Lame Swain and Automobile

So where was poor dear Abel whilst all this was going on? I hear you ask, and rather indignantly at that. Can she really be so lacking in heart as to wipe the poor lad from the annals of history without even so much as a ma`a as-salāma?

No, of course not.

Abel was still very much a part of my life, he was just 190km away – a certain geographical disparity being a necessary component to a long-distant relationship.

We spoke on the telephone (mobiles really coming into their own by that stage) as often as we could afford, and every three or four weeks one of us would hop on a bus and trek over for a conjugal.

Things got marginally easier when I forked out for my first car – purchased from Mavis’ cuckholded Spanish husband, no less – a battered grey Ford Fiesta with a very tenacious sticker of some saint or other in the corner of the windscreen.

The purchase was a definite risk, given that my driving history up to that point was nothing to be proud of.

I got my license in early 1995, at the age of seventeen, having failed the first test (a mortifying state of affairs back then, when a driving test was little more than a tootle round the block with a parallel park and an emergency stop thrown in for good measure), and promptly totalled my ancient Mini Metro against a road sign during an incident involving a broken heart, excess speed, a humpback bridge and a snifter too much Bacardi.

After a few months cycling the 8 miles to work, I once again got behind the wheel – an ageing Citroen AX this time – but as I was soon off to foreign climes, my driving experience itself screeched to a bit of an emergency stop at that point.

Until the year 2000; when Mavis one day ordered me to drive her shiny new company BMW to a nearby car park – wrong side of the road and all…

I was shaky, terrified and half-blinded by sweat, but I managed it; so when the Managing Director’s brother asked me to take another company car from Marbella to Guadalmina, I took on the task with a marginally higher degree of confidence.

Trundling cautiously down the coast road, morning traffic screeching past (my fellow drivers’ baleful glares telling me in no uncertain terms how they felt about my “caution”), my flailing left hand only hit the driver’s door a few times before learning that the gear stick was on the other side. Upon coming to terms with that small difference, everything else just seemed to fall into logical place.

Spotting the Guadalmina sign looming in the distance, I flicked on the indicator and swept confidently off the main road and up towards the car park, at which point a loud graunching and scraping from the passenger side brought the small vehicle to an unscheduled and shuddery stop, alerting me thus that something was perhaps not quite as it should be…

Not being used to having so much car to right of me, I had misjudged my distances and mounted a half-finished curb, tearing the right front tyre to confetti, and buggering the drive shaft in the process.

Oh the shame. How I kept my job at that point was a minor miracle – and I wasn’t even sleeping with management.

Luckily (especially bearing in mind I could only afford insurance covering third-party fire and theft) the Fiesta was not to suffer a similar fate, and went on to admirably perform its task of keeping young love alive by ferrying Abel to and from Marbella bus station. It also diligently, if more infrequently, carried me the bumpy 190km to Granada after work on a Friday night, where we ate chickpeas in tomato purée in the discomfort of Abel’s damp student bed-sit before the stress of Mavis’ incessant and rabid phone calls, the exhaustion of the helter-skelter journey and the unrelenting humidity of Granada’s colder months sent me wheezing off for a steroidal catch-up at Hospital Virgen de las Nieves.

When I say young love, that was not a particularly honest take on the situation. The truth was that I had not-so-subconsciously been hoping that the distance between us would provoke Abel into rethinking his allegiance to our cause. For while I was still very fond of my handsome Moroccan swain, I was living all alone in a brand new place – a place that seemed likely filled with exciting potential and endless possibilities. I was earning above the minimum wage for the first time in my twenty-three years and feeling thrillingly ripe for change.

I was left with no doubt that I was ready to be my own woman once again; but armed with no more than this entirely selfish motivation for bringing our association to an end, I felt unable to take on the emotional responsibility of a break-up.

So on we plodded – and it was exactly as romantic as it sounds.

After my untimely departure from Intereality, I found myself once again kicking my heels and in need of gainful employment.

