Mister Roberts

by Alexei Sayle

  ‘Really? Nobody else seems to think that.’

  ‘They don’t know him like I do and if you’d met some of my mum’s other boyfriends …’

  ‘I guess so,’ Pepper said, losing interest in Mister Roberts, then pushing herself off from the rock she asked, ‘So you want to race back to the fiesta or do you want to stay here and hold hands for a bit?’

  The night after the duck fiesta Stanley came downstairs to the kitchen and jumped at the sight of Mister Roberts sitting at the table with a Santa hat on his head, a long brightly coloured red silk scarf from Morocco around his neck and some pink and green knitted gloves on his hands. He’d forgotten that he and his mum had dressed the robot in his Christmas presents the night before. Donna had bought the scarf at Nige’s shop and the gloves had been purchased by Stanley at the Al Campo supermarket on the coast. It was a measure of how happy Mister Roberts had made his mum that she’d suspended her ban on Christmas.

  Last night he’d thought Mister Roberts looked jolly and festive, but now the big man appeared sort of sad to Stanley, like a guy who had no friends and was spending the Christmas holidays alone in a cold and shabby house.

  Searching in the larder he saw that there was nothing that even vaguely resembled fresh bread so putting on his padded jacket and woolly hat he headed for the panaderia.

  The old ladies who baked the bread in the ancient house on the corner of Calle Santo Segundo always made a big fuss of him and gave him a free cake as well as the loaf he bought.

  Donna was lying face down on top of the bed still in the clothes she’d worn the night before. There was no heating in the house so she woke shivering from the cold as the sound of the door slamming behind Stanley shook her from sleep. Painfully she crawled under the duvet, undressed and pulled on a greasy T-shirt she found beneath her pillow, then she dragged the duvet over her head and imagined she was buried in a snowdrift.

  Donna struggled to remember the night before at the fiesta, obviously the images of giant ducks lumbering about had actually happened, but there were other darker and more distorted figures that loomed on the edge of her memory that she couldn’t figure out whether they were real or not.

  Underneath her jagged headache and mouth swamped with bile Donna’s thoughts were unhappy Her dad had been fascinated by history One of the things she could remember him saying often was that while the Chinese had discovered gunpowder they had only used it to make fireworks, stupid pinwheels and rockets. It had taken the genius of the Western mind to apply gunpowder to the rifle, the grenade and the machine-gun. To use it to enslave the entire world. She thought she was behaving like the Chinese right now, with Mister Roberts. And letting down her dad in a way, wherever he was. She needed that leap of inspiration, that rush of genius, to discover what to do with this astounding gift from outer space.

  Time was particularly crucial because if what Laurence had said was true then there were people after him. In some way she needed to make herself and Mister Roberts invincible right away. Then her dad would see she was worth something.

  When she had a hangover her son would go walking in the mountains for most of the day to keep out of her way, so she assumed she would be alone for some time to think about the future, therefore she was annoyed to hear him return so soon. After some crashing and banging in the kitchen he came into her room with a tray on which was coffee and half of the loaf toasted in two long slices.

  ‘Hi Mum, I’ve made you some breakfast,’ he said.

  Throwing back the cover and wincing at the sudden movement Donna saw he’d taken the Santa hat off Mister Roberts and put it on his own head. Stanley laid the tray on the bedside table, then rather than withdrawing as she’d hoped, he sat at the end of her bed looking at her with his big, annoying brown eyes.

  Donna raised herself and picking up the coffee cup, rapidly cooling in the cold mountain air of the bedroom, put it to her lips, hoping to stave off whatever it was that he wanted to tell her. ‘Mmm,’ Donna said. ‘Nice coffee.’

  It was no use, Stanley wouldn’t be deflected. He said in a rush, ‘Mum, I don’t want to use Mister Roberts anymore.

  Donna kept her nose buried in the coffee cup for a few seconds composing her thoughts. ‘What do you mean you don’t want to use him?’ she finally asked.

