(2008) Mister Roberts by Alexei Sayle Page A

discontent, not
that she had anything better to do. And it wasn’t a particular trial for her.
Nige was one of those people who found everybody on the planet equally
fascinating. She could sit and talk for hours with the most unlikely, dull or
terrible individuals — the local peasants, Ukrainian criminals, Liberal members
of the European Parliament. ‘We call this a spoon in my country,’ he had once
heard her say to a Moroccan farmer.
    When
he’d lived in London he’d had a circle of close friends, some gay guys
certainly but a couple of married couples too. Their relationships had been
forged and tempered through enduring all manner of crises together from
watching lovers expire in hospital wards to the dawning of the realisation that
Kylie was overrated. But by moving he’d lost them and in the village you
couldn’t be choosy The only qualification for being somebody’s friend in the
village was that they were there and they hadn’t seriously tried to rob you in
the last year or two. Often that didn’t seem like enough.
    Laurence
asked Nige, now just a blurred shape across the table, ‘Do you ever wonder why
we came here?’
    ‘What,
to Spain?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Er,
how about a new life free from all the crappy stuff that tied you down back
home: the weather, the government, friends who know you too well?’
    ‘I
guess, it’s just that I sometimes wonder if we’re not all a bit the same, us
Brits. We congratulate ourselves that we’re not like those oafs on the costas
who don’t speak Spanish, if anything we know the language and we know the
culture better than the natives. Even so, we’re never going to be a true part
of the country we live in. I sometimes wonder if it’s that that appeals to us.
We’re all people who can’t quite engage with life, we’re people who sit on the
terrace and watch and, of course, drink. I wish once in a while that I could
give myself entirely to somebody or something. Instead I hang on to my air of
amused detachment like a life raft.’
    ‘That’s
the closest thing we have to a philosophy though isn’t it, “live and let
live”?’
    ‘Sometimes
I wonder whether it isn’t more “fuck up and let fuck up”.’
     
    ‘I’ll tell you what,’
Donna said to her son three days after the eviction, ‘you know tomorrow’s New
Year’s Eve, right? I fancy a trip into Granada, get out of this stinking valley
and spend some of the money that old bastard Monty Crisp gave us.
    ‘Me and
you?’
    ‘Well,
yeah, of course me and you … and Mister Roberts.’
    ‘Oh …
OK, sure.’
    The
next morning as Donna was about to climb behind the wheel of their ancient
brown Nissan Patrol Stanley said, ‘No, Mum, let me.’
    ‘But
you don’t know how to drive,’ she replied.
    ‘I
don’t, but I’ve been exploring his features when I’ve been walking around and
I’m pretty sure Mister Roberts does.’
    As they
drove through the outlying houses beyond the village walls, on a patch of land
cleared for development they saw a circle of jeering English kids. In the
centre was Simon, tears flooding down his face, and next to him was Runciman,
who was cutting up the yellow-tinted designer sunglasses with a pair of pruning
shears.
     
    Most Spaniards wish for a
good death, they do not want to expire as they imagine Scandinavians do, hooked
up to tubes and pipes in some white-tiled sterilised room. Rather they would
prefer to flame out in a showy and extravagant fashion, if possible taking
their family with them.
    All
those who witnessed the Nissan Patrol that day as it hurtled at barely
believable speeds down the valley’s narrow roads and onto the motorway
marvelled at the audacity of its driver. Some who caught a glimpse of him said
later that they wondered whether in his old-fashioned suit and slicked-back hair
the man wasn’t perhaps the spirit of the great toreador, Manolito. Certainly,
whoever he was, he must have had the most incredible reflexes to pilot the
bulky,