Ladies and Gentlemen
The diving-school dog is already pulling at its chains and it’s only 8 a.m. He stands on two legs and lifts his scabby brown head above the wall of the roof terrace, snarling at the beach life below it. Pablo is shouting at the two Mexican men painting the walls. They can’t shout back because they don’t have the right legal documents to give him the finger. The louder the dog howls, the louder Pablo shouts.
I am going to free Pablo’s dog today.
I walk to Café Playa which is next to the diving school and order my favourite coffee, a cortado. Obviously, I want to inspect the way the waiter froths the milk, given that I was trained for six long days at the Coffee House to perfect my milk-foaming techniques. The waiter’s black hair is gelled so that it sticks out in a number of directions. There are so many things his hair is doing with gravity. I could look at it for an hour instead of freeing Pablo’s dog. The cortado is made with long-life milk, which is what they mostly use here in the desert. It is the sort of milk that is described as ‘commercially stable’.
‘We have travelled a long distance from the cow with a bucket of raw milk under its udder. We are a long way from home.’
This is what my boss told me, in her soft, sad voice, on my first day at the Coffee House. I still often think about it. I think about her thinking about it. Is home where the raw milk is?
The diving instructors are wheeling their plastic petrol canisters and oxygen tanks across the sand. Their boat is waiting for them in its specially roped-off part of the sea. When will it ever be the right time to free Pablo’s dog?
I stand up to find the women’s toilet and have to walk past the village alcoholic, who is eating a plate of luminous orange crisps with his morning cognac. The doors to the Señoras resemble the saloon swing doors of a bar in a cowboy movie, they are slatted and painted white. I’ve seen them in Westerns where the barkeeper stares suspiciously at the moody stranger when he makes his entrance. While I am peeing, someone walks into the next cubicle. There is a gap between the floor and the partition between the cubicles and I can see that this person is a man. He is wearing black leather shoes with gold buckles on the side. It’s as if he’s waiting for me. He is standing very still, I can hear him breathing, but he does not move his feet. He is lurking. I suddenly feel observed. Perhaps he can see me with my skirt hitched up round my waist. Why else is he just standing there? I wait a few seconds for him to make a move or to leave and when he doesn’t I start to panic. I quickly pull down my skirt, push open the saloon door and run to find the waiter.
He is busy with the coffee machine and he’s toasting bread and squeezing oranges at the same time.
‘Sorry, but there’s a man in the Señoras.’
The waiter grasps the cloth hanging over his shoulder and wipes the stainless-steel wand, which is dripping with milk. Then he turns round to take the stale baguettes off the grill and slides them on to a plate.
‘What?’
My legs are shaking. I don’t know why I am so frightened. ‘There’s a man in the Señoras. He was looking at me under the door. He might have a knife.’
The waiter shakes his head, irritated, he doesn’t want to leave his machine with all the cups and glasses standing in a line under the steel tubes. It is complicated to make multiple coffees, each requiring a different shape of cup or a different kind of glass. ‘Maybe you walked into the Caballeros? They are next to each other.’
‘No. I think he’s dangerous.’
He walks briskly with me to the door with ‘Señoras’ written underneath a roughly painted red lace fan and kicks it open.
A woman stands by the basin, washing her hands. She’s about my age and she’s wearing tight blue velvet shorts. Her blond hair is tied in a single thick plait. The waiter asks her in Spanish if she has seen a man in the Señoras. She shakes her head and continues washing her hands while the waiter nudges open the other door with his boot.
‘The only man in here is you,’ the woman says to the waiter. She’s got a German accent.
I look down at the floor, humiliated, and while my eyes are down I see that the woman with the blond plait is wearing the men’s shoes that I glimpsed in the other cubicle. Black leather shoes with gold buckles on the side. I don’t know what to say, I’m blushing and I feel the same panic jitter again in my chest. The waiter flings up his hands and stamps out of the Señoras, leaving me and the woman alone.
We stand in silence and I wash my hands just to give myself something to do, but then I can’t work out how to turn off the tap. She thumps it with her palm and the flow of water stops. When I look up at the mirror above the basins I can see her slanting green eyes looking at me. She is about my age. Her eyebrows are thick, almost black. Her hair is gold and straight.
‘These are men’s dancing shoes,’ she says. ‘I found them in the vintage shop up the hill. I work there.’
My wet fingers are now in my hair and I’m fidgeting with it. My curls start to frizz while she stands there calm and poised.
‘I sew for the shop in the summer. They gave me these shoes.’ She tugs at the end of her silky plait. ‘I’ve seen you around with your mother.’
A man in the village square is shouting into a loudspeaker from his truck. He’s selling melons and he’s obviously in a bad mood because his hand is slammed on the horn.
‘Yes. My mother is a patient at a clinic here.’ I sound like such a loser. For some reason, I want her good opinion, but I’m not very impressive. My heart is still racing and there’s water all over my T-shirt. She is tall and lean. Two silver bracelets circle her tanned wrists.
‘I have a house here with my boyfriend,’ she says. ‘We come here most summers. I’ve got a pile of repairs to do for the shop today. After that we are driving to Rodalquilar for supper. I like driving at night, when it’s cool.’
Her life is the sort of life I want. Her fingers are still stroking her plait.
‘Are you going to drive your mother to see the sights?’
I explained how we have to pick up our hire car from the clinic but I don’t drive and Rose has got problems with her legs.
‘Why don’t you drive?’
‘I failed my test four times.’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘And I failed my driving theory examination, too.’
She screwed up her lips and stared at my hair with her long-lidded, eyes. ‘Can you ride a horse?’
‘No.’
‘I have been riding a horse since I was three.’
There was obviously nothing to recommend me to anyone.
‘Sorry about the mix-up,’ I said. I walked out of the Señoras as fast I could without actually running.
Where shall I go? I have nowhere to go. This is the fear the posters on the wall of my mother’s mortgage company were signalling we shared. They are right. I walked to the plaza near the Café Playa to pretend to buy a watermelon.
I am saving the rinds for the chickens which are still, miraculously, laying eggs in the summer heat. They belong to Señora Bedello, whose husband died in the civil war, fighting Franco’s fascist army.
It’s not a man selling watermelons, it’s a woman.
She’s sitting in the driving seat of the van and she is beeping the horn with her small brown hand. I am so confused. I had an image in my mind of a sweaty male driver with stubble on his face, but she is a middle-aged woman in a straw hat. Her blue dress is dusty from the desert road and she’s leaning her vast breasts against the steering wheel.
And then I remembered I hadn’t finished my coffee.