Mister Roberts

by Alexei Sayle

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s go back to the bar in a while, first I’ll have a little siesta then a bath and change my clothes and stuff then we’ll go back. After all, the last time everybody saw us, him over there was dragging me out through the door to do God knows what to me. They’ll be worried about my safety’

  Stanley thought that if they’d been so worried about her safety they would have come round to see if everything was all right by now but he didn’t say anything.

  His mother paused on her way to the bathroom and said, ‘We should give him a name.

  ‘A name. Why?’

  ‘I’ll have to introduce him to people, stupid:’

  ‘But he can’t talk.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell them he can’t talk but he still needs a name.

  Stanley, annoyed that his mum seemed to be taking over his find, tried to get back some of the initiative by saying, ‘We could call him Mister Robot.’

  Donna said, ‘No, don’t be thick — not Mister Robot, that would give the game away, don’t you think? Use your brain Stanley! Anyway, nobody’s called Mister Robot.’

  Stanley tried to think through the sudden fog of irritation that he felt towards his mum. It was always like this, they’d be talking quite naturally, then out of the blue she’d turn nasty ‘Mister Roberts!’ he shouted. ‘That’s what we’ll call him! We’ll call him Mister Roberts.’

  Donna tried it on for size. ‘Mister Roberts… Mister Roberts. Laurence, Armando, Fabien, meet my new boyfriend Mister Roberts.’

  ‘Your what?’

  Sid and Nancy climbed into their Planetary Exploration Suits and travelled in them to the shuttle craft bay, taking a route almost identical to the one the deserter had employed. All over the ship, crew members were frantically repairing wreckage caused by the battle.

  Waiting for them at the bay was a craft similar to the one the escaped alien had stolen. Because of damage from the fighting it had not been possible to provide them with many sophisticated tracking devices to hunt their quarry or anything particularly advanced to enable them to survive on the alien planet; the last thing the captain had told them was that their shuttle craft only had food supplies for a couple of days, but once the damage from the fighting had been sorted out their rations would be replenished from the mother ship.

  The Victorian couple strode on board the craft and sat down on a bench at the back of the cockpit, the couple then climbed out of the rear hatches and settled themselves in the pilot and co-pilot seats in front of the control panel. They strapped themselves in, then Sid set a course for the blue-green planet below them, his partner took control and steered the little ship out of the docking port and into the silence of infinite space. For a few seconds the shuttle craft drifted beside the hull of the battlestar, then the main drive engaged and they sped away from the battered hulk towards the Earth’s atmosphere. In the cockpit the sight of the silent pair in their antique clothes seated behind the two aliens with the reptilian skin had the appearance of the young Prince Albert and Queen Victoria being taken for a drive by two escapees from the zoo.

  ‘Look!’ Nancy said, pointing at the radar screen of the little shuttle craft: it was filled with the image of a thousand pulsating dots that swarmed around the Imperial Battlestar. As quickly as they’d gone the rebel fighters had returned.

  You knew you had been in Bar Noche Azul too long when the sausages came round again. Here in the High Sierras tapas was still a gift given free to those who bought only the simplest drinks of wine and beer, the food cooked by the wives and mothers of the bars’ owners. Those who came into the bar for a drink when it opened at 7 a.m. had little saucers of piquillo al cabales — peppers stuffed with Spanish blue cheese — plonked down in front of them, ensaladilla russa followed, then morcilla, the black pudding made by Fabien and Armando’s mum and, in a more profound way, by the pig Armando kept tethered out the back of the bar, the pig which would be slaughtered every year at the Matanza, the day just after the new year when all the local pigs were killed and the streets ran red with blood. Manchego cheese and membrillo, a quince jelly from the Asturias appeared at around twelve noon, following that came prawns a la Plancha, then buñuelos de espinacas, tiny spinach fritters, then the bar’s own chorizo, a particularly spicy sausage made by Fabien and Armando’s mum and the pig. Next there was jamón de Trevélez, thin slices of snow-cured ham on chunks of rough local bread and finally goat’s cheese preserved in oil from the Alpujarras. Approximately eight hours later the piquillos al cabales came back, and the whole process began again. Laurence sat at a table staring woozily at four plates of chorizo piled in front of him. He couldn’t figure it out: according to the tapas on the table he had been in Noche Azul for nearly two days, that couldn’t be right — he was certain he’d spent last night at home with Stuart. Laurence concluded it was wrong to try and tell the time with sausages.

  He had desperately wanted to run home after Donna had been dragged out of the bar by the big silent man, but as usual she left chaos behind that needed clearing up, namely Sergei lying passed out and bleeding on the floor. Armando and Fabien had decided this was a problem for the English to deal with so he’d had to call on his neighbour Baz and Baz’s pickup truck. Baz was builder to the British and one of the original community who’d been living in the valley since the late eighties; when something physical needed doing he was the automatic choice.

