Читать книгу Confessions of a Holiday Rep - My Hideous and Hilarious Stories of Sun, Sea, Sand and Sex - Cy Flood - Страница 7

I PUSHED OPEN the bathroom door. There before me was a naked man on all fours in an empty white bath. He had been there for some time, trying not to move. His face was contorted with pain and embarrassment. A toilet brush was protruding from his backside. The business end of the implement stuck out of his rear as if it was a porcupine’s tail. Most of the ten-inch-long, white plastic handle was wedged deep in his rectum.

A wave of uncontrollable laughter began to sweep over me, but twelve years as a tour rep instantly subdued any wisp of a smile. Instead, I gave the usual cheery greeting:

‘Hi, Mr Brown. Is everything OK?’

He winced and managed to say, ‘Actually, no.’

Tour rep training teaches you to be positive whatever the circumstances. ‘Have you tried giving it a good tug?’ I blurted out, in an attempt to be helpful.

‘Of course I have,’ groaned Mr Brown.

Standing next to me in the small bathroom was Mrs Brown. The causes of her tears and worry were many. She had failed in her attempts to deliver her husband from his anal agony and was now forced to seek my help. She expected me to conjure up an instant remedy and, at the same time, ensure that none of the other hotel guests, or the management, or the company I worked for, ever got to hear of the family’s shame. Mr Brown’s two young children sat on the sofa in the next room and watched their father with concern.

There was little I could do. I was not a doctor. I had no training in how to remove the hook from the tip of the handle of the toilet brush that was now dug into the lining of Mr Brown’s lower colon. A wrong move and he could have bled to death in front of his loved ones. The company’s guardian angels – Responsibility, Loyalty and Cover-Up – hovered over me, reminding me that, no matter how ludicrous the situation, it had to be treated as routine. I picked up the phone and calmly asked the receptionist to call an ambulance.

Mr Brown was eventually removed from the bath and, like a large pink suckling pig stuck on a stretcher, he was carried, grimacing, through the hotel’s maze of green and white corridors and along cacti-lined paths. With its orange lights flashing, but the siren off, the ambulance drove ever so slowly to the island’s only hospital.

I made my way to my windowless office in the hotel complex. Part of my job as the resort manager for the whole of Fuerteventura was to make out a daily report of what happened on this rugged, spectacular Canary island, which is well down the company’s list of top destinations. On Fuerteventura, nothing out of the ordinary was supposed to happen.

Incident forms are in triplicate and designed for idiots to fill out, with just the spaces to be filled in. One up the bum, I thought. Brush up ends in clean out, I wondered. No. This particular company was not known for its humour. My report about Mr Brown’s unconventional use of a lavatory brush was sent back to headquarters labelled simply as ‘anal accident’.

I needed a beer, and left my office for one, slamming the awkward glass office door shut. The vicious Saharan winds that sweep the island filled my ears, eyes and hair with sand once more. The blast furnace heat soon had the sweat running down my back to form a large damp patch round my waist. By the time I reached my local, The Wobbly Dog, my company issue shirt was stuck to me and my tie clung round my neck like a nylon noose.

As the beer had its desired effect, I reflected on the anal accident and how I had come to witness it. And that started me thinking about how I had ended up on an island that resembles the moon with goats and is frequented by hordes of people who would never dream of living there and don’t seem to enjoy themselves much when they are there anyway. It had all started when I was a child.

As a kid, I had been fascinated by stories of people who ran away to sea, joined the Foreign Legion, the circus or simply travelled the world. But by the time I was thirty, I believed that all those romantic notions had passed me by. The most adventure I would get would be a fortnight somewhere hot where millions of like-minded lemmings went. Although I was on the verge of marriage at the time, I was having an attack of nerves. I was scared of the thought of settling down; the idea of comfortable routine made me jittery. Before I was too old, I fancied running off to play for six months.

The holiday brochures I had constantly flicked through stirred my imagination. For a few weeks, I wrestled with my conscience and my fears. Finally, temptation won out over security and, convinced that I was on the doorstep of a life of sunny hedonism, I applied for a job as a tour rep. I confidently looked forward to dealing with throngs of happy holidaymakers and working alongside diligent colleagues to make a package holiday worth every hard-earned penny. So, one damp April afternoon in 1992, Cy the sandpaper salesman became Cy the sun, sea and sand man. The prospect of dealing with car accidents, death, suicide, rape and violence had never entered into my calculations. Neither had the fact that holiday-makers get involved in as much sex, drugs, corruption and criminal activity.

On my last day at work, I went for a drink with my mate Steve at The Railway Tavern next to Liverpool Street station. We had joined the sandpaper company at the same time and were leaving on the same day, but for entirely different reasons. We were both feeling a trifle melancholy, as the firm had been good to both of us. And we were apprehensive about our futures, which were to be poles apart. Steve was going to a better-paid job with more money and security to provide for his family. I was desperate to shag all the girls I had drooled over in holiday brochures. We downed our beers, wished each other good luck, shook hands and disappeared down different tunnels to very different destinies.

