Underneath the bed was a basket full of his mother’s old lotions. One of them was pearl-colored and cold to the touch, meant for softening the face, combating the effects of aging and fighting wrinkles. He read the bottle as carefully as he could but came across nothing to suggest he couldn’t put it on his arse. He’d done so before and suffered no adverse side effects. In fact, it was probably to thank for how supple the skin on his buttocks actually was, and why he could so clearly make out the eyelets on the lash marks left by his father’s belt.
Blisters quickly formed. It was too painful to wear trousers, so he put on one of his mother’s old dressing gowns. The faintest recollection of her smell lingered on it. Worried that as it faded further she would get smaller in his mind, he set about trying to re-create the scent.
Using an empty glass vase as a mixing cauldron, he discovered that a combination of aquamarine setting lotion and her “frizz-free” conditioner formed a near-perfect base note. Adding half a tube of her favorite toothpaste and what was left of her perfume made it too minty, too watery. It didn’t quite work. Bobby’s mother’s skin had a medicinal quality, a cure-all balm he could inhale to be fixed from the inside. He needed to replicate it as precisely as possible, so he mashed a stick of lip balm to a fine paste, then added that to his own serum of antiseptic lotion and mouth ulcer ointment and poured it into the vase. It wasn’t perfect, but holding his nose and mouth over the opening and inhaling as deeply as he could, he was closer to her than he had been in a while. He was also high, and so found that all of his ideas were good ones.
Bobby wrapped his arms around the pendulous bell of the vase, then liberally splashed its contents over every surface in the room. The bed. The walls. Cindy’s many cases. It was time to prepare the welcome party. He wanted to be ready.
Finding old ribbon in his mother’s craft box, he tore it into strips and hung them from the ceiling. Some of the strips were too springy, so he stole a handful of Cindy’s hair rollers to weight them. He removed the white sheet from his bed and suspended it across the length of the far wall. Then he used Cindy’s foundation and sponge to write WELCOME HOME. The words looked strange in the same salmon shading of his father’s girlfriend’s face.
When his mother left she didn’t take her jewelry. Most of it was kept beneath his bed in a plastic tub. He shook it, delighting in the angelic clatter of the metals, which reminded him of her fingers moving up and down his back while she sang. He arranged the rings in a circle, silver on the left side and the gold on the right, positioning her bracelets in the center, the smaller ones inside the bigger ones, like the concentric ripples on a freshly skimmed pond.
Lacking any musical equipment, he quietly whistled her favorite songs, inventing melodies to replace those he couldn’t quite recall. He was a blow whistler, not a suck whistler, and that’s why he had to pause for a second as he lit the candle, because he only had two matches. Luckily he managed it on the first attempt and slipped the spare match into his pocket for use later. The tang of burnt sulfur had given him a winning idea for revenge that he dreamt about when he fell asleep on the rug, exhausted not by the beating, he told himself stoically, by the counting. When he woke the candle wax had crawled across the carpet toward him. He wished that it had covered him, entered him, thickened his skin. Any extra armor he could gather would be needed when he made the dream a vengeful reality.
His father told him he was not to return to school that week. Though he said that Mrs. Pound had granted him leave, Bobby knew that his father needed time for the bruises to fade. Under strict instructions not to leave the house, Bobby had plenty of opportunity to hone his idea, practicing the plan over and over in his head for seven whole nights, through which his passage was eased by fantasies of his mother’s return.
Sitting in silence on the staircase, forbidden from showing his face and with his buttocks still stinging too much to disobey, he listened to the clack of the scissors as Cindy recounted to her customers how the woman who lived down the road had stripped him nude and bathed him. Each time she told the story it mutated into new and fathomless forms. By Friday it had changed beyond his recognition.
“She was in the bath with him, behind him,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Bruce found lipstick on his back.”
• • •
On the morning of his return to school, Bobby, in his uniform and with his tie knotted tightly, found a woman in the hairdressing chair he’d seen there many times before. In her hand was a photograph of a famous American actress. Bobby didn’t recognize the beautiful starlet, but he knew that the woman holding her picture had the profile of a bullfrog, and no graded mid-neck-length bob was going to disguise that.
