(2008) Mister Roberts (10 page)

‘Daddy’s
feeling frightened,’ whispered Simon’s dad.

After a
few more seconds Mister Roberts turned and walked back out into the snow.

Though it was only half
past four, cold night had suddenly fallen. Still Nige and Laurence remained on
the terrace of Noche Azul. Laurence felt a certain gratitude towards Nige for
sitting with him during most of the day while he poured out his discontent, not
that she had anything better to do. And it wasn’t a particular trial for her.
Nige was one of those people who found everybody on the planet equally
fascinating. She could sit and talk for hours with the most unlikely, dull or
terrible individuals — the local peasants, Ukrainian criminals, Liberal members
of the European Parliament. ‘We call this a spoon in my country,’ he had once
heard her say to a Moroccan farmer.

When
he’d lived in London he’d had a circle of close friends, some gay guys
certainly but a couple of married couples too. Their relationships had been
forged and tempered through enduring all manner of crises together from
watching lovers expire in hospital wards to the dawning of the realisation that
Kylie was overrated. But by moving he’d lost them and in the village you
couldn’t be choosy The only qualification for being somebody’s friend in the
village was that they were there and they hadn’t seriously tried to rob you in
the last year or two. Often that didn’t seem like enough.

Laurence
asked Nige, now just a blurred shape across the table, ‘Do you ever wonder why
we came here?’

‘What,
to Spain?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Er,
how about a new life free from all the crappy stuff that tied you down back
home: the weather, the government, friends who know you too well?’

‘I
guess, it’s just that I sometimes wonder if we’re not all a bit the same, us
Brits. We congratulate ourselves that we’re not like those oafs on the costas
who don’t speak Spanish, if anything we know the language and we know the
culture better than the natives. Even so, we’re never going to be a true part
of the country we live in. I sometimes wonder if it’s that that appeals to us.
We’re all people who can’t quite engage with life, we’re people who sit on the
terrace and watch and, of course, drink. I wish once in a while that I could
give myself entirely to somebody or something. Instead I hang on to my air of
amused detachment like a life raft.’

‘That’s
the closest thing we have to a philosophy though isn’t it, “live and let
live”?’

‘Sometimes
I wonder whether it isn’t more “fuck up and let fuck up”.’

‘I’ll tell you what,’
Donna said to her son three days after the eviction, ‘you know tomorrow’s New
Year’s Eve, right? I fancy a trip into Granada, get out of this stinking valley
and spend some of the money that old bastard Monty Crisp gave us.

‘Me and
you?’

‘Well,
yeah, of course me and you … and Mister Roberts.’

‘Oh …
OK, sure.’

The
next morning as Donna was about to climb behind the wheel of their ancient
brown Nissan Patrol Stanley said, ‘No, Mum, let me.’

‘But
you don’t know how to drive,’ she replied.

‘I
don’t, but I’ve been exploring his features when I’ve been walking around and
I’m pretty sure Mister Roberts does.’

As they
drove through the outlying houses beyond the village walls, on a patch of land
cleared for development they saw a circle of jeering English kids. In the
centre was Simon, tears flooding down his face, and next to him was Runciman,
who was cutting up the yellow-tinted designer sunglasses with a pair of pruning
shears.

Most Spaniards wish for a
good death, they do not want to expire as they imagine Scandinavians do, hooked
up to tubes and pipes in some white-tiled sterilised room. Rather they would
prefer to flame out in a showy and extravagant fashion, if possible taking
their family with them.

All
those who witnessed the Nissan Patrol that day as it hurtled at barely
believable speeds down the valley’s narrow roads and onto the motorway
marvelled at the audacity of its driver. Some who caught a glimpse of him said
later that they wondered whether in his old-fashioned suit and slicked-back hair
the man wasn’t perhaps the spirit of the great toreador, Manolito. Certainly,
whoever he was, he must have had the most incredible reflexes to pilot the
bulky, top-heavy brown car in the way he did. Now he was on the gravel verge,
now he was rounding a sharp bend with two wheels hanging over the void, now he
was on the wrong side of the road zinking in and out of oncoming traffic. Many
an office drone in their workaday Seat or Renault whispered a silent ‘Ole!’ as
the 4X4 Nissan tore off their wing mirror while overtaking at 150 kilometres an
hour on the hard shoulder.

