by Alexei Sayle
This place they were driving to was a town rather than a village and the last community before the Granada/Motril highway, which ran across the end of the main street on an arched concrete bridge. After a few weeks stuck in the house Laurence often felt driving down the main street of the town with its huge grey shed of an orange cooperative, Internet café and two discos that he’d suddenly emerged onto Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, so frantic and twenty-first century did it seem.
Of late, though, during the last three or four years, he had found himself, more and more, avoiding the place. When Laurence had first come to live in Spain, when the only foreign inhabitants had been Roger, Nige and Baz and himself, he’d frequently driven to the town in his little Seat. Before high-speed broadband there had been the bank to visit to change money or make deposits and the post office to send letters and now and then he had just wanted to hear the voice of another English person. In time it slowly dawned on Laurence that each time a new individual came to live in his own village, an almost identical Brit seemingly appeared by magic in this town. In their ‘Bar Harlequin’, almost identical to Noche Azul, with the same harsh neon lighting, screaming stereo and giant TVs in each corner, this British community possessed their own Miriam, their own Leonard, their own Baz the builder, their own Janet, their own Frank and even, he had to admit, their own Laurence — a prissy set designer by the name of Derek Twookey with whom he’d worked years before on a series of Lovejoy. Of course there were differences: the town’s Li Tang was a Cambodian woman called Dao and their Nige, an ex-model called Magenta de Calliope, wasn’t a lesbian.
After some internal wrestling Laurence had forced himself to come to terms with this duplication and the realisation that came with it that he wasn’t a unique snowflake, that there were maybe hundreds of Laurences in southern Spain alone. It took some getting used to, but he eventually managed it. However, since the turn of the century something more disturbing had begun: there had started to appear not just versions of him and his friends but younger versions of him and his friends. Right now in this town there was a whole crowd of young British who were to his eyes clearly Laurence and Nige and Baz and Miriam when they had been in their twenties. That was much harder to take. To see yourself happy and healthy, laughing and optimistic, with all your myriad blunders and adventures ahead of you, stripped away the defences you had laboriously built up against the depredations of old age, like brake fluid thrown over the paint of a car by a jealous lover. Apart from the pain of seeing yourself as you once were, there was also the feeling that these young people were your responsibility in some way, that somehow you could prevent them making the mistakes you made so that their lives wouldn’t descend into the same sadness as yours. Once at an earlier fiesta, very drunkenly he had gone up to the guy he thought was Laurence Version 2.0 and said, ‘Don’t wear brown shoes to the BAFTAS,’ but of course the boy hadn’t known what he was talking about and had simply sidled away from him with a look of disgust on his face.
Their dopplegangers were at the fiesta tonight, grouped around a circular white plastic table, but luckily they were the ones who were the same age. Laurence supposed the younger ones were off somewhere else, perhaps actually having a good time.
So identical to his own gang did this little group appear that he found himself looking to see where their mute, frightening giant was, but of course this town possessed no Mister Roberts. One up to his village, then.
In most ways the fiesta in this town, like its British community, was identical to the fiestas in all the other villages, towns and cities in all of the other valleys of the Sierra Nevada. The same band played in the same tent and the same stallholders sold fried dough and plastic trinkets. Yet there were also always some subtle differences. In this particular town they had a legend that sometime in the distant past there had lived a duck which had saved the town from marauding Visigoths with its loud, warning quacks. Due to this fable the church always had several Barbary ducks wandering up and down the aisles and honking their way through the priest’s sermon. Also at fiesta time the village men would dress up in elaborate duck outfits that would be burnt at the end of the night on a big bonfire. Despite this it had been discovered at some point that being dressed like a duck did not provide the villagers with enough opportunity to make a huge noise, so now in one hand each fowl carried an antique flintlock pistol. From time to time they would fire this gun in the air with a terrifying percussion that sent dangerous shards of shrapnel and bits of the pistol flying in all directions.
Laurence’s gang found themselves a table on the edge of the dance floor. He had never mentioned his doppleganger theory to anyone except Nige and she’d dismissed it as a symptom of his overactive imagination. Nige could see no similarities between the Brits in this town and their own crowd, but he noticed that they naturally chose a table as far away from their doubles as possible. Frank went to the bar to buy the cloakroom tickets that could be exchanged for drinks and then they settled down in the distinctive atmosphere of the Spanish fiesta — the air heavy with the smell of doughnuts and gunpowder.
Laurence leant across to Donna who was sitting opposite him. ‘Do you fancy a dance?’ he asked.
‘You want to dance with me, Laurence?’ Donna replied with surprise.
‘Yes, if Mister Roberts doesn’t mind.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t mind.’ She turned to the hulk, ‘Do you mind me dancing with Laurence, sweetie?’
The hulk made no reply so taking Laurence’s hand Donna led him towards the dance floor and the deafening Latin American beats of Humana Show 2000.
