(2008) Mister Roberts (4 page)

In Spain there is no
mention of Christmas holidays until mid-December but once they get going it can
sometimes seem as if they are never going to end. The semi-official beginning
is on the 22nd with the proclamation of
El Gordo
— the state lottery
known as ‘The Fat Boy’. The centrepiece is a five-hour TV show broadcast on the
number-one channel, during which the winning numbers are called out by orphans
from Madrid’s San Ildefonso school. It’s hard to believe that anywhere else in
the world you could have a television spectacular that was just a handful of
little orphaned boys chanting numbers into a microphone, but Bar Noche Azul was
always crammed for the entire length of the programme.

Unlike
in the UK the Spanish don’t celebrate Christmas Day much. The night of the 24th
is ‘Noche Buena’ — ‘The Good Night’ — traditionally the first big night of
feasting and getting together with the family while the 25th is generally spent
dozing around the house and picking at the remnants of the meal from the night
before.

Even if
the 25th had been more of a holiday, Stanley would still have been walking
alone through the scrub-covered hillside high above the village, for one thing
his mother wasn’t the type to leave presents under the tree or invite the
neighbours round for mulled wine. Last year they’d had their Christmas Day,
complete with turkey and roast potatoes, presents, cards and a tree, on a
Tuesday morning in the middle of July.

Stanley’s
mother Donna had lived in the village since she was a teenager. Roger her
father had been one of the British pilgrim fathers, who had owned a little
village house on Calle Carniceria for several years before even Laurence
arrived. Nobody even knew he had a daughter, until suddenly sixteen-year-old
Donna had turned up with a little baby in tow and announced she was going to
make a new life for herself in Spain. According to Roger the father was a
lonely Brazilian teenage footballer on an unsuccessful and bewildering
three-month loan spell at Middlesbrough FC and that was why Stanley was half
black. Roger said the footballer had been her first and she had only let him do
it to her because she felt sorry for him.

The first time Laurence
met Donna was in the local pharmacy On entering he initially thought somebody
had collapsed by the counter, perhaps after being diagnosed with some terrible
disease but it was just the women who ran the shop fussing in a demented
fashion over Donna’s infant. Children in Spain were treated as visiting foreign
potentates from repressive regimes were treated in Britain, traffic was stopped
and work suspended. In the queue behind Donna people who needed vital
medication understood that they were going to have to wait.

Laurence
usually had great difficulty in talking to people much younger than himself,
either he acted like he was some aged colonel who’d died at the time of the
Crimean War or he had to stop himself speaking like an OG gangsta, saying ‘whattup
dawg?’ and ‘true dat’ even if the kid he was talking to was a ten-year-old
Chinese violin prodigy Somehow with Donna, right from the start he always
managed to just talk. Once he’d introduced himself she said, handing her child
across the counter so that the shop assistants could really have a go, ‘It
would have been easy for me to have stayed in Darlington and finished my
education you know? My mum was more than happy to look after Stanley or I could
have kept him with me in the school’s crèche. I could have carried on going to
clubs with my mates. All the other pregnant teenage girls on the estate shared
out baby clothes they robbed from shops in town. Life was all right but it made
me sick how the council would give every slut who got herself knocked up a nice
little flat with two bedrooms and central heating. That’s why I’ve come to
Spain, to make something of myself. I’m a mother now, a lioness who must do
anything to protect her cub.’

‘Right…’
Laurence said, ‘… and was the father really a Brazilian footballer?’

‘Well,
I don’t know that he wasn’t.’

As Stanley made his way
across the rocky ground, icy wind slithering through the gnarled trees, his
mind was filled with worry about his mother. She’d gone out last night and not
come home; he would really have liked to go to Noche Azul just to check up that
she was there and not injured and lying in a hospital somewhere, but he knew
that if she was in the bar and he came around looking for her there was a good
chance that she’d turn nasty.

So he
figured it was best if he just went walking. But, unlike in the past, he found
he couldn’t leave his worry back down in the village, it came with him up into
the mountains.

