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 wasn’t 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 didn’t see for a while, for his sake really, all that shouting and threatening every time he saw her couldn’t 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 woman’s 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. They’d 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 didn’t have any records or any turntables. He told her that he’d 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t Thirty yet and let’s face it she was fantastic-looking so she had the absolute right to have a good time before it was too late. That’s 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 agent’s. 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 journey’s end.

They didn’t 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 hadn’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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 you’d 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 couldn’t remember a British person on the coast ever speaking Spanish, they didn’t need to, they lived in a bubble of Britishness, radio stations, newspapers, bars; up here it was obviously different, they had to fit in.

One of the English, an old queen who’d been at the centre of a shrieking group, came over and sat down at the table opposite Sue. ‘And whose little girl are you?’

Sue smiled up at him. ‘I’m just passing through.’

‘To where, darling? There’s no through, to pass through to.

He held out his hand. ‘Laurence Leahy…’

‘Sue,’ she said and shook hands.

‘Another drink?’

‘Yeah, why not?’

He shouted over to the barman who quickly brought more drinks and more food.

‘So “Passing Through Sue”, where do you plan to stay tonight? There’s no hotel in our little town.’

‘Somebody usually rents rooms …

‘By an incredible coincidence I happen to do that.’

‘How much?’

‘Umm … twenty thousand pesetas a week.’

‘Eighteen thousand two hundred and sixty-five.’

The odd number threw him, as it was meant to. When haggling for anything Sue always did this for that reason. ‘Yes erm . . alright, eighteen thousand and whatever it was.’

He indicated the crowd he’d been with. ‘Come and meet everyone.

Laurence led her over to the gaggle of foreigners he had been with and introduced her around, still calling her ‘Passing Through Sue’.

They were mostly British with a couple of Belgians and Dutch (who were sort of foreign British people anyway) and a Europhile Singaporean. The whole lot of them stayed in the bar till about 1 a.m. then Laurence led her to his house; he didn’t offer to carry Sue’s bag. In the dark it was hard to tell from the outside the size of Laurence’s place, only that she entered through a small door set in a huge studded Arabic gate that was the only portal breaking the run of a long white wall.

Stepping through the gate brought her into a secret courtyard, this was the first of an uncountable number of hidden places she would step into over that summer. She stood and stared in amazement, up at the abundant stars that lit the hidden garden, then at the tall palms that shaded the starlight, then at the orange and lemon trees, their fruit hanging as copious as the stars. Laurence waited, enjoying her astonishment. ‘Not bad, eh?’ he said.

‘It’s fantastic.’

‘Glad you like it because it costs me a bloody fortune, I’m being drained like a pig. This is supposed to be my retirement, I tell you I’ve never been more distracted .

Come and see the rest of it. Fucking thing.’ He led her through a door into the house and flipped on a light. It was like one of those houses you see in magazines, not the trashy ones in Hello! either, not comedians’ places in Henley or Formula One drivers’ serviced apartments in Monaco but one of the houses in the magazines that are just about houses and show you how you could live, if you had money, taste and about a thousand years.

Laurence whisked her round the place. ‘Living room, you can use that; kitchen, you can use that but clean up after you; my office, stay out of there; my bedroom, stay out unless invited; your bedroom, same goes for Laurence.’

The next morning she didn’t wake up until ten. She could hear Laurence crashing about in the kitchen. The sun was bleaching the stones of the patio and he had laid breakfast out on a long table under a white awning.

‘Is there work around here?’ she asked him.

‘Cleaning some of the houses the tourists rent. Bar work maybe but it’s all at Spanish rates …

‘Well, I’ll hang about to see what opportunities there are.

Sue had noticed that in the living room there were a lot of framed sketches round the walls of men and women in costumes: Cavaliers, Battle of Britain pilots, milkmaids, Victorian nurses, all signed L.L. She asked him, ‘All them pictures on the wall that you did of people from history do you see them in visions or something?’

‘Eh?’

‘You’re a Pisces, in their dreams Pisces travel into the past and bring secret messages back. I thought you might have done the drawings after you came back to the present.’

‘Do they really? Umm … Well, I suppose that’s one explanation but I’m afraid the real one is that I designed all those outfits. Yes, it was what I did before my so-called retirement, I was a costume designer on films and TV.’

‘A what?’

‘A costume designer. Well, you know in movies and on the telly the clothes that the actors wear are designed by someone. Then they’re made specially according to the designs, my designs. Usually there’s several copies of course in case of accidents or so the outfits seem fresh or when there’s a stunt—’

Sue broke in. ‘Are you sure?’

‘What?’

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘Of course I’m sure, I did it for forty years.’

‘If you say so,’ she said and they left it at that and talked about other things. She wasn’t fooled about the drawings though. What a ridiculous idea, she reflected. What was it he called himself again, ‘costume designator’? Yeah right. Maybe he was ashamed of seeing visions of the past in his dreams and was trying to cover it up. Yeah that was it, Pisces could be like that if their Venus was rising.

