Mobile Library (25 page)

“Huh?” he said.

“Oh, I was just saying, the move might be good for Sunny here, too. Been in the wars, haven't you, honey?” The detective looked at the boy. Nobody had warned him about Sunny's condition, and so he was faced with a child he just assumed to be extremely serious. Little unsettles like a serious child. To lighten the mood he made two jokes, neither of them particularly funny. Sunny would still have smiled if he could, if only to put the detective, to whom he'd taken an instant liking, at ease.

“Have you heard from Bobby Nusku?” the detective said.

“No, sir.”

“Has he ever spoken to you about a lady named Valerie Reed?”

“No, sir.”

“Or any boys at school that he might have had a problem with?”

“No, sir.”

Flustered by the case, and by an argument earlier with his pregnant girlfriend about the amount of time he was spending away from home, the detective slapped his clipboard against his knee. It had been a gift from the man whose job he had taken over. Detective Samas didn't like using it. He thought it made him look like a politician, and thus, on some subconscious level, annoying and untrustworthy. In his line of work, having people assume such character traits exist isn't beneficial for getting results. He used it anyway, so as not to offend a man who wasn't even there.

“Do you have any idea why Bobby Nusku might have run away from home?” Sunny thought for a while, long enough that Detective Samas assumed another answer in the negative.

“Have you been to his house?” Sunny asked. Detective Samas looked up from his list of questions at the boy, who had chosen to sit on the rug by his feet.

“I'm sorry?”

“Have you been to Bobby Nusku's house?”

“Yes,” the detective said, remembering the coldness of his room, the scorch over the hob and the hole in the plasterwork. Remembering his father, spiced booze vapor on his breath, a broken television. The size of his hands. The angry stump of a missing finger. Talking to him, he'd identified a tone in his father's voice that he hadn't been expecting to hear. Only later had he been able to identify it. Relief. Relief that the boy was gone.

“Then you already know the answer.”

“I do?”

“Yes.”

“And what is it?”

“He hasn't run away from home. You can't run away from what you don't have.” The detective declined another piece of shortbread. He thanked Sunny's mother and locked his briefcase, deciding never to use the clipboard again.

“One last question,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Could Bobby be headed here?”

Sunny shook his head, comfortably aware that no lies would show through the dead mask of his face.

“No,” he said, “he doesn't even have my new address.”

•  •  •

Bobby insisted Sunny press the button at the rear of the mobile library. He was suitably impressed as the mechanical steps wound out to greet him. Val appeared in the doorway. She also looked different from the way she had on the television. Soft, wholesome, good. She had her arms around him before he could speak.

“I've heard a lot about you,” she said.

“Likewise,” Sunny said. She had been all over the news. An attractive, white female criminal (a kidnapper to boot) overshadowed even the story of the escaped military convict, whom Sunny was baffled to see climb out of the cab, yawning. “This is Joe,” Bobby said. Sunny thought of the story that Bobby had told him and shook the man's hand. He thought of the reward offered, and how it could never be enough.

Next he embraced Rosa, and a new sensation came over him. He hadn't expected it, or ever really known it before. At first he couldn't quite define what it was. She asked what his first name was and then wrote it down in her notebook. Watching her shape the letters, looking back at his face as if painting a portrait, he slowly pieced it together. Rosa hadn't noticed his palsy. She hadn't traced the fallen half moon of his mouth, or the heavy sack of his bottom lip. She had embraced the other, the inside, with a purity so tangible Sunny swore he could feel it pressed against his chest. It was lovely and warm, a bath at the end of a hard day. A tear seen by no one tumbled from his eye and down his cheek. He did not feel it.

Finally he was introduced to Bert and Captain. The patch of skin on Captain's underside was healing nicely.

“Visitors!” she said, dancing to a pop beat tapped out on the wood with the stiff bullet of her beak.

Sunny's neighbor, Mr. Munro, watched from the upstairs bathroom window of his home that backed on to the lot of garages. This was where he spent most of his time these days.

