(2008) Mister Roberts (2 page)

‘So you
say you have a story you wish to tell me?’ the young man asked.

‘Yes,
indeed,’ Laurence replied.

‘Many
have a story they need to get off their chests and I’m here to listen. Don’t be
afraid, there’s nothing I haven’t heard before.’

We’ll
see about that you pompous little prick, Laurence thought to himself, but said,
‘It was like a miracle, seeing you there on the street.’

‘A lot
of people say that.’

‘Hmmm.
Perhaps not in the way you think but I’ve been longing to tell this story to
somebody, anybody, for, well it seems like such a very long time. Even though
it’s only been a matter of months since it happened.’

‘And
what’s been stopping you?’

‘I had
the idea that no ordinary person would believe it, but then like a vision I saw
you just now and I thought, “Of course! He’ll understand, he’ll understand
every bit of it. This is one of the few people in the world who will know that
all of it is true.”’

‘Of
course,’ said the young man, leaning forward and lacing his fingers together in
a gesture of insincere solemnity. ‘Please, do go on.

Noche Buena

All the lights had gone
out in the Valley. A terrible fierce wind had been blowing since the afternoon
and as darkness fell, the power lines that brought electricity up from Granada
to these Spanish mountain villages swung together touching. The resulting
explosion sent clusters of sparks falling into the olive groves, producing a
number of small fires and causing the fine new street lighting with built-in
stereo speakers that the mayor had only just had installed on the road to the
village to snap into darkness. From across the street, where he sat on a
concrete bench inlaid with mosaic tiles, Stanley saw the lights go out in Bar
Noche Azul and felt the sudden absence of its two TVs and one stereo as they
yelped into silence.

The
bench was uncomfortable to sit on being shaped like an angel lying on its side
and weeping blue mosaic tears. It was a terrible pastiche of the work of the
Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi. The mayor had had it built last year, to
commemorate those who’d been murdered in the village and surrounding area
during the civil war. Following the election of the socialist government after
the Madrid bombings, the old pact of forgetting was beginning to break down.
Slowly mass graves were starting to be uncovered and monuments, generally in
appalling taste, had begun to appear up and down the valley.

Stanley
supposed Simon wouldn’t be coming now, seeing as he’d already been sitting on
the uncomfortable bench for an hour and a half. Simon was, or had been, his
best friend, an English boy in the same class of thirteen-year-olds at school.
The plan had been that they were going to meet outside Bar Noche Azul, walk
about for a bit, then go to Simon’s house to play Halo on Simon’s XBox 360.
Stanley knew other kids at school who hung round in a big gang and had loads of
what they regarded as close friends, but he’d never been like that. Certainly
he had a few other mates but his inclination was always to have a special best
friend whom he hung out with all the time. This was not the same special best
friend, because there always seemed to come a point, like tonight, when the
best friend badly let him down, then Stanley got really upset and they never
spoke again.

He
didn’t know why Simon had abandoned him on the bench shaped like an angel on
its side. Stanley remembered a time not that long ago when he had just done
stuff without thinking about it, without reflection. Then, at some point over
the last year or so, he had become aware that things happened for reasons. He
thought of those reasons as shadowy indistinct shapes behind a gauze curtain,
because although he knew now that reasons in a general sense were why things
happened, he didn’t know the specific reason why a particular thing happened.
Why had Simon stood him up? Was it because Simon’s dad talked in the third
person all the time, said things like ‘Daddy’s been a bit of a nana, hasn’t he,
Simon?’ Or was it because they’d just got a new washing machine or because
their front door was blue? It could be any of these things as far as Stanley
could tell.

He
experienced a pang of loneliness that felt like he was on a long dark
waterchute at a closed-up theme park; he wished with all his heart that he had
a best friend right now to go down the long dark waterchute with him.

There
was this new kid at school who really worried him. One day, six months ago he
had turned up in class, his name was Runciman Carnforth. This boy, who was
about the same size as Stanley but more muscled, with freckled pale skin and
his hair in ginger dreadlocks, had lived with his parents as part of a
religious cult that occupied a rambling farmhouse on the other side of the
Granada-Motril motorway, in the foothills of the Alpujarras mountain range.
Just as these rocky gorges and shaded valleys had once hidden the last Moors of
Spain so they now housed all manner of lost tribes. Along the dry, stony river
bed that ran down through the mountains there was a long sinuous bend where it
looked as if all the old post office vans of Europe had come to die. In the
backs of these ex-Bundespost Mercedes and Royal Mail Sherpas there lived
teeming families of hippies, while below the village of Bubión there was a
teepee village equipped with 8GB broadband access and outside of Trevélez there
was a yoga centre made entirely out of car doors.

The
Spanish were remarkably tolerant of these communities. They found their
behaviour no more bizarre than that of the foreigners on the coast who drank
themselves into a stupor then lay out in the sun until their skin turned to
pork crackling. To them all foreigners were children and as such were not
responsible for their actions. They kept an eye on them, just as they kept an
eye on their own offspring — allowing them to put themselves at risk, balancing
on a tower of chairs in a restaurant or running around traffic-packed squares
and then swooping in at the last moment to bring them to safety almost
ninety-five percent of the time.

Runciman’s
group had been one of those that had managed to avoid being noticed for a long
time, so that when they’d finally been raided by a special anticult squad of
the Guardia Civil, the damage they encountered — both physical and psychological
— was severe. A lot of the women and their children had been re-housed in a
block of municipal flats near the motorway, others had gone back to the UK and
most of the male members of the cult were now in the state prison outside of
Cadiz.

