(2008) Mister Roberts (11 page)

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.’

‘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.