We went on our first family holiday abroad this past June: me; my new wife, Chelsea; and our two kids, Jack, 4, and Christopher, 2, staying with my sister in her rented house in the Alicante region of Spain. We were having a great time. It was hot, it was sunny, there was lots to see and do.
Beaches are nice. So are bright and sun-kist touristy areas teeming with hustle, bustle and hockery, but I was hungry to devour the ‘real’ Spain. A Spain with Spaniards in it: Spaniards who would find us as objectionable as they did incomprehensible.
The ‘real Spain’. I wasn’t even sure what I meant by that. Maybe I’m a pretentious sod; maybe I’ve let too many stereotypes seep into my consciousness; maybe the real Spain is whatever it looks like at any given moment and the idea that there is a ‘real’ Spain to find is the real illusion here. Maybe. Maybe that’s all true.
I just knew that I didn’t want us to have traveled across the ocean in an airborne death-cone just to join migratory hordes of English and Dutch people. I wanted us to see the things that happen in Spain when no-one is watching, or at least when no-one with blotchy red skin or a bum-bag was watching. Life under the rock. Life unfiltered and unfettered. That’s a tough call in Costa Blanca. Some towns and principalities within the region contain 60 to 80 per cent foreigners. More full English breakfasts per square mile than paellas.
“I could take you to the mountains,” said my sister. “I’ve never been there.”
“Then let’s go to the mountains,” we said.
I hasten to qualify that we would be visiting the area around the base of the mountains, not scaling the mountains themselves. I’m a man who often resents having to trudge upstairs for a piss half-way through an episode of Stranger Things, so I’m unlikely to be enthused by the prospect of scaling vast monoliths of rock in 34 degree heat.
Jack was up for it, though.
“We’ll climb that,” I said with an air of mischeviousness as we got closer.
“Yeah!” he shouted, seconds away from somersaulting out of the moving car.
“Jack, I’m only joking. We’re not really going up the mountain.”
“I want to.”
“Well, we’re not.”
“Can we though?”
“We can’t.”
He kept staring up at the inky giant, tracing its outline with his eyes as it silently towered over the little town below. “But I want to.”
“Maybe another time,” I said, every parent’s favourite fob-off. Yeah, as if. We’ll come back next week with some pick axes and a team of fucking Sherpas. Whatever. It seemed to placate him.
We arrived in some dusty little barrio and parked on a patch of gravel in a deserted street. There were pick-up trucks and sand-coloured, one-storey buildings, all baking in the oppressive heat. I wondered for a second if we’d driven through a time-and-space portal into 1950s Arizona or New Mexico. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to being inside my favourite computer game from when I was a kid, the Commodore Amiga classic ‘It Came From the Desert’ [it was a sci-fi open-world/shooty mystery game about giant, mutant ants over-running a dusty US frontier town, itself based on the black-and-white B-movie ‘Them’]. I half-expected to see a stubble-chinned, grinning exemplar of transatlantic Desperate Dan-ness standing in the street in a wide-brimmed hat, shaking his head and muttering about ‘those damn hippies’ and ‘killer ants, sheesh’.
I love the post-apocalyptic feel of a mid-summer siesta. Most of the streets we walked down were empty, save for the invisible tumble-weeds and sheets of newspaper I imagined blowing down them. The wind was imaginary, too. There wasn’t even a breeze. The heat hung in the air like a slab. It felt like we ruled the place, a bunch of wild west gunslingers moseying into town at high noon.
We found a play-park in a central square, overlooked by flats that lined its perimeter like fortress walls. Far above them sat the silent, hulking mountain. It’s rare to find an abandoned play-park during daylight hours back home. We quickly found out why this one was free for the taking. Almost every metal and plastic surface was hot enough to cook the glazed hind legs of a giant ant (delicious with parsley and garlic butter, so I’m told). Our kids’ screams kept us apprised of the developing situation.
The town’s eerie, holocaustic vibe didn’t keep us in thrall for long, despite its unusual cavalcade of street graffiti, which included a Pulp Fiction-era Samuel L Jackson and a giant, spray-painted cock-and-balls [presumably the work of Alicante’s very own Wanksy].
We returned to the car and sped off in search of further adventures, arriving in the historic town of Orihuela a short while later. Google told us it had a castle and an historic seminary. We crept around town looking for a parking space. Eventually, we found a side street that presumably contained a time portal back to the late 19th century, because the long street running perpendicular to it was all cobbles and steps and dusty facades and shutters and old swarthy moustachioed men sipping coffee from tiny cups at tiny tables perched outside their front steps. Only the line of cars up both sides of the street belied the date on the calendar.
It was still siesta time, so there was barely a soul in sight. We parked the car outside a dinky police station – more of a police bakery, size-wise – figuring that there were few safer places to leave a car. That proved to be something of a miscalculation. But we’ll get to that.
