Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  I looked to see if he was intending to insult us for a third time but his smile suggested it wasn’t intended as a personal judgement.

  ‘Take Forgreen next door.’ He thumbed towards Micky’s apartment next door. ‘Started off selling apartments here, all nice and bonny. We bought ours from him. All kosher, no problems. Mind you, he knew not to mess with me. Then he got greedy, like all you youngsters do. Started doing deals on the side, taking all the commission instead of splitting it with his two partners. Anyway, like most people on this island, he couldn’t keep that closed.’ He put a finger to his lips. ‘His partners wondered why he was driving about in a flash open-top while they were in battered ex-rentals. So he got found out. Trouble was, one of his partners was married to the sister of a wrong ‘un who didn’t take kindly to her being taken for a ride. Forgreen had to do a runner. They caught up with him in London and tied him to a radiator for a week until he agreed to sign over all his ill-gotten gains in Tenerife. Like his house. Now he’s gone and spoiled it for all of us...’ Maureen had returned and was still humming, busying herself around Pete’s feet with a portable vacuum cleaner. Pete turned up the volume to compensate for the electronic sucking. ‘NOW WE’VE GOT THE SODDIN’ MAFIA LIVING NEXT DOOR.’ The timing was immaculate. Maureen turned off the vacuum just as Pete delivered his condemnation. They both looked at each other, silent, eyes stricken with alarm.

  Maureen held the vacuum nozzle aloft in pink washing-up gloves; ‘Are they in?’ she whispered.

  ‘What time is it?’ Pete whispered back.

  Maureen looked at her watch. ‘11.45.’

  ‘No. Tennis lesson.’ Pete’s shoulders dropped in relief.

  Maureen tightened her lips in a reprimanding look. ‘One of these days…’

  ‘Well ... it’s been entertaining,’ I said, nodding at Joy to stand up. Maureen reached between us to straighten the cushions. ‘But we’ve got to get ready for work.’

  ‘No rest for the wicked I guess,’ said Pete. ‘Don’t go mugging anybody on your way up.’ As the front door closed behind us I could hear the vacuum rev up again.

  We had all been taking advantage of the fact that someone else was available to work the most loathed shift of the day. Loathed because it was a time when the majority of customers were getting steadily drunk and expected us to join them in their frivolity no matter how tired we all were or how early we had to get up the next morning.

  For my brother and , four and a half hours cooking for over a hundred people in 100 degree plus heat and then having to deal with the subsequent washing up was not the best way to raise party spirits. Just when the physical work was over, it was necessary for whoever was rostered for the late shift to switch hats and play the jovial host for the next three to four hours.

  Running a bar is certainly not the 24/7 party that casual observers may think whilst propping up the proverbial. You have to be nice to people who you would much rather slap, pick diced carrot out of urinals if you’re a true follower of the hands-on approach to management and watch everybody stagger to bed whilst you fill the mop bucket.

  Every day brings a new drama, a new dilemma and more often than not a new drunk. But there are worse jobs, like folding knickers on a conveyor belt for eight hours a day or jabbing at rock hundreds of metres below the earth’s surface. This needs to be remembered occasionally, when drudgery and heat gets the better of you and you just wish all the happy smiling faces would sod off so you can scrape the vomit off the upholstery in peace.

  Everybody gets sick of their occupation every now and then but bar work is a ‘party’ business, especially in a holiday resort and being a miserable git just isn’t an option. A drink or two to lift the mood becomes unavoidable especially if you want your customers to continue depositing their cash behind your bar.

  It can’t be denied that a mighty thirst was worked up in our sweatbox of a kitchen. The first ice-cold beer that dampened the parched lips and bone-dry throat of the kitchen crew after a lengthy shift was pure manna. The problem - though understandably many wouldn’t see it as such - was that if you stood at the bar for more than a minute another drink would miraculously appear courtesy of a customer; ‘Looks like you needed that,’ they’d say slapping you on the back. ‘Faith! Get him another, put it on my bill.’

  ‘No’ was not an option. It wasn’t worth the argument. It’s an unwritten law that to refuse a beer from a holidaymaker causes great offence - like turning your nose up at sheep’s testicles during a Bedouin feast. Well, almost.

