Mobile Library (2 page)

“The police will catch us,” Rosa said.

“The police won't catch you because the police only catch bad people. Isn't that right, Bobby?” Bobby understood the pretense, and nodded, so that Rosa copied him with that charming delay she'd perfected. Val had made a new plan, and he trusted her, despite not knowing what it was.

He pulled on his plimsolls, then attached the dog's lead to his collar and put the handle into Bert's mouth. Lazy, even by the standards of old dogs, Bert insisted on walking himself. “Just keep going,” Val said, “all the way to the ice cream van. Don't let them stop you. And make sure you get me a big one, with lots of chocolate sprinkles on top.”

•  •  •

Detective Samas tugged the plump knot of his tie tight. Something about the situation rested awkwardly on his conscience. No amount of training could have prepared him for it. To what life was he returning the boy? He had met Bobby Nusku's father, and seen not the hollow a lost child leaves, but hints of indifference in the space where it should have been. What misery would he, in helping, inflict? There were no happy endings to this story, he was sure of it.

•  •  •

Val hugged Rosa, whose body loosened to fit around her mother's, and they became the same for a second, merging to make pairs of everything. Then she put her hands on Bobby's face to
pull him close, and they kissed a final time. She closed her eyes and hoped that nothing would go wrong.

“I love you,” she said, and he had not heard the words before either, not like that, not sewn together with such magical thread.

He climbed out of the cab and felt the air cool his ankles. Rosa came next, and then Bert, leaping to the dewy grass on the clifftop, only a misstep from the violent drop of the edge.

•  •  •

The detective watched, incredulous, as the children for whom he'd been searching since before autumn came ambling past him arm in arm, followed by a dog, apparently walking itself.

“Hello,” Rosa said, “I am Rosa Reed. What is your name?”

“My name is Jimmy Samas,” Detective Samas said, tipping his head to the side. Rosa stopped and wrote his name down in her notebook.

Many surreal moments had punctuated his service, but none more so than this. It had more in common with a dream's wobbly oddity than it did real life.

Bobby, Rosa and Bert continued on their way. They walked past the police cars and the men and women in their smart blue uniforms, with silver badges and heavy belts so black as to blaze off reflections of the sun, past the eager news crews, past the waiting ambulances. They walked all the way to the ice cream van.

•  •  •

Detective Jimmy Samas approached the mobile library.

Bobby didn't turn around until the fire melted the ice cream over his trembling fingers. Smoke inked the sky.

With eyebrows drawn at an inflexible thirty-eight-degree angle, the toasted ocher of Bobby's father's girlfriend's foundation was a matte bed onto which she painted a single unchanged emotion. Suspicion. The egg-white wink of missed inner ear offered a fleeting hint of her true color, but her singing voice, a dull functional honk, was befitting of the new shade she had chosen. Few who tried could accurately guess at Cindy's age, in the same way it's difficult to know the age of a reptile thanks to its unchanging mask of scales. It was actually somewhere in the mid-twenties but could easily have been a few decades north of that, depending on the harshness of the light. She looked youngest on Saturday nights.

Despite calling herself a mobile hairdresser, people always came to her—that is, to Bobby's father's house, into which she had moved barely three months after Bobby's mother left it for the final time. Though Cindy had received no formal training, her knack for recreating the styles worn by stars from pictures in glossy magazines was passable. Once a week she bleached her own hair over the kitchen sink. The damage she had done it was irreversible. Though permanently attached to her head, it did little to repel potential customers, lending weight to the adage that all publicity is good.

Apart from hair, her other primary interest was gossip. Bobby sat on the stairs listening to the conversations Cindy had with her clients. Soundtracked by the scissors' percussive clack, they discussed rumors and invented new ones. To Bobby, the chatter was of no concern. He concentrated on one thing and one thing only: hair, theirs, cut loose and slowly floating down onto his mother's rug. Individual strands, brown and black and brittle bottle blond, wove themselves into the wool, entwining lives that were never meant to touch. Afterward, when alone, he would pick the hairs out by hand, split them into two piles and put the piles into jars. One jar for his mother's hair, one jar for everybody else's. He could tell which hairs were his mother's because they were softer and smoother. When he held them to the light they were the same color as the glow behind an angel. Collecting them took hours and made his fingertips ache, but Bobby updated his secret files every night after Cindy's last client left and she headed to the shop for wine (she boasted of having become immune to the resultant headaches).

