Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  Wayne shouted from the bedroom. ‘Look in here!’

  Siobhan recoiled and put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh sweet lord, the dirty bitch.’

  The bed was decked in black silk. A pair of handcuffs rested on one of the pillows, still fastened to the headboard. On a chair in the far corner lay a short, leather whip and next to it, a video camera was mounted on a tripod.

  Wayne broke the stunned silence. ‘I hate to say it Siobhan but I think your place is now a brothel.’

  ‘Just what this shithole needs,’ said Frank, rubbing his hands together.

  The suspicion was confirmed as we packed everything into bin liners. Next to the television was a stack of videos, the titles of which left no doubt as to their genre. Barry noticed there was one, unlabelled, half way out of the video recorder. He pushed it back in and turned on the TV.

  We all turned to stare at the groans and heavy breathing emanating from a black-haired woman straddling a man. Her back was to the camera but the room furnishings were alarmingly familiar.

  ‘That’s my bedroom!’ shrieked Siobhan.

  We peered a little closer. Silent nods confirmed her suspicion. The girl flicked her hair, turning her face to the camera for a split second. There was no doubt that it was the Czech girl. Although the man was half concealed, it was evident that it wasn’t Pedro. The legs were too flabby and even though we weren’t exactly friends, I’d gauged enough of an opinion to surmise that he wasn’t the sort to wear black socks whilst he had sex.

  ‘Turn it off!’ screamed Siobhan, crossing herself.

  Barry and Frank were glued to the screen, arms folded.

  ‘Barry! Frank! Turn that godforsaken filth off!’ shouted Siobhan.

  ‘Oh…sorry,’ said Barry, as he fumbled with the remote control.

  It took another half hour for the six of us to stuff everything into the bin liners. When we had finished, we sellotaped a note on each. Josephine had warned Joy and I not to be around when the couple returned to Siobhan’s apartment due to potential legal repercussions. While Siobhan and Terry remained behind to clear up and wait for their return, Joy, Barry, Frank, Wayne and I sat in the bay window of Mrs Tanner’s apartment to await the showdown. Roger had made himself scarce. He deemed it unfit for the community president to become embroiled in possible physical altercations.

  We watched Mrs Tanner’s carriage clock nervously. The brass timepiece stood proudly between a pair of ceramic Siamese cats. It was a token of appreciation from British Aerospace to the late Mr Tanner for 45 years’ loyal service tightening the nuts of Britain’s airborne fighting fleet.

  The dozens of photographs that were slipped in front of us as we waited showed a happy couple in various decades of courtship, each era proving that Mrs Tanner was a great believer in the old adage that suggested the way to a man’s heart was indeed through his stomach. Her aim had been direct. A compulsion to force feed him home-baked confectionery may well have been a contributing factor to her husband’s expanding girth and consequently, his fatal heart attack the day before his 64th birthday.

  The hands ticked quietly towards 5.10 p.m. and the chat fell silent. Even Mrs Tanner’s three excited friends ceased their merriment and gazed down across the narrow passageway to Siobhan’s apartment.

  By 5.30 p.m. Joy and I were starting to grow anxious. We had to open the bar in half an hour but we were determined to watch the climax. The couple had put us through so much worry over the past few weeks that we were desperate to witness the closure.

  As the clock showed 5.45 p.m. we were beginning to think that Pedro and the Czech girl weren’t going to come back that evening.

  ‘Have you seen the time?’ I asked Joy quietly. ‘We’re going to have to go and open.’

  ‘Ssh,’ said Barry suddenly. ‘They’re here.’

  Pedro was walking ahead of the Czech girl. Both had their heads down looking glum. We all inched away from the window in order not to be seen. We watched them both trudge up the steps, still staring at their feet. It was only when Pedro was three steps from the top that he noticed the pile of black bin liners outside the apartment door. He stopped for a moment and gazed round, wondering if he’d come to the right apartment. The Czech girl had caught him up and began to look nervous again. She started to go back down the steps but Pedro grabbed hold of her elbow to halt her retreat. Stepping round the bin liners, he tried the key, then knocked loudly on the door. We quietly opened Mrs Tanner’s window to hear the confrontation. Terry answered, his eyes ablaze with anger.

