(2008) Mister Roberts (12 page)

After
watching him trudge out of sight Laurence and Miriam re-entered the gloom of
Noche Azul. Miriam excitedly told everyone, ‘These headphones. Apparently with
these headphones I can hear the thoughts of cats and dogs. I’m going to try
them on now.’ She placed the device over her springy grey hair. The phones
didn’t quite fit her ears as if they were made for a different, smaller shape
of head but with a bit of bending she forced them until they were close enough.

‘Now I
look at a dog …’ said Miriam turning her head around until she finally fixed
on her own three-legged pet Coffee Table lying on the cold tiled floor of the
bar. As soon as Miriam’s gaze alighted on the creature Laurence and the others
heard a sound like a bad-tempered radio play leaking out of the earphones and a
terrible expression of fear came over Miriam’s face. Frantically she tried to
tear the headphones from her head but at first she couldn’t dislodge them,
until finally, she managed to rip them off, fling them to the floor and stamp
the device into a thousand pieces with her tiny feet. Then she screamed at all
the dogs in the bar, ‘You bastards! You little bastards!’ Then she ran out of the
door. Naturally her dog went after her, travelling remarkably rapidly on its
three legs and, because Coffee Table was leaving, several other dogs followed.
For quite some time as she ran through the narrow lanes of the village they
could all hear Miriam screaming, ‘No you bastards get away from me! How could
you? How could you think those things? I feed you! I feed all of you swine!’
and as she ran the pack of barking hounds pursuing her grew ever larger.

It took Adey two hours of
walking along dusty rock-strewn paths before he finally reached the mouth of a
cave hidden from view in a stand of cork oaks and cactus. He entered the cave
and gave out a low whistle. Immediately there was a rustle from behind him, a
pile of sacking stirred and from beneath it came two aliens both about the same
size as a thirteen-year-old child.

Sitting
quietly in the opposite corner, not quite covered by a blue tarpaulin, were a
Victorian gentleman in a tall top hat and stiff tight suit with black patent
leather boots on his feet and next to him his lady, golden curls spilling out
from under a pink bonnet, gigantic hooped skirt flaring out from her waist and
a frilly parasol held daintily over her shoulder.

Towards morning on
Christmas Day Sid and Nancy’s little shuttle craft had been impelled through
the earth’s atmosphere by the fireball of their mothership exploding under the
remorseless assault of the rebel fighters. In a daze they landed their ship as
near as they could to the spot where the deserter’s craft was recorded as
having touched down.

Since
the moment when they’d been born, in the military hatchery Sid and Nancy had
lived a life of rigorous discipline and were unaccustomed to having to make any
decisions for themselves; unsure of what to do next they sat for a while in
stunned silence while the engines of their craft cooled and clicked behind
them.

‘The
Imperial battlestar is destroyed,’ said Sid finally ‘So what are we to do?’

‘Carry
on with the mission, of course,’ Nancy replied.

She had
come six hundred and ninety thousand places above Sid at the military academy
so considered herself superior to him, even though they were equal in rank.

‘But
the Empire will have no record of the disappearance of the Planetary
Exploration Suit and they will not know that we are trapped on this primitive
planet,’ Sid persisted, ‘and we have no way to get in touch with headquarters.
Perhaps if another battlecruiser is passing close by we could contact it with
our communications equipment, but it could be years before that happens.’

‘So we
have no option but to complete our assigned task,’ Nancy insisted.

Sid
really couldn’t see the logic of this, but unable to come up with a reply he
went along with Nancy in finding a cave and hiding their ship at the back of
it.

Then,
following their last orders, the pair of aliens quickly set about trying to
track down the missing Exploration Suit.

Despite
Nancy’s fixidity of purpose this did not go well. They soon found out as they
travelled around the mountain villages of the Sierra Nevadas and Sierra de
Contraviesas that a Victorian gentleman in a tall top hat accompanied by a lady
with golden curls spilling out from under a pink bonnet and carrying a parasol,
wordlessly showing their 3-D photo of Mister Roberts, did not meet with a great
deal of cooperation.

As there was no re-supply
from the mothership their stocks of food soon began to run low. They were only
a couple of days into their mission and already starving to death. Now it was
Nancy’s turn to be indecisive: there were no precedents for their predicament
in the military training manuals and it was Sid who, by accident, came up with
what they should do.

In some
ways the aliens were obviously more advanced than human beings, their
technology was clearly far in advance of anything that had been created on
Earth. On the other hand, having only ever known constant warfare, fighting and
struggle they were in some ways closer to their primitive natures. Sitting on
the edge of the cave one morning Sid saw a jack rabbit skipping across the
rocky grassland. More or less without a thought he pounced on the startled
animal and killed it with his claws.

With
astonishing rapidity ancient instincts began to emerge. Within five days of
landing they had permanently shed their bulky human suits, and putting their
mission to one side they began to hunt for sustenance. Lightning fast the pair
ran across the hills catching rabbits and small birds to eat. For the first
time in their lives they felt a sense of freedom, the destruction of the
gigantic death star, symbol of Imperial power, of thoughtless devotion to duty,
had shown them their natural selves, which they never could have conceived of
when they were breathing the dead air of the giant spaceship. After all, as
they said to each other, they had to be fit and healthy if at some future date
they were going to find the deserter and the missing Planetary Exploration
Suit.

