(2008) Mister Roberts (13 page)

After
some internal wrestling Laurence had forced himself to come to terms with this
duplication and the realisation that came with it that he wasn’t a unique
snowflake, that there were maybe hundreds of Laurences in southern Spain alone.
It took some getting used to, but he eventually managed it. However, since the
turn of the century something more disturbing had begun: there had started to
appear not just versions of him and his friends but younger versions of him and
his friends. Right now in this town there was a whole crowd of young British
who were to his eyes clearly Laurence and Nige and Baz and Miriam when they had
been in their twenties. That was much harder to take. To see yourself happy and
healthy, laughing and optimistic, with all your myriad blunders and adventures
ahead of you, stripped away the defences you had laboriously built up against
the depredations of old age, like brake fluid thrown over the paint of a car by
a jealous lover. Apart from the pain of seeing yourself as you once were, there
was also the feeling that these young people were your responsibility in some way,
that somehow you could prevent them making the mistakes you made so that their
lives wouldn’t descend into the same sadness as yours. Once at an earlier
fiesta, very drunkenly he had gone up to the guy he thought was Laurence
Version 2.0 and said, ‘Don’t wear brown shoes to the BAFTAS,’ but of course the
boy hadn’t known what he was talking about and had simply sidled away from him
with a look of disgust on his face.

Their
dopplegangers were at the fiesta tonight, grouped around a circular white
plastic table, but luckily they were the ones who were the same age. Laurence
supposed the younger ones were off somewhere else, perhaps actually having a
good time.

So
identical to his own gang did this little group appear that he found himself
looking to see where their mute, frightening giant was, but of course this town
possessed no Mister Roberts. One up to his village, then.

In most
ways the fiesta in this town, like its British community, was identical to the
fiestas in all the other villages, towns and cities in all of the other valleys
of the Sierra Nevada. The same band played in the same tent and the same
stallholders sold fried dough and plastic trinkets. Yet there were also always some
subtle differences. In this particular town they had a legend that sometime in
the distant past there had lived a duck which had saved the town from marauding
Visigoths with its loud, warning quacks. Due to this fable the church always
had several Barbary ducks wandering up and down the aisles and honking their
way through the priest’s sermon. Also at fiesta time the village men would
dress up in elaborate duck outfits that would be burnt at the end of the night
on a big bonfire. Despite this it had been discovered at some point that being
dressed like a duck did not provide the villagers with enough opportunity to
make a huge noise, so now in one hand each fowl carried an antique flintlock
pistol. From time to time they would fire this gun in the air with a terrifying
percussion that sent dangerous shards of shrapnel and bits of the pistol flying
in all directions.

Laurence’s
gang found themselves a table on the edge of the dance floor. He had never
mentioned his doppleganger theory to anyone except Nige and she’d dismissed it
as a symptom of his overactive imagination. Nige could see no similarities
between the Brits in this town and their own crowd, but he noticed that they
naturally chose a table as far away from their doubles as possible. Frank went
to the bar to buy the cloakroom tickets that could be exchanged for drinks and
then they settled down in the distinctive atmosphere of the Spanish fiesta —
the air heavy with the smell of doughnuts and gunpowder.

Laurence
leant across to Donna who was sitting opposite him. ‘Do you fancy a dance?’ he
asked.

‘You
want to dance with me, Laurence?’ Donna replied with surprise.

‘Yes,
if Mister Roberts doesn’t mind.’

‘Oh, he
doesn’t mind.’ She turned to the hulk, ‘Do you mind me dancing with Laurence,
sweetie?’

The
hulk made no reply so taking Laurence’s hand Donna led him towards the dance
floor and the deafening Latin American beats of Humana Show 2000.

