by Alexei Sayle
The plants in these humid hells would never touch soil — they were grown from bags, while chemical fertilisers were drip-fed to each plant from giant computer-controlled vats. If you went anywhere near them you’d notice a chemical tang in the air.
Laurence felt guilty about how much he hated this new Spain because as a Brit who had moved there, in a tiny way he sensed he was responsible for it.
He imagined sometimes that he had brought the contagion with him like a well-meaning missionary to the Americas whose blanket was heaving with smallpox. Whenever Laurence visited the hypermarket in Granada he saw a reminder of the damage the Spanish empire had done. In Carrefour, avoiding all the yelling, bright-red Brits falling over each other in the booze section, Laurence would find himself in the Productos Latinos Americanos aisle. In contrast to the clamour in the rest of the store a strange reverential silence always seemed to reign in this canyon of tins and jars, due to the little Inca-looking people who gathered there. Laurence guessed that they were Ecuadoreans, Bolivians and such. Workers from the plasticas, earning the lowest wages in Europe, who lived in camps of flimsy huts of cardboard and corrugated iron next to their workplaces and who had escaped to the city for a few days. The little Indians didn’t ever buy anything, but he supposed fingering the packets of corn tortillas and jars of jalapeño peppers reminded them of home. Sometimes there seemed more to it though, their silent contemplation of boxes of enchiladas and tubes of chilli sauce appeared to have an almost religious quality to it, as if they were looking for something or somebody in the stacks who would lead them out of the land of their enslavement.
On that night, after the power cut off, Laurence slid open the heavy wooden door that led to the patio and went out into the shaking, windblown night to stare up at the suddenly revealed stars, stars which were normally hidden by the glare of the hundreds of powerful streetlights that the mayor was obsessed with installing. One of the things Laurence valued about his village was that there would never be any balsamic vinegar or lemongrass in the shop there. Twenty different kinds of ham certainly, but never anything that would not have been sold in the locale fifty years before. Unfortunately, this conservatism did not extend to modern technology He remembered when he’d first come to the village nineteen years before. There’d been no street lighting and the stars in their billions had been on show every night; now the power cut had made them visible for the first time in ages. He stared hard at the blackness and the dusting of heavenly bodies and took the opportunity to try to feel insignificant. Laurence had heard people say that the sheer uncountable number of stars made you feel tiny and meaningless when confronted with the uncaring and infinite vastness of the universe. He figured that if he could only feel a little of that vastness then he might not mind so bloody much about the costume-designing job on the big new BBC-produced Henry James drama series being given to one of his younger rivals, he might not find Stuart quite so annoyingly dim and he might not feel that if he didn’t do every sodding thing for the British community in the village then it simply wouldn’t get done. Laurence tried hard to look into his soul to see if he could find some insignificance but there wasn’t any there. Hey ho, he thought, trying to be relaxed about losing the TV job.
For a while, a year or two perhaps, work had been gradually tailing off; the gaps between projects getting longer and longer but this series going to somebody else meant he wouldn’t have done anything for well over nine months.
It was what happened: he was getting old. Of course, in his time he’d pushed out an older generation of costume designers without a thought for how they felt and now the same thing was happening to him, all the thrusting young directors and producers who’d started out with Laurence were now organic sheep farmers, in long-term psychiatric care or were commissioning editors and channel controllers and so didn’t make programmes anymore, indeed this last group were, in a way, more detached from TV than he was. If he still lived in the UK he might have been able to mix with the new batch of producers, go with them to rap concerts or skateboarding or whatever it was that they did for entertainment, but from high up in his valley it was impossible. Laurence thought to himself that in the new year he was going to have to return to the UK and make a really serious effort to get back in the game. If he just took a few meetings, chatted up a few old friends and looked up some of those godchildren he’d neglected then the quality of his work would shine through and get him the jobs he wanted.
