Mister Roberts

by Alexei Sayle

  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.

  The strangest thing though, the chilling thing, as the man stood calmly looking around him, his head slowly swivelling from side to side, was that on his face, below the neat short swept-back black hair, there was no expression whatsoever, utter blankness. Laurence thought that he had never seen such emptiness on the face of a living being.

  Though fuzzy with drink some ancient male radar had woken Yuri and Sergei to the fact that hazard had entered the bar. Yuri straightened and took the pool cue by its slender end while Sergei reached inside his jacket to grasp the pistol.

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ Laurence found himself incongruously whispering before the stranger, with three astonishingly quick strides, was upon the Russians. Sergei managed to get the pistol half out of his pants but the big man took his gun arm and snapped it with a simple twist, one shot rang out incredibly loud in the bar, the ejected cartridge case chinging onto the unyielding floor. Screaming with pain, Sergei did not get the chance to fire off another round as the big man lifted him with no apparent effort and threw the Russian one-handed against the back wall of the bar, cracking his skull on the lurid Spanish tiles, the blood that splayed onto their unyielding surface mingling with the jagged blues, yellows and reds.

  The man turned to look for Yuri but he was long gone, out the front door down the street across the plaza by the church into his Mercedes onto the twisting road down the motorway and back to the coast.

  Seeing that his prey had fled, the stranger’s dead eyes alighted on the swaying figure of Donna. Wordlessly he walked towards her, took the woman gently by the arm and led her out of the bar. As they went she gave Armando, Fabien and Laurence a last beseeching look.

  Noche Vieja

  Back up in the black night of space, the Imperial cruiser had not, as the deserter expected, been destroyed. Though intensely battered she was still more or less in one piece, for at the climactic moment the rebel fighters had broken off their attack and fled in the direction of Saturn.

  In his shattered command centre the captain of the ship took reports of the damage then called two subordinates to him. A pair of aliens scuttled into his presence. There’s no sound on Earth that even approximates their names, the closest would be somebody trying to yodel with a mouthful of mice so we’ll call the male Sid and the female Nancy The captain said to the pair, ‘At the height of the battle a shield operative abandoned his post, stole a Planetary Exploration Suit and a shuttle craft and headed for the nearest planet. Possibly he was hit by an enemy fighter. We are not entirely certain because of the confusion of battle, but the monitor screens seem to show that he managed to land his ship on a particular sector of the planet below us.’

  On the ship’s screen a view of the earth appeared. The image zoomed in until it showed a section of Southern Spain, a red dot pulsing over the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

  ‘He landed somewhere in this area, but at the moment, given the damage to our communications equipment, it isn’t possible to be more accurate. The Imperial Navy will not allow desertion under any circumstances, and we cannot permit our technology to fall into the hands of the primitive creatures on that planet.’

  As the captain talked two storage tubes similar to those from the Planetary Exploration Suit Room were brought in.

  ‘I am sending you two down to the planet to bring back the deserter and to retrieve or destroy the suit. We do have two spare suits but they had to be brought out of deep storage. They are left over from our last visit about a hundred and fifty years ago.

  Sid and Nancy stared at the glass tubes. They were covered in thick dust so that it was impossible to see inside, at a signal from the captain the release switch of the first tube was pressed. Slowly and creakily the cylinder opened to reveal a frozen, immobile Victorian gentleman his face adorned with a splendid moustache and long sideburns. The man was dressed in a tall top hat and stiff tight grey suit and on his feet were shiny black patent leather boots. Then the other tube was opened to reveal his lady as tall as the male. Golden curls spilled out from under her pink bonnet which framed a round, pretty, vacant face. A gigantic hooped skirt spread out from her slender waist above a tight green velvet jacket. Over her shoulder she d
aintily held a frilly parasol.

  ‘These are your suits,’ the captain said. ‘Go down to the planet, locate the deserter, bring him and the suit back. You have thirty-six revolutions of the planet to complete your task. If you don’t succeed, after that time we will be forced to destroy it.’

