Mr Lynch’s Holiday

by Catherine O’Flynn

  He was roused from his reminiscences by a low moan. He looked over the balcony in time to see a black shape darting along the side of the pool, realizing then it had just been a dispute between cats, a territorial confrontation in the deep end. He watched the vanquished tabby retreat and take cover in shrubbery and then looked up once more at the stars. It was a sure sign of old age, this constant picking over the past, a growing affliction since Kathleen’s death. He made his way quietly back to his room, sitting on the bed and rubbing his face. He looked at the clock. Another two hours before dawn.

  12

  They had been caught. If he ever read the emails, or picked up the seemingly endless ‘Dates for your Diary’ slips that fluttered from his mailbox each time he passed, or took any notice of the forlorn printed reminders stuck on lamp posts all over Lomaverde, he would have known that it was not safe to leave the apartment that day. But he did none of those things and as a result, while he and his father were setting off for a stroll, Jean had spotted them.

  ‘Oh, Eamonn, lovely! You’re bringing Dermot too.’

  He saw the folder under her arm and realized his error. At the same moment he had a flicker of hope that Dermot could be his salvation.

  ‘Hi, Jean. Can’t make the meeting today unfortunately. You know … Dad’s on holiday. Doing my tour-guide bit.’

  ‘Oh, of course I understand. Are you off somewhere nice?’

  Dermot spoke. ‘We had no plans at all.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jean looked confused and Eamonn laughed.

  ‘No, that’s not quite right. I was going to take Dad for a walk, show him around.’

  Dermot frowned. ‘Sure I think I know the way around myself now. It’s not what you’d call a metropolis. I can’t imagine I’d get lost.’

  Eamonn looked at him. ‘You don’t want to go off on your own. What would you do with yourself?’

  ‘Plenty of nice spots to sit and read a book. You don’t want me in your hair all the time. You carry on.’

  Eamonn noticed his father grinning broadly, delighted at this little manoeuvre.

  ‘Oh, are you sure, Dermot? I don’t want to ruin your plans. It would be good though if Eamonn could come along as he had to miss the last one too.’

  ‘Well, there’s no question, then. Go on, son, you go along and enjoy your meeting. I’m sure I’ll find something to occupy me.’

  But with that touch of pathos he had gone too far. Jean was concerned.

  ‘Oh dear, I don’t like the idea of you sitting on a bench on your own. Here’s an idea: why don’t you come along too? I mean, if you haven’t anything special planned. It’s just … it would be lovely to have an outside perspective. You know, sometimes we all get a bit of tunnel vision.’

  ‘No, no, I’d just be in the way.’

  ‘Not at all. Would he, Eamonn?’

  Eamonn shook his head fervently and smiled at his father, who was no longer grinning.

  ‘Right, so. I’ll come along.’

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful. To think we almost had neither of you and now we have both!’

  Eamonn looked at Dermot and repeated: ‘To think.’

  It was Ian and Becca’s turn to host the meeting and Becca was relishing the role, introducing Dermot to everyone.

  ‘You know Roger and Cheryl, and Jean and David. That’s Gill and Rosemary at the table. Gill’s our chair today.’

  Gill raised a hand, looking far from thrilled at the honour.

  ‘That’s Simon there, who lives with Raimund, who, incidentally is German. And over there, on her ownsome, is Inga, who’s come all the way from Sweden!’ She put her head to one side and wrinkled her nose at Inga. ‘You all right, love?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘You let me know if you need anything.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She gestured at the other corner. ‘And finally, Henri and Danielle.’ She turned to Dermot and mouthed, ‘French.’

  Eamonn led his father to a couple of chairs in the corner of the room behind Inga. Gill started the meeting.

  ‘So, first up, back in December we said we’d review the security situation after another six months and that time is now up. How effective is the current solution, etc., etc. Would anyone like to start us off?’

