Parrot in the Pepper Tree (8 page)

This episode began one July evening on the road outside Orgiva. I was standing by the car, talking to a cousin of Manolo’s, when suddenly there was a yelling and shouting and a woman came stumbling round the corner in a state of hysteria.

‘Please help,’ she babbled in Spanish. ‘He’s going to kill her —he’s gone really crazy — go now, please..!’

‘Walt,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you want me to do and where and what’s happening…’

‘Just go, now, please, over there!’ she implored.

So I got in the car and headed off in the direction the woman had indicated, wondering what on earth I was letting myself in for, but knowing I had to go anyway. After about a kilometre I came across two people standing by the side of the road. One was Petra, a slight Danish woman with long, light brown hair, which she had swept in front of her face in a vain attempt to hide behind it. The other was her lover Juan, a man I knew a little as a result of having sheared his sheep a few times. Though barely taller than Petra, Juan seemed somehow to be towering over her with a look of clenched menace.

Petra acknowledged my arrival with a terrified glance. ‘Please don’t leave me alone with him, Chris, he’s going to kill me?

‘Cristóbal, what are you doing here?’ demanded Juan with a look of fury.

I got out of the car and Petra explained as well as she could what was going on. ‘I’m leaving him, Chris. I can’t stand his moods and his wildness any more. And he can’t accept that I’m leaving like this so he keeps grabbing me and shaking me and trying to make me say I’ll stay. And now he says he’s going to kill me — we’ve called the police but just please don’t leave me alone with him. Stay till the police get here?

Petra was crying now and rubbing her bruised arms. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay until you tell me I can go.’

All this we said in English. It didn’t seem necessary somehow to translate it for the benefit of Juan.

‘What are you saying? Speak Spanish,’ he shouted.

‘Petra is telling me what’s going on and I’m staying here until she says I can go,’ I said to Juan.

‘You can go now. I don’t want you here?

‘No. Here I stay till Petra says I can go,’ I repeated.

Juan bristled — a stocky man, with teeth mostly knocked out, nose well broken and a stubbly moustache. He muscled up to me. I held my ground.

‘Cristóbal, a man does not get in the way of another man and his woman,’ he snarled.

‘He does, Juan, when there is violence, so here I stay.’

Little by little, as our group moved back and forth between the house, from which Petra was getting her belongings, and the van where she was stowing them, Juan began to get aggressive with me. He didn’t hit me, but there was a lot of the pushing and shoving with chest puffed out that men do as a prelude to slamming their fists into each others’ faces. ‘We used to be friends, Cristóbal,’ Juan growled. ‘But now you have a serious enemy.

Anyway, I did my stuff and stuck to Petra like glue, and after about half an hour a Guardia Civil patrol car appeared and two policemen got out. One was a pleasant-faced young man who was obviously a trainee, the other a little runt of a man with a thick grey moustache and a strut like a bantam-cock.

‘Show me your papers, passport…’ he snapped at Petra. ‘And you,’ he turned to me. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m staying to make sure that my friend doesn’t get hurt.’

‘Well, you can clear off now,’ he said, with a look of distaste.

‘I’m staying until this woman says I can go,’ I told him with what I hoped was an answering sneer. It was immediately obvious this noble little custodian of the law thought that if Juan wanted to beat up his girlfriend then that was his own affair and none of us should be interfering.

The bantam disappeared into the house with Petra to check her papers, and Juan and I were left outside in the dark with the young apprentice. Juan was still being aggressive towards me. ‘You’re not going to arrive home alive tonight, Cristóbal,’ he said. ‘Juan,’ I warned him. ‘It’s all very well to threaten a man, but to do it in front of the Señor Guardia here is surely foolishness, no?’ I was a little emboldened by the young policeman’s cosh and his gun and his silly green hat.

In the end the Guardia escorted Petra to the police station, and as she left she assured me that she had friends who would collect her and that she would be alright. ‘Thanks, Chris,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine now.’

