PEPAC novel: excerpt: "The Courses"

“I thought it might be another course.” Volunteers Richard, as the Bentley glides on to Park Lane and heads left towards Hyde Park Corner.  “As usual.” 

“As usual”: how would you say that in Spanish? He wonders.  No idea.  As usual.  The only Mexican Spanish Richard can remember right now is a single phrase, and that, he will admit, is of questionable utility: “Chinga las Sandías!” which translates as “Fuck the Watermelons.” 

Chinga las Sandías!  He only remembers that through an unforgettable combination of repetition and heat on the meat of his brain, with an overseer employed by his father repeating the phrase approximately a hundred times a day under the beasting sun of Chihuahua, Northern Mexico just five months ago. 

That was on the most recent of the “courses” that Raul had insisted he take over the years; months-long sojourns abroad under the instruction of various (so-called) experts in a baffling array of fields, all announced at a moment’s notice by the unexpected arrival of Francesco, no explanations offered, and little discernible benefit gained. 

On Richard’s Chihuahua trip, Chinga las Sandías! was pretty much all that El Jefe, the fat, sweating peasant who supervised him with a squint and a grudge, would say. 

Richard would ask about the watermelons.  And why shouldn’t he?  It was a pertinent enquiry: all he would do all day (with not inconsiderable personal effort) was load watermelons neatly into battered, open-top lorries, only for El Jefe to throw them about and squash them with his size 12s as he tinkered endlessly with various parts of the lorries’ bodywork. 

The role of the (mostly ruined) watermelons remained ambiguous.  And El Hefty (as Richard wittily nicknamed him) seemed equally reluctant to reveal the rationale behind his endless running repairs, which seemed to intensify as they actually got going and drove towards La Frontera (whatever that was). 

At first, Richard assumed that La Frontera was the Spanish word for the border with the US, which lay very close to the North.  But El Hefty’s reaction to this suggestion this made him think again.  When questioned about La Frontera, El Hefty would become very animated, almost panicked, and adopt a ferocious pantomime scowl of disapproval; “La Frontera,” he would growl, visibly exuding even more sweat, “es asunto secreto, muy secreto.”

In triumph, Richard latched onto the word “secreto.”  A secret, then! 

So El Hefty can’t have meant the US border, because that was hardly a secret, was it? 

Weighing the evidence, Richard came to one inescapable conclusion: he and Hefty were, effectively, second-hand car salesmen.  Richard was certain there was a model of car called a Frontera.  There was probably one called Asunto too, and maybe even one called Secreto; so with all these names of exotic cars being thrown about and this never-ending interest in the bodywork of the lorries, part-exchange must be the name of the game; maybe part-exchange with the part about consent exchanged for something else, but who was he to question how his father made his money? 

But how did the watermelons fit into the picture?  Were they deployed as emergency supplies should he and Hefty become stranded in the jungle?  Maybe they were barter goods for exchange with primitive (and presumably dehydrated) jungle peoples?  Or were they required as a form of business tribute, a complimentary gift considered de rigeur in the second-hand vehicle market of Northern Mexico? 

He never got to the bottom of it, as all he and El Hefty would do was drop the lorries in the middle of a banana bush or some-such and get a lift back to Cuidad Juárez with some chaps who seemed to live permanently at the jungle drop-off point, judging by the rather tasty assault rifles they carried to keep wild animals at bay. 

Maybe they used the melons to feed the wild animals?  As a peace offering? 

For all Richard knew, they used the bloody things as ammunition.  Because, try as he might to clarify the issue, the only response that El Hefty would give was to shrug, spit on the floor, and tell him to fuck the fruit items in question.

Well, Hefty me old mucker, the watermelons fucked you in the end.  On Richard’s final mission into the jungle to achieve God-Knows-What, the mutinous mound of fruit in the back of their lorry shifted on a corner on a mud track, tipped the vehicle over and knocked El Hefty unconscious (which was a start), and it all lead to El Hefty being accidentally shot six times in the back of the head at close range by Los Federales who turned up to investigate the crash (which was a definitive finish).  Strangely, Los Federales too had a fascination with the lorry’s bodywork.  And no interest at all in the watermelons.   Maybe it was a cultural thing.

As one of his father’s “courses” went, the Chihuahua trip wasn’t half as interesting as others he had taken. 

Zurich had been good the year before (lovely in the Summer, super totty, lots of bore-jaw about money though, especially “Jew Diligence”, which had struck Richard as a little risqué). 

Russia had been an eye-opener, although the weather was a blow and the totty apparently all pre-owned, according to some primitive feudal arrangement, by spiv-like “barons” in disappointing suits.

The highlight was two months spent on an airfield near St. Petersburg with some raddled rough types from Spesnaz — Special Forces, don’t you know!  And what a bunch of alcoholics those chaps had been!  No Special Brew for them!  No no, they used to drink the stuff used to clean the wiring on the gigantic Antonov transport planes that littered the airfield.  Miles of wiring, so miles of hideous moonshine.  They swore by the stuff.  Frequently.  Imaginatively.  And eventually died by it, by all accounts.

Africa, much to his surprise, had been Richard’s favourite.  It had always looked to Richard that Africa could do a lot better, given its high historical percentage of Christians and lack of snow.  And look at the size of it!  Look how green it is!  How the Hell could people be starving?  Must be some sort of gigantic, ongoing cock-up at senior management level, he concluded.

So he was expecting some pretty shoddy arrangements on the ground — queue-jumping, people not speaking English, that sort of thing — and he got them.  That was tolerable: when in Rome, and all that.

The poverty, disease and terrifying violence of anarchic Sierra Leone somehow passed Richard by.  He was more preoccupied with the frankly appalling attitude of the locals, who, for some reason, were not keen to work under UN protection; love nor money could not convince them to build the bridge he was expected to produce over the Rokel river 25km outside Freetown.  They kept running off into the jungle.  He ended up doing most of the hard stuff himself, which he enjoyed. 

But nobody could explain why they hadn’t just employed an engineering firm to do the job in the first place!  Which was infuriating.  All this “volunteering” business seemed needlessly, and embarrassingly, amateurish.

On the plus side, he got to see the exact spot where the Paras and the SAS had slaughtered the West Side Boys (the foolish gang of drug-crazed ne’er-do-wells that had somehow captured some soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment) and floated the corpses down the Rokel into Freetown as an “impact statement.” 

Not only that, but Richard managed to get his hands on a gold-plated AK47 alleged to have belonged to the captured "Brigadier" Foday Kallay, leader of the West Side Boys, which his father had arranged to be smuggled back to London, fully functional; it is hung, proudly, in the kitchen above the cat’s bowl.   Some “impact statement” that, he had thought, rather smugly, on behalf of the cat: steal my whiskas, and receive instantaneous punishment in the form of a hundred rounds per minute from a gold-plated celebrity artefact.

Best of all about Africa — and this was rather puzzling — were the little kids running around playing football.  Everywhere he went Richard was dragged into a kick-about with gaggles of smiling, highly-skilled children.  From one dustbowl to the next, he embarrassed himself with his appalling lack of co-ordination and speed; rather like one of those big black water buffalo trying to outmanoeuvre a herd of gazelle. But he didn’t care.  He was happy.  There was something all very  … well, he’s never been able to put his finger on it.  Meaningful, but meaningless, somehow, in a nice way.