by Alexei Sayle
‘Maybe he was Santa, spreading Christmas cheer,’ Baz remarked, his words muffled because he was holding his head in his hands.
‘More like Satan, from what I saw,’ said Frank.
‘Or Stan,’ added Janet.
‘Eh, Stan! What do you mean Stan?’ Laurence asked looking up, his head fizzing with annoyance and unabsorbed alcohol.
‘He looked a bit like my Uncle Stan,’ Janet replied, smiling serenely.
Laurence felt a sudden stab of despair that he spent his life with these people, that was exactly the sort of thing that had him on his hands and knees crawling around the floor.
He was seriously contemplating hitting Janet when there was a scraping, scuffling sound at the door and a large black man entered the bar, bent under the weight of a huge canvas bag hanging from his shoulder.
In the big cities or the coastal resorts there were many Africans just like him who walked from bar to bar offering for sale pirated CDs, cheap sunglasses, crappy jewellery or knock-off DVDs, but up here in the mountains they were rarer, and as the pickings were thinner only the most desperate worked this remote valley Two weeks before, Samuel, the big boss, had driven Adey and three other men in his BMW from Algecieras to a village much lower down the valley and told them he would pick them up in twenty days’ time. Until then they would walk from village to village, sleeping in the fields or in cortijos at night and during the day attempting to sell the goods that Samuel provided for them at a substantial mark-up.
As soon as he stepped into the bar the British launched a chorus of aggrieved bleating at him. ‘Adey, that Best Bob Dylan CD I bought off you had the same track on it twelve times and it sounded like it was sung by a Chinese man in a shed,’ said Baz.
‘Adey, that Windows XP you sold me set my computer on fire,’ moaned Miriam.
‘Adey, those sunglasses were backwards,’ complained Frank.
Only Laurence and Nige remained silent since they never bought any items from Adey Laurence never purchased his shabby products because as someone who worked in the entertainment community (however infrequently these days), he would have nothing to do with piracy and Nige never bought from him because she wasn’t an idiot.
‘Yes, yes,’ Adey replied smiling sweetly, ‘yes, yes, as I’ve told you before all complaints must be addressed to the head office in Lagos.’ Adey often wondered what they thought they were getting for five Euros. Then rather than spreading out his wares as anticipated he said, ‘Mister Laurence, I would like to have a little word with you on the terrace.’
‘Merry Christmas, Mister Laurence,’ whispered Nige as after a few seconds’ pause Laurence unsteadily got out of his chair and crossed to the front door and the wintry sunlight beyond it.
‘If I’m not back in an hour don’t send a search party,’ he told the group with a sickly smile.
As he emerged blearily into the daylight Adey was already seated at one of the tables under the vine-covered terrace, bare of leaves at this time of year. The watery light filtering through the stout tendrils stippled the rusty furniture like camouflage.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ Laurence asked nervously, sitting down next to the African. ‘A cocktail, perhaps?’
‘No, no thank you, I do not drink.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that.’
Taking a breath Adey began, ‘Mister Laurence I have always respected you. I respected you because you do not buy rubbish from me. You and the lady who likes other ladies. So, because I respect you now I have something extremely important to ask you.’
‘Yes?’
Adey reached into his pocket and brought out a square of plastic and passed it to Laurence. ‘Tell me, Mister Laurence, have you seen this man?’
Laurence found himself staring at a photograph of Donna’s new friend Mister Roberts standing stiffly inside some sort of glass tube. ‘No,’ he said after a second’s pause, ‘I’ve never seen him.’ And handed the piece of plastic back to the African. It occurred to him, even as he lied, that a truly first-rate hangover such as his, which dulled the senses, was a great thing to have when you didn’t want to tell somebody clever the truth. Laurence said to himself that in denying knowledge of Mister Roberts he was simply and automatically following an important tradition of life in the village. When inquisitive people — the Guardia Civil, private detectives, wives, husbands, defrauded timeshare investors — came round searching for somebody, an event that happened with remarkable frequency, everybody, both British and Spanish always automatically denied their existence. Like the foreign legion, they said, ‘El no existe.’
