(2008) Mister Roberts (6 page)

The
strangest thing though, the chilling thing, as the man stood calmly looking
around him, his head slowly swivelling from side to side, was that on his face,
below the neat short swept-back black hair, there was no expression whatsoever,
utter blankness. Laurence thought that he had never seen such emptiness on the
face of a living being.

Though
fuzzy with drink some ancient male radar had woken Yuri and Sergei to the fact
that hazard had entered the bar. Yuri straightened and took the pool cue by its
slender end while Sergei reached inside his jacket to grasp the pistol.

‘Oh,
Mother,’ Laurence found himself incongruously whispering before the stranger,
with three astonishingly quick strides, was upon the Russians. Sergei managed
to get the pistol half out of his pants but the big man took his gun arm and
snapped it with a simple twist, one shot rang out incredibly loud in the bar,
the ejected cartridge case chinging onto the unyielding floor. Screaming with
pain, Sergei did not get the chance to fire off another round as the big man
lifted him with no apparent effort and threw the Russian one-handed against the
back wall of the bar, cracking his skull on the lurid Spanish tiles, the blood
that splayed onto their unyielding surface mingling with the jagged blues,
yellows and reds.

The man
turned to look for Yuri but he was long gone, out the front door down the
street across the plaza by the church into his Mercedes onto the twisting road
down the motorway and back to the coast.

Seeing
that his prey had fled, the stranger’s dead eyes alighted on the swaying figure
of Donna. Wordlessly he walked towards her, took the woman gently by the arm
and led her out of the bar. As they went she gave Armando, Fabien and Laurence
a last beseeching look.

Noche Vieja

Back up in the black night
of space, the Imperial cruiser had not, as the deserter expected, been
destroyed. Though intensely battered she was still more or less in one piece,
for at the climactic moment the rebel fighters had broken off their attack and
fled in the direction of Saturn.

In his
shattered command centre the captain of the ship took reports of the damage
then called two subordinates to him. A pair of aliens scuttled into his
presence. There’s no sound on Earth that even approximates their names, the
closest would be somebody trying to yodel with a mouthful of mice so we’ll
call the male Sid and the female Nancy The captain said to the pair, ‘At the
height of the battle a shield operative abandoned his post, stole a Planetary Exploration
Suit and a shuttle craft and headed for the nearest planet. Possibly he was hit
by an enemy fighter. We are not entirely certain because of the confusion of
battle, but the monitor screens seem to show that he managed to land his ship
on a particular sector of the planet below us.’

On the
ship’s screen a view of the earth appeared. The image zoomed in until it showed
a section of Southern Spain, a red dot pulsing over the foothills of the Sierra
Nevadas.

‘He
landed somewhere in this area, but at the moment, given the damage to our
communications equipment, it isn’t possible to be more accurate. The Imperial
Navy will not allow desertion under any circumstances, and we cannot permit our
technology to fall into the hands of the primitive creatures on that planet.’

As the
captain talked two storage tubes similar to those from the Planetary
Exploration Suit Room were brought in.

‘I am
sending you two down to the planet to bring back the deserter and to retrieve
or destroy the suit. We do have two spare suits but they had to be brought out
of deep storage. They are left over from our last visit about a hundred and
fifty years ago.

Sid and
Nancy stared at the glass tubes. They were covered in thick dust so that it was
impossible to see inside, at a signal from the captain the release switch of
the first tube was pressed. Slowly and creakily the cylinder opened to reveal a
frozen, immobile Victorian gentleman his face adorned with a splendid moustache
and long sideburns. The man was dressed in a tall top hat and stiff tight grey
suit and on his feet were shiny black patent leather boots. Then the other tube
was opened to reveal his lady as tall as the male. Golden curls spilled out
from under her pink bonnet which framed a round, pretty, vacant face. A
gigantic hooped skirt spread out from her slender waist above a tight green velvet
jacket. Over her shoulder she daintily held a frilly parasol.

‘These
are your suits,’ the captain said. ‘Go down to the planet, locate the deserter,
bring him and the suit back. You have thirty-six revolutions of the planet to
complete your task. If you don’t succeed, after that time we will be forced to
destroy it.’

The man led Donna by the
arm in a grip that was both gentle and unbreakable down the narrow alley of
Calle Santo Segundo to the little house she lived in on the corner of Calle
Carniceria. Into Donna’s mind there suddenly popped a Lorca poem she’d heard a
woman reciting at the checkout of the Carrefour supermarket in Granada.
Andalucians are inclined towards declaiming bits of Lorca at almost any time —
whether sitting on the bus, visiting the doctor or putting out a chemical fire
at the docks.

The
poem went:

I realised I had been murdered,

They searched cafés, cemeteries and churches,

They opened barrels and cupboards,

They plundered three skeletons to remove

their gold teeth,

They did not find me,

They never found me?

No, they never found me.

Now it
was going to happen to her. She was about to join the ranks of the village’s
disappeared. Andalusia was a place where those drifting westwards, looking for
opportunity sometimes reached the end of their road. Somebody would turn up,
rent a house, say they were starting a business providing eco pools or legal
services, they would be in Noche Azul every night shouting about how they were
half Chocktaw Indian or were hiding from the Provisonal IRA, then one day they
would be gone. Inside the house a table might be turned on its side, a window
might be broken or shouting had been heard in the middle of the night. The next
day the house would be let to somebody else. You got used to these sudden absences
and vanishings so it took a while for Donna to notice that her own father had
disappeared. They had struggled on together in their little house for four
years, Donna, her baby and Roger, who had tried hard to be some kind of father
to them both but it was not in his nature.

