(2008) Mister Roberts (17 page)

“Follow
me”. They sort of consulted together without speaking, looking at each other
with their blank faces but then Mister Roberts signalled to them and they
trouped off after us. We went through canned goods, household products, the fish
counter, sliced meats, until we came to the salad aisle. I stopped them there
in front of all the beautiful coloured leaves, crammed into their crinkly
packets. “This is the fruit of your labours,” I said. “You picked these salads
in temperatures hotter than an oven, the air was full of poison and they paid
you nothing.” I indicated Mister Roberts. “And he feels pity for you. But he is
also angry because you shouldn’t do this work. You help them strangle the
rivers and contaminate the soil. He is here to take you out of slavery Look,” I
said, “look at the strength he has.” Then Mister Roberts, without me even
telling him to, picked up the whole lettuce section and threw it all the way
into dairy products. Then the security guards came running with their batons
drawn and when I looked back all the South Americans had legged it.’

Here
Donna lapsed into silence giving no sign that she was ever going to continue
until Stanley was forced to ask, ‘So what happened?’

‘Well,
me and Mister Roberts drove into Granada, we waited till it got dark, broke the
window of a jewellery store, robbed that, mugged a couple of tourists, and came
back.’

Stanley
said, ‘This is mad. Look, are you going to tell him to give himself up or not?’

‘No,
no, no,’ Donna said. ‘I’m sure this religion thing could work if I just gave it
another go. And we could do so much good in the world, preach a message of
peace and ecology and all like that. Do you, do they, want to kill somebody who
could save the planet?’

The boy
didn’t know what to do. He turned to the African. ‘I dunno Adey, maybe she’s
right … what do you think?’

Adey
put a hand on the lad’s shoulder and said in a kind voice, ‘Boy, your mother’s
crazy’

Donna
seemed at last to accept that she was not going to argue her way out of this.
Squaring her shoulders she said, ‘Well, from what I remember of the legends the
Norse Viking told our class there’s always a big battle between good and evil
at some point so it looks like we’re going to be having Ragnarok here in Bar
Noche Azul. And from what I can see Mister Roberts is a later model than those
two so perhaps he can do things they can’t, we’ll see won’t we?’

Then
turning to her companion she ordered, ‘Take them, you can do it.’

Laurence
was one of the few who had seen Mister Roberts using all of his physical power
but even so he was staggered by the agility the big man showed as he vaulted
the counter and in a half-crouch approached the Victorian couple.

If his
movements were a shock, the speed and grace with which these two moved apart,
throwing tables and chairs aside to give themselves more room, was just as
astonishing. In a split second they flanked Mister Roberts, the woman folding
her parasol with a snap, forming it into a short jabbing spear.

At the
first whiff of the coming fight all of the British, following long-established
practice, cleared to the walls, but for some odd reason none of them actually
made for the door, which would have been the truly sensible thing to do.
Laurence supposed that like him they all had a sense that they were witnessing
something that they would never see again.

To
Laurence the fight that unfolded resembled one of those Victorian boxing
matches that went on for ninety-five rounds. In part this was due to the style
in which two thirds of the contestants were dressed, but there was also
something remorseless and cruel in the pounding that the three of them handed
out to each other. The strangest thing, though, was that unlike all the other
fights there had ever been in Bar Noche Azul none of the contestants made a
sound. Apart from the smashing of crockery, the dull thud of blows and the
splintering of furniture, there was silence.

The
woman’s spear was the first thing to make contact, jabbing up under Mister
Roberts’ armpit and causing him to stagger sideways.

Next,
as the top-hatted man moved in, fists raised, Mister Roberts caught him with a
tremendous back-handed blow sending shivers running through his body like a
telegraph pole that a car has just run into. The man froze unable to move.

Donna
was right, Mister Roberts was faster and stronger than his opponents but
unfortunately for her his extra ability did not cancel out the man and woman’s
numerical advantage. The Victorian gent was not out of action for long: as
Mister Roberts closed to grapple with the lady the man straightened and drove
blows with his fists into the back of Mister Roberts’ head. Mister Roberts
threw the woman across the room, her head landing in the orange-juice-making
machine behind the bar, smashing it to bits, plastic, metal and orange pulp
flying everywhere.

Now
Mister Roberts and the other man began trading punches. Years ago Laurence had
filmed in a car factory where there had been a giant machine stamping out whole
sides of cars from flat sheets of metal; their blows appeared to have as much
force as that remorseless mechanism.

From
behind Mister Roberts the woman reappeared, orange juice dripping from her
bonnet, and taking a good grip on his throat with one hand began to squeeze.
Though he tried everything to shake her off she refused to let go and while he
writhed, her other hand tore at his body with clawed fingers. From the front
Mister Roberts continued to repel the man, matching him blow for blow but there
were simply twice as many punches, kicks, bites and stabs coming the other way
so slowly he began to crumble: first one of his arms stopped working and swung
limp at his side then under assault from both of them his legs began to buckle
until slowly he crumpled to his knees. The woman finally let go of the big man’s
neck and took the opportunity to land a tremendous blow with both fists to the
top of his head. Without a sound Mister Roberts flopped face down onto the
floor of Bar Noche Azul, dust, bits of prawn and peanut shells flying up into
the air as he hit the tiles.

There
was a pause as the Victorian man and woman stared down at their toppled foe.
Then the man bent down and with a tearing sound ripped the back of Mister
Roberts wide open. Gently the two of them then bent over the body and lifted
Runciman out, like a giant, limp, bloody baby being born by caesarian section.
The man and the woman carefully laid him on the rubble-strewn floor of the bar
and looked at Adey He stepped forward and touched his fingers to the boy’s neck
then ran his hands lightly over his torso.

