• • •
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.
CHAPTER SIX
THE MOTHER
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.
He checked behind the thornbushes by the art department where Sunny’s tunnel was now a faint gray smudge on the brickwork. This was where they usually met, but Sunny was not there. Instead he found two older pupils locked in a long sloppy kiss, undisturbed even by the sounding of the bell.
• • •
Mr. Oats had been peculiarly shaped by years of overindulgence in pastry and whisky. His hair was flat at the sides and on the top. A frosting of toothpaste had settled on the uneventful thinness of his top lip, which had somehow forged a right angle from nothing. He held the register out in front of him and leaned forward, as if he was going to preach.
“Penny Abrahams,” he said. Penny’s arm shot up into the air. She had spent the summer changing, new curves carved into her tumbling silhouette. Mr. Oats took a second to gather himself before proceeding, but in that simple thrusting of her hand upward and the extension of a natural line—this larval transformation of womanhood—she’d sucked the wind right out of him.
“Thomas Allen.” Thomas Allen, who hadn’t changed at all over the summer, limply made himself known.
Mr. Oats read the entire register without saying the name Sunny Clay.
“Sunny Clay,” Bobby said. “You missed out Sunny Clay.” The chair in front of his, where Sunny always sat, was empty. Bobby refused to look at it.
“Sit down, Bobby,” Mr. Oats said. He slipped the register inside the drawer of his desk and slammed it shut. Thomas Allen whimpered.
“But you’ve left somebody out. How can it be a register if you missed out Sunny Clay?” Bobby heard his name being whispered behind him, carelessly churned in the mouths of others. He became flustered and unable to think clearly. Nobody in the room would have guessed that it was born of a fear that his protector was not there.
“I said sit down, Bobby. When you’re a teacher it will be your turn to stand up in front of the class and say whatever you like. That day is not today.”
“Just because he’s turned into a cyborg, it doesn’t mean he isn’t part of the class anymore.” Other children began to snicker.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Sunny is a cyborg now, and when he comes he’ll smash your skeleton to smithereens!” Everybody gasped. Bobby was sure he felt the air move around him. He kicked over his desk. The cheap wood splintered, scattering sharp needles acro
ss the freshly shined floor. Penny Abrahams screamed, a far fuller scream than she’d have managed just a few precious months before. Mr. Oats took Bobby by the arm and walked him out of the classroom. Once they were in the corridor with the door shut behind them, the laughter grew loud enough to rattle the glass.
Mr. Oats pushed Bobby against the wall. He could feel anger vibrating in his twisted arthritic hands.
“I suggest you calm down,” he said, though he himself was not calm. That wave had already broken, and the foam of its pungent wash gathered in the corners of his mouth.
“Fuck you,” Bobby said, pretty sure that it would be impossible to be in any deeper trouble than he already was. Mr. Oats had known all manner of profanity hurled at him in his forty years teaching. These days he hardly noticed. He drew slowly onward like a hearse, ignoring their insults, the flowers flung at it. Nobody knew what an exemplary teacher he had been in the beginning. He barely remembered himself.
• • •
Bobby sat outside the headmistresses’ room for the rest of the morning copying equations from a math textbook. When Mr. Oats arrived with Mrs. Pound beside him they talked quietly, then summoned Bobby into her office. A plant on her desk had died over the summer. Cigarette smoke tinged the blinds. Everything was a sickly, terminal yellow.
Mrs. Pound sifted through a stack of papers, occasionally circling lines with a thick red pen. Despite stern features, everybody said that she was a kind woman and so Bobby was not scared, especially when she talked in her gentle, dripping lilt.
“How are things at home, Bobby?”
“Fine,” he said.
“I guess what I mean is that we know things haven’t been easy for you. So, as it’s a new term, I wanted to see how you were doing.” Mr. Oats had declined a seat and was cramming himself into a small space between the door and a filing cabinet. Conversing with children was hard enough, but a child and woman in a position of authority stretched him beyond his meager means. He yearned for the tobacco-spiced sanctity of the pub darts team, the order with which they approached drinking beer, the strange solace they found in the smell of each other’s farts. He hadn’t always been this miserable. Bobby could see it in his eyes, a look he recognized from his father.
• • •
They had never had a holiday before. Bobby’s mother showed him a picture postcard of the sea and he didn’t even recognize it as being water, rather a mass of blue crystal baking in the sun.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a long, waggling stripe of white.
“Chalk,” she said, “a cliff face.”
He sat on the bed and watched her pack. She folded the clothes into neat squares, then stacked small towers of them atop one another. She assembled the towers into columns, until there was a grid of clothing layered by material. Wools at the bottom, silks at the top, cotton a soft filling in the middle. Then she deconstructed her work and rebuilt it inside the case. Afterward she had Bobby jump up and down on top of it so that the buckle came together with the strap. She strained and pulled until finally the metal prong slid through the eyelet, then explained what they’d find when they got there.
“Giant cliffs,” she said, “the very edge of the country.”
“What do you mean the very edge? The end?”
“The end. There is no more. It’s like flicking through a storybook and running out of pages.”
“What happens if you fall off the country? Can you get back on again?”
“No one ever falls off the country. It’s impossible.”
“What if the edge of the country moves until it’s not underneath your feet anymore?”
“For that to happen you’d need to stand in the same place for millions of years.”
“We’d move, though, wouldn’t we?”