“Here he is,” Cindy said as he emerged from the door at the bottom of the stairs. The woman shook her head. “She stripped him and bathed him.” A crunch of the scissors, then a clump of hair falling on to Bobby’s mother’s rug. The woman pushed a glob of saliva around her mouth with her tongue.
“Oh, you don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I’ve already heard. I think it’s disgusting. Something should be done.”
“I bathed myself,” Bobby said. The woman turned her face, as if he had just secreted something disgusting from a hidden gland. “She’s my friend, and your hairs are on my mother’s rug.” Cindy put the scissors down on the arm of the couch and ushered him out of the room. He heard her apologizing to the woman on his behalf, which he’d have resented, had it not bought him enough time to go through his father’s things.
He had to wrap the tool belt around his chest twice and tie it with a double knot to stop it from falling. Clanking against his midriff, the metals made him feel ready for war. He unplugged the telephone, then, for good measure, cut through the cable with the pliers.
Autumn had arrived but the day was bright and the wind only playful at best. Bobby got to school early, before the gate had been unlocked. Nobody noticed him behind the thornbushes as they assembled in the yard. New kids dragged their feet through mulched leaves. Bobby rehearsed the plan in his imagination. It would happen the same as it would in a book.
Since Val had given Bobby access to the mobile library, Bobby had become acutely aware of certain changes in his thinking. It was bigger somehow, wider, as if he were having dreams in the daytime while awake. He had read Roald Dahl’s Matilda, and wondered if he too might have special powers. One night he spent three hours trying to move an apple across his bed by staring at it. It didn’t work, but for the first time Bobby considered how, as he burst the apple’s crisp peel in his mouth and wiped the juice from his chin, anything was possible, as long as you gave it enough thought. This was the mobile library’s first gift to him, though he did not know yet how to use it.
There were two hundred and eighteen steps between the thornbushes and the gate, giving him a window of around forty seconds, employing a brisk run and accounting for nerves. He removed Cindy’s bronzer from his rucksack and smeared it over his face, neck and hands, until everything was a shade somewhere between the clay bricks and dead foliage. It would buy him the few extra seconds he’d need, if everything else went as planned.
The bell rang and the yard started to clear. Mr. Oats emerged to round up the stragglers and lock the gate, checking around the tennis court and behind the bike sheds. As he paused to rue another day’s work, he looked directly toward where Bobby was standing. They held each other’s gaze. Bobby fingered the loose ends of the knotted belt and prepared to untie it, but Mr. Oats moved on, leaving him behind unnoticed, another part of the scenery.
Relieved, Bobby took a last piss in the doorway. It crackled on the sullied ground and rose back up as steam. Conducting a final check on his equipment, he lay down in strike position, careful to avoid the puddle he’d just created. It was obvious to him now that without Sunny he would need to protect himself. That his plan would avenge Rosa’s attack imbued it with a poetry he couldn’t resist.
• • •
> Amir and the two Kevins arrived twenty minutes later, clambering over the gate and sauntering across the yard in a slovenly three-pointed prong. Bobby remained still until they crossed the painted yellow line of the basketball court, then crouched, shutting his mouth tight to trap the hummingbird of his breath inside it. When they were in just the right place, he sprinted toward them, but the tool belt proved too cumbersome. He was not as quick as he had hoped.
Roused by the slap of Bobby’s shoes on the ground, the three boys spun to face him. What a sight it was. The boy they had watched piss through his own trousers, caked in thick makeup, moving as deftly as a rusted tin man. Amir laughed, which permitted the others to join in. Bobby recognized him as the ringleader, hair shorn clumsily close to his skull, scalp dotted with dried bloody nicks. A thick brow hung over his eyes, so the light could not reach them to be reflected. Bobby slowed, then stopped, just a meter away.