  ‘Yes?’ he barked.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Pedro confidently, and in English.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ answered Terry, taking one step closer to the Spaniard.

  Pedro didn’t move. ‘This is my apartment. What are you doing here?’

  ‘This is my mother-in-law’s apartment and I’m staying here with her,’ said Terry.

  ‘You…you can’t be. We live here. We rented this apartment from Joy at the Smugglers Tavern.’ Although Pedro had revealed his mastery of English, Terry’s threatening demeanour was causing him to falter.

  ‘Never heard of her,’ snapped Terry. ‘Do you have a contract?’

  ‘Err… no.’

  ‘Well I suggest you just fuck right off and stop wasting my time,’ said Terry. He was clearly enjoying himself.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ argued Pedro, raising his puny frame as much as he could. ‘These are all my things,’ he continued, pointing at the bin liners.

  ‘Well move them off my doorstep before I tell the police you’ve been dumping rubbish outside my mother-in-law’s apartment.’

  At the mention of ‘police’ the girl turned and made her escape. She called to Pedro from the bottom of the steps, beckoning for him to follow but he wasn’t giving in just yet.

  ‘You can’t throw me out,’ he continued. His voice was getting louder now. ‘Where am I going to go?’

  Terry suddenly leaned closer, making him step back suddenly. He was reading the label on one of the bin liners.

  ‘Why don’t you go back to apartment 224, Playa Sol, Las Americas? That’s where you live isn’t it?’

  Pedro was speechless.

  ‘I’m… I’m… I’m calling the police,’ he spluttered.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Terry, smiling, and closed the door.

  ‘He won’t do it,’ whispered Wayne. ‘He’s bluffing.’

  ‘He’ll do it,’ said Joy. ‘He’s got that much front.’

  Instead of feeling relief that the confrontation had seemingly gone our way, and equally importantly that Terry had managed to resist assaulting Pedro, we now sat with knotted stomachs, awaiting the arrival of the police.

  The two homeless squatters loitered at the bottom of the steps. The girl was trying to persuade Pedro to leave but he was resolute. After several failed attempts, they both sat down in silence.

  It was now ten minutes past six but Joy and I had decided we had to stay around for the finale. We’d pay the consequences of an angry patronage later.

  After half an hour, two uniformed policemen sauntered up to the couple, guns swinging on their hips. They listened to Pedro as he pointed up at the apartment and showed them the handwritten receipt that Joy had given to the girl. The volume and tone of his voice started to rise as he tried to evoke a sense of injustice. One of the officers held his hands up to halt the onslaught.

  The two policemen lead the way back up the stairs and knocked at Siobhan’s door. This time Siobhan answered. In broken English, one of the policemen asked who she was. Siobhan told him her name, adding that she was the owner of the apartment.

  ‘You have papers, say you owner?’ asked the officer. Siobhan went back inside. Pedro tried to follow but the other policeman pulled him back. The two officers looked through the title deeds, bank statements, utility receipts, community payments and all the other reams of paperwork that Josephine had advised us to tell Siobhan to bring.

  ‘This man say he live here,’ said
the officer glancing up.

  ‘I’ve never seen him before in my life,’ answered Siobhan, her eyes fixed on Pedro’s. ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about. I live here. I arrived last night and found all this stuff outside my house. I was about to throw it away. I assumed it was rubbish.’

  The policeman handed the stack of papers back to Siobhan, turned to Pedro and shrugged his shoulders. He said something in Spanish and then nodded at his partner before descending the stairs and walking off. Pedro was left at the top of the stairs with his hands on his hips, staring at the closed door. He began to knock but gave up after realising that Siobhan was not going to open it. He snapped something at the girl, who was waiting at the bottom of the steps. She ran up and they grabbed two bin liners each before trudging back down the stairs and walking off dejectedly.

