For some reason, I’d got it into my head that one of the passports might not ‘work’ or something – I had visions of the Spanish police shaking their heads and taking our kids away. But in the end, the policeman barely glanced at them before waving us all through.
Finally, we trundled our suitcases out into the great unknown to face a wall of bearded men holding name tags.
‘God, how are we supposed to find Joe among this rabble?’ Ant asked, and it was exactly what I was thinking.
But then Lucy broke free from my grasp and ran straight under the barrier, pushed her way through the front row of men, and jumped into Joe’s outstretched arms. ‘I found him, Mum!’ she shouted proudly. ‘I found him!’
Four
Joe
The house was in a tiny hamlet called Fuente Nueva, and it was truly in the middle of nowhere – about two hours west of the coast and three north of Malaga airport. I had never realised just how big and empty Spain was until that first drive from Malaga through the rolling, sun-bleached landscape. Three hours barely moved us up the map.
Fuente Nueva consisted of twenty or thirty houses – actually, dwellings would be, I suppose, a better word, as they had all been dug out of the mountainside. The frontages overlooked a vast flat plain bordered in the distance by a mountain range, the Sierra Maria.
The landscape of the plain was bleak tundra interspersed with outcrops of rock, and to give you a better idea of how arid it was, if you’d filmed a drone attack on a couple of jeeps, everyone would have assumed it was Iraq. Only a patchwork of fluorescent green fields to the east, mainly comprised of heavily watered broccoli, gave the game away.
The house itself was extremely cool, in all senses of the word. It consisted of what looked, from the outside, like a tiny white stucco shed, but this was in fact merely the entrance to a series of caves cut deep into the hillside. These chambers were rounded and organic, with bumpy white-painted walls. They remained so cool that even at siesta time, when the outside temperature frequently hit forty, you still needed the thick quilts the owners had provided.
In front of the house, bordered by hewn rock face to the right and some unused outbuildings to the left, was an airless courtyard that shimmered in the heat, and in the middle was a blue-tiled pool with a so-called jacuzzi. I say so-called because, as the pump was out of order, it was really no more than a sit-down zone at one side of the pool – though that turned out, in the end, to be incredibly useful as a kiddy-pool.
There was quite literally nothing to do in Fuente Nueva. There were no shops, no cinemas; there was no beach. It was too hot to walk anywhere and there were no restaurants or bars to visit of an evening. Best or worst of all, depending on your perspective, we’d forgotten to ask about Internet, and not only was there no Wi-Fi, but our phones didn’t pick up a signal either. Though she acted like it had been a conscious choice, saying how great it was to ‘digitally detox’ for a while, I could tell that Amy was gutted at the oversight.
With the exception of a brief drive to nearby Orce for food once or twice, we’d done nothing whatsoever for ten days.
Personally, other than the fact there was no beach, I thought the place was pretty amazing. My job, my life, was physically exhausting, and sitting in a super-heated pool reading, or taking long siestas in the deep, silent darkness of our cave-bedroom, was as close to paradise as I could imagine. But Amy and Ben were getting restless, and I was beginning to admit that perhaps it had been a good idea to invite the others after all, if only to take the pressure off me. Ben, particularly, was longing for the arrival of fresh blood.
All the same, my sense of unease remained and during the three-hour drive to the airport I tried to reason with myself that my nervousness was groundless. After all, what could go wrong?
But I’d once managed to fall out with a girlfriend in Italy, I remembered. And OK, I’d only been eighteen, but on another occasion I’d had a huge bust-up with one of my best friends in Amsterdam. So shit can happen, even on holiday. And I couldn’t help but think that if something were to happen, that house, that constrained courtyard, our isolated village . . . well, it could all become a bit of a pressure cooker.
The fact that they’d decided not to rent their own car bugged me too. Of course, it meant that I had to drive back to Malaga to meet them, but that wasn’t really the problem. I like driving, and it gave me some time to myself. It was more the fact that they’d be depending on us for everything the entire time that worried me. So even though I knew that the suggestion to rent a single seven-seater Kodiaq for all of us had been Amy’s, I was unable to convince myself it had been one of her better ideas.
For the return trip from the airport, Ant sat up front, with Heather and the kids in the rear seats. As Ant fell asleep almost immediately, that was a bit of a shame, really. Heather was awake and seemed quite lively at first, and I would have enjoyed having someone to talk to for the drive home. But as it was all but impossible to hold a conversation with her in the rear, I quickly gave up and put on Spanish radio, and by the time we got home, they’d all been asleep for some time.
It was