They went down to Noche Azul for their lunch and had the Menu Del Dia. As they walked through the high-walled skein of narrow alleys they had to step over various dogs lying stretched out on the hot ground, and outside the bar lay, scampered or sat panting in the backs of pick-up trucks all the dogs who belonged to those inside. More or less the same crowd as last night were in there, with a few additions and subtractions. These were the people she would spend her summer with. There was ‘Nige’, a very tall dark-haired woman of about forty years, a sculptor with a studio and living quarters right in the middle of the village; she had two dogs, ‘Dexter’ and ‘Del Boy’, two big matching yellow things. Frank, middle-aged cockney wide boy, doing up a house in the next village and exporting antiques, owner of one wolf with a trace of dog in it, name of Cohn. Kirsten, Dutch academic working on a doctorate for the next six months, loosely attached to one nameless hound for the duration. Li Tang, big house on the edge of the village, extremely vague about activities, dogless. Janet, retired BBC executive, small village house, small pension, small dog also called Janet (or more usually ‘Little Janet’). Baz, local builder to the foreigners, four dogs of mixed size from giant to a tiny creature that seemed to be half-dog half-squirrel, names Canello, Negrita, General Franco and Macki. Miriam from Macclesfield, small cortijo in the woods below the village, early retirement from the planning department on mental health grounds, three-legged black female mongrel called ‘Coffee Table’ and, fiercely protective of her, a male Doberman answering to the name of ‘Azul’. Malcolm, writer, big house in the village, two little dogs, ‘Salvador’ and ‘Pablo’.

When Sue and Laurence joined them the foreigners were having a conversation about how much they the outsiders should get involved in village affairs. Miriam said, ‘If they want us to take on some of the jobs for the Junta then they’ll ask us. We shouldn’t push ourselves forward.’

‘This is a timeless culture, we shouldn’t distort it by importing extrinsic influences,’ added the Dutch woman Kirsten in much better English than anyone else present.

‘My taxes to the EC pay to keep it timeless … why shouldn’t I do what I want?’ said Frank.

Laurence laughed. ‘When was the last time you paid any taxes?’

This from Nige: ‘Well, I pay the amount of tax I paid in the UK. I reckon I bought Domingo’s shiny new tractor.’

There seemed a bit of needle between Nige and Laurence, and he said with some asperity, ‘I’m sure he’d give you a ride on it, dear, if you asked him. Either way you might have paid for it but you don’t own it.’

Malcolm said, ‘Those of us with money could help in a non pushy way. During the winter this place is often cut off for weeks. We could buy a snow plough and give it to them. I couldn’t get into Granada last year to buy fresh memory cards for my Sony Dreamcast.’

Laurence disagreed. ‘No, that’s one area where we shouldn’t mess with the balance. It’s part of the ecology of the village that nobody can get in or out from time to time in the cold months, it is a beneficial quarantine, the snows purify the village.’ Which seemed to Sue a pretty whacky thing to say, yet maybe everyone felt the same way for discussion moved on to other matters.

Through the rest of that week Sue, via Laurence’s sponsorship, found herself easily worked into the fabric of the little group of foreigners. It wasn’t hard, a group of highly intelligent urbanites such as these living amongst peasants would naturally hunger for new stories and Sue had a whole pack of new stories, even accounting for the forty per cent she had to hold back for what might be termed legal reasons.

That weekend, as if to celebrate her arrival, it was the village fiesta. All along the valley every weekend one village or another would have its fiesta. The saints would be taken out of the church and paraded around. The old women would crawl around on their knees as if auditioning to play dwarves in a panto, the men would get drunk, there would be bands and dancing, paella for a thousand given away free at 4 a.m. for those still standing (which was more or less everybody), there would be a theme of some kind and always the most dangerous possible use of fireworks. In Sue’s village the men would hold formidable rockets in their hands, then casually light them from the cigarettes that were draped from their bottom lips. As the flame beat on their arms they would hang on to them looking nonchalant with an ‘Oh do I have a rocket in my hand?’ expression on their faces, then they would release the sticks letting the rockets swoop into the howling air, where they would explode with an immense concussion.

A pair of recovering Welsh bulimics had rented the house next to the plaza, the very seismic epicentre of the fiesta. Used to France they had thought that a village in Spain would be similarly quiet. At 5 a.m. they came out in their nightgowns to ask Paco the Mayor if he could turn the noise down but he couldn’t hear them. They left the next day.

On the Monday the few Spanish who were about walked with the shuffling steps of chemotherapy patients, the plaza was still littered with fragments of exploded rocket and other bits of firework.

As Sue was crossing the square a pack of dogs came skittering round the corner in a happy mood. She recognised most of the canine gang, Cohn, Little Janet, Azul, Salvador and Pablo, General Franco, Canello plus three of the effete little yappy dogs that the peasants surprisingly favoured, with Coffee Table unsteadily bringing up the rear. However, bounding and leaping at the centre of the group was the most magnificent dog she had ever seen, the size of a small cow it was, with lustrous grey black fur, and a long intelligent head set with jet-black eyes. The Dog appeared to have been much better groomed and fed than any of the local pack of hounds, and Sue thought it might perhaps be some sort of a pedigree.

Later on that evening as Sue was sitting on the terrace of Noche Azul with Laurence, the pack again came lolloping past. She said, ‘Laurence, whose is that big dog? I haven’t seen it before.’ He straightened from his chair to take a look.

‘Nobody’s, it’s abandoned. Been here since the second night of the fiesta,’ replied Laurence. ‘It probably belonged to some Spaniards who are going down to the coast for the summer and don’t want to pay for kennels, or who didn’t realise how big it was going to grow, who knows? They often abandon their dogs on the highway or they leave them in this village because they know there are a lot of us British here and they think we’ll look after them.’

