(2008) Mister Roberts (7 page)

Donna
circled the robot tentatively touching it and peering inside.

‘But…
where did it come from?’

‘Outer
space of course.’ Stanley said this with the certainty of someone for whom
computer-animated figures on TV were as real as the village baker.

‘Outer
space. I don’t think so. How do you know it isn’t it like some sort of secret
military thing?’

Stanley
snorted. Donna thought it was amazing how supercilious somebody who didn’t know
anything about life could be.

‘What,
the Spanish military? Don’t be dense, Mum. They don’t even have modern hats,
never mind gear like this. No,’ he said with unassailable confidence, ‘this is
from outer space, no question. It’s sort of like a space suit, but one that
lets them explore earth without being detected. And it’s strong as well. Mum, I
can smash down trees and jump really high and run really fast. It’s incredible,
Mum.’

‘Won’t
they be looking for it then, the space people?’ Donna asked.

Her son
thought about this for a second. ‘Well, no, I don’t think so. The alien that
was in it wasn’t around. There’d been a big fire and I think it was his
spaceship that got burned. I reckon he was hurt and staggered off somewhere. So
I don’t know but I don’t think so.

Absentmindedly
Donna said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that to Sergei and Yuri.’

‘He hit
me, Mum.’

‘Yeah,
I suppose Yuri was in the wrong too.’ Then sticking her head inside the body of
the Exploration Suit she said.

‘Blimey
It’s amazing. And only somebody exactly your size could fit into it?’

‘Yeah.
I guess so.

Donna brightened,
the sudden lifting of danger always made her euphoric, indeed in her few quiet
moments she sometimes wondered if that was why she got into so many scrapes.
‘Let’s go back to the bar, me, you and that thing,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Let’s
go back to the bar in a while, first I’ll have a little siesta then a bath and
change my clothes and stuff then we’ll go back. After all, the last time everybody
saw us, him over there was dragging me out through the door to do God knows
what to me. They’ll be worried about my safety’

Stanley
thought that if they’d been so worried about her safety they would have come
round to see if everything was all right by now but he didn’t say anything.

His
mother paused on her way to the bathroom and said, ‘We should give him a name.

‘A
name. Why?’

‘I’ll
have to introduce him to people, stupid:’

‘But he
can’t talk.’

‘Well,
I’ll tell them he can’t talk but he still needs a name.

Stanley,
annoyed that his mum seemed to be taking over his find, tried to get back some
of the initiative by saying, ‘We could call him Mister Robot.’

Donna
said, ‘No, don’t be thick — not Mister Robot, that would give the game away,
don’t you think? Use your brain Stanley! Anyway, nobody’s called Mister Robot.’

Stanley
tried to think through the sudden fog of irritation that he felt towards his
mum. It was always like this, they’d be talking quite naturally, then out of
the blue she’d turn nasty ‘Mister Roberts!’ he shouted. ‘That’s what we’ll call
him! We’ll call him Mister Roberts.’

Donna
tried it on for size. ‘Mister Roberts… Mister Roberts. Laurence, Armando,
Fabien, meet my new boyfriend Mister Roberts.’

‘Your
what?’

Sid and Nancy climbed into
their Planetary Exploration Suits and travelled in them to the shuttle craft
bay, taking a route almost identical to the one the deserter had employed. All
over the ship, crew members were frantically repairing wreckage caused by the
battle.

Waiting
for them at the bay was a craft similar to the one the escaped alien had
stolen. Because of damage from the fighting it had not been possible to provide
them with many sophisticated tracking devices to hunt their quarry or anything
particularly advanced to enable them to survive on the alien planet; the last
thing the captain had told them was that their shuttle craft only had food
supplies for a couple of days, but once the damage from the fighting had been
sorted out their rations would be replenished from the mother ship.