  David raised his hand. David loved meetings. ‘Madam Chair’ – Eamonn put his head in his hands. Sometimes it was hard not to scream – ‘I’ll start if I may. I think on the whole the results have been mixed. On the one hand I’d say we’re all pleased and relieved to see that the burglaries have stopped, touch wood. And, while the gang in question have now been arrested, I think we’d all agree that it’s probably Esteban’s part-time presence that prevents others from thinking we are easy pickings. But there have been other incidents that signal to me at least that we need a greater security presence.’

  Gill looked up. ‘What other incidents?’

  ‘Well, there was the unpleasantness with the red paint, that of course we all know about.’ There was general murmuring at this and Dermot turned to Eamonn with a questioning look. Eamonn remembered the sight of the empty house, livid in the morning sun. Red paint running down the walls in thick rivulets. The door covered in crimson handprints. It was really too weird and inexplicable to take in let alone describe to his father. He shrugged.

  ‘Just some vandalism.’

  David raised his voice to speak again. ‘Since then there has been the defacing of the sign at the entrance and the dumping of rubbish along the main approach road.’

  There was some muttering at this between people who already knew and those who didn’t.

  ‘Disposable nappies!’ Eamonn heard someone exclaim.

  Cheryl looked bored and picked up a magazine.

  Gill held up her hand. ‘Can we have just one person at a time, please?’

  Henri called out: ‘What happened to the sign?’

  Ian answered: ‘The usual thing. Some local teenager with a spray can. “Look at me, look at me. I’m cool. I can write my name.” Yeah, illegibly, you dick.’

  ‘Actually, Ian,’ Simon corrected him, ‘that’s not right. It’s not kids writing their names. Someone has sprayed “Ladrones” all over the entrance sign. I think we can assume that both that graffiti and the rubbish being dumped near the entrance are because of local anger at the developers and their failure to pay off the contractors.’

  Eamonn recalled the exodus the previous September. One morning he awoke to a different type of silence. He’d grown used to the absence of certain elements in the soundscape: traffic, commerce, workers, children. On that particular day though he noticed something else had dropped from the mix. It wasn’t until lunchtime that he identified the difference as the lack of building noise. While the pace of finishing Lomaverde had never been frenetic, there was usually some activity: the buzz of a drill, slow hammering, the distant repetitions of Hit Radio. He had thought it was perhaps a local holiday, until he saw Hernán, one of the security guards, leaving the sentry cabin, wheeling an office chair loaded up with a computer tower and monitor. Between Hernán’s basic English and his own poor Spanish he couldn’t follow everything but he understood that cabrones were involved. That neither Hernán nor anyone else had been paid for some indefinite period and that Hernán was taking some crappy, low-quality office equipment as an unofficial compensation package.

  Roger was speaking. ‘Well, they can join the back of the queue. We’ve got our own issues with the bloody developers.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Becca, ‘and it doesn’t bother Zadis if people paint all over their signs or dump rubbish, the only people it hurts is us, the people who live here. And I for one think we’ve suffered enough!’

  Rosemary raised her hand and waited to speak. ‘I think their anger is totally understandable and to be honest there is very little we can do about people dumping rubbish on the approach road. That’s a matter for the local council.’

  ‘Ha!’ shouted Roger, mirthlessly. ‘Well, don’t exp
ect them to do anything without a nice backhander. Same way this place got built in the first place! We know all about that now.’

  Gill raised her voice. ‘OK, let’s save that for later.’

  ‘And so’ – Danielle had her hand in the air and spoke quietly – ‘the red paint … that was someone angry at Zadis too? Yes? Is that what we are saying now?’

  Raimund cleared his throat and stood up. Eamonn thought Raimund had an interesting aesthetic. It would be incorrect to say he looked like a Hell’s Angel; what he looked like more precisely was someone playing a Hell’s Angel in an 80s Hollywood movie. A generic barroom brawler with nightmarish tattoos and assorted ironware piercing his head and face. Laura liked to call him by his imagined film credit: ‘Bad Guy One’. Eamonn saw Dermot staring at whatever it was Raimund had growing out of his forehead.

