(2008) Mister Roberts (18 page)

‘So
Donna and Stanley, they live in your house now, do they?’

Laurence
paused and looked around. He wondered what he was doing in this place, he suddenly
realised how tired he was, he’d had enough. And they’d had enough of him. For
the last hour or so he had noticed they’d been getting nasty looks from the
young man’s boss. He clearly wasn’t supposed to spend so long with a single
person. It was time to get out of there.

‘As
well as saddling me with Donna they made me help dispose of the corpse. Stanley
took Donna back to my house then we returned to the bar where they were pulling
Mister Roberts apart. The Victorian couple and the remaining Brits, we loaded
all the separate bits into my little car and drove them to the orange grove
where we buried him. I had this feeling, like somebody should say something but
you know, as Stanley said, he was just a machine after all. You wouldn’t make a
speech when you took an old stereo to the tip, would you?

‘Yes,
Donna and Stanley, they still live with me. It can be difficult; she’s given
herself permission to feel sorry for herself for the rest of her life. There’s
some good days when she forgets she’s a victim and then she can be fun but on
the bad ones there’s something broken between them. It’s a terrible thing to
see. I mean, you get used to watching married couples going through the
motions, barely concealing the hatred and disappointment that lies between them,
but to see a mother and her son doing the same is painful.

‘But
for me it’s been,’ Laurence felt for the right word, ‘it’s been great. I told
myself before it all happened that I was self-sufficient and didn’t need
anybody else, but now I think I was just selfish and frightened.

‘You
know if you go to the Middle East and you ask for directions they’ll always
tell you something, even if they’ve really got no idea where they’re directing
you. I always wondered why they did that, I thought they were just being
annoying but now I know: to help somebody on their way, even if you haven’t got
a clue where you’re sending them, it’s thrilling! I tell Stanley all kinds of things,
try and teach him all sorts of lessons and I truly think it doesn’t matter if I
know what I’m talking about or not as long as he knows it’s done with love.

‘Stanley’s
doing OK at school, says he wants to be a pilot one day and a plumber the next.
Runciman came back too, after he got out of the hospital. He’s no longer a
bully I guess getting beat up like that would put anybody off doing the same
thing. In fact, him and Stanley are reasonably good mates. They share something
nobody else will ever understand.

‘I’ll
tell you something else, he goes away with Adey at the weekends to the high country
I don’t go but recently people, farmers and walkers and the like, keep coming
back with reports of seeing strange scaly creatures in the mountains, not just
two either but a couple of little ones as well. Of course nobody believes them
yet.’

Laurence
looked hard at the young man. ‘You know it’s true, don’t you? That’s what I
need to hear, I mean, it chimes with the things that you believe, doesn’t it?’

‘Well,
yes, I mean, there’s also some aspects that I can’t square but yes, I do
believe it to be true, yes. And can I say I’m very glad that you have decided
you want to become part of the Church of Scientology’

Laurence
gave a yelp of laughter. ‘Good Lord no!’ he said, then more kindly, ‘Son, I
don’t want any part of your religion.’

The
young man looked confused and hurt. ‘Then why have you been telling me all
this?’

‘Because
I thought you’d believe it, that’s all. Space aliens, who else but somebody in
a group like yours would believe a story about evil intergalactic empires?’
Laurence half got up from the table then paused and sat down again. ‘No, I’m
not being fair,’ he said. ‘There’s another reason I chose you. When I first saw
you there in the street, right away I recognised someone who was acting. I’ve
seen enough of it and done enough of it myself. What I sensed was that you are
not really a part of all this.’ Laurence waved his hands around the room filled
with desks at which the desperate and the confused and the calculating sat on
either side. ‘I know you don’t want to feel alone, nobody does. I learnt
something of the universe over last Christmas and it is vast and cruel and
empty but I also saw that you can’t hide yourself away from it. Let yourself
be vulnerable, get somebody to look after. These people, this thing, won’t fix
you. Son, you need to find something that’s kinder. Here’s my email …’ Laurence
said, scribbling an address along the top of a leaflet all about stress and how
only the Scientologists could cure it. ‘If you ever want to come out I can show
you a side of Spain that the average tourist would never see. And you can maybe
meet my family Admittedly it’s not a conventional one. My immediate family is
a thirteen-year-old boy who isn’t mine, plus his mother who is still grieving
for a dead robot. While my extended family consists of a weird kid, an African
and a brood of aliens.

‘But
then a lot of families are very mixed up these days, aren’t they?’