The Camino

by Eddie Rock

  He’s wearing them, not me.

  “Come on, let’s go!”

  I stick a cigarette in my mouth, light it, tighten my straps, and I’m ready for action. Cocker looks like a cross between a boy scout and a train spotter.

  “As the shepherd said to the sheep dog: Let’s get the flock out of here!”

  Our exit is blocked, but not for long!

  “Coming through, get out of the way, move, move, and move!”

  I need to piss like ten horses, so I shove my way out like Moses parting the Red Sea, only this time it’s a Red Sea of raincoats with gray clouds on top closely followed by Cocker in his Egyptian sandals.

  “Hey, hey, watch out!” they moan in their mother tongues.

  “No smoking in here,” shouts fat safari.

  We stand for a moment in the monsoon, trying to get our bearings.

  “Well, this is it; this is what we came here for. Adios, dickheads!”

  We wave goodbye to the shocked faces at the door.

  “To be a pilgrim!” I shout, raising my fist in defiance at the lightweights.

  “Follow zee yellow brick road,” shouts a squeaky Italian woman.

  “Stick to zee road,” shouts one of the druids.

  “The yellow brick road! What yellow brick road?”

  “No, the yellow arrows!” shouts Cocker through the wind.

  “The yellow arrows? What yellow arrows?”

  “The yellow arrows that lead us to Santiago,” he says, pointing at a splodge of yellow paint on a tree.

  Luckily for Cocker it’s a puddle-free track, with no one in front and no one behind. We’re wet through in minutes, but I’m glad of his company, so I hand him one of my trekking poles to use as compensation. I knew it was a stupid idea to bring them.

  “Did you have a hat yesterday?” I ask him.

  “No, why?” he shouts, looking like some kind of demented pixie, with the pointed hood of his cagoule pinning his ears forward so he can hear what I’m saying through the gale.

  “You look different somehow,” I tell him.

  After half an hour or so we reach the village of Burguete and find a nice quiet café bar with us its only customers.

  “Peace at last,” I sigh.

  We order our coffee and cake, shivering like junkies at a funeral.

  My back is soaked with sweat, and I can feel the straps of my heavy pack cutting deeply into my shoulders like some kind of medieval torture device. Cocker blows into his hot coffee and panics, checking his pockets, then the table, then the floor, searching and longing but for what? The hot coffee solves the mystery, as it hasn’t steamed up the lenses of his glasses because they are still back where he left them beside the crowded sink at the asylum. And just like Velma from Scooby-Doo, Cocker needs his glasses! Mystery solved?

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he swears all the way back to Roncesvalles as I contemplate life over another coffee and make use of the pristine, fragrant, and uncrowded bathroom facilities.

  A few equally bedraggled pilgrims arrive, and after half an hour, so does my wet companion, having added another six kilometers to his journey.

  The café starts filling with grumpy wet pilgrims, including the big fat, stupid, loudmouth German acorn-excuse-for-a-cock naturist.

  He’s now happily telling everyone at the top of his booming idiotic voice that there are “No!” places to stay in between here and a place called Larrasoaña. I fear I may have to kill him painfully if we ever meet again!

  * * * *

  We leave the café and plod on through the streets of Burguete, with the rain steadily getting worse and the puddles getting bigger and deeper, and with the paths more treacherous and downright dirty.

  As we cross a small bridge onto a muddy trail, I feel a horrible chill from the toxic sweat on my back. So I try snuggling into my pack for warmth, pulling the sleeves over my freezing fingers as I shiver, shake, and slide through the wet mud. My bones tremble and lungs pound with every slippery step, each cell in my body crying for mercy.

  My companion has gone very quiet now, using all his energy to leap to and from sparse bits of dry ground while trying unsuccessfully to avoid the deep puddles and then across the Basque countryside come the immortal words.

  “FUCKING HEEELLL! MY FEET ARE BASTARD FREEZING!” he screams.

  I stifle a huge laugh as my Gore-Tex boots splash through another puddle as he stands there, up to his knees in a great big muddy hole. Then we walk along in cold silence, and eventually he resigns himself to his fate, splashing angrily through the puddles like a naughty boy on a crap school outing.

