Last Days of the Bus Club (10 page)

T
HE PHONE
–
IT WAS
M
ICHAEL
. Michael being my good friend and travel companion Dr Michael Jacobs, art historian, author, stuttering raconteur and formidable cook, calling from his home in Frailes, a village not far to the north of us, near Jaén.

‘Ah, Chris … erm … I’ve got myself into a b-bit of a scrape. You see, Cuqui has asked me to be president of the jury at a
concurso gastronómico
in C-Conil. It’s tuna, the
almadraba
– the spring tuna harvest.’

‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘Tuna is by a long head my favourite fish, although …’

‘Mine, too. But I can’t possibly do it.’

‘You what?’

‘I can’t possibly do it,’ he said again, with an unusual air of finality.

‘Why ever not?’ I expostulated. ‘You must be bonkers. It’ll be the best tuna you’ve ever eaten.’

‘Yes, but … well … I’m trying to get this wretched b-book written and so saying no to absolutely everything, and as you know I don’t drive, and going all the way to Conil on public transport will take me the best part of a week there and back. It’s out of the question. I’m not doing it.’

I could tell what was coming next; sure enough it came:

‘Y-you don’t want to d-do it, do you?’

‘Come on, Michael. I couldn’t possibly be president of the jury at a
concurso gastronómico
…’

‘Of course you could; all you have to do is eat the tuna – admittedly rather a lot of tuna – and then say nice things about it. It’s easy as that. You could d-do it in your sleep.’

‘I really can’t, Michael. I’m trying to get a book finished too, and I’ve got the
acequia
to clean and the sheep to shear … I’m right up against it. I mean, it sounds very tempting but I really can’t. I’m sorry.’

And so we said no more about it. And then I thought about it a bit and, as it got nearer supper time and as I began to feel a little bit peckish, the idea of that tuna began to seem more and more tempting. Also I was looking for material for an article or two, and it seemed likely that on a jaunt of this nature something worthy of an article or two would be bound to happen. Neither should one forget the old adage that ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’

So I rang Michael and told him that I would do it.

‘That’s marvellous, Chris. I’ll ring Cuqui right away; she’ll be delighted.’

Next there was a silence while a thought occurred to him …

‘You know what?’ he continued. ‘I’ve been thinking and I th-thought that if you’re going to go along, then p-perhaps I might c-come along too, and you could pick me up?’

‘Well, that would be lovely, Michael,’ I lied (for I had rather wanted to be the president of a jury, the first and probably the last time in my life that I would be president of anything). ‘But surely we can’t both be the president … can we?’

Another silence, a short one. ‘You can be the p-president,’ he said, magnanimously.

‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly,’ I, with false modesty, replied.

There was yet another pause while Michael pondered how best to put something.

‘Actually, I wasn’t telling the whole truth about the p-president. Neither of us will be p-president; in fact, there isn’t a president.’

‘But surely there has to be a president; you can’t have a jury without a president.’

‘Er … these sort of juries d-don’t actually have presidents. They don’t work like that. They’re different.’

‘Then why,’ I rounded on him, ’did you say you were going to be president?’

‘S-sometimes one says things to make things seem a b-bit more interesting than they really are. This was one of those. There is no president.’

Michael was right about Conil being a long way away. I looked on the Internet and it seemed that by an
unimaginably
convoluted route it would be four hours and twenty-two minutes from Granada … and Granada is an hour and a half from home! Six hours driving west in the evening, squinting into the lowering sun, hunched over a wheel. I would barely be able to walk by the time we got there.

Still, the sky was a hazy blue and the northern slopes of the Sierra Nevada were white with thick snow that shone in the afternoon sunlight as I pulled into the bus station of Granada to pick up my friend.

‘Ay, Andalucía,’ he exclaimed. ‘What a paradise!’ And it was: out towards Santa Fe the River Genil was rushing full and clear amongst the great groves of whispering poplars that seem like armies laying siege to the city from the west. As we raced along towards Loja and Antequera the land began to roll with hills of asparagus and corn, still green and shot with scarlet seams of poppies.

‘Ooh,’ said Michael.

‘Aah,’ I concurred.

A little later, as we spun past the lorries lumbering up the Cuesta Blanca near Salinas, we each gasped anew at the great pinnacles of bare rock that burst from the fertile earth of the valleys of the Montes de Málaga.

‘D’you know what that one’s called?’ asked Michael,
indicating
an extravagantly shaped colossus of rock soaring to the south of the motorway. I didn’t, or I’d forgotten; one or the other. ‘It’s El Peñón de los Enamorados – Lovers’ Cliff – and of course there’s a cock-and-bull story that goes with it, the usual thing of a Moorish princess and a Christian prince whose love was impossible and so they threw themselves in the time-honoured fashion off the cliff and were dashed together on the rocks below. And, predictably enough, in the popular imagination the shape of the rock is that of the princess, lying down, or her h-head, at any rate.’

We pondered this singular phenomenon together. ‘Can’t you see it?’ said Michael.

I couldn’t. The rock resembled nothing so much as an amorphous lump of rock. But as we zoomed past, it did
indeed begin to change shape … and suddenly I saw it. ‘She has a hooked nose like a beak, and a receding forehead, like a Cro-Magnon hag on a bad day. It seems unlikely your Christian prince would fall for a girl who looked like that.’

