Chapter 1: Bombing the Belly of the Beast
Tray Tables Up, Wheels down, it's Time for Benidorm
Contents | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
I was somewhere on the edge of Valencia when the drink started to take hold. The tables and seats were up, the wheels were down, and the descent towards Benidorm had begun. As is tradition for any UK passport holder on a flight south to an Autonomous Spanish community, drinking had begun in the airport, with the percentage by volume of liquid flowing freely in quantities that any sane health board would wag a finger and raise a brow at. Their silent tsk-tsking was absent in the terminal and in flight. Besides, the average British tourist was too pissed to notice or care. This was summer. This was Spain, and the budget airliner’s nose was pointed at the Alicante coastline like an Exocet. The warhead was packed with several hundred incendiary Glaswegians, full of beer and bravado. The payload would be dropped on Alicante, a beautiful coastline much accustomed to the raining money bombs of Northern European tourists, most notably the Brits. I sat front row, a last-minute seat grab thanks to my previous night’s flight falling foul of French Air Traffic Control’s strike action. It’s hard to say ‘solidarity, my brothers and sisters’ when your holiday is being fucked with, but I managed it after much cursing, and even then, it was whispered. The flight was non-eventful; the guy next to me was glaikit, auld, and deaf as a dead dormouse. Some sort of senility infused him with childlike wonder at things such as carpets and shoes, but he was a good egg who only needed to be told the same thing five times before a crack of recognition appeared. The font on his iPhone meant that had he been outside, under a clear sky, the lads on the ISS could have told him that his daughter was reminding him to take his tablets.
“Look, whit dae ye make of that?” he said, showing me the Princess of the Seas for a seventh time on his iPhone, “some bloody ship, eh? I wis oan that!”
“Bigger than an American aircraft carrier,” I said.
“Whut?” was all he said. So I followed the flowchart of this conversation back to the start, and we went through this sequence again.
The next twelve rows behind thrummed with a giant wedding party. They jostled and roamed the aisle like their seat were full of angry ants. Above me, the overhead lockers groaned with a bounteous swag of post-Brexit duty-free fags, clinked with blue label Smirnoff and Malibu, and between it all, acting like mortar, was luggage. A conga line of middle-aged women played peek-a-boo with the drinks trolley, going around slurring the same careworn jokes at anyone with the temerity to look up.
“Aye, married three times, and I sais, there must be cheaper ways tae enjoy cake, know whit I mean?”
The older men seemed merry, stationary, knowing that this was their wives’ time. The colossal logistical feat of getting fifty-something Glaswegians anywhere voluntarily was the result of much phone calling, back scratching, whispered threats, and drunken, kitchen-table negotiation. There could be nothing more working-class than this, granted the scale on this Airbus jet was excessive. Behind me, one of the less favoured entrants to the extended family failed to look after a toddler, who, as was her want, toddled off down the aisle. His dippit complexion was rocked by a snarled warning from one of the grandfathers in the party and underlined by a stern glare from another. I didn’t know whose son-in-law this was, but I instantly knew his sexual congress with wan ey the lassies was unsanctioned and unwanted. It took a minute for the penny to drop and the protest to die before the youngster got up out of his seat, dragging his semi-retarded features with him to do what a parent should do. I couldn’t ascertain if he were the groom, and nothing about the perma-confused set to his angular face gave anything away. Further back, one of the granny class of the party, well lubricated on Prosecco, gathered the errant toddler, hugged her, kissed her and returned her to the father, issuing more stern words for the moron. I had no sympathy for the idiot as he loped down the aisle with his child. Some people were designed to be lesson-proof.
Middle class and above need not signal their presence on this flight lest they wish for verbally delivered seppuku. This was a salt-of-the-earth mission to the heart of what has animated the working classes for half a century now: the allure of looking and feeling like you have more than fuck all. We denizens of the OECD’s ninth most unequal country refuse to accept our lot in the owning-stuff stakes. Far from lamenting the fact that the bottom fifth of the income scale own a paltry 0.5% of the stuff in the UK, those of my liquored-up savage-class, soon to be lit with cheap coke and cheaper cigarettes, were here to live it up. And why not? Life hands you lemons, you ask the bartender to put them in your all-inclusive cocktail. Gone were racy cocktail lounges and the romance of mid-20th-century air travel; here to stay were bargain basement pricing posters, queues and conversations such as: ‘Aye mate, Donald Trump has the right idea,’ mixed with, ‘Well, it’s these foreign cunts coming over’ said with no irony by people who knew neither language nor custom of their intended destination.
