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after several hours, when my arms and hands began to complain from so much lifting and grabbing. Salud had slowed down a bit after cutting her hand, only collecting the almonds that had fallen to the ground.
    For a while we stared down at the enormous pile of nuts at our feet, the inevitable question ‘Now what?’ hanging wordlessly in the air. What on earth were we supposed to do with them all? Sell them? Where? Who to? How much should we charge? The complexities of a simple task farmers all over the world had been carrying out for several millennia held us paralysed for a moment. One of us should have asked Arcadio, but it had slipped both our minds.
    ‘What does your father do with his oranges?’ I asked Salud.
    She thought for a moment. ‘The local co-operative takes them from him and then gives him money depending on quality, weight, that kind of thing.’ She pushed her hair back behind her ear. ‘They rip him off. In the shops they sell for over ten times the price he gets for them. Sometimes he ends up just giving them away.’
    So here we were with a pile of almonds we had nowhere to take, and even if we did find anyone to buy them they’d probably only give us a pittance for them. Farming was looking less attractive as a way of life by the minute. We should stick to planting trees, I thought.
    ‘Whatever we do with them,’ Salud said, ‘we can’t just leave them like this. We’ll have to break them open, get rid of the shells.’
    She stood up, walked over to where I kept the tools, picked up a couple of hammers and then came back to the table. I looked down at the overflowing sack with a renewed horror. This was going to take a very, very long time.
    ‘Here,’ she said, thrusting the hammer into my reluctant fist. ‘Get cracking.’
    It was four o’clock in the morning when I woke up, my head resting on the kitchen table, a small pool of dribble forming from my half-open mouth. Salud had collapsed on the sofa. Beside me was a large bowl of shell-less almonds. I smiled, before looking down and realising there was an even bigger pile of unshelled almonds still waiting for us in the sack. I gave a groan and went to pick Salud up and take her to bed.
    Arcadio returned the next day unannounced. Our bodies ached by now from sitting bent over the table trying to crack open the almonds without breaking what was inside. I had about a 50 per cent hit rate; Salud was doing only slightly better. We were, however, at least managing to get close to the bottom of the sack.
    Arcadio looked unimpressed when he saw how many almonds we had. ‘Bad year,’ he said enigmatically. I thought we’d done rather well. ‘Too much rain last spring,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘Affects the blossom. Almonds don’t grow right.’
    And he bent over to pick up the bowls of nuts we’d shelled and started pouring them into a bag.
    ‘Er …’ I started.
    ‘Be back this afternoon,’ he said. And with that he was gone, our almonds now sitting in the bag tossed over his shoulder.
    ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I said. Had we just been robbed under our very noses?
    ‘It’s all right,’ Salud said. ‘He’ll come back. Just watch.’
    I had no choice but to trust her instinct.
    Some time after lunch we heard the sound of Arcadio’s car chugging back up our road. Salud smiled.
    ‘Let’s see what story he’s got to tell,’ she said.
    Moments later the old farmer was back in our kitchen.
    ‘Here,’ he said, holding something out in his hand. ‘It’s all I could get for them at the village co-op. As I said, it’s a bad year.’
    He pushed the money forward again and Salud eventually reached out with her bandaged hand to take it from him.
    ‘Hundred euros,’ he said. He pronounced the word strangely – ‘
ebros
’ – as though still not quite used to this weird new currency that had been around now for six or seven years.
    I looked into his small, yellow eyes and somehow knew that he was telling the