“Hello again,” Amir said. Bobby looked at the ground and mumbled, as if in prayer. He pulled up his sweater. Loosened by movement the tool belt rode down over his hips, but he caught it before it hit the floor. The larger of the boys bent over with his hands anchored to his knees and brought his face close enough to Bobby’s that Bobby could smell chewing gum. He rubbed Bobby’s cheek with his right forefinger and studied the brown smudge of makeup left on the tip.
Biting his tongue until it drew blood, Bobby plunged his hand into the front pocket of the tool belt and pulled out a bottle of denatured alcohol. He had pre-loosened the child lock. This was the benefit of planning. The cap spun off at the flick of his thumb. With a sharp stabbing motion he splashed half a bottle’s worth into Amir Kindell’s eyes.
They all held their breath, Bobby included, as if in mourning for a moment that had only just passed. They knew, in their flawed togetherness, that when they exhaled again it could never be undone. Amir dropped to the ground, clawing at his face, and screamed so loudly that Bobby was sure the entire school must have heard it. Without further thought, Bobby emptied the rest of the bottle in a large skyward arc into the wide-open targets of the other boys’ mouths. They both fell to their knees at his feet.
He took the match from his pocket and saw how, with its shiny red hat, it looked like a soldier reporting for duty. Kneeling, he struck the match against the concrete floor. The three boys clambered around one another, eyes streaming, and Bobby held the lit match in the air above them. Amir grabbed at the hem of Bobby’s trousers. He could not see what was in Bobby’s hand, but he had sensed it. Fear, that cruel cramp of the soul. This, which the boy had given to Rosa in the mud, is what Bobby saw, and loved, on the twist of his face.
Running as fast as she could, Mrs. Pound’s movement had a balletic quality, as if the small doll-like shoes she wore were mementoes from a past calling to dance. She snatched the match from Bobby’s hand, extinguished it, and slapped the empty bottle from his grasp. It bounced five times and spun before stopping, a gelastic little dance of its own.
• • •
Bored but keen not to show it, the younger of the two policemen, standing in the corner of Mrs. Pound’s office, cradled his hat in his hands. The older of the two had turned his chair to face Bobby’s. Occasionally their legs touched and the static in his uniform rushed across his thighs. His own children had grown up years ago. Dealing with kids now seemed an alien task, one with which he was wholly uncomfortable, though his wife would have argued that little had changed.
“Son,” he said. Thick black hairs hung from his nostrils, levers moving when he spoke. “You’d be advised to talk to me if you have any interest in fixing the situation you’ve found yourself in.”
The plastic denatured alcohol bottle was perched on the edge of the desk, curving the sunlight inside it. Mrs. Pound squeezed a stress ball, the shape of a banana.
“I’d like to apologize on Bobby’s behalf,” she said.
“I’m not sure an apology will settle this,” he said. “Those boys are in the hospital. What Bobby did was very serious.”
Mrs. Pound walked around the desk and stopped behind Bobby, gently laying her hands on his shoulders. “Bobby,” she said, “perhaps you’d like to wait outside.”
Though they lowered their voices to a funereal hush, the smallness of the room and the glass panel in the door meant he could still hear every word they said, amplified, almost as if it was inside his head. All he could think about was a time in the near future when he was somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t here.
“Bobby is a pupil to whom we pay special attention,” she said. “He’s had a lot of trouble making friends, and the only friend he did have moved away over the summer.”
“Mrs. Pound,” the policeman said, “we’re investigating what amounts to assault with a toxic substance. Amir Kindell might be lucky to keep his vision.” Bobby pushed his ear more firmly against the wall, the spidery shadow cast by a plant in the corner climbing across his face.
“I appreciate that.”
“Then you’ll appreciate the importance of us getting his parents here as quickly as possible so that we might get the matter resolved.”
“We’ve been trying, we can’t get through.”
“Then we’ll go to them, if you’d kindly supply us with an address. You have that, don’t you?”
“Well that’s just what I’m getting to . . .”
With his knees bent, hoisting it first onto his lap, and then standing to let it rest against his chest so that he might net his fingers on its underside, Bobby picked up the plant pot, a hulking great thing fired in clay. Before he’d even exhaled he had it up to neck height, and from there, with every ounce of push his arms had left in them, he threw it through the glass panel of the door.