  The man led Donna by the arm in a grip that was both gentle and unbreakable down the narrow alley of Calle Santo Segundo to the little house she lived in on the corner of Calle Carniceria. Into Donna’s mind there suddenly popped a Lorca poem she’d heard a woman reciting at the checkout of the Carrefour supermarket in Granada. Andalucians are inclined towards declaiming bits of Lorca at almost any time — whether sitting on the bus, visiting the doctor or putting out a chemical fire at the docks.

  The poem went:

  I realised I had been murdered,

  They searched cafés, cemeteries and churches,

  They opened barrels and cupboards,

  They plundered three skeletons to remove

  their gold teeth,

  They did not find me,

  They never found me?

  No, they never found me.

  Now it was going to happen to her. She was about to join the ranks of the village’s disappeared. Andalusia was a place where those drifting westwards, looking for opportunity sometimes reached the end of their road. Somebody would turn up, rent a house, say they were starting a business providing eco pools or legal services, they would be in Noche Azul every night shouting about how they were half Chocktaw Indian or were hiding from the Provisonal IRA, then one day they would be gone. Inside the house a table might be turned on its side, a window might be broken or shouting had been heard in the middle of the night. The next day the house would be let to somebody else. You got used to these sudden absences and vanishings so it took a while for Donna to notice that her own father had disappeared. They had struggled on together in their little house for four years, Donna, her baby and Roger, who had tried hard to be some kind of father to them both but it was not in his nature.

  One reason it took some time for her to realise he’d gone was that he took nothing with him and even left behind his car. Yet she did not inform the Guardia or organise a search party, since she had in her mind an idea of a vast row of little lightbulbs on a board with people’s names above them and one day a person’s fizzled and went out, but right now she thought Roger’s light still burned.

  As the big man steered her down the moonlit streets Donna realised that all this time she might have been lying to herself and her father could have been disappeared just as surely as she was going to be. He had certainly made enough enemies, from his various schemes, rackets and scams. Maybe Roger was buried in the orange grove alongside the village’s other troublesome corpses. Maybe he’d been killed and his body driven in the trunk of a car to be disposed of under the concrete of some raw new shopping mall east of Malaga — apparently 25 per cent of the foundations of some of those places was composed of corpse. Then she thought, what would happen to her son? Donna wondered what a Spanish orphanage was like, they probably gave the kids wine for lunch. She supposed if he was lucky he might get to announce the Christmas lottery numbers on the TV.

  Next a wave of anger at the stupidity she’d shown overwhelmed her. She would never get to present her own property-developing TV show now, or build her own gated community — all of her plans were never going to happen. Instead this huge man, some disgruntled associate of the Russians probably, was going to torture her for information she didn’t have, then strangle her. She’d told herself that Yuri and Sergei were just a couple of guys to have fun with but she must have known all along what they were like, it was as if there were two Donnas who didn’t talk to each other: one who got chatting with dangerous men and the other who pretended that nothing was ever going to go wrong, no matter how crazy things got. Now that attitude was going to get her killed.

  She unlocked the front door with shaking hands and they stepped into the dark living room, which suddenly felt much too small. The man’s head actually brushed the black beams of the ceiling, but surprisingly he did at least release her. Donna eased out of his grip and not knowing what else to do switched a light on, except that as the power was still out nothing happened. ‘Can I, erm, get you a coffee or something,’ she said to the silent, shadowy stranger. This phrase seemed to be some kind of spell or hypnotic suggestion because as soon as she said it all life went out of him. She had never seen such lack of animation in a person, not even a dead one: her Gran lying in a coffin in the front room in Darlington had seemed more alive than this fellow. The man was standing there but you could tell that there was no spirit to him, he was as frozen as a squid on the seafood display at the Carrefour supermarket.

  Then as if that wasn’t enough weirdness for one Christmas Day, all the lights came on and at the same time her son appeared, jumping out of midair from behind the stranger.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ he said popping his head around the frozen man.

