(2008) Mister Roberts (8 page)

‘Hello,
Mister Roberts.’

‘Hola,
Señor Roverts.’

‘Hello
there, Mister Roberts.’

There
then followed a silence as the arrival of this huge, hulking inscrutable man
cast a pall over the little group.

Janet
leant across and whispered into Donna’s ear ‘So why can’t he talk?’

Donna
mouthed back ‘throat cancer’, and pulled a face suggestive of great suffering.

‘Poor
man,’ said Miriam, peering at the vibrant giant. ‘He looks well on it, though.’

‘Positive
visualisations.’

Laurence
said, ‘None the worse for your experiences of this morning, I see.’

‘No
indeed,’ Donna preened. ‘Haven’t you ever had men fighting over you, Laurence?’

‘People
in the entertainment business don’t fight with each other, dear, that’s far too
healthy and civilised compared with what they get up to. Anyway, that wasn’t a
fight, it was a beating up. Poor Sergei, we thought he was dead and we’d have
to bury him in the same place where we …

‘But he
was still breathing,’ Miriam said, jumping in because he was coming up to very
dangerous ground here. ‘So Baz put him in the back of his pickup truck and he
dumped your friend in the waiting room of the clinic in Durcal. If you were
thinking of sending flowers or anything.’

With a
frown, Nige, who never drank as much as the rest of them, asked, ‘Donna,
where’s Stanley? From what I heard he seemed a bit freaked out by everything,
is he OK?’

Donna
gave a silly little smile. ‘Oh, he’s fine, he’s nearby Don’t worry about
Stanley’

With a
sudden crack Mister Roberts’ chair, unable to sustain his great weight, buckled
under him and he fell to the ground. The big man lay on the prawnshell-strewn
floor staring up at them with his blank face.

La Comunidad Ingles
would talk about that Christmas Day in Bar Noche Azul for months to
come. Sometimes, very occasionally, it happened that an evening caught fire
like this and the plain bar with its lurid colour scheme and twenty-year-old
posters, an ordinary room with a snooker table and fruit machine, the same
freezing cold space where they saw each other day in and day out, where they ate
their breakfast and their lunch, seemed suddenly transformed into a glittering
ballroom filled with the sexiest, wittiest and most erudite personalities in
the whole of Europe. Laurence supposed all the drink and drugs had a lot to do
with the transformation. Yet on this occasion they weren’t that important,
rather it was the silent looming presence of Mister Roberts that seemed to
bring everyone to a pitch of hysterical excitement. From time to time one of
them would try to talk to him, address some remark, ask how long he’d been in
Spain or whether he wanted to take care of a stray dog but he would just stare
expressionlessly with his strange dark brown eyes, eyes that seemed as if they
looked straight through them, directly into their souls. That sensation stirred
them on to drink more alcohol and shout more nonsense and feel each other up as
if Mister Roberts was some kind of maypole around which they danced their
springtime fertility dance.

To
Laurence the night resembled the DVD of a strange foreign film that had its
subtitles missing and which some controlling entity was playing on fast
forward, everyone in the bar was all flailing arms and jabbering mouths.
Suddenly there would be a brief moment when the entity hit the pause button and
he would see the crowd around him all frozen in mid yelp. In one of these brief
moments of clarity it struck him with a stab of loneliness that nearly
everybody in the bar had made money out of him at one time or another. For a
start, he was certain that Nige had sold him his house for considerably more
than she’d paid its original Spanish owners. Baz had done the building work to
expand the house and to install the swimming pool and that had cost him a fair
chunk of change, then for a while Miriam had charged him a fortune to plant and
maintain his garden, until she got the idea that some of the plants were
talking about her behind her back. And then, of course, there was Donna.