‘He’s
still alive,’ the African said, ‘but he needs to be taken to the clinic right
away.

There
were a few seconds of silence before Baz started out of the trance they were
all in. ‘The pickup’s right outside,’ he said, glad to get away from all the
madness. ‘I’ll take him.’

He,
Miriam and Leonard lifted the boy and carried him out of the back door as
tenderly as they could.

‘Nobody
must be told what went on here,’ Adey called after them.

‘Yeah
right,’ Baz shouted back. ‘Who exactly do you think would believe it?’

Of
course, Adey need not have worried. Besides the reticence of those in the
village towards giving information to the authorities, if there was one
occasion when you wanted to take a battered and bloodied thirteen-year-old to
the clinic in Durcal with no questions asked it was the matanza, since a
combination of sharp knives, blowtorches, drunkenness and absconding pigs
meant this was their busiest day of the year and they had no time or
inclination to make probing inquiries.

Donna had stayed behind
the bar during the fight, now finally she came forward and the crowd
respectfully parted to let her through. Slowly she knelt beside the battered
form of Mister Roberts, putting her hands lightly on his torso she looked up at
the Victorians and quietly asked, ‘Could you turn him over please?’

They
seemed to understand what she wanted and bent and rolled him onto his back.

She
threw herself across him, weeping.

Laurence
thought that even though her grief was perhaps real there remained a theatrical,
self-pitying quality to it. Her son, who would have been justified in taking
up a chair and hitting her with it, instead knelt beside her and, taking his
mother’s hand said, ‘It’s all right Mum, it’s all right now, we’ll be fine,
I’ll look after you, we don’t need anybody else. After all he was only plastic
and metal.’

On film
sets there was generally a nurse present, often moonlighting from their regular
jobs in A&E departments. One had once told Laurence that in a dangerous
situation you didn’t need to be afraid of people who were all spluttering and
aggressive and red in the face, because all their blood was going to their
head. They weren’t going to do anything to you. The ones you had to worry about
were those whose faces were completely white: they’d sent all their blood to
their limbs prior to smacking you with them. Donna’s features were the shade of
the snows on Mulhacén as she looked at her son. Pulling her hand away she said,
‘You couldn’t stand to see me happy could you? You had to go and ruin it.’

Unlike
hers, Stanley’s face turned red with shame and hurt. ‘But Mum, he was just a
machine. I’m your own flesh and blood.’

‘He
meant more to me than you ever will. After I’d done so much for other people,
he was going to be my reward. He was the only one who looked after me.’

Then
she collapsed again, weeping bitter tears onto the corpse of her imaginary,
mechanical lover and crying out, ‘Let me die here with him.’

Adey
turned towards Laurence who had been trying to ease his way out of the bar without
anybody seeing him.

‘Mister
Laurence,’ he said.

‘Err
yes, hello?’ Laurence answered, he was wedged half in and half out of the door.
Outside in the street the gutters ran red with blood, men chasing runaway pigs
raced past brandishing sharp knives and dismembered carcasses and miles of
looped intestines hung in the doorways of all the houses opposite. Not for the
first time Laurence understood why all the leading surrealists had been
Spanish; if the clock overlooking the basketball court had started melting he
wouldn’t have been in any way surprised.

Adey
said in a stern voice, ‘I asked you about him and you lied to me. You swore you
knew nothing, yet you must have understood how serious I was.’

‘Well,
I’m sorry,’ Laurence blustered. ‘You do know we have a rule around here that we
don’t tell on anybody?’

‘That
is a coward’s way to avoid making a moral choice,’ Adey stated. ‘The other
ones, they say they are not happy with you. That you are going to have to be
made an example of.’

‘That’s
right,’ said Donna, rising furiously from the corpse of Mister Roberts, her
face slick with tears. ‘It’s all his fault.’

Next Summer in London

It
was evening in London, the gummy pavements unable to absorb even a
fraction more heat exhaled it back into the atmosphere so it lay shimmering
like imperfect glass over the cars, buses and the dripping pedestrians.

‘Were
they going to mess you up?’ asked the young man.

‘Well,
of course I thought that’s what they were going to do: mess me up in some way,
smash my head in, but what they did at first seemed worse. They told me I had
to look after Donna and her son. That I had to have them come and live in my
big house. Adey said in his country a place the size of mine would be the
airport terminal or parliament and it was criminal to keep it for just one old
man.

It
suited their purposes too, of course, him and his alien friends. This way
somebody was keeping an eye on Donna and Stanley, making sure they didn’t go
around blabbing their secret.

‘Though
really in some ways, it was too late: the brown sauce was out of the bottle.
People tell me that in the markets, around the bus stations and in the
backstreets of the industrial cities where they sell stuff for the South
American workers from the
plasticas,
there’ve started to appear on the
religious stalls, alongside the crucifixes made of shells and the statues of
the Virgin Mary, these painted plaster figurines of a man in a dark suit: a man
with black hair, a muscular body and empty black eyes. I’ve seen a couple that
people have brought back and I have to say the resemblance is quite
remarkable. If I were to ask the South Americans directly they wouldn’t talk
about it but according to Nige, who of course gets on with them, the cult of
the dark man is spreading through the
plasticas
like leaf mould. Though
there’s been no mention in the papers there have been protests, strikes,
sabotage. The sect even has its first martyr, the Guardia saw to that. Nige
also said that there’s already been a split over the meaning of His words, as
relayed by Donna. Apparently her Spanish was open to ambiguous interpretation.’