He got the feeling that Adey wasn’t entirely convinced by his protestation of ignorance but was also certain that there was no way for the African to penetrate the bleary disconnection he was feeling.
Looking into his eyes Adey said, ‘It is really important that this man is found, Mister Laurence. I can’t emphasise that enough.’
Putting the photo back in his pocket he continued, ‘This man, he is very, very dangerous, more dangerous than you can possibly imagine. If you do see him I would like you to fire three rockets to the east in rapid succession or I suppose you could send an SMS text message to my mobile phone, but reception in the high country can be very poor. At the moment that is my base of operations — up in the high country in the caves where they say the last Moors hid from the inquisition.’
‘Yes, of course, Adey I’ll definitely be in touch if I see him,’ Laurence replied, not really paying attention to what was being said. He was beginning to panic now, fearing that his hangover must be reaching new depths of toxicity because it had just come back to him that a few seconds before when he’d looked at the picture of Mister Roberts, even though it was on a flat piece of plastic the image had appeared to be moving; the camera or whatever it was that had recorded the image had been circling the glass tube round and around giving a clear 3-D view of the front and back of the big man’s head. Laurence had never experienced that particular side effect of alcohol poisoning before: three dimensionality If he was starting to have such delusions could the bats in the walls be far behind?
Adey was sorting through his bag of junk prior to leaving when Miriam came out onto the terrace. ‘So, Adey,’ she said flirtatiously, swaying a little from side to side, ‘have you got anything special for little old Miriam?’
‘Oh, I do have something but I’m not sure you’ll want it,’ Adey replied. As he spoke, for some reason the African looked directly at Laurence.
‘Ooh what is it? What is it?’ Miriam said.
The black man reached into his bag and came out holding a strange-looking pair of headphones.
‘With these headphones you can hear the thoughts of cats and dogs,’ Adey stated simply.
‘Really?’ Miriam said, her eyes wide. ‘That’s always been my dream.’
‘Well, now you can do it. Sadly they don’t work on human-to-human transmission. You can’t read people’s thoughts, only animals’.’
‘Who would want to know what people were thinking?’ the woman asked, perplexed. Then, ‘How much?’
‘Five Euros, as always.’
Miriam quickly produced a five-euro note from her pocket and handed it over. In return she got the headphones.
Adey said, ‘You just look at the animal you wish to communicate with, Miriam, then you will hear its thoughts.’ As he rose he addressed Laurence, ‘Remember, Mister Laurence, that man is more dangerous than you can possibly know.’ Then he left, slinging his heavy bag over his shoulder and walking down Calle Santo Segundo towards the main gate in the ancient wall and the path that led to the high country.
After watching him trudge out of sight Laurence and Miriam re-entered the gloom of Noche Azul. Miriam excitedly told everyone, ‘These headphones. Apparently with these headphones I can hear the thoughts of cats and dogs. I’m going to try them on now.’ She placed the device over her springy grey hair. The phones didn’t quite fit her ears as if they were made for a different, smaller sha
pe of head but with a bit of bending she forced them until they were close enough.
‘Now I look at a dog …’ said Miriam turning her head around until she finally fixed on her own three-legged pet Coffee Table lying on the cold tiled floor of the bar. As soon as Miriam’s gaze alighted on the creature Laurence and the others heard a sound like a bad-tempered radio play leaking out of the earphones and a terrible expression of fear came over Miriam’s face. Frantically she tried to tear the headphones from her head but at first she couldn’t dislodge them, until finally, she managed to rip them off, fling them to the floor and stamp the device into a thousand pieces with her tiny feet. Then she screamed at all the dogs in the bar, ‘You bastards! You little bastards!’ Then she ran out of the door. Naturally her dog went after her, travelling remarkably rapidly on its three legs and, because Coffee Table was leaving, several other dogs followed. For quite some time as she ran through the narrow lanes of the village they could all hear Miriam screaming, ‘No you bastards get away from me! How could you? How could you think those things? I feed you! I feed all of you swine!’ and as she ran the pack of barking hounds pursuing her grew ever larger.
