Mobile Library (9 page)

“Here,” she said, “count these.” So he did. One two three four five six seven. One two three four five six seven. One two three four five six seven. Every time he got to seven he had to start again as quickly as he could, without stopping for breath, so that he couldn't hear his father's voice through the space left, and he couldn't hear his mother's crying.

He did hear the crash and the crumple of the metal, the smashing of his head through the windscreen, the landing of his body on the car stopped in front. He heard that perfectly.

Afterward, their sandwiches lay strewn across the road. And their socks, forty-two, some balled together, some limp and alone. And their underwear. Twenty-one pairs, in different styles and sizes.

He remembered being glad that they were not dirty. He remembered feeling absolutely fine, not hurt at all, bar a mild dizziness that quickly passed. And he remembered knowing that there would only be three of them now. No baby. Just them, as they were in the wreckage, on the road.

“Mum,” he said.

•  •  •

Bobby's bottom lip shook. Mrs. Pound shooed Mr. Oats from the room. Relieved, he shut the door behind him, scowling at Bobby through the glass.

“Would you like me to call your father?” she asked.

“Why?” Bobby said.

“You can take the afternoon off if you wish. Come back tomorrow. Start afresh.”

“Can you call someone else?”

“A relative?”

“A friend.”

“They would need authority from your father, Bobby.” He looked at her shoes. They were black and shiny, small, like a doll's, but charmless, like a soldier's.

“It's okay,” he said. “I'd rather be here with you.”

Mrs. Pound let Bobby work for the rest of the day in the nook outside her office. It was the perfect spying tower over the schoolyard. Bobby wished that he had brought his father's binoculars, which his father had used only once, the wrong way round, to see how far away the television appeared through the lenses.

The yard was a thin concrete corridor with tall walls on either side. Pupils clogged the artery of the thoroughfare that led to the school's humongous heart, the hall where they convened for assembly.

Bobby had prepared mental maps of the area. It was a total of three hundred and eighty-four steps across the playground. The far gate, locked during lesson time, was only twice Bobby's height and so could be climbed with relative ease. There were twelve doors along the route that it was possible teachers could emerge from, but on the whole they liked to stay in the staff room, tarring their tongues with black coffee.

He waited for Mrs. Pound to leave her office, packed his belongings into a plastic bag and left through the side door of the administration building. It was lunchtime and the yard was busy. He put his back to the wall, crouched down low and began shuffling toward the drain. His plan was to circumnavigate the entire school unseen and at the far end make a dash for the bushes beside the basketball court. From there he could get to the gate undetected. The drain was blocked with leaves and mud, so he gave it a wider berth than he had anticipated, but no one noticed him by the time he got to the basketball court, where he paused to breathe and tighten his shoelaces.

Bobby reached the gate to find three figures climbing over it, coming in his direction. Though they were still some distance away, he immediately recognized them as Amir, Big Kevin and Little Kevin. Suddenly he became aware that the moves he wanted to make weren't those he was actually making. Instead of turning and running, he found himself frozen in an awkward squatting position. Their laughter sounded tinny. Bobby wondered if he was shrinking, and whether his heart would soon outgrow his chest, which he could feel happening already. He closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around his face. Warm droplets of piss spotted his crotch, cooling as they slithered down his thigh. The three boys approached as the piss forced itself through the polyester. He wondered what would happen if they were in a book.

Sunny the cyborg sliced the gate in two with the red-hot lasers blasting from his eyes. The steel in his feet crushed the stones and left imprints of his might in the ground. A charging sound, electricity gathering in the chamber of his enormous metal engine, then the titanium cannons reconfiguring, the robotic buzz of the gun barrel forming, the whir and click and fire. The smell of flesh, their skin and hair burning to vapor. Chinese lanterns—scorched hearts inside a charred rib cage—rocking. A metal arm clasped Bobby's shoulders, and a high-powered headlamp cut a pathway through the smoke.

