Mobile Library (19 page)

“We're on an adventure,” Bobby said, and Rosa repeated.

“We're on an adventure.”

“I bet you are!” Her eyes thinned. She recognized the girl, but why? It wouldn't crystalize.

“You do
such
a good job. I bet it can't be easy,” the lady said to Val.

Val smiled. So many people had said this to her in the past, as if her daughter were a machine she had to operate. Such a peculiarly hurtful thing to say. They left before the lady could piece the memory together, and it went to the graveyard of thoughts that are never fully formed.

“That's the key to good camouflage,” Joe said as they wound down the mobile library's metal steps. “People only ever see what they are looking for. And if we look like a family, if we behave like a family, then we become a family, we
are
a family.”

And that's exactly what they did. Val and Joe held hands. Warmed though she was by the tandem of it, Rosa was unable to spot the signs of two people falling in love. She had never seen or even heard of it. Love, for her, was constant. It didn't come or go, grow or subside. You didn't fall into it, you didn't fall out. It was the nook of her mother's armpit, cheese melting on a hot baked potato and the way Bert guarded her meals without ever snatching from the plate. It was how she felt about Bobby Nusku. It didn't develop, it was there and now, with no past or future at all. It just was.

Val was experiencing it very differently. Feelings she'd suppressed for years were rising up, seeping through her pores, sitting there in puddles like surface oil on a south Californian rock. Bobby had noticed. Val, as she changed her underwear behind the shelving marked Biology, uplit only by the desk lamp, was ravishing. She had a smile on her face. She was a puzzle solved. He decided not to tell her what he'd seen take place between Joe and the man. His overriding urge, for her to be happy, remained paramount. He could keep Joe in check. He could protect her if he needed to.

They drove for days, Joe searching for a hint of a landscape he recognized, anything that hadn't changed in the two decades that had passed since he was last in rural Scotland. Fields collapsed into shores lapped by solemn stretches of water. Soon they stopped seeing people, or even lights on distant houses that they mistook for low stars.

“It's near here, I swear it,” Joe said, in bursts of confidence spurred by a bend in the road, or the gulp as they drove across a humpback bridge. Occasionally he'd stop the truck, stand in the road and scan the view through the box of his fingers. Then he'd shake his head and they would keep on going, Joe scouring every turn, braking and checking every lane. “I promise you, it can't be far.”

It was the end of a long day, one that began before the first blasts of orange combed the sky. There was damp in the air and everything was as moist as a cucumber heart. They were near the sea and far north, but unsure exactly where. In the stormy center of a tantrum, Rosa had thrown the atlas from a bridge into a fast-running river, so there was no way of knowing.

“Oh no,” Val said, tapping the red flashing light in the shape of a petrol can blinking behind the steering wheel. They parked. The white sides of the library were splattered with mud and Rosa's cape was already tatty at the trim.

“What do we do now?” Bobby asked. Val moved four copper coins around in her hand.

They climbed down from the cab. Bert idly watched a rabbit hop inside a hollow log, then licked sea-salty wetness from the bark.

“We don't do anything,” Joe said, pointing through the trees to a flat gray dam, creaking with the weight of water pushing. He wiggled his finger to show that he meant for them to look beyond the fog, where they could just about see a large structure atop the steep incline of a hill. “We're here.”

“A castle!” Rosa said, loud enough to make Bert scuttle back inside the library.

“Almost,” Joe said, snapping his fingers. Bobby had thrown so much paper out of the window that there were no pages left between the covers of the physics textbook on his lap. His trail had lasted just long enough.

They waited by the roadside while Val reversed the library down a thin winding trail into the pines. Joe wove leaves and branches through the grille to disguise it, but there were no tracks there, just unblemished earth where nothing came nor went. Bert dug with his snout and found the bones of a bird. Even he had sense to leave them undisturbed, that there were some places people—or dogs—just didn't belong.

Joe carried Rosa up the steep side of the dam and then they walked across the top hand in hand. On one side was the lake, on the other a drop into nothingness. An uneasy thinness comprised the line between two fates.

