Seriously Mum, How Many Cats?

by Alan Parks

  I could make out a small house on the other side, so I turned the car around and headed back to the turn off that I’d passed. A few minutes’ drive and I was across the lake. I found the front of the house, which was about 50 metres up the hillside, but I could see no way of getting in. There was no sign of Diego either. I shouted out his name, “DIEGOOOOO!” Adding the extra “oooo” at the end for effect. Out of the small house came Diego, as always smiling and with one of the trademark cigars in his mouth. He directed me to continue on the track, and take the next derecha (right) turn, so I did.

  I’d gone a few hundred metres and I was beginning to think I had missed it, but I made the turn and followed the track. In places it was bumpy and there were a couple of dogs that came to see me. One was the blue dog from before, now all cleaned and black and white and another one was a little Chihuahua type dog. Obviously he was the guard dog. He came running at the car barking and jumping. I was nervous of running him under the wheels, but he seemed to have road sense and avoided that fate.

  When I reached the house it was totally unexpected. I’d thought it would be the usual Spanish farm house, surrounded by piles of scrap and motor parts waiting to be used at a later date, but Diego’s place was like a little oasis. The house was small, but nice, and painted brown and cream to fit in with the environment. The house was surrounded by trees; oak, pine and fig, providing complete shade from the warm sun. There was a pagoda with a grapevine just starting to sprout and fruit trees spread about all over the garden. The driveway area was gravel, but, unlike our own gravelled areas, there was not a weed in sight. Around the perimeter of the garden was a fence made up from rustic wooden sleepers. As I stood at the front of the house the view stretched all the way over the lake. Until today I didn’t even know this house was here. It was lovely, really idyllic.

  “¿Eeeeee, que pasa?” Diego greeted me, and shook me warmly by the hand.

  He dragged me into the house; I got the feeling he wanted to show it off. The inside was not quite as stunning as the outside, although with enough money it could be turned into a really beautiful house. Simple decoration and very old furniture was the order of the day. The kitchen was barely a kitchen at all, just an old gas stove and a sink. There didn’t even seem to be a fridge. Diego pulled two beers from a cool, larder type cupboard, and handed me one.

  “Erm, posible Coco-Cola?” I tentatively asked.

  “Ah, siiii! Claro!” he patted me on the back and took the beer from me and found an old can of Pepsi. It was so old the design was the red, white and blue one with the red and blue half-and-half logo on it. Who knows how long it had been in that cupboard? When I opened the can it made an effort to fizz, but although I made a show of putting the can to my mouth and mimicking drinking, not a lot of it went down.

  I’d been concerned that there would be lots of awkward silence between us, but between Diego telling me how preciosa his house was, and how I should get some of my friends to buy it, it seemed to be going OK.

  Then new people turned up and just walked in. First to enter were Diego’s daughter and son-in-law. I’d seen these two driving past recently and the man seemed to have bought Antonio’s green jeep (the one we took our first trip to The Olive Mill in). Diego’s daughter was not very Spanish looking, with long blonde hair and an almost English complexion. I half expected her to be English, but when she started rattling off in full Andaluz, I soon put that thought out of my head. They were followed by another blonde, younger girl, who was the couple’s daughter and Diego’s nieta, granddaughter. She was accompanied by Ramon Jr, who seemed to be her boyfriend.

  This gang all hung around for half an hour or so, tried a bit of conversation with me, asked if I wanted to buy a horse, that kind of thing.

  They all left and once again Diego and I were alone and the conversation had dried up. I was just considering trying to get away, when the next wave of visitors arrived. I couldn’t believe it; we go days sometimes without seeing so much as a car pass by, so where were these people coming from?

  This time it was a group of four Spanish women. They had supplies; food and drink, and washing including clothes and bedding. The four women, or Diego’s harem as I thought of them, set about tidying, cleaning and fussing around the place. Diego was barking at them, and they were gabbling back. He just looked at me and gave me a wink. It seemed like he loved all the attention.

  I assume that at some point Diego must have been married, but my Spanish was not good enough to have a conversation to ask where his wife was. I assumed she was dead as he must have been in his sixties, but that was a conversation for another time, maybe with a translator handy.

  Two of the ladies started to prepare some food for Diego, so I took this as my opportunity to leave; it was starting to get dark and I needed to get back to see to the animals. All the ladies kissed me on the cheeks as I left, and as I went through the door I turned around to see them all fussing over Diego and getting him up to the table.

  Chapter 14

  Wintertime

  I did indeed spend Christmas Day with our wonderful friends, Ricardo and Rita, who treated me like one of their own. I was able to put my feet up in front of the fire and relax, just like being at home with Mum for Christmas Day. The alternative would have been me at home, at The Olive Mill, cooking myself egg and chips for lunch and talking to the dogs for company. I had made sure the dogs had had a plentiful breakfast and I’d given the alpacas a fresh supply of water, hay and alfalfa and locked everything up for the night. We don’t very often leave The Olive Mill overnight, but occasionally we’ll stay at a friend’s house.

