(2008) Mister Roberts (5 page)

The journey into the high
country had taken the boy three hours but with the enhanced power of the suit
he was able to return in something under thirty minutes. Soon he was back in
cultivated land, travelling through orange groves and stone-walled terraces of
almond trees.

When he
got nearer to the steep Arabic walls of the village he paused then climbed down
into a steep-sided
arroyo
— a river bed that was dry at this time of
year but would become a torrent when the snows melted in spring on the high
sierras. Crouching now the man ran along the gully until he came to a
stone-walled shack called a
cortijo,
once used by a farmer but long
since abandoned, which teetered on the bank above him. Scrambling up the sheer
sides of the
arroyo
the man easily brushed aside the rotten wooden door
of the shack and entered the building. In one corner the roof had collapsed
onto the beaten earth floor so that it now formed a pile of termite-eaten logs
and ancient brittle straw. The man in the suit effortlessly lifted the logs
aside then went and stood in the dark corner of the
cortijo
facing its
rough stone wall.

Abruptly
all the rampant vitality went out of him and a few seconds later the door at
the back of his body sprang open and Stanley climbed out. His plan had been to
pile the logs against the robot but though the boy struggled mightily to shift
them, he wasn’t able to wrestle any of the wood back into place. Finally he
gave up and contented himself with hiding the robot under a pile of straw,
firewood, strips of dirty blue sacking and torn sheets of fibreboard.

Back at the crash site,
hidden where he had fallen in the centre of a large patch of juniper, the body
of the alien deserter lay Buzzards descended and began to pick at the corpse,
while tiny lizards scuttled from the nearby rocks and tore at him with their
sharp teeth, then carried off small pieces of their fellow scaly creature to be
devoured within the crevices of the mountain.

Navidad

Though it was Christmas
morning Laurence was sitting at his usual table in Bar Noche Azul trying to
read the copy of yesterday’s
Guardian
that Stuart had brought out with
him from England. An hour ago Stuart had gone back to Malaga in his little red
Korean hire car and Laurence couldn’t imagine he’d be coming back. Further down
the valley the bars put out their own copies of the British papers, usually the
Guardian
or the
Independent
but it was thirty minutes’ drive from
here to a shop where you could buy the international press so he’d been
anticipating sitting down with the paper and his breakfast before having to
pass the increasingly tattered and greasy pages around the rest of the British
community Trouble was he found himself unable to concentrate on the stories of
the people in the paper because he no longer knew who they were. His mind kept
slipping off the stories saying this minister was doomed and that minister was
on their way up, that this thing was a horror and this other thing was a
delight and instead Laurence’s thoughts continually slid back towards his
breakfast. It was always the same thing,
pan tostada
— half a loaf
smeared with a thin layer of mashed up tomato and garlic. That was all you
could buy for breakfast in Noche Azul. He’d had a complicated relationship
with
pan tostada.
For a while Laurence had loved
pan tostada
for
its authenticity Then after a few years he’d hated it, the same goddamn thing
every day, it nearly drove him crazy But then, about a decade in, there’d been
a moment of surrender, of acceptance, like an alcoholic hitting their rock
bottom, and he’d come to see the lack of choice as a good thing: his breakfast
was something he couldn’t change so now he loved it again. As far as breakfast
went the lack of options was a liberation. Unfortunately, though he tried,
Laurence didn’t seem to be able to extend that surrender to the rest of his
life. With an effort of will he forced himself to again stare at the pages of
the newspaper blurred by his indifference. One column, written by a mad-looking
Jewish guy, stated with complete authority that one thing would definitely
happen, then beneath it another column by a crazy-looking Muslim woman said
with the same authority that the complete opposite would happen.

Some
change in the air made Laurence look up from the paper. At first he didn’t know
what was unsettling him then he saw that Donna’s son Stanley had come into the
bar, presumably looking for his mother. The boy was what Laurence’s dear old
mum would have called ‘half chat’, and which he kept having to remind her when
she came out to visit was now referred to as ‘mixed race’. The boy’s black curly
hair was hacked into a short afro that contrasted oddly with his light caramel
skin and the European cast of his features. The face was dominated by big brown
eyes that to Laurence always seemed to be pleading for something that nobody
could give him. Under his thin nylon jacket the boy wore a short-sleeved white
shirt that Laurence would have given to a kid in a film who was good at chess
and didn’t have many friends. On the boy’s thin legs were too short,
ill-fitting jeans of cobweb-thin denim. Laurence guessed that the whole lot had
come from the budget range at one of the hypermarkets on the Granada ring road.
For some reason they always gave these cheapo brands names in mangled English
such as ‘basik’s’, ‘Lord Mutley’ or ‘mister cheeZe’, as if a few words would
give these trashy garments the quality of Savile Row tailoring. Laurence was
still sometimes astounded at the shoddiness of the goods sold in Spanish stores
compared to those in Britain: gardening tools that bent at the first stab at
the soil, leaky hot water bottles that erupted during the night and clothes
that looked like they were made from three-quarters dust. To dress your child
in such tat amounted to child abuse in Laurence’s book.

