Mobile Library (18 page)

•  •  •

After she had gone, when the doorbell stopped ringing, and the neighbors' interest in cooking for them waned—in the short time before Cindy arrived—Bobby had spent long evenings wondering how to talk to his father. It was far simpler for them both to not speak at all, a decision they came to mutually, and, fittingly, in silence.

Bobby's father heated soup, a lot of it, so much that the kitchen walls sweated blush tomato vapor. One day he burned the plastic kitchen counter with the underside of a hot metal pan. This was how Bobby's files began, with a scraping of the charred laminate, so that he might show his mother how awful his father's cooking was in comparison to her own. They soaked the soup up with thickly sliced bread slathered in salty butter; most nights his father would eat three-quarters of a loaf. His belly would distend, a mottled hairy boulder wedged between the sofa cushions. Bobby would lie across it, lifting and falling, listening to the gurgling springs of acid inside and enjoying the way he stroked his hair—gently, and with nine fingers. If Bobby stayed extra still and quiet his father would put his arm around him, and he could smell the undercarriage of it, as squishy on his neck as blancmange.

This tenderness made Bruce feel awkward. It didn't last.

When there was no soup they had sandwiches. Bruce was bad at making sandwiches. Torn by the knife, the bread fell apart, half the crust clinging on as an afterthought. The soft white top deck bore the imprint of his hands. Limp squares of processed cheese and tinned meat fillings smelled of swimming pool skin. They made Bobby's stomach ache well into the night.

Both found it difficult to sleep. Bobby double-plumped his pillows, hung one foot from the mattress and even made a blindfold from an old sport's sock, but nothing seemed to work. One night he nibbled the tiniest grain from a sleeping tablet he'd found amongst his mother's things, but got so scared that he wouldn't wake up when she came home that he ran to the bathroom and made himself sick. He prayed that night, too.

•  •  •

“Come down, Bobby,” Val said, peering up into the treetops, “it's time for us to go.” Morning was coming and the chirrup of the insects slowed, but the woods remained alive in silhouette.

The mobile library was packed up and ready. Val held the keys in the ignition.

“Ready?”

“Ready!” Rosa said.

But they were too late. Bert cocked his head, splashing drool against the window. He'd heard what they all had, the jangle of the bell on Lola's collar once more.

•  •  •

The man had woken on the rug beside the fireplace, Lola's wet tongue taking the shape of his inner ear. His hangover was sturdy, thick-footed, and would be difficult to topple, certainly more robust than any in the previous fortnight. Turning to his usual emergency cure (reserved for instances of this severity), he made himself a sugary bowl of porridge laced with the tartest lime pickle available to man. Then, as was customary, he sipped a mug of hot chamomile tea, listened to the news on the radio and tried to piece together exactly what had happened the night before. He remembered drinking all afternoon, starting on home brew in his garage and moving on to rum before supper. He recalled going to the pub, where, as usual, he'd been roundly ignored by the other locals, most of whom his drunkenness had irked in the past.

And that was it. It had been an evening like almost all of the others.

No matter what form his hangover took—sometimes they hid from him as a niggling headache, only to bloom into a lobe-splitting migraine around lunchtime—he always walked the dog. Lola was his only real friend, and the least he could do was reward her undying loyalty with a saunter up the hill. That it was still dark outside made the prospect more appealing than it would be later on, when the hangover came on strongest. He'd hate for his inevitable nausea to blossom in the sun. He was still drunk, and so felt artificially magnificent.

He checked his phone—no calls or messages. It was while putting on his worn leather boots that he noticed them in the corner. Green socks, balled up like a hand grenade, glistening with slobber. Then he recalled a conversation with a large man, whose feet Lola had been obsessed with. He had a wife and two children, their faces painted as animals that right now he couldn't place. They were walking up the hill to the next village. In that weather. At that time of night. He'd offered them a lift.
Good job they hadn't accepted
, he thought. Last time he went out that drunk he'd left his trailer upturned in a ditch. But the man, neck wide as a beech, had been wearing a coat he recognized. Not from sight, from its description. A shaggy donkey jacket, torn at the lapel, faded mauve color and worn epaulettes. The coat that an old man from the village had described having stolen from his washing line in a conversation he'd overheard at the store.