It was approaching thirty-five degrees and the humidity was high so each step was a trudge. The shade was our friend. We hid in the hulking shadows of tall buildings. Close to where we’d parked was a path that winded up the mountain to the Castillo de Orihuela, the ruins of a Moorish castle that lent spectacular views across the town itself. The castle was the reason we’d come to Orihuela, but we didn’t want it to be the reason we died of heat exhaustion half way up a mountain. We decided to sight-see around town for a while until it got a bit cooler, or at least until it wasn’t so hot that mosquitoes were considering us medium-rare. There was always the seminary in the meantime, the Colegio Diocesano Santo Domingo.
Orihuela is like the first four episodes of The Wire: this is what I look like, it says, this is how I talk, this is how I am, this is what I’m about, and if you don’t understand it, or you don’t like it, more fool you, you philistine. Don’t let the Colegio hit you on the way out. Orihuela makes few concessions to tourists. While we walked its streets the town was largely indifferent to us, and the part that wasn’t fucking hated us. I loved it.
We couldn’t find the Colegio Diocesano Santo Domingo, despite a long search. I was sure we’d passed it only moments before finding our parking space, but no-one believed me. After winding a circuitous route around the town we were parched and tender-toed. We eventually found a cafe with tables outside where we could stave off thirst and exhaustion a little while longer.
An old lady sat at the table next to us, and despite her not speaking English, and me speaking very little Spanish, I tried to ask her where the nearest barber-shop was. We struck up a conversation, and I can assure you that I’m using the word ‘conversation’ in its loosest possible sense. I thought it polite to tell her a little bit about us, our names, where we were from. It wasn’t the first time that holiday I’d tried to tell a bona fide, non-English-speaking Spaniard that I was Scottish, but it was the last.
To my incredulity, the word ‘Scotland’ didn’t register with her. At all. Her old eyes narrowed with irritation as I continued to labour the point. I refused to give up, and started to mime the bagpipes. Still nothing.
Up in Catalonia my country’s struggle for independence is synonymous with their’s (although thankfully Scotland’s route hasn’t been so fraught with police action and political violence), so the land of William Wallace and battered haggis suppers is very much alive in their thoughts and imaginations. But in the Alicante region? In Orihuela? Wow. Nunca has visto Braveheart, anciana?
Maybe I’m just not very good at charades, which I concede might be the case. This was my technique for miming the bagpipes: I held my left fist up to my mouth, adopted the ‘I’m a little teapot’ pose with my right arm and waggled it about at my waist, all the while puffing my cheeks out and making an intense blaring sound. It’s possible that the old lady interpreted this mime as either a chicken having a mental breakdown or some sort of sinister sexual request.
“It’s not your mimes,” said my sister. “They don’t know. They don’t care.”
‘What?’ I thought, with a not insignificant amount of disdain. ‘Not know SCOTLAND? But we’re the darlings and heroes of the world. There are probably kids running through the Brazilian rainforests and beach-combing on Vanuatu right now wearing ‘CU Jimmy’ hats. When people trace their ancestry, they’d give anything to find a wee Scottish laird in there somewhere. How DARE these old Spanish ladies not know what Scotland is!’
“They only know England,” continued my sister, who I feel it’s appropriate to point out was born in Essex.
Our thirst proved to be a great sat-nav. The cafe looked on to the Colegio. It was an interesting place, our visit to which was only mildly marred by my two lunatic children, who were determined to fight their way through this historic relic, even though there was nothing and no-one to fight. Well, except each other.
As we left the Colegio and walked to the top of the street, we realised that we’d been parked a side-street away from it all along. We’d set off in the wrong direction from the very first moment. Well, I say ‘we’. Visionary that I am, and as hinted a few paragraphs ago, I’d known this all along. I’d lobbied hard to steer the group left, but the women, who always thought they were right, urged me right. They were wrong. I knew I was right, I KNEW it, but I’d buckled under the weight of my wife’s heat-bolstered bolshiness and sunkist rage. I was too hot to argue, so I slinked and shuffled behind her muttering unkind remarks, like I was one of the kids and I’d just been told to go tidy my room.
I was right, though. I was right. They should’ve been ringing the bells. The mayor of Orihuela should’ve ordered the streets shut to traffic and thrown a carnival in my honour. Cruelly, I was denied my moment in the sun, couldn’t bask and dance a jig in the fierce light of the truth, because a troubling scenario had presented itself: the unexpected absence of cars in the street in which we’d parked.
All cars.
All gone.
My sister’s car, too.
Stolen.
As I stormed up and down the nearly deserted Spanish street I temporarily allied myself with Donald Trump by shouting, ‘I see you can’t even park your car outside of a fucking police station without it getting nicked in this shit-hole of a country!’ I was waving my hands around like an orchestra conductor wired directly to the electricity grid. A dark-skinned boy in basketball garb bounced past me with a confused smile on his face, obviously wondering why the big pink-and-red flabby guy was trying to summon a heart-attack.