  Laurence phoned and explained what had happened; at first Baz thought Laurence was exaggerating but a couple of his Spanish labourers who’d been in the bar confirmed the tale of the giant man in the suit. A few minutes later he rolled up and with the labourers’ help Sergei was loaded in the back of the pickup and covered with a tarpaulin. Then they drove down the valley and along the old road, where they were less likely to encounter a Guardia checkpoint, to the town of Durcal where Baz and the labourers dumped Sergei in a chair in the reception of the twenty-four-hour clinic. When they returned they said the Russian’s breathing had become very shallow, but that wasn’t their problem anymore.

  Afterwards they’d all needed a drink to calm their nerves and then the rest of the British had started to drift into the bar and they’d had to be brought up to speed on what had happened so that now it had turned into yet another lost afternoon in Noche Azul.

  Seated around a long table was almost the entire British community, La Comunidad Ingles as the locals called them. There was Nige, a tall dark-haired woman of forty, who everybody considered very beautiful, especially in comparison to the squat brown Spanish women. She was a sculptor with a big studio space and living quarters in a rambling four-storey house right at the very centre of the village in the small plaza where Calle Carniceria and Calle Trinidad met. Nige’s dogs Dexter and Del Boy, two big matching yellow things lay outside on the bar’s terrace. Next to her was Frank, a middle-aged Londoner who had foolishly let himself be persuaded by TV property programmes that he could make his fortune renovating a house in the village and had spent every penny of his redundancy on it. He worked on the house each day and the more effort he put into it the more decrepit it seemed to become. Alongside Frank was Kirsten, who was Dutch, which more or less made her an honorary Brit, except her spoken English was much more precise and erudite than theirs. She was an academic who worked for the European Community in Brussels on matters of social compliance, but since she spent most of her time in the village they didn’t appear to miss her. To Kirsten’s right was Li Tang, a Singaporean woman who owned a big walled house on the edge of the village and who was always extremely vague about her activities. Opposite Laurence was Janet a retired BBC executive, who lived in a small house facing Nige’s. She had a small pension and a small dog who was also called Janet (or more usually ‘Little Janet’) . At the other end of the table was Baz, next to him was Miriam from Macclesfield who owned a farmhouse hidden in the woods below the village walls. She’d taken early retirement from the Solihull planning department on mental health grounds, having instituted
a one-way system in the centre of town where all the roads went in different directions, some of them vertical. Her three-legged black mongrel called Coffee Table sat squirming nervously beside her. Both Janet and Miriam had more than one dog, in fact they each had about five back at their houses or dotted around the streets, in addition to numerous cats that they fed but Armando and Fabien rigidly enforced a one dog per customer rule in the bar.

  Lastly there was Leonard, a writer of feminist science fiction of impenetrable obscurity, all about planets populated entirely by big red-headed women. Like Laurence, Leonard had one of the bigger houses in the village, hidden behind an anonymous white wall and reached via a tiny studded gate.

  Laurence glanced towards the entrance where with an electric little skip of his heart he saw Donna and the enormous shape of a man standing in the doorway As the couple walked towards the bar Donna linked her arm in that of the man’s. ‘This is nice,’ she said in a loud voice.

  The dogs lying on the ground stirred and began growling through clenched teeth in a strange high-pitched fashion that their owners had never heard before as Donna and the huge man, a tile snapping under his heel, crossed the floor.

  Armando took hold of the cricket bat lying under the counter and several of Baz’s Spanish workers who’d been drinking at the bar straightened and reached behind them for the big folding knives they carried tucked in the back pockets of their pants.

  The British were overcome with a collective feeling of shiftiness. None of them had thought to check on Donna after she’d been dragged out of Noche Azul but then they reminded themselves Donna was the sort of girl that that sort of thing happened to. Anyway, the Brits reasoned she now seemed to be best friends with her attacker so they’d been wise to do nothing.

  Donna and the man strode confidently over to the foreigners’ table and sat down at a couple of spare seats. Donna beamed at everyone. ‘So, who’s going to get me a drink?’ she asked.

  Baz was the first to respond. ‘Yeah sure, what do you want?’

  ‘Rum and coke.’

  ‘And your friend?’

  ‘Oh he doesn’t drink,’ Donna said.

  ‘A water or fruit juice or something?’

  ‘No he doesn’t drink like … anything.’

  Baz couldn’t really see how this could be but still he said, ‘Right, OK.’

  ‘So, hello everybody,’ Donna said, ‘this is my new friend Mister Roberts. He erm … he can’t speak but he can hear. So you can, you know, you can say hello to him.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have a first name?’ asked Janet.

  ‘Yeah, probably …’ Donna replied, ‘but he can’t tell me what it is can he?’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ Janet replied confused. Everybody said hello to Mister Roberts. ‘Hello, Mister Roberts.’

  ‘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: