(2008) Mister Roberts (9 page)

He
stepped back from the parapet. Since they’d stopped paying rent Monty and Dawn
always made sure they never went out of the house together —this morning his
partner had slipped out at
5
a.m. to drive to the hippy market in Orgiva
where she had a stall selling fusewire butterflies of her own creation. As long
as one of them was on the premises any forced reclamation would be illegal.

The
potter’s confident smile faded a little as he heard a tearing sound and again
peering into the street saw that the big man had somehow torn the door from its
hinges and was now in the process of stacking it neatly against the wall of the
house opposite. Next he saw the pair enter his house.

Rushing
downstairs Monty found Donna and her companion standing calmly in the living
room waiting for him. Seen from ground level the man was much, much bigger than
he’d appeared from above. None the less, Monty’s ponytail bobbing about with
righteous indignation at the invasion of his home, the older man shouted, ‘What
do you think you’re doing? You’re going to have to pay for that door!’ and
reaching for his mobile phone said, ‘I’m phoning the Guardia about this right
now!’

Quite
gently the big man reached across, took the phone out of Monty’s hand and
crushed it as if it were made from balsa wood and silver paper.

‘Now,
Monty,’ Donna said. ‘You’ve had a good run, but you really need to pay your
back rent for the last six months. Of course, you could denounce my friend
Mister Roberts here to the Guards, after all it was him that did all the
damage, but Monty, I want you to look deep into Mister Roberts’ eyes and I want
you to tell me if you really feel like upsetting a man with eyes like that.’

Trembling,
but unable to stop himself Monty looked up from the wreckage of his ancient
Nokia scattered on the tiled floor and stared hypnotised into the dark orbs of
Mister Roberts. He’d never witnessed such blankness in the gaze of another
human being. Yet there was still some core of stubbornness or ingrained
meanness in the old hippy which made him gasp out. ‘No, you’re not getting anything
out of me …

‘Oh,
Monty, Monty, Monty,’ Donna said with a vicious little smile on her face. ‘You
are not going to like what happens next.’

Late that evening when
Dawn got back from Orgiva in their old post office van she almost drove past
Monty sitting hunched up and trembling in front of the town hall with all their
belongings heaped around him and a terrified look in his eyes. She stopped in
the middle of the square and hurriedly clambered out of the driver’s seat.
‘Monty, for heaven’s sake, what’s wrong, what’s happened?’ she asked the
quaking figure clutching its knees and whimpering on the cold stone steps.

It took
Monty a good fifteen seconds to haul himself back from whatever terrible place
he was in. ‘That’s the last time we rent a cottage from the
Guardian
,’ was
all he said.

Across from Noche Azul was
the village’s basketball court which, like most of the improvements in the
last few years, had been paid for by a generous grant from the EC. In the bar
when the locals started their usual moaning about the perfidious
Ingles
hanging
on to Gibraltar, Baz would shout back at them, ‘You can ‘ave the rock back when
you give me back all the bleeding Sports Halls, Highways and regional
parliaments my UK taxes have paid for!’

All the
Brits knew that Baz had never actually paid any tax when he’d been in the UK,
which was one of the reasons why he’d had to move to Spain, but they agreed
with his general point.

The
concrete, mosaic inlaid bench in the shape of an angel in front of the court
was where the teenage boys and girls gathered after school. Overlooking this
scene seated at their usual table on the terrace of Noche Azul, faces upturned
to the bright winter sun but bodies wrapped in down-filled ski jackets,
Laurence said to Nige, ‘Have you noticed how the young Spanish girls have
changed over the last few years? A while back seeing them come off the school
bus they were these stubby-legged, black-haired peasant girls, bodies perfectly
suited for farm work. Now there’s all these willowy things with blond
highlights and tight trousers showing off their flat brown bellies. These girls
look like five minutes working in the fields would kill them.’

‘It’d
certainly make a mess of their nails,’ Nige said.

