Mr Lynch’s Holiday

7

They had worked for the same company back in England. Laura edited Web-design manuals with pretensions to being coffee-table books. She spent her days clarifying the meaning of words written by men who wore shorts to work, most of whom, she discovered, collected dolls of one sort or another. Eamonn worked on computer-programming titles with astonishingly ugly covers. He once queried a jacket design and learned that the move from restrained typographic covers to large, brutal, greyscale portraits of the author’s face had single-handedly driven up sales by 200 per cent. Programmers were reassured by the faces of other programmers.

He and Laura used to debate whether programmers or designers had the more abysmal prose style. They would email each other passages of clogged, impenetrable text, a competition between them. Laura began to suspect that her own literacy was being eroded by spending each day laboriously disentangling knotted jumbles of words and punctuation marks. She worried the shattered sentences, orphaned subclauses and teetering conjunctions would start to colonize her brain and a viscous fog descend over all meaning.

As time went on there was less and less need for either of them to go in to the office, until eventually they realized that they could work remotely and live wherever they chose. They were not tempted by the quaint seaside towns of Suffolk that seemed to attract many of their colleagues, or the self-regarding buzz of Shoreditch or Brighton. Laura was drawn to the sun. Her ideal scenario was their existing life minus the nine interminable months of greyness and damp. For his part, Eamonn had no qualms about leaving England — overfamiliar and cloying, unsurprising and pleased with itself. He felt the lure of somewhere different, the promise of renewal.

Their original plan had been for one of the big cities — Barcelona or Madrid or Bilbao. They had no interest in joining the hordes of expats clustered along the Costas in vast apartment complexes and chintzy hillside developments. Eamonn saw the majority of British settlers in Spain as an amorphous mass of Daily Express readers riddled with hypocrisy: railing against benefit cheats at home while happy to avoid Spanish tax; indignant at immigration levels in the UK, but oblivious to their own immigrant status. These were people for whom Spain’s greatest cultural achievement was its tireless dedication to polished floors and gleaming kitchen worktops.

But escape was more difficult than they had anticipated. The competition for decent apartments in the overcrowded cities was fierce, and as a couple of clueless guiris, with barely any Spanish, they had no contacts or resources to call upon. It soon became clear that buying or even renting an apartment in such places was far more complicated and expensive than they had imagined. They spent a depressing two weeks in Barcelona looking at a succession of tiny apartments, with increasingly inventive layouts. Mildewed shower cubicles in the corner of bedrooms, toilets on balconies, a mezzanine bed platform suspended above the kitchen, and everywhere perky Ikea accents to mask the squalor.

Laura first saw Lomaverde mentioned in an article in the kind of decor magazine that Eamonn insisted he hated but surreptitiously read nonetheless. The houses and apartments were described as minimalist cube-structures with a nod to the principles and aesthetics of Bauhaus. Lomaverde claimed to offer all of the style and sophistication of city living but without the bureaucratic wranglings and complexity. Where Barcelona had been difficult and impenetrable, Lomaverde was easy and welcoming.

Nieves, the sales manager, spoke perfect English and carefully explained every step of the purchasing process. She understood what they’d been through trying to deal with private landlords and vendors, she knew how baffling the red tape could be and, true to her word, she shouldered the burden of much of the paperwork herself. In her startling zebra-print glasses, she painted a picture of Lomaverde as a creative and vibrant community — a haven for designers, artists, writers and programmers sick of city life in Spain and abroad. Her description sounded somewhat hellish to Eamonn and Laura, but they liked Lomaverde in spite of it. They knew the location, in Almería, was remote, far from the bars and culture they had thought were their target, but it was easy to devalue such attractions, to imagine themselves self-sufficient: working from home, free to travel to cities when they chose, masters of their own destinies with a spacious apartment and sea view for the same amount as a dingy, interior box in Barcelona.

They moved in the March of 2007. For the first few weeks their only neighbours were Roger and Cheryl and Raimund and Simon. The vacancy then had a certain other-worldly charm, rendering everyday life somewhat ethereal. They used to imagine themselves on a different planet — the buzzing of the electricity substation, the tinny echoes of the empty streets, the sci-fi sunsets. They feigned indignation at the idea of other buyers moving in and spoiling it all.

They quickly settled into a routine, working from early morning until mid-afternoon and then over to the pool. Their budget hadn’t stretched to a private pool, but their terrace overlooked the communal one and they found this made it curiously difficult to relax. Even when they had no urge to swim or lounge it was impossible to simply look upon it all; the desire to be in the view too seductive to resist.

It was called an infinity pool, but they never really understood why. It was like a normal pool, but instead of a visible wall at the far end, the water fell away to a smaller, lower pool. This didn’t, as far as they could see, make the length of the pool appear infinite. It made it appear like a fifteen-metre pool with no rear wall. Laura started to refer to any short distance as ‘infinity’ and anything longer as ‘beyond infinity’. They would lean against the wall of the shallow end and see only blue: the surface of the pool, the distant sea beyond it and the sky above.