‘Ah yes, but you’ve missed it. A minute ago, while you were overtaking those lorries, she was perfection itself – the ideal f-feminine physiognomy.’

For a while we wondered at the transience of beauty, but at our age it wasn’t a subject that we particularly wished to dwell upon.

‘Th-there’s a slight p-problem with the judging of the tuna competition,’ began Michael.

I began to smell a rat. I knew there would be a rat; there always is.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, you know there are two c-categories: the
innovative
and the tr-traditional.’

‘Yes, you said that. I want to judge the innovative
category
, and seeing as how I’m not going to be president, then I think I ought to be granted that little whim. I like raw tuna best and I think that it’ll be less likely to have had the living daylights boiled out of it in the innovatory line, no?’

‘Y-yes, b-but you can’t,’ said Michael, a little defensively, I thought.

‘Why ever not?’

‘B-because I shall be j-judging the innovators and you’ll b-be with the traditionals.’

This seemed manifestly unjust, but I waited for an explanation.

‘You see, C-Cuqui is submitting a dish in the traditional and I’ve known Cuqui for a long long time and so I will feel it inc-cumbent on me to make sure she wins … out
of f-friendship you understand. And so because everybody knows that I know Cuqui – and I’ve known Cuqui for thirty years – I’m not allowed to judge the category she’s in. It’s b-bad enough my even b-being here, but then it was Cuqui herself who g-got me the g-gig.’

‘Gig’ is not a word that Michael uses that much.

We had left the
autovía
now and were zooming along a long straight road between fields of garlic and cotton on the way to Campillos. Michael, as always on such
occasions
, was watching me with admiration and bewilderment as, nonchalantly and almost unconsciously, I controlled the headlong flight of the great steel beast in which we were so comfortably cocooned. Michael has never learned to drive. To impress him I casually switched on the windscreen wipers and sprayed the screen, ostensibly to clear the thick film of insects that had seen fit to immolate themselves against our hurtling juggernaut. It was easy, just an almost imperceptible flick of a finger. ‘I may not know much about art history,’ I enthused, ‘but after all these years I sure know how to drive a car.’

The further west we travelled the more the beautiful blue
Echium
took over from the poppies. We oohed and aahed all the more as we wound among whole hillsides of deep blue. Michael, out of academic interest, was plotting our course on his accursèd iPhone, which was unnecessary as a) I knew the way, b) I had a printed route description off the internet, and c) it was signposted.

‘We’ll be in Olvera before long,’ he said, fingering the wretched device.

‘I know; I’m looking at it, on that hill up ahead.’

In a similar vein, without actually looking at it, Michael announced our imminent arrival at Medina Sidonia.

‘I think it’s my favourite town in all of Spain,’ he
continued
. ‘It’s exquisitely beautiful, and there’s a bar that’s the most perfect bar and it does the perfect breakfast.’

‘Well, I’ve never been there, so perhaps we can have breakfast there on the way home on Wednesday morning.’ This, I figured, would be a useful gambit to get Michael on the move early so that we could each arrive home in time to put in a respectable showing on the respective books we were supposedly writing.

‘Yes, that would be good; we can get an early morning hit of pig fat.’

The mere mention of the pig fat made us both think how hungry we were. It was getting on for that time of day. The last rays of the sun were setting over the sea as we pulled into Conil. I staggered from the car, shook myself and delved in the back for my needments: the beloved Marrakech Medina leather man-bag containing on this occasion the single necessary item for spending the night in places other than my own dear bed – that is, an ageing blue toothbrush. I also had with me a rather disgusting Panama hat with a brown sweat stain oozing from the hatband at the front, and a cherished pale corduroy jacket, part of the only suit I have ever owned. I bought it over thirty-five years ago and, although it costs me dear to squeeze the lower half of my person into the trouser, the jacket still fits – so long as I hold my breath and stand up straight – like the proverbial glove.

Michael emerged from behind the car. To my surprise and delight, he was dressed almost identically: Panama hat,
beige jacket, black jeans and leather man-bag. He stopped and looked at me in consternation.

‘God,’ he said. ‘We look like a couple of old, gay
ice-cream
salesmen.’

I had to admit that he was right. I bristled a little, though, at the slight to my jacket. ‘This jacket, I’ll have you know, Michael, is proper class,’ and I held it open so that he could admire the prestigious if rather frayed label on the inside pocket. ‘It dates from the days when things were made well; I’ve had it for over thirty-five years …’

‘It certainly looks like it,’ he observed.

Following the directions suggested by Michael’s
telephone
, we entered the labyrinth of the town, looking for the hotel that the Tourist Board had booked us into. I had been to Conil once before, with Ana on the way to Cádiz, if I remember rightly. It was round about lunchtime and the Wife’s blood sugar levels were hitting the floor, so we stopped and installed ourselves at a restaurant on the front. We decided, for some reason which escapes me now, on a large plate of Ortigas de Mar, which the menu translated as ‘Sea Nettles’. They are actually sea anemones, or the
particular
type of sea anemone that has its being off the coast of Conil. There was a strong hint of mucus about them and a certain amount of sand, but they smelt of the sea and that was enough for me. Having guzzled a plateful of the
anemones
we continued our journey to Cádiz without giving Conil even half a chance.