Though
Runciman had gone around punching and kicking a lot of other kids he’d shown no
sign that he’d even noticed Stanley existed. Still Stanley couldn’t stop
himself worrying that at some point Runciman would notice him and then the
bullying would start just like you saw all the time on the TV. After all, he
was the perfect target. You couldn’t throw your weight around at school with
the Spanish boys because of their big protective families and if Runciman
picked on a really vulnerable British child nobody would respect him, but if he
bullied Stanley, a boy who wasn’t unpopular but wasn’t that popular either,
he’d solidify his status as boss of all the British kids in his year. Stanley
wished sometimes he’d just get on with it so they could become bullier and bullyee.

Another
confusing thing from the world of adults was that his mum was friendly with
Runciman’s mum. Stanley couldn’t understand how she could be mates with a
person who was parent to such a monster. But what really got Stanley down was
the thought that he never swam across Runciman’s consciousness. It made Stanley
feel horribly small to know how little he mattered to the person who was
ruining his life.

The microwave in
Laurence’s kitchen ground to a halt midway through spinning its radiation
dance, right in the middle of heating up a Marks & Spencer’s Cous Cous with
Char-Roasted Vegetables. The ready meal was a Christmas present from his
flight-attendant friend, Stuart, who was now asleep in the big bed. He’d
brought it out from England, safe in the fridge of his Monarch Airlines flight
from Luton to Malaga, which had landed that very Christmas Eve morning. This
chilled package, gift-wrapped in soggy gold paper had been driven for two and a
half hours on the back seat of a little red hire car up into the mountains.
‘Happy Christmas, Laurence,’ Stuart had said and kissed him, and Laurence had
acted grateful, since it was what he’d asked for, but he thought to himself
that really it was an empty pretence, this supposed longing for ready meals
from the UK. It was the same nonsense as all of the British in the village
saying the only thing they truly missed from home was a good curry when they
didn’t really, it was just something to say, something they had said for years.
If they’d wanted to it was only an hour’s drive to the city or the coast and
then they could have as much curry as they wanted so why then did they never
make the trip?

Of
course, one reason they never took the journey was that nowadays most of the
coast had the appearance of a new super-purgatory that was being built because
the old one was nearly full. From Almería to Malaga and beyond, a mighty
highway under a permanent cloud of bitter smoke wove between gigantic concrete
developments over which hovered towering cranes that dipped and grabbed like
invaders from Mars in an Edwardian novel. From time to time the highway passed
neurotically neat golf courses that sucked up all the water for hundreds of
miles around, and near Marbella an Irish estate agent with the features of a
baby-faced Ukrainian assassin had had giant billboards erected that stated,
alongside an enormous picture of himself, ‘You are now entering Mulverhill
Country Holiday developments in Spain, Dubai, Slovakia, Zimbabwe.’

Near
Torreviejas there was a supermarket called ‘Spainsbury’s’ that only sold
products imported from Britain: shelf after shelf of Branston Pickle and boiled
white bread and chipolatas made from mechanically recovered pigs’ rectums. In
Laurence’s imagination it looked like an exhibit at the Imperial War Museum all
about rationing during World War Two.

What
truly kept him away from the coast, though, were the
plasticas.
Huge
swathes of the hills inland from the sea were ruined by a continuous canopy of
plastic. It covered so much territory that it could easily be seen from space,
the roofs of fifty thousand closely packed plastic greenhouses. Just ten years
ago this was largely uninhabited desert, rich in plant and animal life but
arid. Now, under cover, tomatoes, lettuces, melons and peppers were grown all
year round for the supermarkets of Europe. And they were expanding, moving
rapidly north towards Laurence’s village. You knew another one was going to be
built when the diggers arrived to scar the hillside. They came pushing all in
front of them, destroying mountainsides and blocking up dry riverbeds.

The
plants in these humid hells would never touch soil — they were grown from bags,
while chemical fertilisers were drip-fed to each plant from giant
computer-controlled vats. If you went anywhere near them you’d notice a
chemical tang in the air.

Laurence
felt guilty about how much he hated this new Spain because as a Brit who had
moved there, in a tiny way he sensed he was responsible for it.

He
imagined sometimes that he had brought the contagion with him like a
well-meaning missionary to the Americas whose blanket was heaving with
smallpox. Whenever Laurence visited the hypermarket in Granada he saw a
reminder of the damage the Spanish empire had done. In Carrefour, avoiding all
the yelling, bright-red Brits falling over each other in the booze section,
Laurence would find himself in the Productos Latinos Americanos aisle. In
contrast to the clamour in the rest of the store a strange reverential silence
always seemed to reign in this canyon of tins and jars, due to the little
Inca-looking people who gathered there. Laurence guessed that they were
Ecuadoreans, Bolivians and such. Workers from the
plasticas,
earning the
lowest wages in Europe, who lived in camps of flimsy huts of cardboard and
corrugated iron next to their workplaces and who had escaped to the city for a
few days. The little Indians didn’t ever buy anything, but he supposed
fingering the packets of corn tortillas and jars of jalapeño peppers reminded
them of home. Sometimes there seemed more to it though, their silent contemplation
of boxes of enchiladas and tubes of chilli sauce appeared to have an almost
religious quality to it, as if they were looking for something or somebody in
the stacks who would lead them out of the land of their enslavement.