  In Mrs Tanner’s apartment, a cheer went out, perhaps a little too prematurely. Pedro looked up over his shoulder to see Wayne pressing his nose against the window giving a one-fingered farewell. It was over. I felt four stone lighter, and that was even after a fistful of homemade scones and chocolate biscuits.

  In the bar that night, Joy was in party mood. The bad-tempered rants of some of our more routine-bound customers couldn’t shake her, nor could the protestations of Freidhelm, who stabbed at his watch with a finger and wobbled his jowls disapprovingly. ‘Big problem,’ he croaked, but for us the big problem had finally gone and we could get back to our intended mission of trying to run a successful Tenerife bar.

  CHAPTER 20

  Having a job that doesn’t differentiate between weekdays and weekends means it’s difficult to mark the passing of time. It was only when we noticed that our local cash and carry seemed to be stacking an inordinate amount of sweets and nuts did we realise that Father Christmas had booked his flight and was halfway through packing. Panic set in as it dawned on us that we had made no preparations whatsoever, with only three weeks to go.

  Although in Tenerife, British supermarkets are only second in supply to British bars, the ones we ransacked in order to buy traditional festive paraphernalia had either grossly underestimated the demand for tinsel et al or were having as much difficulty as us in importing it.

  The only Christmas crackers we could find were small, pink and embossed with the somewhat discomforting smirks of Barbie and her plastic sidekicks. We bought them anyway in the over-ambitious hope that we may be able to use Blue Peter skills to turn them into more adult-orientated decorations.

  Party poppers, tree baubles, sage and onion stuffing, chipolatas, cranberry sauce, parsnips, Christmas puddings and chocolate logs were also proving to be elusive which meant our hastily put together Christmas menu had to be hastily disassembled again. A sprig of holly on chicken and wine was looking a distinct possibility until David remembered that our cousin Les was coming to spend Christmas with us and could perhaps bring over one or two items.

  So it was that a fortnight before Christmas Joy, David and I were helping to bundle Les’s six cases onto two airport trolleys.

  ‘A hundred and forty-five pounds excess,’ Les chunnered as a red bauble fell out of one of the holdalls and shattered on the hard floor.

  There appeared to be a lot more than we had asked him to bring and that was taking into the account the two cartons of party poppers and four boxes of crackers that had been confiscated before they left British soil.

  ‘They’re explosives,’ the bag checker at Gatwick airport had countered, as baby-faced Les pleaded for their liberty.

  Although he was 12 years our junior, our cousin’s interests crossed over into both our spheres. He too was looking for an alternative to the 9-5 and had had limited success as a thespian, his peak of stardom portraying a sublimely camp Judas in a university production of Jesus Christ Superstar before pursuing more of a strict musical angle as an aspiring orchestra conductor.

  Spending Christmas with us in Tenerife was just a way of avoiding the commercial expectations of UK festivities and also provided a way of “going against the grain”. But it was with some disdain that he found himself humping half of Christmas over to Tenerife with him in return for three weeks of winter sunshine.

  Although the offer was actually to spend a little time with his cousins helping out here and there, it wasn’t long before he was drafted into full-time employment, such was our panic.

  With the bar lacking even a trace of festive cheer, our first mission was to find some decorations. The four of us packed into the Renault 5 and headed up to the mountains to find the perfect tree.

  The mercury was still loitering around the 75 degree mark when we left El Beril but our geographical naivety bit us like a rabid Jack Frost as soon as we reached the fringe of greenery marking the start of Teide National Park.

  ‘Whoa, that’s cold,’ said Les, winding the window up as an icy, pine-scented gust breezed through the car.

  The view until now had been one of stark ruggedness. The road had climbed through fields of sharp, black rock, a legacy of the frequent occasions when Mother Nature had decided to redecorate the island in hues of ash black and fiery red. Petrified rivers of grey tumbled over terraced ledges like molten lead poured down a staircase. Here and there, green cacti and mountain broom punctuated the apocalyptic vision, bursting resolute from the tiniest of fissures.

  Eventually the road began to level off and lone straddlers were replaced by clumps, then a whole forest, of Canary Pine. Small patches of snow began to appear under rocky overhangs.

