the wheelie bins every second Tuesday morning over the head with a garden spade.
The man is on the ground. He’s bleeding from the forehead. He is looking bewildered. He holds up his hand and looks at the blood on it. He puts it back up to his forehead again.
The woman is leaning on the spade as if her spade’s blade, on the pavement, is a couple of inches into earth and she’s simply tidying her garden and has paused to take stock of what work she’s done. She looks about sixty. She looks quite well-to-do. She looks too old, too proper, too well-dressed, to have done what she’s just done. Round her, round him now, the man’s work colleagues off the truck are gathered in a tableau, open-mouthed, between laughter and anger. The driver of the truck is hanging out of the front cabin, one foot on the step, the door swinging open behind him. All the men are wearing the same green council overalls. It’s summer. It’s evening. The trees are different here. On one of the back streets of a small Mediterranean resort two women are eating at a restaurant whose tables are wooden and rickety. The table they’re at shifts its weight between them every time one or other of them cuts something up on her plate. The street is a slope; one of the women is a lot higher up on its slant than the other, even though she’s just two feet away.
The women are bright pink from four days of too much sun. The one on the up slope is still exclaiming over the way that tomatoes taste so different here, the way that everything tastes so different here. Everything tastes of sun. The other, on the down slope, is beginning to worry about what she’ll do when she gets bored with eating Greek salad, since there’s nothing else she likes the look of on this menu but there’s no other restaurant in the tiny resort that she likes the look of, not really, and it was touch and go about whether they’d be able to get a table at this one again tonight.
Gypsy children go up and down the street just like on each of the other evenings, but tonight the braying noise of the little squeezeboxes they use for begging is almost drowned out by the Americans. The Americans are off-duty troops. They are sly looking and shy looking, polite looking and hangdog looking and only just school-leaving-age looking; they look so young and so raw that it’s really near-criminal. The women have gathered, from overhearing them talk, that they’re here en masse on a working holiday to accustom them to sun and heat before they’re shipped to the Gulf. When the women exclaimed to the waiter about the number of people in the restaurant tonight, this is what he told them.
Three ships, many thousand troops, arrive on the resort’s outer harbour. So the bars on the outskirts unwrap the big boots this morning and put them on the tables and then everybody knows what is happening, and the big boots go through the town like a fire. And then the soldiers in two or three days go away and the boots are wrapped in the paper again until the next ships.
The waiter shrugged. The women nodded and looked interested. When the waiter went, they made faces at each other to let each other know that neither had understood what he was talking about.
Now a small child is standing next to their table. She is working the tables at this restaurant with a boy of about ten who plays the same perfect Italian-sounding cliché over and over on his child-sized squeezebox. He looks businesslike and disinterested as he holds his hand out at the end of each riff at table after table. The girl standing pressed up against the women’s table is dark, very pretty, very young, maybe only five or six years old. She says something they don’t understand. The woman on the down slope shakes her head and waves at the girl to go away. The woman on the up slope picks their Rough Guide phrasebook up off the table. She flicks through it. Ya soo, she says while she does. The child smiles. She speaks in shy English. Give me money, the smiling child says. She says it seductively, almost under her breath. The woman has found the page she wants.
Pos se leneh? the woman says.
Money, the child says.
She presses