A Lizard In My Luggage (9 page)

  'What are you looking at?'

  I start back. 'Who spoke?'

  'Who'd you think? Are you blind?'

  'I'm sorry, I never knew frogs could speak.'

  He eyes me coolly. 'They can't, to the best of my knowledge. Anyway, I'm a toad.'

  I'm slightly abashed. 'Do all toads speak?' Can I really be asking this question?

  'Not many,' he drawls. 'So, how d'you like it here?'

  'It'll take time to adjust. You can't just up sticks from one place to another without feeling a bit disconnected.'

  He quacks loudly, a sort of hollow laugh. 'Pah! I do it all the time. I've lived in more ponds than you can shake a lily pad at. The trouble with your kind is that you carry too much baggage. Jeez, all those trucks you had up here full of I don't know what. You don't exactly travel light.'

  'It's stuff we can't live without.'

  He shrugs sceptically. 'If you say so, but what's with the clothes and shoes? When are you gonna wear all that gear up here? People round here will think you're nuts.'

  'Well I evidently am, since I'm talking to you.'

  'What's wrong with talking to a toad? We always get a bad press. Look in a dictionary and it's all the same discriminatory frogspawn. Toads are ugly. Toads are slimy. Go on touch me, do I feel slimy?'

  I touch his skin. It's bone dry and tough as leather.

  He rants on. 'All that human fairytale bunkum about the princess kissing a frog and ending up with a handsome prince. Makes me want to throw up. He'd be gay, or even some kinda psycho, mark my words. Fairytales don't exist, honey. You gotta take the rough with the smooth, warts and all.'

  He puffs up his cheeks. 'Hey and listen, don't come sneaking around at night when we're doing our vocals. Me and the boys are working on some new numbers. So long, kid.' He slides inelegantly into the ink-black water.

  I get up slowly and make my way back to the house. Alan is standing sleepily in the
entrada
, having fetched a glass of water from the kitchen.

  'What were you doing out there?' he yawns.

  'Just cooling off.'

  He's at the top of the stairs when he calls back dreamily, not expecting an answer, 'Well as long as you're feeling OK.'

  Hardly. I'm hallucinating that I'm talking with an American toad and it's the best conversation I've had all year.

Ollie is scowling at me and scuffing one of his new black shoes against a wall. I don't bother to chastise him. Around us are children of all ages tearing about, screaming, laughing, babbling in various languages and playing with balls. Sun-kissed parents in shorts and T-shirts appear to be cheerfully exchanging news. I don't spy any designer labels and there are few nannies, for that matter. The noise is intense. A tall, smiling woman in a red jacket whom I recognise as the headmistress is standing surrounded by teenage girls, all of them vying to kiss her cheeks. I'm mesmerised, imagining that this must be some sort of new term ritual. Several gangly youths are slouching along towards a similar group some way off. Maybe two rival gangs? But no, now they're all laughing, calling out and falling on each other with bear hugs and hand shakes. A school where it's cool to hug?

  'So will anyone speak English?' hisses Ollie, hoisting up his oversized grey school shorts. His skinny legs are covered in bruises and scratches, the spoils of football and treacherous ant hunts. I make reassuring clucking noises. His wavy blond hair is tousled and kissing the tip of his nose so I vainly attempt to smooth it back with my hand. He flinches, mortified, his blue eyes flashing angrily at me. 'What on earth are you doing? Someone might see!' He peers round furtively.

  'Well, you look like a Komodo dragon. I should have got your hair cut.'

  'Komodo dragons don't have hair,' he sniffs disdainfully.

  My son may only be six but he has a great way of putting me in my box.

  A small boy about his age runs up to him.

  'Do you like football?'

  Does a Scotsman like whisky?

  Ollie nods.

  'Do you speak Mallorcan?'

  'Maybe,' he says. Enigmatic as ever.

  'I'm Sebastià. See you at break.'

  Ollie nods gravely and Sebastià trots off.

  A school bell sounds and there's bedlam. Everyone's running to take his or her place in line. They seem to know the procedure. We don't. Suddenly I feel a little hand in mine as Ollie looks up at me pleadingly.

  'Where do I go, Mummy? Where? Quick!'

  I turn round to make sense of what's happening but the headmistress is already bearing down on us, beaming like a jolly Butlins Red Coat, enveloping my son in a huge embrace. She grasps his free hand and gives me a reassuring wink.

  'Come with me, poppet. Mummy will be back later.'

  He throws me an inscrutable look and walks with her to the back of a line of small children. I stand transfixed. Will he be OK? Should I accompany him? As if reading my mind, he looks back at me and shakes his head, indicating with his eyes that I should go.

  I think back to his previous sanitised existence at St George's in Pimlico run by the ghastly Priscilla EggertonSmith. On one of the last days of the school term, I had deposited him as usual on the front steps where all the other little boy bugs were collecting in their stripy green shirts, grey woollen shorts and caps. The hideous Eggerton-Smith, with rotund white chignon sitting squat on her head like an albino toad, bent towards him frostily. 'Good Morning, Jamie! Remember polite boys shake hands in the morning.' She proffered a plump, ring-smothered hand, the nails blood-red.

  'My name isn't Jamie,' he said in quiet fury.

  'Hand please?'

  'No!'

  'No? Well then you'll stay on the steps until you remember your manners. Stand aside please.'

  Brushing us impatiently away with her hand as if we were a pair of tiresome gnats, she theatrically carried on shaking the hands of her cowed pupils. I remonstrated angrily with her but she fixed me with a cold stare and snapped, 'Manners are key at St George's. No exceptions to the rule.'

  The bell finally sounded, the last straggler had gone inside and still my small son stood resolutely on the doorstep, glowering at her, tears in his eyes and with utter defiance stamped on his little chin. I was frantic to get to a meeting.

  'Oh for heaven's sake, he's only five…' I began.

  'Very well, Jamie. No break today,' she barked angrily, ushering him roughly up the steps. I sprang after him and caught his arm tenderly.

  'It's all right, Mummy,' he whispered, 'I won.'

  But it wasn't all right. It was a travesty and had I been carrying a pair of scissors, I might just have disabled her albino toad of a hair bun and lain it to waste in the road, waiting to see it flattened by a speeding car. The parents at the school were no better: anorexic mothers in Armani dresses with full make-up and five-inch Jimmy Choo heels who swished up the steps, nannies in tow, wafting Coco Chanel and boredom. And their husbands? A rare sighting but occasionally a frazzled banker would roll up in a limo, instruct his driver to deposit a child on the steps as it were a bag of refuse, and then drive away.

  One anxious, toothpick-thin American mother called Cecily Withers constantly tried to ensnare me with invitations to infant parties and coffee gatherings. I politely declined but on the fifth attempt, I took her aside and explained that I worked. She winced and the edges of her mouth drooped. 'Oh my God, really? You poor thing.'

  'No actually, I like to work.'

  She stared at me in awkward silence for a second. 'That's just fine then. Well, I'd best be going. Have a great day.' She never spoke to me again.

  Then there was Joan Hedges whose child, Edward, spent every evening at some private crammer class or other, be it swimming, chess, piano, flute, Egyptology or Serbo-Croat. She insisted on taking my Mallorca address when I walked home from school for the very last time. Reluctantly I fished out an old bus ticket from my handbag and scrawled down our details on the back. After all, she'd never really get in touch, would she?

  I drive back to the mountains from Ollie's school in Palma and coax the car up the mouth of the track, wondering whether Pere our plumber has managed to fix a bad leak in the bathroom. Alan was disappointed not to be with Ollie on his first day at school but Pere could only visit early in the morning and since water was gushing everywhere, he had no choice but to stay at home and wait for him. As I level with the first house there's a sharp knock at my window and there on the other side of the glass, squinting at me, is the troll on the bridge. She's wearing a stern expression again and her gnarled fingers grip a stick, which is raised in the air. I slam on the brake and roll down the window in trepidation. She talks breathily in local dialect and when I look baffled, wanders off returning with a small bunch of hand picked flowers which she thrusts at me through the open window. 'Senyora Sampol,' she says, indicating herself. Then as an after thought, 'Marg
alida. Benvinguts
.'

  I tell her my name and thank her. To my relief she drops the local dialect so that we can at least converse in Castilian Spanish, the language that is spoken across much of the mainland. She tells me her eyesight is terrible, so bad that she can barely see her own hands. This, she says, is bad when you are an eighty-six-year-old widow. She is happy we have moved here and hopes we'll be good neighbours. As I rev up the car to go she peers foggily into my face.

  'How old are you, senyora? Maybe twenty-five?'

  Senyora Sampol's eyesight is definitely far worse than I'd thought.

Catalina is scrubbing the concrete floor in the kitchen to the accompaniment of the Gypsy Kings. The older sister of Stefan, our builder, she has been working here at the house for a month now, popping in for a few hours each day to help me set up my office and share the cleaning as well as babysitting Ollie. However, Catalina does far more than this. She is the eyes and ears of the valley, a local intelligence bugle arriving with a mountain of news and gossip each day to keep us au fait with neighbourhood affairs. Having spent some years in London and California as an au pair she speaks English fluently and is relied upon hugely by the local English speaking community in her village. Walking with Catalina through the town can be a lengthy business as she is stopped and greeted enthusiastically by locals and foreigners alike at every step.

  Perhaps her greatest claim to fame is that she is a superb cook, spending many a patient hour showing me how to prepare local dishes such as paella, delicious meatballs known as
albondigas
, and
croquetas
filled with meat and vegetables. Like a nurse with a drug addict, she has gradually weaned me off thoughts of Tesco on-line and prepackaged hummus from Marks & Spencer. As part of her therapy we have spent afternoons together hunting for hidden delicacies on our own land such as edible fungi, wild asparagus that grows in the hedgerows and
bleda
, Swiss chard. But there's a strange metamorphosis taking place because I'm actually having fun, getting covered in mud and grime, and loving it. A few months back whoever would have believed this is how I'd be getting my kicks?

  I dawdle in the kitchen over a cup of mint tea, the leaves freshly picked from the garden, and the local British newspaper, the
Majorca Daily Bulletin
. Ollie is safely ensconced in school. Never have I seen him so happy and carefree. For the first time that I can remember, he actually nagged me to get him to school early so that he could play with his new friends before line-up. Catalina rises and stretches her back before sloshing the dirty water from her pail out into the backyard. Then she begins washing a large pile of chard in the sink, its leaves and stalks covered in tiny white snails and mud. She plucks them off quickly, engulfs the greens in water to rid them of silt, giving me a wry grin when I pull a face.