Laurence took her in his arms. It made him feel melancholic recalling the fiestas in the past where they’d danced together. With Donna, once she’d broken with you, her anger was such that there was no way back. She might act friendly if it suited her but she’d never shine that bright light on you ever again. He, on the other hand, was never able to let even the smallest thing go: there were feuds he’d had with people going back to primary school and there were ex-lovers from whom he was still demanding an explanation, sometimes in front of their wives and children, as to why they broke up with him. Laurence supposed that this reluctance to let go, this inability to acknowledge when a relationship was over, was why he felt he had to warn Donna over, the danger he thought her boyfriend might be bringing down on her.
As they slowly circled the wooden floor Laurence said, ‘You know Adey?’
‘The darkie who goes around selling stuff? Yeah, I bought a hairdryer off him once that turned out to have its insides made of waste paper.’
‘The African, yes. Well, he came to me yesterday in Noche Azul and showed me a photo of your friend Mister Roberts and told me that he was really dangerous, that people were looking for him and if I knew where Mister Roberts was I should alert Adey by firing three rockets into the air.’
‘I see, yeah.’ She paused thoughtfully, then said, ‘OK. So what?’
‘So do you know any reason why people should be looking for him? I mean how much do you know about him, have you asked him where he’s come from, what he’s doing here?’
Laurence had expected she would at least consider what he was telling her but with a confident, silly smile Donna merely said, ‘You know we don’t pry into other people’s business in our village, Laurence. I don’t ask you why you can’t ever go back to Switzerland now, do I?’
Laurence sighed. ‘I know but I thought we always had a limit about who we allowed to live in the village:
VAT fraud, OK; sexual offences that are only illegal in the Southern states of the US, fine; dodgy passport, all right … but there is something about that man that is truly disturbing.’
Seemingly changing the subject she asked him, ‘Laurence, you’ve met lots of rich, powerful people over the years haven’t you?’
‘Yeah, I suppose so.
‘Were they nice?’
‘Nice?’
‘Yeah: nice, polite, interested in what other people had to say Nice.�
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‘Well, no, they weren’t by and large. Very occasionally they would be OK, polite and thoughtful but then you’d really notice it and it would usually pass and they’d go back to being not nice.’
‘Exactly,’ Donna said. ‘My dad once told me that poor people had to be nice to each other because they might want to borrow somebody’s van one day But the rich, they can buy their own van, can’t they?’
‘Well, I don’t know what Julia Roberts would want with a van, but I suppose you’re right.’
‘And don’t you think that in fact rich people are being more human really, more authentic, because that’s what we’d all be like if we had proper power, if our lives weren’t in the hands of others?’
‘Are we still talking about the loan of commercial vehicles?’ Laurence asked.
Ignoring him, Donna continued. ‘You know, I used to worry like mad if people liked me or not. I was terrified of being alone, abandoned, friendless, because the world seemed like such a frightening place that you had to have allies but I’ll tell you what, Grandad, now I’ve got Mister Roberts the world needs to be frightened of me.’
At the same time as Donna was dancing with Laurence and explaining her ideas of evolutionary psychology, her secret weapon was being forced to listen to Miriam drunkenly telling him all the details of her mental breakdown. There was something about the stillness of the big man that encouraged some people, those whose brains weren’t put together right, to confide in him.
‘Is it wrong for a woman to want to have a child by her cat?’ Miriam woozily demanded.
With the use of hand gestures Mister Roberts indicated that he had to go somewhere immediately and without waiting for Miriam to tell him any more he got up and striding through the dancers was soon far away from the clamour of the dance floor.
On the southern edge of the town there was a stone bridge that spanned an arroyo and carried the old coaching road that ran from Granada to the coast. Mister Roberts headed towards this. The robot’s footsteps echoed from the walls of the town’s long shopping street, empty since all the inhabitants had been drawn to the noise and excitement of the fiesta. In the distance as he walked Mister Roberts saw Runciman Carnforth heading back into town after huffing a can of lighter gas under the bridge.
Under a streetlight they came together, Mister Roberts and the boy Runciman went to pass but Mister Roberts stepped in front of the thirteen-year-old, blocking his way and putting a hand on his chest. Runciman was vaguely aware of who this man was, having seen him around the valley, so he wouldn’t have been particularly worried even if he hadn’t been high.
As it was, the bully simply stared placidly up into the dark eyes of the man, expecting that at some point he’d ask a question or tell him off about some misdemeanour but instead the big adult merely withdrew his hand and brushing him aside walked towards the darkness of the countryside.
‘Goodnight, boss!’ Runciman called after him.
Rapidly Stanley parked Mister Roberts underneath the bridge with his back to the rough dripping stone, then he climbed out, scrambled back up the dirt bank and re-entered the town.
As he walked Stanley thought to himself, shouldn’t there be some warm glow of goodness burning in his chest? To have let Runciman go on his way was a really big thing for him and yet he felt, what? Nothing really, well maybe if he thought about it he didn’t feel bad, not particularly good but not bad.
When he’d done a bad thing, like helping his mother mess with Monty or beating up Sergei, there had been a kind of mad pleasure to it but it had been tinged with blackness at the edges in a way that this feeling wasn’t.