•  •  •

When Bobby opened his eyes, all of them, or those that had existed, were gone. He plucked a leaf from the bushes and wiped his groin, but it did little to mop the stain. He waited for his hands to stop shaking, then climbed over the gate, catching his shirt on the spike and tearing a gash in the cotton.

A stitch needled his ribs by the time he arrived on the corner of Sunny's street. There was no sign of his mother's car parked outside. After rapping three times on the door, he hid around the side of the house. Nobody came. He tried again, harder this time, in case Sunny had already had his entire head replaced with metal but not had a chance to have his ears tuned to the correct frequency. Still nobody came. He used the secret hole in the fence to access the back garden. It had grown since he was last there and he sank ankle deep into the plush rug of the grass.

He tried the back door but it was locked. At the rear of the house the kitchen window still comprised only a plastic sheet. He peeled the tape away from the corner and peered inside. The kitchen was bare. Not just of food, of everything. The table. The chairs. Even the sink. Grease framed the space where the oven had been.

Bobby climbed in through the hole and entered the living room. A clean square of carpet in the shape of an armchair. A patch free of dust that was once the television. Walls with faint outlines remembered the pictures they held, the pictures of Sunny when his smile had worked, and Jules, in those long blissful summers when she was still able to protect her boy from harm.

Back in the garden, beside the shed, Bobby dug to find the shiny black stone that looked nothing like the others around it. This was the rock on which they'd both wiped their blood on the day they had agreed to be brothers. Sunny had said that it was binding for life. Beneath it was a small tin that once contained peeled plum tomatoes. Though Sunny had washed it twice, it still had a pulpy residue clinging to its rim. Bobby emptied the dirt from it and found a small plastic bag inside. In that, a scrap piece of card.

Dear Bobby Nusku. They have taken me away. Find me so that I can keep you safe. Sunny.

At the bottom was an address. He was gone. Bobby lay back on the lawn, his breath painfully trapped.

Whenever he heard people—teachers, mostly—talk about hope, it was as if it was something that people only had in times of despair. Bobby didn't think this was true. He knew, for instance, that his mother would return. This was hope. Hope is a constant, a pilot light in the soul. It never flickers, never dies. Though they may not realize it, people warm their hands on the flame every day. It gets them out of bed. It makes them leave the house. It powers them through life. Regardless, he felt bereft of it now.

Dusting the ornaments, wiping the sill, Val endeavored to pass the time of day. In her own way, so did Rosa, ignoring the home-school work Val set for her to instead write his name again and again in her notebook, until the blackness blocked out the white of the page. Neither explicitly realized they were missing Bobby Nusku. Both were too concerned with the vague and sickly sense of longing bringing them low, which they couldn't quite place and mistook for hunger. This is how missing somebody disguises itself, so that those it inflicts are not driven to madness by want.

When Bobby knocked on the door, Val was surprised to see him, but not as surprised as she was delighted. Neither mentioned the fact that he should be in school. She invited him inside and noticed the greenish dock-leaf hue of his trousers. Tears filled his eyes as she put her arms around him, running her fingers up and down the harp of his spine.

“Sunny has been taken away because he's a cyborg and they're scared of what he might do,” he said.

“To where?” she said. He showed her the address. “Oh my. That's on the south coast.”

“How far away is it?”

“We're right in the center of England. This is a long way,” she said, “a very long way indeed.”

Val made tea and shortbread, then left Rosa and Bobby watching television while she filled the bathtub with water and bubbles.

•  •  •

Bobby's father didn't let him take baths. He claimed that the water was too expensive to heat. This was a shame because the bathroom was Bobby's favorite part of the house, even though nothing really worked properly. The extractor fan was broken. Steam had curled the edges of the lino and the ends of each individual slat on the blinds. The walls were mottled with damp and the pipes shrieked whenever he turned on the taps. The shower, despite the promise of its futuristic nozzle, was a constant disappointment, piddling no more forcefully than a toddler. The room's imperfections were everywhere, but they were constant. That's why it reminded Bobby of his mother, and all of the times he sat on the toilet watching her try to put her eyeliner on straight. It had not changed since she left.