  After a breakfast of bacon and fresh eggs (ours), I left them to enjoy their Boxing Day in peace and quiet, and of course to get home and check that all the animals were OK.

  As I pulled up to The Olive Mill, something seemed unusual. I could only see four of the five alpaca boys. Where was Marcus? Was he lying somewhere, unwell?

  I unlocked the gate as quickly as I could and I worked out what had happened immediately. I could hear the orgling from a distance. I turned the corner to look at the girls and there he was, sitting atop of Cassandra, mating away, without a care in the world. She was also sitting there happily. I looked around. There were no signs of forced entry to the girls’ paddock, or any obvious signs where Marcus had been able to escape from the boys’ quarters. I decided that as Cassandra had obviously not become pregnant during the last mating, I would let him finish the job he was doing, it was the easy option.

  I collected a halter and lead and fitted the halter around Marcus’s head. He was so engrossed in what he was doing that it was no trouble. As soon as he was finished, they both stood up (lit a cigarette), and started to graze on some hay. I went up to Marcus and calmly walked him back to the boys’ paddock. I looked and looked but found no evidence of how he had been able to get out of there and to Cassandra.

  Just five days later it was time for Lorna to return home and to normal life (if you can call our life here normal).

  Of course, as usual it was difficult for her to leave the family, especially after spending their first Christmas together for five years. I picked her up from the train station at Cordoba and she laughed as I told her the tale of Cassandra and Marcus and the miraculous escape.

  I found a gap in the fence, and decided. Now was my chance! There didn’t seem to be anyone around, so I crept through while the others were asleep and went to see the girls.

  When I got there they were not pleased to see me. The two white ones were chasing me and spitting at me. At one point they cornered me and just kept spitting at my head, but then I got away.

  I noticed that the brown one was making doe eyes at me so I went to say, “Hi!” Things moved pretty quickly after that, and we were getting down to business when the man came back and started shouting. He put a thing on my face and took me away from the girls, back to the boys. I told them where I had been.

  The man was too late anyway, the brown girl and I are goin
g to have a baby soon, just you wait!

  Marcus

  ***

  Winters here can be eventful (you may have read about our past incidents in my earlier books) including our bridge being washed away, snow, sick animals and of course, not forgetting our leaky ceilings.

  Winters here can be characterised by a couple of things: olive picking and the weather, and one relies very much on the other. This year there had been people out picking the olives since November and the weather had been fine. We had some rainy days and some dry days, but nothing extreme, which meant the olives stayed on the trees and grew and grew. The weeks passed by however and no-one had yet touched our own olives. Miguel was no longer there and we were yet to see the two men who generally worked on our trees. The previous year we had been delivered a small amount of wood in return for our olives, but it hadn’t lasted very long.

  Luckily our new friends Richard and Natalie have got five times the number of trees that we have. As they were building their own house and had not yet moved in, I was allowed to collect wood from them regularly over the winter, so we could at least keep warm.

  I had made it my mission this year to talk to the men who now seemed to be in charge of maintaining our trees. I wanted to make sure we were given some more wood this year, plus our agreed share of the olive oil. It didn’t seem right that we were paying for olive oil when our own trees were just outside. One day we were leaving to go out and their work car, a battered old Land Rover that must have been at least 40 years old, was parked at the bottom of the hill, just by the edge of our trees.

  “I’m going to talk to them,” I said to Lorna as I pulled the car over and got out.

  I could see the two men working, high up on the hillside, hacking away at the small shoots on the trunks of the trees. I started up the hill and as I got closer I could almost see the fear spread across their faces. Not because they are scared of me, but because they are scared of talking to me. The younger of the men, the son, carried on working. The older man spoke to me.

  “Buenasss,” he growled at me.

  “Buenos días,” I replied.

  There followed one of those awkward conversations that you’d only know if you’ve lived in rural Andalucía. He spoke to me very fast and I didn’t understand. I asked him to speak more slowly and he didn’t understand. Eventually I managed to ask about the leña and the aceite. “Necesito mas, este año,” I said to him.

  “No hay problema,” he replied.

  After this they did indeed become friendlier, well the older man did anyway. The son always drove the community tractor. I call it this because I see it being used by about four different farmers. Miguel’s tractor is blue and gleaming, but this one is red, old and faded - it is often seen with the engine open, having running repairs. The son always looks away when we pass. I don’t know if he was shy, mute or both, I just nodded at him in the way that men do when they pass each other on the street.

  However, the older man became braver and each time we saw him over the winter we would stop and say “Hi!” and he would say something along the lines of “Muchas aceitunas este año.” Lots of olives this year.

  It was all very pleasant and we were looking forward to more wood for the winter.

  As the end of the season approaches we see less of the workers banging the trees with sticks to remove the olives, and more of them scrabbling about on the floor collecting the remnants so that nothing is wasted. On one of these days, Arthur was barking, telling us that Ramon and family were along the hill working, and as usual they had loads of dogs with them, running and barking and generally upsetting the big fella.