During the weeks before I was called up to do my holiday rep training course, my emotions see-sawed. I wanted all that sex; I wanted to get drunk, live in the sun and get paid to do it. But I still could not satisfactorily work out why a sane, logical, thirty-year-old would harbour ambitions to become a lunatic, unhinged twenty-year-old.

I suppose the seed had been sown in the summer of 1988, when I went on the ultimate in sun, sea and sex holidays – a youth holiday to Ibiza. It was the biggest mistake in holiday terms I have ever made. I went with my cousin Mike. We were opposites: he was a mollycoddled mummy’s boy who always had money; I was playing in a rock and roll band churning out the old standard, waltzing through the working men’s clubs of Bristol. His parents loathed me, but could do little to stop us going away on holiday together. We decided to take Ibiza by storm, just as we did Bristol most weekends. We arrived on the island expecting to spend the fortnight in an alcoholic blur interspersed with frequent exchanges of body fluids with all those heavenly bodies the travel agent had mentioned – nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

We arrived early in the morning and the coach took us to San Antonio, the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Mediterranean, where shagging, clubbing and losing it on drink and drugs were the norm. We could barely contain our excitement – until, that is, we arrived at our hotel. The concrete and breezeblock structure looked as though it had only just survived an earthquake; the food was the stuff that starving refugees would turn their noses up at. But worst of all, there were no available women. Nine out of ten of our fellow fun-seekers were either hardened Estuary boys or dullard Jocks. Both breeds were dangerous and obnoxious when in drink, which was most of the time. There was little scope for two pleasant lads from the West Country to have a good time. As the gloom set in, Mike and I predictably downed bottle after bottle of San Miguel, argued, ogled and took the mickey out of the two tribes from the north–south divide – providing they couldn’t hear us. At the welcome party, the rep smoothly relieved us of half our spending money to pay for trips to the water park, the bucking bronco barbecue, the hillbilly hoe-down, the hypnotist show and a boat trip. The captain’s cruise sounded enticing: a trip to a secluded beach, packed with scantily clad women, water as clear as gin, a feast ashore and bottles of champagne to be dived for on the seabed. A perfect day was in the making.

The trouble was, Mike and I had stayed up until dawn the night before, drinking and arguing about the girls we hadn’t shagged. We were woken at 8am by the sprightly rep and, with hangovers that would have put George Best to shame, we climbed aboard the boat. The sun rose; the heat increased and our heads started to feel like they were being drilled open from the inside.

‘Go and get some water, or a Coke, or something,’ I murmured to Mike – the one with the money.

‘Shit,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve left the fucking bum bag in the room.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I replied, very calmly all things considered. ‘I’ll get a loan off one of the reps.’

The promises of help and understanding they had expounded at the welcome party were still fresh in my fuzzy brain. I found a male rep leaning over the stern, guzzling a cold Coke and feeding a fat sandwich to the seagulls, and explained the situation. He surveyed me with the same revulsion Mike and I had used when we’d tripped over a dead dog on the side of a road outside San Antonio.

‘Tough luck, pal. You’ll have to grin and bear it,’ he chortled. With that, he pushed past me, headed to the bar and bought another Coke. A red mist came down over my red eyes.

The cruise around the delightful island of Formentera was obviously well known in the perfect bay we were headed for. As our boat approached, all other shipping upped anchor. The beach cleared in seconds as around fifty of Britain’s finest examples of yob culture disembarked, shouting, swearing and being sick over each other.

By now our thirst was of biblical proportions as we fried on the shimmering sands. My tongue, I decided, was definitely stuck forever to the roof of my mouth; my lips were like the sandpaper I used to sell. Our heavenly surroundings had become a thirsty hell. Then it was Mike’s turn to have a bright idea. Being a good swimmer, he decided to end our purgatory by diving for a couple of those bottles of chilled champers. He disappeared down into the azure waters and I sat back and started imagining how I would feel when he surfaced, a green bottle in each hand. I had mixed feelings as to how I felt about him when he didn’t. He swam ashore and lamely told me he had his contact lenses in and couldn’t open his eyes in the water. I wanted to kill him.

Then I saw a female rep coming towards us through what seemed like a mirage. I explained our predicament and, mercifully, she took pity on us and gave us two bottles. Out popped the corks and we thrust the cold necks straight down our throats.

It was like drinking bubbly battery acid. It stripped the enamel from my teeth and tore at my tonsils. I spat it out. Blistered and delirious, Mike and I sat on the burning sand watching the male rep down more cold Cokes. Until it was time to leave paradise, we discussed in hoarse tones how we would take it in turns to torture him to death.

