I was sick with nerves when I booked Spain. So much cash to invest at the click of a mouse, and I wasn’t even driving the plane. How could I trust the buggers at Easyjet to land at the right airport? Then, I screwed up with the hire car, committing the naive sin of not having a credit card with which to leave a “deposit” and felt like I’d been poisoned. That my hands did not stop shaking until the point at which everyone else’s began to shake, at takeoff, was testament to the degree to which my body was wired.
Just as my utter disorientation on our return was testament to how uncoiled I had become.
Before, the rhythm of South London had me in its sway, though sway is to embody the madness with some kind of beneficial trance. Rather I was trapped in its jaws like some innocent bloody live chestnut branch down on the Rye, set upon deliberately by one of those stupid terriers, goaded by a dickless owner. The battle to keep up was being lost in a bouncy blur until finally, I was only able to focus on an hour at a time. Don’t ask me what is happening at five or six, I only know what to do when I get to the fruit and veg aisle at Sainsburys.
The funny white and orange plane was like a Haribo, and its disconcertingly smiley crew – where was the inferno that Dante experienced on his all his trips to cheap flight hell? – literally lifted me. Up and out, laughing. Take that you teeny weeny bastards. Now try and bite me! And for a while me and the kids were in a delicious chewy limbo while Fred got to walk with the clouds for the first time in his life. The calm hum buzzed through us so thoroughly that by the time we rode the turbulence, the pits of our bellies being tossed up and dropped, and tossed and dropped for longer than any flight I can recall, we laughed like it was fifteen minutes of quaint hump-backed bridges with a pipe-sporting dad behind the wheel.
Dante’s inferno it seemed was on the ground. Not just the wall of heat that clouted my unsuspecting townie brood as we emerged into a land of searing light and palm trees but in the air that seemed to contain sparks. We were breathing cindery draughts of malevolence, the temperature in the car that collected us read 41 degrees C. Kim, saviour of the ballsed-up car booking, took us to a roadside café to give us a blast of air-conditioned relief and inside, they were watching newsreel of fires pouring across their own sierras. Back in the motor, I hung my arm out of the window and stroked the hot wind as if it were animal hide.
He rocked us round the bends towards a cluster of sugar cubes twenty km in land and up into hills not yet on fire and Willa’s nose bled from the unaccustomed altitude. Then after a cold beer, he handed us over to Nice Gary, who had collected our hire car, paid for it, filled it & delivered it upwards. We had another beer and made the steep climb to our hot mountain dwelling with our luggage. The girls were shattered and pleading when I left them in the strange shuttered hovel to have another drink in the bar below. And then, as Nice Gary drained his glass and ordered me a third, he casually dropped the bombshell that I’d be driving him home.
I have an image fixed of Fred’s pale biscuit of a face in the front seat of a left-hand drive car, politically incorrectly clutching my beer bottle as I, having delivered the man to his house in the rambla some kms down the hairpins, lurched back up in the profound barrierless dark, cactus looming like trolls on the bends, my boy was terrified. Such fine parenting.
The next morning, we had been transported to yet another place. Like a Mediterranean version of the Railway Children, the dark horrors of the night before vanished with the throwing open of shutters and the discovery of a picturesque normality beyond, albeit hotter and sunnier than, er, Yorkshire. Within hours, we’d sped down the mountain past ghost homesteads, a crashed car (Fred couldn’t look), olive trees and marble quarries; we’d located the car hire company on a dusty roundabout stationed with its very own prostitute and picked up the relevant documents, and then we punished the good people of Vera for possessing an Intermarche with hysterical happiness as we loaded a trolley with food we recognised.
Later, in the sublime heat, we lugged the newly purchased Intermarche eco shopping bag through the narrow, breathless streets, past blue jasmine, past rubble and gypsies and chickens in makeshift cages to the top of a hill where an improbably pristine municipal pool glinted blue and where we tipped out our swimming things on to a magical green lawn. Diving in was like the dream I visualise when the suffocating grey Southwark stress threatens me. I close my eyes and imagine myself curving into a turquoise body of water that takes me whole without a ripple. It cleaves evenly and I emerge cleansed.
