Sat in the car at the airport, doing a swing past the guards every so and along so as not to get stuck in the expensive park and queue to pay and lug the suitcases across and up the steps. It’s worse inside with huge hangers full of marble and Germans. I park on the flowerbed for a piece. My old mate and his companion arrive. The girl looks nice. I help haul the suitcases. We leave with the windows down and papers blowing around and out. No air-con in this old car.
With friends staying you want to show them around and impress. That’s right. It’s too early though. I was once in the airport bar having a drink, you know as one does, and Dennis Hopper came in, so I pretended I didn’t know who he was then we bought each other beers and stuff, and laughed at the girls, then it turned out it wasn’t him anyway.
Right, come on, they’re a lot cheaper just down the road here than they are on the coast and, frankly, the company is nicer.
Sandwiched between a tour-bus and a cement truck, we pull off the road at the first opportunity. A few houses stand around, looking unconcerned. The car cools down over another flowerbed, this one rather tatty, as we enter a building through an enormous barn-door. We’ll have a couple of beers and tapas. I’m all knowing as the host; role-playing as a tour-guide with witty answers to all the queries.
‘…That’s right, donkeys!’
Some blond fellow watches us from the far end of the bar. He probably works down at the nearby cowboy town film-set. A young girl with a bruised face works the beers and the customers. The blond looks like he wants to start something. The foreign residents here have an easy way to measure themselves against each other: how long you bin living here? You must watch their eyes when you face up for this one. It’s a kind of pissing contest where there can only be one winner.
After better than fifty years man and boy, I try and avoid this, as the loser can get sore.
My friends are looking at the sad range of pickled entrails lying under the glass counter.
‘Sí, una ronda de cañas. ¡Oiga!’ The little barmaid brings the drinks and goes ‘t’ree beer?’ and I’m deflating like a spare tyre on a Renault. Kinda place is this anyway? ‘Thank you, dear child. And where are you from?’
Rumania. Well, I’ll be buggered. All these years living here, trying to blend in with the locals and to pick up a few words of various languages as one does, and do you know, I couldn’t even say in her gibberish: ‘I am a secret policeman, where is your sister?’
A Russian friend had been telling me about his work permit and the paperwork he’d given in. He’d prepared and written up the document himself on a sheet from a Saint Petersburg cigarette company with fancy headed paper and had covered it with stamps made with ceiling wax and a melted metal top from a Chivas Regal bottle.
We need people like this in Spain.
By now, we’re into some of those beers that come in dark glass bottles and feeling the kick. The blond fellow has joined us. It’s too hot to take an attitude.
From the terrace you can see a piece of a wide, sandy riverbed. It was here that they shot the film Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. Well, a small piece of it. A Welshman, cashiered from the Horse Guards, once told me the story of how the producer, Sam Spiegel, had obtained a thousand horses and camels to attack the papier mâché town of Aqaba on the Carboneras coast. The Welshman led the charge dressed in suitable togs but for some reason, with no saddle. ‘One mistake and I would have been trampled to death’ said the Welshman sadly as I solicitously bought him another drink. It is told that, after the shoot, they asked Mr Spiegel what was to be done with the animals. He answered laconically: ‘Give the horses to the gypsies and shoot all the camels.’
The whole bloody lot. Some reward for being in an Oscar film.
My friend notices that the bar has a sign to say that This Establishement has Complaining Sheets. We order a few to take away with us.
A man in a string vest comes through a door behind the bar. He’s scratching himself with a kind of reserved enthusiasm. ‘You boys look like you would fit in perfectly in Mojácar. You ever been there?’
It’s about an hour’s driving to get to my place. I reckon it’s going to take us a little longer.