There
existed a hierarchy in the village which had nothing to do with class or wealth,
rather it concerned how much time you spent in the place. Those who lived in
the village permanently were united in mild contempt for the Brits who owned
second homes in the valley, and the ones who owned second homes looked down on those
here on holiday who only rented. Donna attempted to make a living from all
three groups. She rented out a little village house that she’d bought and done
up when prices were low, she went in for a bit of property developing, buying
and selling tiny scraps of land with highly suspect planning permissions, she
did some translation work, she cleaned pools and she looked after other
people’s houses while they were back in the UK.

Laurence,
back when she had sometimes called herself his personal assistant, when he and
Donna had been good friends and they were having one of their late-night talks
curled up on his sofa, said, ‘Don’t you think your taste for all these
dangerous men —all the Brit hard cases from the coast, the Spaniards, the
gypsies both single and married, that German transvestite who beat you up and
ruined your tights — don’t you think it’s all an attempt to capture the wild
youth that you think has been stolen from you by having a child so young, and
by you having to make your way in the world without any help?’

Her face
hardened, clearly intimating to Laurence that she didn’t want to go into the
subject. Laurence knew that sometimes you could say all kinds of things to
Donna, get her to admit to all sorts of personality defects (though she never
attempted to change any of them) while on other occasions she got very hostile
if you suggested even the smallest flaw. ‘Oh yeah?’ she asked, ‘and where did
you do your degree in psychology, Doctor Laurence?’

‘Pinewood
University, dear,’ he replied, frightened of offending her and so allowing
himself to be derailed, ‘that’s where I studied. When you work in the movie
business, with directors and producers and actors and, my God!, actresses, you
learn all you need to know about the human mind because everybody experiences
everything in bigger portions than the ordinary mortal. They feel they have to
undergo every human emotion but they must do it forty times larger than anybody
else so they fill up the silver screen.’

‘Sounds
exhausting,’ she had replied. ‘You’re better out of it. You should be glad you
don’t get much work anymore.’

In the
end, he reflected, his sensitivity hadn’t made any difference, Donna had fallen
out with him anyway.

It was well into Boxing
Day morning before Donna and her companion were back through the door of their
house and into the kitchen. Mister Roberts went limp and lifeless and after a
few seconds Stanley climbed out of his back.

‘Aw…’
said Donna, approaching the silent machine. ‘I was hoping for a dance.’

She
went closer and began running her fingers tipsily across the face of the robot.

‘Mum,
leave him alone,’ Stanley said over his shoulder as he rummaged in the fridge
looking for something to eat. Finding some leathery chorizo at the back of the
frost-furred shelves he put the meat in his mouth and chewed. They were both
staring at the big silent man when Donna said:

‘You
know, Stan, how people are always letting me down?’

Her son
nodded, it was a story that was repeated time and time again in their lives
like a plotline from a long-running sitcom. When his mum made a new friend it
was like she was falling in love. She always became friends with her new
friend’s friends, got tangled up in their lives and Stanley would reluctantly
become close with the new friend’s kids, even if he didn’t like them that much.
But as his mum said, the thing was they were never really grateful enough.
There she was running around, picking them up from the airport or cleaning
their poxy house, so why shouldn’t she take a few sheets from their bed just to
furnish her holiday let or why couldn’t she have a swim or throw the odd party
in their garden, seeing as they only used their stinking house about four weeks
a year? Even then, when the arguments started, she’d try and keep everything
nice and polite but the people always forced some kind of bust up and then he
couldn’t mix with their kids anymore because his mum would get really upset if
she saw him with them.

‘But
Mister Roberts here,’ Donna said in a quiet voice, ‘he’ll never let me down
will he Stan? And he’s big and strong, I bet there’s things he could do …
well we don’t know yet do we? There’s got to be all kinds of possibilities.’

After a
pause in a different voice she said, ‘Stanley?’

‘Yes,
Mum?’

‘I was
wondering. Have you looked at him closely, is there like a man’s body under
there, do his clothes come off and stuff?’