•  •  •

A pink evening sky struck out the day's crisp blue. Sunny waited until his mother had left for his grandparents' house before emptying the cupboards and fridge of food. He tipped the lot into an old sleeping bag, which he dragged across the road and down the path to where the mobile library hid behind the garages. If they rationed it sparingly, Val calculated that it would be enough food to last them for a week.

Sunny and Bobby crossed the petrol-stained gravel to the garages on the far side. Nobody came here anymore, even the local errant youth could think of ten better places to go. Whoever had owned the garages, in a time when the area had promise, now only used them to store junk, had abandoned them or, Sunny guessed, died. The entire plot, about the size of half a football pitch, and with rows of lock-ups on either side stopping it being fully seen from the street, was dirty and overgrown with weeds. Brickwork crumbled and when it rained you could smell rust.

Sunny used a crowbar he'd hidden in the bushes to jimmy open a garage with a dented door, where behind the rusting shells of an old washing machine and a mattress's skeleton of springs he had constructed a secret den. It was comprised of a broken stool, torn world map pinned to the wall and a wind-up radio that only received a Gujarati-language station he'd established was devoted to cookery.

“Welcome to headquarters,” he said. Bobby noticed the sole chair facing the map, as if it were the view from the porch of an old folks' home. This scene was made all the sadder for knowing that it was where his best friend spent so much time alone.

“It's excellent.”

“It's a little messy but it will do. I was wondering if news of you would ever surface. I was going to plot on the map where you'd gone with colored pins and strings.” Bobby sat down on an upturned bucket, split down the side, buckling under his weight. They reminisced about school. Sunny did his impression of Mr. Oats (even funnier now that his face retained a hint of misanthropy). Despite the months apart there was no space between them, no lost tooth, no hole tender to the tongue that had returned to explore it.

“In the story you told me,” Sunny said, “did the Boy ever find the Robot?”

“Yes,” Bobby said, “he did.”

Sunny rubbed his forehead. He had been hoping for a different answer. “I'm not a robot, Bobby. I'm not a cyborg. I'm not anything. I'm just a boy with some metal in his arms and legs whose face doesn't work. I'm not a part of the story. That kind of thing doesn't happen to people like me.”

“You're wrong,” Bobby said, “I know you're wrong.”

For the next three hours they went to work tidying up the garage. Bobby scrubbed the walls clean of cobwebs clagged with dust. They cleared the floor of scrap. A tumble dryer, a fridge, the washing machine, white goods once deemed essential by someone, but now forgotten. Sunny repaired the rip in the map with parcel tape. Bobby tightened the stool's wonky leg. Joe came to help, salvaging wood from old furniture and using it to build a set of shelves. Val filled it with books from the mobile library and soon Sunny had quite the collection of his own. Rosa told him which he might like best.

Bobby went into night mode. He jacked up the doors of the other abandoned garages and sifted through what detritus had been left there. Before long Sunny had a scuffed leather office chair, an oak desk with a scratched marble finish and a Persian rug only one-fifth eaten by moths. It smelled musty, but that would clear if he hung it up to air. In the corner was an empty liquor cabinet in the shape of a globe. Next to it, positioned to appear as though it was inspecting the Indian subcontinent, was a life-size dressmaker's mannequin. He even had a sofa, threadbare in places but comfortable enough, perfect for sleeping.

By the time they had finished, and Sunny had stolen the padlock from his mother's garden shed to secure it, the garage was transformed. Baron's drawing room, eighty feet wider, with opulent pillars holding a ceiling aloft among the gods, could never have housed half its soul.

Joe rolled a perfect cigarette from the tobacco pouch Sunny had stolen from his mother's handbag and they stood back to admire their handiwork. As a final seal of approval, Bert walked four complete circles and lay down on the rug. Captain perched on his back, kneading his flesh with her talons.

