by Alexei Sayle
Stanley felt a desperate urge to go over and talk to Simon, to be part of his happy gang. Slowly Mister Roberts approached the little group and stood next to them, he even reached out his hand towards the other boy but of course he couldn’t speak. Gradually becoming aware of the ominous, threatening presence standing mute beside them Simon’s family fell into an uneasy silence.
‘Daddy’s feeling frightened,’ whispered Simon’s dad.
After a few more seconds Mister Roberts turned and walked back out into the snow.
Though it was only half past four, cold night had suddenly fallen. Still Nige and Laurence remained on the terrace of Noche Azul. Laurence felt a certain gratitude towards Nige for sitting with him during most of the day while he poured out his discontent, not that she had anything better to do. And it wasn’t a particular trial for her. Nige was one of those people who found everybody on the planet equally fascinating. She could sit and talk for hours with the most unlikely, dull or terrible individuals — the local peasants, Ukrainian criminals, Liberal members of the European Parliament. ‘We call this a spoon in my country,’ he had once heard her say to a Moroccan farmer.
When he’d lived in London he’d had a circle of close friends, some gay guys certainly but a couple of married couples too. Their relationships had been forged and tempered through enduring all manner of crises together from watching lovers expire in hospital wards to the dawning of the realisation that Kylie was overrated. But by moving he’d lost them and in the village you couldn’t be choosy The only qualification for being somebody’s friend in the village was that they were there and they hadn’t seriously tried to rob you in the last year or two. Often that didn’t seem like enough.
Laurence asked Nige, now just a blurred shape across the table, ‘Do you ever wonder why we came here?’
‘What, to Spain?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Er, how about a new life free from all the crappy stuff that tied you down back home: the weather, the government, friends who know you too well?’
‘I guess, it’s just that I sometimes wonder if we’re not all a bit the same, us Brits. We congratulate ourselves that we’re not like those oafs on the costas who don’t speak Spanish, if anything we know the language and we know the culture better than the natives. Even so, we’re never going to be a true part of the country we live in. I sometimes wonder if it’s that that appeals to us. We’re all people who can’t quite engage with life, we’re people who sit on the terrace and watch and, of course, drink. I wish once in a while that I could give myself entirely to somebody or something. Instead I hang on to my air of amused detachment like a life raft.’
‘That’s the closest thing we have to a philosophy though isn’t it, “live and let live”?’
‘Sometimes I wonder whether it isn’t more “fuck up and let fuck up”.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Donna said to her son three days after the eviction, ‘you know tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve, right? I fancy a trip into Granada, get out of this stinking valley and spend some of the money that old bastard Monty Crisp gave us.
‘Me and you?’
‘Well, yeah, of course me and you … and Mister Roberts.’
‘Oh … OK, sure.’
The next morning as Donna was about to climb behind the wheel of their ancient brown Nissan Patrol Stanley said, ‘No, Mum, let me.’
‘But you don’t know how to drive,’ she replied.
‘I don’t, but I’ve been exploring his features when I’ve been walking around and I’m pretty sure Mister Roberts does.’
As they drove through the outlying houses beyond the village walls, on a patch of land cleared for development they saw a circle of jeering English kids. In the centre was Simon, tears flooding down his face, and next to him was Runciman, who was cutting up the yellow-tinted designer sunglasses with a pair of pruning shears.
Most Spaniards wish for a good death, they do not want to expire as they imagine Scandinavians do, hooked up to tubes and pipes in some white-tiled sterilised room. Rather they would prefer to flame out in a showy and extravagant fashion, if possible taking their family with them.
All those who witnessed the Nissan Patrol that day as it hurtled at barely believable speeds down the valley’s narrow roads and onto the motorway marvelled at the audacity of its driver. Some who caught a glimpse of him said later that they wondered whether in his old-fashioned suit and slicked-back hair the man wasn’t perhaps the spirit of the great toreador, Manolito. Certainly, whoever he was, he must have had the most incredible reflexes to pilot the bulky, top-heavy brown car in the way he did. Now he was on the gravel verge, now he was rounding a sharp bend with two wheels hanging over the void, now he was on the wrong side of the road zinking in and out of oncoming traffic. Many an office drone in their workaday Seat or Renault whispered a silent ‘Ole!’ as the 4X4 Nissan tore off their wing mirror while overtaking at 150 kilometres an hour on the hard shoulder.
