by Alexei Sayle
‘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.
He stepped back from the parapet. Since they’d stopped paying rent Monty and Dawn always made sure they never went out of the house together —this morning his partner had slipped out at 5 a.m. to drive to the hippy market in Orgiva where she had a stall selling fusewire butterflies of her own creation. As long as one of them was on the premises any forced reclamation would be illegal.
The potter’s confident smile faded a little as he heard a tearing sound and again peering into the street saw that the big man had somehow torn the door from its hinges and was now in the process of stacking it neatly against the wall of the house opposite. Next he saw the pair enter his house.
Rushing downstairs Monty found Donna and her companion standing calmly in the living room waiting for him. Seen from ground level the man was much, much bigger than he’d appeared from above. None the less, Monty’s ponytail bobbing about with righteous indignation at the invasion of his home, the older man shouted, ‘What do you think you’re doing? You’re going to have to pay for that door!’ and reaching for his mobile phone said, ‘I’m phoning the Guardia about this right now!’
Quite gently the big man reached across, took the phone out of Monty’s hand and crushed it as if it were made from balsa wood and silver paper.
‘Now, Monty,’ Donna said. ‘You’ve had a good run, but you really need to pay your back rent for the last six months. Of course, you could denounce my friend Mister Roberts here to the Guards, after all it was him that did all the damage, but Monty, I want you to look deep into Mister Roberts’ eyes and I want you to tell me if you really feel like upsetting a man with eyes like that.’
Trembling, but unable to stop himself Monty looked up from the wreckage of his ancient Nokia scattered on the tiled floor and stared hypnotised into the dark orbs of Mister Roberts. He’d never witnessed such blankness in the gaze of another human being. Yet there was still some core of stubbornness or ingrained meanness in the old hippy which made him gasp out. ‘No, you’re not getting anything out of me …
‘Oh, Monty, Monty, Monty,’ Donna said with a vicious little smile on her face. ‘You are not going to like what happens next.’
Late that evening when Dawn got back from Orgiva in their old post office van she almost drove pas
t Monty sitting hunched up and trembling in front of the town hall with all their belongings heaped around him and a terrified look in his eyes. She stopped in the middle of the square and hurriedly clambered out of the driver’s seat. ‘Monty, for heaven’s sake, what’s wrong, what’s happened?’ she asked the quaking figure clutching its knees and whimpering on the cold stone steps.
It took Monty a good fifteen seconds to haul himself back from whatever terrible place he was in. ‘That’s the last time we rent a cottage from the Guardian,’ was all he said.
Across from Noche Azul was the village’s basketball court which, like most of the improvements in the last few years, had been paid for by a generous grant from the EC. In the bar when the locals started their usual moaning about the perfidious Ingles hanging on to Gibraltar, Baz would shout back at them, ‘You can ‘ave the rock back when you give me back all the bleeding Sports Halls, Highways and regional parliaments my UK taxes have paid for!’
All the Brits knew that Baz had never actually paid any tax when he’d been in the UK, which was one of the reasons why he’d had to move to Spain, but they agreed with his general point.
The concrete, mosaic inlaid bench in the shape of an angel in front of the court was where the teenage boys and girls gathered after school. Overlooking this scene seated at their usual table on the terrace of Noche Azul, faces upturned to the bright winter sun but bodies wrapped in down-filled ski jackets, Laurence said to Nige, ‘Have you noticed how the young Spanish girls have changed over the last few years? A while back seeing them come off the school bus they were these stubby-legged, black-haired peasant girls, bodies perfectly suited for farm work. Now there’s all these willowy things with blond highlights and tight trousers showing off their flat brown bellies. These girls look like five minutes working in the fields would kill them.’
‘It’d certainly make a mess of their nails,’ Nige said.
Laurence sighed. ‘Sometimes, you know, I miss the way things were when I first came here. When there were donkeys in the streets and you and me, Roger and Baz were the only Brits.’
‘Well, things change, Laurence, and you can’t stop them and we’re not doing such a bad job of holding on to a lot of the old ways up here. Besides, your old mate Donna’s been doing her bit to scare away any more British coming here with her new friend Mister Roberts.’
‘You heard about yesterday then?’
‘Miriam told me Monty had to be sedated with some of her nervous breakdown pills before they could get him into their van to take him to Granada Airport. If Monty Crisp goes around telling the Frida Kahlo of Basingstoke and the Pablo Neruda of Darlington what happened and it puts them off coming to the valley, then it’s no bad thing.’
‘Sure,’ Laurence said, ‘but I was there with Miriam, I saw Monty before he went and the look on his face and the things he said Donna got Mister Roberts to do to him …’
‘Oh, I expect he’s just exaggerating because he got scared out of the house that he was living in for free.’
Laurence didn’t feel able to let it go. ‘I’m not sure if I don’t believe what he said. You don’t know Donna like I do, that girl is full of fury It’s not a good idea for any of us if she has a sidekick like Mister Roberts, somebody who seems happy to do what she wants. She’s not that stable in the first place.’
‘Oh, Laurence, you always get like this with women you used to be friends with. And if it comes to it, well, we’ve dealt with difficult women before.’
‘I know, but I’ll tell you something, you haven’t been in the middle of this like I have. You weren’t there when Mister Roberts messed up Sergei. I bet if you’d seen the power of that man you’d feel differently And another thing, Sergei got a shot off and his gun was pointing directly at Mister Roberts, but the man didn’t react in any way.
‘Well, the bullet must have gone somewhere else.’
