The electricity bill arrived on a Tuesday morning.
I opened it with coffee in one hand and the sort of confidence that comes from having no idea what you are about to see.
Then I saw the total.
I checked the dates first. Surely it covered six months. Possibly the entire street. Maybe they had accidentally included the bakery and that enormous freezer in the little supermarket.
Nope. Just us.
“Carmen,” I said.
She was outside shaking a rug over the wall.
“Carmen.”
Nothing.
I walked out holding the bill.
“Is this normal?”
She looked at it for about three seconds.
“No.”
That was all I needed to hear.
The problem with showing Carmen anything remotely interesting is that it never stays between us. By lunchtime the woman across the lane knew about the bill. By two, Paco had seen it. By three, a man I had never met was standing in my kitchen pointing at the water heater.
He turned one of the taps on. Hot water came out.
He nodded as if this confirmed something serious.
“What did he say?” I asked Carmen.
“He says this is old.”
“The water?”
“The heater.”
It didn’t look old. It looked white and had a green light on it. In my experience that puts an appliance firmly in the modern category.
Paco arrived carrying a tape measure.
I hadn’t asked him to measure anything but that has never stopped Paco.
He paced across the kitchen, looked through the window and went outside. We followed him because it seemed safer. He stood in the street and stared up at the roof with his hands on his hips.
“Solar,” he said.
Of course.
Five minutes later there were four people looking at the roof. One thought the front section got enough sun. Another said the chimney would cast a shadow. Paco said the chimney could be moved.
It could not.
It had been there longer than all of us and was probably the only structurally reliable part of the house.
Carmen’s neighbour appeared with her own electricity bill. Hers was lower than ours which she seemed delighted about. She held the two sheets next to each other and tapped the totals several times.
I understood the message.
She was better at electricity than me.
The conversation moved into the street. It was no longer about our bill. It was about everyone’s bills, somebody’s cousin’s heat pump and a set of solar panels fitted to a house near Granada that apparently produced either a great deal of power or absolutely none. The translation became a little uncertain at that point.
A chair appeared.
Then another.
I made coffee because there was clearly no chance of getting back to work.
Paco drew our roof on the back of an envelope. It wasn’t a particularly accurate drawing. The house had gained an extra floor and the chimney he wanted to move had disappeared entirely.
He added six rectangles.
“Panels,” Carmen explained.
“I got that.”
He wrote a number underneath.
“What’s that?”
She asked him.
“He doesn’t know yet.”
Good start.
That evening the street emptied and I finally sat down with the bill again. Carmen put her feet up on the chair opposite.
“We should look into it,” she said.
“I am looking into it.”
“You’re staring at the total.”
I opened the laptop.
The first few websites wanted my phone number before telling me anything useful. One had a photograph of a family standing in a spotless kitchen smiling at an electricity meter. Nobody has ever been that happy near an electricity meter.
I wanted to understand the basics before inviting another man onto the roof. What size of system would suit a small house? Would the old tiles cope with it? Did battery storage make sense or was that another expensive box with a green light?
Carmen messaged one of her cousins down towards the coast. He had been asking similar questions about his place and sent back a company he had found. I opened Costa del Sol Solar and started reading while Carmen inspected Paco’s roof diagram.
“This house is enormous,” she said.
“It’s his improved version.”
“He’s added a bedroom.”
“And removed the chimney.”
She looked at the envelope again.
“He may be planning to move in.”
We worked through the bill properly. The air conditioning had been used more than I remembered. The water heater was probably not helping and the spare-room radiator had been left on twice for most of the day.
That last one was me.
I had gone upstairs to turn it off, noticed the sticky door and become distracted trying to fix it. The door was still sticking. The radiator had spent eight hours heating a room nobody used.
Carmen didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
The next morning Paco returned for the envelope.
He had added another two panels.
“Why eight now?” I asked.
Carmen translated.
Paco looked at me like the answer was obvious.
Apparently we would need the extra power for the swimming pool.
“We don’t have a swimming pool.”
He waved towards the patch of uneven ground behind the house.
I went back inside and put the kettle on. There are conversations here that can be stopped early and conversations that will eventually involve concrete. I’m slowly learning which is which.