by Alexei Sayle
‘Right…’ Laurence said, ‘… and was the father really a Brazilian footballer?’
‘Well, I don’t know that he wasn’t.’
As Stanley made his way across the rocky ground, icy wind slithering through the gnarled trees, his mind was filled with worry about his mother. She’d gone out last night and not come home; he would really have liked to go to Noche Azul just to check up that she was there and not injured and lying in a hospital somewhere, but he knew that if she was in the bar and he came around looking for her there was a good chance that she’d turn nasty.
So he figured it was best if he just went walking. But, unlike in the past, he found he couldn’t leave his worry back down in the village, it came with him up into the mountains.
In many ways it was a good thing that in Spanish villages and towns, unlike in the UK, there was no separation between the young and old: they all used the same bars, went to the same fiestas, hung about in the same squares. In comparison, if you were to look at any town centre in Britain at night-time you’d think there’d been some sort of plague caused by an escaped virus, that had killed everybody over thirty while leaving the young survivors with terrible brain damage. Brain damage that caused them to reel about the streets vomiting, shouting, fighting and showing their breasts to passing policemen.
Still sometimes, if you were a kid in the village with a parent who was an abrasive, noisy person like Donna, then it would have been nice from time to time to get away from her, but it wasn’t possible. You were stuck at a youth club where they let old people play on the ping-pong tables and dance at the disco.
At the moment for Stanley each new day seemed to bring some fresh and unpleasant thought or unsettling feeling. Yesterday it had been his confusion about the reasons why Simon hadn’t come to meet him. Today Stanley was beginning to be concerned that a lot of people in the village thought of his mum as a bit of a nutter. Only two days before in Bar Noche Azul he’d seen her push past the owner Fabien to go and rummage in the kitchen fridge for something to eat. Emerging with a chicken leg in her hand she’d said to her son, ‘They love me in here’, but the look on Fabien’s face seemed a long way from love.
While Donna didn’t seem to have any idea of how she was perceived, her son churned inside with embarrassment on her behalf. With an effort he decided that he couldn’t cope right now with the worry of whether his mum was a figure of ridicule or not. He was probably getting everything backwards. As he walked on, his agitation slowly decreased with each step he took away from the village. He’d been hiking for about three hours since he’d passed through the gate in the ancient walls, climbing steadily through the changing vegetation of the valley Once past the orange and olive groves that surrounded his home, crossing streams and ancient water channels he travelled in the shade of oaks, maples and elms. Higher up still, Stanley emerged from the tree-line onto rocky flatland, the windblown grass woven with creeping juniper and laburnum. Up on these slopes the shrubs were low, rosemary, thyme and lavender all flourished but never grew above about knee-high. In spring wild flowers in blues and purples would compete with the astonishing red of the poppies but right now the landscape was almost monochrome. As he walked lizards scuttled away from his footfall towards the shelter of the dry brush.
Stanley paused for a second and surveyed the little clusters of habitation far below him that grew like white patches of pigment on the green skin of the mountains. Above him a griffin vulture wheeled lazily in the sky Breathing heavily the boy clutched his thin jacket around him. Though the sky was an unremitting clear blue, even in the sunshine it was freezing.
Pressing on it took a while for him to notice that a clump of Spanish firs towards which he’d been heading had been smashed apart by some large object which had left a path of still smouldering, scorched earth etched into the scrubland. Stanley paused and looked around for other human activity but there was only the shivering of grasses and the creaking of tree branches in the icy wind. Tentative at first he followed the trail of blackened soil which ran for nearly half a kilometre before it ended abruptly at a rocky outcrop against which something had smashed with tremendous force; the object now reduced to a few twisted ribs and melted clumps of some strange not quite metal-looking substance. The boy stared for a few seconds at the mangled wreck before noticing with a sudden start the body of a man lying face down in a cluster of broken cactus. Approaching closer his first thought was that the jacket of the man’s dark suit, a bizarre sight in itself up here on the mountainside, had been torn open at the back and was standing proud of his carcass.