At
first Donna screamed and hung on to the door handle, but after a while she
relaxed and sat smiling vaguely at the world as it hurtled at supersonic speeds
towards her.

In
Britain roadworks are presaged by miles and miles of cones so that traffic is
affected in all directions but in Spain sometimes the only warning that men
were working on the carriageway was a mechanical dummy of a man stuck by the
side of the road, dressed in a fluorescent lime suit and brandishing a red
flag. They passed one such just before the Alhambra junction and Mister Roberts
gave him a secret little wave, robot to robot.

Mister Roberts parked the
car alongside the Rio Genil in a stand of cypress trees at the foot of the
Alhambra Hill. Smoke gently curled from the overheated brakes as Donna took
the arm of Mister Roberts and the two of them walked away from the Nissan
upwards towards the shopping streets in the centre of town.

Donna
and her companion spent the morning in the smart little clothes shops around
the Plaza Bib Rambla. From time to time she would solicit his opinion about
some prospective purchase. ‘What do you think about this scarf?’ she’d ask,
then, when he just stood impassively looking at her she’d invent a reply, ‘No,
you’re right. Orange isn’t my colour.’

When
she tried something on that she didn’t like Donna would simply throw it on the
floor, the ship-owners would move to complain but the hulking presence of
Mister Roberts always took away their courage at the last minute. They also
found themselves surprisingly open to offers of a discount when the time came
to pay.

As the
cathedral clock struck twelve Donna sat down at an outside table of a café in
the square by the cathedral and told Mister Roberts to go back to the car to
drop off all the bags of shopping they’d accumulated while she had a coffee and
a sandwich and smoked a cigarette. Watching his broad muscular back as he
punched through the crowds of tourists Donna comforted herself with the thought
that her going out with a robot who was really her son wasn’t by a long way the
weirdest relationship she’d ever been in.

After he’d dropped off the
shopping at the car Mister Roberts walked swiftly up to the Generalife gardens that
surrounded the Alhambra. In front of a clipped hedge he sat down on a marble
bench and after a second Stanley climbed out of the back, the opening in the
robot’s torso masked by the hedge. Then he walked to a kiosk outside the palace
of Charles V and bought a ham and cheese sandwich. Returning to the bench he
sat down next to Mister Roberts to eat it.

His mum
had forgotten that there was no way that he could eat while he was inside the
robot, just as she seemed to forget that he was inside Mister Roberts at all,
and told him all kinds of things that he didn’t really want to know, stuff
about her pretending to be a gynaecologist in front of one of her boyfriends
for example.

Stanley
found himself being troubled by a whole range of disquieting emotions and
thoughts. Firstly the loneliness he’d experienced the day before up in the
Sierra Nevada was still with him, plus he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t
been allowed to simply enjoy this marvellous object he’d found. On the one hand
he was pleased that Mister Roberts was making his mum so happy but it had given
him a queasy feeling to do the things she’d ordered him to do to Monty Crisp.

Stanley
thought to himself, ‘I’m a kid. I’m not supposed to be able to do stuff like
that to a grown-up.

The
whole situation made him miserable: he’d been so excited when he’d found Mister
Roberts but it was extraordinary how quickly his mum had taken him over so that
now the whole state of affairs seemed like some sort of incredibly complicated
problem.

There
was a quality of unrestrained rage that Mister Roberts had brought about in his
mum that he’d never seen before, and he was afraid of how much further she
would go, or rather, how much further she would make
him
go.

When Mister Roberts
returned to the Plaza Bib Rambla Donna said crossly, ‘Where’ve you been?’

Then,
realising he couldn’t reply, said, ‘Never mind. I feel like having a look round
the tourist tat now.’

They
moved through the narrow streets of the Alcaicería, the sun-starved alleyways
that had once been the Arab silk market at the very centre of Moorish Granada.
To the tourists this place reeked of authentic Islamic Al Andalus, but had in
fact been remodelled in the nineteenth century as arcades of purpose-built
souvenir shops.

