(2008) Mister Roberts (15 page)

‘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.

Stanley
took a track leading upwards to the cave where the Moors had hidden from the
Inquisition and where Adey was waiting with whoever was looking for Mister
Roberts.

It was a little before
midnight, a few minutes prior to the day of the matanza when the brown Nissan swung
into the parking place just outside the village walls. Most of the lanes
between the houses were too narrow to get cars down so drivers had to park at
the top of the village then walk. Donna tumbled out of the driver’s seat and
Mister Roberts climbed more slowly from the passenger side. Donna was full of
twitchy energy ‘Jesus!’ she said, stretching her back. ‘What a day’

On the
other side Mister Roberts slowly closed the car door with solemn deliberation.

‘Let’s
get the stuff out of the back,’ Donna said.

Together
they opened the rear of the Nissan and took out four overflowing supermarket
bags. After closing up the car they carried these to Donna’s house. The couple
encountered nobody on the way since everyone in the village was getting an
early night in preparation for the matanza.

Unlocking
the door Donna whispered to Mister Roberts, ‘Let’s keep the noise down, Stan’ll
be in bed by now.’

Once
inside the kitchen Donna switched on the light then, with feverish animation,
tipped the contents of the bags onto the wooden table. There were mostly small
denomination Euro notes, greasy and crumpled but also a tangle of cheap gold
and silver necklaces, bracelets and rings. She turned to Mister Roberts.

‘Do you
want to get out of that thing?’

Slowly
he shook his head.

‘Please
yourself.’

With
trembling hands Donna ran her fingers over the money and the jewellery.

‘Now,
I’m going to pile this lot up here and this is going to be Stanley’s share.
He’ll be amazed when he comes down and sees all this, won’t he?’

After a
second Mister Roberts nodded.

‘I
mean, after a while he’ll see I did the right thing, don’t you think? After I
tell him what we’ve been doing?’

Again
after a second Mister Roberts nodded.

‘And
you’ll never hurt him?’

This
time there was a longer pause before the big man moved his head slowly up and
down.

‘OK,’ Donna
said. ‘Great, let’s get the rest of this stuff upstairs. You know, suddenly I
feel exhausted.’

The matanza dawned cold
and clear. It started early for both the British and the Spanish communities
but for once there was little overlap in their activities, the British either
stayed locked in their homes all day or crowded into Bar Noche Azul as soon as
it opened, running there with hands covering their eyes in case they caught a
glimpse of what the locals were up to.

The
Brits often complained that it was typical Spanish showing off, that they
couldn’t kill their pig somewhere quiet but had to do it in the middle of the
road where everybody could see. But Laurence sometimes wondered whether there
wasn’t another explanation: right up until the nineteenth century people in
these parts could be burnt alive for having Arab or Jewish blood in their
families so if you wanted to show everybody you had absolutely no connection
with Muslims or Jews, then killing and eating a pig in the middle of the road
was a pretty good way to do it.

The
Spanish woke at 6 a.m. and walked or drove out into the campo to their
fincas
from where the pigs they’d been keeping all year were brought back, either
trussed up in the backs of pickup trucks or dragged squealing and kicking into
the village, tied by steel strings to stop them running away A little while
later the families whose pig was kept behind their house rose, and they too
hauled their animals out into the street.

Waiting
for them was a wooden table called a
banco
and strong men who had been
deputed to lift the pig squealing onto it. Once the animal was wrenched onto
the table they tried to hold it still, as if they were wrestling a naked,
screaming dwarf. Next a man called the
matarife,
the slaughterman,
stepped forward with a sharp knife and killed the pig with a single cut to the
throat. Immediately women with bowls rushed forward to catch the blood that
gushed from the dying animal’s throat. This blood would later be used in the
morcillas
served to the Brits in Bar Noche Azul.

Soon
the homes of all the Spanish came to resemble butcher’s shops or the homes of
particularly busy serial killers: rooms crammed full of basins of intestines,
trays of meat, buckets brimming with blood and fresh, dripping hams hanging
from the ceiling beams.

Engrossed
in their work the sight of Stanley alongside the African who sold stuff around
the valley, a Victorian gentleman in a top hat and a pretty Victorian lady
wearing a crinoline skirt walking purposefully down the main street did not disturb
them all that much. They guessed it must be some English holiday practice they
hadn’t come across before, that on 7 January you were visited in your home by a
couple wearing fancy dress and accompanied by a black man. Still, deeply
superstitious as they were, some Spaniards wondered if it was an augury that
something odd was going to happen today.