Back at our cottage, we found an iron table base and a cornerless slab of marble to make an outdoor table to eat at in the evenings. And we retacked mosquito nets at windows after the winds that Helpful John, yet another local Brit, told us came from Africa had returned to their desert switchback, to appreciate the odd loose cloud and a midnight breeze.
And so the days went as we acclimatised to consistent warmth and light. Madre mio, the children were even so inspired they found perches on the terraced hill and Fred wrote lyrics (“Lavender Rose” and, thrillingly, “Losing Buildings”..) and Constance began a holiday diary (shudder...) and Willa lit candles, the latter only slightly stoking my imagination into a real life national emergency. They made friends with Kim’s two blonde-brown sprites, Poppy & Nico, and joined in the fiesta games with the village kids on the plaza, passing buckets of water over their heads, shrieking; they conquered their own sierra and roamed its ruins. After a while, they could even pee beneath the thicket of harvest spiders that were usually fixed like a hairball to the cool corner above the toilet cistern, without hurrying out at the flush with their knickers still round their knees.
Meanwhile, the stray dogs barked from 4am, the cicadas roared all day like miniature black lions, geckos moved soundlessly in their own universe, emerald tails sweeping the dirt iridescently; laughter percolated up from the bar with the smell of boquerenos fritos. One afternoon, echoing off an empty hot cobbled calle, I heard the unmistakeable metallic volatility of a heel on sprung timber as somewhere above, beyond the billowing curtains on a balcony, a dancer rehearsed her passion. You couldn’t make it up. The ocean was good too. We found an unpretentious swatch of sand backed by a solid cafe and while the world and his Spanish wife ate the middle out of a scorching afternoon, we let the little fish suck our toes in a silty blue sea that was balmy enough to accept us without snatching our breath. Drying afterwards in the shade of a parasol was like being blessed. No, really. Cooled by a fat scoop of helado for a euro (where was this expensive Spain I had heard bemoaned? Blimey, give the bemoaners a month in Dulwich and see what little change they have left), we drifted back to our fond little vehicle to climb back up the sierra feeling as if we’d had a refit.
One day we journeyed out and took an exhilaratingly high drive round the burned black peaks passing only two cars and two lorries to Las Negras, a kind of Moorish nest cradled in maritime sierras like jutting unshaven chins, our feet burning on twinkling black sand.
After, lost inland amidst acres of encrusted plastic presumably forcing the produce bound for supermarkets, we added a new roundabout to our collection – a giant marble tomato, proud in filthy municipal planting. And as if the colour cipher hadn’t sunk in, the only people out in the midday sun were black guys on pushbikes, black guys leaning, deep black guys with their arms around eachother. I guess I know now where the labour comes from that picks the produce for that blasted aisle. And it must have felt like those desert winds were stalking them.
But mainly, we stayed in our mountain roost collecting images and sounds. Strips of green pimentos drying on an enamel top on the roof terrace below; bunches of red pimentos swinging like lanterns beneath split bamboo; bony kittens rolling in the shade of a vine; Fred’s football stolen by a cactus; cactus fruit squashed like gore under foot. Tonio the goat herd admonishing his ragged, clanking army (“I’m gonna miss goat guy,” said Constance in her scariest Phoebe from Friends voice); church bells clanging on the quarter-hour.
I sat at the marble table with a two inch cicada ranting in the almond tree to my right and found myself thinking that those sierras, those to the left, under the sky pinned up like a festoon of grubby white communion skirts, were evenly jagged, like they’d been serrated with a single Jurassic bite. There was really nothing else in my head. And that’s when the chavvy, slavering chops of Sarf London released me.
lovely!
Posted by: bhikku | 20/08/2009 at 08:59 AM