(2008) Mister Roberts by Alexei Sayle Page B

top-heavy brown car in the way he did. Now he was on the gravel verge,
now he was rounding a sharp bend with two wheels hanging over the void, now he
was on the wrong side of the road zinking in and out of oncoming traffic. Many
an office drone in their workaday Seat or Renault whispered a silent ‘Ole!’ as
the 4X4 Nissan tore off their wing mirror while overtaking at 150 kilometres an
hour on the hard shoulder.
    At
first Donna screamed and hung on to the door handle, but after a while she
relaxed and sat smiling vaguely at the world as it hurtled at supersonic speeds
towards her.
    In
Britain roadworks are presaged by miles and miles of cones so that traffic is
affected in all directions but in Spain sometimes the only warning that men
were working on the carriageway was a mechanical dummy of a man stuck by the
side of the road, dressed in a fluorescent lime suit and brandishing a red
flag. They passed one such just before the Alhambra junction and Mister Roberts
gave him a secret little wave, robot to robot.
     
    Mister Roberts parked the
car alongside the Rio Genil in a stand of cypress trees at the foot of the
Alhambra Hill. Smoke gently curled from the overheated brakes as Donna took
the arm of Mister Roberts and the two of them walked away from the Nissan
upwards towards the shopping streets in the centre of town.
    Donna
and her companion spent the morning in the smart little clothes shops around
the Plaza Bib Rambla. From time to time she would solicit his opinion about
some prospective purchase. ‘What do you think about this scarf?’ she’d ask,
then, when he just stood impassively looking at her she’d invent a reply, ‘No,
you’re right. Orange isn’t my colour.’
    When
she tried something on that she didn’t like Donna would simply throw it on the
floor, the ship-owners would move to complain but the hulking presence of
Mister Roberts always took away their courage at the last minute. They also
found themselves surprisingly open to offers of a discount when the time came
to pay.
    As the
cathedral clock struck twelve Donna sat down at an outside table of a café in
the square by the cathedral and told Mister Roberts to go back to the car to
drop off all the bags of shopping they’d accumulated while she had a coffee and
a sandwich and smoked a cigarette. Watching his broad muscular back as he
punched through the crowds of tourists Donna comforted herself with the thought
that her going out with a robot who was really her son wasn’t by a long way the
weirdest relationship she’d ever been in.
     
    After he’d dropped off the
shopping at the car Mister Roberts walked swiftly up to the Generalife gardens that
surrounded the Alhambra. In front of a clipped hedge he sat down on a marble
bench and after a second Stanley climbed out of the back, the opening in the
robot’s torso masked by the hedge. Then he walked to a kiosk outside the palace
of Charles V and bought a ham and cheese sandwich. Returning to the bench he
sat down next to Mister Roberts to eat it.
    His mum
had forgotten that there was no way that he could eat while he was inside the
robot, just as she seemed to forget that he was inside Mister Roberts at all,
and told him all kinds of things that he didn’t really want to know, stuff
about her pretending to be a gynaecologist in front of one of her boyfriends
for example.
    Stanley
found himself being troubled by a whole range of disquieting emotions and
thoughts. Firstly the loneliness he’d experienced the day before up in the
Sierra Nevada was still with him, plus he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t
been allowed to simply enjoy this marvellous object he’d found. On the one hand
he was pleased that Mister Roberts was making his mum so happy but it had given
him a queasy feeling to do the things she’d ordered him to do to Monty Crisp.
    Stanley
thought to himself, ‘I’m a kid. I’m not supposed to be able to do stuff like
that to a grown-up.
    The
whole situation made him