At the gateway to the towering country pile, its crumbling brickwork, wild garden and holey roof, they stood and stared. It was just as Joe had described. They shimmied over the outer wall to find a long gravel driveway writhing toward the door. A grandiloquent expanse of oak, it would have been impressive even if it were not set into the foreboding gothic archway, disappearing on either side into the mist. Bobby had never seen a bigger building. Its intricate corners hid magic in shadow. He was relatively sure they'd stumbled across Hogwarts.

In the center of the door was a large brass knocker carved into the shape of a bat. Rosa slammed it down on the wood three times, then hid behind her mother.

Joe pushed the door ajar. “Hello!” he said. An echo scurried away from him.

The entrance hall was long enough to cast the back wall in darkness. Faded portraits of long-dead men had tired of never being looked at. Now the paint was brittle and chipped. Vines grew through the cracks around the windowpanes and leaves blown in rotted on the dirty floor. It was difficult to know where the outside ended and the inside began. Rosa and Bobby yelled at the top of their voices, but the words were returned in ever quieter echoes. Clocks showed time that never passed.

Rosa opened a cupboard and climbed inside.

“We can live here, Val,” she said.

They stalked rooms lined with dusty furniture, sticking together in case they got lost. Labyrinthine corridors curled around spiral staircases, and in the furthest corners the building was reclaimed by the grounds. Even the weather crept in, clouds somehow wafting between the rafters, condensing then dripping from the beams. Bobby let the cold drops fall into his mouth.

They passed through an impressive library. Almost all of the books were old, chocolate-box gold and green with covers thick and dusty, shelves too tall for even Joe to reach the top. It smelled different from the mobile library. The pages had broken down, and now gave off the scent of a good-quality vanilla absolute, giving Bert a ravenous desire for ice cream.

There were too many rooms to assign a unique name to each. Bobby passed through the filthy drawing room, with its curved chaise longue and green baize billiard table, to find that the next room was almost identical. Taxidermy gathered in packs, a deer with its own forest of antlers and snow foxes frozen mid-prowl. He ran his fingers across the sharp combs of their teeth. Their tongues were waxy purple, clammy to the touch. Above them an eagle stretched its wings to full span.

Into the next room, a kitchen, with a pantry bigger than any room in any house Val had ever lived in. There were enough tins of food to last a year or more, and a musty smell that made Bobby's lungs kick against his chest. Joe swiped a finger across the dining table then blew a thick layer of dust from the tip.

An hour later and they had still only searched the manor's east wing. Joe smashed apart an antique table and used its broad stanchions to seal the front door closed. With what wood remained he built a fire while Val blocked drafty windows using sandbags from an unfinished conservatory.

Bobby investigated the basement, guiding Rosa through the darker corridors in night mode. Piles of junk sagged with the onset of damp. Mold ate cardboard boxes and spiders scuttled by. They found engines and chains, batteries and belts, a dismantled vintage motorbike, each part stripped, painstakingly spread out on a dust sheet and then abandoned. Everywhere were mechanical items, none loved enough to work.

Another basement room, smaller this time, colder, had been painted pink a long time before. On the widest wall was a stencil of a girl holding two balloons and floating away into the sky, but being held down by a small dog pinching her sock in its teeth. In the middle of a room was a crib, cobwebs layered across it, collapsing under the weight of trapped lint. Then a rocking horse, its hollow chest now home to only insects and a bird's nest long deserted.

Rosa pulled a photo album from an expensive but unloved chest of drawers. Leafing through it, a story of strangers emerged, a man surrounded by exotic animals, but there was no beginning, middle or end to the story, just snapshots of an unknown narrative.

Joe appeared in the doorway.

“You shouldn't be down here,” he said.

“Why not?” Bobby asked.

“It's too gloomy. These are someone else's memories—someone else's story. Not yours.” He pulled from his pocket a large silver key. “I found this. Let's see if we can find what it unlocks.”

•  •  •

The garden was vast and the grass had grown out the markings of what was once a perfect croquet lawn. A fountain over a pond in the middle was dry and caked with bird shit. Joe beat a track through the wild pasture and piggybacked Rosa over the sod—a sight Val found pleasing. She held Bobby's hand and they followed close behind. They reached the wall at the bottom of the grounds, alive with climbing plants and tall enough to mark the perimeter of a high-security prison. Above it, the steel sky of a Scottish evening.