The
Victorian couple strode on board the craft and sat down on a bench at the back
of the cockpit, the couple then climbed out of the rear hatches and settled
themselves in the pilot and co-pilot seats in front of the control panel. They
strapped themselves in, then Sid set a course for the blue-green planet below
them, his partner took control and steered the little ship out of the docking
port and into the silence of infinite space. For a few seconds the shuttle
craft drifted beside the hull of the battlestar, then the main drive engaged
and they sped away from the battered hulk towards the Earth’s atmosphere. In
the cockpit the sight of the silent pair in their antique clothes seated behind
the two aliens with the reptilian skin had the appearance of the young Prince
Albert and Queen Victoria being taken for a drive by two escapees from the zoo.

‘Look!’
Nancy said, pointing at the radar screen of the little shuttle craft: it was
filled with the image of a thousand pulsating dots that swarmed around the
Imperial Battlestar. As quickly as they’d gone the rebel fighters had returned.

You knew you had been in
Bar Noche Azul too long when the sausages came round again. Here in the High
Sierras tapas was still a gift given free to those who bought only the simplest
drinks of wine and beer, the food cooked by the wives and mothers of the bars’
owners. Those who came into the bar for a drink when it opened at 7 a.m. had
little saucers of
piquillo al cabales
— peppers stuffed with Spanish
blue cheese — plonked down in front of them,
ensaladilla russa
followed,
then
morcilla,
the black pudding made by Fabien and Armando’s mum and,
in a more profound way, by the pig Armando kept tethered out the back of the
bar, the pig which would be slaughtered every year at the Matanza, the day just
after the new year when all the local pigs were killed and the streets ran red
with blood. Manchego cheese and
membrillo,
a quince jelly from the
Asturias appeared at around twelve noon, following that came prawns
a la
Plancha,
then
buñuelos de espinacas,
tiny spinach fritters, then the
bar’s own chorizo, a particularly spicy sausage made by Fabien and Armando’s
mum and the pig. Next there was
jamón de Trevélez,
thin slices of
snow-cured ham on chunks of rough local bread and finally goat’s cheese
preserved in oil from the Alpujarras. Approximately eight hours later the
piquillos
al cabales
came back, and the whole process began again. Laurence sat at a
table staring woozily at four plates of chorizo piled in front of him. He couldn’t
figure it out: according to the tapas on the table he had been in Noche Azul
for nearly two days, that couldn’t be right — he was certain he’d spent last
night at home with Stuart. Laurence concluded it was wrong to try and tell the
time with sausages.

He had
desperately wanted to run home after Donna had been dragged out of the bar by
the big silent man, but as usual she left chaos behind that needed clearing up,
namely Sergei lying passed out and bleeding on the floor. Armando and Fabien
had decided this was a problem for the English to deal with so he’d had to call
on his neighbour Baz and Baz’s pickup truck. Baz was builder to the British and
one of the original community who’d been living in the valley since the late
eighties; when something physical needed doing he was the automatic choice.

Laurence
phoned and explained what had happened; at first Baz thought Laurence was exaggerating
but a couple of his Spanish labourers who’d been in the bar confirmed the tale
of the giant man in the suit. A few minutes later he rolled up and with the
labourers’ help Sergei was loaded in the back of the pickup and covered with a
tarpaulin. Then they drove down the valley and along the old road, where they
were less likely to encounter a Guardia checkpoint, to the town of Durcal where
Baz and the labourers dumped Sergei in a chair in the reception of the
twenty-four-hour clinic. When they returned they said the Russian’s breathing
had become very shallow, but that wasn’t their problem anymore.

Afterwards
they’d all needed a drink to calm their nerves and then the rest of the British
had started to drift into the bar and they’d had to be brought up to speed on
what had happened so that now it had turned into yet another lost afternoon in
Noche Azul.