Occasionally when Bruce came home covered in paint he took a bath with the door wide open, and Bobby would wait patiently outside for him to finish. Afterward, when Bruce stood up, the water was tepid and the tub ringed with murk. Water clouded with the paint and streaked down the sides of his face. It ran down his neck and chest and over the deadweight of his paunch. Only by leaning forward at the waist or sticking out his groin could he see his penis, gnarled, with an uneven rhythm to its creases, looking much like the finger he had lost.

Bobby took off his clothes and climbed into the tub while his father dried himself. As this was no more expensive, it was allowed. He strapped on his goggles, held his breath, submerged his head and gathered samples for his files. Toenail clippings and sock fluff, the softened floating shells of old blisters. One day, Bobby thought, he would have enough material to build a new father from the pieces. He had already decided that when the day came he wouldn't bother.

•  •  •

Val's bathtub was far more luxurious than the one at Bobby's house. Foam expanded and spilled from the sides, billowing out onto the floor. Heat rolled upward over his body and steam squeezed open his mouth. He let the water fill him until he was a part of it, a crouton in the hot soup. Val sat beside the tub and rubbed a bar of soap against the soles of his feet in ticklish decreasing circles.

“Does that feel better?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, his foam beard torn apart in clouds. She washed his hair with strawberry shampoo, the scent of it bringing Bert to an inquisitive halt at the bathroom door. Val filled a plastic jug with water and slowly poured it over Bobby's head. The suds cascaded down his back, which she traced with the nub of her thumb. He made a birthday cake from bubbles that exploded when he blew out the candle. She handed him a towel, cream-colored and marshmallow soft.

When she had gone he stood in the center of the room letting the water drip onto the floor. His piss-stained trousers sulked in the corner, surrounded by rose-tinted flannels, serums and softeners, floral-patterned linen and sweet-smelling salts. He realized what was missing from Val's house. The dirty water. The skin in the tub. The stink that made the scent of flowers all the sweeter. A man.

He found her sitting on the edge of her bed and was struck by the scarcity of her belongings. A bed with a bra hooked over the headboard and a box that contained the sum of her clothes, torn down one edge. The room was as functional as a corkscrew. He held her. They were briefly of the same faultless contour.

•  •  •

Bert's bark woke Bobby, but not Val. It became a growl and then a throaty mixture of the two. Val didn't stir until Rosa started shouting her name from the bottom of the stairs. Something in the sound of the knocking on the front door, in its force, its speed or both, untethered Bobby's heart from its post in his chest and readied it to gallop from his mouth.

Val straightened her dressing gown. Bobby followed her downstairs. Just as the door handle stopped shaking, the knocking started again.

“Who is it?” she said into the wood.

“Open up,” the voice said, and Bobby froze.

Val, still extracting the shrapnel of a dream from the day, clipped the chain on to the latch and opened the door a few inches. Rays of sunlight thrust through the gap, illuminating two worlds Bobby kept separate with the same stark and unforgiving gleam.

“Where is my son?” Bruce Nusku said.

“Your son?”

“
My
son.”

Bobby's father wrapped a giant, lopsided hand around the chain and yanked it, screws and all, from the frame, pushing the door open until they all stood before him. “You,” he said to Bobby, “care to tell me why the headmistress of your school is calling to inform me that you've run away?” Bobby was unable to look his father in the eye, for it might have confirmed he was real, that this wasn't a jolt in a nightmare into which he was locked, upstairs on the bed in Val's arms. Instead he concentrated on the area just above his father's head, where the light played with his baldness, finding funny angles in the dips of his skull. He thought about slamming the door, but Bruce had what remained of his fingers inside it. When the opportunity to hurt his father arose he couldn't take it.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it.”

“What good is that now you've done it?”