A Long Walk in the High Hills Read online

  It was because ants had wriggled into my tea leaves and spoiled my morning cuppa that I set off earlier than normal to the village to buy a fresh supply. Walking back and in no particular hurry I stop near a ramshackle collection of huts, a smallholding, shielded from the road by canes lashed together to act as a kind of screen. I must have passed it dozens of times, not taking much notice except to register there were a few orange and lemon trees in a scrubby-looking field with hens, ducks and goats hobbled, bound from one ankle to the other, to prevent their escape. I have never seen anyone in the building but today I notice the place is well fortified. A tall metal gate is shuttered with a big padlock and through a chink in the canes I can make out, almost within touching distance, a female dog anchored to a kennel by a short, heavy chain. She hasn’t made a sound. The kennel I notice faces west and has little shade. The young mongrel, lying on a concrete slab, is dejected.

  I don’t know quite what to do or who to speak to. The dog is lying down, but as I look more closely I can see there is a bowl of water close by, she seems to be in quite good shape and is certainly not starving. I try to hope that this, then, is just a temporary measure and that whoever owns her will be here soon to let her off the chain so that she can run around.

  My shoulders are starting to burn and as I move to look for something in my bag which might protect them an old man on an elderly motor scooter suddenly appears. He’s wearing a flat cap, is about five foot high and doesn’t look happy to see me, although I try to be pleasant. ‘Buenos días,’ I venture with my best smile. He just lifts his head, a backwards nod, in acknowledgement. And that is it. He goes to park his bike round the corner and returns, with a limp, to unlock the gate.

  I wish I could speak Mallorquín so that I can ask about this dog but I am not sure where it will lead and the man is obviously in no mood to help me. So I turn away, trying to think of who to ask, who might know about him.

  Unable to shake the image of the dog from my mind, I decide to invite my nearest neighbours to dinner to quiz them. Emmy Lou lives in a finca on the hill higher up the valley which she found twenty-five years ago. An old man occupied the house then, one of the few Mallorquíns who stayed to try and keep the old place from falling into ruin but Emmy Lou and her family were prepared to give it a new lease of life so they settled in when the old man moved out. Emmy Lou, like so many hippies in this part of Mallorca, washed up on the shores of the Balearics back in the sixties on a wave of free love and flower power. Initial landfall for them was Ibiza but with growing broods and little money most seemed to find their way to Mallorca, settling a little inland in farmsteads with no running water and no power but promising the good life.

  When I was first introduced to her, Emmy Lou sent me poetry in praise of the beauty of the place. One, I remember, was called ‘An Ode to the Vale of Tranquillity’. It was a bit off the mark especially when Emmy Lou’s dog went AWOL. ‘John-O!’ she’d yell at the top of her voice, shattering my siesta. Emmy Lou has many good points, but trying to discuss, for example, the state of the road or the water supply is like trying to wrestle with bubblegum. Her ability to talk a subject out and decide nothing is exasperating. I was in the TV business where interviewing people meant sound-bite responses of three minutes max. An entire life story could be told in three minutes. It was more than I gave my dearest friends. Emmy Lou would take some getting used to and she, me.

  My other neighbours are of the same vintage as Emmy Lou, artists of one kind or another or musicians who in the early days helped one another repair their respective ruins. Like all close-knit support groups they also get a certain combustion out of the many simmering feuds that regularly bubble up. I soon discovered that becoming involved in their cirque du soleil is a bit risky for a newcomer like me – friendships stretching back many decades take some figuring. Emmy Lou, for example, has a strained relationship with Lauren, a fellow American, who lives nearby. They are pretty much the same age and ditched the fathers of their respective children at about the same time, leaving them both to battle on in straitened circumstances. You would have thought that they would be sympathetic to one another, but no. Perhaps it’s because they share the same stretch of pot-holed road, maybe it’s because they have seen too much of one another and their comings and goings over too many years.