From
where he sat he could see both Stanley and Donna. The boy’s mother was in the
small room at the back of the bar bent over the pool table. The position she
was in gave him a good view of her boyish behind clothed in tight American
jeans of a much better quality than her son’s. They did not dress up much in the
valley and she almost always wore these jeans along with tight T-shirts in
pastel colours or washed out greys and blues that emphasised her slender
frame. Her shoulder-length hair was the colour of pine furniture, her skin was
much lighter than her son’s and she had eyes of an unsettling, swimming-pool
blue. She was now twenty-nine years old. Donna’s movements were always quick,
she laughed a lot, though not necessarily at anything funny and got really
excited about a completely different thing every week, so that she was always
organising outings to concerts in Cordoba, yoga classes or visits to reiki
masseurs up in the Alpujarras.

Right
now, sprawled provocatively over the table, Donna was making laughing
conversation with the two men she’d been playing pool with for the last couple
of hours. Laurence finally acknowledged that this was the other thing that had
been making him agitated. He really wasn’t sure that the way she was behaving
was such a good idea with those two; he had never seen these particular
characters before but in this day and age the danger signals of Russian Mafia
up from the coast were unmistakable.

During
the Spanish civil war this had been an anarchist village, the black and red
flag of the FAI — the
Federación Anarquista Ibérica
— had hung from the
town hall roof for nearly three years and they held the regional record for
shooting priests and nuns. Even if there was the most extreme kind of trouble
the bar’s owners Armando and his brother Fabien would never think of calling
the Guardia Civil.

None
the less Armando was clearly edgy at having the Russians in his bar and a few
minutes before had called Fabien on the mobile to ask him to come downstairs
from their flat above. The older brother, thinner and darker than his stocky
sibling, had emerged holding the bat that he used once a year in the annual
Spanish versus English village cricket match. Laurence guessed that Donna had
been drinking with these two Russians since the night before and taking cocaine
too, yet only she would be unaware, at least on the surface, of what all the
other males in the bar — Armando, Fabien, Laurence, a few Spanish workers and
now little Stanley — knew, that the two men she was with were trouble on a
stick.

Laurence
saw Donna’s son hesitate, calculating the peril he was in, yet after a pause
the boy still went up to his mother and pulling on her arm said, ‘Mum, I’ve got
something to show you, c’mon, it’s really amazing…’

Donna
turned and for a second incomprehension at why this little person was talking
to her flashed across her face, before she suddenly seemed to realise that it
was her son. It looked like she had set out the day before to forget for a
short while that she was a woman with a child and had succeeded a bit too well.

‘Not
now Stan,’ shaking him off, ‘can’t you see I’m celebrating Christmas with my
friends Yuri and Sergei.’

‘But
Mum, I really want to show you this.’

‘Show
it me later, darlin’,’ she replied.

Petulantly
Stanley said, ‘You told me we didn’t celebrate Christmas.’

‘Well,
I’m not sure if it is Christmas where these two come from.’

‘That
doesn’t make sense.

‘You
fuck off now kid,’ said one Russian, stepping forward and slipping his hand
underneath Donna’s T-shirt to caress her stomach while staring straight at the
boy ‘We’re havin’ fun wit your Moms.’

Donna
giggled nervously and pushed the Russian’s hands away ‘Not in front of my son,
Yuri.’

Laurence
expected Stanley to back down at this point but something seemed to have made
him less timid than usual.

‘Leave
my mum alone Yuri,’ Stanley said.

‘Oh
shit,’
Laurence thought, turning his gaze towards the counter where he could see
that Armando was also straining under the quandary of what to do next. Laurence
made a mental note that the British community really were going to have to have
another attempt at doing something about Donna, she was making them all look
bad.

The
Russian paused for a second then stepped towards the boy and delivered a
tremendous backhanded slap to the side of his face. ‘Stop it!’ Donna yelled as
Armando and Fabien both came around the counter, only to be brought up short by
the other Russian turning to them and pulling his jacket back to show the
stubby little pistol tucked into his belt. Nobody knew what was going to happen
next, only that chances were it was going to be bad.

Fortunately
Stanley seemed to be the one who chose to act like a grown-up, taking one final
look at the man who had slapped him he rushed out of the bar clutching the raw
side of his face. Slowly the tension hissed out of the bar.

‘Fucking
kid,’ Yuri said. Donna was crying now and the Russian turned his fury on her.
‘Come on bitch, stop dat crying or I’ll get mad now.’ Snuffling, Donna pulled
herself together.

‘Sorry,
Yuri,’ she said. ‘Kids, you know, they want too much attention.’

‘Sure,
whatever,’ replied Yuri, losing interest. He called to Armando for more
brandies and they returned to playing pool.

Laurence was hastily
gobbling the last of his breakfast
tostada,
eager to get out of the bar
and back to safety behind the high walls of his house. His mind told him he
should have just abandoned everything when trouble first started, but here in
the land of Lorca’s ‘Blood Wedding’ there were certain notions of male honour
that had to be adhered to even for him. If he’d just fled at the first sign of
a fight and not eaten his breakfast he would have lost face with Fabien and
Armando and, sadly, that was important to him.

‘Too
late…’ Laurence said under his breath as the door of Noche Azul crashed open.
Turning he saw framed against the wintry morning light a huge serious-looking
man, his arms spread wide so that he seemed to fill the entire opening. The man
wore a ridiculously neat suit, which to his eyes said United States circa 1960,
rather like something somebody in Frank Sinatra’s entourage might have worn at
the height of the Vegas Rat Pack years. Funny what you find yourself thinking
when menace comes through the door, Laurence found himself thinking.