  Why am I doing this again? I ask myself. Oh yes, I remember: I’m doing it for the criac! Why did I write that, even? It’s not true; in fact this is quite the opposite of craic . It isn’t craic at all. I’m sweating from the inside out and soaking wet from the outside in.

  My pack gets heavier and heavier, soaking up more rain, with the straps biting deeper and deeper into soft flesh. We stop in the relative shelter of a wooded glen. I need my waterproof trousers, and where are they? Yes, there, at the bottom of my pack! I dig them out as Cocker shivers and shakes, and to save time I try to pull them on over the tops of my muddy boots. “FOOL!” As I raise one leg into the pants, the other slips and I find myself on my back again—this time in mud, luckily.

  Cocker is now almost hypothermic and realizes the error of his ways. Should he die today, his express wish is for his memorial to be inscribed, “Unprepared for Everything.”

  I assure him I will attend to any funeral arrangements just so long as I get to keep his sandals. It’s agreed. Our bodies dampen, but our spirits lighten as we laugh in the face of adversity and trudge onward despite our ever-growing problems.

  Now, not to be outdone by his lack of rain cover, Cocker stops and asks me to pull the back of his cagoule up and over the back of his pack in a vain attempt to stop the contents getting wet. This only adds insult to injury by exposing his bare chest to the elements, robbing Peter to pay Paul, as they say, and giving himself pneumonia at this rate.

  Up ahead a solitary woman makes slow progress in the mud.

  “Hola,” she says cheerily, trying to place one foot in front of the other.

  “Hola. ¡Buen camino!” I say to the second person I’ve seen smile in two days. She’s Brazilian, so it’s time to resort to universal sign language.

  “Rain.” I point to the sky.

  “Cold, yes?” She laughs and shudders.

  “Santiago?” I point ahead.

  “Ha, yes.” We all laugh.

  She’s a happy old soul, but up in the distance is her not-sohappy companion, leaning against a tree.

  “Hola. ¡Buen camino! Cheer up, only another 499 miles to go,” I joke.

  Her face says it all.

  * * * *

  On the steep inclines my legs are pumping like a steam engine and I’m beginning to overheat. I can’t get my breath, my lungs are fit to explode, my legs are swelling, and my body is reaching meltdown.

  The trousers that are cutting off circulation to my whole body did once belong to me, only they got too tight, so I kindly gave them to my cousin, and like the fool that I am, I borrowed them back off him to go on this walk. So here I am today in this completely idiotic situation, and to make matters worse, seconds later I’m flat on my back in the mud again like an upturned tortoise with a small stream of dirty water running down my sleeve and another down the crack of my arse.

  “Pull them off me, man!” I plead, waving my legs in the air.

  Cocker yanks hard at my trousers, pulling me along through the mire as he manages to free one leg. Then with a huge effort he frees the other, and a wet streak of mud splatters his face and the inside of his glasses.

  Splat!

  My laughter echoes through the valley, and when I stand I award him the filthy Gore-Tex trousers as some kind of Camino compensation. Then he washes the mud and grit out of his eye with contact lens solution.

  “At
least it’s not spunk,” I tell him.

  “What!” he shrieks.

  “Spunk! I slipped in spunk in Amsterdam and broke my rib.”

  Cocker blinks in disbelief.

  “Don’t worry, it wasn’t my spunk,” I tell him.

  * * * *

  High in the mountains we eventually begin our descent down a very uneven trail that the rain has turned into a fast-flowing stream. The going is treacherous and rough, with Cocker trying to stay out of the icy water as I, on the other hand, am just trying to get to the bottom in one piece. As I jump down onto a large boulder, my knee cap almost pops out of its socket, and I feel a sickening pain as muscle tears.

  “Hang on!” shouts Cocker, coming to the rescue.

  As he helps me to stand, I suddenly feel icy cold and my teeth start chattering in shock. Painfully we get to a tarmac road, but at the other side there’s even more danger. This time I find myself crawling and kneeling in icy water, but I slip again, and now something rips in my back as the muscles twist and spasm, locking me up solid in immense pain.

  “Wait here,” says Cocker. “I’ll go for help.”