‘Will we?’

‘I’m not sure, I think everybody’s fully dogged up at the moment, but we’ll see.’

Through the week Sue began to look out for The Dog and became quite friendly with it, feeding it her unwanted tapas when the owners of Noche Azul weren’t watching and scratching it behind the ear as it lay asleep on the stone steps of the church.

It turned out to be a week for making new friends as her horoscope in the international edition of the Daily Express that somebody had left in the bar had told her it was going to be. For on the Friday of that week the Mayor, Don Paco, a man of at least seventy, wearing the strongest spectacles she’d ever seen, consisting of what appeared to be a pair of zoom lenses held in a thick black plastic frame on his head, came to see her in Noche Azul where she was having her morning coffee. He asked her to accompany him to the terrace of the villagers’ bar, which as far as she could tell didn’t have a name or indeed any furniture, being a big empty tiled room; its only decoration was a big photo display provided by the manufacturer of all the various ice creams that the bar didn’t stock.

Sue and Don Paco sat outside under a fig tree, on faded orange plastic stacking chairs placed at a wonky old green-baize card table. The local guy who ran the bar brought them coffees and for the Mayor a giant brandy in a fish bowl. She recalled what Laurence said about the cost of booze in these parts: ‘At these prices you can’t afford not to be drunk!’ Except the Spanish never ever seemed to get drunk, not in the fighting, spewing, brawling, boasting British way that she was used to from Saturday nights in Bolton and every night on the costa.

Don Paco obviously had something serious to say. ‘Here it comes,’ she thought. ‘Run out of town on a rail.’

But instead he spoke to her most formally. ‘Senorita Sue, I have heard from Antonio the truck driver that you did a little favour for him in return for a ride up here. I was wondering whether it would be possible, if you could perhaps do something similar for me. What it is, if I could put … mi pajaro, between your breasts which are coated with soap and you could squeeze them together, until well, you know what follows on from that. Perhaps once a week might be suitable? I would provide my own soap.

‘Hmm …’ She thought about it. ‘Weekly soapy tit wank. That’ll cost you, Mr Mayor.’

‘So be it, nothing is free in this life, we must pay in the end for everything. I had some little money set aside to buy an electric corn husker this autumn, but a soapy tit wank sounds like it would be better value.’

A few days later another old farmer called Ramon asked her to sit under the fig tree with him. ‘Senorita Sue, I have a little money, it was intended for my wife’s operation but you know she will die soon anyway, so…’

So that was a bi-weekly, non-penetrative butt fuck that he was after. Then there was an armpit wank for the bank manager, another soapy tit wank for the baker, hand jobs for innumerable old campasinos and ten thousand pesetas from the priest to let him watch her taking a piss in the orange groves.

Pretty soon she had quite a business going. The average age of her clients was seventy-two and all of them were old Spanish men from the village or the surrounding campo. Laurence told her that the younger men in the village either had girlfriends who let them have sex with them (though it was understood that this also meant marriage) or they visited the something like thirty brothels that lined the main roads between the village and the big city of Granada. These brothels were shabby breezeblock, tin-roofed buildings, always seemingly with a single dusty car parked outside, their neon signs hung dead in the daylight spelling out ‘Club Paradiso’ and ‘Club Splendido’. They were staffed, so it was said, by beautiful Argentinian girls.

Sue did not feel any guilt about what she was doing, she was providing a much-needed service at a reasonable price. She was aware that generally peasants did not have a very enlightened attitude to whores, yet when she passed them in the streets and lanes the old men would greet her in a courtly fashion even when they’d had their dick squeezed between her buttocks half an hour before, and even more surprisingly their wives were chatty and friendly when Sue encountered them in the village shop or when they queued at the bread van that came twice a day.

Sitting in Laurence’s courtyard with Miriam, Nige, Frank, Kirsten and Baz and the remains of a zarzuela de mariscos, Sue mentioned she was surprised that she hadn’t encountered any opprobrium from the Spanish for her activities. Laurence, as always, reckoned he had an explanation and because they were all too dozy and drunk to stop him he was able to launch into one of his lectures. ‘What you have to remember is that for nearly a thousand years, from 711, Andalucia was the most tolerant, literate, liberal, progressive place on the planet. Under the rule of the Moors it led the world in science, mathematics, poetry, gardening even. Jews, Christians, any religions were tolerated and encouraged to play a full part in society. Then after that black year, after 1492, after the so-called restoration when the Moors were driven out by Ferdinand and Isabella, it was the most repressive, intolerant, backwards looking and led the world maybe in torture techniques.’ Then he started to veer off his original course. ‘Typical, of course, that Torquemada was a convert, a Jew who became a persecutor of the Jews. Why does that happen so often, that converts become so much more fanatical than those born to the faith?’

Sue let him go on, she thought what a good thing it was that she was so in tune with other people’s feelings that she couldn’t find it in herself to show him up by letting all the others know what cock he was talking. She had a hard job holding herself in because it made her angry and sad at the same time, all this babble about kings and queens and caliphs and not one word, not one bloody word had he mentioned about angels! When everybody knew that until 1492 a quarter of the population of ancient Andalucia had been proved to be angels. There were loads of books about it: The Andalusian Prophecy, White Wings Over Spain, The Celestial Costa Connection. It was angels that had built the Alhambra, the signs were everywhere if you knew where to look, and every serious historian knew that the Inquisition had largely been aimed at destroying the power of angels.

