greeted now not with a vista I thought I recalled, but a face I recognised. The next shot cut to a driveway, at the head of which the automatic door of a garage was raised to reveal the back of the car inside. It was a beige BMW, a big one, but a composite model with no series number. The registration, of course, had been blurred out with a matrix, just like they do on the free porn channels with any peninsularities that might arise or any vagaries that open up.
The setting here, however, was unmistakable, as was the presence of twisted yellow tape across all entrances and exits. Sexless beings meanwhile meandered collectively in their head to foot enclosing white suits. And then the full face of a still photo occupied the screen. I knew it well. I was tempted to say “Hello,” or even the more apposite, “Buenas tardes.” I knew he wouldn’t reply, of course. Twelve inches, I thought.
Now I am not used to seeing the house from that angle, but there was no mistaking where we were. I have driven past that entrance many times, not, you must understand because I was casing the joint or spying on anyone, but merely because I had, let’s say, a professional interest in its comings and goings. This interest of mine had only heightened in the weeks since my goal had vanished. I had at one stage been convinced that if I camped out along the street I would be sure to see her at least from a distance, so sure was I that this was her resting place. But all I ever saw was Alicia coming in and out and then, at rather odd times, the car making its own discreet entries. I was never once there to witness its departure.
On arrival it would stop short in the street, the occupant or occupants electing to open the electric gates with a remote and then driving straight into the garage rather than alighting into the fresh air. Though I had never been inside that clearly ample cavern, I could make out that there was access from within to the interior of the house via an escalator. Once the car pulled in, the garage doors invariably closed before anyone got out. The identity of whoever was driving in and out was thus never once revealed, the tinted windows delivering their intended secrecy.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 48