  Travelling along a rare straight stretch of tarmac, the freshly painted centre lines rushed ahead like bursts of tracer fire. Then suddenly, they disappeared, as a swirling wall of cloud rolled slowly across the mountain road. We slowed down, visibility reduced to little past the rusty red bonnet of our car. Then, as quickly as the scenery had vanished, it burst forth again as we drove out of the other side and back into brilliant, sharp sunshine.

  Ahead of us, the towering pinnacle of Mount Teide, the highest peak in Spain, soared into the sky. To its right, the jagged rim of Pico Viejo serrated the bright blue. Side by side, the pair stood ominous, threatening future cataclysms. In front of them, lesser volcanic cones seemed to cower in their presence, minions of destruction softened with smooth slopes of loose ash and basalt.

  We pulled to the side of the road and parked on a carpet of fallen pine needles. None of us had had the foresight to bring warm clothes. Joy was the least appropriately dressed, in shorts and t-shirt, but was the first to venture out. She hugged herself and blew into her hands. Whilst she gathered pine cones from the side of the road, Les, David and I ventured deeper into the forest in search of a suitable tree. We all took turns at sawing and dragged it back to the car, removing a handful of branches so it would fit in the back.

  We knew it was an offence to cut down trees in the national park and raced back down the mountain, hoping we wouldn’t be seen. Les and Joy, the smallest of the group lay in the back, arms draped over the kidnapped pine in a token effort to hide its presence. Fortunately we fled unhindered by the strong arm of the park rangers and the Smugglers Christmas tree was planted in its new home, a sturdy potato pan festooned in bright foil wrapping paper.

  The bookings for Christmas dinner were going well. Our biggest dilemma was the seating arrangements. A number of unexpected single reservations had thrown a spanner into the logistics. We had come to realize that the tens of thousands of British tourists who chose to escape the slush and sleet of Britain for sunnier climes over the festive period were not all happy holidaymakers. A number of individuals were also trying to escape from the cruel reality that Christmas was a time for family get-togethers and communal merriment.

  For those unfortunate few who had lost their family and were drifting towards the end of their days in joyless isolation, the last thing they needed was to be surrounded by exaggerated mirth and the painful reminders that this particular time of year can inflict. Thus, a dash to a foreign land where at least the commercial pressure and the foreboding wea
ther are far from the mind was the preferred choice for those less jubilant.

  Plus there was Friedhelm. His closest relations were the scantily clad staff of Cleopatras whorehouse, and it was highly unlikely that they would be joining him for a turkey dinner. Seating Friedhelm was the biggest problem. His English language skills were limited to, “big problem”, “big beer” and “fucky-fucky”, hardly the vocabulary necessary to kindle riveting conversation with fellow festive diners.

  To sit him entirely on his own would be too cruel, cracker pulling is a two-man sport after all. To sit him at another party’s table would conversely be too unfair on them. It was therefore after a lot of name-tag swapping that we arranged to squeeze all three of our lone diners on barrel tables just close enough to each other so that introductions could be made, yet just far enough away to make room for the cold shoulder approach, should it be preferred.

  Despite the anxiety that cooking a five-course meal for 62 people for the very first time can bring, I awoke on the 25th feeling strangely content, mainly because it was another break in the routine.

  Also, there was an element of personal pride in the fact that all of these people had decided that they wanted to spend Christmas day with us, and were willing to pay a small fortune for the privilege.

  Six months previously, such demanding situations would have caused a barrel-full of consternation and acute hair loss. Now, having realised that the worst that could happen is that people get hungry, poisoned or pissed off – and occasionally all three – for once, apprehension was not one of the overriding emotions.

  David, Les and I had spent the previous evening preparing the festive fare while Joy took care of the front of house business. Because of this advance preparation, the four of us took the liberty of opening some sparkling wine at ten in the morning. In hindsight this was not such a wise idea. Instead of double-checking that everything was on track, alcoholic complacency beset us all and we all managed to overlook one important element of Christmas dinner.