  Gill gestured towards him. ‘Raimund. You have something to say?’

  And then came the voice – a sound that could not be more at odds with his appearance, softly German-accented with a soothing, almost melancholy, ring to it.

  ‘Oh, yes, I have something to relate that I think might have some bearing on this.’ He stopped for a moment as if waiting for someone to grant him permission to continue, and then began again.

  ‘I met a man in a bar last week in Mojácar. We got talking. When I told him I lived in Lomaverde he asked me if I’d happened to watch a programme recently made by a historian named Dr José Dominguez. Of course this then led on to a brief discussion about television and the difference between Spanish and German television news and he agreed with me about the intriguing differences in emphasis. I’m sure we all have our own examples.’

  ‘Pringle?’ Becca whispered loudly, holding out a bowl to Dermot. He shook his head and she continued around the room in a low crouch.

  ‘It seems the programme in question was one of the kind so very popular here, you know the type, I’m sure: people sitting around a table discussing something: la crisis or immigration or lactose intolerance or whatever it might be. (I’ve never known a nation with such an appetite for watching other people discuss things.) Anyway, you are all familiar with such shows: the women with the little glasses and the men with the trimmed beards. I didn’t see the programme, of course, but I was able to imagine it quite vividly from this man’s description of it.’ He paused thoughtfully and turned to Simon. ‘I’m forgetting his name. Isn’t that terrible?’ Then he said something in German and they both laughed.

  Gill cleared her throat and said gently, ‘Raimund. The red paint.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. The red paint. So. There is the programme, that I did not see, but which I hope I have given you some flavour of. It seems the historian, Dr José Dominguez (I have googled him since and he is based at the University of Salamanca and is very respected) is doing a larger research piece about the latter part of the Civil War and in particular attempting to locate some of the graves of those who went missing.’

  Becca whispered loudly again: ‘What’s he going on about?’ And Ian shushed her.

  ‘So, it seems that in November 1937, and no one disputes this, sixteen men were taken from Agua Blanca by Nationalist forces to be executed and the whereabouts of their bodies has never been discovered. Obviously all this was hushed up for years, but now there’s this new investigation into all the executions and disappearances and Dr Dominguez has been active in this.’

  Gill had given up on politeness. ‘For God’s sake, Raimund, get to the bloody point.’

  Raimund looked put out. ‘Very well. To cut a long story short, there is some justification to believe that there may be an unmarked mass grave under Lomaverde.’

  General commotion broke out. Raimund held up his hand. ‘That, anyway, is the contention of Dr Dominguez. Apparently another historian on the programme disputed it. The politician from the left said questions need to be asked about how much the local council knew and how permission was ever given to build here, and the politician from the right said there was no good to come from opening up old wounds.’

  Jean held up her hand and gradually everyone quietened. ‘Can I just ask Raimund, did you get from your acquaintance any sense of whether this information was going to be acted upon? I mean, are they planning to excavate?’

  Simon answered for him. ‘I’ve read up a bit about it in the meantime. There’s a fierce debate raging on both sides. I don’t think ultimately much will happen, but when we heard all this and read the news stories afterwards, we looked at one another, didn’t we, Raimund?’ – Raimund nodded – ‘And we both said, “I bet that was what the red paint was about.”’

  Becca was tearful. ‘This is awful. Awful. Just horrible.’ She blew her nose. ‘We will never, ever, ever be able to sell.’

  Roger shook his head. ‘Incredible, isn’t it? Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse. Do you ever wonder what we’ve done to deserve all this?’

  Rosemary stood up. ‘With respect, Roger, I think it’s in poor taste to portray ourselves as the victims here. We’re talking about people being abducted and murdered. Families left not knowing what became of their loved ones for over seventy years. I think we should show a little compassion.’

  Inga shifted slightly in her seat and Eamonn and Dermot were able to see the notebook she had been busily scribbling in. Instead of notes, the page was filled with a sketch of Roger. She had captured his likeness exactly, somehow rendering even the roll of his eyes. It was a faithful reproduction in every way except instead of sitting on a dining chair, he was shown sitting inside a glass case with a coin slot to operate.