  Lauren is slightly built and blonde, in her mid-forties, with a talent for reiki and other holistic treatments that she ministers to grateful customers who suffer especially from bad backs. She travels in a beat-up jeep all over the island and knows people as only those who ease pain can. Lauren lives on her own in an old house in need of repair and yet with drive and determination continues to colour her life with adventure. To raise cash for her travels Lauren rents out her finca for months at a time, as does Emmy Lou. Emmy Lou has a casita, a small one-roomed house that she lets usually to young men looking for work in the building trade. Up until now we three have kept a friendly distance, but as usual in a small place where there’s information to trade, such an amicable arrangement doesn’t last long. When I phone to arrange a time to meet, both Lauren and Emmy Lou are willing. They want to discuss the state of the road; I’m keener to know about the dog.

  There’s the most heavenly scent cascading off the honeysuckle mounded at the side of the house when Lauren arrives first, looking pained. Emmy Lou turns up soon after with Carter, her blond son with his firm jaw, probably in his twenties, in tow. Lauren will have watched Carter as a child growing up in the valley, but you wouldn’t know it judging by her manner. It’s hard to pin down, just dismissive I suppose and Carter, in turn, is lukewarm towards her. I make to pour some very large glasses of best Binissalem red, leaving the three of them to circle the encampment.

  When I return the conversation’s getting heated as they warm to the grievances both share over the road. The discussion starts okay, each agreeing that soon it will be almost impossible for vehicles to get up or down as summer storms have washed away what little surface it has. Just when I begin to think we’re in for a convivial night, out of nowhere, Emmy Lou launches a sidewinder at Lauren, accusing her renters of wrecking the road by driving along it at great speeds. Lauren flings something back to the effect that Emmy Lou shouldn’t even be using the road. I forget the exact reasons why. ‘What are we going to do about fixing it?’ My voice strains to drown the vibes.

  Lauren calms down a bit and then says, ‘Tarmac is the only solution, end-to-end tarmac’

  But Emmy Lou, blazing, is having none of it. ‘The last thing I want is a super-highway Why can’t we repair it by digging out channels and back-filling with stone?’

  ‘Oh, yes. And are you going to get out the shovel, Emmy Lou?’ Lauren prods, as sweet as apple pie.

  ‘How much can each of us pay to repair the road?’ I try another tack knowing that it is all pretty futile by now. It is plain neither of them is prepared to spend a cent on the road as long as the other is using it. Lauren says she has no money and will have to take out a loan but she will only do so, anyway, if the road gets tarmacked. Emmy Lou has no cash either and if she had she wouldn’t waste it on something toxic like tar.

  A nighthawk shrieks as it hunts in the field outside but as no one is showing any sign of going home, I decide to change the subject. ‘Where can I find the best spring water in the district?’ I brightly lob into the gloom.

  Now this is something Emmy Lou obviously feels qualified to pronounce upon having been here for years. She has no hesitation in declaring that the Font des Bosc, a spring about two miles away, is the finest but Lauren has different ideas and is not about to let an opportunity to outsmart Emmy Lou slip by. She makes an announcement that she has had Font des Bosc water analysed only recently and the report has come back: ‘Thirty per cent sheep shit, forty per cent rat shit and thirty per cent unspecified shit.’

  This juicy bit of information hangs over the four of us for all of a second. Then Carter, having kept schtum until now, says, ‘But Lauren, I have been drinking that w
ater all my life.’

  Lauren doesn’t miss a beat. ‘And why does that not surprise me, Carter?’

  Carter, not getting the joke and out-classed, shuts up but his mother is not for letting this joust end yet. She and Lauren chew on until I bring up the subject of the dog. Did they know it was tied to a short chain so it can hardly move? Emmy Lou says, unfortunately, that’s the way it is here, but dogs are better treated now than they were when she first arrived. I then get a lecture on the way things used to be. Large sheepdogs were dragged behind horse-drawn carts, attempting and sometimes failing to keep up at the end of a rope.

  Carter jumps in. ‘You can’t come here and tell local people how to live their lives,’ he snarls at me. ‘The dog has always been chained. It is fed and watered and that’s the way it is.’

  I try one last shot. ‘But can’t you speak to the man who owns her?’