‘No,’
Stanley replied his voice muffled, still chewing on the ancient chorizo, ‘I’ve
looked and he’s all one piece of a sort of plasticky metal.’

‘Oh
well,’ Donna said, ‘that’s good I suppose. Easy to keep clean with a damp
cloth.’

Later on that Boxing Day
Donna woke from sleep with, for once, no hangover. She made herself a cup of
coffee and putting on a warm coat went up onto the roof terrace, from there she
breathed in her favourite view of the snow-tipped mountains that encircled the
little cluster of houses. Turning she studied the valley and the ravine on
whose edge the village teetered. Supposedly in Arabic the name of the valley
was ‘The Valley of Happiness’, usually Donna thought ‘Valley of Drunkenness’
might be a better description but this afternoon, looking out at the bright
blue sky, the deep red hillsides, the dark green citrus groves, their trees
heavy with fruit she felt she might be able to agree with the original name.
Donna was feeling unusually optimistic because she had an idea of what Mister
Roberts’ first task might be.

It was
like she’d wished on a star and her entreaty had come true. A man had arrived
who could protect her, who would be a friend and an ally, who would make people
fear and respect her and would never leave her. When you thought about it it
was a proper Christmas miracle.

One of
the village houses Donna looked after was owned by a retired couple from
Swansea. About a year ago they’d emailed her to say that because of illness
they wouldn’t be using it for holidays in the near future and they asked that
she advertise it as being for rent, this she did in various British newspapers
and on her website.

Donna
finally managed to let the house to a potter named Monty Crisp and his
girlfriend. He was in his late fifties, bald with a ponytail and muscular in a
stringy, sinewy sort of way He always wore baggy faded T-shirts and
loose-fitting cotton trousers in gaudy prints, such as weightlifters wore on
their days off. His girlfriend Dawn still dressed like the model she’d been in
the sixties though her skin was now wrinkled and scored like the hide of a
rhinoceros. Donna had let them have the house at a low rent because they’d told
her that they were looking to buy a ruin or a plot of land on which they
intended to build a big house of their own and they wanted her to find it for
them. Figuring that she would be able to charge Monty and Dawn a huge
commission on the sale, for three months Donna drove the couple from house to
house, took them to dinner and listened to their endless stories about their
circle of friends who all seemed to be the second division, provincial versions
of famous personalities. ‘He was the Humphrey Lyttleton of Derby’ they would
say of some bore they hung around with or ‘they were the Ted Hughes and Sylvia
Plath of Luton’ which was their way of describing a pair of librarians they’d
met on holiday in Crete. Of course Donna didn’t know who the originals were of
any of these people but she diligently looked them up afterwards on Google.
Still, she was confused by somebody Monty and Dawn described as the ‘Graham
Greene of Berkhamsted’ once she discovered that the real Graham Greene came
from Berkhamsted.

After
three months and all the work she put in, the couple abruptly stopped paying
rent on the house citing a long list of non-existent faults and refusing to
move out until these non-existent faults were rectified. It drove Donna crazy
that she had been played by these wizened old chancers but when she cut off
their water and electricity they denounced her to the Guardia Civil. Because
tenants’ rights are very strong in Spain and because the Guardia were always
happy to inconvenience one of the
Comunidad Ingles
they forced her to
restore the services, which made Donna even more crazy.

The day
after Boxing Day and Monty Crisp lay sprawled across the cheap and grimy
plastic sun lounger on his roof terrace basking in the warm winter sun and
revelling in the same view over the mountains, thinking that it was about time
he re-henna’d his thinning hair and ponytail.

Suddenly
there was a ferocious pounding on the front door, Monty levered himself up from
the lounger and peered over the parapet. Looking down he saw a familiar sight —
the top of Donna’s angry head. Beside her stood a dark-haired man.

Monty
smiled to himself, the door was made of sturdy Spanish oak; its solid iron
bolts had survived attacks from the Moors, Visigoths, Falangists and Donna
running her four-wheel drive into it.