  Gill was speaking again. ‘So, taking all this on board and returning to the original point, if we can, about the security situation. We’re paying Esteban for three days a week. Is that enough?’

  David spoke again. ‘I think with all the potential uninvited guests we have to contend with, from outright criminals to locals with grievances and now to bereaved families, we might all feel safer with Esteban here full time.’

  Ian nodded. ‘And, quite frankly, the economic situation as it is, there’s very little work down here in this part of the country. I don’t know if you’ve been into Agua Blanca or San Pedro recently but they are slipping over the edge – shops closing down, delinquent kids necking Don Simon under the trees. And here we are, in what appear to be fancy houses; I don’t like to be alarmist, but people will turn to crime and we’re obvious targets.’

  Eamonn remembered the not so subtle insinuations made by Ian in the wake of the burglaries about the community of Gypsies in the nearby town. The gang was in fact English, professional criminals from Essex targeting the many ghost towns and failed golf resorts of the Spanish Costas.

  Becca joined in. ‘He has a point. I mean, I don’t think we’re saying people who fall on hard times automatically become thieves, but envy is a terrible thing. Ian and I have plenty of tales of trying to establish up-and-coming pockets of housing in run-down, tatty areas. There can be a lot of resentment. Also, I’m not being racist but’ – Eamonn braced himself – ‘you have to consider the immigrants.’

  Gill looked at her. ‘What about the immigrants?’

  ‘Well, there’s more of them everywhere.’

  ‘Like us, you mean?’

  ‘No, I mean the ones from Romania, Morocco, places like that. The women with the babies begging for money. You ask any Spanish person who’s responsible for most crime in this country and they’ll tell you it’s the Romanians. Or the Moroccans.’

  Raimund said softly, ‘I don’t think that is the view of all Spanish people; I think that is the view of racist Spanish people.’

  Ian called over: ‘What did you say?’

  Gill put up her hand. ‘So, I’m taking my turn now. As far as I can see, we might all feel happier if Esteban was here more, but at the same time I don’t suppose any of us can really afford that. The burglaries have stopped and that is the main thing. The other issues we face, it seems to me, can best be addressed not by increas
ed security but by putting our message out there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Jean.

  ‘I mean, something simple like approaching the local paper to do an article about us. Get active on community forums. Make it clear that we have suffered at the hands of the developers too. That we are sympathetic to others. That we are just normal people, struggling with the same economic situation as everyone else. It might achieve nothing, but I think the answer is to join forces with the local community, not barricade ourselves away from it. A siege mentality, this idea of “them and us”, will not do us any good.’

  She got a round of applause from some of the residents for that. Eamonn wondered if her words would do any good. No one wanted to be paranoid but the condition seemed endemic in Lomaverde. It was hard not to overreact to events that in less isolated places or for people with busier lives might have seemed minor. He remembered with some embarrassment his own fearfulness at times. The adolescent pranks of kids from neighbouring towns had occasionally felt truly menacing. He recalled one particularly inglorious afternoon after an argument with Laura. It was, he’d realized at some point, an argument with himself and he had used her as his proxy, something he had started doing more and more. Afterwards he’d been walking through the nearby woods to clear his head when a loud crack sounded in a tree above him. He had looked up and as he did so something hit him on the arm. He put his hand to where the pain was and saw a stone hit the back of his knuckle. He peered into the thicket of trees from where the stone had been thrown. Someone whistled, another made a monkey cry and then the air was thick with small stones, flying past his ears, pinging his face and body. It took him a moment to understand what was happening – bored kids, guiri-baiting. He knew he should be cool, be on their side, say something to show he understood. But he didn’t understand. He found them unknowable and sinister. They weren’t on his side, they were alien and hostile, like everything else in this place. He had fled in terror and shame, his heart pounding and a terrible anger burning his eyes.