I became. At the end of the season my friends made their way back to Scotland, back to university and the coming term. I didn’t need to, I had received my education.
The main lesson? That there are signals we give off, signals that tell the world how we would like to be accepted. That how we are accepted is in our control. That sometimes when we are freed from the expectations of others who know us from our past we can surprise ourselves with the energy and eagerness with which we reinvent ourselves, how we reinvent how we would like to be received. And some of the signals are easy to change – the way we dress, or wear our hair, the language we speak – all external signs, all easy. The ways we think and confront the world, these all come from inside, these are harder. The way you gesture for someone to get into the back of your van. An example? I’m trying to sell fucking donuts. I want to be approachable, warm, uncomplicated, purposeful; someone with integrity handling quality goods. What I don’t want to be is withdrawn, burdened, arrogant; someone with whom the transaction, however brief, is going to be unpleasant. I need to be a success, not a victim of the tray hooked on to my shoulders. The signals I give will dictate whether the market sees me as one or the other.
I sold another three items on that first day, and ate two myself in lieu of lunch. My total day’s commission was fourteen francs, just over a pound in real money. It was still more than Henri had expected, being used as he was to the negligible impact of new starts. They all had to go through this learning curve before they decided to give up or get very good. I wasn’t going to give up, although the hardest part of the day was trying to persuade the lads back at the campsite that my efforts had been worth such a derisory wage. How they laughed. Within the week though, things were different, I was carting round my own ice-box and selling my own range of drinks bought from the supermarket and suitably marked up to reward my investment, as well as my original tray of sugared delicacies. I could clear a hundred and fifty francs, more than ten times what I had made at the very start. Hard work, sure – not so much I let it look that way; the signals I gave were the opposite. So much so that my initially dubious companions soon joined me in the endeavour. And when they did we sold to a plan, my plan.
My plan involved the occasional lifting of the daily wage to even higher levels. This involved exploiting the weak point in Henri’s operation, and I’d known what that was from the very first briefing he’d ever given me, in fact I’d known it from the moment he’d gestured for me to climb into his wagon. Henri’s operation was illegal. You weren’t allowed to sell anything on the beach without the appropriate licence, let alone organize whole squads of hawkers to cover every grain of sand. The CRS – the municipal guard – were out there on the same ground determined to maintain public order. Henri had mentioned them in what he probably thought was a casual way right at the start. If you see them, he’d said, drop the tray and keep your money, run like fuck. According to him they would detain us if we were caught but he’d already given the game away. The CRS were never likely to imprison us, not for more than a couple of hours anyway. What they were likely to do was to confiscate our goods and sales proceeds, that’s what scared Henri. Hold on to the money he’d said, hold on to it so you can give it to me. Sensible advice? Perhaps not. Perhaps, occasionally, you just can’t run fast enough and they take all your merchandise and your revenue and your change. Perhaps no one else sees this and Henri just has to take your word for it. Perhaps it happens to everyone once in a while, perhaps it’s inevitable that way. In my plan, such an occurrence would take place to each one of us every three weeks. We just happened to have repeated bad luck that way. Henri cursed it as much as we did, muttering in his curious way as he drew his breath in, so that the words all came out as one, almost backwards in the anguished tongue of the possessed; mer-mer-merde!
We would look the other way whilst he came to terms with his grief. There never were any arrests, the CRS and gendarmerie didn’t seem that interested in us. Just as well – I was soon carrying goods which were more dangerous than apple donuts.
Great moments in my life. Sometime last year, sometime in the morning. Sometime when what I had to do was clear enough. I’ve closed the bar maybe ten minutes ago, at which point I felt as if I would fall asleep in mid-conversation with the two remaining customers who were busy telling me what a great place I had, what a great guy I was and how they envied me my lifestyle here on the island – the sunshine, the spot here at the marina, the holiday atmosphere. So sincere, so drunk, so very keen that I understood exactly what a great guy I was. Were they Danish, or Dutch? Doesn’t fucking matter, they all speak in the same, confident English with American a’s and r’s. MTV has a lot to answer for. They tap their feet to the latest bland anthem going out to Europe on all the screens like mine, talking to me as they groove along. My bar is a happening place thanks to the satellite pap my guests steal their accents from. ‘Martin … up … Marrt-in, could you turn the volume up?’ And so I do, and then shout above it to ask the usual stuff, had you heard of Puerto Puals, of the Arena Bar, will you be back?
These are not the questions at the front of my mind though, those are to do with the money. Do you know how much you have spent here, how much you owe me, how much I have taken in total tonight? No, neither do I but I’m dying for you to go so that I can see, so that I can clean this place up and get it ready for tomorrow morning when we open for breakfast and start this whole thing up again like we do all summer. Go on, fuck off. I pour a couple of whisky shots. The third glass, my glass, already has its liquor in it, flat ginger beer, not that these two will notice. An old trick, if you want someone to leave, ply them with cheap whisky. If they drink it as fast as they should, once they have seen me down mine in my impressive manly gulps, the dizziness and nausea will carry them out the door before I can shout time. Yes, goodnight, thank you gentlemen, that last one was on the house.
When they leave I count the takings. A so-so night, every table outside taken in one way or another. Some Germans who laughed loudly and bought a lot of beer. Some middle-aged British who sat quietly, probably intimidated by the whole ambience of the bar and the glam parade it’s part of, here by mistake at the club of the beautiful people. They drank even more beer and the best part of three bottles of Irish Cream, we nearly ran out of ice trying to stop the stuff from curdling in the heat. And some girls, Scandinavian girls. Young, early twenties, four of them, all blonde, all Identikit minis, cream lace crop-tops, blue eyes and brown limbs. I gave one of them the treatment for a while, I thought she was going for it but then they were gone, all off to a club to dance under the ultra-violet so that their white bits can at last sparkle. A realization from my early years in Spain: girls like this don’t sunbathe to get brown, they do it so that everything can be bright against them – their flashing eyes, their perfect teeth, the whiteness of their underwear, your dick.
I take twenty thousand pesetas for my immediate needs and put the rest of the cash inside the safe-bag for banking tomorrow. The chairs outside are already chained with the parasols tied down and locked, these being the last instructions given to my crack new staff before I sent them home. The glasses can be done in the morning, I just stack them by the dishwasher. My mind is slowing right down as tiredness takes over once more. How many hours’ sleep will I get before I’m back in here – three, four?
Not really sleep at all, more a fucking cigarette break; I try not to think about it. What time does the cleaner come, is she coming at all, do I have to do the fucking toilets? The last is not really a question, I know I do. The shit in my toilets, I mean, you would be amazed and appalled by the shit in my toilets, stuff you can never imagine. The men’s and the women’s. Both as bad. Shit on the floor, on the walls, everywhere but the lavatory pan. Dregs of cheap cocaine on the cistern, on the washbasin, on top of the paper dispenser, everywhere but up the nose of whoever was snorting the shit. Sometimes there might be syringes in the waste baskets, spent and used, like the tampons in beside them, and the condoms chucked in the corner of the floor. The shit in my toilets, God knows what will be in there tonight, but experience has taught me that whatever there is it is better faced now than in the morning when I come back. Seeing it now, it will irritate me, something else to be sorted before I can hit my bed; tomorrow, in the cold light of day, it would break my heart. All this energy, investment, hope, to be landlord to a cast of animals, is that what it was all about? No, I’ll deal with it now, my cleaner can do the easy stuff if and when she shows – the tables outside, the windows, the walkway. Easy yet still part of the show,