Two Old Fools in Spain Again (3 page)
“We...” I started, but couldn’t think of a response.
“That’s good, then. We will see you at the grand opening.
Hasta luego!
” and they were already turning away, pushing the pram in front of them.
I groaned and rested my forehead on the broom handle. I was going to have to pick my moment to tell Joe about that. And what grand opening?
Just then, Paco’s front door opened and Sofía skipped out, giggling, closely followed by a handsome young man. They didn’t see me and the young man carried on pinching her bottom as she flapped his hand away half-heartedly.
“Stop it, Alejandro! Somebody will see!”
So Paco’s house hadn’t been empty last night! His daughter had stayed and so had Alejandro, her new boyfriend, the millionaire’s son. Suddenly the nocturnal noises made sense. The pair were so wrapped up in each other they didn’t notice me in my porch. They locked their door and swung off up the street, arms around each other.
I looked across the valley and saw our car descending the twisting road into the village. Joe would be home in a few minutes. I wondered if he’d managed to purchase all the things on my list. Knowing Joe, he would have forgotten the most important items and come home with utterly random stuff instead.
3. Creatures Great and Small
J
oe lugged in the last of the shopping bags and dumped them on the kitchen floor. Spain is rather behind with recycling, but stores had just stopped issuing free plastic carrier-bags and our extra-strong re-usable Carrefour bags were lined up like a battalion of soldiers.
“Did you manage to get everything?” I asked.
“Yup. And before you ask, yes, I did get the cockroach killer.”
Joe can read my mind like a psychic. He was still catching his breath from bringing in the shopping and I decided that now was not a good time to tell him about Emilia and our future babysitting task.
Instead, I busied myself putting things away and finally found it: a flat, red, plastic gadget with holes in the sides. It came with little insecticide blocks to be inserted in the holes.
“Cockroaches, are you watching?” I said, waving the contraption around. “Tonight you will be
dead!
”
“You know the building the council were working on when we left for Bahrain?” asked Joe.
“Um, yes. By the square?”
“Well, it’s finished. They’ve finished painting it now. I drove past it and had a look.”
“That’s a surprise! Spain doesn’t have any money.”
“Not only is it finished, but there’s going to be a grand opening in a couple of weeks. I passed Geronimo and he told me about it.”
“Ah, that explains something the Boys said today.”
“You saw the Boys?”
“Oh, only briefly, when I was sweeping the front doorstep. The baby is theirs, adopted I assume. She’s gorgeous. What’s the building going to be used for?” I asked, deftly changing the subject.
“The downstairs part is going to be a bar, according to Geronimo.”
“Well, he’ll like that! I bet he’ll be their best customer.”
“And the rooms upstairs will be a surgery for when the doctor visits. And offices.”
“Gosh, no more going to Marcia’s house to see the doctor then?”
“Nope, El Hoyo is getting very modern.”
That night, we set the cockroach trap, baiting it according to the instructions. I slept easier, trusting that would be the end of our problem.
But cockroaches have been around since prehistoric times and they managed to survive much longer than any dinosaur. It would take more than a red, plastic gadget to end the cockroaches in our kitchen.
The following morning, I found two corpses on the floor. Well, it was a start. Shuddering, I swept them up, noticing that they were still alive, lying on their backs, their legs (and all 18 knees) still twitching.
“I’ll stand on them,” said Joe.
“No! You can’t do that! I read on the Internet that they may be carrying eggs and you’ll just spread their children all over the house.”
Each morning produced a few more corpses, but I knew they were just the tip of the iceberg. I imagined the armies of cockroaches lurking in the shadows of my kitchen, looking at their watches, just waiting for us to go to bed.
The next time Joe went down the mountain, cockroach killer was still on the shopping list. But this time he returned with three cans of spray.
Cans of cockroach spray
“Spray?” I asked. “Are we supposed to stay up all night in the dark and spray them as they appear?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Read the side of the can.”
So I read the
modo de empleo
carefully and, that night, followed the instructions to the letter. I sprayed at floor level, all around the edges of the room, paying particular attention to the gaps beside the cooker and fridge. The smell of it was diabolical, but it needed to be done.
Success! My labours bore fruit. Twenty black carcasses awaited me the next morning. Each morning produced more corpses, but the numbers were declining most satisfactorily. After a week, I’d used all three cans and disgusting black bodies no longer littered the kitchen floor. I disinfected all the kitchen cupboards (cockroaches can climb and fly) and heaved a huge sigh of relief.
However, I confess to having a sneaky admiration for the
cucaracha
. They’ve been around for millions of years and scientists maintain they are capable of surviving a nuclear blast. But that doesn’t mean I would welcome them into my kitchen. Believe me, if one so much as pokes its head out from behind the cooker, it’s history.
Perhaps we had a close shave because I was astonished to read the following cockroach story in the Olive Press, an excellent English language newspaper.
‘
A BRITISH man is lucky to be alive following an explosion that sent him flying through the wall of his Torrevieja flat.
Daran Cooper hit the pavement below his first-floor apartment after a can of insecticide exploded in his hand.
He had been preparing a meal to celebrate his 48th birthday while his partner Carmen was trying to kill a cockroach with some bug spray.
Cooper took hold of the can, which then exploded, catapulting him out into the street.
Speaking from Torrevieja Hospital, Daran said: “I started spraying at the cockroach and some of the gas must have got into the washing machine.