At first Donna screamed and hung on to the door handle, but after a while she relaxed and sat smiling vaguely at the world as it hurtled at supersonic speeds towards her.
In Britain roadworks are presaged by miles and miles of cones so that traffic is affected in all directions but in Spain sometimes the only warning that men were working on the carriageway was a mechanical dummy of a man stuck by the side of the road, dressed in a fluorescent lime suit and brandishing a red flag. They passed one such just before the Alhambra junction and Mister Roberts gave him a secret little wave, robot to robot.
Mister Roberts parked the car alongside the Rio Genil in a stand of cypress trees at the foot of the Alhambra Hill. Smoke gently curled from the overheated brakes as Donna took the arm of Mister Roberts and the two of them walked away from the Nissan upwards towards the shopping streets in the centre of town.
Donna and her companion spent the morning in the smart little clothes shops around the Plaza Bib Rambla. From time to time she would solicit his opinion about some prospective purchase. ‘What do you think about this scarf?’ she’d ask, then, when he just stood impassively looking at her she’d invent a reply, ‘No, you’re right. Orange isn’t my colour.’
When she tried something on that she didn’t like Donna would simply throw it on the floor, the ship-owners would move to complain but the hulking presence of Mister Roberts always took away their courage at the last minute. They also found themselves surprisingly open to offers of a discount when the time came to pay.
As the cathedral clock struck twelve Donna sat down at an outside table of a café in the square by the cathedral and told Mister Roberts to go back to the car to drop off all the bags of shopping they’d accumulated while she had a coffee and a sandwich and smoked a cigarette. Watching his broad muscular back as he punched through the crowds of tourists Donna comforted herself with the thought that her going out with a robot who was really her son wasn’t by a long way the weirdest relationship she’d ever been in.
After he’d dropped off the shopping at the car Mister Roberts walked swiftly up to the Generalife gardens that surrounded the Alhambra. In front of a clipped hedge he sat down on a marble bench and after a second Stanley climbed out of the back, the opening in the robot’s torso masked by the hedge. Then he walked to a kiosk outside the palace of Charles V and bought a ham and cheese sandwich. Returning to the bench he sat down next to Mister Roberts to eat it.
His mum had forgotten that there was no way that he could eat while he was inside the robot, just as she seemed to forget that he was inside Mister Roberts at all, and told him all kinds of things that he didn’t really want to know, stuff about her pretending to be a gynaecologist in front of one of her boyfriends for example.
Stanley found himself being troubled by a whole range of disquieting emotions and thoughts. Firstly the loneliness he’d experienced the day before up in the Sierra Nevada was still with him, plus he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been allowed to simply enjoy this marvellous object he’d found. On the one h
and he was pleased that Mister Roberts was making his mum so happy but it had given him a queasy feeling to do the things she’d ordered him to do to Monty Crisp.
Stanley thought to himself, ‘I’m a kid. I’m not supposed to be able to do stuff like that to a grown-up.
The whole situation made him miserable: he’d been so excited when he’d found Mister Roberts but it was extraordinary how quickly his mum had taken him over so that now the whole state of affairs seemed like some sort of incredibly complicated problem.
There was a quality of unrestrained rage that Mister Roberts had brought about in his mum that he’d never seen before, and he was afraid of how much further she would go, or rather, how much further she would make him go.
When Mister Roberts returned to the Plaza Bib Rambla Donna said crossly, ‘Where’ve you been?’
Then, realising he couldn’t reply, said, ‘Never mind. I feel like having a look round the tourist tat now.’
