(2008) Mister Roberts (14 page)

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.
Stanley 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.’

‘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?’