Half a mile away a rocket rose in the night sky and exploded with a cascade of sparks, the muted boom reaching Laurence a few seconds later. He hardly noticed either. At any time of the day or night at more or less any time of the year there were explosions in the air above his valley The locals would tell you that the firing of the rockets was connected with religious festivals or somebody’s saint’s day or the European Year of the Dyslexic but everybody knew in their heart that the impulse to fire them came from a deeper and older place. The hissing smoke trails, the bangs and the bright flashes of light were their way of frightening off devils. That in the dark, creeper-strung canyons and rock-strewn flatlands of the mountains there lurked beasts capable of unimaginable evil was accepted by all, and making a loud noise and a flash of light was considered the best way to keep them at a distance. Rockets were such a central part of life in the valley that most people kept a stock of them in their larder next to the dried spices, cured sausage and preserved peppers.
But then, as Laurence stared up into the black night sky, a more spectacular stellar display dragged him from his self-pitying reflections: one of the myriad of stars suddenly seemed to swell until it was as big as a tennis ball and brighter than one of the big 20k lights they used at Pinewood Studios. At first he assumed it was another projectile, but unlike a rocket it didn’t die in a burst of sparkles. Instead the big burning ball hung seemingly only a few thousand metres above him, then abruptly lurched sideways across the sky Rapidly diminishing in size the intense point of light finally disappeared behind one of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
A bright star shining over the village on Christmas Eve? Laurence thought to himself. My dear, how tacky is that? Then, with a sigh, he went back inside to Stuart.
Laurence was wrong. The bright shining light that had passed across the sky in front of him was not as he’d thought a shooting star — it was a burning spaceship. For several hours on that Christmas Eve, over on the dark side of the moon, an Imperial cruiser of the Galactic Empire had been battling with attack ships of the Universal Rebel Uprising. Time and again the tiny rebel fighters darted in, stinging the bulky lumbering battleship with their guns and missiles.
Most of the aliens on the big cruiser stuck to their task with brainless devotion but deep in the entrails of the ship one of the crew was feeling a great deal of fear. In appearance, like all his comrades, he was small and stocky, about a metre and a half tall, strong muscular arms and legs covered in greenish/grey scales with clawed hands and feet, his head longer than ours but with eyes, golden in colour, at the front — the mark of the predator. Inside, though, he was different from his fellows, he had a terror of death that had been bred out of most of his race. This alien’s role on the ship was to monitor the condition of the defensive shields and to effect repairs on the shield generators as they sustained damage from enemy fire. With the knowledge his job afforded him he’d known for some time that the battlestar’s defences could not take much more of the assault and once the shields went down the ship was finished.
He cursed the fact that through some accident of genetics or lack of conditioning he did not subscribe to the Imperial cult of cold rationality whereby an individual life was worth nothing and everything had to be sacrificed for the collective well-being of the Empire. He was convinced there was no eternal honour in dying for the common good as the Imperial political commissars endlessly stated, and he had devised a desperate plan not to.
A power surge from a missile strike caused an overload that exploded his bank of instru
ments, a flying shard of metal slashed him across his body, creating a gaping wound. Quickly, and without a backwards glance, he abandoned his post.
Clutching his side the alien began to shuffle into the fume-filled corridor, towards the outer hull of the ship some two kilometres away.
Over the following hour the deserter journeyed, with determination and stealth, the entire length of the crippled battlestar. He sped along moving walkways, he hissed from one end of antigravity chutes to the other, his molecules were disassembled then reconstituted as he teleported short distances and finally he ran down some stairs. At last he fetched up at a door in a distant corridor marked PLANETARY EXPLORATION SUITS. AUTHORISED ENTRY ONLY. After a quick, cautious look around, the alien slid inside.
The room he’d entered was bathed in a tranquil blue light and though it occasionally shook with the nearby impact of incoming missiles he found it strangely peaceful. As his eyesight adjusted to the gloom the alien saw far into the distance row upon row of bulky forms, each standing on its own plinth. These were the Planetary Exploration Suits. In essence, each outfit was a full-sized, fully powered replica of the inhabitants of various worlds that the Empire wished to explore without alerting the native population — a sort of cross between a gorilla suit, a deep-sea diver’s outfit and a hollow cyborg. Through an access panel in the rear of each costume its operator could climb inside and once installed was able to activate it, to lift things and move about.
