Double trouble
Jeremy Clarke Iwas early for the Club Taurino of London's monthly meeting. They usually have it in a central London tapas bar, but the tapas bar was being refurbished, so they'd booked the function room of a large busy Victorian pub in Paddington. The pub was packed and the bar staff were working like acrobats. I couldn't see any aficionados I knew in there and the barman who served me had no knowledge of the booking. He leafed through the pub diary with one hand and flipped an empty pint glass over and over in the other to keep his momentum going. 'Club what?' he said. 'You're not a darts team, are you? All I've got down for tonight is a darts match.'
There was a newspaper on the bar. Without physically interfering with it, I read two single-paragraph news stories. In one, an argument about an inheritance had ended with a man bludgeoning his dead father's lover to death with a bust of his father. In the other, a man had shot and killed his best friend during a row about which of them had the longest criminal record. Then someone punched me lightly in the ear. It was my friend LittleEyed Dave. Little-Eyed has no interest in la corrida, but I'm rarely in London and the CTL meeting was an opportunity for us to catch up with each other. 'How's tricks, Dave?' I said. 'Jel.' he said. 'things are going so well at the moment I wouldn't be surprised if it was a fit-up.' I showed him the news paragraphs I'd just read, but he didn't see the funny side. In the milieu Dave moves in, it isn't unusual for heated arguments to end in bloodshed. In fact a friend of Dave's was currently being blamed by police for shooting a nightclub doorman in a case that made some of the
nationals. 'If Ronnie did it,' commented Dave, 'he must be a very good shot because he was in Maidstone prison at the time, doing six months for deception.' I ordered drinks. While the barman was away pouring them, Little-Eyed said, 'He's from Kerry, he is. I can tell a Kerry accent anywhere.' Little-Eyed thinks he's a bit of an authority on regional accents, so when the barman came back with our drinks, I said, 'Where are you from, by the way?' 'Sweden,' said the barman.
I told Little-Eyed I was surprised that an honest man like Ronnie should end up going to prison for deception. 'That's right, Jel,' said Little Eyed. 'Ronnie's such an honest person, it's untrue. Me, I've been lying all my life. Do you know, Jel, I've never told the truth even for the sake of telling the truth. If I occasionally tell the truth, it's only because it might get me somewhere.—You know what the truth is then, Dave?' I said. 'Course I do, prat,' said Dave. 'I wouldn't know how to lie otherwise, would I?' He took a long drink with his shoulders hunched and I did the same.
At a nearby table, two speechlessly drunk dossers stood up to leave. One of them couldn't do up the zip on his coat. It was cold outside so it was an important issue. Then he stood patiently in front of his mate, like a little boy in front of his mum, while his mate had a go at doing it up for him. His mate couldn't do it up either. The project was abandoned and they set their faces towards the door. Listing heavily to port, the man with the problematic zip veered off at the wrong angle until he came up against a pillar, where he paused, then lit out again on a corrective course towards the door. 'The last time I saw anything walk like that,' said Dave, 'the whole herd had to be destroyed.'
Speaking of which, I wondered what had happened to the Club Taurino crowd and went to investigate. In the function room they were still throwing darts. It turned out that there had indeed been a double booking so the CTL meeting wasn't going to happen. The man who had driven all the way from the South of France to address the meeting, Mr Jeff Pledge, had arrived, but didn't appear too put out by the sudden cancellation.
The number of English-speaking people who really know about Spanish bullfighting is tiny, but Jeff Pledge is, they say, indisputably one of them. Since becoming fascinated by the bulls of Iberia, there's one fundamental, bottom-line question I've been dying to ask someone who really knows. Seeing Mr Pledge at a loose end momentarily, I seized my chance. 'Mr Pledge,' I said. 'What percentage of bulls fought in first-class Spanish bullrings have had their horns tampered with?' 'Between 90 and 100,' he said, without blinking. I thanked him and returned to the bar and relayed this important information to Little-Eyed Dave, who said he 'didn't f—ing well blame them'.
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