The summer was the time for excursions and one Saturday a whole gang of them got in a flotilla of cars and drove away, the dogs saw them off, barking and nipping each other. They were all going to the fiesta in Lanjaron, which was the biggest fiesta in the whole valley. This spa town in the Alpujarras was where all the area’s mineral water came from. Massive petrol-tanker type trucks full of fizzy water ground up and down the narrow mountain roads, refusing ever to slow down or give way, forcing other drivers close to, and sometimes over, the crumbling edge in a b-cal carbonated version of the Wages of Fear.

For years the Lanjaron fiesta had been one that glorified the contrasting characteristics of ‘Fire and Water’ but even by Spanish standards there had been a few too many terrible burnings, so it had been remade as .a fiesta that celebrated the different qualities of ‘Ham and Water’ thus the damage incurred now, though severe, was primarily psychological. From early on the Saturday of the fiesta there was a parade of people dressed in aquatic costumes, scuba gear, sailors, mermaids, while others threw buckets of water down from their balconies and the fire department went around soaking celebrants with their hoses. The locals would walk up to a tourist with a big smile then throw a bowl of water in their face. In no time at all Sue’s T-shirt was soaked to transparency; naked but not naked, she felt tremendously sexy and would have gone to the toilets to bring herself off if they hadn’t been too busy and crowded.

The real horror though began after 1 p.m. Those in the know crowded into the bars which then locked their doors, leaving those outside trapped and running from doorway to doorway as they were repeatedly doused. At first they found it amusing but after a while the constant assault began to wear them down. The gang Sue was with laughed manically as a couple of Dutch tourists beat on the glass doors of the bar they were in while behind them a fire truck directed its hoses onto their backs, till they sank to the flooded ground and curled into a sodden ball, their tears adding to the pool in which they lay. Surreptitiously Sue rubbed herself against a corner of the bar as the Dutch couple were spun and battered to the ground by the gushing hoses of the firemen. She realised she needed a boyfriend, it was all very well being non-penetratively shagged up the arse by eighty-year-olds but she needed some cock of her own age.

As usual her own personal angel — who a psychic healer in Totnes had told her was a Choctaw Indian by the name of ‘Lightning Dog’ who’d been killed at the Battle of Bull Run — must have been listening, for on the Tuesday of the next week there was a new car in the village. By now Sue knew everybody’s vehicle. Nige’s beat-up old locally made Santana Landrover, Baz’s Japanese pick-up truck, Laurence’s ancient Mini still on British plates, the little white vans with seats in the back that all the local old boys had. The only cars that came and went were the hire cars, bright little hatchbacks rented by the tourists who leased for a couple of weeks the few villas that were available to let for the summer.

This big new silver Opel Omega with Madrid number plates stood out, just as the big dog had when it had come to the valley. When Sue first saw it, the car was parked outside the house of an old English guy called Max. She had met him once when he had come out for a weekend. He was a retired engineer who seemed to talk about nothing except the kinds of toast he had eaten throughout his long, long life. Laurence said he came for the entire summer once he had got his mother settled in a rest home in Coventry. The door of the house was open and a young man of her own age came out, shading his eyes against the bright sunlight. He took an old leather suitcase out of the car’s boot and was hauling it into the house when he saw Sue looking at him.

‘Awright?’ he said to her.

‘Awright’ she replied. He was English and Northern, home-grown cock.

His name was Tony and he was from the flat brown alluvial Lancashire farm country inland from Blackpool Bay. Home-grown, organic, free-range cock.

They started fucking that night.

Sue introduced Tony to the crowd in Noche Azul the next lunchtime. Of course they already knew he was there.

‘So,’ said Nige, ‘you’re staying at Max’s place — when will he be coming out to join us?’

‘Oh he won’t be,’ said Tony. ‘Not this year. He decided to stay at home … for the cricket.’

‘Oh shame,’ said Janet.

‘I’m a sort of nephew of his.. He gave me the keys to his house; he wanted me to enjoy it even if he couldn’t.’

‘Will you be staying long?’ asked Miriam.

‘I’m not sure, Miriam. I’m on the look-out for opportunities, perhaps here or on the coast, so I thought I’d chill for a bit, see what happens.’

‘Did he sort of give you his watch as well?’ drawled Laurence.

 

‘Did he give you his watch? A Tag Heurer that his firm gave him after thirty years’ indentured slavery, you … you’re wearing it.’

Tony looked at the watch. ‘Yeah, like I said he’s me favourite sort of uncle. He likes to give me things.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Laurence.

Sue had been around dangerous men all her life, she knew this about them that they didn’t bluster and shout, they didn’t issue funny threats like they did on the telly. They didn’t say through gritted-together teeth: ‘If you do that again I’ll cut your bollocks off and nail them to the letter box as a draught excluder!’ It was not the way of the violent to indulge in complex verbal linguistic display. If they could indulge in complex verbal linguistic display they probably wouldn’t be violent in the first place. And they didn’t issue warnings like the weather forecast either; they didn’t say, ‘I’ll only tell you once,’ or ‘I’m warning you…’ or ‘I’m giving you one more chance but, I swear, if you screw up again I’ll …’ They just did you right there and then with no prior notice and no right of appeal. The only warning you might get is that sometimes the situation they were in, like for instance it being their first day in a new town, led them, occasionally, once in a while, to consider their actions. Sue could see that Tony was thinking of doing Laurence right there and then with no prior notice and she could also see that Laurence knew he was in danger of being done and yet, strangely, Laurence didn’t seem frightened and he didn’t seem bothered either. The old pouf went up in her estimation. Still, following that, he stopped needling Tony and the danger passed.