  ‘Stanley?’ she said, then in a sudden rush of panic shouted, ‘Stan! Get away from that man, quick! He’s dangerous, he smashed up Sergei. I think I put him into a coma or something by asking him if he wanted a coffee but he might come round at any second…’

  Of course kids never did what you wanted them to do even when there was terrible danger and amazingly Stanley just laughed at her warning. She would have slapped him except she was afraid to go anywhere near the man. Next, even more stupidly, he put his little hand on the enormous arm of the frozen figure.

  ‘No, Mum,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand. He can’t come to life; he was me, I was him, I was inside him. He can’t come round without me being inside him.’

  This was all too messed up. ‘Look,’ Donna said in a voice as calm as she could muster, ‘I’m going to go and phone the Guardia, no maybe not that. I’m going to go and get the car and we can drive to the coast or up into the mountains and we’ll stay there for a few days and when we get back I expect this man will be gone.’

  It felt really weird to Donna to be having this conversation while the guy was standing there like some totem pole. Even though he’d wanted to do her over, and God knows what else, it still felt like she was being somehow rude to him. All her life she had squashed herself in the company of men, listened to their idiotic opinions, stayed more or less faithful to them until they got out of prison and right now it didn’t seem nice to be talking so brazenly in front of such a big, tough-looking one.

  Still her son wouldn’t shift, continuing to talk to her in the patronising tone of voice she recognised that kids used to describe the intricacies of the latest bizarre Japanese gadget they’re obsessed with: a clam but also a rocket that’s also a high-school kid who’s saving the world from another more evil clam. Rocket, high-school kid, evil clam, Donna realised her brain was in danger of overheating.

  Fortunately Stanley said in a calm voice, ‘No, Mum, honest, he’s harmless. Come and look round at the back of him.’

  His gestures seemed so certain that with an unconfident shuffle Donna edged round the rigid figure until she was behind it. What she saw there nearly stripped the gears of her already frazzled mind.

  ‘Stanley What the… ? I mean how? I mean what the…?’

  Now that she could see it for herself Stanley talked in a happy babble. ‘I found it… I found it in the high country There was like a crash fire, something from the sky had come down and burned and he was lying next to it with his back open. So I got in and he came to life. He’s sort of like a Terminator but also you can wear him like a suit of armour and there’s these screens inside that show where you’re going and other stuff I haven’t figured out yet…

  Donna circled the robot tentatively touching it and peering inside.

  ‘But… where did it come from?’

  ‘Outer space of course.’ Stanley said this with the certainty of someone for whom computer-animated figures on TV were as real as the village baker.

  ‘Outer space.
I don’t think so. How do you know it isn’t it like some sort of secret military thing?’

  Stanley snorted. Donna thought it was amazing how supercilious somebody who didn’t know anything about life could be.

  ‘What, the Spanish military? Don’t be dense, Mum. They don’t even have modern hats, never mind gear like this. No,’ he said with unassailable confidence, ‘this is from outer space, no question. It’s sort of like a space suit, but one that lets them explore earth without being detected. And it’s strong as well. Mum, I can smash down trees and jump really high and run really fast. It’s incredible, Mum.’

  ‘Won’t they be looking for it then, the space people?’ Donna asked.

  Her son thought about this for a second. ‘Well, no, I don’t think so. The alien that was in it wasn’t around. There’d been a big fire and I think it was his spaceship that got burned. I reckon he was hurt and staggered off somewhere. So I don’t know but I don’t think so.

  Absentmindedly Donna said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that to Sergei and Yuri.’

  ‘He hit me, Mum.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose Yuri was in the wrong too.’ Then sticking her head inside the body of the Exploration Suit she said.

  ‘Blimey It’s amazing. And only somebody exactly your size could fit into it?’

  ‘Yeah. I guess so.

  Donna brightened, the sudden lifting of danger always made her euphoric, indeed in her few quiet moments she sometimes wondered if that was why she got into so many scrapes. ‘Let’s go back to the bar, me, you and that thing,’ she said.