I drove home. Ana and I sat outside eating a late supper, as you do on hot summer nights, while Chloë dozed on the sofa. Halfway through the meal, the phone rang. Ana answered it. ‘I want to speak to Cristóbal’ said an angry voice. Ana passed me the telephone.
‘Diga
— speak,’ I said, only to hear the phone slammed down. ‘That’ll be Juan,’ I confided. ‘Checking to see if I’m at home so he can come round and kill me.’

The call somehow put a damper on the rest of the meal. We lapsed into silence and you could hear the clinking of the cutlery and the burbling of wine being poured into glasses. At midnight, Ana rose from the table. ‘I’m sure it’ll be alright, Chris, but give me a shout if you hear anything worrying,’ she said, as lightly as she could manage, then gave me a surprisingly tender goodnight kiss and took herself and Chloë off to bed. I repaired to the roof, where I often slept on hot summer nights, and placed a mattock beneath my bed.

Now, a mattock is a pretty uncompromising tool. A good blow to the head would be likely to end in serious injury or death. Still, I reckoned if Juan were going to make the effort to come all the way out here in the middle of the night, he was not just coming to bring me a bunch of flowers. He was going to fix me good. He had seemed just as much riled by my role in the evening’s episode as over the loss of Petra. Pride was at stake.

One of the odd things about this event was that I felt a kind of guilt, as if I had offended some base animal instinct and that Juan was right to seek to duff me up or worse. I wondered how I would have felt had the situation been reversed. Surely I would have been glad to have someone there stopping me throwing punches — I mean, once I’d calmed down? Wouldn’t I? I’d have given a lot to know at that moment whether Juan was of the same mind.

The roof I had chosen as summer bedroom has a sweeping view of all sides and is set a little higher than the rest of the house. Juan would not be able to see me in my bed unless he had decided to creep up from behind, but that would mean a very long, very deliberate tramp over the mountains. The moon was not far off the full so I would see my enemy long before he saw me — assuming, that is, that I didn’t fall asleep.

What should you wear in bed when you’re waiting for someone to come and kill you? It was a hot night and what I usually wear on a hot night is nothing. But it wouldn’t do to have to pull on clothes as a prelude to defending myself, while a naked man wielding a mattock is a far from formidable looking opponent. I decided on a tee-shirt and underpants as my battle costume, with a pair of sandals ready to slip on, under the bed by my weapon.

I lay down on my back and looked up at the bright sky. It was too light to sleep like that, so I rolled over and peered over the pillow at the moonlit rivers and valleys. I tried to breathe quietly so I could hear any furtive footfalls above the quiet swish of the river. Then I got fed up lying that way and rolled over again giving the mattock a quick fingering just to make sure.

It was a bad business, this. It seemed such unwarranted bad luck to find myself preparing to fight for my life in my underpants with a mattock on a rooftop in the moonlight. Life, which had hitherto seemed pretty good, suddenly seemed even sweeter. I fingered my mattock again and rolled over. There was a car creeping into the valley. I could see the lights in the dark rocks above La Herradura. This was it. It was late; who else would be coming in at this time of night? I had a good fifteen minutes till he got here, assuming that he left his car on the other side of the river — and he would do that because he would hardly drive all the way up to the farm and thus lose what he believed was the advantage of surprise.

I slipped into my trousers, buckled my sandals and grabbed the mattock, then I sat on the bed for a bit. All was silence now; the car had disappeared into the valley. I weighed up the mattock. Now, how do you hit a man with a mattock? Do you crack him over the head with the back of it? Or do you go for no holds barred, finish him off in one, cleave the bastard down through the middle with the blade?

I wasn’t sure, but probably the technique would become clear as the combat heated up. I crept up the hill to look over to the river bridge. I just caught the lights heading off up the track to Carrasco. Not Juan at all, some midnight visitor for our neighbours across the river.

