Mobile Library (7 page)

“I promise more than all of the other promises added together forever.” He crossed his heart and showed her that his fingers were spread so as not to jinx the deal.

“In every book is a clue about life,” she said. “That's how stories are connected. You bring them to life when you read them, so the things that happen in them will happen to you.”

“I don't think the things that happen in books will happen in my life,” he said.

“That's where you're wrong,” she said. “You just don't recognize them yet.”

It started to rain. Val gestured for Rosa to come inside. Picking up Bert, his body falling limp in her arms, she started toward the library. Bobby edged his deck chair a little closer to Val's, so that their legs were touching.

“It's nice to have a new friend,” he said, and she agreed, already suspecting that the word
nice
didn't do his arrival in their lives justice.

Val let Bobby borrow four books, even though he didn't have a library card. He promised to take care of them, and he did, by hiding them in a place where no one would ever find them. At the back of the wardrobe behind the boxes of his mother's stuff, with his files.

One of the books,
The Iron Man
by Ted Hughes, was about a little boy and a giant robot who become friends. Bobby wondered if this was a clue about his life. He was the boy and Sunny was the robot. He wished more than anything that he could share it with Sunny. By now, Sunny would be able to scan the book with his eyes in five seconds flat and memorize it forever.

Bobby was so busy reading the books that he fell behind on the upkeep of his files. He forgot to count the empty bottles. He failed to log what times of day the door slammed. Women came to have their hair cut and he didn't even note their names, or which celebrity's hairstyle they wished to emulate.

He wanted to be in a book, to have an adventure. But his story seemed set. There was no point in its ever being read.

•  •  •

When he woke the sky was newborn pink. Waiting for his father to go to work was infuriating—Bruce was always running late, funneling black coffee into his throat, mustering appetite enough to swallow breakfast. Bobby noticed the skin around his father's eyes speckling, the yellowness of his cheeks. How hilarious it would be, he thought, if on his mother's return she didn't recognize the man to whom she was still married.

As soon as his father had gone, Bobby went straight to Val and Rosa's house, Val made breakfast, comprising many things he had never tried before. Spinach. Poached eggs. A white cheese that crumbled in the warmth of his fingertips.

“What would you like to do today?” Val asked.

“I don't know,” Bobby said, “what is there to do?”

“We could go to the park?” Bobby shook his head. “You don't like the park?”

“I don't like it as much as I like it here.”

Every week, Val allowed Rosa to choose a book from the mobile library, and since discovering a beautifully illustrated edition of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll, she had clutched it tightly to her chest. On the cover, rendered in frail gold leaf, was the image of the Cheshire Cat's grin. Each tooth carried a letter, executed in elegant calligraphy, combining to spell out the heroine's name. It took Bobby a few seconds to realize that Rosa wasn't just showing it to him, but urging him to take it, to open it and read.

“I can't read it to you,” he said.

“Why?” Rosa asked.

“I just can't.”

“Why?”

“Because . . .” Any excuses he could think of seemed to scatter as soon as they came to him, like a child kicking away a ball it wants to pick up. Rosa thrust the book into his lap and opened it on the first page. Bobby looked to Val for help, but she took off her slippers and reclined in her chair with both hands behind her head. Rosa mimicked her mother and they both laughed. Sighing, Bobby finished the last of his toast. He began to read aloud. Alice, bored on the riverbank, chased the clock-toting White Rabbit down the rabbit hole and got lost in a room with many doors.

“Do the voices,” Rosa said. Val snatched the book from Bobby.

“Come on Rosa,” she said, “give the poor boy a break.”

Bert, upset by the kerfuffle, waddled past them into the living room, the mangled remnants of Val's leather watchstrap a macabre tongue hanging from his lips.

“To the den!” Rosa said, grabbing Bobby by the hand and following Bert into the living room that overnight she and her mother had completely transformed. Suspended a few feet from the ground was a false ceiling of sheets and blankets, hoisted atop upturned sofa cushions and stacks of pillows from the beds upstairs. Beneath that, a catacomb, into which Bobby crawled behind Rosa, imagining a labyrinth that expanded forever. Val listened to them laughing and wondered what was so funny.