Night fell, silencing the birds in the trees. Val made cocoa so hot it scalded their tongues, and the cookies they ate tasted of burnt sugar. The mobile library glinted orange under a solitary flickering streetlight. So dim was its glow that none of them, sitting on the steps blowing steam from their mugs, noticed Mr. Munro peer over the wall that separated the garages from the street. Arthritis riddled his hips, and it took him far longer than he would have liked to get home. Reaching his front door with glacial pace he searched his pockets for the key and realized that he had locked himself out. His only hope of getting to the telephone and calling the police would be to climb over the rickety back fence. With the reward money, he'd be able to afford a new one.

•  •  •

After such a lonely few months, Sunny reveled in the company of his new, and old, friends. Seeing Bobby's affection for Joe, Val and Rosa, and the way they repaid it so wholly, he knew these weren't the people on the news. They were the Caveman, the Queen and the Princess.

They sat outside the mobile library. Joe, still exhausted from the drive, held Val tightly, kissed her and announced that if he didn't sleep soon he'd fall over.

“Good night, love,” she said.

“Good night, love,” he said.

The thought of Joe being put back in prison stuck in Val's mind as she listened to him snore. Willfully distracting herself from this sadness, she watched the two boys play-fighting on the gravel, and Rosa acting as referee.

“Don't hurt each other,” she said.

“We won't,” Sunny said, “we're good boys.”

“Oh, sure you are.” She winked at Rosa. “Like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.”

Bobby stopped. He scampered into the mobile library, reemerging with a smile on his face and a book in his hand. Its hardback cover was well worn, the spine cracked and feeble. Perhaps a thousand pairs of eyes had read it.

“Here,” he said, pressing it into Val's hands. It was an old copy of
Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain.

“You want me to read it to you again?” she asked.

Bobby was speechless. How could she not see the answer in the pages, right there on her lap? They must have read it together three times or more. He leafed through the pages for her, eventually finding the right one. The warm gold of aged paper bounced off her skin.

“Look,” he said. Val did. Tom and Huck had run off to play pirates on an island in the Mississippi. Bobby imagined the vast channel of water rushing by, play-fighting in the foam smashed against the rocks on the shore.

“Huh?” she said, “you want us to become pirates? In a mobile library on the seven seas?”

Rosa laughed.

“No,” Bobby said. “Why are they free to go and do whatever they want?”

“Why?” Val said.

“Because the townsfolk think they have drowned in the river.”

She pictured the mobile library by the ocean, on a clifftop. Its doors were open, swinging gently in the breeze. On the beach, four pairs of shoes were half buried by sand. The police would wait for the water to give up its secret, but the tide would break its promise. They would wonder how Joseph Sebastian Wiles had met Valerie, Rosa and Bobby. They would wonder what had caused them to walk into the sea with their pockets full of rocks. Somewhere else entirely, they would be together, with a dog and a macaw that knew them all to be alive and well.

Val saw that it was a preposterous plan. They might as well jump in the Mississippi for real. But isn't that life? Its currents drag you this way and that. Sometimes you're washed up, sometimes smashed against the rocks, no matter how hard you kick. What the past few months had taught her was that it wasn't the swimming, but who you clung to on the way that was important. That was what was with you in the end. She had to cling.

Tomorrow, once he had rested, she would tell Joe and they would make a plan. But for now she was content to have Rosa and Bobby by her side, where both of them should always be.

•  •  •

An electric blue flash briefly changed the sky's black complexion. Bobby assumed it was distant lightning and listened out for the clap of thunder. It didn't come. Whatever it had been, it riled Bert, who began running around the clearing between the garages, barking at the clouds. Perturbed by this sudden rodeo, Captain dismounted from the dog and flew into the back of the mobile library, dazzling Sunny with her plumage. They waited, but the night returned to deadened form.

“What was that?” Bobby asked. Sunny shrugged. They walked together to the back wall, from where they had a decent view of the road that, within ten miles, spread out into many smaller lanes, which, like the tributaries of a river, eventually led to the ocean. But for the occasional window lit by the glow of late-night television, there was no sign of life. Bobby scanned the darkest alleyways, just to be sure. Everything was as it should be, in a suburban street when the moon is up.