Parrot in the Pepper Tree (11 page)

There was a part of me that day-dreamed about a life on the road, feckless and fancy-free, hauling my didgeridoo from town to town… but on reflection I decided that the dedication wasn’t really there.

Waving goodbye to my teachers I headed back up to the house for breakfast. I had a phone call to make.

It didn’t take long before we started to lose the romance of making phone calls. There weren’t many people we needed to phone and we soon ran out of things to say to those we did. Receiving calls, however, had an air of unpredictability about it and therefore kept its excitement. On many an evening we would sit around casting sideways looks at the telephone willing it to ring, but more often than not it didn’t.

The first people to start using it were the shepherds; it was getting near shearing time. Before the advent of our telephone, shepherds who wanted me to shear their flocks would actually arrive on our doorstep, more often than not either on muleback or on foot. Others prevailed upon more modern friends with vans to drive them, but even so it was quite an endeavour, as El Valero is a long way down from the mountains where most of the shepherds keep their sheep.

These days Alpujarran shepherds have become pretty adept in the use of mobile phones, but this wasn’t the case when our phone was first installed. In those distant days, grappling with a telephone was considered a serious business, and was certainly not to be undertaken when sober.

Typically a shepherd would wait until he had shut his flock in and done all the ancillary jobs before heading for the village and a bar with the necessary apparatus for making a telephone call. The flock would take a dim view of being shut in too long before nightfall; the jobs around the stable would take a good half an hour; the ride or walk to the village could be anything from one to three hours, and upon arrival at the bar, the shepherd would feel the need to fortify himself at length before embarking on the unfamiliar and alarming task at hand. So the early calls would start coming in round about midnight.

When we picked up the receiver, the first thing we would hear would be the music and shouting of a bar, with perhaps the electronic burbling of the fruit machines. There would be a long silence from the other end.

‘It’s a shearing job,’ Ana would say, handing me the phone.

I could imagine the character on the other end holding the handpiece at arm’s length, glaring at it with distaste and then shouting loudly at it. Of course when it spoke to them, they couldn’t possibly hear, because of the great distance between the diaphragm and the ear, and also the bedlam of noise around them in the bar. So the shepherd would shout at it angrily to speak up.

‘CRISTOBAL!’ I would hear as a faint and raucous bellow.

‘Yes, speak to me…’

‘CRISTOOOBAAL!’

‘Alright, I can hear you. Speak now…

‘CRIISTOOOBAAAL!!!’

‘YEES! WHAT DO YOU WANT?’

A silence from the other end, as the shepherd digested the idea that the plastic thing with the wire he was shouting at, had actually shouted back at him.

‘CRISTOBAL. WHEN ARE YOU COMING TO SHEAR MY SHEEP?’

‘WHO ARE YOU?’

‘CRISTOOBAAL!’

‘YES, I CAN HEAR YOU, BUT I NEED TO KNOW WHO YOU ARE?

This would produce a silence on the other end, then some muttering as the other incumbents of the bar were consulted and some advice offered.

‘CRISTOBAL…’

‘Look, I need to…’ but it was no good, my interlocutor had had enough and slammed the phone down.

That was the way it was with the shepherds on the telephone, though little by little, as they became more adept with it, and picked up a few of the necessary social skills, things got better, until finally we got to a point where we could even exchange rudimentary pieces of information over the phone.

Mistakes however remained inevitable. There was one evening, when Chloë answered the phone quite late at night. I noticed her move the earpiece sharply away from her ear to avoid being deafened by the raucous shout from the other end. ‘NO,’ she shouted back at the handset, ‘YOU CAN’T SPEAK TO MY HUSBAND BECAUSE I HAVEN’T GOT ONE. I’M ONLY SEVEN YEARS OLD!’ And she slammed the phone down.

I couldn’t help but feel proud of my daughter showing a bit of spirit.

And then, late one evening, the phone rang again. I picked it up and girded myself ready for the deafening shout.

‘Chris,’ it said softly. ‘Is that you?’

It was a person who knew the telephone, a blessing indeed.

‘Boss!’ I cried. ‘Tell me, what news from the wider world?’

‘Well,’ said Nat, my editor in London, for it was she. ‘Are you sitting down? Because I’ve got some news for you?

‘No, I can’t sit down; I’m wedged into the corner by the telephone. That’s the way it is here. But I’ll lean on something instead.’

‘What I’m going to say,’ continued Nat in a soft tone, ‘is don’t get too excited — but
Driving Over Lemons
is going to be read on the radio, and it’s being ordered all over the place?

I stared at the phone. None of us had expected anything like this. It was a bit like entering the local horticultural fete and finding you’ve won a rosette at the Chelsea Flower Show.

‘THERE’S A MAN ON THE TELEPHONE,’ SAID ANA. ‘I THINK HE’S CALLED Leaf of the Male. He says he wants to speak to you.’

‘Seems an odd sort of name,’ I muttered, and we both looked at the telephone as if it might hold some sort of clue. But by the time I picked up the receiver, the line was dead. Then of course it dawned on me. It was the journalist — Leith of the
Mail on Sunday.
My book had just been published in England and, to Ana’s particular disbelief, had not disappeared without trace. In fact, on the back of a couple of nice reviews, and the reading on Radio Four, it had been charging up into the non-fiction book charts.

It was then that Leith had phoned up and said he wanted to do a story — and he’d be coming out to talk to us at our home in Spain. ‘I’ll just get a car at Malaga,’ he had said, blithely dismissing my attempts to warn him of the perils in store. ‘And I’ll see you very soon.