“It must be here somewhere,” Joe said, plunging his hand into the ivy to feel the rough scratchy surface of the wall.

“What are we looking for?” Rosa asked. Joe smiled.

“A door.”

“Like in
The Secret Garden
?” She and Bobby had read
The Secret Garden
by Frances Hodgson Burnett together as the mobile library had rolled over the Scottish border. Though she hadn't been able to articulate it to Bobby, she imagined herself as the young Mary Lennox, the book's heroine unloved by her selfish wealthy father, who is healed by the gardens she finds one day while playing with her skipping rope. She was, for the first time, outside herself, and this new terrain, her imagination, was a secret garden of her own.

Joe looked to Val for an answer. She nodded.

“Exactly, like in
The Secret Garden
.”

Bobby counted that they'd walked four hundred and eighty-three steps along the wall before Val stopped them in their tracks.

“Here,” she said, pointing to an area behind the foliage that was not the raw-meat red of brick. She parted the ivy to reveal a green wooden entry. Joe hacked around the entrance with his knife, and the lock creaked as he turned the key. As soon as it had opened, Bert ran, faster than he had in many years, and disappeared into the acreage of a dilapidated private zoo. Val opened her eyes wide.

“I didn't believe you,” she said to Joe.

“I can forgive you for that.”

Astonished, Val sat down on a decrepit bench. In every direction, gothic wrought-iron cages taller than men, with signs above them, for lions, leopards, chimpanzees; hundreds of animals that existed behind thousands of bars. Now the cages were empty, gingered by rust. Doors swung in the breeze. There was a sense of sudden abandonment and the haunting that emptiness brings.

Rosa made animal sounds for every sign she could, growling at the tiger enclosure and arfing at the seal pen. Bobby kicked a stone along the main walkway and imagined the zoo's former splendor, filling the cages with the animals he had read about in the mobile library. What a grand sight it must have been. Past the reptile house, where rare iguanas had lamp-bathed on heated logs, and an alligator, who had only emerged from the man-made marsh for a taste of warm, living lamb. An aquarium, where he pictured dolphins sharing a tank with tropical coral, now had broken glass and spent crab shells strewn across the floor like bullet casings. Vacant cabinets housed nothing but sawdust, and a cold ditch where the rainwater collected overflowed with floating bilge.

Bobby set off in search of Bert. He checked the barren penguin pool, and an enormous cage that the sign promised was once the playground of a grizzly bear. He found a small clump of hair in there, and put it in his pocket for his files. His mother was bound to be impressed by genuine bear hair. He remembered a faux fur coat she had owned that his father had burned in a bucket in the yard.

Bert sat looking up at the spectacular and curious thing he'd been able to smell since he got out of the mobile library, now made flesh before his very eyes. He didn't necessarily want to eat it. It was more that he wanted to hold it in his mouth. Regardless, it was making him drool, and his tongue hung out like the inflatable ramp on an airplane. He'd never known a smell like it before. Artificially flavored dog food often strived to achieve it, but no scientific mind could re-create a scent like this for a nose as finely tuned as his. He wanted more than anything to be on the same side of the mesh as it. For Bert, a dog old enough to know that very little was worth his effort in the end, this was a desire of profound intensity. It was worth all the effort he could muster.

“There you are, Bert,” Bobby said, entering the disused aviary. Only then did he see it, a glorious blue and yellow macaw. It had a curved, charismatic bill, strong legs and sharp-clawed zygodactyl feet. When it spread its wings, Bobby gasped.

“Visitors,” the macaw said, a word it had learned from its mother before she'd died of psittacosis, the parrot fever that had eventually wiped out the inhabitants of every cage in sight, except for him.

Joe, Val and Rosa came running when they heard Bobby calling their names. No one could explain where the bird had come from or why it was there, but they were all mesmerized by the vivid punch of its colors. Joe rattled the rusted padlock, its metal far too thick to slice through with his bolt cutters.