  “From where exactly?” I ask him.

  He thinks for a moment, realizing we’re miles from anywhere, and this time he shakily accepts my offer of a cigarette. As we smoke like doomed men before the firing squad, I realize that there’s nothing I can do except to carry on regardless until I drop.

  Thankfully, no more waterfalls cross our path, only farms with horrible, ferocious barking dogs on taught chains that I pray are well tethered.

  Eventually we pass through a valley and a wooded glen with a beautiful green river running beside us. We come to rest at an old bridge close to some dwellings and smoke again to rejoice in our stay of execution, as we’ve made it to Larrasoaña at last, safe but not sound!

  We follow the yellow arrows into the village and pass a small gray-haired old woman taking very slow, tentative steps, almost on tiptoes. She is obviously in immense critical pain.

  “Hola. ¡Buen camino!” we shout cheerily.

  Our salutations go down like a lead balloon. She just answers with her stone-cold glare. Just leave me to die! I want to laugh at the irony of the situation, as the woman who, although soaked to the bone and at death’s door, has bothered with a special plastic cover for her hat!

  “Are you all right?” asks Cocker in a soft voice.

  She is too tired to even speak so we leave her to die and crack on as Cocker keeps looking back anxiously while I limp along in agony, scanning the streets for any kind of welcoming sanctuary or medical facility.

  In the distance I see familiar pilgrim-type faces loitering around a doorway with intent to cause me misery.

  LARRASOAÑA

  SANDALS AND SEx OFFENDERS

  IN THE COLD WINDSWEPT FOYER of the pilgrims’ hostel, the old woman floats in like a ghost and collapses in a heap. I try to help but I can’t move; my body is locked, frozen solid. Thankfully, Cocker leaps up to her aid and a couple of kindly ladies rush out of a dormitory and spirit her away, never to be seen again.

  Maybe I ought to try that trick? I could do with the same treatment myself.

  A tall, immaculately dressed Dutch man saunters through and smugly announces with a joyous grin that the dying old lady has taken the last bed.

  It takes awhile to sink in. “What! Hang on a fucking minute. How can she have taken the last bed?”

  He nods, shrugs, and sits down in front of us, mocking us with his presence and his ironed shorts.

  Soon more poor, bedraggled souls turn up, and yet again the smirking man tells them with a huge smile that there are no more beds left. With a self-satisfied look, he pulls out a book and begins to read as the atmosphere turns to one of utter hopelessness.

  Insanity rules in my fragile state of mind, and I find myself on the very edge of despair.

  Suddenly from out of nowhere, a small aggressive man appears, barking and shouting. He picks one of my boots up by the lace and shouts at the muddy floor, and then at the rest of our dejected group.

  The Dutch man looks up from his book, shaking his head and smirking at our misfortune yet again, and disabled or not, if he does it one more time, I’m gonna crawl over there and bite his kneecaps off!

  As the little man whizzes around the room like a demented spinning top, my damaged brain translates his barking into English, telling us yet again that there are no more beds, shouting in our faces like white noise inside my head, driving me totally and utterly Billy Bonkers.

  I need to get out of here quick!

  “Cocker, help me!”

  “Cocker.”

  Suddenly, he jolts out of his trance and slowly helps me to stand.

  I take a very long, deep breath and hobble barefoot out into the cold rain to smoke my last cigarette as my mind wanders over the hills and far, far away.

  “Come on. Eddie, there are beds upstairs,” says Cocker, tugging at my sleeves.

  “What?”

  As if by magic, the barking devil has now suddenly transformed into an enchanting little angel. Showing us the toilets and the showers, where we can hang our wet clothes, then finally he shows us our icy little room with five mattresses on the floor, like sardines in a tin.

  “Jesus, it seems colder in here than it is outside!” says Cocker.

  I’m third in line for a cold shower, where I inspect my wounds and try to straighten my twisted train wreck of a body. Then it’s back to the subarctic bedroom, where I change into wet joggers and wet T-shirt, and crawl into my wet sleeping bag on my soon-to-be-cold, wet mattress.

  At least we’ve a room to ourselves. I couldn’t be sharing such a confined space with a load of these so-called pilgrims. Physical pain I can cope with, but mental pain, that’s another story altogether.