In many
ways it was a good thing that in Spanish villages and towns, unlike in the UK,
there was no separation between the young and old: they all used the same bars,
went to the same fiestas, hung about in the same squares. In comparison, if you
were to look at any town centre in Britain at night-time you’d think there’d
been some sort of plague caused by an escaped virus, that had killed everybody
over thirty while leaving the young survivors with terrible brain damage. Brain
damage that caused them to reel about the streets vomiting, shouting, fighting
and showing their breasts to passing policemen.

Still
sometimes, if you were a kid in the village with a parent who was an abrasive,
noisy person like Donna, then it would have been nice from time to time to get
away from her, but it wasn’t possible. You were stuck at a youth club where
they let old people play on the ping-pong tables and dance at the disco.

At the
moment for Stanley each new day seemed to bring some fresh and unpleasant
thought or unsettling feeling. Yesterday it had been his confusion about the
reasons why Simon hadn’t come to meet him. Today Stanley was beginning to be
concerned that a lot of people in the village thought of his mum as a bit of a
nutter. Only two days before in Bar Noche Azul he’d seen her push past the
owner Fabien to go and rummage in the kitchen fridge for something to eat.
Emerging with a chicken leg in her hand she’d said to her son, ‘They love me in
here’, but the look on Fabien’s face seemed a long way from love.

While
Donna didn’t seem to have any idea of how she was perceived, her son churned
inside with embarrassment on her behalf. With an effort he decided that he
couldn’t cope right now with the worry of whether his mum was a figure of
ridicule or not. He was probably getting everything backwards. As he walked
on, his agitation slowly decreased with each step he took away from the
village. He’d been hiking for about three hours since he’d passed through the
gate in the ancient walls, climbing steadily through the changing vegetation of
the valley Once past the orange and olive groves that surrounded his home,
crossing streams and ancient water channels he travelled in the shade of oaks,
maples and elms. Higher up still, Stanley emerged from the tree-line onto rocky
flatland, the windblown grass woven with creeping juniper and laburnum. Up on
these slopes the shrubs were low, rosemary, thyme and lavender all flourished
but never grew above about knee-high. In spring wild flowers in blues and
purples would compete with the astonishing red of the poppies but right now
the landscape was almost monochrome. As he walked lizards scuttled away from
his footfall towards the shelter of the dry brush.

Stanley
paused for a second and surveyed the little clusters of habitation far below
him that grew like white patches of pigment on the green skin of the mountains.
Above him a griffin vulture wheeled lazily in the sky Breathing heavily the boy
clutched his thin jacket around him. Though the sky was an unremitting clear
blue, even in the sunshine it was freezing.

Pressing
on it took a while for him to notice that a clump of Spanish firs towards which
he’d been heading had been smashed apart by some large object which had left a
path of still smouldering, scorched earth etched into the scrubland. Stanley
paused and looked around for other human activity but there was only the
shivering of grasses and the creaking of tree branches in the icy wind.
Tentative at first he followed the trail of blackened soil which ran for nearly
half a kilometre before it ended abruptly at a rocky outcrop against which
something had smashed with tremendous force; the object now reduced to a few
twisted ribs and melted clumps of some strange not quite metal-looking
substance. The boy stared for a few seconds at the mangled wreck before
noticing with a sudden start the body of a man lying face down in a cluster of
broken cactus. Approaching closer his first thought was that the jacket of the
man’s dark suit, a bizarre sight in itself up here on the mountainside, had
been torn open at the back and was standing proud of his carcass.