“A moment later, there was the click of the wash cycle, followed by an almighty bang as I flew through where the wall used to be.
“There was glass and all kinds of stuff in the air, but miraculously I stayed conscious all the time and all I could think of was that I had to protect my head.”
The explosion totally ripped out the wall of the flat, but Carmen escaped unharmed and the couple’s five-year-old son Sebastian remained safely tucked up in bed.
Daran suffered a broken wrist, bruising and head wounds, as well as an elbow injury that required surgery.
Investigators initially believed the blast had been caused by a gas leak. However, fire crew sources have suggested the bug spray may have reacted in some way with nearby domestic appliances to spark the explosion.’
“I bet the cockroach survived,” said Joe.
Poor Mr Cooper. Reading that article made us realise that we were lucky, things could have been a great deal worse.
Joe has a theory about the fire behind the dishwasher. He maintains it was caused by a cockroach crawling into the plug wiring, resulting in a short-circuit. We’ll never know for sure. I wish I could say that the cockroach invasion was the last insect plague we suffered, but of course it wasn’t.
Having conquered the mould and cockroaches, it was time to think about getting some more chickens to keep our poor lonesome hen, Regalo, company.
She wasn’t entirely on her own, as the two village cats, Sylvia and Gravy, had reappeared. They had been born in our chicken coop years before and we sometimes fed them. The two sisters moved back into our garden and looked surprisingly fit and well considering that they’d been forced to fend for themselves for a year without help from us.
Once again we fed them scraps but were careful not to give too much, or too regularly. Had we done so, word would quickly have spread to the village cat community and we’d have been mobbed by the furry felines. Spain has a serious feral cat problem and we didn’t want to add to it.
Sometimes I’d put out scraps, then stand back and watch. Sylvia, Gravy and Regalo the chicken would appear from nowhere and charge toward the treat. I hoped they’d share, but no, Regalo won the contest every time.
Sylvia backing away from Regalo
Chickens eat anything and she’d gobble the offerings while the cats crouched a little distance away, their eyes glued to the food, inching forward ever so slightly like lions stalking their prey. It wasn’t until Regalo had eaten her fill, wiped her beak on the ground and strutted away, that the cats approached and devoured the leftovers.
Now that I had tidied the garden somewhat, it was time to put Regalo back in the coop permanently and get her some new sisters to live with. We hated the chicken shop, but it was the only place we knew where we could buy hens.
It was located on an industrial estate and was not small. Behind the building that housed the shop was a huge metal warehouse that stored a variety of items for sale: farm machinery, animal produce, bales of straw, plants, to name but a few. Alongside the warehouse was a smaller windowless brick building that housed the chickens and other poultry. On the ground and piled against walls, were mounds of onions, waiting to be shovelled into sacks.
“We’d like to buy some hens, please,” said Joe to the assistant in the shop.
As usual, he led us outside and round the back of the shop. The smell of onions hung in the air.
We approached an outbuilding with no windows. He unlocked the big, wooden doors and pulled them open. From outside, you could barely hear the chickens, but now the noise hit our ears like an explosion. I don’t know how many chickens were housed in that building, but I would hazard a guess at two or three hundred.
The chickens were kept in battery-style conditions, with row upon row of wire cages, stacked one above the other, each cage containing between one and five hens. They had no room to stretch their wings, no daylight and no solid ground to walk on. The smell was terrible and the sound of hundreds of hens, squawking and giving off alarm calls, was deafening.
“You choose,” said Joe, as the assistant stood by.
How to choose? Today there were only brown ones and a few black ones and we had decided to buy six. I marched to an overcrowded cage and pointed.
“All these?” asked the assistant.
“No, just one.”
The assistant opened the cage door and reached inside, grabbing the legs of the chicken I’d indicated. She shrieked and flapped as he dragged her out and her companions shrank, terrified, against the cage sides. The assistant awaited further instructions, the chicken dangling from his hand, upside-down and calm now. I stopped at the next blatantly overcrowded cage.
“All these?” asked the assistant hopefully.
“No, just one.”
I wanted to make this operation as speedy as possible, but I also wanted to take one hen from the most crowded cages, leaving a little more space for the others. A futile attempt, as I knew the vacancies would soon be filled by more unfortunate chickens for sale.
The assistant with our new girls
Soon, four brown chickens and two black ones hung quietly from the assistant’s fists. He strode out of the building with Joe and me close on his heels. Unceremoniously, he thrust the chickens headfirst into two waiting cardboard boxes and jabbed his penknife into the walls to make air-holes. We were familiar with this procedure, having bought chickens several times before, but we never liked it.
On the journey home, the chickens were quiet, apart from one that coughed ominously. Regalo watched with interest as we entered the coop and opened the boxes.
Chickens occupying a coop will attack any newcomers and we had learned that the best time to introduce chickens to an existing group was at night, as hens can’t see in the dark. However, we felt that as Regalo was totally outnumbered, we were safe to introduce them in daylight.
At first, the new chickens stood stock still in a group, beaks slightly open, panting a little, eyes blinking. How bright the light must have been for them! They’d never been outside before. Cramped in tiny cages, with a sky of corrugated iron over their heads and only artificial light, what must they have thought of the big, blue Spanish sky, the sun and the breezes? How strange the soil must have felt under their feet.