  Another three mattresses lie next to us and I begin to worry.

  Cocker comes back from the bathroom wearing a brand-new pair of gleaming-white Dunlop sex-offender training shoes. I force a painful cackle at his terrible choice of footwear again, and then I cry, “Fuck me! I knew I had forgotten something. Extra fucking shoes!”

  Cocker’s face breaks into an enormous grin as a group of rude and noisy French pilgrims arrive, shattering the peace, and a big red face pokes around the door, rudely demanding beds.

  “All taken,” says Cocker, saving our sanity a little while longer as we prepare for our trip into town.

  * * * *

  First, I’d like to be rushed to the accident and emergency department of the local hospital, followed by the chiropractors, clothes store, knee specialist, and last but not least, a shoe shop. We only make it as far as the local bar and decide upon a little drink for medicinal purposes to warm our cockles and thaw our souls, setting a new world record for drinking a bottle of red wine in seventeen seconds flat. As the waitress comes back with our change, she’s off again to fetch another bottle.

  “May as well fetch two!” I shout, but she doesn’t understand.

  “Ah, the Blood of the Pilgrim,” comes the mysterious voice and we look up from our raised glasses at the strange, small olive-skinned man standing before us.

  “The wine. The Blood of the Pilgrim, we call it,” he says proudly. “You have walked from Roncesvalles today?” he asks.

  We nod as he sits down and introduces himself as Manuel from Madrid. Considering he came the same way, Manuel is miraculously clean and dry. He takes a small device from his pocket and announces that today he’s walked 23,098 steps.

  “I have lost five stones in weight,” he says, delighted with himself.

  “Jesus, by tomorrow there will be nothing left of you.” I laugh, but he doesn’t understand the joke and turns down our invitation of a glass of wine. Swiss John arrives with a very sexy companion he has met en route. “Hola.” she smiles and takes off her padded jacket to reveal a stunning cleavage, and Cocker’s glasses steam up as if on cue and yet another joke falls on deaf ears.

  I prepare to order some foo
d from the pilgrims’ menu.

  The waitress comes over and I pick the same for myself and for Prince Charming here. He is now too busy chatting to the Spanish girl’s lovely boobs; and all interest in food has gone. Manuel sternly waves his finger, warning us both not to drink any more wine. So, in response to his idiotic suggestion, we refill our glasses and order another bottle as he stares at us bug-eyed.

  “Where are you from?” Cocker asks the girl.

  “Salamanca,” she replies in a lovely Spanish lilt.

  “I’m Rob and this is Eddie,” he says, and we shake her soft little hand.

  “Hi, I’m Belen,” she says with a pretty smile.

  “Bell-end? No way!” I protest as Cocker frowns angrily.

  “No. It’s Belen,” she says. “Like Helen but with a B.”

  The innkeeper arrives with soup and bread, and we tuck in gladly, but Cocker starts playing with his food like an irritating child, separating his peas from his ham and clanking his spoon on the side of the bowl all the time. When the innkeeper comes back to collect the plates, he points down at the pile of ham on the side of Cocker’s plate.

  “Buen jamón. ¿Qué pasa?” he says, shaking his head, rubbing his mustache. “Jamón buen jamón,” he keeps saying, outraged as the room falls silent. Belen begins to translate.

  “Why haven’t you eaten your bacon?” she asks Cocker.

  “I’m vegetarian,” he says like a big dandy.

  “Vegetariano,” she tells the innkeeper.

  “Vegetariano,” the innkeeper snorts, rolling his eyes. “Vegetariano,” he shouts, pointing at Cocker, and the whole place erupts into laughter.

  “What’s wrong with that?” he moans.

  “It’s not a great part of the country to be a vegetariano,” she tells him.

  We all laugh this time, and I laugh the loudest, because the innkeeper brings me two legs of chicken with chips and Cocker only chips.

  “I can see this being the start of a great partnership,” I laugh.

  We toast with full glasses, and Manuel toasts us back with his step counter. He laughs for a moment and then frowns as I pour more wine. We even get an unexpected dessert, which Cocker eats with gusto.