He kept the jars beneath his bed. He was an archivist of his mother.

Measurements formed a similarly integral part of his files, and he would meticulously catalogue them in a notebook, making the numbers as small as possible so that his father, should he ever find it in a hiding place beneath the bedroom carpet, would have great difficulty understanding what they said. With arms outstretched, walking sideways like a crab, he could make it from one wall of the house to the other in five big steps. There were eleven stairs to the staircase, thirty-eight tiles on the kitchen floor, forty-three swirls in the bedroom ceiling plasterwork and nine mini paces from the toilet to the bath. There were fifty-seven different vehicles—planes, police cars and helicopters—on the wallpaper in his bedroom, but they were only the ones he could see to count. Bobby estimated that another twenty were hidden on the far wall, behind the boxes bulging with Cindy's belongings.

Sometimes he practiced walking around the house with the lights off. If he couldn't be seen, he couldn't be punished, and so in the darkness he was closest to himself. As his night vision improved, he was able to find his way around without touching any furniture, even on the blackest of nights. If he ever encountered a burglar, Bobby planned to wait until he fell over the hairdressing chair in the middle of the lounge, then stab him through the throat with the scissors. Coagulated in the carpet fibers, the blood would make the hairs more difficult to pick out. But he would do it anyway. There could be no greater indicator of commitment to his files than that.

The rug was five feet by three feet—it said so on the label—and turned from red at one end to yellow at the other, the colors of a plate after a decent breakfast. Other rugs looked plain by comparison. No wonder she had loved it.

Houses are bodies, their memories mapped by the scars left behind. Bobby drew sketches of each room with a charcoal pencil that his mother had used to draw him, and added the pictures to a special section at the back of his files devoted to art. He knew that this was the section she would enjoy most.

The black smudge on the wall above the stove marked the time she set fire to a pan of oil when his father crept up behind her, drunk and in a state of arousal. The spot was two and a half hands wide. There was a crumbly seven-inch hole on the stairs from afterward when she ran, fell and put her foot through the plasterwork, breaking her ankle. There were the divots her fingernails dug in the headboard, and remnants of the easel Bruce had smashed.

Bobby imagined how proud his mother would be of his archives when she returned. They could use the notes to re-create the house to these exact specifications, except up on top of a mountain. Inside, it would be identical. Lime-green curtains in the lounge, chocolate-brown borders ringing the walls. Cream tiles on the kitchen floor betraying splats of dropped food. The same gap between the cupboard and the fridge, three inches across, where lost items could always be found. But when they opened the back door there would be clouds on the lawn. Eagles would nest in the drainpipes, and he'd scoop snow from the peak for pure washing water. The world would be their garden, just as she had promised.

Days felt longer with her gone. Bobby chased the slowing hours round his watch. Until his mother came home, only one other person in the world knew about his files. His name was Sunny Clay and he was Bobby's best and only friend. He was also his bodyguard. That's why he always wore a shifting mask of bruises, the colored lumps changing, a violent ode to coral reef.

•  •  •

Bobby arrived at Sunny's house on the first Saturday morning of the summer holidays. Everywhere glimmered reminders of the amassed blank days ahead, on which he and Sunny could impress any fantasy they wished. Excitement's hot tickle rushed down Bobby's spine, until Sunny finally answered the door with a familiar look on his face.

“Hello, Bobby,” he said.

“Hello, Sunny,” Bobby said.

“Do you know what today is?”

“I know it's Saturday. Is that going to be enough of an answer for you?”

“Not really,” Sunny said.

Bobby sighed. He hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and hitched up his jeans. “Then you'd better tell me.”