But why get a stick up your arse about that now?
I was on this airborne pilgrimage to the heart of it, the working-class Mecca, the promised land in which behaviour standards were lower than a rat’s balls and the blood/alcohol content was stratospheric. I was psyched. Somewhere behind me, a chant of ‘ole, ole, ole, ole!’ started up. The sombreroed-up cunts at the back. These used to be my people, at one time, in that branching Many Worlds Hypothesis past; I could have one of them with a sombrero and a stinky attitude to consonants. Who knows?
Twenty years ago, in the afterglow of the 90s, I lived in Spain. First, Zaragoza, and then Barcelona. This pre-Brexit world allowed me to decamp from Escocia to España with all the friction of an ice cube skating across a Teflon pond. After visiting the correct municipal building, my tax code was established, and the Euros could be transferred into my Spanish bank account. No visa, no fuss, no raging at the Brussels machine and its interminable bureaucracy. Since the UK brexited stage left, this whole process has become bureaucratic Velcro. An island of angry pariahs floating off into the stormy waters of an indifferent Atlantic alliance that seems as firm as a dying man’s handshake. My time in Spain was set against a backdrop of internet cafes, the emergence of colour-screened mobile phones with zero data and a €0.12 SMS charge. Fast times with slow tech. Why did this period bloom with more possibilities than today’s world of pocket super-computers and digital nomads? In the here and now, on a plane brimmed to the max fill line, how could so many be blind to the plights of those around them and also themselves? It had been an hour into the flight that I heard a conversation between two of the handout generation, baby boomers, loudly lamenting the youth of today. Did these overfed jackals not hear the echo of Plato in their own words? A few hundred short years before god decided he was his own son also, Socrates’ most famous student was heard to have said, “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law.” The patter is much the same, save for the fact that now the complaint has iPhones and avocados mixed in with the moral decay. These members of my parents’ generation were the only ones ever to have sacrificed anything, after all, a chant that is very loud now their own parents are in the ground and no longer able to wank on about The War.
‘Young wans the day, they waste aw their money oan fuckin lattes and iPads.’ Big words for the only generation whose rising tide carried almost every boat. I managed to surf down the end of this wave with my own property and the final ever higher education grant the government dished out. Woe betide the poor fuckers born four or more years later in the millennial camp whose hopes crashed against the neoliberal wave break. By then, the shit-headed gospel of self-reliance was the only word our lords sought fit to bestow, and blame could no longer be systemic. Why not just tell these poor swine that, ‘Christ lugged his own cross up to Calvery, so go get fucked’? Compassion and empathy must be hard once you can’t see who is behind the drawbridge you pulled up with your votes and actions.
Clapping and cheering as tyres touch tarmac. A ritual I don’t take part in. Frazzled and in no mood for a bus journey, I aimed my shoes at passport control and a taxi. On the way, I stopped for what my former father-in-law would term a “prophylactic peepee” to find three Brummie gorillas doing key bumps of ching in the toilets, openly whilst screaming some English people fuckwittery about ‘Dabzo, doing it fuckin large’. Probably some English cunt joke that we Scottish cunts don’t get. A wall was between them and the Guardia Civil, but no alarm was raised. Instead, a marker was put down. I went through the passport scanner, got my papers stamped and made a beeline for the taxis, head spinning with possibilities. What was this assignment? This Gonzo holiday? Just what was I doing here, semi-sober and ready to record all before me? Was I even up to the task? Would some cabal of furious forklift drivers, savage supermarket shelf stackers, and a UKIP-y Uber driver smell my snobby disdain like blood in shark-infested waters? I had to maintain, to focus. And get off my high horse. I like hedonism as much as the next arse on an Airbus seat, so I folded up my doubts, put them in my trouser pocket and promptly fell asleep in the taxi. Thirty minutes later and at ballistic speeds, the phallic peaks of Benidorm hove into view. The taxi driver was a small, middle-aged Alicante woman, in no mood for cars in her path. She guided me to the hotel, calling me “guapo” in a manner that did not threaten sexual congress. Maybe I wanted the threat, for this to be my first or only sexual encounter of the trip? To be violently penetrated by a one and a half metre tall taxi midget with a deranged dildo, strapped to her tiny hips. But no. Not now. I had work to do.