Laurence
sighed. ‘Sometimes, you know, I miss the way things were when I first came
here. When there were donkeys in the streets and you and me, Roger and Baz were
the only Brits.’

‘Well,
things change, Laurence, and you can’t stop them and we’re not doing such a bad
job of holding on to a lot of the old ways up here. Besides, your old mate
Donna’s been doing her bit to scare away any more British coming here with her
new friend Mister Roberts.’

‘You
heard about yesterday then?’

‘Miriam
told me Monty had to be sedated with some of her nervous breakdown pills before
they could get him into their van to take him to Granada Airport. If Monty
Crisp goes around telling the Frida Kahlo of Basingstoke and the Pablo Neruda
of Darlington what happened and it puts them off coming to the valley, then it’s
no bad thing.’

‘Sure,’
Laurence said, ‘but I was there with Miriam, I saw Monty before he went and the
look on his face and the things he said Donna got Mister Roberts to do to him …’

‘Oh, I
expect he’s just exaggerating because he got scared out of the house that he
was living in for free.’

Laurence
didn’t feel able to let it go. ‘I’m not sure if I don’t believe what he said.
You don’t know Donna like I do, that girl is full of fury It’s not a good idea
for any of us if she has a sidekick like Mister Roberts, somebody who seems
happy to do what she wants. She’s not that stable in the first place.’

‘Oh,
Laurence, you always get like this with women you used to be friends with. And
if it comes to it, well, we’ve dealt with difficult women before.’

‘I know,
but I’ll tell you something, you haven’t been in the middle of this like I
have. You weren’t there when Mister Roberts messed up Sergei. I bet if you’d
seen the power of that man you’d feel differently And another thing, Sergei
got a shot off and his gun was pointing directly at Mister Roberts, but the man
didn’t react in any way.

‘Well,
the bullet must have gone somewhere else.’

‘Darling,
I’ve looked all over Noche Azul but I haven’t found the hole if it did.’

‘Oh, is
that why you were crawling around the bar on your hands and knees last night?’

‘No,
that was just drunkenness, drunkenness and despair, you know, the usual.’

‘So are
you saying bullets can’t harm Mister Roberts, that he’s immortal or a zombie or
something?’

‘I
don’t know what I’m saying apart from the fact that him and her together is a
dangerous combination.’

After a
few more minutes of contemplative basking Laurence said to Nige, ‘You know,
I’ve always been suspicious of people who act as if they know exactly and in
minute detail what was going through the mind of their childhood selves. As if
the person they were at the age of ten or whatever is on the other end of the
phone or easily reachable by email, like they could just call them up and say,
“Hi, Childhood Self, now just remind me why were we so desperate to take our
pet snake along to our first day of secondary school?”

‘For
me, young Laurence disappeared when he was about twenty, leaving no forwarding
address. After that age I can more or less dimly figure out why I did what I
did but before then I haven’t the faintest idea what was going through my head.
I can only guess at why my favourite books at the age of eight were the novels
of Graham Greene or the reason why I was a supporter of Cardiff City football
club even though I’d never been to Wales or why I wanted a javelin and a
rolling pin for my ninth birthday That’s not to say that I didn’t go through
inner turmoil, after all something must have formed my personality It’s just
that the emotional memory of my formative years is a complete blank, as if the
computer file has been wiped by a wild power surge on some forgotten, stormy
night.’

Nige
said, ‘I think that might just be you. I can remember lots about my childhood,
too much really, the number of my Aha fan-club membership and an entire episode
of the
Bionic Man.
It’s yesterday and today I struggle with.’

‘I was
just thinking about young Stanley I’m fond of that boy, but since I fell out
with Donna she won’t let me have anything to do with him; I can’t say I was the
best man to have in his life but I’ve got to be better than that Mister
Roberts.’

‘You
were the closest thing to a mother that he ever had.’