“Today is an important day. Today is the day that we commence Phase Three.”

Bobby had been dreading Phase Three. Phases One and Two were difficult enough. Bones had been broken. Blood had been spilled. It wasn't very relaxing. However, they had made a plan, a mission, and there was no backing down. When it was over, Bobby Nusku would never be picked on by anyone, at school or by his father, ever again. Sunny would become a cyborg by the end of the summer holidays, and then he'd be able to protect Bobby with all the extra strength and speed being half human, half robot would bring.

•  •  •

It had been Sunny's idea, and though he claimed it a long-term ambition, it had come to him shortly after he and Bobby met. Sunny had approached Bobby in the playground at school and asked if he knew anything about making tunnels.

“Tunnels?”

“Yes, tunnels.”

“Not really.”

“Then you can pick it up as we go along.” Bobby presumed that Sunny had an ulterior motive. He was considering running away when Sunny stretched an open palm out toward him. When Bobby finally opened his eyes he was surprised to realize that he hadn't been struck. They shook hands, and Bobby was impressed by the strength of Sunny's grip.

Sunny had been watching Bobby all week. He had watched him skulk alone around the perimeter of the fields at break time. He had watched him try to avoid three older boys, who had chased him across the football pitch. He had watched one of them trip Bobby into the mud, not once but twice, and followed him unseen into the bathrooms, where he had attempted to clean his shirt in the sink, only to make it worse.

He recognized loneliness when he saw it. Noisy crowds that swirl around the silence in the center where you sit. An irrepressible ache made by the melody of other people's laughter. The breadth of the canyon between you and someone you can reach out to touch. He too had felt as if he had radioactivity trapped in his bones.

Sunny was large for a twelve-year-old. Bobby on the other hand was slight, waspish and the color of milk. He looked like he needed a friend no matter what shape they took, and so this new arrangement was mutually beneficial.

“Come with me,” Sunny said, and Bobby walked proudly behind him toward the art department, trying to match the exact timing of his steps.

“Why are you making a tunnel?” Bobby asked, as they reached a brick wall, sheltered from view of the playground by a thornbush.

“So that we can get out of here. You want to get out of here, right?” Bobby's first thought was of the trouble they would be in, just as his mother had raised him to think. Embarrassed, he put his hands on his hips and tried to stand up tall and straight.

“Of course.”

“And you've seen prison films?” When Sunny's father walked out on Sunny and his mother he left behind a considerable library of old movies on VHS cassette. Sunny had made an education of staying up late and voraciously consuming them.

“Uh-huh,” Bobby said, not sure what Sunny even meant.

“Then you'll know as well as I do that tunnels are the only way out.” Sunny leaned against the wall, stroking the brickwork so that the cement turned to dust on his fingertips.

“But this is the wall to the art department. If you tunnel through this, you'll be breaking back in.”

“Wrong kind of tunnel,” Sunny said. He lay on his stomach on the ground and reached into the base of the thornbush, from where he produced a box containing two stolen tins of black paint. Bobby glanced down at the ground, which he sensed move further away from him. This, he reasoned, would be his view from the gallows. Regardless, he didn't want to desert Sunny. He wanted to climb on his back and throw both fists into the air.

Sunny daubed the semicircular outline of a tunnel onto a wall, as he'd watched Wile E. Coyote do in countless
Road Runner
cartoons. This Bobby
had
seen, though he wasn't brave enough to point out where he recognized it from, hoping he might be wrong, and that Sunny wasn't crazy. Sunny thrust a brush into Bobby's hand and told him to start helping fill its empty center black.

“This isn't going to work. You do know that don't you?” Bobby said, liberally splashing the paint onto the wall.

“Incorrect,” Sunny said, “this tunnel will get me out of school today.” Bobby admired the fervor of his new friend's belief. Even if it was misguided, it was enough to convince him. And that was all Sunny wanted to do. He knew full well the plan was stupid, but in that hour, the timid boy he'd watched retrieve the contents of his bag from the marshes at the back of the field had scarcely looked over his shoulder. He hadn't needed to.