“Val,” Rosa said, forcing her head through the gap between two cushions in the wall of the den. Val was sitting on the stairs admiring their handiwork.

“Yes?”

“Can Bobby Nusku come and live here with us?” Bobby stopped dead. Val saw the hump of his back rising and falling underneath the sheets.

“Oh, I think his father would be wondering where he is.”

“He won't,” Bobby said.

“How do you know?”

“One time I stayed out all night because I thought I'd killed my friend Sunny.”

“All night?” Bobby could tell that Val thought he was exaggerating.

“Yeah. I sat on his doorstep until the morning when his mum came home.”

“And nobody came looking for you?”

“Nobody,” he said. Val looked at the den and realized that she wanted to be in there with them. She felt like Alice, full of EAT ME cake, too big to fit through the door.

Bobby appeared at the far end of the room, beside the fireplace, where he had widened an entrance to the den that she would easily be able to crawl through.

“I don't think so,” she said.

“Come on,” he said. Val dropped down on to all fours and shuffled, self-consciously, across the carpet toward him. With each inch she moved forward she regressed another year. “Go in,” he said. So she did, reminded of how it felt when she was a little girl, when she and her father would play in the attic, and he would bury her in blankets and pillows until she giggled so much she could barely breathe. Rosa took her hand and led her to the center of the den. There, she found what they had been laughing at. Bert, licking the leather watchstrap's lacquer from his teeth, a luminous Cheshire Cat grin of his own.

•  •  •

On hot days they laid a blanket out on the plush grass in the garden and had a picnic. When it rained they stayed indoors and took turns reading aloud.

Bobby taught Val how to keep a ball in the air using just her head and she taught him about psychology and sociology. How people work on the inside and out. About experiences and what they make you do.

“I haven't had any experiences,” he said, “I'm not old enough.”

“Sadly,” Val said, “that's not how experiences work.”

“How do you know so much? Were you a professor before you were a cleaner?” She smiled and the tuning fork of his heart hummed.

“I wanted to be. Or something like that. Instead I clean around the textbooks and take them home to read afterward. I suppose I'm my own professor. But really I'm just a cleaner.”

“Well, it's like you said, the world always needs cleaners. There is always someone making things dirty.”

Val caught a laugh in her throat before it could cleave open her lips. Rosa dangled treats in front of Bert's nose, but he remained unimpressed by their half-hypnotic twizzle.

When the weather was warm enough they went to town. Every time Bobby recognized somebody from school, he walked beside Rosa with his jaw pointed upward at the sky. For the first time in his life, he felt pride and confidence, those twin spires that rise from the soul when you have a good friend.

One day they saw Cindy drinking coffee and eating chocolate cake with another woman, her hair not even slightly reminiscent of the film star's it was intended to be. The indistinct memory of a tattoo had blurred on her forearm, a permanent dark green mess. Bobby slowed to hide behind the ballooning ruffles of Val's dress as they passed by, and though convinced he'd made it, they had moved out of step. He had been seen.

Two thoughts entered Cindy's mind. The first was how odd it seemed that Bobby was with the woman and her disabled daughter who lived at the end of the road. She considered calling Bruce, but knew better than to disturb him while he was working. The second was that she should finish her cake, which was delicious.

•  •  •

As the end of the summer approached, Val received the news she had been dreading in the form of a letter from a man she had never met. It said, as succinctly as it was possible to put it, that the mobile library was closing down. Funding had expired, and despite a small but vocal campaign to save it, belt-tightening had cut off blood to the head. It would be mothballed, starved of the resources needed to operate. In return, Val wrote a letter of complaint to the local council. She received no reply.