  Unless you are a paid-up member of Alcoholics Anonymous it’s surely reasonable to not want to drink every single night. And although the calories flooded off in the kitchen, accepting beery gifts seven nights a week was a sure way to acquire the familiar expat gut.

  ‘The gut’ is just one of the attributes of the expat crowd. In a holiday resort they always have a certain demeanour that makes them stand out from the holidaymaker. It’s not just the difference in confidence from knowing “the street”. More often than not there is also a physical variant. Usually this is manifested in a tasteless surfeit of gold jewellery in an attempt to distract the focus from sun-shovelled wrinkles on leathery skin. The male of this species often looks like he’s just swallowed a deflating space-hopper. Such customary swelling is due to a combination of too much time on his hands and a sub-culture where the sun sets over the yardarm as soon as the Rice Krispies have stopped crackling.

  Within this sub-culture exists a micro-culture. The BBC, or Boring Bullshit Crowd. The BBC are not only afflicted with the physical traits mentioned above, from the moment they wake to the moment they start dribbling on the pillow (and beyond, for the worst cases), they have a compulsive obsession to bore the arse off those unfortunate enough to wander into conversational proximity with tales of their business acumen.

  ‘Oh yes, you should come down to my boat for a glass of champers. She’s a twenty-eight footer you know,’ blabbed a member of the BBC whom I encountered in the bar one night. He patted his rotund affliction in a gesture of smug satisfaction, sublimely managing to slip this information into a casual comment about the price of Dorada.

  The topic then ricocheted from how much money he had, to how he was a self-made man, followed by a detailed analysis of where his wealth had been recklessly distributed.

  Fantasy Island is one of the pet names for Tenerife, for the very reason that people arrive here, choose a personality, and spend their time convincing themselves and other unfortunate listeners that they are that character.

  ‘Oh aye,’ the globe continued, ‘I might get meself another, you know, something a bit bigger for the weekends, when all me mates come over. Mind you I’m not here much anymore. I like to go to me villa in Florida every now and then. It’s got an infirmity pool, you know’

  His bulk blocked the only escape route and my hands were beginning to tremble with the weight of two pints in each.

  ‘Well, it was nice talking...’ but he was off again.

  ‘Do you know how much money I made last year? You couldn’t possibly guess.’ I had no real desire to, but in the hope that I might just flatten his ego I estimated that it was thousands.

  ‘Millions son. Now, if you want a tip from me, start early. Invest all your money in a few houses, sell them and then buy bigger ones, then bigger ones, then bigger ones still.‘ He had spread his arms as wide as his chubby body would allow in a demonstration of enlarging wealth in case I hadn’t grasped his amazing formula for success.

  As he bent towards the bar top to take a slurp from the fruit- and vegetable-laden cocktail, I spotted daylight and made my exit. It was an untimely move; a piece of pineapple perched dangerously on the rim of the glass stabbed him on the nose and his whole body jolted back. Four pints of chilled Dorada slopped onto my new trainers and down the back of an old fellow who was slowly gnawing his way through half a chicken. He stiffened sharply as cold beer raced down the back of his Y-fronts.

  ‘Watch what you’re doing w
ith those drinks, son,’ said BBC. ‘These are Gucci shoes. Had ‘em made ‘specially, when I was in Italy. Now there’s a place with style...’

  One thing you notice is that despite the abundant wealth, the BBC always drink alone. Money may be able to buy you Gucci, but it can’t buy you buddies and without friends, with whom are these people going to share their success? Well, with me it would seem, though previous experience has taught me that this is no time for British politeness and feigning interest. You move away from the BBC like he’s a nuclear reactor on fire.

  This wasn’t our first encounter with a resort fantasy character. Two years earlier Joy and I had wangled an idle six weeks at a family friend’s apartment in Majorca whiling away a summer in between jobs.

