(2008) Mister Roberts Read Online Free Page B

into a microphone, but Bar Noche Azul was
always crammed for the entire length of the programme.
    Unlike
in the UK the Spanish don’t celebrate Christmas Day much. The night of the 24th
is ‘Noche Buena’ — ‘The Good Night’ — traditionally the first big night of
feasting and getting together with the family while the 25th is generally spent
dozing around the house and picking at the remnants of the meal from the night
before.
    Even if
the 25th had been more of a holiday, Stanley would still have been walking
alone through the scrub-covered hillside high above the village, for one thing
his mother wasn’t the type to leave presents under the tree or invite the
neighbours round for mulled wine. Last year they’d had their Christmas Day,
complete with turkey and roast potatoes, presents, cards and a tree, on a
Tuesday morning in the middle of July.
    Stanley’s
mother Donna had lived in the village since she was a teenager. Roger her
father had been one of the British pilgrim fathers, who had owned a little
village house on Calle Carniceria for several years before even Laurence
arrived. Nobody even knew he had a daughter, until suddenly sixteen-year-old
Donna had turned up with a little baby in tow and announced she was going to
make a new life for herself in Spain. According to Roger the father was a
lonely Brazilian teenage footballer on an unsuccessful and bewildering
three-month loan spell at Middlesbrough FC and that was why Stanley was half
black. Roger said the footballer had been her first and she had only let him do
it to her because she felt sorry for him.
     
    The first time Laurence
met Donna was in the local pharmacy On entering he initially thought somebody
had collapsed by the counter, perhaps after being diagnosed with some terrible
disease but it was just the women who ran the shop fussing in a demented
fashion over Donna’s infant. Children in Spain were treated as visiting foreign
potentates from repressive regimes were treated in Britain, traffic was stopped
and work suspended. In the queue behind Donna people who needed vital
medication understood that they were going to have to wait.
    Laurence
usually had great difficulty in talking to people much younger than himself,
either he acted like he was some aged colonel who’d died at the time of the
Crimean War or he had to stop himself speaking like an OG gangsta, saying ‘whattup
dawg?’ and ‘true dat’ even if the kid he was talking to was a ten-year-old
Chinese violin prodigy Somehow with Donna, right from the start he always
managed to just talk. Once he’d introduced himself she said, handing her child
across the counter so that the shop assistants could really have a go, ‘It
would have been easy for me to have stayed in Darlington and finished my
education you know? My mum was more than happy to look after Stanley or I could
have kept him with me in the school’s crèche. I could have carried on going to
clubs with my mates. All the other pregnant teenage girls on the estate shared
out baby clothes they robbed from shops in town. Life was all right but it made
me sick how the council would give every slut who got herself knocked up a nice
little flat with two bedrooms and central heating. That’s why I’ve come to
Spain, to make something of myself. I’m a mother now, a lioness who must do
anything to protect her cub.’
    ‘Right…’
Laurence said, ‘… and was the father really a Brazilian footballer?’
    ‘Well,
I don’t know that he wasn’t.’
     
    As Stanley made his way
across the rocky ground, icy wind slithering through the gnarled trees, his
mind was filled with worry about his mother. She’d gone out last night and not
come home; he would really have liked to go to Noche Azul just to check up that
she was there and not injured and lying in a hospital somewhere, but he knew
that if she was in the bar and he came around looking for her there was a good
chance that she’d turn nasty.
    So he
figured it was best