We got lost once or twice. Parked the car in a side-road just behind a big trailer that had stopped ahead of us. There was a blond girl sitting in the grass at the side of the road with her back to us. It looked a bit strange but I didn't think any more of it. We were looking for a big church cut into the rock in the mountains not so far from here, just north of Barcelona. "Ask that girl, she might know," said Bud, ushering me out of the car from the driver's seat. I didn't want to, didn't think she would know but got out of the car with the map. She wasn't sitting down any more. She was walking in my direction, bag over her shoulder, blue demin jacket zipped shut above a denim mini skirt. "Iglesia?" I asked, pointing at the minute black cross on the map. She looked irritated, as though she didn't want to be bothered. "Iglesia?" she repeated, "Ugh?" and frowned, looking at the map I was brandishing under her nose. "Big church", I said, hopefully, still without success. "Sant X is that way," she said, naming the nearest town and swinging her arm wildly in an arc to the left and "Sant Y that way," she added, swinging the other arm in the opposite direction, still visibly irritated. She looked up at me, her gentle eyes meeting mine questioningly as though she was astonished - touched even - to approached by someone as naive as me. For one fleeting moment, I caught a glimpse of her soul. Then I caught sight of the white war paint around her eyes and mouth and the glistening, dewy lips and the penny dropped. She was a whore and I'd just interrupted her as she set out to meet her next client - the driver of the trailer parked just a few metres in front of our car. This girl was about to have sex in broad daylight in the cab of an articulated truck with some hairy, brawny, horny guy who was probably watching all this through his side mirror, with weapon in hand.
I thanked her and, In the way that only an English woman can, felt apologetic for having disturbed her.
As I got back into the car, she passed by - calling out some last directions, in German (she'd figured out I wasn't Spanish) through the open window as she went.
"I think she's a whore," I said to Bud as we watched her go, looking, frankly, rather good with long tanned legs and two perfect half moons of tanned bottom showing clearly under the bit of denim that passed for a skirt. "Yes, I think so too," said Bud. "I thought so all along but I didn't say it as I knew you wouldn't ask her then." I cursed him silently under my breath - and spent the rest of the day wondering why such a good looking girl with a brain in her head would spend her time like that, whether her client treated her OK and whether my interruption caused her extra stress or even (I remain naive) made her think twice about the value of being abused for 25 euros or whatever she charges. And would she manage to get back into the mood for it inbetween looking for a mountain church on a tourist's map and arriving at the truck cab door?
I'll never know. I just know that it was good, somehow, to meet her just as a normal human being - which, after all, she is.
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