“Okay.” They shook, Joe’s hand swallowing Bobby’s whole. Joe licked the narrow strip of gum on the paper, then held it on his open palms with a generous pinch of tobacco. He balled his hands around the precious inventory with his fingers contorting inside it. When he felt sure it was airtight he dropped to his knees and thrust them both under the dry layer of topsoil on the ground, which he had piled high in preparation.
“You look stupid,” Bobby said. Joe’s lips twisted into strange shapes as he concentrated.
“I don’t care.”
“This bet should have a time limit.”
“No need,” Joe said, “I’m done.” He pulled his hands to his chest, soil cascading down, and slowly opened them up. “Ta-da!” There it was, a cigarette. A little messy, but a cigarette all the same. He popped it in his mouth, took a match from the box and lit it in a single fluid motion. It smoked. Sure, there was a lot of dirt in it, now collecting round his tonsils, but not enough that he was about to choke. He sucked it right down to the stub, two big lungfuls that made his chest whistle, then slapped Bobby on the shoulder. Bobby was impressed enough to let the feeling drip slowly down his back.
Just then Val emerged from the library with a tin of glistening peach segments and a mug of strong coffee.
“Joe,” Rosa said, “what is your last name?”
“Joe,” he said.
“So your name is Joe Joe?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Joe Joe.” Rosa immediately accepted his answer and began shaping the letters in her notepad. Bobby barely tried to disguise his suspicion.
Scrubbed, washed and dried, Joe assumed a different color altogether. His skin a soft, babyish pink; his hair fluffy and blond, like stuffing protruding from the head of a teddy bear. Val gave him her oversize dressing gown to wear, and he made a fire five times faster than she had managed to all week. Bobby fetched a pile of books from the library, pretended that he was going to read them to Rosa, and built a dividing wall between Joe and everyone else, except the traitor Bert.
“So this is your library?”
“I’m the librarian, yes,” Val said.
“They let you live in it?”
“I’m just driving it to its next home and we thought we’d make a little camping trip of it. Much like yourself, I guess.” Part of Val didn’t like to lie, especially not to a man who had been as kind as Joe. He cleaned up well, and though clearly into his thirties she could still sense the roguish, youthful glint he’d honed in the dormitories where he’d come of age. A pinkish rash, cast in the shape of strangler’s hands, appeared around Val’s neck, disappearing under the collar of her shirt. This always happened whenever she found someone attractive, though it had been a while. She rubbed the skin as if chasing it away.
“Seems strange is all,” he said.
“They were closing it down,” she said. “They’re closing them all down. You must have read about it in the papers?”
“I don’t read the papers much.”
“No,” she said, “me neither these days.” They both smiled. “The long and short of it is that the mobile library would only have gathered dust. Books are nothing until they’re opened. Stories aren’t stories unless they’re told. Characters might be good or bad, but until you have known them they are neither, and that’s worse.”
Joe rolled another cigarette. “You’re the librarian,” he said. “Who am I to argue?” Rosa closed her book with a thud.
“We’re camping,” she said, “because we ran away from home.”
“Rosa!”
“We all run away from time to time,” Joe said. For a second, Val and Joe shared a look that told him whatever it was she was up to, she didn’t want to be caught, not yet. That was enough. The children seemed happy enough to him. He didn’t want them to be caught either. It was a desire he didn’t just share. It was one he completely understood.
The broad plates of his forearms were covered in dark green tattoos, twisting like Japanese knotweed up to his shoulders. There were anchors, wizards and snakes wound round shields, swords, scrolls and hollow-eyed skulls. Words bled out. Bobby inched closer to see but the dressing on his belly came unstuck.
“What about you?” Val said. “What are you running away from?”
“Who said I was running away?” Smoke rolled over Joe’s top lip and disappeared into his nose.
“You’re living in the woods.”
“Staying in the woods.”
“Why?”
“Because I have nowhere else to go. I’m just one of those people, I suppose,” he said, letting the flames warm his legs.
“Nowhere?” Bobby asked.
“Uh-huh. Been in the army since I was old enough. I quit, so that’s over, and I guess I’m just a traveler now.”
“Why did you join the army?”
Joe thought for a while. “To stay out of trouble, I guess.”
“By going to war?”
Joe laughed. “Huh. By going to war.”
“Well, you needn’t sleep rough tonight,” Val said. “You can stay in the cab if you like.”
“I wouldn’t want to make a nuisance of myself.”
“It’s no nuisance. The children and I sleep in the truck. It’s fine.”