  I was being nosey so I went to have a look at what was going on. The family were quite a distance from me, but I could make out Ramon and his wife and the two sons all on the hillside collecting. I could see their dogs running all over the place, but I could also see something else. What was it? It certainly wasn’t a horse. It wasn’t a dog either. It looked like a small deer.

  “Bloody hell, what on earth is going on now? How have they got themselves a deer?” I asked myself.

  I went to get Lorna and dragged her out to show her. But a mixture of her poor eyesight and the fact that the deer seemed to have disappeared only added to the confusion. Had I imagined it?

  A few days later we were having a walk around the reservoir close to our house. The temperature was cool and good for walking. Most times we walk there we see the odd person fishing and that day was no different. On our way home, across the top of the lake, we could see Ramon’s son’s car zooming along towing a trailer with a pedalo on it. I guess he was going to use it for fishing, but running along behind the car I could once again see the deer.

  “Look! Look!” I said to Lorna. “See it? The deer behind the car?”

  “Where?”

  The car had turned the corner at the end of what we could see of the track and again I looked the fool as Lorna hadn’t seen the deer. I was sure I wasn’t going mad.

  ***

  I heard the tractor rumbling outside and watched through the window as our two workers trundled up the hillside on a mission to collect the trimmed firewood. I watched as the older man, 60 at least, followed the tractor doing all the graft while the young man, about 25, sat on the tractor. An hour or so later they had filled the trailer and were on their way back up to the house. I went out, unlocked the gate, and waited for them for what seemed like an eternity. The community tractor was not built for speed.

  When we had unloaded the wood, I asked, using a mixture of hand signals and the word ciervo, if they knew whether Ramon had got a deer. They just smiled at me, said “Yes,” and shrugged their shoulders as if to say, “Yeah, why not?”

  I couldn’t get my head around it. I wanted to know more, so when Lorna was away to the UK for Maisie’s 4th birthday in March, I decided to go and find out.

  I drove up to Ramon’s house. Only Ramon Jr was there, but I asked him.

  “¿Tienen uno ciervo?” I asked. Tienen means ‘have you got’ and is the word I would use in a shop, so I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate in this instance, but he understood me.

  “Si, si. Venga.”

  He got me to follow him around to the back of the house where there was a makeshift enclosure. As we got closer I could see the animal. It got up and came over to Ramon Jr, nuzzling itself against his palm. I asked him why they had it.

  Ramon Jr explained to me that they had found it as a baby at the back of their land. He pointed to where the forest started. There was no mum in sight and they didn’t want to leave it there where it could have been attacked by dogs or worse; so they brought it home and bottle fed it. Now it was almost big enough to be released back into the forest.

  “¿No para comida?” I asked nervously. Not for you to eat?

  “Nooooo!” He smiled at me as if to say “Don’t worry.”

  When Lorna got home I explained to her what I’d seen. We talked about going up there to see the deer again, but never got around to it. I hope the deer got released safely and is having a nice life in the forest behind Ramon’s house.

  Chapter 15

  Eye Eye

  “Wow! Look at the eagle over there!”

  I was looking out from the decking by our pool, pointing out to our friends the eagle that was soaring over the trees a few hundred feet away.

  “I can’t see it,” Lorna insisted.

  Her eyes aren’t great anyway, so I didn’t think too much about it until she talked to me later.

  “I really couldn’t see that eagle earlier. My right eye is all blurry, it doesn’t seem right. I know sarcoidosis can affect the eyes, so I think we should go and get them tested.”

  Later that week, we made an appointment to go and see Jorge in Montoro to get Lorna’s eyes tested.

  “Hmmm,” he said in his Spanish accent. “I don’t like the look of the eye. Your ‘pupeel’ seems to be a strange shape. I think you must see the doctor very urgently.”

  We promise
d we would go and see the doctor, but of course that meant trying to converse in Spanish and making sure the problem was understood. Every day Jorge emailed to ask if we had been yet. He was really worried and in the end he volunteered to come with us if we went the following day.

  As always, Doctor Montaña was very pleasant, and he had a good look in Lorna’s eye. He seemed to agree with Jorge about the problem, but he couldn’t do anything there, we needed to go to the hospital in Cordoba; it was becoming our second home. The doctor wrote a note that we could pass to the people on the front desk of the Urgencias, and it would make sure that we would be seen by the right kind of doctor. As our appointment in Montoro had been in the afternoon we decided to wait until the next morning to make the trip to Cordoba.

  We left home at about 8.30am in Frank and rumbled our way down the motorway to Cordoba. We found a space to park in the car park and made our way to the Urgencias department. At the front desk we handed over the piece of paper and Lorna’s medical card, and passed through the doors to the triage section.

  This time, after triage we were taken to a different area where we had never been before. There were just a couple of rooms, but the waiting area was crowded, as always.

  There were two doors for the eye doctors. The only way we could tell this was because people were going in and out with eye patches on. From one room, a kindly looking man emerged every so often, gently calling in the next patient. From the other room, a scary lady doctor came out and demanded her next patient come into the room. The lady doctor had long wavy hair, was dressed in a Wall Street style power suit and glasses and bellowed the names of the patients as they waited for their turn.