Lying on a lounger, sipping a beer, one of them would look at their watch and ask: ‘What are the workers doing now?’ And they’d try to outdo each other in their lurid imaginings of friends and colleagues. Rob dying on his feet as he pitched a book to the sales team in the US. Tony Daly standing on a chair just to be seen, shouting insanely about eating competitors’ breakfasts. Endless grotesque fantasies about the mysterious yachting accident that had left Viv Crawford with a bald spot above his right ear and an inability to pronounce, though a compulsion to employ, the word ‘segmentation’. They laughed, giddy at the improbability of their life, feeling as if they had pulled off a great victory.

Over a year on and Eamonn still experienced a small shock every time he opened the door or looked out from his terrace. A sense of disbelief that he lived in such a place. He used to imagine that it was a good thing, this palpable sense of ‘wow’ each time he stepped outside and was confronted by deep blue sky, gleaming white cubes and glistening sea. Now though he felt that a permanent state of wonder was not right, that a more profound or complicated relationship with the environment should have evolved over time.

It was a stark contrast to the cluttered, choked environment they had left behind in England. They’d lived in a Victorian terrace on a tiny road with constant friction over parking. The compensations were an apparently nuclear-powered central-heating system that meant the house was never cold or damp, and an incomprehensible rear garden, stretching sixty feet back before turning a corner and running another fifty behind the other houses. Twice a year they would run howling into the long grass, crazed survivors of a forgotten jungle war, wielding machetes and hacking back bindweed and laurel, but largely they let it be, their L-shaped wilderness. It was much loved by their limping cat, Werner. Eamonn would stalk him through the long grass, mimicking his every move, attempting to infuriate the implacable animal with a bad German accent. In summer they had barbecues with Laura’s caipirinhas and their friend Dave’s boxes of charity-shop vinyl. In winter they curled up inside with boxsets and books, Eamonn terrorizing Laura with his frozen feet.

He wondered now if maybe there had never been anything wrong with any of it.

Dwelling on the past was perilous but still his mind went back. The more he tried to fight them, the harder the memories pressed in. He thought back to the early days, his caution with Laura in the beginning. It had seemed too easy and perhaps it was some vestige of Catholicism that made him believe that suffering had to be involved. He thought there must be a virtue in the customary awkwardness, the minor misunderstandings and endless adjustments normally necessary to get aligned with another human being. The ease and instantaneity of their attraction made him suspicious; he thought of catchy songs whose appeal proved thin and short-lived.

A chance remark about a particularly egregious type of trouser briefly popular in 1988 led to the discovery that they had attended many of the same parties as teenagers. When she realized this, Laura suggested that they had simply worn each other down, that their attraction was subliminal and attritional. Her friend had gone to a nearby girls’ school and Laura had apparently formed part of the haze of hairspray, Thunderbird and Impulse that he had seen huddled in corners of darkened suburban sitting rooms over several years. Neither of them remembered the other, though when he first visited her parents’ house, he had a distinct sense that he had been there before.

She had honey-blonde hair, green eyes and a faded tan even in winter. He was gangly and pale with black hair and pale blue eyes. Even in his early twenties he had a tendency towards misanthropy, as opposed to Laura’s generally sunny disposition. She thought him smart and funny and honest, and found the difficulty he experienced enjoying himself endearing. For his part he loved her openness, her generosity of spirit. He mocked her for it, labelled it as confidence born of privilege, but he marvelled at it. In his darker moments he would characterize their relationship as one long failed attempt by him to contaminate her good nature.

If they went to a restaurant, Laura would blithely eat her food and enjoy the change of scenery. Eamonn though would look at the people around them, people superficially just like themselves, and he would have bad thoughts about them, their hats, their haircuts, their shoes, their conversations, an itchy kind of contempt spreading over his skin like a rash. It seemed to him that the key achievement of his education had been to alienate him from both the people he had mixed with as a child and the people he went on to mix with as an adult. In both worlds he felt adrift, bobbing erratically between feelings of inadequacy and contempt.

By the time he reached thirty, comfortable in his job and in his life, he was bored by his own incessant commentary, sick of beating himself up about every lifestyle choice he made. That was at the heart of his willingness to move abroad: to live in a place where he was unaware of the secret signs, for such things to be invisible or unreadable to him, where he might imagine the best of everyone. He hadn’t been lured to Spain by the sand and the sea and endless re-runs of A Place in the Sun on daytime television, but rather by the promise of sitting in a bar and not being able to extrapolate an entire way of life from someone’s choice of shoe.

One afternoon, settled in Lomaverde, leaning back against the wall of the shallow end of the pool, he had squinted at the horizon. A transformation had taken place. The beauty had become invisible. Blue sky, blue sea, blue tiles. What once was sublime had become banal. He knew he’d made a mistake. A few weeks later the pool was empty and he knew then too that there was nothing he could do about it.