Tony never bothered much with the Noche Azul crowd after the first few days; in the early weeks of June he spent a lot of time driving backwards and forwards to the coast, in the big silver car. When she didn’t have a client Sue would go with him and sometimes she would bring The Dog as well. It would lie panting on the black leather of the back seat until they arrived in Malaga or Marbella or Nerja. Then while Tony went off to have his meetings Sue and The Dog would go for long walks. At first she felt uneasy being back on the coast but having The Dog with her gave her courage. A couple of times she did see people who might wish to do her harm but they never got close enough to recognise her; also, she realised, her appearance had changed since she had been in the village. Her hair had grown longer, her skin was darker from the time she had spent in the campo and the muscles of her arms were a lot firmer from all the wanking that she was doing.

One lunchtime back in the village towards the start of July an amazing thing happened: the bar went quiet. Sue looked up from her newspaper to see in the doorway an officer of the Guardia Civil. The Guardia, Franco’s semi-military rural police were hated up here. During the civil war the village had been an anarchist stronghold and the Guardia had been in charge of reprisals when the republic was lost. They had shot seventeen of the village boys along the cemetery wall and the village had not forgotten. The officer strode up to the bar and started asking Armando something, she couldn’t quite hear what but it seemed to be something to do with a car from Madrid. Getting nothing out of the sullen bar owner the policeman soon turned and left, climbing back into his Nissan Patrol and gunning it back down the mountain. A few days after that, Sue was taking a pee in the campo, the padre a few metres away furiously pulling himself off behind an ancient gnarled olive tree, when she heard a sudden ‘Whooph!’ At first she thought it was the priest coming, some of those old campo boys she had found went off like hand grenades. Then turning the other way she saw in a distant ravine that a car had exploded and was now on fire, it looked like a silver Opel Omega with Madrid plates.

Tony said his car had been stolen while he was in Almunecar, but anyway he only needed one more trip to the coast. He persuaded Sue to borrow Laurence’s Mini for this trip south though Laurence lent it grudgingly.

In the end she wasn’t able to go with him and Laurence went on and on saying that he’d never get his poxy Mini back. But Tony did return. When he got back, after a few days, he told Sue what his plan was. ‘See all the cocaine in dis country comes in through Galicia, they’ve got great contact with South America for obvious reasons, funny it’s the women who control the trade as well, once the Guardia put all their husbands in jail. The dope, the blow, that comes through here, the south of Spain, after all it’s only half an hour from Algeciras to Africa by fast launch. Scag though, heroin, they ain’t got any of that, cos they ain’t got any contacts with Turkey, Afghanistan, any of them places. Except now on the costa there’s Russians and they’re looking to shift what they know, scag, up here into the valleys and the mountains. Now I have an opportunity to get a load at good prices and I reckon the kids up here would take to heroin real well.’

Sue had a question. ‘Have you got the money to do it?’

‘I got some, that’s why I’m talking to you, though. I need more, as much as I can get.’

‘You’re not worried about the locals?’

‘They’re fucking divvies these people,’ said Tony. ‘They deserve to get fucking took. We know that they don’t like the Guardia, so what the fuck are they going to do about it? Even if they figure it’s me that’s dealing the gear. So you in or what?’

Sue gave him the money that she had saved up, plus she stole a watch from Laurence. A Rolex with a gold strap that Tony got a thousand dollars for in Almunecar. He wouldn’t miss it, a person could only wear one watch at a time after all (apart from her DJ boyfriend who’d worn six) and she’d never seen him wearing this one so he deserved to lose it really when you thought about it.

Pretty soon all over the valley the Spanish kids were doing heroin. With drink they had been brought up to understand its properties and its dangers but with scag there was no bargain that could be made, no truce. Scag would not talk to the hostage negotiator. The boy in the bakery who’d once been chatty and smiling now stood for hours at a time, white-faced and spotty, with his arms buried up to the elbows in a bowl of dough. In the next village the bar owner had to lock the doors to keep out a rampaging gang, and in the orange groves a young boy was found shot dead with his father’s hunting rifle.

Tony gave Sue her savings back plus a big bonus after six weeks and then he went into Granada and bought a convertible BMW from the big dealership on the ring road.

One morning in July before the sun had begun to scour the white-painted alleys, Sue and Nige were walking back from Anna’s shop, they each had a carrier bag in both hands. It had taken them an hour and a half to buy their groceries, which was pretty good going given the lethargic pace of things during the hot months. As Nige talked her two dogs came running round the corner, tongues lolling from their mouths, pursued a few seconds later by a cloud of the other hounds with The Dog, at the centre of things, seeming to be directing operations. The whole furry storm shot past and disappeared down Calle Iglesias on their way to the church. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen my dogs in three days,’ said Nige. ‘That big one seems to have taken over the pack with its big city sophisticated ways.

‘Nobody’s taken it in though,’ said Sue.

‘No, and they won’t now, it’s too wild and flea-bitten.’