  ‘I mean I don’t want to be inside him, or to do stuff with him. Do you know what I mean? I don’t think we should be using him the way we have been. I keep worrying, what if he was sent to us as a test? Like in all those Bible stories where everybody always does the wrong thing then God punishes them by turning them into frogs or whatever. I’m scared, Mum. He’s too powerful.’

  Donna, her thoughts churning, eventually said, ‘Of course, babe, if it makes you unhappy then we’ll just hide him somewhere and leave him alone.’

  Stanley let out a trembling breath. ‘Really, Mum? Do you mean it?’

  ‘Of course I do, darling. After all, you being happy is the most important thing, isn’t it?’

  A big smile spread across his face. ‘Aww, thanks Mum. You’ll see — this’ll be much better for everybody’ Then he leaned across and hugged her.

  ‘Well, no mother wants to make her son miserable. Now why don’t you go out for a walk or something?’

  ‘Yeah, cheers Mum, you’re the best.’ So saying Stanley slid off the bed, ran down the stairs and out of the door.

  Wearily Donna threw the duvet back and touched her feet to the freezing tiled floor. She was going to have to go out after all.

  ‘That’s the thing about soup: every mouthful’s the same as the last,’ said Lady Jennifer de Saint Cloud Von Rumminger, Duchess of Bolton and Viscountess Carnforth, better known to Stanley as Runciman’s mum.

  She and Donna were having the set lunch at a roadside restaurant off the old road to Granada just beyond the pass of Suspiro del Moro, known in English as the Moor’s Last Sigh. This was the spot from where Boabdil, the last Muslim king of Granada, surveying the lands he had lost to the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella wept, at which point his mother helpfully turned to him and said, ‘Now you weep like a woman over what you could not defend as a man!’

  There was a nice restaurant and a branch of the DIY chain Polanco there these days.

  Jennifer Carnforth still lived with her four children in the farmhouse from where her husband had led the religious cult that had only recently been broken up by the special squad of the Guardia Civil.

  Amongst the Brits her home was universally referred to as ‘The Funny Farm’, because it was the oddest house that anybody had ever seen, which was really saying something — in these parts the title had some serious contenders. There seemed to be some madness that seized people when they moved to Spain and set about building their dream home. Indeed, that is often what they come to resemble, houses that were only ever seen in dreams, of a disturbing kind.

  Amongst the British community only Laurence and Nige lived in dwellings that followed conventional notions of interior design with walls and doors and windows where you’d expect them to be, everybody else’s house possessed at least one aberration — a hen house in the living room or an open-air toilet on the roof but even they had to admit that Jennifer Carnforth’s place went far beyond anything envisioned even in their wildest fantasies.

  From the outside the Funny Farm was relatively conventional, a jumble of buildings that leaned against each other with crenellated battlements, walls of wood, concrete and stone and in parts roofing of thatch, tile and corrugated iron. It was inside where the real madness began. The interior walls were painted incompetently in scumbled blues, reds and yellows as if infected with psychedelic mould and at random the walls were studded with stained-glass windows and ancient doors stolen from temples in India and Tibet. Rather than have anything as hierarchical as an acute angle the walls flowed into each other as in an hallucination, so that it was impossible to tell where one room ended and another began, to know what was a corridor and what was a kitchen. On top of that there
was a menagerie of animals who wandered in and out without restriction so that guests might be greeted by a cow in the cinema or a parrot yelling obscenities from under blankets in what probably wasn’t the laundry room.

  The farmhouse, set in a wooded bowl two kilometres across and accessible only by a dirt track and rough plank bridge, had, until the raid by the Guardia, been occupied by forty or so disciples of Donna’s husband.

  Though she was stick thin, Jennifer Carnforth only picked at her soup, salad and indeterminate ‘meat in tomato sauce’.

  ‘So, how are you feeling then, Jen?’ Donna asked, trying to sound concerned.

  ‘Oh well, you know … I’m a bit disappointed, to tell you the truth. My husband said that God would appear to us “Illuminated Ones” some time this year and take us all to heaven … but I guess that isn’t going to be happening now. Which is, you know, a bit depressing for me. My husband’s OK though, he loves prison.’