‘He probably thinks he knows where we live because of that map in the front of the book,’ said Ana. ‘You know, the one that you drew?

I began to feel a bit guilty about my handiwork: the drawings of eucalyptus and olive groves, where perhaps a track or turning might have been more descriptive. I hadn’t actually considered that anyone would use the map in the book. It had been more of a
Swallows and Amazons
sort of thing.

In the event, Eugene the photographer and his assistant arrived first. They were smooth and hip and had hired a top-of-the-range silver Volvo at the paper’s expense to transport them and their equipment to El Valero. They first appeared racing along the rubbly track in a cloud of dust. Then they hurtled down the unspeakable hill to the river and whooshed straight through the ford — a deed normally attempted by only the most robust and high-slung of four-wheel-drivers.

‘It’s only a bloody hire car,’ drawled Eugene. ‘I mean, they don’t expect you to polish it outside your villa all week, do they?’ Eugene seemed a cool character.

I hovered around the car as the photographers humped out their huge bags and boxes, their silver umbrellas and coloured screens, sun-lamps, chargers and tripods. I thought they were from another planet. ‘Last week we done Oasis an’ next week the Spice Girls,’ commented Eugene.

‘How nice,’ I said, shuffling my toes in the dust.

‘Great spread you got here,’ said Eugene, tucking into the
chorizo
and ham and olives we brought out to welcome them. ‘Wasn’t there supposed to be a journo comin’ too?’ he asked.

‘Yes, that would be Leaf of the Male, but he hasn’t turned up yet. I think he’s lost?

‘Nothin’ would surprise me.’ Eugene squinted at the sun. ‘Right, let’s ‘ave a beer or two an’ then we’ll ‘ave you all sittin’ up there on that terrace.’

The telephone rang. It was Leaf. He was lost. Ana took the call and gave him detailed instructions on how to find the road to the valley.

It was a hot, hot July day and the sun was raging from a clear sky, as it always does in July. Andrew, Eugene’s assistant, was setting up a huge bank of floodlights below the terrace.

‘What the hell do you want with that lot on a day like this?’ I asked.

‘These pics ‘ye gotta be good,’ asserted Eugene as he added ever more invasive probosces to his camera. ‘I don’t like natural light; you can’t trust it. Your
Mail
reader don’t like to see things in a natural light anyway. Can you do something about your ‘air, Chris?’

‘Not really, no. It’s what’s called “flyaway hair” I believe, or what’s left of it is…’

I mussed it up a bit with my fingers.

‘There, how’s that?’

‘I s’pose it’ll ‘ave to do. Now look just above the camera and see if you can raise a grin of some sort…’

The telephone went again. Leaf… still lost.

Eugene and Andrew pushed and pulled at Ana and Chloe and me, and contorted us in and out of all sorts of different positions and poses, and shoved us this way and the other as if we were a family of teddy-bears. Then they did the whole thing all over again but with different lenses and filters and umbrellas and screens, and holding different props and leaning against different things, and then eventually they had the three of us all standing and holding hands and jumping up and down in the river —’Just try and look natural like, you know, I want you in sort of everyday poses.’

We felt like a family of half-wits, and that, when the photo came out later, was exactly what we looked like — muttonheads allowed out for the day from some sort of institution. Still, Eugene and Andrew were fun, and we all had a good laugh out of it — except of course when we were supposed to be laughing for the camera, when we just looked moronic.

Leaf called several more times in the course of the morning, each time a little bit more lost. We all laughed about poor Leaf, who was apparently some sort of a hot-shot reporter.

‘Why would the
Mail
want to send us a hot-shot journo? Surely we’re not big news?’ I wondered.

‘They’re treating you like a big one,’ Eugene reassured us. ‘Not perhaps as big as the Spice Girls, but big nonetheless. So they’re sending you Leaf?

William Leith turned up just before lunch. He was hot and just about as flustered and bothered as I’ve ever seen a man. He had flyaway hair too, and it was drenched in sweat from the walk up the hill, and his glasses were sticky with dust and muck and he was shaking like a… like a leaf. He reeled into the house and slumped into a chair.

‘I’m William,’ he said huskily, then smacked his dry lips together. ‘Any chance of a beer?’

I brought a bottle — one of those small Spanish ones that wouldn’t really register if you poured the contents into a pint glass. William sat back in his chair. Eugene and Andrew looked at each other, then at us. We looked quizzically at Andrew and Eugene. Ana gave me a look. William downed his bottle in one, and then, looking up, noticed that some of us — those of us who weren’t looking at each other — were looking at him.

‘Lord!’ he said. ‘Any more where that came from?’

He stayed slumped in his chair with the second bottle, looking like some organism that has somehow got into the wrong element — a deep-sea creature in a bingo-hall, for example. We all stared at him, wondering what he was going to say next. Only when he had finished three beers was he able to communicate.

‘Lord God! That road! I have never been so terrified in my life! And then that assault course DIY bridge! I thought I would die… honest to God, look at me; I’m still quaking. Where’s the bathroom?’

We assumed that the awfulness of Leaf’s experience with the road and the bridge might have loosened his bowels, and ushered him hurriedly to the bathroom. But he didn’t shut the door, and as we all peered across we could see him going through the potions and lotions in the cupboards and on the shelves, picking each one up, turning it round and reading the directions for use.