One
reason it took some time for her to realise he’d gone was that he took nothing
with him and even left behind his car. Yet she did not inform the Guardia or
organise a search party, since she had in her mind an idea of a vast row of
little lightbulbs on a board with people’s names above them and one day a
person’s fizzled and went out, but right now she thought Roger’s light still
burned.

As the
big man steered her down the moonlit streets Donna realised that all this time
she might have been lying to herself and her father could have been disappeared
just as surely as she was going to be. He had certainly made enough enemies,
from his various schemes, rackets and scams. Maybe Roger was buried in the
orange grove alongside the village’s other troublesome corpses. Maybe he’d been
killed and his body driven in the trunk of a car to be disposed of under the
concrete of some raw new shopping mall east of Malaga — apparently 25 per cent
of the foundations of some of those places was composed of corpse. Then she
thought, what would happen to her son? Donna wondered what a Spanish orphanage
was like, they probably gave the kids wine for lunch. She supposed if he was
lucky he might get to announce the Christmas lottery numbers on the TV.

Next a
wave of anger at the stupidity she’d shown overwhelmed her. She would never get
to present her own property-developing TV show now, or build her own gated
community — all of her plans were never going to happen. Instead this huge man,
some disgruntled associate of the Russians probably, was going to torture her
for information she didn’t have, then strangle her. She’d told herself that
Yuri and Sergei were just a couple of guys to have fun with but she must have
known all along what they were like, it was as if there were two Donnas who
didn’t talk to each other: one who got chatting with dangerous men and the
other who pretended that nothing was ever going to go wrong, no matter how
crazy things got. Now that attitude was going to get her killed.

She unlocked
the front door with shaking hands and they stepped into the dark living room,
which suddenly felt much too small. The man’s head actually brushed the black
beams of the ceiling, but surprisingly he did at least release her. Donna eased
out of his grip and not knowing what else to do switched a light on, except
that as the power was still out nothing happened. ‘Can I, erm, get you a coffee
or something,’ she said to the silent, shadowy stranger. This phrase seemed to
be some kind of spell or hypnotic suggestion because as soon as she said it all
life went out of him. She had never seen such lack of animation in a person,
not even a dead one: her Gran lying in a coffin in the front room in Darlington
had seemed more alive than this fellow. The man was standing there but you
could tell that there was no spirit to him, he was as frozen as a squid on the
seafood display at the Carrefour supermarket.

Then as
if that wasn’t enough weirdness for one Christmas Day, all the lights came on
and at the same time her son appeared, jumping out of midair from behind the
stranger.

‘Hello,
Mum,’ he said popping his head around the frozen man.

‘Stanley?’
she said, then in a sudden rush of panic shouted, ‘Stan! Get away from that
man, quick! He’s dangerous, he smashed up Sergei. I think I put him into a coma
or something by asking him if he wanted a coffee but he might come round at any
second…’

Of
course kids never did what you wanted them to do even when there was terrible
danger and amazingly Stanley just laughed at her warning. She would have
slapped him except she was afraid to go anywhere near the man. Next, even more
stupidly, he put his little hand on the enormous arm of the frozen figure.

‘No,
Mum,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand. He can’t come to life; he was me, I was
him, I was inside him. He can’t come round without me being inside him.’

This
was all too messed up. ‘Look,’ Donna said in a voice as calm as she could
muster, ‘I’m going to go and phone the Guardia, no maybe not that. I’m going to
go and get the car and we can drive to the coast or up into the mountains and
we’ll stay there for a few days and when we get back I expect this man will be
gone.’

It felt
really weird to Donna to be having this conversation while the guy was standing
there like some totem pole. Even though he’d wanted to do her over, and God
knows what else, it still felt like she was being somehow rude to him. All her
life she had squashed herself in the company of men, listened to their idiotic
opinions, stayed more or less faithful to them until they got out of prison and
right now it didn’t seem nice to be talking so brazenly in front of such a big,
tough-looking one.

Still
her son wouldn’t shift, continuing to talk to her in the patronising tone of
voice she recognised that kids used to describe the intricacies of the latest
bizarre Japanese gadget they’re obsessed with: a clam but also a rocket that’s
also a high-school kid who’s saving the world from another more evil clam.
Rocket, high-school kid, evil clam, Donna realised her brain was in danger of
overheating.

Fortunately
Stanley said in a calm voice, ‘No, Mum, honest, he’s harmless. Come and look
round at the back of him.’

His
gestures seemed so certain that with an unconfident shuffle Donna edged round
the rigid figure until she was behind it. What she saw there nearly stripped
the gears of her already frazzled mind.

‘Stanley
What the… ? I mean how? I mean what the…?’

Now
that she could see it for herself Stanley talked in a happy babble. ‘I found it…
I found it in the high country There was like a crash fire, something from the
sky had come down and burned and he was lying next to it with his back open. So
I got in and he came to life. He’s sort of like a Terminator but also you can
wear him like a suit of armour and there’s these screens inside that show where
you’re going and other stuff I haven’t figured out yet…