  ‘Loves prison. Why?’

  ‘He’s got a captive audience and him being so charismatic he’s got the whole place under his spell, even a few of the warders are secret worshippers.’

  ‘Really? And how are you off for money?’

  ‘It’s tough. My parents won’t let me get at my trust fund and the kids need all kinds of things …’

  With a friendly expression on her face Donna said, ‘I might be able to help you out there, Jen. I was thinking I could maybe look after Runciman for you.’

  ‘That’d be terribly kind of you, Donna, but why would you?’

  ‘Well, I’ve taken rather a shine to the lad, and him and my Stan are such great friends, so why not? My new partner Mister Roberts is about to come into a lot of money so I’ve been thinking I’d like to spread it around a bit.’

  ‘That’s awfully good of you.’ Tears filled Jennifer’s already watery aristocratic eyes.

  ‘One thing I need to ask you, though, Mister Roberts — he’s very keen on obedience in children. So is he obedient to adults, your Runciman?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Lady Carnforth replied. ‘If there’s one thing they learn growing up in a religious cult, it’s blind obedience to adults.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ Donna said, ‘and he seems quite small for his age, do you think he’ll grow much?’

  ‘Oh, Donna,’ the Viscountess sobbed. ‘It’s a terrible thing but the doctors aren’t sure about that at all. The diet was so bad at the farm that they think he may never grow much bigger than a thirteen-year-old child.’

  On the one hand Stanley would have liked the man on the horse to throw him some sweets, but on the other he was glad that he didn’t because he considered himself more or less a teenager now and teenagers didn’t eat sweets that had been thrown to them by a man on a horse dressed as an Oriental potentate. It was the evening of January 5, the festival of Three Kings, the last big party of the Christmas holidays. Tomorrow was when the children would be given their Christmas presents and the day after that, just to keep things going there was the matanza, then the day after that all the Spanish would be back at work and the Brits who were on holiday would begin to drift back to the UK and by the middle of January the village would be back to being a quiet backwater on the road to the valley of nowhere.

  Next to him Pepper Fawkes showed no such inhibition and threw herself into the air to catch a handful of sweets, her T-shirt riding up to give him a tantalising glimpse of her slender torso.

  For the remainder of the evening the two of them wandered through the fiesta. Occasionally their hands would brush together and they would smile shyly at each other. After an hour or so they fell in with a crowd of British kids and the whole pack, shouting and laughing and pushing hysterically, ranged over the village and the countryside, losing some of those they were with, then going looking for them, discarding others in the search, then going looking for them. Stanley hardly spoke again to Pepper; he was just happy to be swept along amongst this crowd of kids, completely content.

  Stanley was tingling with happiness when he got home around 2 a.m. and found his mother sitting in the kitchen waiting for him. Seeing her there a sense of foreboding gripped the boy, pushing his previous contentment aside as if it had never existed.

  ‘Stanley,’ Donna said in a replay of the scene they’d had in her bedroom. ‘Sit down. I need to talk to you.

  The boy placed himself opposite her at the table and waited for his mother to begin speaking.

  ‘Son. You know I love you.’

  ‘I love you too, Mum.’

  ‘But you are so young, how would you know what it was like to be a parent? To give everything for your child.’

  As she spoke Stanley experienced another of the — what would you call it? Breakthroughs? Visions? Inevitable revelations of growing up? — that he’d been encountering lately Stanley suddenly had the idea of life with his mother as being lived under a kind of hypnotic spell, that most of the time this person, your parent held you in thrall simply because of who they were, what they had done for you, when you were a helpless infant but occasionally, for a little while, as you got older the spell wore off and you saw them as they truly were. He had one of these moments of clarity right there in the kitchen. He knew that soon this lucidity would dissolve but for the moment he saw her as she was — a vain and silly girl, self-pitying and hysterical. She imagined the way she looked after him — dressing him in the cheapest clothes, never providing any food in their freezing cold house, making a fool of herself in the bar, recruiting him in her feuds with people who had never done him any harm — as an example of enormous self-sacrifice. Well, it didn’t appear like much of a sacrifice to Stanley at that moment, it seemed like the bare minimum, if that. And now she was going to do something much worse.