I thought it must be street urchins. Shoeless motherfuckers from ye olde tenements at the top end of the street. An old man was sitting outside his glorified cubicle of a house, sipping tea at a small table with a chequered table-cloth draped over it. He raised himself up, balancing his body atop his bandy old legs and tip-toed through a curtain into his house. That earned him a place in the vast tapestry of my car-thieving conspiracy. What was he, the lookout? HOW MUCH WERE THOSE URCHINS PAYING HIM?!
This wasn’t the one we found, but it’s the same idea
I scoured the empty space where the car used to be. Did I expect the car to mysteriously reappear once I’d looked for it in the same place forty times? Miraculously, though, on approximately the forty-eighth time of looking, I found something. A flat, triangular sign stuck to the ground near the spot. I’m not very good at reading Spanish, but you don’t have to be Miguel de Cervantes to recognise a picture of a tow-truck. I showed it to my sister, and watched as her panic turned to relief then to anger, then to dread, then back to panic again. We crowded round the triangle like it was some mysterious artefact, trying to unlock its secrets with our eyes. The kids thought this was a fun game, ‘Hide That Car’ or something, and were rioting up and down the street, stopping now and then to ask unwelcome questions like, ‘Where did the car go, Aunty Ali?’ ‘Will we ever get the car back again, Aunty Ali?’ ‘Does this mean we can’t go to the castle, Aunty Ali?’
I could tell that Aunty Ali, who normally found the children unremittingly cute no matter what they did, was ready to fucking throttle them. I herded them up, and took them along the street with me to a little art gallery we’d passed where I hoped very much the gallery owner spoke English.
She didn’t. If it was hard to mime ‘Scottish’ think how much harder it was to mime ‘my sister’s car has been towed from the street and they’ve left a little triangle on the pavement and do you know how far away the impound place is?’ Very hard. In fact I gave up. I offered a meek, polite but defeated smile, and backed out of the gallery, taking my two Tasmanian devils with me.
It wasn’t until days later we realised that 10 seconds from where the car was towed was the house of Miguel Hernandez, a famous Spanish poet
My sister was on the phone to the people from the triangle, slumped against the wall of a side-street as if she’d been shot, frantically trying – and largely failing – to understand and be understood by the policia. The kids bundled into their mother’s legs, then resumed spinning around the street in circles of screams. I silently surveyed the street. It was clear to me what had happened.
We’d arrived during siesta, where the normal rules of street parking didn’t apply. Presumably, everyone had returned in the dying minutes of siesta to move their cars, leaving ours sticking out like a Scottish person on an Iberian beach. We’d learned that parking outside a police station isn’t really that smart when you’re flagrantly violating local bye-laws.
The woman from the gallery appeared at the foot of the alley-way waving a map. She’d thought I was a lost and curious tourist asking for directions to museums and the like, and had decided to follow me and conclude our non-conversation on a positive note. I took the triangle from my sister’s hand and held it aloft for the gallery lady to see. The centimo dropped. She agreed to speak to the policia over the phone. After the call she was able to indicate on the map where we should haul our sorry, heavily-fined asses. Thankfully, the police car impound was a mere twenty minute walk across town, and easy to reach.
Although we were all relieved that the car hadn’t been re-appropriated by a pack of thieving Spanish peasants from my quasi-racist imaginings, my sister remained understandably upset. I felt bad for her, and consoled her as best I could, but now that we were out of immediate peril I was free to enjoy the adventure as it unfolded.
We were walking through parts of the town that tourists would never think, or want, to tread: the grimy parts, the neglected parts, the soulless and empty parts. We walked over raised walkways, behind graffitied walls, past car lots and junk piles, heading towards a taste of ordinary – albeit remarkably stressful – Spanish life in an every-day municipal building. This was an adventure. I was in heaven. ‘This’ll be fun to write about,’ I thought to myself. And do you know what? Summer me was right. It has been fun to write about.
A police station isn’t a cheery place. If you’re in there, you’re either a perpetrator of a crime, or a victim of one. Bright paint-jobs and murals of suns and butterflies aren’t really the order of the day. This particular police station was as muted and anti-septic as you would expect from any police station anywhere in the developed world. Luckily our kids were there, to break the sombre silence with their happy wee faces and delighted shrieks. Within moments, the policeman on the desk was sharing cheeky faces with them from behind the glass. My sister was very upset as we filled out the paperwork to get the car back. I half-hoped her very genuine display of emotion would inspire a movie-esque change of heart in the policeman, and he’d tear it all up and chuck us the keys, but the police don’t really work like that.
A few minutes later we were all in the freshly liberated car. My sister’s hands were still shaking, but we had overcome adversity and come out on top. We were safe. We had a story to tell.
OK, we’d never managed to reach the castle ruins or see much else of the towns around the mountains. But I felt we’d seen Spain. Really seen it.
For better or worse, it had been ‘real’.
Here’s that graffiti I mentioned earlier.