  ‘Can’t you offer to take the dog for a walk? You must pass it several times a day’

  As if. I now desperately want the night to end but just as I begin to think they might finally say their goodbyes, one of Emmy Lou’s cats with all its kittens arrives.

  Apparently Emmy Lou has started bringing left-over food from the village restaurant where she’s head cook up to her house in the valley. There she dispenses her largesse to her cat, Tiddles. But news of free food has spread all over the district and now Emmy Lou is inundated with starving cats desperate for grub. What’s worse, hungry mother cats bring their little ones too, so that now there is an army of vociferous kittens in the valley. I had wondered why, eating out under the stars, I was accosted by lots of appealing faces, never realising that the kittens were feral. I gave them what I could, thinking they were just a breed of opportunistic cats who really had proper homes with owners who loved and cared for them. Who wouldn’t?

  By the light of a lantern, these kittens would jump up the stone steps, scramble over the flagstones to my front door, their little tails trembling to stop themselves tumbling. Often mothers would push the kittens forward to let them eat first, not taking a thing for themselves. Coming so soon after the dog on his chain this was the last thing I wanted to know, another harsh lesson, the abandoned cats of Mallorca.

  The sight of kittens is too much for Lauren. Her own pet cat has been badly mauled, she says, ‘And all thanks to you, Emmy Lou. You are personally responsible for all the cat fights because you feed all these strays.’

  Having delivered her parting shot, Lauren heads home, the cat and her kittens choosing to trot off after Emmy Lou into the night as I make a mental note to always carry cat food with me and never to invite these two adversaries to the same gig again.

  Next morning I am in the mood to tackle the towering bougainvillea, which has thrown itself exuberantly over the road. It is in full purple but has taken to catching and tearing with its thorns anyone who walks by. Grabbing my secateurs and gloves off the kitchen table I launch into the shrub, the problem of what to do about the dog on the chain bugging me. I guess I must have been occupied for about an hour when ‘Buenos días, Señora,’ floats over and there through the bougainvillea is an elderly couple wearing sun bonnets, complimenting me on how bonita – how beautiful – my garden is. They are telling me they’re on their way to visit their old home further up the road. It is so very hot and, although they are both well protected with their straw hats, I ask them if they’d like a glass of water. They say they would, and they come and sit with me under the shade of the vine for a while.

  I learn that they regularly walk up the hill from the village to the ruin behind my house, which, many years ago, was once their home. The roof fell in only recently, they say, now it’s a pile of rubble but it still holds enough memories for them to sit amidst it, thinking of the past and enjoying the fact that they still own the old place and the land all around. In spring they collect armfuls of blue iris in what used to be their garden or gather tender tips of wild asparagus from the roadside. There is always something for them to do. The old man must be in his eighties and has a sweet face, the skin around his deep-set brown eyes crinkled with the sun. Funnily enough, his wife looks almost identical, they could be brother and sister: the same height, the same colouring and the same way of speaking.

  After a time I ask them about the man who owns the dog and am told that he has met with tragedy in his life. His oldest son, Nico, was almost killed in a motorcycle accident when he was on his way home one night after finishing work at a restaurant. The accident left him paralysed on one side so he can now no longer use his arm and leg and it is feared he has brain damage. Nico was hospitalised in Son Dureta on the outskirts of Palma for months. The old man pauses and shakes his head. While this boy was close to death his mother died of cancer. The family has been shattered. The dog, called Kendi, belongs to Nico but now no one walks her and she is tied up. There is nothing anyone can do, the old man shrugs, this is the way of people here, they have dogs to protect their property and most of them are on short chains. He tries to reassure me, saying that the dog will be let off her chain during the day and be given exercise, but I am not convinced.