‘So what’ll happen to it?’

‘The usual Spanish thing. They’ll let it run round for the summer then one day, after the hot months are over, The Dog Catcher comes … and deals with it.’

‘Takes it to a dogs’ home?’

‘Silly girl. Shoots it.

‘No!’

‘They reckon they’re being kind, letting it have its summer. By their standards they are.’ Then, appearing to change the subject. ‘Sue, tell me something. How did you travel here, to Spain, in the first place?’

‘Plane. Scallyjet from Liverpool airport to Malaga.’

‘Ah yeah. Everybody comes by plane now but see, when I left my husband, left Devon, I drove down here in an old post office van. I’ll never forget that trip. The mountains and pastures of the Basque country, your senses tell you you’re in Switzerland. La Mancha, the flat table lands that seem to go on forever, they were once forest you know, they chopped it all down. South from Madrid, this was before they built the highway, it was just a dead-straight road through a desert. After the foothills of the Sierra Morena you eventually come to the Gateway to Andalucia. It’s a pass through the mountains, a defile, a natural cuffing. You know what its name is? “Despenaperros”, “Desfil de Despenaperros”, literally in Spanish, “The Place for Throwing the Dogs off the Cliffs.” Some say that the dogs referred to are infidels, foreigners, those who do not belong. I believe the other explanation. That the bandits who certainly infested this pass in the nineteenth century would pelt travellers with dogs that they threw down from the high places.’

‘You’re having me on,’ said Sue.

‘Not at all. Whether it’s true or not, the name of the pass tells us two things about the Spanish. One, that dogs are as plentiful as stones, as rocks, as dirt in this part of the world; and two, that given a choice between throwing a dog or a rock, then the Spaniard would choose to step to the edge and throw the dog. I don’t know. Perhaps it had a practical purpose, I suppose it must have disturbed the travellers mightily to find that the sky was suddenly full of flying dogs but it never does to rule out pointless sadism in your dealings with these here Spanish.’

They were at the door to Nige’s place. Another studded gate in a blank white wall.

‘You want to come in?’ she asked Sue.

‘Sure why not.’ She had never seen inside Nige’s place. Nige opened the gate and they stepped through. Unlike Laurence’s house they were not in an open courtyard but instead in a high-ceilinged space that was Nige’s workshop. Her sculptures were dotted around all over everywhere. Sue had been expecting something perhaps oldee worldee, nice framed oil paintings, like they sold in the rastros of Granada and Seville. Authentic studies of whitewashed cortijos with peasants sitting outside on straw chairs, still lifes of pewter plates piled high with Serrano ham and Andalucian figs, farmyards full of chickens, the plains of old Castile as seen from Toledo. All the paintings signed ‘Chavez’ and ‘Milagro’ and ‘Romero’ and all of the paintings created by painting factories in Southern China where, on a production line as regulated as the nearby Toyota van plant, Chinese workers ground out studies of a country they had never seen and never would see, each one specialising in a fragment of the painting, this one concentrating on chickens, this one doing skies, this one the best sad donkey eyes painter in all of Ghanzu province.

Nige’s sculptures were nothing like that. It was a big room and it was hard to see where the mess on the floor ended and the sculptures began; all over the hidden ground, a foot deep in places, was soil, straw, clay, plaster, paint and rising out of this derangement were figures compounded out of the same stuff. Dogs snarling and snapping at each other, men with the heads of bulls and huge cocks drooping in an arc, pigs, ducks, leaping fish, some white, some grey, some stained with the dust of the mountains, some blood red, some midnight black.

Sue stared for many minutes before speaking. She wove in and out of the figures then she said, ‘This is fucked up. This is the most fucked-up thing that I have ever fucking seen. You never, ever, know what is behind these fucking doors.’

Nige laughed, she thought Sue was saying a good thing, which she might have been. The sculptress led Sue into a dark side room, its walls of rough-cast plaster hung with beaten copper plates, the tiled floor piled high with oriental cushions, a dim light spilling from coloured-glass-studded Arab lamps.

‘This is almost normal,’ said Sue as she dropped straight down into the cushions. Nige landed next to her.

‘I bought all this stuff when I was backpacking in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Then I shipped it back. The markets in Peshawar are just unbelievable.’

Nige reached behind her into a carved box and drew out dope and skins. She began to roll a joint and kept talking.

‘You can buy, like, literally anything there, stolen Range Rovers from Britain, any drugs you want, they hand-make copies of any kind of gun in the world, gold-plated Purdey shotguns, Kalashnikovs, Ml6s, pirated Snoop, Doggy Dog CDs, all this next to the most beautiful, timeless, local handicrafts, rugs, lamps.’ Nige lit the joint and took a luxurious pull, languorously exhaled and passed it to Sue.

The younger woman drew in the smoke. Before she could breathe out Nige placed her wide open mouth over the other woman’s lips. Sue expelled the smoke and Nige took it down into her own lungs, then they both flopped back against the cushions, laughing.

Sue leant forward and began kissing Nige’s long neck, while her hand crept down and unbuttoned the older woman’s jeans. She slid her fingers inside and began to stroke between Nige’s legs. After a while, with all their clothes off, it was hard to tell where Sue began and Nige ended.

August in the frying pan of Spain, all the villas were rented and it was too hot to go out at night before eleven. It was so hot that Don Paco even took his cardigan off and he didn’t need to bring his soap along to the orange groves as the sweat between Sue’s breasts was all the lubricant that they needed.