To her surprise, her immediate concern was not the loss of wages. This was important—without the money she earned for cleaning she would need to quickly find another way of supplementing the pittance she received from the state to help look after Rosa. If she couldn't secure a job with hours so suited to Rosa's care, then she would need to consider moving into a smaller house, perhaps an apartment with one bedroom, like the place where they'd lived before she worked at the mobile library. But that was not what kept her awake at night. Instead, she lay in bed counting the memories she cherished, more of which had happened in the last six weeks, in the mobile library, than at any other time in her life. The stories they had shared. The discoveries made in them. How they had cheered a victorious hero and willed on a villain's comeuppance, as if these were tales of their own existence. Parts of themselves they'd never noticed absent, concealed in the ink on the page.

The thought of the library closing, and what would be lost, seemed, in those early hours when the starlings sing, incomprehensible. There could be no other place for her, Rosa and Bobby to be together, she knew that, and that was what she found herself missing even before it had ended. Togetherness—the creation of something new, something bigger than the sum parts of its people. She was sure that her daughter, who she often knew better than she knew herself, was awake in the next room, struggling with the same giant loss.

Bobby felt it more keenly still. He didn't want the summer to end, but this news had sounded its death knell. He dreamed of closing himself inside the mobile library and bolting shut the doors. He could see in the darkness. There were no windows, yet there were thousands of windows, in every book on every shelf.

Despite the many ways his imagination had been opened up by the mobile library, he could not imagine wanting to be anywhere else, with anyone else. The mere thought of it filled his bones with the inexorable ache of yearning. It felt like being ill, so badly that it crossed his mind he might die. If it weren't for Sunny being back at school with him, he was sure that he definitely would.

“I don't want to go back to school,” he said to Val as they sat on the steps of the mobile library late one night. “I want you to teach me with Rosa in the library. That way you can be a teacher and I don't have to go anywhere. We both get what we want.” The separate swaths of her makeup—pink across her cheeks, blue across her eyes, red across her lips—conspired to resemble the showy belly of an exotic bird, circling overhead.

“You have to go back,” she said, with evident displeasure. “It can't be summer forever.” But Bobby was sure that somewhere, in a book he hadn't yet read, it could.

Only if the photograph of Bobby's mother was carefully examined would anyone spot the slight rotundity of her belly, cupped by shadow in her floral summer dress. The bump would be Bobby's brother or sister one day.

In the photograph, she held Bobby in her arms. Suitcases full of their holiday clothes lay beside them on the curb.

When he returned from Val and Rosa's house, Bobby often felt wistful and lonely in his bedroom. He'd been too young when it was taken to remember it, three, maybe four he guessed, but he found that looking at the photograph transported him into a memory he'd since built, where everything and nothing was real. There, on his back, holding the photograph above his face and with his feet on the radiator for warmth, he could still feel the faint pressure of her hands beneath his buttocks, and smell Mentho-lyptus sweets on her tongue where she kissed him, regardless of whether she ate them or not.

•  •  •

It was the first morning of the new term, another school year beginning. Bobby placed the photograph in the front pocket of his schoolbag with a lock of his mother's hair bound neatly by thread, two broken pencils and a chocolate biscuit that had melted and reset. This was the day he'd see Sunny as a cyborg for the first time—Jules Clay might not have been able to stop her son from injuring himself, but she always made damned sure he never missed a day of school. Bobby would tell Sunny what Amir and the two Kevins had done to his new friend Rosa, and have his vengeance wreaked. Then he'd never have to worry about crossing the park again. Though nervous, Bobby could barely wait. He took a wrench, a pair of pliers and a pocket screwdriver from his father's toolbox in case Sunny needed any urgent repairs. When his father found out he would be angry, but by then he'd have a fully functional cyborg bodyguard who could crush his skull and make a beach from the dust of his bones.

Bobby waited until the last possible moment before leaving the house and arrived at the school just as the last of the stragglers filed through it. Bodies flocked around the playground, swooping and diving, this way and that. New uniforms were noisily compared. The collar of last year's shirt pinched the skin on Bobby's neck, the cloth round his thighs strangled the flesh. Familiar faces, newly licked with suntans, kept an eye on the far side tennis courts, on the incline where new pupils instinctively herded. The school loomed over them with a sense of foreboding only institutional buildings can inspire. Bobby felt a pang in his stomach when he looked up toward the roof.