On the plane home, I couldn’t get over what an interesting, albeit demanding, job those reps had. And how bad they were at it. The genie was out of the bottle now. I knew that I wanted to be a rep – and a good one. I drew up a well-embellished CV as bait and sent it off. One company called and, in March 1991, I found myself on a ten-day training course held on Majorca.

I enjoyed every second of that course, even though it was a bit like what I imagine basic training in the army to be. You are stripped down to your basic parts to see what you are made of and then rebuilt the way the company wants you. I passed muster and was offered a job but, after much heart-searching and tears from my fiancée, I turned it down at the time and went back into sandpaper. But as I went from dry shop to ironmongers, I found myself brooding about the life I could have been having in Majorca. The genie wouldn’t go back in the bottle.

So in October 1991, I revamped my CV and tentatively sent it off to another tour operator. I was summoned for an interview. I explained my motives and reasons – though, of course, not the ones to do with drinking and shagging – and told them why I thought I’d shine as a rep. I also mentioned that I had languages (a friend had given me some Spanish tapes – that’s what I thought they were, anyway – and had spent some time talking back at the tape recorder). When the girl who was interviewing me asked me to tell her about my family in Spanish, she looked baffled as I spluttered on for about a minute, then said she had heard enough. She confided in me that her Spanish wasn’t up to much, but said that mine sounded OK. It was only later, when I did learn Spanish, that I found out that those tapes I had been given were, in fact, Brazilian Portuguese.

There followed an intimidating group interview with other likely candidates, a sudden-death multi-choice questionnaire – fail that and you are out – and then the part everyone dreads, the presentation. Each of us had to sell a trip to the rest, who were sitting round in that tight circle. One woman droned on for forty-five minutes about the wonders of Coventry, handing out pamphlets and pinning pretty pictures on the walls, until the exasperated examiner told her to sit down. We applauded politely and then it was my turn.

I had rehearsed my merry tale of a wild Wild West night out time and again. In my head I could hear the laughter and the excitement as my captive audience lapped it up. I got all my lines right and my delivery was perfect. But not a sound emanated from those sitting in front of me. They stared past me, their faces as blank as fused television screens. Halfway though my show, the examiner put his head in his hands. I was unsure as to whether the gesture was caused by amusement or despair. I returned to my seat to tepid applause and went back to my fiancée resigned to a life selling sandpaper and taking our future offspring to see Bristol City play.

When a big envelope flopped on to the lino three weeks later, I had trouble opening it, such were my nerves. But there it was: my chance of a new life, a passport to debauchery and general misbehaving. I was among the ten per cent of the 6,000 applicants to be invited on the training course – the toughest of them all.

When some of the chosen few gathered at a hotel in Essex on a frosty February morning, I was primarily worried about two things: my name and my age. In the 1930s, Cyril was among the nation’s favourite names, but by the time I was born – in the Sixties – it was reserved for hamsters or tortoises, fluffy toys and other objects of ridicule. My father was unaware of this when he came across the name in a book he was reading, liked the sound of it and informed my mother that the lad was going to be called Cyril. My mother protested, but the old man insisted and so Cyril I became. I was the only Cyril on the Hartcliffe council estate in Bristol, where I grew up. Matters were made worse by my parent’s Irish brogue, which meant they pronounced my name as ‘Cerril’, which came out sounding like ‘Sarah’. Some of our neighbours were mightily bemused by the eccentric Irish family that lived at the end of the street and had a son called Sarah. Being called Cyril pronounced Sarah was also the cause of a few scuffles in the school playground. Even now the name is likely to provoke fits of giggles. And, of course, everyone knows the rendition of the song ‘Nice One Cyril’, written in honour of the only famous Cyril I’ve ever heard of – the Tottenham Hotspur player Cyril Knowles.

And that wasn’t all. Being a good ten years older than the rest of my course companions made me feel like I was a sly old fox let loose amongst a flock of young chickens. For them it was their first or second job. I sensed they thought I was only doing the course as a last desperate attempt to make something of myself. Maybe they were right.

Some of my suspicions were confirmed when I approached the door of the room where we would all meet formally for the first time and I caught the faint strains of ‘Nice One Cyril’. Not very original, I thought, and strode in. Our names were on labels: Andrew, Malcolm, Robert and a collection of sensible girls’ names. I thought of sitting down in front of any of them, even a Sarah if there had been one. Instead I sat down behind my tag; the oldest bloke with the silliest name.