‘You
know, I say I remember nothing of my childhood, but funnily enough one thing
which is quite vivid is that point when you start to see all adults, especially
your parents, not as the godlike figures they were to you when you were an
infant but as real, fallible people. For me it happened when I was on the bus
to school and the conductor forgot to take my fare. Up until that point I
thought grown-ups knew everything, that there was a daily newsletter or
something that said “little Laurence is going to try and not pay his fare
today”. Once I realised they didn’t know any more than me it made the world
seem a lot more dangerous, but I suppose you also knew that if you had the
nerve then you could probably get away with anything. In a way I blame that
bus conductor for me taking opium, becoming gay and not being able to visit
Switzerland for the next twenty years.’

Nige
said, ‘I suppose it’s a necessary evolutionary stage isn’t it? Finding out that
adults aren’t omnipotent, the first phase of detaching from Mum or Dad and
becoming an independent person.

‘Yeah —
and I guess most people end up still more or less on speaking terms with their
parents. But when you have the kind of claustrophobic relationship Stanley and
his mum have, I wonder how that can end? Sometimes I think Stanley might be
like the citizen of some repressive regime who’s managed to get round the
Internet censors and suddenly discovers the rest of the world sees their
beloved leader not as a super hero but as a big fat joke in a stupid uniform.
What happens to those countries?’

‘When
they realise the emperor is a fraud? Oh civil war, genocide, the collapse of society,
that sort of thing.’

Stanley spent all of 28
December — the day after the vanquishing of Monty Crisp — with Mister Roberts.
He got up early, before his mother, and took Mister Roberts down the valley to
the next village. While they were away from her, he thought, at least his mum
couldn’t get him to beat anybody else up. Once there they had walked around for
a bit giving people the creeps, then when Stanley tired of this they turned and
headed up into the hills.

Out of
sight of human habitation they climbed north and west across the mountains
towards Mulhacén, the highest mountain in mainland Spain. They were making for
the ski resort of Sierra Nevada, he’d had a great day out there one Christmas
holiday with Simon’s family The boys had spent the day snowboarding and they’d
all had a sing-song in the car on the way home.

Mister
Roberts made easy work of the difficult ascent, travelling over the smooth,
shiny, slate-covered slopes at speed, his footfall shattering bits of rock into
razor-sharp needles as he ran. Higher up on the mountainside they passed across
the top of a bowl-like valley at the bottom of which there was a tarn of
startlingly turquoise water still unfrozen. To Stanley it looked like a single
blue eye staring back up at them.

Eventually
they arrived at the resort. Begun in the sixties and built entirely out of
alpine concrete it had the appearance of a council estate that had been
provided with a ridiculous number of restaurants and bars. Mister Roberts
wandered amongst the skiers in their brightly coloured outfits. A lot of them
felt strangely uncomfortable at the sight of a man in a dark suit in their
midst: they wondered if he wasn’t an undertaker who had come to attend to one
of their number who’d skied into a tree. The creepy couple in the Victorian
outfits who’d been prowling around town in the days just after Christmas had
been hard enough to take, but this guy was somehow even more unsettling.

Inside
the suit Stanley was finding it wasn’t as much fun as he thought it would be.
It was amazing to possess this incredible machine, to travel great distances
and smash down trees but it made him feel lonely and detached just watching the
effects of his actions on the screens inside Mister Roberts’ head.

In a
square in front of the chairlift there were clusters of metal tables served by
various cafés and restaurants. At one of these Stanley saw his ex-best friend
Simon together with his family, eating the long doughnuts called churros,
dunking them in hot chocolate and laughing under a big red umbrella. Tipped up
on his forehead Simon wore an enormous pair of yellow-tinted designer
sunglasses as if he were a playboy member of the royal family of Monaco.

Stanley
felt a desperate urge to go over and talk to Simon, to be part of his happy
gang. Slowly Mister Roberts approached the little group and stood next to them,
he even reached out his hand towards the other boy but of course he couldn’t
speak. Gradually becoming aware of the ominous, threatening presence standing
mute beside them Simon’s family fell into an uneasy silence.