The alien deserter passed between the racks of lifeless forms, through their open access panels he occasionally caught a gleam of metal, a brief sight of glistening rods and highly polished swivel joints and a shadowy suggestion of inert dials and screens. The deserter knew he didn’t have much time, the faraway screaming of the ship’s engines told him the end couldn’t be long in coming, but he also knew panic wouldn’t help so he tried to remain calm. The alien was looking for one particular suit. As he searched he passed — amongst others — a large tentacled beast, a three-metre high tusked, bear-like animal, and an insectoid creature with enormous crab-like claws before he came to the entity he was looking for.
This Planetary Exploration Suit was the perfect replica of a member of the dominant species on the primitive planet above which the battle was now being fought. It stood in its storage tube immobile and lifeless — the figure of a big, muscular, earth man in his mid-forties. Its hair was deep black, brushed back from a high, intelligent forehead, its skin lightly tinged with olive. In the days to come, though everybody was able to agree that as a whole his features were broad and handsome, nobody was able to agree on greater detail, as if to each of them he presented a different face.
The man was dressed in a smart dark suit of a lightweight material, a white shirt and dark tie, such as might have been worn on earth by a man who frequented jazz clubs in Montmartre forty years ago — the time of the aliens’ last visit to the earth.
The deserter pressed a button at the foot of the tube and with a hiss the glass cover rose into the roof. Looking round one last time he began to climb inside the humanoid. First he wriggled his legs into its legs then slipped his arms into its arms, squirmed his entire body inside the machine and finally fitted his head into a head-shaped space at the top of the man’s chest. Once he was completely inside, the access panel closed with a snap and the interior of the machine burst into life. In front of his eyes a full-colour screen lit up, on which were displayed the exterior view, as seen through the camera eyes of the robot and grouped around the edges (like a head-up display in a fighter plane) various read-outs and images, such as external temperature, infra-red night vision, power reserves and so on.
Next, the alien began to experiment gingerly with movement. He tilted his head and the head of the robot moved, he moved his arms and the arms of the man moved too. Satisfied, the alien took a step forward and the man in the business suit strode clumsily off his podium and walked unsteadily out of the room.
In the time that the deserter had been in the Planetary Exploration Suit Room the condition of the ship had deteriorated rapidly and she was now in an extremely bad way As the alien in the robot suit crept along the corridor the concussions grew worse, flames and gases spouted from ruptured pipes and exploding machinery, occasionally the big man would have to step delicately over the body of a crew member. Eventually the robot came to another door marked SHUTTLE CRAFT BAY, this one guarded by a single nervous trooper who didn’t see the big humanoid leaping at him until the last moment by which time it was much too late to raise his weapon or cry out before his neck was broken by a single blow from the power-assisted arm of the robot. Without pausing, the alien opened the door to the shuttle bay, dragged the body of the guard inside and closed it behind him.
He was now inside a large hangar within which were several small space craft, stubby, inelegant little vessels used to ferry personnel between the battle cruiser and nearby planets. The man climbed into the cockpit of one of these craft and started it up.
Outside the Imperial cruiser the battle raged fiercer than ever. The ship was taking hit after hit and while its laser cannon caught numerous attacking fighters, sending them spinning away in a thousand fragments they were instantly replaced by other incoming craft. In the midst of this fury the stolen shuttle came nosing out into the heat of battle from an exit hatch. It hung for a second on the skin of the mother ship, then with a burst of its jets, powered away from the fighting at top speed.
Soon the battle was left far behind, and in minutes the tiny ship reached the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere, the alien relaxed a little and began to consider what he was going to do next. It dawned on him that he hadn’t really thought through his escape plan that thoroughly While he’d been obsessed with getting away from the doomed ship he hadn’t considered how he was going to live on this foreign planet; from the reports he’d read on the ship’s central computer he knew that the atmosphere was breathable and that with a few dietary supplements he could eat the food, but he wondered what he was going to do with his time, how was he going to keep himself amused? Seeing as every second of his life up until that point had been ruled by the Empire, he thought he might have to get some sort of a hobby.
The scaly alien need not have worried about what he was going to do once he was on Earth, since from the moment he’d left the battlestar his movements had been tracked by an X-wing fighter. As the shuttle touched the penumbra of the earth the shadowing rebel craft let loose with its cannons. The little ship took hit after hit and, mortally wounded, spun out of control. In a cloud of burning gases it fell through the air towards the night-time side of the blue-green planet.
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.
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.’