‘Darling, I’ve looked all over Noche Azul but I haven’t found the hole if it did.’
‘Oh, is that why you were crawling around the bar on your hands and knees last night?’
‘No, that was just drunkenness, drunkenness and despair, you know, the usual.’
‘So are you saying bullets can’t harm Mister Roberts, that he’s immortal or a zombie or something?’
‘I don’t know what I’m saying apart from the fact that him and her together is a dangerous combination.’
After a few more minutes of contemplative basking Laurence said to Nige, ‘You know, I’ve always been suspicious of people who act as if they know exactly and in minute detail what was going through the mind of their childhood selves. As if the person they were at the age of ten or whatever is on the other end of the phone or easily reachable by email, like they could just call them up and say, “Hi, Childhood Self, now just remind me why were we so desperate to take our pet snake along to our first day of secondary school?”
‘For me, young Laurence disappeared when he was about twenty, leaving no forwarding address. After that age I can more or less dimly figure out why I did what I did but before then I haven’t the faintest idea what was going through my head. I can only guess at why my favourite books at the age of eight were the novels of Graham Greene or the reason why I was a supporter of Cardiff City football club even though I’d never been to Wales or why I wanted a javelin and a rolling pin for my ninth birthday That’s not to say that I didn’t go through inner turmoil, after all something must have formed my personality It’s just that the emotional memory of my formative years is a complete blank, as if the computer file has been wiped by a wild power surge on some forgotten, stormy night.’
Nige said, ‘I think that might just be you. I can remember lots about my childhood, too much really, the number of my Aha fan-club membership and an entire episode of the Bionic Man. It’s yesterday and today I struggle with.’
‘I was just thinking about young Stanley I’m fond of that boy, but since I fell out with Donna she won’t let me have anything to do with him; I can’t say I was the best man to have in his life but I’ve got to be better than that Mister Roberts.’
‘You were the closest thing to a mother that he ever had.’
‘You know, I say I remember nothing of my childhood, but funnily enough one thing which is quite vivid is that point when you start to see all adults, especially your parents, not as the godlike figures they were to you when you were an infant but as real, fallible people. For me it happened when I was on the bus to school and the conductor forgot to take my fare. Up until that point I thought grown-ups knew everything, that there was a daily newsletter or something that said “little Laurence is going to try and not pay his fare today”. Once I realised they didn’t know any more than me it made the world seem a lot more dangerous, but I suppose you also knew that if you had the nerve then you could probably get away with anything. In a way I blame that bus conductor for me taking opium, becoming gay and not being able to visit Switzerland for the next twenty years.’
Nige said, ‘I suppose it’s a necessary evolutionary stage isn’t it? Finding out that adults aren’t omnipotent, the first phase of detaching from Mum or Dad and becoming an independent person.
‘Yeah — and I guess most people end up still more or less on speaking terms with their parents. But when you have the kind of claustrophobic relationship Stanley and his mum have, I wonder how that can end? Sometimes I think Stanley might be like the citizen of some repressive regime who’s managed to get round the Internet censors and suddenly discovers the rest of the world sees their beloved leader not as a super hero but as a big fat joke in a stupid uniform. What happens to those countries?’
‘When they realise the emperor is a fraud? Oh civil war, genocide, the collapse of society, that sort of thing.’
Stanley spent all of 28 December — the day after the vanquishing of Monty Crisp — with Mister Roberts. He got up early, before his mother, and took Mister Roberts down the valley to the next village. While they were away from her, he thought, at least
his mum couldn’t get him to beat anybody else up. Once there they had walked around for a bit giving people the creeps, then when Stanley tired of this they turned and headed up into the hills.
Out of sight of human habitation they climbed north and west across the mountains towards Mulhacén, the highest mountain in mainland Spain. They were making for the ski resort of Sierra Nevada, he’d had a great day out there one Christmas holiday with Simon’s family The boys had spent the day snowboarding and they’d all had a sing-song in the car on the way home.
Mister Roberts made easy work of the difficult ascent, travelling over the smooth, shiny, slate-covered slopes at speed, his footfall shattering bits of rock into razor-sharp needles as he ran. Higher up on the mountainside they passed across the top of a bowl-like valley at the bottom of which there was a tarn of startlingly turquoise water still unfrozen. To Stanley it looked like a single blue eye staring back up at them.
Eventually they arrived at the resort. Begun in the sixties and built entirely out of alpine concrete it had the appearance of a council estate that had been provided with a ridiculous number of restaurants and bars. Mister Roberts wandered amongst the skiers in their brightly coloured outfits. A lot of them felt strangely uncomfortable at the sight of a man in a dark suit in their midst: they wondered if he wasn’t an undertaker who had come to attend to one of their number who’d skied into a tree. The creepy couple in the Victorian outfits who’d been prowling around town in the days just after Christmas had been hard enough to take, but this guy was somehow even more unsettling.
Inside the suit Stanley was finding it wasn’t as much fun as he thought it would be. It was amazing to possess this incredible machine, to travel great distances and smash down trees but it made him feel lonely and detached just watching the effects of his actions on the screens inside Mister Roberts’ head.
In a square in front of the chairlift there were clusters of metal tables served by various cafés and restaurants. At one of these Stanley saw his ex-best friend Simon together with his family, eating the long doughnuts called churros, dunking them in hot chocolate and laughing under a big red umbrella. Tipped up on his forehead Simon wore an enormous pair of yellow-tinted designer sunglasses as if he were a playboy member of the royal family of Monaco.