  Actually, ‘in between’ is a bit of a misnomer as there were no jobs to be ‘inbetween’. Joy had just finished drama college and was inactively pursuing her first big break. I had just returned from a stint of drumming in the USA with a band teetering on the verge of mediocrity but dismantled in an untimely manner by the United States Department of Immigration. They had decided that our guitarist, a Sid Vicious look-alike, did not fit their profile of “desired persons”. My last communication with him was a phone call informing us that he might be a tad late for our showcase gig in Boston, as he had been deported and was currently thumbing his way from Heathrow airport in a desperate attempt to get his Gibson Emperor guitar, himself and a K-Mart carrier bag of possessions back to Manchester.

  Needless to say, our spectrum of sound, somewhat limited as a 3-piece, was hindered irreparably as a duo and like most wannabee pop groups, dreams of stateside stardom were unceremoniously dunked in the Atlantic. British fame and fortune had proved equally elusive, unless you count having a photocopied flyer of your band on every fifth lamppost in Marple Bridge as a publicity coup.

  And so it was, with an air of resignation and a nagging demand from parents to settle down, that Joy and I fled with all the money we could muster. The idea was to see how long we could survive on £200, blagging the odd day’s work whenever the cupboards looked bleak.

  In times of trouble, faced with the prospect of having to go and find work, it’s amazing just how far you can stretch a measly subsidy. Mealtimes forced a creative compromise between economy and edibility. One-pan cooking was the trend, and the limit of our culinary repertoire, the ingredients being relatively inconsequential. Tuna, sausages, cheese, potatoes, eggs, rice, tomatoes, peppers, vinegar and oil were united in what we called ‘stir-fry surprise’ and what usually proved to be only palatable if preceded by copious quantities of carton wine. The ingredients were donations from kind holidaymakers whom we befriended by the resort pool. ‘Meet us on the hotel steps on Friday and we’ll give you whatever food we’ve got left over,’ they would say. Fridays were like Christmas, racing home to see what presents had been left in Santa’s supermarket bags.

  In the evenings Travel Scrabble saw a lot of action and when word blindness set in we would master an ability of seeing how many coins we could simultaneously spin on the apartment’s marble floor. Occasionally we would baby-sit for holidaymakers, introducing their toddlers to the wonders of Monopoly or impressing them with our coin-spinning prowess.

  During our stint, Joy did manage the odd shift in the local supermarket and I was promised a job with one of the island’s pioneers in bullshit.

  We were savouring the sterility of the hotel bar in celebration of a new world record in gyrating 25-peseta coins - 11, if you’re interested. All the furnishings were from the ‘sit on the fence’ school of design, created neither to offend nor favour any particular taste. The tables and chairs were busily patterned with green and white leaf motifs, the tables faux bamboo. As much thought had been given to mood lighting as to the gallery of pictures hung on the wall. Spanish tourism posters showing impossible-to-find coves were clipped behind smudged Perspex.

  We made two pints of beer last as long as possible so that our petri dish of complimentary peanuts was kept replenished. A conversation in the adjacent quartet of armchairs had caught our attention. A orange-tanned man in his mid-forties was trying to play it cool with a young, suited Spaniard. No easy feat when you’re wearing Elton John sunglasses

  ‘You tell me,’ said Elton. He raked his fingers through his thinning hair. ‘I’ve shot films with three cameras, four cameras, a dozen cameras. It all depends on the budget, baby.’ The Spaniard was clearly unsure what to make of this extraordinary Englishman.

  ‘Well ... I thought ... err ... we’d need at least three crews. We need to put on a big show for the ministers.’

  ‘Three?’ Elton extended an upturned palm at the man and turned his head towards a lady slumped in the next chair. She was either his secretary or his long-suffering wife. Perhaps both. He threw her a “see what I’m dealing with” look, which was reciprocated with “I really don’t care”.

  ‘Sure, I can put out three crews but between you and me you’ll still get a better effect with just the one. Besides, all the other cameramen are tied up with my other movies.’ Elton leaned into the man revealing a lopsided stump of a ponytail that protruded beneath a bald patch like a capital Q. ‘There’s a lot of exciting stuff in the pipeline,’ he whispered.

  ‘Ok, I’ll have to get back to you when I’ve spoken to my boss,’ said the Spaniard hurriedly. He stood up and shook hands.