It took Adey two hours of walking along dusty rock-strewn paths before he finally reached the mouth of a cave hidden from view in a stand of cork oaks and cactus. He entered the cave and gave out a low whistle. Immediately there was a rustle from behind him, a pile of sacking stirred and from beneath it came two aliens both about the same size as a thirteen-year-old child.
Sitting quietly in the opposite corner, not quite covered by a blue tarpaulin, were a Victorian gentleman in a tall top hat and stiff tight suit with black patent leather boots on his feet and next to him his lady, golden curls spilling out from under a pink bonnet, gigantic hooped skirt flaring out from her waist and a frilly parasol held daintily over her shoulder.
Towards morning on Christmas Day Sid and Nancy’s little shuttle craft had been impelled through the earth’s atmosphere by the fireball of their mothership exploding under the remorseless assault of the rebel fighters. In a daze they landed their ship as near as they could to the spot where the deserter’s craft was recorded as having touched down.
Since the moment when they’d been born, in the military hatchery Sid and Nancy had lived a life of rigorous discipline and were unaccustomed to having to make any decisions for themselves; unsure of what to do next they sat for a while in stunned silence while the engines of their craft cooled and clicked behind them.
‘The Imperial battlestar is destroyed,’ said Sid finally ‘So what are we to do?’
‘Carry on with the mission, of course,’ Nancy replied.
She had come six hundred and ninety thousand places above Sid at the military academy so considered herself superior to him, even though they were equal in rank.
‘But the Empire will have no record of the disappearance of the Planetary Exploration Suit and they will not know that we are trapped on this primitive planet,’ Sid persisted, ‘and we have no way to get in touch with headquarters. Perhaps if another battlecruiser is passing close by we could contact it with our communications equipment, but it could be years before that happens.’
‘So we have no option but to complete our assigned task,’ Nancy insisted.
Sid really couldn’t see the logic of this, but unable to come up with a reply he went along with Nancy in finding a cave and hiding their ship at the back of it.
Then, following their last orders, the pair of aliens quickly set about trying to track down the missing Exploration Suit.
Despite Nancy’s fixidity of purpose this did not go well. They soon found out as they travelled around the mountain villages of the Sierra Nevadas and Sierra de Contraviesas that a Victorian gentleman in a tall top hat accompanied by a lady with golden curls spilling out from under a pink bonnet and carrying a parasol, wordlessly showing their 3-D photo of Mister Roberts, did not meet with a great deal of cooperation.
As there was no re-supply from the mothership their stocks of food soon began to run low. They were only a couple of days into their mission and already starving to death. Now it was Nancy’s turn to be indecisive: there were no precedents for their predicament in the military training manuals and it was Sid who, by accident, came up with what they should do.
In some ways the aliens were obviously more advanced than human beings, their technology was clearly far in advance of anything that had been created on Earth. On the other hand, having only ever known constant warfare, fighting and struggle they were in some ways closer to their primitive natures. Sitting on the edge of the cave one morning Sid saw a jack rabbit skipping across the rocky grassland. More or less without a thought he pounced on the startled animal and killed it with his claws.
With astonishing rapidity ancient instincts began to emerge. Within five days of landing they had permanently shed their bulky human suits, and putting their mission to one side they began to hunt for sustenance. Lightning fast the pair ran across the hills catching rabbits and small birds to eat. For the first time in their lives they felt a sense of freedom, the destruction of the gigantic death star, symbol of Imperial power, of thoughtless devotion to duty, had shown them their natural selves, which they never could have conceived of when they were breathing the dead air of the giant spaceship. After all, as they said to each other, they had to be fit and healthy if at some future date they were going to find the deserter and the missing Planetary Exploration Suit.