The afternoon sun was at its zenith, and it was time for holiday mode. Check-in at the Hotel Levante Club was efficient, and my room was good. The air conditioning was strong, the mattress was firm, and the toilet was comfortable and clean. But fuck that noise, you’re here for the what happened next bit.
By the pool, I met up with my non-attorney friend and two English acquaintances he had made. We convened in the shade, by the pool bar.
“Well, it’s all fuckin pakis, ain’t it?” This was my introduction to English Steve. A Guinness Paddy’s Day hat sat on his melon head. Beneath its shamrock-heavy brim, his eyes lurked behind knock-off Oakleys.
“What do you mean?” I said, my eyebrow in a question mark.
“Up in Glasgow, same as Bradford, all fuckin pakis. Too many if you ask me,” he slurred. Before him was a stack of empty plastic glasses, each showing the high tide mark of a lager head.
“I didn’t ask,” I said. I thought of my last date, a beautiful Sri Lankan girl, and wondered if his “paki” umbrella would shade her too.
“I’ve never been up there,” said his rotund mate, Snipes, “but if it’s anything like Bradford, it’ll be a shitshow. Sharia Law and shishas. Fuckin pakis.”
“Probably shouldn’t judge a place before going,” I offered to their impassive stares.
English Steve continued, “The problem with Pakis is that they just don’t integrate, do they?”
Aye, and you’re here hablando Español con la gente, I thought. But it pays not to break the flow so much. Thankfully, my very real Bloc shades killed the UV coming in and the incredulity radiating out. Race, small boats, and all things pertaining to melanin content were to be recurring themes, ones I would have to learn to brush aside with consummate ease. This was going to be a long twelve days. Eventually, with all the ease of wrestling a drunk, horny alligator in a swamp, whilst doused in alligator pheromones, I turned the conversation away from all things Daily Mail, to the histories of these men. The sun was setting, and the pool bar was closing as their truth began to leak from them. Snipes was a retired firefighter, pensioned out after a horrific motorcycle accident that saw his leg take on T-800 levels of metal. It was clear that his self-worth and identity had been tied to his role. Now, without his duty, he was rudderless in a sea of beer.
“I’m over here without the missus,” he said, his vowels exaggerated in a Peter Kay/Phoenix Nights manner, native to Bolton. “Aye, she’s away herself, the kids with family, and I’m here, with Steve, to live it up.”
He cast a half-skelped plastic beer cup around the pool at the retreating arse cheeks of the lady-sunbathers, “nothing like it for morale,” he said, content.
“Ayyyyeeeeeee,” said English Steve, his head flying up briefly to join the conversation. He had been the first casualty of the all-inclusive bar today, but he wouldn’t be the last. His head sank slowly down to standby mode. His brush with consciousness was over for now. Snipes was weather-blasted, life-battered forty-five. I was incredulous that he and I would have been in the same school year. He could easily have passed for a haggard fifty-five. English Steve was sixty-five, his jowls flapping at talking points and his mouth a ruptured gutter threatening to expel a handful of teeth with every utterance. Steve’s life story was more complex, but ultimately led him to work as a security guard, unhappily counting down the days until retirement. Both men were stained in resentment from an intangible that the shite-wing press had long taken to moulding boogeymen from. The monster du jour was migrants and their “plague of fucking small boats.” Tory talking points penetrated southern skulls deeply, especially those of English Steve & Snipes.
Later, we had dinner, I introduced the boys to Tequila Rose, and then things really started to shift gear. The last memory of the hotel I had was my non-attorney friend saying, “Ok, c’mon, time to go out,” and Snipes saying, “Just let me get the scooter,” and my prophecy that “the first night is always the maddest.”
Call me Nostrodamus.
Ah big man, the wonders and beauty of what it holds, for everyone who boarded that plane, me included, although not on the same 'flying tin can'.