While walking along the road from Alcalali to Parcent this morning, I found one credit and two debit cards in the name of Miss H. Deaves, chucked in the ditch. I wouldn't normally be scouring the ditch but the cars bomb so close at times, that you have to be aware of the roadside in case you need to make a leap to safety. (One night walking home in the moonlight I got tipped in the ditch and found the stream at the bottom. Another time Joe and I were drunk and stood in the field pretending to be trees whenever potential axe-wielding murderers drove by looking for their next victims. Of course, we used to live in London, or we'd never think such things, here in sleepy rural Spain.)
Where was I ? Oh, yeah, so I found these cards and it seemed like a message. I'd been having a tough time at home - pile of bills mounting up, Joes new business is just eating cash, the girls need shoes, teeth-braces, swimsuits, school books - an endless list. I haven't bought new underwear in over a year. How grim and unattractive that sounds! I looked at these cards in my hand - one from Abbey National, one Tescos, one HSB - and they were all in date, signed on the back, pristine-looking. A womans name and signature. And for just one second I thought about what would happen if I kept them? Hid them in a drawer in case times got even harder. Would I be tempted to try and use them? Could I even hand them in for a reward? I wasn't really sure of the procedure - should I report them to the Guardia Civil? Ring the number on the back? Would the person have already cancelled them?
I imagined a lady, pleasant-looking, very English, living over here maybe, with folks back in the UK, and a retaining back account there. Perhaps she'd been robbed last night, and the thieves used her cards to pay on the motorway toll roads. Maybe she was devastated - could she have been mugged like a friend was last week? A knife held to her throat through the window of her car, while she was made to hand over her bag and contents, possibly forced to reveal her PIN number. Horrible.
By now, I'd walked home, and was snatching a quick tea before picking the girls up from their last day at school. I stood holding the cards and picked up the phone. I thought about the arguments lately, and how I'd threatened to walk out last week. I wondered why I'd found them today. Was there a reason? Is the world just random?
Of course, I phoned to report the cards stolen - the phone operative at the other end said they'd already been cancelled. Could I please cut them up, length-ways and width-ways and dispose of them? I put them in the bin, with a strange sense of purpose. Miss Deaves would never know I'd found them, and there they were among my decomposing tea-bags, the remains of Tabi's Rice Krispies, the bill envelopes.
Tomorrow I would write the first line of my next novel - maybe the one that will get published. Maybe the one that will moulder in the Playroom cupboard until Farley finds it one day, looking for scrap paper, and hand it out in sheaves to her two sisters to cover with exotic drawings of stick people and grinning suns and wobbly houses.