Laurence
took her in his arms. It made him feel melancholic recalling the fiestas in the
past where they’d danced together. With Donna, once she’d broken with you, her
anger was such that there was no way back. She might act friendly if it suited
her but she’d never shine that bright light on you ever again. He, on the other
hand, was never able to let even the smallest thing go: there were feuds he’d
had with people going back to primary school and there were ex-lovers from whom
he was still demanding an explanation, sometimes in front of their wives and
children, as to why they broke up with him. Laurence supposed that this
reluctance to let go, this inability to acknowledge when a relationship was
over, was why he felt he had to warn Donna over, the danger he thought her
boyfriend might be bringing down on her.

As they
slowly circled the wooden floor Laurence said, ‘You know Adey?’

‘The
darkie who goes around selling stuff? Yeah, I bought a hairdryer off him once
that turned out to have its insides made of waste paper.’

‘The
African, yes. Well, he came to me yesterday in Noche Azul and showed me a photo
of your friend Mister Roberts and told me that he was really dangerous, that
people were looking for him and if I knew where Mister Roberts was I should
alert Adey by firing three rockets into the air.’

‘I see,
yeah.’ She paused thoughtfully, then said, ‘OK. So what?’

‘So do
you know any reason why people should be looking for him? I mean how much do
you know about him, have you asked him where he’s come from, what he’s doing
here?’

Laurence
had expected she would at least consider what he was telling her but with a
confident, silly smile Donna merely said, ‘You know we don’t pry into other
people’s business in our village, Laurence. I don’t ask you why you can’t ever
go back to Switzerland now, do I?’

Laurence
sighed. ‘I know but I thought we always had a limit about who we allowed to
live in the village:

VAT
fraud, OK; sexual offences that are only illegal in the Southern states of the
US, fine; dodgy passport, all right … but there is something about that man
that is truly disturbing.’

Seemingly
changing the subject she asked him, ‘Laurence, you’ve met lots of rich,
powerful people over the years haven’t you?’

‘Yeah,
I suppose so.

‘Were
they nice?’

‘Nice?’

‘Yeah:
nice, polite, interested in what other people had to say Nice.’

‘Well,
no, they weren’t by and large. Very occasionally they would be OK, polite and
thoughtful but then you’d really notice it and it would usually pass and they’d
go back to being not nice.’

‘Exactly,’
Donna said. ‘My dad once told me that poor people had to be nice to each other
because they might want to borrow somebody’s van one day But the rich, they can
buy their own van, can’t they?’

‘Well,
I don’t know what Julia Roberts would want with a van, but I suppose you’re
right.’

‘And
don’t you think that in fact rich people are being more human really, more
authentic, because that’s what we’d all be like if we had proper power, if our
lives weren’t in the hands of others?’

‘Are we
still talking about the loan of commercial vehicles?’ Laurence asked.

Ignoring
him, Donna continued. ‘You know, I used to worry like mad if people liked me or
not. I was terrified of being alone, abandoned, friendless, because the world
seemed like such a frightening place that you had to have allies but I’ll tell
you what, Grandad, now I’ve got Mister Roberts the world needs to be frightened
of me.’

At the same time as Donna
was dancing with Laurence and explaining her ideas of evolutionary psychology,
her secret weapon was being forced to listen to Miriam drunkenly telling him
all the details of her mental breakdown. There was something about the
stillness of the big man that encouraged some people, those whose brains
weren’t put together right, to confide in him.

‘Is it
wrong for a woman to want to have a child by her cat?’ Miriam woozily demanded.

With
the use of hand gestures Mister Roberts indicated that he had to go somewhere
immediately and without waiting for Miriam to tell him any more he got up and
striding through the dancers was soon far away from the clamour of the dance
floor.

On the
southern edge of the town there was a stone bridge that spanned an
arroyo
and
carried the old coaching road that ran from Granada to the coast. Mister
Roberts headed towards this. The robot’s footsteps echoed from the walls of
the town’s long shopping street, empty since all the inhabitants had been drawn
to the noise and excitement of the fiesta. In the distance as he walked Mister
Roberts saw Runciman Carnforth heading back into town after huffing a can of
lighter gas under the bridge.