  ‘These people,’ sighed Elton. He shook his head as the man made a sharp exit.

  ‘Can we go now, Norman?’ whined the lady, ‘I’m starvin’.’

  Elton snapped his fingers in an attempt to attract the waiter. ‘Fuck. Where am I going to get a crew from?’

  Joy and I stopped crunching.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind us eavesdropping,’ said Joy, ‘but I heard you were looking for crew?’

  The man switched back into Hollywood mode. ‘Yes, all my regulars are finishing off my latest film. I’m Billy Rhodes, Billy Rhodes Productions. This is my wife Margaret.’

  ‘Hi. Pleased to meet you.’ Margaret slowly lifted a hand without disturbing her slump.

  ‘We’re looking for work over here. Joe’s worked in video production before if you need any extra crew,’ said Joy.

  It was true. Whilst in America I had managed to get part-time work with a video production company in Boston. I’d been given the opportunity to help in various departments including camera, lighting and sound but due to circumstances, namely my lack of ability in all three, my role generally fell under the title of gofer, fetching and carrying for whoever demanded on set.

  The catalyst that finally convinced me the glamour of tinsel town wasn’t coming my way came during a blizzard whilst shooting a car commercial. I was assigned the responsibility of persuading a dog to pee on cue at a pre-lit spot.

  I soon realised that a friendly word in its ear was not going to work and was reduced to trailing after another dog that happily wandered the street where we were filming. With bucket and spade at the ready I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the mutt’s butt waiting for signs of bladder action. Every three or four paces it would cease sniffing at the ground, stand still and look nervously over its shoulder at this strange, two-legged stalker. The idea was to scoop a bucketful of pee-coated snow and deposit it next to the parked Buick that we were filming. When the cameras rolled, I’d then release our actor-dog who, if he ever wanted to work in TV again, would toddle straight over to the alien scent and cock a leg up to regain his territory.

  I had become so engrossed in tailing the rogue up a nearby driveway in pursuit of its urine that I didn’t notice the door of the house open or the family of four that peered anxiously from behind it.

  ‘Aha,’ I muttered to myself as the dog delivered the liquid prop, ‘good boy. Now if I can just have that...’

  ‘Can I ask what in Christ’s name you’re doing?’ said the head of the household, arms firmly folded.

  ‘Ah... I’m... err... collecting dog pee to film... for...’ I backed off waving my plastic spade
apologetically as the winter storm carried the words ‘crazy fucking limey’ into my hood.

  ‘I might just be able to help you out then,’ said Norman, Billy or whatever his name was. ‘I run a production company here in Spain. My last film was a big hit, shot entirely on location in Majorca. I was just negotiating a deal for another one but to be honest I’ve got that much work I’m only going for the big bucks. What have you worked on? Anything I’d know?’

  ‘Well, probably not. I’m just a production assistant really but...’

  ‘Great, I need a cameraman for a film I’m making next week.’

  ‘I have to admit I’ve not really had much experience as a cameraman...’

  ‘That’s okay, I’ll book you in anyway. Probably three days’ shooting. How are you at editing?’

  ‘I’ve done a few rough cuts but...’

  ‘Fantastic. I’ll put you down for a week in the studio as well. How about you, babe? What do you do?’

  ‘Uh, I’m an actress?’ tried Joy.

  ‘Hmm, talent eh? Done any presenting?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Never mind, you’ll be fine. It’s all simple straight to camera stuff. How about you both come round to the house tomorrow and we’ll sort out the details?’ He wrote his address on the back of a flimsy business card and strode off, leaving his wife to pay the bill.

  The following day we decided that to save costs we’d walk to the village where the film mogul had told us he lived. Even in a straight line it took us the best part of three hours to reach the old part of this hillside town. It was mid-afternoon and the place was deserted. Doors were closed and shutters were down. The only sign of life was a lone buzzard that circled overhead like an aerial undertaker in search of clients. Dehydrated and glowing red from the sun, I tapped on the door of Norman’s house. There was no answer. I rapped harder. Still nothing. Joy and I looked at each other in despair, still panting.