‘Bloody Hell!’ he thought. ‘Is that it? Is that the best you could hope for if you were really good and didn’t abuse your power over terrible bullies who in anybody’s book deserved to be well smashed-up. The absence of bad?’
In the long and forgotten centuries before the British came to southern Spain the things that affected life in the valley were the simple, timeless elements of rural existence: the weather, disease, feuds and family disputes, the wholesale price of oranges. Excepting the upheaval of the civil war even changes of government in distant Madrid had had little effect. Yet in the twenty-first century these little white villages strung out along a twisting mountain road on the edge of the high sierras were in certain ways more connected to Crouch End than to Cordoba. In the last few years the holiday times of private schools in Britain had become as important a component of village life as the almond harvest. The numbers of kids running around the squares, lanes and paths would be swollen considerably throughout the duration of the winter, easter or summer breaks by the children of those who owned second homes within the walls of the village or out in the surrounding countryside.
Many of the parents of these youngsters were powerful people back in the UK, TV producers, surgeons, hedge-fund managers, successful publishers. They spent huge amounts of money sending their children to private schools in order to ensure that they mixed only with the offspring of people identical to themselves. Yet curiously, when they came to the village, these same powerful parents took no notice of what their sons and daughters were up to, so that unsupervised they came into contact with all kinds of youths from all kinds of possibly unsavoury backgrounds. A couple of summers back the two daughters of Fabien, the co-owner of Noche Azul, had spent a fortnight staying in London with a Channel 4 commissioning editor and his two teenage girls. The village girls found most things about London unimpressive including being part of the audience for the recording of a top comedy gameshow and dinner at the Ivy Restaurant where they sat next to Elton John’s boyfriend, but all the girls would cherish for ever the afternoon the four of them got together with Baz’s three children who lived with his estranged wife and her new boyfriend on a council estate in Hackney and the whole gang had spent seven hours travelling around the West End of London surreptitiously disposing of the separate parts of a sawn-off shotgun that had been used to rob a post office.
Stanley walked back through the press of drunken adults attending the fiesta, down to the schoolyard where he knew most of the younger people would be hanging out. In the crush of kids milling around the stalls was a girl called Pepper Fawkes. Pepper’s father was a solicitor in the West Midlands who specialised in getting footballers off charges of rape, drug possession and dangerous driving. During the last few holidays Stanley had been one of a crowd of kids who’d been allowed to hang around their big house on the edge of the village, to enjoy its pool in the summer and its central heating and satellite TV in the winter. Though Pepper herself had never given him much attention he felt a fondness towards her because her parents had continued to be nice to him after they’d had the inevitable falling out with his mum.
Catching sight of her Stanley wondered whether Pepper had always possessed those small breasts and long glossy chestnut hair and whether she’d always been so tall. He seemed to remember in the summer she’d been chubby and worn childish dresses, but it might have been that back then he hadn’t found every centimetre of her as unbelievably fascinating as he did right now. Seeing somebody over his shoulder Pepper detached herself from the crowd of English girls and came in his direction with a sinuous walk he couldn’t take his eyes off, then to his surprise she came and stood right in front of him, her little feet planted apart sheathed in trainers he’d seen advertised on the TV. ‘I bet you can’t run as fast as me, Pepper said.
Stanley was astonished that she was talking to him, as far as he could remember they’d never had a conversation of any kind, but he quickly replied, ‘I bet I can.’
‘All right, I’ll race you to the Ermita then.’
The Ermita was a small chapel built on a rocky hill about a kilometre and a half outside the village and reached by a narrow dirt path that wound through the orange groves.
Without looking at him or saying another word Pepper set off at a run, her whippy body dodging through the clumps of families who were hanging round the stalls. Stanle
y charged after her and soon they were out of the settlement and deep into the silent countryside, the white of her T-shirt flickering ahead of him in the moonlight. Slowly he gained on her but she still arrived ahead of him at the chapel where she slumped breathless on a bench. Stanley joined her and they sat gulping in the cold night air until after a few minutes the girl’s breathing calmed and she said, ‘I won.’
‘Yes, you did.’
Looking sideways at him she asked, ‘So who’s that bloke that’s been hanging around with your mum?’
‘You mean Mister Roberts?’
‘Yeah, him. My dad says he’s the most frightening-looking man he’s ever seen and if we were back home he’d inform social services and they’d have you taken into care.’
‘Just as well this is my home then,’ Stanley said. ‘He’s wrong about Mister Roberts anyway, he just looks hard. But he’s all right really, when you get to know him.’
‘Honest? My mum said that black guy who sells stuff was looking for Mister Roberts. Apparently, according to what she heard in the bar, he showed Laurence a picture and said he was really dangerous and if he saw him he should fire three rockets in the air or find him in some cave he’s living in, up where the Moors had their last stand.’
‘Well, people really shouldn’t interfere because he’s not dangerous or anything. I know he looks rough and frightening on the outside but inside, believe me, he’s a very kind person, good-hearted and honest.’