They moved through the narrow streets of the Alcaicería, the sun-starved alleyways that had once been the Arab silk market at the very centre of Moorish Granada. To the tourists this place reeked of authentic Islamic Al Andalus, but had in fact been remodelled in the nineteenth century as arcades of purpose-built souvenir shops.
This was the area where the gypsy women gathered to try and sell the tourists sprigs of heather and worthless advice. Their leader was a stout woman of perhaps fifty called Maria Conchita y Christabal Oviedo de Antequera. In the streets and on her blog she gave the impression of a fierce pride in her Romany heritage, but secretly Maria Conchita often wondered why she bothered, all of her family with all their complicated scams and importunings and thieving made about as much money as if just one of them had got some sort of proper job, cleaning buses at the depot perhaps or selling sandwiches outside the bullring — but that wasn’t the gypsy way History hung heavy on her: until twenty years ago her family had lived in a cave about half a kilometre away in the Sacremonte — the Gypsy Quarter of Granada, but then after the floods the council had moved most of the gitanos out to apartments on the Poligano, the bleak wind-blown housing estate hard by the Southern ring road. Maria Conchita caught the bus into the centre of Granada every morning, six days a week to walk the streets forcing herself on the tourists who ambled through the narrow mediaeval streets. Pretending to tell their fortunes she would inform rangy Scandinavian girls in rapid heavily accented Spanish that they were going to marry a man called Paco and would give birth to seven children — four boys named Carlos, Pedro, Miguel and Ramon, and three girls named Juanita, Marta and Conchita Immaculada.
When she was surveying the herds of sightseers Maria Conchita often imagined herself to be a lion on the plains of Africa sniffing the wind for the scent of wildebeest. A tingling of the scalp drew her gaze to one particular couple, a pretty if hard-faced blonde woman hanging on the arm of a bigger older, dark-haired man in a suit. Many would have mistaken the woman for Dutch or Scandinavian but Maria Conchita knew right away that she was English. It was one of her skills that she was proudest of, her ability to deduce instantly the country of origin of any tourist. The man on the other hand, no for once she didn’t know. Disappointed she thought to herself that she must be getting old. Maybe soon she wouldn’t bother coming into town so often.
Suppressing her irritation the gypsy woman approached the pair with a confident walk and grabbing the hand of the blonde launched into her patter. ‘Beautiful señorita let me unravel for you the mysteries of the planets that determine the future of—’
The gypsy woman was shocked when the foreigner took her hand back with a dismissive gesture and a cataract of abuse in perfect Andalusian Spanish with a couple of authentic gitano swear words thrown in for good measure. Now Maria Conchita, her previous self-doubt thrown aside, was determined to make a sale, so wriggling sideways she tried the man instead. Taking firm hold of his hand and gazing up into his face she began her patter, but as soon as she looked into his dead eyes and felt the cold lifeless touch of his fingers she instantly knew him for what he was. Over numberless centuries at night around the campfire the gypsies had told stories and many of the stories had concerned such as him. In the caves of the Sacremonte the tale, a particular favourite of Maria Conchita’s, was told as if it had happened yesterday It was a story of the old ghetto in Prague and the rabbi who brought to life a man made of mud.
‘Golem!’ Maria Conchita screamed in Romany, ‘the golem is in the ghetto. Help! Help! The golem, the dybbuck has come here to Granada!’
Further up Calle Reyes Catolicos two of her cousins in the middle of picking the pockets of an Australian backpacker heard her cry and took it up; in a cave in the Sacremonte four of her uncles who’d been giving an appallingly inept flamenco show to some frightened Danes heard their relative and also took up the call. ‘The golem is in the ghetto! The dybbuck has come here to Granada!’ they cried and throwing down their guitars raced from the cave and headed down the hill and into town. On a patch of land below the Alhambra, where they ran a parking scam almost as old as the Alhambra itself, members of Maria Conchita’s tribe heard the call and stripping off the luminous jackets they wore to lend them spurious veracity as parking attendants they too ran for the Alcaicería. Soon seemingly every gypsy in Granada and the family of frightened Danes were running through the narrow streets, bowling over tourists as they ran. Before long there was a large mob of dark-skinned men and dirndl-skirted women brandishing knives and sticks, pouring down the alleyways of the old town and heading for the continuing screams echoing around the silk market. In the middle of the rabble Maria Conchita thought to herself, Yes this is what it is to be a gypsy When you are threatened by a monster a single call and they come from all corners of the city to protect you.
