Alexei Sayle - The Dog Catcher

The woman came into the valley, whose Arabic name meant happiness, at the very start of the summer. She had hitchhiked up from the coast, along the highway that climbed twisting through the gorge into the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. In the wide delta there had been fields of sugar cane, banana palms, custard apple orchards and waving clumps of bamboo, later on as they climbed into the campo there were steep terraces of olive trees, oranges and lemons, then on the rocky mesas almond trees, their leaves a beautiful spring green and the fruit hanging half formed. Nowhere were there the gigantic sheets of plastic, covering chemical-drunk, sweating vegetables, that disfigured the growing lands further up the coast towards Almeria. There had been decent spring rains that year and the acequias, the irrigation channels that the Romans had built, ran fresh with icy water.

She wasnt running away exactly but there were a number of men all along the Costa Tropical and Costa del Sol, one Latvian guy in particular, who it was better that she didnt see for a while, for his sake really, all that shouting and threatening every time he saw her couldnt be doing him any good. Some people just seemed to get so twisted around her, that was her opinion. She knew the reason for it, it was because she was too trusting, too giving, and individuals, guys especially, saw that as a green light to try and suck her dry. Aquarians were always taken advantage of, it was a scientific fact.

The womans name was Sue, she was from the North of England, that part of the North West where all the towns ran into each other along motorways and bombed-out high streets. She had come to Spain on a whim not knowing really where Spain was, with a bloke of course Aquarians had a great need to give and receive love, repeated studies had proved it. A nice posh lad with money who she met in a club in Liverpool. Theyd been going round together for a couple of weeks when he said he was going out to DJ on the costa, he paid for her plane ticket and he paid for the rented flat in a smart urbanisation. After a bit she asked him why he didnt have any records or any turntables. He told her that hed thought she understood that he was a conceptual DJ who played the music that he heard all the time in his head, straight into the heads of other people and the heads of cats and dogs too. Then he said he was also working on a machine to slow down time and reverse the flow of entropy. Then the Civil Guards came and took him away. Sometimes she tried to hear his music but she didnt think she could.

The idea of going back to England was a non-starter, her husband and kids had made such a fuss and her own mother had gone on the TV show Kilroy to denounce her. They all had to understand that she wasnt Thirty yet and lets face it she was fantastic-looking so she had the absolute right to have a good time before it was too late. Thats what feminism had taught her.

So it was bar jobs in the town and other blokes after that and some of the blokes getting twisted. Then the Latvian trying to run her over and ploughing his Mercedes into the stack of butane canisters outside the supermercado. Once his burns healed she sensed he would come after her again so it was time to move on.

With her bag over her shoulder she walked to a big bar on the road out where the camionistas parked their trucks for one last brandy before slinging the rigs up the sinuous mountain roads. She asked around, looking for the perfect destination as if she were in a travel agents. The old man in the wheezing lorry loaded down with watermelons, whose name was Antonio, said he was going back to his home, one of the villages in the foothills of the mountains. One with a stout wall around it built by the Moors, with a single gate in and out; where the road ended, he said, and where you could see a car coming from five kilometres away. To her it sounded like it might be a safe place; he said he would take her up there for a blow job which she bartered down to a hand job and a feel of her tits, payment to be made at journeys end.

They didnt go on the highway but took the old road, first through the tourist towns, going so slowly that even car drivers towing caravans kept giving them the finger. Then Antonio swerved onto a narrow serpentine camino that bent up into the mountains, and the straining old truck seemed to be pushed up the slopes by the jets of thick black smoke that roared from its tailpipe. All the time Antonio spoke about his little town, its fine walls, its beautiful church, its lovely white-painted jumble of houses. And as if he had talked it into existence, suddenly, there it was above them, rising out of the orange groves, the red-tiled roofs of the houses poking above the thick stone walls.

She paid for her ride in the parking lot of the orange cooperative, a large modern shed built on a rock plateau just outside the single gateway that led into the shaded web of alleys and lanes that was the little town. He was a fit old boy, she had to give him that; the tit fondling would have gone on all night if she hadnt called time after half an hour, still he seemed very grateful. Afterwards he dropped her at one of the two bars in the village, the one where he said all the English drank.

The place was called Bar Noche Azul. You could tell it was a foreigners bar because there were chairs on its vine-covered terrace though it was only May with the thermometer reading twenty-nine centigrade. The Spanish did not begin sitting outside until later on in the summer when the temperature started pushing into the high thirties.

She stepped inside the bar and dumped her bag on the littered floor. There was the usual battle of the giant noises going on. Two TVs, one behind the bar and another monster, wide-screen one in the corner, both were turned on and both were tuned to different channels. Over that there was a stereo playing Spanish pop and a fruit machine clonging away to itself. The bar was of course tiled, traditional patterns rendered in acid, factory colours on floors, walls and ceiling so the racket bounced and ballooned back on itself. The place was also quite full of people and everybody had to shout to make themselves heard. Sue went to the bar and ordered the smallest beer, a canya, and took it to a vacant table. After a while the barman came over and chucked a big piece of chorizo on a hunk of bread onto the table. In the traditional Andalucian way tapas were given free up here if you bought wine or beer. If you bought a much more expensive drink like twelve-year-old brandy or imported Malibu you didnt get anything.

Though none paid the slightest attention to her she knew she had been noticed, first because she always got noticed, she was that kind of girl, but in a place as small as this a new arrival, no matter how self-effacing, would be clocked by the inhabitants. She studied the ones she knew were the British. There were several clumps of them, mostly older than her, in their forties and fifties. These British didnt seem anything like the ones on the coast. On the coast you got your tweed-coated Nazis, or your gold-dripping cockney villains or your pulling-their-trousers-down fat lumps, being sick in the streets and calling the Spanish Pakis. This lot in Noche Azul spoke English amongst themselves, like on the coast in a variety of accents youd never hear conversing to each other back home:

High Church Knightsbridge talking to Thick Birmingham talking to California talking to Camp Old-fashioned Queen but the difference was that when they ordered drinks from the bar staff or threw some comment to the younger locals who also seemed to hang in this bar they did it incredibly, unbelievably in Spanish! Good Spanish, too. She couldnt remember a British person on the coast ever speaking Spanish, they didnt need to, they lived in a bubble of Britishness, radio stations, newspapers, bars; up here it was obviously different, they had to fit in.