•  •  •

“Joe, wait . . .” Val said, but he had already opened the door, climbed out of the cab and was gone. Rosa, Bobby and Val sat in silence for ten minutes as the wind rose, branches shaking like angry fists. He did not return. Somewhere in the woods the bell kept ringing.

“Should I switch on the headlights?” Val asked.

“No,” Bobby said, thinking of the blade in Joe's pocket. “I'll go and find him.”

“Don't get out,” she said, but Bobby was already outside, nettles lapping his calves.

Following the sound of the bell on Lola's collar, it was fifty-three side steps to the edge of the clearing's rough grass. Seven long hops made it over the bank, an eighth skirted the brook where it petered to nothing. Sticky mud took the shape of the tread on his soles, but he skipped through it. The bell got louder. Bobby placed it behind where the trees were most dense. A thirty-second jog around the stone track, one short skip to the foot of an old oak and twenty long strides across the forest floor where the fallen leaves were sheltered from the wind, so the ground was spongy and no movement could be heard. That's where Bobby spotted Joe.

The old man was crouched at Joe's feet wearing his shirt as a blindfold. Joe's balled-up socks, which the man had carried with him so that Lola could follow the scent, had been crammed into his mouth. Lola cantered around the clearing, driven delirious by her owner's whimpering.

Joe knew this feeling of numbed clarity well. Aware of what he was doing, but incapable of stopping it, he had experienced it a thousand times since he was a boy, the bad hawk of rage that swooped down and took him in sharp talons. Gliding in the air above himself, watching powerless as the unrecognizable figure tied the old man's wrists with rope. It always happened for the same reason. Because he was scared. Here, now, he was scared to lose Val, Rosa and Bobby, this slapdash family, the closest to one he'd ever known. All that stood between them, in that moment, was the man, fright flushing all traces of hangover from his shivering system. Something had to be done.

Joe held the torch in his mouth while he rummaged through his pockets for the knife, and the wandering spotlight picked out Bobby in the trees.

“What are you doing?” Bobby said. The man jumped but his begging was muffled. Joe suddenly became aware of time, of place, of the man sobbing by his feet and the boy watching, just as scared as he was. He couldn't answer. He didn't know.

Bobby unclipped Lola's collar and threw the bell into the undergrowth, then knelt down close to the man's ear while untying him. “Sorry,” he said. “Go home.” The man clambered to his feet. Lola followed him to the road. They walked together down the hill, the soberest he'd been in a very long time, remembering the boy's final words.

“Tell them we're on an adventure.”
By God
, the man thought,
do I need a drink.
He knew that no one would believe him.

Bobby led Joe back to the mobile library.

“Will you tell Val?” Joe asked. Bobby didn't answer. Joe hung his head and closed his eyes. He didn't need to see the path. Bobby had it all taken care of.

With full beams dipped to oncoming traffic, the mobile library snaked slowly down the lanes that sliced the country up. Joe drove. He had barely spoken since the incident in the woods.

“You're a professional,” Val said of his driving.

“My other car's a tank,” he said.

She let her hand settle on his thigh. The lean, solid muscle dried her mouth instantly, reducing her voice to a squeak. Joe relaxed and pondered his tremendous good fortune, but a tightening in his lower back made him wonder if it could last.

Rosa rested her head on Bobby's shoulder. He read to her,
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson. Rosa squawked at every appearance of the parrot, Flint, who always perched on Long John Silver's shoulder, and shrieked as Flint's pirate master revealed his ruthless violent side, murdering a member of the crew as part of his plan to escape with the treasure.

“Do only baddies have parrots?” Rosa asked. Bobby thought about it. The stiff beak. The beady eye. Hooked nail claws for tearing the skin.

“Probably,” he said.

“Then why don't they fly away?”