Back to bed. I thought about Petra and Juan. I had thought their affair was romantic — but maybe not. Petra was a generous soul, sexy and optimistic and always game for something interesting. She had come out to Orgiva after growing tired of an office job in Copenhagen, and fallen in with a Spanish-Moroccan bloke from Ceuta. Together they travelled back and forth to Morocco, trawling for artefacts which they would sell at a stall in the market. Then Paco, the partner, decided he was going to India to do some work on his karma, while Petra took up with an installation artist and part-time welder, whom she had met in Alicante. All seemed to go well for a while and she would return in high spirits with her new lover to stay with friends in the mountain villages. And then one day, I was out wandering in the hills of the Contraviesa when I found myself in the middle of a big flock of sheep. Standing at the back, tending them with a stick and a couple of scruffy-looking dogs, was Petra — the very same Petra who had once worked as a stationery buyer for a mobile phone company.

The sheep, she said, belonged to Juan. I knew Juan a little and had found him a quiet, reserved sort of a man. I liked him. Petra went on to tell me how she had cast her lot with him and moved into his ramshackle
cortijo
to share the shepherd’s life. Sometimes I would come across her in town in her van, loading up with sacks of feed and shepherd’s necessities. And then she told me how the two of them had left the flock in the charge of a cousin or two, and headed off round Spain in the van for a holiday — a thing Juan never would have dreamed of doing before.

So, all in all, it seemed that Petra enriched Juan’s life, and Juan and his pastoral existence was really something of a revelation to Petra. ‘Oh, it’s wonderful, Chris,’ she would tell me eagerly. ‘It’s opened out a whole new world for me. I can’t tell you the pleasure I get from living up on the mountain with the sheep, getting to know this new way of life.’ Her eyes would glisten with excitement as she said this, so I knew it was so.

And now here I was, alone in the moonlight with my mattock, waiting for Juan, who was on his way to kill me. I couldn’t help but feel disillusioned about it all. I rolled over and listened to the sounds of the night. An insect hummed, another whined and stopped near my ear. A scops owl started its monotonous booping from the river — boop…boop…boop — a noise to drive you to distraction. Ana’s Aunt Ruth from Brighton came to stay with us one weekend. ‘Are you sure there’s not a factory of some sort around here?’ she had asked, peering fearfully into the unrelieved blackness of the mountain night. ‘Not as far as we know,’ said Ana acidly. ‘But that noise,’ said Ruth, ‘it sounds so like people clocking off.’

I listened to the scops owl and thought a bit about Aunt Ruth’s visit. She had enthused about the farm: ‘How wonderful to live so wild and free in the mountains, drinking water from the spring, so far from the hurly-burly, the hustle and bustle, well out of the rat-race, and not stuck in the concrete jungle in an endless traffic jam.’ She hooked one cliché after another. Later we discovered she had so feared the water from the spring that she had cleaned her teeth in lemonade.

I fell asleep for a while, but all of a sudden I was aware of the dogs barking furiously — the intruder-bark. Back into the trousers, grab the mattock, feel around for my glasses by the bed-leg. The dogs were going crazy; somebody was lurking around the house. This was it. ‘Right, you bastard! Come and get it!’ I said out loud to myself, taking courage from the ring of these words and their sense of impending violence. I peered down from the roof. Nothing, not a sound. Still the dogs were at it, infuriated by some presence.

And then I heard it. It was the call of a fox in the valley, that little howl of feral yearning, the distillation of all the wildness, savagery and horror of the night, a call that thrills your very blood — and drives the dogs bonkers. It’s the call of the wild and it makes the dogs feel guilty of a moral dereliction as they slumber on the rug by the fire. It reminds them of the way they should be — not consorting with cats, slurping dog-food and biscuits for breakfast, and walking to heel on the end of a lead. ‘Come to me,’ the fox calls, ‘this is how life should be lived, racing through the woods on starlit nights, massacring runs of obese hens, delighting in their cries of terror. Come on, you unfit, molly-coddled slobs, come and get it.’ Of course it drives the dogs to distraction.

I returned to my bed, almost regretful at the lack of action. And sleep did not come easily. The night was just too exciting and, besides, if Juan did succeed in sticking me with his knife, then this might be the last night I would ever see. It seemed a pity to waste it in sleep.