Heroin continued to seep down into the valley like the water that ran along the acequias from the high Sierra Nevadas. Though entirely without conscience, empathy or kindness, Tony thought himself to be a good man who only did what had to be done to get by. He thought that in other circumstances he might have been a doctor or a fireman, helping people instead of poisoning the youth of a valley with narcotics. Partly to prove his decency to himself he would be good almost at random. He was good to Sue, for example, he gave her a regular cut of his earnings even though he was self-financing by now. And he suggested that she could give up servicing the old boys if she wanted to and she could move into Max’s house with him.

Sue declined. She said her work with the old men made her feel that she was providing a vital service to the village. The wives of the old men were as polite to her as they were to any foreign woman so there did not seem to be any anger against her, though she did not delude herself that everybody didn’t know what was going on. Plus she was enjoying what she did, giving the old boys a thrill, and she was even picking up a fair bit of farming knowledge from her clients, for example they were all very insistent that things, tasks, had to be carried out on a specific day, or during a specific short period: vines had to be pruned on 25 January and, most important of all, the Matanza, the day of pig-killing, absolutely had to be done between Christmas and New Year. Maybe she’d become a farmer one day, Aquarians were very good at farming.

September came and the hot weather ran away like a coward that owed money. The tourists went and all the crops were gathered in. As Sue walked down to the bar she could hear the sound of Paco swearing as he noisily husked corn by hand-cranked machine.

The village already seemed to be drawing in on itself for the winter, the bus had stopped coming from Granada two days ago, the locals no longer drove or walked as often down into the valley.

One day Laurence asked her if she would go to the shop to get him some stamps. Sue didn’t really feel like it but she hadn’t paid him any rent for six weeks and she wasn’t in the mood for a row so she grumpily pulled her boots on and stomped out of the gate, into the shaded alley.

When Sue got to where Anna’s, the village shop, was, for a moment she thought it had gone, that it had somehow taken off into the air like the spaceships disguised as houses that the angels sometimes used, or it had vanished in some other way. Then she realised what the sense of dislocation was: the shop hadn’t gone it was just that the door to the shop was closed! Previously Sue never knew that Anna’s even possessed a door! Up to that point, in all the time she had been in the village, the entrance had always been covered solely by the coloured strips of a plastic fly screen; now suddenly a peeling but substantial, ancient olive wood door barred the gap. She slammed on the door a few times with the heel of her palm but there was no reply. Vaguely confused she turned away and headed back to Laurence’s. There was something missing, a vacancy, an omission she hadn’t been able to put her finger on at first, but now it suddenly struck her what it was. There were no dogs! Jackie, Salvador, Pablo, Little Janet, they were nowhere about. Their absence made the village seem strangely empty.

Up ahead of her Tony was standing in the middle of the little plaza at the corner of Calle Solana and Calle Santiago looking bewildered.

‘Alright Sue,’ he said. A tone of uncertainty she’d never heard before in his voice. ‘I don’t understand this, Noche Azul’s closed. I’ve never seen it closed in all the time I’ve been here, it’s always been open day and night. Laurence said he wanted to meet me here at eleven to discuss something really important, when fuck me I finds it’s fuckin’ cerrado and that old pouf nowhere to be found.’

Sue was about to tell him both that Laurence was back at home and that Anna’s had also been shut when, very close, perhaps two streets over, they heard a sudden loud crack, the sound amplified twenty times, cannoning off the white stone walls. Tony jumped. ‘What the fuck was that?’ He yelped.

‘Must be a firework or a rocket, you know what they’re like,’ said Sue.

‘I guess,’ said Tony.

Just then a little yellow dog that used to run with the pack came racing across the square. Another firework went off, nearer this time and the little yellow dog did a somersault and then flopped onto its back with its legs wide open, the way it did when it wanted to be stroked, except when it wanted to be stroked it wriggled about in the dust in a rather disgusting way and this time it was lying still.

Sue and Tony went slowly over to where the little dog lay, the right half of its head was missing and thick tarry dog blood seeped slowly into the dust.

‘The Dog Catcher,’ said Sue. ‘The Dog Catcher must be here.’

‘You what?’ said Tony.

‘It must be the day for The Dog Catcher. Haven’t you heard of him? The Dog Catcher comes at the end of the summer and shoots all the stray dogs. I thought he’d take them away somewhere to do it. That’s why everybody’s locked their doors! They must be keeping their dogs in, away from The Dog Catcher.’

‘Shittin’ ‘ell, it’s a bit much that he shoots them right ‘ere in the street. That’s fucking dangerous, that is. The ‘ealth and Safety wouldn’t allow that back in England I can tell you.’

‘Well you know what they’re like, the Spanish and danger. Macho isn’t a Spanish word for nothing. They probably think it’s great, bullets flying about. Danger and killing animals, I’m surprised they haven’t brought their kids out to watch.’

She looked up and down the deserted lane. ‘Come on. Let’s get back to Laurence’s house.’

So they hustled down the lanes to Casa Laurence but when they got there the little door in the big studded gate was shut and bolted from the inside.

‘Oi, Lorenzo mate, lerrus in!’ shouted Tony and kicked the door.

Suddenly there was another explosion, even closer this time.

‘Christ!’ said Sue. ‘This is gettin’ a bit bleeding silly.’