“I don't know,” Bobby said, “I don't know.” Together they sang “that old sea song.”

“Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!” He read until they reached the light strip of the motorway, where the cars sped small around them, fish swimming in the slipstream of a shark.

Before midday, Joe turned the mobile library in at a service station forecourt and parked in the area reserved for long-haul vehicles. When he switched off the engine there was an abruptness to the way the silence arrived.

Tired-looking men came and went, but despite the days and weeks of radio news coverage, the amount of times they'd heard those names as they retuned for a traffic update, the chats they'd had with other drivers (“How the hell could a forty-four-ton truck disappear just like that?”; “What kind of amateurs do they employ as policemen these days anyway?” and “Bet she's rolled the thing. They'll find them against a tree in a field somewhere, that poor little bastard she kidnapped was probably dead a long time ago . . . might as well give up the search”), none of them suspected that the most sought-after vehicle in Britain was the one they'd pulled up next to. Or that in the back was the infamous Joseph Sebastian Wiles, with Rosa sleeping beside him, as she had taken to insisting on doing. He didn't mind. In fact he adored the way she used his arm as a pillow, and he didn't even move it when it went dead.

Morning, afternoon, evening and night become vague terms for how light the sky was and nothing more. They slept when they could and drove when they couldn't, never staying in a single place long enough for anyone to get more than one look at them. They cut back and forth across the country, detouring to avoid towns, taking any minor road the mobile library would fit down and trying some it resolutely wouldn't. Joe made Val cut her bank cards in half with his knife and they spent what remained of the cash as slowly as possible. They split into unsought twos, mother and son, father and daughter, and bought provisions from rural mini markets. Roadside vendors sold them freshly picked fruit and vegetables. Farm shops filled plastic tubs with cheaply priced milk. When the sun was high enough they stopped in fields to eat and rest, then picked spiky yellow seedlings from the fur on Bert's back. They played cards and built half-finished dens they knew they'd soon abandon. Joe kept the truck in order, Val made the meals, Rosa tidied books away and Bobby fetched clean water from streams in a rusting tin bucket. They moved by night.

Every day had a different view. Cloud-thronged snow peaks on mountains in the north. Valleys in the west, green, lush and wet with mist. Lochs stiller than death and entire meadows that bowed to the wind.

Bobby read voraciously. He consumed stacks of classics Val had recommended. He discovered new books for himself, based on little more than a feeling he got when he held them and read the back cover, an itch that would not abate until it had been scratched.

Rosa listened. As Bobby gave voice to the characters, she found that a hundred friends lived inside her greatest friend of all.

Just over the Scottish border they parked the mobile library behind a disused crematorium, put on their disguises and went to a fun fair on the lip of a national park. Val and Bobby rode the bumper cars, where the first crash shunted his face into the candy floss and left his forehead sticky for the rest of the night. Joe claimed a prize of two helium balloons in an apple-bobbing competition. He gave them both to Rosa. They walked home—and it was home—along a rambler's path surrounded by sheep, balloons tussling for position in the sky.

Everywhere they went they left a book. Sometimes they buried them, or hid them beneath a rock. Sometimes they left them on show so that they could easily be found. One was left in the center of a hilltop fort. Rosa left another in the cave walk of a gorge. Bobby gave an illustrated book about birds to a crying girl at a market, and a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov
(Val's idea—he hadn't read it) to a grumpy-faced boy whose father wouldn't let him have a plastic ray gun from a toy shop.

“It's about patricide,” Val said, “he might get a kick out of it in a few years' time.”

“Patricide?” Bobby asked. It sounded to him like a drink. “What's that?”

“Something you'll never need to worry about.”

When needed they bought cheap clothes from charity shops. In a tourist-friendly village where the air carried the odor of compost, Bobby chose for Rosa a purple velvet cape that might once have been a curtain, and she picked for him a hat with corks dangling from it, the same as a kangaroo might wear in a cartoon.

“What a darling family you have,” the lady behind the counter said to Val. Her makeup was white and patchy, like sea wash breaking on sand.