“Yes, baby,” she said, “we would move.” She closed the bedroom door and fixed Bobby with her most serious stare. “Now I need you to listen to me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean really listen to me.”
“Okay.”
“When we get there we’re going to do something very special.”
“What is it?”
“We’re going to run away.” His mother lifted him off the packed suitcase and held him in her arms. “Together, just you and I.”
“To where?”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll be gone.”
“How?”
“When we get to the beach . . .”
“By the cliffs?”
“Yes, by the cliffs, I’ll ask your father to go and get an ice cream, and when he’s gone we’ll walk away, just like that.” Bobby toyed with the shiny buckle on the case.
“He won’t like that.”
“No, I don’t expect he will.”
Gee Nusku laughed, delicately, like bubbles bursting on water. She pushed her hair (long, silken, its texture an innate obsession of Bobby’s even then) behind her ears and stood, looking down at her feet. It had been so long since she’d worn heels. Bobby’s father didn’t like them. He said they made her too tall, but by that he meant taller than him. Gee stashed her highest pair inside a beach bag, wrapped up inside a threadbare towel.
“All you have to do is keep a secret,” she said.
“About your shoes?”
“Well, yes, about my shoes. But also about us running away. Your daddy cannot know.”
Bobby nodded. “Okay.”
“You promise?”
“I promise more than all of the other promises added together forever.”
“Good boy.” She lifted Bobby up from the bed and placed him on the floor. He wound himself tighter, arms hooped around her legs, head pressed against the mound between them, her pregnant belly above him, the impeccable correlation of mother and son.
“You promise you won’t go without me?” he said.
“Like I’ve always taught you. Never hurt anyone. Never lie to anyone. Of course I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“We’re going to lie to Daddy.”
Gee sighed. “No, we’re just not going to tell him anything. There’s a difference.”
“So promise.”
“I promise more than all of the other promises added together forever. Now get some sleep. In the morning we go on holiday for a very, very long time.”
When Bruce got home he was covered in paint. He painted other people’s houses for a living. In his own house there were many bare walls of cold plaster, so the air always had a chill in it, a sense of loss that gave Bobby goose pimples. He didn’t talk much, and when he did it was mostly about the everyday ins and outs of his solitary profession.
Bruce never worked without a bottle of denatured alcohol tucked into the pocket of his tool belt. He liked its ruthless functionality, how it was the shark of the ethanols. He had spent his entire adult life painting and decorating, and in doing so he had used denatured alcohol as a weapon against almost all of his professional banes. Not just paint, but ink and dust. Even mealybugs, which had overrun the solarium of a florist whose skirting boards he had painted. He had used denatured alcohol to disinfect the cracked skin on his heels before draining an angry-looking blister. He had employed it as a germicide by rubbing it into a persistent cold sore that clung to his top lip like a baby koala. He had even poured it into the glistening wound left when he severed the little finger on his left hand by trapping it in the metal hinge of a foldaway ladder. The surgeons did not commend his efforts when he arrived at the hospital carrying his finger in a beakerful of it. By then it had killed the skin cells, serving fine as an antiseptic for the wound but destroying what had once been there. Still, they were impressed that he had driven himself to Accident and Emergency.
What he liked best about denatured alcohol was that, despite its potency—or rather because of it—its manufacturers still had to put something in it to stop people from drinking it. It was called denatonium benzoate and was the bitterest known chemical compound. Unpalatable to humans, they used it in animal repellen
ts and nail-biting preventatives. Without denatonium, people would drink denatured alcohol even though they knew that it could make them blind or even kill them. Some people still did. What a thing, that you could still love it no matter what ruin it brought. Bruce respected that about it, and deep down hoped the same principle could be applied to him.
“You know this is a waste of time,” he said. “The beach will be cold and strewn with dog shit. Everywhere will be packed with tourists. You won’t even be able to see the view for the clouds.” He pointed at Bobby. “And he’ll be wanting everything he sees in every shop. We’ll be dragging a screaming child down the seafront in the wind. I don’t consider that a holiday.”
“It’ll be a holiday from this,” she said.
They didn’t speak again until the next morning as the cases were being loaded into the car, when she tried to soften him up with her special buttery diction. She asked him to take a photograph of her and Bobby leaning on the hood. She held her son in her arms. It took a long time for the flash to go off. Bobby could feel the bump inside her belly. Even though she was changing she was always the perfect shape for him.
Bruce agreed to put the radio on but the air-conditioning was broken, so the windows were open and the wind whipping at their ears meant they couldn’t hear the music. Bobby amused himself by picking leather from the back of his father’s seat, rolling it up into little balls and making tiny pyramids that collapsed in his hand whenever they hit a bend. His mother had taught him that counting was a good way to make the voice in his head louder than their arguments, so he counted the balls, then the dials on the dashboard, then the bugs’ bodies splashed across the windscreen.
After two hours they pulled into a service station forecourt. Bruce got out, slammed the door and walked away sucking on a cigarette. The smoke made pretty designs in the air. He headed to a bar inside a hotel that catered to lonely traveling salesmen and truckers who had decided to stay parked up for the night, rather than face another mile of the road’s endless trundle, a sight seared into their every waking minute. Bruce ordered a glass of port, which the barman found in a bottle on a dusty top shelf. Rarely did he drink port, but it seemed to call to him in that moment, bottled promise.
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