But Tony wasn’t listening to her, he was looking down at a hole that had appeared in his stomach. ‘Sue, I think I been … I think I been…’ Another bang and where his lips had been there was a pulpy mass.

Sue took off, running. Turning skidding into Calle Santiago she saw The Dog coming the other way, its ears flat against its head, it tail low in terror between its legs. As she flew past it The Dog turned and followed her. Together they bounded down one lane and up another, cutting across squares, racketing off the high mute walls and finding no sanctuary. The church was shut and barred, the gates in the fortified wall locked and immovable. They cut back into the centre, the woman and the dog.

Suddenly as she fled down a lane a familiar door opened in a wall and a voice called to them, ‘Quick, inside.’

They both leapt through. They were in Nige’s workshop. Hastily she slammed the door and bolted it.

Sue and The Dog stood trembling amongst the clay figures. She went up to Nige and hugged her.

‘Thank you, thank you, thank you. There’s somebody out there trying to kill me.’ Then, indicating The Dog, ‘Kill us.’

‘Yeah,’ said Nige. ‘It’s the Day of The Dog Catcher.’

‘But he shot Tony. Tony’s not a dog.’

‘Wasn’t he?’ said Nige. ‘You should pay more attention. I tried to tell you when I spoke about Despenaperros. They don’t distinguish between outsiders and dogs. If they’re a nuisance they get rid of both of them, when the time is right, on the appointed day. Half the kids in the valley are going to be doing cold turkey when the snows close them in this winter because of Tony. Tony was a mutt. Like I said, they let the dogs and the mutts run around for the summer and then The Dog Catcher comes on the day when The Dog Catcher has always come and deals with them both.’

‘What about the Guardia?’

‘You’ve seen the Guardia don’t count up here. It’s that strange mix of tolerance and cruelty, remember Laurence talked about it? And there’s also that thing that if you’re a local, a real local or a foreigner local, it doesn’t matter. Then you know when The Dog Catcher’s coming. You lock yourself and your dog inside and you’re safe.’

‘Shit Laurence, the bastard! He sent me out this morning. He knew The Dog Catcher was coming! And he sent me out, the old cunt!’

‘Well, you’re a mutt. If you keep a mutt away from The Dog Catcher then you have to be responsible for it. And you did steal his Rolex watch and you stopped paying rent. That wasn’t very nice. He took you in when you were obviously running away from something and you stole from him.’

Sue felt a momentary shame replace her self-righteous anger but it faded. Nige was going on again and getting on Sue’s nerves.

‘Let’s face it, you have done a few things this summer, Sue. If you keep a mutt and it kills sheep or steals or attacks a child or deals drugs, or turns tricks, then you, not the mutt, you have to answer for its bad behaviour, and the punishment is … well, you don’t want to know what the punishment is, they learnt some things from the Inquisition.’

‘Holy shit! But you took me in, you’ve saved me … Christ, thanks Nige… I won’t let you down, I mean not that I’ve really done anything bad anyway. So I’m alright as long as I’m locked inside when The Dog Catcher comes?’

‘Umm… Well, yes usually you would be alright, if you were locked inside when The Dog Catcher comes,’ said Nige rummaging in an Indian trunk.

‘Eh? What d’you mean, usually that I would be alright?’ said Sue.

‘Umm… What I mean is that usually you would be alright, fine, if you were locked inside, except, you see, I’m The Dog Catcher.’ Nige turned back from the trunk with a bolt action copy of a British Army Enfield .303 rifle, the kind that you can still buy in the gun markets of Peshawar, the kind that the Peshawaris called a ‘Britannia Mk 3’, held loosely in her hands. Nimbly she worked a round into the breech and raised the gun to her shoulder.

‘This is the first time they’ve allowed a foreigner to be The Dog Catcher. I don’t suppose you ever can understand what a tremendous honour that is because you simply do not comprehend what it is to be part of an ancient culture. I can’t afford to screw it up by letting dogs go now, can I? They’d think we weren’t serious about being here.’ And she shot Sue in the head, the round smashing through her pretty forehead and taking a chunk out of the wall behind. In the enclosed courtyard the concussion from the round was huge, Nige felt displaced air from the passage of the bullet smack her in the chest and rock her back on her heels.

As soon as the gun went off The Dog leapt up, mad with terror and raced round and round the rough stone walls, its ears back, urine streaming from its trembling flanks. Nige worked another cartridge into the breech and tried to draw a bead on the careering canine but it was impossible to get a good sight picture. Nige felt stupid and dizzy trying to aim with a rifle at a dog indoors. She was most likely to shoot one of her own sculptures so she simply lowered her weapon, cradled the rifle in her arms and stood still, waiting for the creature’s panic to subside. Eventually after fifteen minutes or so the beast slowed down and flopped, its legs too weak to hold it up, whimpering in a corner, its black eyes fixed pleadingly on Nige.

She stepped up to The Dog and pressed the stubby barrel of the .303 against the side of its long head. The creature’s ears flattened as it waited for what it knew was its end. After a few seconds Nige lowered the rifle.

‘Fuck it,’ she said to herself. ‘One more dog won’t make that much difference around here.’ Then she spoke to The Dog, looking straight into its big fearful eyes, ‘Just don’t cause any trouble, OK? You know what’ll happen if you do, don’t you?’

The Dog nodded.