(2008) Mister Roberts Read online

  For Linda

  Contents

  Next Summer in London

  Noche Buena

  Navidad

  Noche Vieja

  Año Nuevo

  Tres Reyes

  La Matanza

  Next Summer in London

  Next Summer in London

  The summer air was thick and viscous, like the poisonous water drawn from polluted Chinese rivers that was used to fill up the souvenir snowdomes of London laid out with the rest of the tat on the shelves of the tourist shops. Laurence strode purposefully through the West End, though by now he knew he was far too late for the meeting. He admonished himself over what a stupid waste of time it was to fly all the way from Spain, spend an uncomfortable night on his cousin’s foldout bed, get a train in from Brockley that was so small and cramped it seemed like a half-sized model of itself, and then not to get to Soho House at the appointed time.

  Laurence told himself he was being melodramatic saying that snubbing the producers of a TV series, who’d been considering him as their costume designer meant the end of his career. After all, it wasn’t absolutely certain that he would never, ever, work again. On the other hand, even in the television business where people could, in this play-it-safe century, still be pretty wayward, turning up for the interview was generally considered a basic requirement for getting a job. And everybody said you didn’t upset the people connected to the particular, diminutive star who was attached to this project. Short, light-entertainment stars were inclined towards being highly vindictive: everybody in the industry was aware of the story of the young runner who’d spilt a tiny amount of soup on Charlie Drake — a strange comedian who’d been big in the sixties — and was more or less blacklisted. The runner had ended up taking a job as a traffic warden, though subsequently he was able to ticket Charlie’s Rolls-Royce up to five times a week.

  Laurence was in two minds over the prospect of not working: up until a few months ago, he would have considered it a catastrophe. Back then, his sense of himself had been completely tied up with career success, but each day he felt his former ambition recede like the ache of a healing wound. In some ways he missed his old unhappy self, as if for many years he had lived next door to a football stadium that had recently moved, and now he was nostalgic for the noise and mess and the men peeing in his front garden.

  He was more certain that he never wanted to return to London. It had been over four years since Laurence’s last visit and during that time surveillance cameras and chain coffee shops seemed to have grown and expanded like bathroom mould. From where he stood now at a road junction completely blocked by one of the incredibly long buses that had appeared since his previous trip (he wondered whether you didn’t just get on one and then walk to your destination so seldom did they seem to move) he could see two branches of Subway, two Pret a Mangers, three Starbucks and twenty-one video cameras on fat black poles. Laurence couldn’t shake the idea that travelling through modern London was rather like being trapped in one of those cartoons they showed on the TV when he was a kid where, if a character was running, the background would go round and round on a loop behind them, the same few objects flashing past time after time. Laurence had always resisted the temptation to moan about the state of the UK in the way so many expat Brits did. He’d always had the vague feeling that to disrespect your own country was to disrespect yourself in some fashion but he had to admit that London seemed like a sordid mess to him now.

  All this wasn’t why he hadn’t gone to the meeting. Laurence knew for certain that the reason he hadn’t shown up at Soho House was to do with what had occurred in his village in Spain over the Christmas holidays. Even though it was now early summer, since ‘the Events’ he’d had a great deal of trouble taking the idea of work seriously. Money might become a bit of a problem in the future but he liked the idea of being frugal. He thought he might get a plot from the town hall and grow his own vegetables.

  There was only one high and difficult hurdle that had to be got over before his new thrifty life could truly begin. It had been at the back of his mind in Spain shouting to be heard but since he’d been in London it had grown like a government subcommittee. Laurence had this overwhelming urge to tell somebody, anybody, every detail of what had happened. If he lived in a normal place he would, perhaps, be able to discuss it with those who had been there, but in Spain there was something called el pacto del olvido, literally the ‘pact of Forgetting’. It was an unspoken and collective decision taken after the death of Generalissimo Franco: the only way Spain could survive the end of fascism without succumbing to savage retribution, as had happened in so many other countries, was by a tacit, communal agreement never to talk about the awful incidents that had taken place. The foreign community in his village over-enthusiastically adopted all things Spanish, so they too had taken on their own pacto del olvido, which over the years had come to encompass a lengthy list of things which they could never discuss. The events Laurence had the irresistible compulsion to talk about were currently at the top of that list.

  Laurence supposed this need to unburden himself was connected with him being out of the valley for the first time since it happened. After all, it was something many travellers did. Liberated from home and amongst strangers whom they had no chance of seeing again, people were often overcome with an irresistible desire to tell another person their darkest secrets. Over the years Laurence had had men and women in airport lounges, hotel bars and train stations relate to him the most intimate and disturbing confidences: how they were in love with their sister, how they binged on jam, how they’d sold nuclear material to Chechen separatists. Now he wanted to do the same thing, but the problem was he didn’t have any idea who to talk to. Whoever he confided in needed to accept certain far-fetched things as being true. If he didn’t choose carefully there was the danger that some stranger might pretend to accept the things as being true just to humour him but really think he was deluded. That wouldn’t be nearly good enough. He was certain he’d pick up if they were humouring him, and then he wouldn’t get the sense of release he so desperately craved.

  Right at the moment he was thinking all this, Laurence noticed the man standing in the middle of the pavement not twenty metres away: poised as if he’d been placed there by one of those interventionist deities people prayed to, an all-powerful life form who cared whether or not they passed their cookery exam. Laurence knew at once that here was somebody who he could easily tell his whole story to. This man would regard as true everything that the average stranger in the bus station waiting room would think were the ravings of a delusional psychotic.

  With what he thought was a big friendly smile on his face Laurence approached the man. He was younger than he’d seemed from a distance, with black, unkempt, curly hair and skin that was a waxy white, even though he must spend a good part of the day outdoors. Up close his eyes were bloodshot and darted from side to side as if he’d once lived somewhere where there were a lot of wasps. His suit seemed too big for him and the wrinkled white shirt he wore was cinched in at the waist by a ratty leather belt.

  At first the young man seemed a little surprised to encounter such eagerness, Laurence assumed that usually he had to do at least a little cajoling to reel a contact in. Never the less he seemed gratified by the interest and invited the older man to step inside a nearby building.

  Despite its rather home-made-looking interior the place was dark and cool and fiercely air-conditioned and Laurence immediately felt the sweat evaporating from the small of his back. He thought that no matter how things went he could still be grateful to get in from the street. Soon they were sitting facing each other across a plain wooden table with a little clear plastic cup of chilled water beside each of them. />
  ‘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.