This
was the area where the gypsy women gathered to try and sell the tourists
sprigs of heather and worthless advice. Their leader was a stout woman of
perhaps fifty called Maria Conchita y Christabal Oviedo de Antequera. In the
streets and on her blog she gave the impression of a fierce pride in her Romany
heritage, but secretly Maria Conchita often wondered why she bothered, all of
her family with all their complicated scams and importunings and thieving made
about as much money as if just one of them had got some sort of proper job,
cleaning buses at the depot perhaps or selling sandwiches outside the bullring
— but that wasn’t the gypsy way History hung heavy on her: until twenty years
ago her family had lived in a cave about half a kilometre away in the
Sacremonte — the Gypsy Quarter of Granada, but then after the floods the
council had moved most of the
gitanos
out to apartments on the
Poligano, the bleak wind-blown housing estate hard by the Southern ring road.
Maria Conchita caught the bus into the centre of Granada every morning, six
days a week to walk the streets forcing herself on the tourists who ambled
through the narrow mediaeval streets. Pretending to tell their fortunes she
would inform rangy Scandinavian girls in rapid heavily accented Spanish that
they were going to marry a man called Paco and would give birth to seven
children — four boys named Carlos, Pedro, Miguel and Ramon, and three girls
named Juanita, Marta and Conchita Immaculada.

When
she was surveying the herds of sightseers Maria Conchita often imagined herself
to be a lion on the plains of Africa sniffing the wind for the scent of
wildebeest. A tingling of the scalp drew her gaze to one particular couple, a
pretty if hard-faced blonde woman hanging on the arm of a bigger older,
dark-haired man in a suit. Many would have mistaken the woman for Dutch or
Scandinavian but Maria Conchita knew right away that she was English. It was
one of her skills that she was proudest of, her ability to deduce instantly the
country of origin of any tourist. The man on the other hand, no for once she
didn’t know. Disappointed she thought to herself that she must be getting old.
Maybe soon she wouldn’t bother coming into town so often.

Suppressing
her irritation the gypsy woman approached the pair with a confident walk and
grabbing the hand of the blonde launched into her patter. ‘Beautiful señorita
let me unravel for you the mysteries of the planets that determine the future
of—’

The
gypsy woman was shocked when the foreigner took her hand back with a dismissive
gesture and a cataract of abuse in perfect Andalusian Spanish with a couple of
authentic
gitano
swear words thrown in for good measure. Now Maria
Conchita, her previous self-doubt thrown aside, was determined to make a sale,
so wriggling sideways she tried the man instead. Taking firm hold of his hand
and gazing up into his face she began her patter, but as soon as she looked
into his dead eyes and felt the cold lifeless touch of his fingers she
instantly knew him for what he was. Over numberless centuries at night around
the campfire the gypsies had told stories and many of the stories had concerned
such as him. In the caves of the Sacremonte the tale, a particular favourite of
Maria Conchita’s, was told as if it had happened yesterday It was a story of
the old ghetto in Prague and the rabbi who brought to life a man made of mud.

‘Golem!’
Maria Conchita screamed in Romany, ‘the golem is in the ghetto. Help! Help! The
golem, the dybbuck has come here to Granada!’

Further
up Calle Reyes Catolicos two of her cousins in the middle of picking the pockets
of an Australian backpacker heard her cry and took it up; in a cave in the
Sacremonte four of her uncles who’d been giving an appallingly inept flamenco
show to some frightened Danes heard their relative and also took up the call.
‘The golem is in the ghetto! The dybbuck has come here to Granada!’ they cried
and throwing down their guitars raced from the cave and headed down the hill
and into town. On a patch of land below the Alhambra, where they ran a parking
scam almost as old as the Alhambra itself, members of Maria Conchita’s tribe
heard the call and stripping off the luminous jackets they wore to lend them
spurious veracity as parking attendants they too ran for the Alcaicería. Soon
seemingly every gypsy in Granada and the family of frightened Danes were
running through the narrow streets, bowling over tourists as they ran. Before
long there was a large mob of dark-skinned men and dirndl-skirted women
brandishing knives and sticks, pouring down the alleyways of the old town and
heading for the continuing screams echoing around the silk market. In the
middle of the rabble Maria Conchita thought to herself, Yes this is what it is
to be a gypsy When you are threatened by a monster a single call and they come
from all corners of the city to protect you.