It was during one of their hunting trips that they came face to face with Adey He was tramping between one village and another his bag of cheap junk on his back when he saw two large lizard-skinned creatures, one with a dead rabbit in its mouth. This was the first native that Sid and Nancy had encountered without the protection of their suits but they felt no reason to worry over meeting a lone human in this isolated place, after all they came from a culture that ruled most of the galaxy so they were merely curious to see what an inhabitant of this planet had to offer them.
On Adey’s part he was unafraid partly because it was simply not in his nature to be intimidated by anyone but also because of a quirk in his character that had meant he had always been considered peculiar back home, because even as a child he had loved animals.
Everybody of importance, the preachers and the politicians, told the modern African that all creatures, all plants, all of nature was merely a resource for all-important, all-conquering mankind; any other feeling for the planet was dismissed as old-fashioned and outmoded sentimentality Any animals that got in the way of intensive agriculture or chemical plants or prestigious dam-building schemes were to be exterminated, apart from those that were nice to eat or were of the bigger, furry kind that could be kept in parks for white tourists to visit.
This had always felt wrong to Adey and back when he was a child in his home village he had found a monitor lizard which had had one of its legs hacked off by local kids. Adey had nursed the creature back to health and kept it as a pet for many years so when he was confronted by two scaly creatures the size of a thirteen-year-old child, he was merely reminded of his former pet and felt only a benign curiosity.
Using sign language Sid and Nancy persuaded Adey to follow them to the cave where they had been sheltering and once there, employing headphones identical to the ones he’d sold Miriam that allowed different species to talk to each other, the aliens and the African were able to communicate with each other.
Over the next day and a half as they sat round the fire feasting on rabbit and wild capers Adey told them all about his life: the poverty in his home country, his trip across the rough seas from the Spanish colony of Melilla to Alicante in a leaking fishing boat and the work he did trudging from village to village, trying to sell pirated junk. In turn they told him all about their home planet, the Empire and the galactic wars, the many technological marvels they possessed and every detail of their mission including the bit about the Earth being destroyed if they didn’t succeed in locating the missing Alien Exploration Suit
and if they managed to contact another Imperial Battlestar. The preachers back home had often gone on about the Earth being destroyed so it didn’t come as a particular shock to Adey that it might actually happen, but he still felt on balance that it would be a good idea if Mister Roberts was found, so he suggested to Sid and Nancy that he should undertake the task of finding the robot. With nothing to lose the two aliens agreed and handed over the 3-D picture of their quarry.
Tres Reyes
The Christmas and New Year holidays ground on like some kind of demented gameshow from Italian television where the objective was not to go to bed ever and to absorb as much drink and drugs as possible. In former times the festivities would have been a brief respite from the endless backbreaking toil of life on the land but these days, when most people’s work seemed easy and undemanding, with all kinds of power tools and electronic devices to help them, the Spanish appeared determined to drink and eat more and stay up later than they ever had before.
Even so there was a limit. Once the holidays were over a lot of the community, both British and Spanish, would gratefully disappear behind their studded gates, metal window grills and high walls until the spring, but before they could do that they had to get through the festival of Three Kings on the evening of 5 January, the holiday on the 6th then finish with the Matanza the day after.
So there was still just under a week to go when on the evening of the 2nd the whole gang of Brits drove ten kilometres down the valley to another settlement where they were having a fiesta. To squeeze in a fiesta between Christmas, New Year’s and Three Kings might seem odd but there simply weren’t enough days in the year for the number of fiestas the modern Spaniard wanted to throw. Sometimes when Laurence drove to Granada or Malaga on the motorway it seemed as if half the commercial traffic was merry-go-rounds and doughnut stalls being towed from town to town by groaning, smoke-belching old trucks. The other half was eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers hauling prawns up and down the country.