You might have thought I had learnt my lesson regarding the dubious nature of the Costa del Sol real estate industry, but, together with another Intereality escapee, I soon found myself in negotiations with an acquaintance of hers who planned to open a new real estate agency. It would be a subsidiary to what was an already thriving construction company.

And so after a short, but not undeserved holiday – ten months of emotional and mental Mavis-induced torture certainly creates the need for a spot of unwinding – I returned to work, this time with the even loftier job title of Marketing Manager.

Now as a brief aside, I must stress that as an academic wash-out who left school at sixteen and only sporadically dipped her toes in that fountain of knowledge and enlightenment known as ‘Education’ ever since, and as much as I enjoyed being bestowed with all these highly improbable titles; even I was aware that they went far and beyond what the actual job description warranted.

And this brings me, dear reader, to expound on another of my theories:

People who have fought their way through intensive further education in order to carve out a satisfactory career, and those boasting more humble academic beginnings but who have relentlessly climbed the ladder of advancement in that same quest, are highly unlikely to find themselves looking for work in the rather unwholesome environment of the Costa del Sol or indeed any other sun-washed, bar-heavy, holiday resort.

No. The majority of ex-pats immigrants who find themselves enmeshed in the world of Costa property, or Costa timeshare, or indeed pretty much any of the readily available Costa employment avenues, were more often than not the sort who had not forged much of anything for themselves back in their home countries.

Fortunate for them, they washed up in the exact place where your level of education or previous experience were irrelevant; a place where future employers didn’t ask for references (there was unlikely to be anybody who could vouch for the employers’ good record either); a place where the property boom turned even the most unlikely folk into wealthy individuals overnight; a place where, albeit as big fish in a very small pond, those same people came to find themselves wielding power over others, regardless of their unsuitability for the task.

In such an environment you could be whoever you wanted to be, and I couldn’t resist the temptation of being a “Marketing Manager”; and trying to make myself believe it was true.

One interesting thing that came to my attention, was that my new boss, and the colleague who had defected from Intereality with me, were both Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Now I am, and have always been, an outspoken atheist, but in the days when I was still young and naïve I assumed that those who loudly proclaimed their faith, in whatever deity they had chosen, thus assuming a self-sewn mantle of moral superiority over the rest of us, must lead exceptionally good and compassionate lives in order not to be hypocritical turds.

It turned out that my naivety was to let me come a cropper yet again, when the first stumbling block in the new job was the insistence of our future employer that we become self-employed, with all the disadvantages entailed therein: no health insurance, no sick pay, no pension plan, no contract to wave at your bank or other companies whose services you wished to engage, huge social charges and other miscellaneous taxes that rose every year even if as salary didn’t, plus the additional cost of an accountant to unravel the complexities of Spanish self-employment bureaucracy. But hey, at least the godly owner of a large and highly successful Costa del Sol construction company, an enormous mansion in the hills behind Marbella, a house in central London and another large property somewhere sunny in Asia, saved himself a bob or two. Thank Jehovah for that.

Now none of this was mentioned to either me or my colleague when he was courting us initially, but as we were both now irreversibly jobless we had little choice but to grudgingly capitulate to these new conditions, especially when offered us a marginally more interesting financial package as a pretence at offsetting the enormous disadvantages.

It would seem that Jehovah digs a little self-serving and cunning artifice in his witnesses, who knew. Hallelujah.

The second stumbling block was the difficulty involved in actually persuading him to allow me to do my job.

For despite many years of business dealings, he was singularly disinclined to spend any money on marketing his newest venture. That, unsurprisingly, made my position as Marketing Manager rather problematic; I would even go so far as to say that it made my position increasingly surplus to requirements.

But after much discussion, during which I fought to conceal my frustration by cleverly pointing out the advantages of informing potential clients of the services we could provide, he at last conceded a microscopic budget with which I could tentatively begin our assault on the already saturated Costa de Sol property market.