I emptied the cases. For the life of me, to this day I cannot think why they were so heavy. I looked at the contents lying on the bed and on the floor, and there really was nothing to wear. I couldn’t make out what made up all the weight. I do, though, have to own up to having made some pretty surreal decisions when I was deciding what to bring with me for that six-month trip. I had the following list of useless items in my possession. Six pullovers, woolly. (What on earth I imagined I was going to do with six woolly jumpers in the Mediterranean summer climate, I cannot imagine.) One pair of hobnailed boots, two spanners and over two hundred business cards from my last job … The list goes on, but modesty forbids me revealing more to you. Suffice to say that, in future, I resolved to take advice on packing, before getting someone else to do it for me!
I tidied my room as best I could, leaving a pile of the useless items in the corner, so I would see them every time I entered the room and embarrass myself into throwing them away eventually. Once this was done, I scampered off down to the bar to meet my new colleagues. There were to be six reps living in the area with me, all women, and we would all be living in the same house, once it was ready (I think it was being aired for the summer). For most red-blooded males that would be heaven, and I was no different. I thought I had landed on my feet.
Of the six, four of the girls were children’s reps. There was Anna and Rhona, both of whom would be working in the Hotel Galleon at the top of the resort. Both of them were very young, and this was their first time away from home; they were shy, but happy-go-lucky. Then there was Sheila. She was another children’s rep, had been with the company for years and reminded me of Mrs Baylock, the dreadful housekeeper in the film The Omen, the one that was sent to guard the Anti-Christ as he grew up in his father’s home and who had a Rottweiller dog. Sheila never had a Rottweiller for company, though she was followed around by a stray cat for a few months. The children’s rep that would be looking after the youngsters in our hotel, the Hotel San Miguel, was a short, fat Scottish girl aged about eighteen. She had red skin, covered in freckles, and a mop of the reddest hair I had ever seen. She might have been a nice girl. I can’t really say. The thing is, she had the broadest Scottish accent I had ever heard. I simply could not understand a word she said. She might have been saying all manner of lovely things to us all, but I never knew.
The two reps were Jill and Tracey. Jill was a wily old campaigner who had been with the company for a couple of years. She had long ago lost her enthusiasm, and it had been replaced by ample helpings of cynicism. If ever you needed a reminder of just where your feet should be, Jill was always there to remind you to get your head out of your arse and look at your heels, planted firmly on the ground. Finally, there was Tracey. She was young and attractive, and she was residing firmly under the wing of Jill, who was, it seemed, anti-men – or, more accurately, anti-me.
So there we were, all gathered in the bar of the Hotel Galleon, ready to meet our entertainers, the boys and girls who would be providing entertainment for our guests when they arrived. The games of bingo, darts, snooker and rifle-shooting, and at night the cabaret shows. We had already met the two Dutch dynamos, Mark and Saskia, and there was one more to go: Kira. Kira was from Denmark. She was, and probably still is, stunningly beautiful and I fell in love with her about two seconds after I met her. I wanted to marry her there and then – so did every other male who set eyes on her during the season – but she wasn’t into pale, skinny men from England with no language skills. She was about five feet five inches tall, with lovely natural curly blonde hair and a beautiful, kind face that lit up every time she smiled, which was about every two seconds. I made great friends with Kira, which was just as well, because she spent an awful lot of time working in our hotel during the season. She was a winner before she opened her mouth; everybody loved her. With this team, and Anna our long-serving colleague to complete the line-up, how could we fail?
Anna was to be my direct colleague, meaning that we would be working side by side in the hotel for the next six months. We had to get on. I soon discovered that she planned to run the ski school as well as carry out her repping duties. Unless I was very much mistaken, that meant that I would not be getting her undivided attention. Oh well, I had to forget all those fancy ideas of being taken under the wing of a more experienced member of staff – that is, unless I wanted to learn to water-ski. Anna had the most glorious of suntans. She was a beautiful golden brown and beside me, her pale and pasty colleague, she looked even better. In the photograph that we arranged to be taken for our information books, together we looked like an advert for the United Colours of Benetton. I was probably the palest-skinned rep ever to set foot in Spain, apart from Sarah our children’s rep, that is. I put it down to my Irish heritage. It takes me a good six months of intense sunshine to even go pink; along the way, I just burn.
Anna made it quite clear from the beginning that she had very little time at all to spare for me. She treated me with contempt, as if I was the reason she could not dedicate all her time to the water-ski profit-making machine. There were others in our team in the resort, but Anna and I were to be working more closely together than anyone else. This was a bit unfortunate considering her dislike for me, but that was the way it was going to be. Our duties coincided at the same time in the hotel every day, unless she had to take a water-ski class. And we put together our own time-off and guiding rota. When I say guiding, I mean taking coaches to excursion venues in other parts of the island. I was lucky enough to get the youth guide every week, and that meant that once a week I had to gather up all the young people in our resort and take them down to San Antonio, the heart of the party area of the island, about an hour’s drive away. I looked on this as my saving grace, my weekly escape from the confines of San Miguel.
Our first guests arrived along with the first of the summer rains. Good timing, really. It pissed down day and night for the first three days of their holidays. As San Miguel is only a six-month holiday resort, not every bar opens its doors for the first day of season. They kind of yawn first, and then start to clean their bars and shops; normally the resort will not be fully functional until about mid-June. When you only have one alternative bar to the hotels in the resort, and that is closed during the first two weeks of the season, this can present a slight frustration to the guests, who begin to feel imprisoned in the area. As our first customers expressed their frustration at the lack of activity, I could only sympathise with them. The rain made it difficult to use any of the great facilities outdoors, such as the tennis courts or the football pitch or the rifle-shooting range, or even for the guests to use the free mountain bikes that were on offer.
During that first week, I thought the rain would never stop. In desperation we organised dart-throwing contests and pool competitions. The attendance levels at these events was fantastic. I am sure that if the rain had kept up we could have sold the rights to cable television, such was the excitement of a double top. Our duty times were never meant to be more than six hours a day, but I found myself staying anything up to twelve hours every day. There really was nothing else to do except stay with your guests. At least this secured us the friendship of the first lot of arrivals; we developed a kind of siege mentality, trapped in the Port of San Miguel. I felt just a little cut off from what I thought was happening up in San An – and whatever it was, I still wanted to be a part of it if at all possible.
Eventually my time came. I was called upon by the youth team to go up to San An and help out with the first bar crawl. This proved to be a wild occasion and ended up with six of our guests in hospital with various injuries, after getting involved in a fight in the middle of the town. It was great fun and kind of whetted my appetite for a weekly jaunt to the fun area of the island. Alas, though, it was only a distraction. The real work for me was going to be in San Miguel. There were no wild nightclubs or the like in this area, but we still had a lot of hard work to contend with.
When I try to remember our guests from that first year, I can only think of the dickheads. I am not sure if other industries are like the tourist industry in this respect, but when reps sat around and gossiped about the people they worked with – i.e. the general