Courses always begin with trainees introducing themselves to the group. The teeth-grinding strategy serves a dual purpose: to give the course tutors an instant idea of the new recruits’ potential to cause trouble, and to give the trainees their first opportunity to make fools of themselves. Telling total strangers a brief history of yourself tends to result in a tale of woe, intertwined with lies and pathetic attempts to raise a laugh. One bloke announced, ‘Hi! My name’s Darren. I’m twenty-three, from London. I used to be plumber, but all the pipes got fixed. I wanted to be a chicken, but I couldn’t pluck up the courage. So now I want to be rep, as it’s gonna be sun, sea and sex, but this time I’m gonna get paid for it.’ There was a cringing silence, briefly broken by one of the tutors deliberately letting her biro clatter on to the floor.

After Darren came Liz, a wardrobe of a Welsh girl with a voice that must have put sheep to flight as it echoed round the valleys. In her previous job she had sold sex aids and she was an expert on the subject, so she told us with a knowing smile. Liz expounded on her sales techniques, but just when it looked as though she was about to whip out a contrivance and demonstrate its purpose, one of the tutors told her sharply to sit down. The atmosphere was one of collective shock.

Now it was my turn. ‘Hi! My name’s Cyril and I used to be a sandpaper salesman and I support Bristol City.’ The howls of laughter caught me by surprise. ‘No, really. I am called Cyril and, well, someone’s got to sell sandpaper,’ I twittered above the rising tide of hysteria. One girl had slipped off her chair. ‘And I want to be a rep because anything’s better than watching Bristol Rovers. And that’s it really.’ I sat down feeling silly. I glanced at the tutor who had dropped her biro. The bottom half of her face had all the humour of a bulldog eating stinging nettles, but I thought I saw the merest glint in her eyes that made me think I had made the right career move.

Nice one Cyril, I thought.

Our course tutors were Malcolm and Tracy. An efficient and well-worn pair; they played the roles of good cop, bad cop. Malcolm was friendly and could be approached. The way round him was to ask him to reminisce. He would oblige with wondrous tales of times in Benidorm or Greece, neglecting the coursework, his mind out there somewhere in the Mediterranean, a long way from the stuffy classroom in Essex.

Tracy, though, was not for turning. Her view was that the course was not meant to be fun, and that knowledge should be acquired through fear and diligence. We joked that she only smiled when she broke wind. I christened her Miss Prissy Knickers, a nickname that I believe stuck with her for a while.

The week’s course was intensive and gruelling. We laid on welcome parties, did role plays, paperwork practicals, boring but essential theoretical work and endless presentations about even the most mundane minutiae of package tour holidays. To counteract the wealth of information being hurled at us, we socialised and drank copious quantities of Guinness.

No one has ever satisfactorily explained to me why, but the job of a tour rep was particularly attractive to women and gay men and my course reflected this. My pal for the week was Andy, an affable sort, who had had a career carved out at a big high street retailer. He was the same age as me, and had joined the company for most of the same reasons as I had. On the first night at the bar, he let it be known he wanted to be a rep so as to turn himself into a shag monster. We hit it off immediately.

The girls on the course outnumbered the boys. There was Liz, of course, who made instant friends with another Welsh wench called Julie. Both were of the same build – short and wide – with masses of wild blonde hair, giant chests and an obsession with willies. Standing together at the bar, from behind they resembled the back row of a rugby scrum. They developed the tiresome habit of kissing you, hugging you and grabbing you at the slightest pretence. Their intentions were blatant, but Andy and I – the two budding sex machines – wimpishly turned them down with, ‘Nah, not my type.’

Michelle, another of the girls in our group, was a no-nonsense Mancunian, and was destined to be a rep from the day she was born. She bore a startling resemblance to the Simply Red singer Mick Hucknall and was duly dubbed Mick. It came as no surprise that she sailed through the course and went on to shine.

The other girl I recall on that course was Karen, who was about as out of place as a rep as a camel in a garage. She was from somewhere in the Home Counties and had a cut-glass accent and a way of putting people down that made you feel you were something nasty stuck to her shoe. I’d figured that she’d doubtless do well in up-market resorts. The company thought otherwise and sent her to Ibiza, to get a bit of experience of the other side of life.

The only other bloke of record from that time was Quentin. He shared a room with Andy and shared his thoughts with us chaps on the kind of men he fancied. After one heavy night at the bar, Andy returned to their room, to be confronted by a fretting Quentin.

‘Where’ve you been all night? I’ve been worried sick,’ he trilled. Andy pushed past him and crashed on his bed. He awoke the next morning to find himself in the bed with his pyjamas on and Quentin at his bedside with a welcome cup of tea. Andy was strangely quiet for a couple of days afterwards, and drank noticeably less.

Quentin never made the grade. But the rest of us did. There we were, the class of ’92, ready for an exciting future, serving the travelling British public. I was gripped by a tinge of sadness and much foreboding as we rookie reps stood in the drizzle and said our farewells. And Liz tried to stick her tongue down my throat for the last time.