He could hear Mrs. Pound screaming as he ran down the corridor to the staircase, gliding along on the freshly polished floors.
• • •
Gleaming with sweat, beads on his neck stuck to the coldness of a fast-dampening collar, Bobby arrived at Val’s house to find her standing outside, facing the front door so that she did not see him approach. He stood behind her, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. In her shabbiest clothes, and a tattered apron, Val scrubbed spray paint from the door’s dark wood with a stiff-bristled shoe brush. Tinted pink water ran off the bottom, a mazy trail down the path to the drain. Hints of the letters, where the red paint was sprayed most thickly, still remained, a now indistinguishable and patently unwanted legend. Val had found it that morning as she’d stepped out into the street clutching another letter, the third that week, wondering who would have the gall or motive to pen such a blatantly hurtful untruth, and post it through her door. She was none of the things they accused her of being, but the more she read them, the more she felt as dirty as they made her out to be. At her most desperate she wanted to scrub herself with the brush, scrub until nothing but a shiny pile of bones remained. Perhaps that might satisfy them. All of the books in the mobile library could not have prepared her for words as unspeakable as these.
“What did it say?” Bobby asked. Val knocked over the lathery bucket and the wash hit his shoes, where it broke into two foamy arcs.
“You can’t be here.”
“I am here.”
“But you can’t be.” Val looked one way down the street and then the other. “Quick,” she said, “come inside.”
In the light of the kitchen, Bobby could see paint-stained fingertip tracks trailed across Val’s face. The glare of the bulb searched the sunken wells in her cheeks, shifting as she sobbed into her hands. “They’re talking about us,” she said.
“Who are?”
“Everyone. They’re saying the most awful things.”
“But nobody knows us.”
“Yes. And that’s the problem.”
“Everything we make clean they will dirty.” Clumps of tissue the size of snowballs built up on the table by her side. Bobby scooped them into the bin. “I got them for you,” he said.
“Got who?” Her grip tighten
ed around his arms.
“Those boys.”
“What boys?”
“The boys who hurt Rosa.”
Val paused. “What did you do?”
“I got them. That’s all. They won’t hurt her again.” He could feel movement in his chest, as if his heart had become a bird and started beating its wings.
“Bobby,” she said, weeping. “Go.”
“What?”
“Go. You have to go.”
“Why?”
“Go!” Val slammed her hand on the sink. Teacups trembled on the draining board. He buckled with the punch of it. She put her arms around the middle of his body and squeezed. He winced, not just with his face but with a shudder that traveled the length of his body and ended as a twinge in his toes. “Oh God,” she said, “did I hurt you?”
“No,” he said, his forehead creased with pain.
“I did. I know that I did.” The rings around her eyes were dark but colorful, like cross-sections of strange fruit. She lifted his sweater and untucked his shirt. A bruise, much bluer than it had been, the lightness of a clement sky, curled from a third of the way down his back to the top of his waistband. On closer examination she could see the mark of his father’s left hand. Val unbuttoned his trousers and rolled down his underpants. The bruise’s persistent stain continued, breaking up on the bow of his buttocks. Three fingerprints and one thumbprint fading.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE BRIDGE
Val didn’t share Bobby’s mother’s approach to packing. Fumbling for the opening, she handed Rosa a bin liner.
“Rosa,” she said, “cram as many of your clothes into this bag as you can.” Bobby filled Rosa’s rucksack with pens and paper.
“Thank you, Bobby Nusku,” she said. Val instructed them to take all of the food they could find in the cupboards, including the stuff they didn’t recognize or particularly like to eat. Bobby piled it all inside an empty sports bag, making sure to take a tin opener, then filled four side pockets with cans of dog food for Bert, adding the squeaky chew toy in the shape of a pork chop for which he had only ever shown a grumpy disdain. Val emptied a box of Rosa’s old toys and packed it with toiletries. By the time they were finished the house looked as though it had been ransacked, which in a way it had.
Mobile Library Page 8