It was
during one of their hunting trips that they came face to face with Adey He was
tramping between one village and another his bag of cheap junk on his back when
he saw two large lizard-skinned creatures, one with a dead rabbit in its mouth.
This was the first native that Sid and Nancy had encountered without the
protection of their suits but they felt no reason to worry over meeting a lone
human in this isolated place, after all they came from a culture that ruled
most of the galaxy so they were merely curious to see what an inhabitant of
this planet had to offer them.

On
Adey’s part he was unafraid partly because it was simply not in his nature to
be intimidated by anyone but also because of a quirk in his character that had
meant he had always been considered peculiar back home, because even as a
child he had loved animals.

Everybody
of importance, the preachers and the politicians, told the modern African that
all creatures, all plants, all of nature was merely a resource for
all-important, all-conquering mankind; any other feeling for the planet was
dismissed as old-fashioned and outmoded sentimentality Any animals that got in
the way of intensive agriculture or chemical plants or prestigious dam-building
schemes were to be exterminated, apart from those that were nice to eat or
were of the bigger, furry kind that could be kept in parks for white tourists
to visit.

This
had always felt wrong to Adey and back when he was a child in his home village
he had found a monitor lizard which had had one of its legs hacked off by local
kids. Adey had nursed the creature back to health and kept it as a pet for many
years so when he was confronted by two scaly creatures the size of a
thirteen-year-old child, he was merely reminded of his former pet and felt only
a benign curiosity.

Using
sign language Sid and Nancy persuaded Adey to follow them to the cave where
they had been sheltering and once there, employing headphones identical to the
ones he’d sold Miriam that allowed different species to talk to each other, the
aliens and the African were able to communicate with each other.

Over
the next day and a half as they sat round the fire feasting on rabbit and wild
capers Adey told them all about his life: the poverty in his home country, his
trip across the rough seas from the Spanish colony of Melilla to Alicante in a
leaking fishing boat and the work he did trudging from village to village,
trying to sell pirated junk. In turn they told him all about their home planet,
the Empire and the galactic wars, the many technological marvels they possessed
and every detail of their mission including the bit about the Earth being
destroyed if they didn’t succeed in locating the missing Alien Exploration Suit
and if they managed to contact another Imperial Battlestar. The preachers back
home had often gone on about the Earth being destroyed so it didn’t come as a
particular shock to Adey that it might actually happen, but he still felt on
balance that it would be a good idea if Mister Roberts was found, so he
suggested to Sid and Nancy that he should undertake the task of finding the
robot. With nothing to lose the two aliens agreed and handed over the 3-D
picture of their quarry.

Tres Reyes

The Christmas and New Year
holidays ground on like some kind of demented gameshow from Italian television
where the objective was not to go to bed ever and to absorb as much drink and
drugs as possible. In former times the festivities would have been a brief
respite from the endless backbreaking toil of life on the land but these days,
when most people’s work seemed easy and undemanding, with all kinds of power
tools and electronic devices to help them, the Spanish appeared determined to
drink and eat more and stay up later than they ever had before.

Even so
there was a limit. Once the holidays were over a lot of the community, both
British and Spanish, would gratefully disappear behind their studded gates,
metal window grills and high walls until the spring, but before they could do
that they had to get through the festival of Three Kings on the evening of 5
January, the holiday on the 6th then finish with the Matanza the day after.

So
there was still just under a week to go when on the evening of the 2nd the
whole gang of Brits drove ten kilometres down the valley to another settlement
where they were having a fiesta. To squeeze in a fiesta between Christmas, New
Year’s and Three Kings might seem odd but there simply weren’t enough days in
the year for the number of fiestas the modern Spaniard wanted to throw.
Sometimes when Laurence drove to Granada or Malaga on the motorway it seemed as
if half the commercial traffic was merry-go-rounds and doughnut stalls being
towed from town to town by groaning, smoke-belching old trucks. The other half
was eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers hauling prawns up and down the country.

This
place they were driving to was a town rather than a village and the last
community before the Granada/Motril highway, which ran across the end of the
main street on an arched concrete bridge. After a few weeks stuck in the house
Laurence often felt driving down the main street of the town with its huge grey
shed of an orange cooperative, Internet café and two discos that he’d suddenly
emerged onto Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, so frantic and twenty-first century
did it seem.

Of
late, though, during the last three or four years, he had found himself, more
and more, avoiding the place. When Laurence had first come to live in Spain,
when the only foreign inhabitants had been Roger, Nige and Baz and himself,
he’d frequently driven to the town in his little Seat. Before high-speed broadband
there had been the bank to visit to change money or make deposits and the post
office to send letters and now and then he had just wanted to hear the voice of
another English person. In time it slowly dawned on Laurence that each time a
new individual came to live in his own village, an almost identical Brit
seemingly appeared by magic in this town. In their ‘Bar Harlequin’, almost
identical to Noche Azul, with the same harsh neon lighting, screaming stereo
and giant TVs in each corner, this British community possessed their own
Miriam, their own Leonard, their own Baz the builder, their own Janet, their
own Frank and even, he had to admit, their own Laurence — a prissy set designer
by the name of Derek Twookey with whom he’d worked years before on a series of
Lovejoy.
Of course there were differences: the town’s Li Tang was a Cambodian woman
called Dao and their Nige, an ex-model called Magenta de Calliope, wasn’t a
lesbian.