  Donna continued. ‘You were right when you said Mister Roberts might have been sent to us as a sort of test. I don’t know where he’s come from but I do think he was meant especially for us, and I think the worst thing we could do with him is nothing, which is what you wanted. So the thing is … I’ve got somebody else.’

  Still a bit silly from the night he’d had Stanley was slow to take in her meaning. He’d often heard her say the phrase, ‘I’ve got somebody else.’ It generally meant her previous boyfriend had been arrested or run off with their electricity money and she was now sleeping with his best mate. So he asked, ‘What do you mean you’ve got somebody else?’

  Behind Stanley there was a noise, a scraping sound, he forced himself to look over his shoulder, to see Mister Roberts descending the last couple of steps from upstairs. The big man unsteadily crossed the floor and took up a position behind Donna.

  The boy stared at his mother and the robot, standing as if composed by a Regency portrait painter. Stanley was surprised that what he felt most of all after the initial shock had faded, was sorry for the two of them.

  ‘We need to be safe,’ she said.

  ‘Is that Runciman in there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hi, Runciman.’ The boy waved and Mister Roberts gave a little wave back. ‘He’s nuts you know.’

  Mister Roberts made a move towards Stanley but Donna put her hand on his arm and said, ‘No!’ firmly The big man stopped in his tracks then returned to stand placidly behind Donna.

  ‘I’ve told him he’s not to harm you under any circumstances. And in the end you’ll benefit from what we do. You’ll have everything you want soon. I’ve got an idea now of how he should be used and soon we’ll live like kings, the three of us.’

  ‘What’s to stop me stealing him back?’

  His mother smiled. ‘Well, you can try but Runciman doesn’t mind being inside Mister Roberts like you do, so there’s not going to be much opportunity for you to get in there and we’ll hide him somewhere good. I’ll keep guard and anyway it seems to me you’re growing really fast and there’s not much time left for you to fit inside him so …’

  ‘You’ve got it all worked out then?’

  ‘I think so. You know, Stan,
I might have been a bit wild at times but I’ve always been there for you, nobody has ever denied that. I’m only doing this for your own good, because I love you, you know.’

  ‘I know, Mum.’ There didn’t seem much else to say so he got up from the table. ‘I’m going to bed now, it’s late.’

  ‘Good boy’

  ‘Goodnight, Mum. Goodnight, Mister Roberts.’

  It seemed that’s how it was with them now, they didn’t fight but gave in to each other with the courtesy of Bavarian duellists.

  Stanley slept well, a deep dreamless nothingness but still awoke with a snap to hear his mother and Mister Roberts leaving early the next morning. The two of them had spent the night together in her bedroom. He didn’t know whether Runciman had got out of the suit or stayed in it all night, and he found he didn’t really want to think about that.

  However he looked at the situation he couldn’t see a way in which his mother’s behaviour wouldn’t end in disaster, letting somebody like Runciman have control of something like Mister Roberts. It was a mistake only someone as deluded as his mum could make. Did she really think that boy would allow himself to be controlled for long?

  Stanley found that he was lying there rigid with rage, sucking in shallow little gulps of angry air. Taking control of his breathing and unclenching his fists he forced himself to relax. He knew Donna had always hoped that some man would come along to rescue her, and as it turned out it looked like he was going to have to be that man. He was convinced it wasn’t supposed to be this way yet it seemed like he was going to be the one who had to act like an adult.

  Once he was sure the pair were gone and unlikely to return the boy got up and, putting on his warmest jacket, set off through the silent village and out into the campo. Outside his house the streets of the village were silent and carpeted with brightly coloured crushed sweets, on the window sills there were half-drunk plastic glasses of beer or sangria and paper plates with the remains of free paella on them.