Read Online (2008) Mister Roberts by Alexei Sayle - Free Book Online
Authors: Alexei Sayle
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name?’ asked Janet.
‘Yeah,
probably …’ Donna replied, ‘but he can’t tell me what it is can he?’
‘No, I
suppose not,’ Janet replied confused. Everybody said hello to Mister Roberts.
‘Hello, Mister Roberts.’
‘Hello,
Mister Roberts.’
‘Hola,
Señor Roverts.’
‘Hello
there, Mister Roberts.’
There
then followed a silence as the arrival of this huge, hulking inscrutable man
cast a pall over the little group.
Janet
leant across and whispered into Donna’s ear ‘So why can’t he talk?’
Donna
mouthed back ‘throat cancer’, and pulled a face suggestive of great suffering.
‘Poor
man,’ said Miriam, peering at the vibrant giant. ‘He looks well on it, though.’
‘Positive
visualisations.’
Laurence
said, ‘None the worse for your experiences of this morning, I see.’
‘No
indeed,’ Donna preened. ‘Haven’t you ever had men fighting over you, Laurence?’
‘People
in the entertainment business don’t fight with each other, dear, that’s far too
healthy and civilised compared with what they get up to. Anyway, that wasn’t a
fight, it was a beating up. Poor Sergei, we thought he was dead and we’d have
to bury him in the same place where we …
‘But he
was still breathing,’ Miriam said, jumping in because he was coming up to very
dangerous ground here. ‘So Baz put him in the back of his pickup truck and he
dumped your friend in the waiting room of the clinic in Durcal. If you were
thinking of sending flowers or anything.’
With a
frown, Nige, who never drank as much as the rest of them, asked, ‘Donna,
where’s Stanley? From what I heard he seemed a bit freaked out by everything,
is he OK?’
Donna
gave a silly little smile. ‘Oh, he’s fine, he’s nearby Don’t worry about
Stanley’
With a
sudden crack Mister Roberts’ chair, unable to sustain his great weight, buckled
under him and he fell to the ground. The big man lay on the prawnshell-strewn
floor staring up at them with his blank face.
La Comunidad Ingles would talk about that Christmas Day in Bar Noche Azul for months to
come. Sometimes, very occasionally, it happened that an evening caught fire
like this and the plain bar with its lurid colour scheme and twenty-year-old
posters, an ordinary room with a snooker table and fruit machine, the same
freezing cold space where they saw each other day in and day out, where they ate
their breakfast and their lunch, seemed suddenly transformed into a glittering
ballroom filled with the sexiest, wittiest and most erudite personalities in
the whole of Europe. Laurence supposed all the drink and drugs had a lot to do
with the transformation. Yet on this occasion they weren’t that important,
rather it was the silent looming presence of Mister Roberts that seemed to
bring everyone to a pitch of hysterical excitement. From time to time one of
them would try to talk to him, address some remark, ask how long he’d been in
Spain or whether he wanted to take care of a stray dog but he would just stare
expressionlessly with his strange dark brown eyes, eyes that seemed as if they
looked straight through them, directly into their souls. That sensation stirred
them on to drink more alcohol and shout more nonsense and feel each other up as
if Mister Roberts was some kind of maypole around which they danced their
springtime fertility dance.
To
Laurence the night resembled the DVD of a strange foreign film that had its
subtitles missing and which some controlling entity was playing on fast
forward, everyone in the bar was all flailing arms and jabbering mouths.
Suddenly there would be a brief moment when the entity hit the pause button and
he would see the crowd around him all frozen in mid yelp. In one of these brief
moments of clarity it struck him with a stab of loneliness that nearly
everybody in the bar had made money out of him at one time or another. For a
start, he was certain that Nige had sold him his house for considerably more
than she’d paid its
‘Yeah,
probably …’ Donna replied, ‘but he can’t tell me what it is can he?’
‘No, I
suppose not,’ Janet replied confused. Everybody said hello to Mister Roberts.
‘Hello, Mister Roberts.’
‘Hello,
Mister Roberts.’
‘Hola,
Señor Roverts.’
‘Hello
there, Mister Roberts.’
There
then followed a silence as the arrival of this huge, hulking inscrutable man
cast a pall over the little group.
Janet
leant across and whispered into Donna’s ear ‘So why can’t he talk?’
Donna
mouthed back ‘throat cancer’, and pulled a face suggestive of great suffering.
‘Poor
man,’ said Miriam, peering at the vibrant giant. ‘He looks well on it, though.’
‘Positive
visualisations.’
Laurence
said, ‘None the worse for your experiences of this morning, I see.’
‘No
indeed,’ Donna preened. ‘Haven’t you ever had men fighting over you, Laurence?’
‘People
in the entertainment business don’t fight with each other, dear, that’s far too
healthy and civilised compared with what they get up to. Anyway, that wasn’t a
fight, it was a beating up. Poor Sergei, we thought he was dead and we’d have
to bury him in the same place where we …
‘But he
was still breathing,’ Miriam said, jumping in because he was coming up to very
dangerous ground here. ‘So Baz put him in the back of his pickup truck and he
dumped your friend in the waiting room of the clinic in Durcal. If you were
thinking of sending flowers or anything.’
With a
frown, Nige, who never drank as much as the rest of them, asked, ‘Donna,
where’s Stanley? From what I heard he seemed a bit freaked out by everything,
is he OK?’
Donna
gave a silly little smile. ‘Oh, he’s fine, he’s nearby Don’t worry about
Stanley’
With a
sudden crack Mister Roberts’ chair, unable to sustain his great weight, buckled
under him and he fell to the ground. The big man lay on the prawnshell-strewn
floor staring up at them with his blank face.
La Comunidad Ingles would talk about that Christmas Day in Bar Noche Azul for months to
come. Sometimes, very occasionally, it happened that an evening caught fire
like this and the plain bar with its lurid colour scheme and twenty-year-old
posters, an ordinary room with a snooker table and fruit machine, the same
freezing cold space where they saw each other day in and day out, where they ate
their breakfast and their lunch, seemed suddenly transformed into a glittering
ballroom filled with the sexiest, wittiest and most erudite personalities in
the whole of Europe. Laurence supposed all the drink and drugs had a lot to do
with the transformation. Yet on this occasion they weren’t that important,
rather it was the silent looming presence of Mister Roberts that seemed to
bring everyone to a pitch of hysterical excitement. From time to time one of
them would try to talk to him, address some remark, ask how long he’d been in
Spain or whether he wanted to take care of a stray dog but he would just stare
expressionlessly with his strange dark brown eyes, eyes that seemed as if they
looked straight through them, directly into their souls. That sensation stirred
them on to drink more alcohol and shout more nonsense and feel each other up as
if Mister Roberts was some kind of maypole around which they danced their
springtime fertility dance.
To
Laurence the night resembled the DVD of a strange foreign film that had its
subtitles missing and which some controlling entity was playing on fast
forward, everyone in the bar was all flailing arms and jabbering mouths.
Suddenly there would be a brief moment when the entity hit the pause button and
he would see the crowd around him all frozen in mid yelp. In one of these brief
moments of clarity it struck him with a stab of loneliness that nearly
everybody in the bar had made money out of him at one time or another. For a
start, he was certain that Nige had sold him his house for considerably more
than she’d paid its
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