As soon as the Gypsy woman began screaming Donna and Mister Roberts fled. At first they ran side by side, along the cobblestones of the ancient town, while in the distance the guttural cries of the gypsy mob grew louder by the second. Stanley realised that even with the power of Mister Roberts he would not be able to fight so many armed and determined people, so suddenly he pulled Donna to a stop.
‘What are you doing?’ she gasped, her eyes wide with fright.
Silently Mister Roberts grabbed Donna and threw her over his shoulder then began to run, faster than before, down the hill towards the safe territory of the Calle Colon and the newer nineteenth-century part of town with its big stores and fancy hotels, and where the gypsies would not venture.
As he fled, Donna, jolting up and down on Mister Roberts’ shoulder, shouted insults at the pursuing mob.
‘C’mon, you pack of bastards,’ she yelled. ‘My boyfriend would kill the lot of you if I told him to.’
Año Nuevo
It took the two of them several hours to circle back to their Nissan parked on the banks of the Rio Genil without being spotted by any gypsies and night was falling by the time they reached the battered brown car. Donna drove back to the valley sunk in thought while Stanley dozed inside the suit. Once they were back in the house and Mister Roberts was parked upstairs in Stanley’s bedroom they convened a family meeting around the kitchen table. For once it was Stanley who spoke first. ‘Well, we can’t take him anywhere where there’s gypsies.’
‘Which means, more or less, any town in Spain,’ Donna replied, glumly.
Stanley added, ‘I don’t think they’ll bother us if we don’t go too close. If they’re like those other gypsies that used to come round to our house, Paco or Pedro or that one with the American car, then they’re very superstitious, they’ll only attack if they feel threatened, like geese …’
‘So he’s stuck here and we’re stuck here with him.
How am I going to make money out of him if he’s stuck in the valley?’
Stanley felt a great relief flood through him and at the same time another realisation. Until that moment he hadn’t known how desperately he had wanted his mother to accept there were restrictions on what Mister Roberts should do.
If Mister Roberts was stuck in the valley it seemed a much better and safer outcome. Before his appearance there’d been a limit to how far his mother could go, after all she had to make a living and get served in the shops and stuff, so even if she wanted to, she couldn’t fight with absolutely everybody, but he’d feared that with Mister Roberts by her side she’d get completely out of control. In the days since he’d found Mister Roberts he’d spent a lot of time wondering if he shouldn’t be doing something special with his discovery If his life was a comic book then Mister Roberts would be out there fighting crime or feeding the poor, not going around screwing people over, which seemed to be his mother’s preferred option. At least he hoped after the problems in Granada his mum might drop any plans she’d had to profit from Mister Roberts by messing with people.
In a while Stanley left his mother drinking vodka in the kitchen and went upstairs to sleep. He felt really tired because Donna kept Mister Roberts up late into the night sitting beside her at Bar Noche Azul.
Earlier on when he’d taken the robot up to his bedroom he had sat him down on a wooden box facing the bed, now his last sight as he tumbled into sleep was the reassuring picture of Mister Roberts sitting watching over him as the church bells tolled in the New Year and rockets exploded across the night sky.
Next day in Bar Noche Azul the foreign community was nursing its collective New Year’s hangover. Kirsten, the Dutch academic, returning to her seat from the toilets where she had been sick, said in her perfect English, ‘Retrospectively it has to my mind been a curious Christmas holidays. Typified, if you will, by the arrival of that huge silent man Mister Roberts. Though I didn’t see it, from what I’m told it was remarkable what he did to those two Russians and then his dragging Donna out and she being completely terrified then returning with her a few hours later all smiles, that is most peculiar. What’s more the whole shebang occurring on Christmas Day.’