Initially
Stanley assumed that he was looking at a murder victim. After all, in films
people were always coming across murder victims. Sometimes these people became
part of the plot but generally you never saw them again. It was one of the
things he’d always worried about, finding a body At school, when somebody
committed a transgression and the teacher asked the class who’d done it, he
inevitably had the compulsion to confess even though he was invariably
innocent. He was convinced if he ever found a corpse he’d be unable to stop
himself telling the Guardia Civil that he’d done it and knowing them they’d
probably look no further but lock him up in the big prison near Cadiz with
Runciman’s dad. Only on closer inspection did he see, with enormous relief,
that the thing wasn’t a person and that the raised flap was in fact a door that
opened into the body of whatever it was that was lying there. But what was this
thing exactly, an unwanted figure from a waxwork museum of the last President
of France but one? Or a shop window dummy from some old-fashioned haberdashers
in Malaga’s old town? Its neat dark suit certainly seemed pretty dated. But
what was it doing up here?

Stanley
knew that there was nothing the Spanish liked better than to come to a beauty
spot and leave their rubbish, but this seemed a bit excessive even for them,
especially since the nearest road was two hours’ walk away and Spanish garbage
leavers, not being fitness fanatics, always travelled by car or truck.

The boy
took Valery Giscard d’Estaing, or whoever it was, by the ankles and tried to
pull him out of the cactus, but either he was stuck or the dummy was incredibly
heavy because he could not budge it even one centimetre. He paused for a
minute, then skirting the spikes of the plant was able to edge himself
alongside the prone form and peer inside. He now understood that it could be a
costume of some kind and someone his size might find it possible to climb
through the hatch and fit inside it.

Stanley
suddenly thought of the large number of stray cats that lived in his village:
they were fed, watered and their multiple medical needs attended to by a gang
of middle-aged Englishwomen led by one called Miriam. Unlike the cats in other
villages their coats were glossy, their eyes unclouded, clearly they didn’t
need to hunt for food, yet nearly every day there was some crisis amongst the
women: a cat had got itself wedged down a drain or bricked up behind a wall or
had fallen asleep in the boot of a tourist’s car and now somehow had to be
shipped back from Norway Stanley, as he struggled unsuccessfully against the
overwhelming desire to stick his head into the body of the prone figure,
thought he now understood what drove the cats to get themselves stuck. Giving
in to his irresistible curiosity he manoeuvred himself on top of the figure and
slid his head inside. It felt cool and slightly rubbery against his skin, but
not frightening, so he wriggled the rest of his body into the casing of the
man, slipping his arms and legs within the arms and legs of the suit.

As soon
as Stanley was completely enclosed all the screens burst into life and the
hatch door slammed shut. The boy was now trapped within the alien machine,
pinioned into place by the closefitting limbs. Immediately he panicked and
tried to free himself. From the outside it appeared as if the man lying face
down in the cactus had suddenly come to violent life, he began to writhe and
twist on the ground, sending shards of plant and clumps of earth flying
hundreds of metres in every direction with the ferocity and power of his
movements. From inside the man’s head there came an indistinct yelling.

After a
minute of flailing the figure collapsed and lay still, then after a pause, and
with great hesitation, the man began to climb unsteadily to his feet. Several
times he pitched sideways back into the cactus but each time he slowly raised
himself until eventually he stood swaying like a baby on unsteady legs. The big
man in the suit remained motionless for some minutes, only his head pivoted
from side to side, his strange black eyes seeming to take in the scene like a
traffic camera, then he took a tentative step forward which sent him flying
face down into the earth.

The
whole process was repeated but this time the big man in the dark suit coped
better, taking a number of wavering strides before he fell again.

With
his head pressed into the inner skin of the robot Stanley thought of how to
open the suit. In his mind he imagined the back of it opening up and as soon as
he did this the hatch at the rear of the robot unlocked, the door sprung open
and a split second later Stanley came tumbling out of the back.

Slowly
the young boy circled the huge, frozen figure of the man. ‘Unbelievable!’ he
said to himself and then, just as the silly kitten re-enters the drain that has
nearly cost it its life, Stanley climbed back into the machine. The door closed
behind him and the man in the business suit climbed slowly to his feet, then
set off back down the mountain, walking at first but after a while breaking
into a joyful loping run. Swifter than the most sure-footed mountain goat he
hurtled through the pink rock-rose and juniper towards the white village below,
the muffled sound of whooping coming from inside his head.