Extremadura

I knew a guy from university days. He was always a chancer. Running strange jobs. Pushing this and that. Had the most beautiful young things for friends. Willing and able, he’d say, with a tip of his hat.

Later his life went to shit. He ended up with some crazy deal, his pension and money that came from God knows where. Bought 40 hectares of prime Extramadura plateau desert shite land fit for development but 100km from anything.

He married one of his lovelies, poor sod. Dragged her out way back to the back of beyond. Debbie, I think she was called. Such a sweet gel.

He aged. Went bitter. Or more bitter than Plaistow could. Obsessed and obsessed and obsessed about the rain. Watched forecasts. Ran radars. Rang the one-horse abandoned villages around for news. Si, si, si, he’d insist. But is it effing raining.

She got desperate. The tension was unbearable. Watching wisps of cloud drift the wrong way, slipping over spoiled horizons. Ice and rain trails so far from his bloody useless hallowed land.

So she started to play him. First, just a crushed antihistamine in his lunchtime ice-cold wine. He’d sleep his siesta better, more deeply, less troubled.

But he’d wake expectant for rain. Clamouring for some evidence, however scant. He loved to play and feel the marginal moisture content, the hydrology of his bastard soul.

So she took to seeding his rain gauge. She’d even slip out the stepladder in the unbearable heat to
pour measured doses into his stupid bollocks of a German weather station.

Waking from his siesta he’d roll over on his side, his big gut following like a semi trailer on a mountain road, to peer through the shuttered darkness at the control panel.

How he’d laugh with relief at the readings. 20mm of rain. And yet he’d not heard a thing as he slept. And the air smelt as dry and dusty as when he’d stumbled into his wine sodden slumber.

She had to shoot him in the end. He ran so suspicious about the precipitation data when cross tabbed with the villages around. He so wanted to believe. And she was so tired of the deception. She put him down like a sick dog and buried him in his precious bone-dry soil. Last time I heard she was in Hong Kong selling soya futures to the Chinese like they’d gone out of fashion.


Postscript

The rain really did arrive here. 20mm. Lots of hail the size of Robin’s eggs. The tanks nearly full.

The woman in the bread shop said,

‘You want it too much. Be patient. Look neither at forecasts nor radars. Just wait and get on with your life. Take no heed of the chaos out there. It will come when your back is turned and your mind is empty.’

She was right of course. As always. And as always I brought four onion grissini and a loaf of integrale.