SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher Read Free Page B

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