  His wife finishes her glass of water and prompts her husband to leave so that they can get back to the village before noon and I try to put Kendi to the back of my mind without success, the beauty of the day darkened by the plight of a dog.

  two

  T he BBC is under pressure to find me work. A press JL conference, heralding the new autumn schedule, is hijacked by the tabloids demanding to know where I am, what I’m doing and whether I’m still being paid. And while we’re at it, how much exactly am I getting? My gardening leave from Breakfast that summer is clearly not going to wiggle away unnoticed. So in the meantime, asks the director-general, will I agree to front a new weekly fashion programme, The Clothes Show, while the BBC considers my long-term future and short term gets the press off its back? I’m not mightily impressed at being parachuted into a show whose producer has already picked his presenter, in this case, the fashion designer Jeff Banks, but the DG is insistent. So I dump my sandals and shorts and fly off to Birmingham to meet Jeff and the team.

  The BBC announces my new role and I lob in my own bit of information: I have also been hired to co-anchor CBS’s new coast-to-coast current affairs show, West 57th, a younger version of the iconic 60 Minutes programme from the same network, which will mean me commuting back and forth to the States. As both shows are due to start later in the year I have a month or two to figure out how I can manage the workload and also take care of business in Mallorca.

  It hasn’t taken long for me to discover that candles aren’t romantic after all. Reading in bed is downright dangerous under a flimsy mosquito net. The roof tiles absorb the sun’s daytime intensity and turn my bedroom into an oven at night. With rats dancing on the tiles and mosquitoes buzzing inside the net what I need, urgently, is a new roof, electricity and, oh yes, mosquito blinds at all the windows. More vital than anything, I have to fix the water supply. All this in the few short months before work begins on two continents.

  Waking to a crystal-clear morning in the middle of September is delicious. I feel I can tackle anything. Like cleaning out the cupboard under the sink where I know a cockroach lurks and turning the mattresses before going in search of the water I ordered by tanker, a week back. I decide to wrestle with the beds first and am upstairs struggling with a heavy mattress when suddenly a fiery little scorpion jumps out and races across the floor, its tail waggling up and down, very, very angry at being disturbed. Its mate leaps out to join it, quickly followed by their babies. And all from under my pillow. To think I am sleeping with this lot.

  The whole caboodle disappear down a crack in the floor -every last man of them – and I steel myself to resolutely refuse to think of the damage they are capable of inflicting. I suppose I am becoming a bit inured to creepy-crawlies although a scorpion in the bed takes a bit of beating. I give the mattress turning a miss and head to the village for a coffee because I need a slug of so
mething strong to set me off on the trail of the elusive water cart.

  The flock of long-legged sheep that graze the rough ground around the village are walking up the track towards me with their shepherd, Jesus. Jesus is in his early sixties and has a thatch of greying hair. He’s taking his sheep to the land he owns on the hillside, fenced off with bits of old wire and tin, where they lodge during the day, sheltering from the sun under holm oaks while he goes to his own home to sleep. Jesus’s gangly Mallorquîn sheepdog trudges alongside him on a lead of old rope, his black coat covered in fine dust. Both are exhausted after a night spent watching the flock. As I pass them on the road, Jesus tips his head and gives a fleeting smile.

  Sancho’s son Paco bounces into the bar as I arrive. He is a tall boy with an open face, an engaging manner and feet that float outwards as he walks. His mother, Pepita, obviously loves him to bits. Paco works part-time for an American couple who own a boat and has started augmenting his native Spanish with what he believes are über-cool expressions. ‘How are you, Paco?’ I ask. And out pops, ‘Feeling no pain, Sal.’

  Half an hour later, the bloke behind the front desk of the water office in nearby Andratx is putting me through agony. He is insisting I cannot have any water as the road to my house is so bad. Water tankers criss-cross the island daily, filled with spring water – agua potable – delivering up to forty tons wherever needed. I want a ten-ton load and there is only one firm in the district with a tanker small enough to negotiate my track. This is it, in the market town of Andratx, three miles away.

  I try not to panic as this fellow who holds my future in his hands goes on to say that one of his tanker drivers is in hospital with serious injuries after tipping and falling down an incline on a road not nearly as rough as mine. I suppose I can’t blame him, as the track is like a river bed with great boulders and lumps erupting along its length. I don’t think there is a single smooth spot, and a tanker, with its huge weight, is going to really rock and roll. Just as I am about to sit down and weep, he tells me to telephone Santiago.