Seated
around a long table was almost the entire British community,
La Comunidad
Ingles
as the locals called them. There was Nige, a tall dark-haired woman
of forty, who everybody considered very beautiful, especially in comparison to
the squat brown Spanish women. She was a sculptor with a big studio space and
living quarters in a rambling four-storey house right at the very centre of the
village in the small plaza where Calle Carniceria and Calle Trinidad met.
Nige’s dogs Dexter and Del Boy, two big matching yellow things lay outside on
the bar’s terrace. Next to her was Frank, a middle-aged Londoner who had
foolishly let himself be persuaded by TV property programmes that he could make
his fortune renovating a house in the village and had spent every penny of his
redundancy on it. He worked on the house each day and the more effort he put
into it the more decrepit it seemed to become. Alongside Frank was Kirsten, who
was Dutch, which more or less made her an honorary Brit, except her spoken
English was much more precise and erudite than theirs. She was an academic who
worked for the European Community in Brussels on matters of social compliance,
but since she spent most of her time in the village they didn’t appear to miss
her. To Kirsten’s right was Li Tang, a Singaporean woman who owned a big walled
house on the edge of the village and who was always extremely vague about her
activities. Opposite Laurence was Janet a retired BBC executive, who lived in
a small house facing Nige’s. She had a small pension and a small dog who was
also called Janet (or more usually ‘Little Janet’) . At the other end of the
table was Baz, next to him was Miriam from Macclesfield who owned a farmhouse
hidden in the woods below the village walls. She’d taken early retirement from
the Solihull planning department on mental health grounds, having instituted a
one-way system in the centre of town where all the roads went in different
directions, some of them vertical. Her three-legged black mongrel called Coffee
Table sat squirming nervously beside her. Both Janet and Miriam had more than
one dog, in fact they each had about five back at their houses or dotted around
the streets, in addition to numerous cats that they fed but Armando and Fabien
rigidly enforced a one dog per customer rule in the bar.

Lastly
there was Leonard, a writer of feminist science fiction of impenetrable
obscurity, all about planets populated entirely by big red-headed women. Like
Laurence, Leonard had one of the bigger houses in the village, hidden behind an
anonymous white wall and reached via a tiny studded gate.

Laurence
glanced towards the entrance where with an electric little skip of his heart he
saw Donna and the enormous shape of a man standing in the doorway As the couple
walked towards the bar Donna linked her arm in that of the man’s. ‘This is
nice,’ she said in a loud voice.

The
dogs lying on the ground stirred and began growling through clenched teeth in a
strange high-pitched fashion that their owners had never heard before as Donna
and the huge man, a tile snapping under his heel, crossed the floor.

Armando
took hold of the cricket bat lying under the counter and several of Baz’s
Spanish workers who’d been drinking at the bar straightened and reached behind
them for the big folding knives they carried tucked in the back pockets of
their pants.

The
British were overcome with a collective feeling of shiftiness. None of them had
thought to check on Donna after she’d been dragged out of Noche Azul but then
they reminded themselves Donna was the sort of girl that that sort of thing
happened to. Anyway, the Brits reasoned she now seemed to be best friends with
her attacker so they’d been wise to do nothing.

Donna
and the man strode confidently over to the foreigners’ table and sat down at a
couple of spare seats. Donna beamed at everyone. ‘So, who’s going to get me a
drink?’ she asked.

Baz was
the first to respond. ‘Yeah sure, what do you want?’

‘Rum
and coke.’

‘And
your friend?’

‘Oh he
doesn’t drink,’ Donna said.

‘A
water or fruit juice or something?’

‘No he
doesn’t drink like … anything.’

Baz
couldn’t really see how this could be but still he said, ‘Right, OK.’

‘So,
hello everybody,’ Donna said, ‘this is my new friend Mister Roberts. He erm …
he can’t speak but he can hear. So you can, you know, you can say hello to him.’

‘Doesn’t
he have a first name?’ asked Janet.

‘Yeah,
probably …’ Donna replied, ‘but he can’t tell me what it is can he?’

‘No, I
suppose not,’ Janet replied confused. Everybody said hello to Mister Roberts.
‘Hello, Mister Roberts.’