Initially Stanley assumed that he was looking at a murder victim. After all, in films people were always coming across murder victims. Sometimes these people became part of the plot but generally you never saw them again. It was one of the things he’d always worried about, finding a body At school, when somebody committed a transgression and the teacher asked the class who’d done it, he inevitably had the compulsion to confess even though he was invariably innocent. He was convinced if he ever found a corpse he’d be unable to stop himself telling the Guardia Civil that he’d done it and knowing them they’d probably look no further but lock him up in the big prison near Cadiz with Runciman’s dad. Only on closer inspection did he see, with enormous relief, that the thing wasn’t a person and that the raised flap was in fact a door that opened into the body of whatever it was that was lying there. But what was this thing exactly, an unwanted figure from a waxwork museum of the last President of France but one? Or a shop window dummy from some old-fashioned haberdashers in Malaga’s old town? Its neat dark suit certainly seemed pretty dated. But what was it doing up here?
Stanley knew that there was nothing the Spanish liked better than to come to a beauty spot and leave their rubbish, but this seemed a bit excessive even for them, especially since the nearest road was two hours’ walk away and Spanish garbage leavers, not being fitness fanatics, always travelled by car or truck.
The boy took Valery Giscard d’Estaing, or whoever it was, by the ankles and tried to pull him out of the cactus, but either he was stuck or the dummy was incredibly heavy because he could not budge it even one centimetre. He paused for a minute, then skirting the spikes of the plant was able to edge himself alongside the prone form and peer inside. He now understood that it could be a costume of some kind and someone his size might find it possible to climb through the hatch and fit inside it.
Stanley suddenly thought of the large number of stray cats that lived in his village: they were fed, watered and their multiple medical needs attended to by a gang of middle-aged Englishwomen led by one called Miriam. Unlike the cats in other villages their coats were glossy, their eyes unclouded, clearly they didn’t need to hunt for food, yet nearly every day there was some crisis amongst the women: a cat had got itself wedged down a drain or bricked up behind a wall or had fallen asleep in the boot of a tourist’s car and now somehow had to be shipped back from Norway Stanley, as he struggled unsuccessfully against the overwhelming desire to stick his head into the body of the prone figure, thought he now understood what drove the cats to get themselves stuck. Giving in to his irresistible curiosity he manoeuvred himself on top of the figure and slid his head inside. It felt cool and slightly rubbery against his skin, but not frightening, so he wriggled the rest of his body into the casing of the man, slipping his arms and legs within the arms and legs of the suit.
As soon as Stanley was completely enclosed all the screens burst into life and the hatch door slammed shut. The boy was now trapped within the alien machine, pinioned into place by the closefitting limbs. Immediately he panicked and tried to free himself. From the outside it appeared as if the man lying face down in the cactus had suddenly come to violent life, he began to writhe and twist on the ground, sending shards of plant and clumps of earth flying hundreds of metres in every direction with the ferocity and power of his movements. From inside the man’s head there came an indistinct yelling.
After a minute of fla
iling the figure collapsed and lay still, then after a pause, and with great hesitation, the man began to climb unsteadily to his feet. Several times he pitched sideways back into the cactus but each time he slowly raised himself until eventually he stood swaying like a baby on unsteady legs. The big man in the suit remained motionless for some minutes, only his head pivoted from side to side, his strange black eyes seeming to take in the scene like a traffic camera, then he took a tentative step forward which sent him flying face down into the earth.
The whole process was repeated but this time the big man in the dark suit coped better, taking a number of wavering strides before he fell again.
With his head pressed into the inner skin of the robot Stanley thought of how to open the suit. In his mind he imagined the back of it opening up and as soon as he did this the hatch at the rear of the robot unlocked, the door sprung open and a split second later Stanley came tumbling out of the back.
Slowly the young boy circled the huge, frozen figure of the man. ‘Unbelievable!’ he said to himself and then, just as the silly kitten re-enters the drain that has nearly cost it its life, Stanley climbed back into the machine. The door closed behind him and the man in the business suit climbed slowly to his feet, then set off back down the mountain, walking at first but after a while breaking into a joyful loping run. Swifter than the most sure-footed mountain goat he hurtled through the pink rock-rose and juniper towards the white village below, the muffled sound of whooping coming from inside his head.
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 be
en 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.