Under a
streetlight they came together, Mister Roberts and the boy Runciman went to
pass but Mister Roberts stepped in front of the thirteen-year-old, blocking his
way and putting a hand on his chest. Runciman was vaguely aware of who this man
was, having seen him around the valley, so he wouldn’t have been particularly
worried even if he hadn’t been high.

As it
was, the bully simply stared placidly up into the dark eyes of the man,
expecting that at some point he’d ask a question or tell him off about some
misdemeanour but instead the big adult merely withdrew his hand and brushing
him aside walked towards the darkness of the countryside.

‘Goodnight,
boss!’ Runciman called after him.

Rapidly
Stanley parked Mister Roberts underneath the bridge with his back to the rough
dripping stone, then he climbed out, scrambled back up the dirt bank and
re-entered the town.

As he
walked Stanley thought to himself, shouldn’t there be some warm glow of
goodness burning in his chest? To have let Runciman go on his way was a really
big thing for him and yet he felt, what? Nothing really, well maybe if he
thought about it he didn’t feel bad, not particularly good but not bad.

When
he’d done a bad thing, like helping his mother mess with Monty or beating up
Sergei, there had been a kind of mad pleasure to it but it had been tinged with
blackness at the edges in a way that this feeling wasn’t.

‘Bloody
Hell!’ he thought. ‘Is that it? Is that the best you could hope for if you were
really good and didn’t abuse your power over terrible bullies who in anybody’s
book deserved to be well smashed-up. The absence of bad?’

In the long and forgotten
centuries before the British came to southern Spain the things that affected
life in the valley were the simple, timeless elements of rural existence: the
weather, disease, feuds and family disputes, the wholesale price of oranges. Excepting
the upheaval of the civil war even changes of government in distant Madrid had
had little effect. Yet in the twenty-first century these little white villages
strung out along a twisting mountain road on the edge of the high sierras were
in certain ways more connected to Crouch End than to Cordoba. In the last few
years the holiday times of private schools in Britain had become as important a
component of village life as the almond harvest. The numbers of kids running
around the squares, lanes and paths would be swollen considerably throughout
the duration of the winter, easter or summer breaks by the children of those
who owned second homes within the walls of the village or out in the surrounding
countryside.

Many of
the parents of these youngsters were powerful people back in the UK, TV
producers, surgeons, hedge-fund managers, successful publishers. They spent
huge amounts of money sending their children to private schools in order to
ensure that they mixed only with the offspring of people identical to
themselves. Yet curiously, when they came to the village, these same powerful
parents took no notice of what their sons and daughters were up to, so that
unsupervised they came into contact with all kinds of youths from all kinds of
possibly unsavoury backgrounds. A couple of summers back the two daughters of
Fabien, the co-owner of Noche Azul, had spent a fortnight staying in London
with a Channel 4 commissioning editor and his two teenage girls. The village
girls found most things about London unimpressive including being part of the
audience for the recording of a top comedy gameshow and dinner at the Ivy
Restaurant where they sat next to Elton John’s boyfriend, but all the girls
would cherish for ever the afternoon the four of them got together with Baz’s
three children who lived with his estranged wife and her new boyfriend on a
council estate in Hackney and the whole gang had spent seven hours travelling
around the West End of London surreptitiously disposing of the separate parts
of a sawn-off shotgun that had been used to rob a post office.

Stanley walked back
through the press of drunken adults attending the fiesta, down to the
schoolyard where he knew most of the younger people would be hanging out. In
the crush of kids milling around the stalls was a girl called Pepper Fawkes.
Pepper’s father was a solicitor in the West Midlands who specialised in getting
footballers off charges of rape, drug possession and dangerous driving. During
the last few holidays Stanley had been one of a crowd of kids who’d been
allowed to hang around their big house on the edge of the village, to enjoy its
pool in the summer and its central heating and satellite TV in the winter.
Though Pepper herself had never given him much attention he felt a fondness
towards her because her parents had continued to be nice to him after they’d
had the inevitable falling out with his mum.