“I’m not a child,” Bobby said. Rosa copied the way he’d shaken his head.
“I’m not a child either,” she said.
“Well,” Val said, “okay. But you know what I mean.”
They talked about nothing, both intent on not probing too deeply into each other’s lives. Come dusk, tired by the events of the day, they decided to call it an early night. Val showed Joe how to wind down the sun blinds on the windows and lock the doors. When he wasn’t looking, Bobby removed the keys from the ignition and hid them beneath the front wheels. Once Val and Rosa were asleep, Bobby stayed up until morning—only the owls for company—with his vision turned to night mode and trained on the cab’s door just in case.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE BOY
Gargantuan and apparently endless, Joe’s appetite saw the mobile library’s stocks diminish speedily. After that first night he stuck around and became a steady fixture, or, as Bobby saw it, a black hole for food. In return he serviced the engine (he had been responsible for the upkeep of Warrior armored vehicles during his time in the forces) and helped out with everyday chores, most of which Bobby was happy to shirk so long as Val didn’t notice. He had a sore belly and his files to maintain, which since he’d smashed the hair jar were in a state of disarray.
He had begun mapping the area around the mobile library. There were thirty-seven lunges across the clearing. Two routes through the woods were passable at night, one via the brook, another by the thicket. The road by the clearing averaged three cars an hour in the daytime (one, at most, by night) and beneath the mobile library there were four gaps above the wheel arches that would make decent hiding places should they ever be needed, though Joe would never fit. Bobby marked that down as a victory of sorts.
• • •
“Come on,” Joe said one morning a few days later, as he leaned against the untouched shelves of books in the self-help section.
“What?” Bobby jumped, dropping the battered volume in his hand. He had been engrossed in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which he’d found crammed behind two intimidating hardbacks under Classics. He found it dense, too dense for his tender years, but the old-fashioned language lured him in to where the sentences spiraled around one another, and that was how he found himself entranced by the relationship between George Milton and Lennie Small. How different they were. George was small, uneducated but as smart as any teacher Bobby had ever known, while Lennie, lumbering Lennie, was big as a rock and twice as dumb. Yet despite their differences, or because of them, their friendship thrived. George kept Lennie calm. Lennie protected George from harm. They had become dependent upon one another in so many different and wonderful ways. It filled Bobby with warmth, as if they existed right there, talked their
talk beside his ear.
“We need food,” Joe said. “I’m going to teach you how to forage.”
“You mean seeds and berries?”
Joe shook his head. “No. Much better than that.”
“What then?”
“Come on. It’ll be an adventure.”
Seeing it as a good excuse to get Joe away from Val and the mobile library for a while, Bobby agreed. Val made them promise not to go too far, but Bobby didn’t want Joe to watch her mothering him that way. He made sure he rolled his eyes so that Joe could see the whites, then put on his wellingtons and raincoat and they headed out together, promising to return with supplies.
“Where will you get supplies?” Val asked, before deciding it might be best if she didn’t hear the answer.
Tractor-dug trenches had made moats around the fields. Banks of mud collapsed beneath their feet. Bobby got stuck and Joe had to heave him out by his armpits, then sling him over his shoulder and free his boots from the slop holes.
“This was a stupid idea,” Bobby said, pointing at the clouds swilled with inky darkness.
“Means there will be less people around,” Joe said. “Means we will leave less tracks. Trust me. If the army taught me one thing it is how to disappear. Rain should always be welcomed by outcasts like you and I.”
“I’m not an outcast.”
“Whatever you say.”
Joe removed a small set of bolt cutters from inside his jacket and snipped through a barbed wire fence. Bobby skulked nervously behind him, keeping his fists balled so that Joe didn’t see his fingers quaking. They stalked the back lot of a farm, hiding between plastic water barrels when the farmhouse curtains twitched. The rain wouldn’t let the cowpats settle so the air was thick with the smell of shit. They ran behind the hay bales that blocked the back entrance to the stables, then dipped down low to reach the chicken coop beneath the farmer’s kitchen window. Joe reached inside and picked up six white eggs in one enormous hand. He carefully lowered them into Bobby’s pockets.
“Close your eyes,” Joe said. Bobby didn’t trust him completely, but when he saw Joe wrap his hand around the neck of a chicken he shut them tight. He heard what he guessed was the cracking of a tiny bone, then the gossipy jabber of a final cluck, and he nervously braced himself for blood to splatter his face. It didn’t come.
“You can open them now.” Joe lifted the chicken’s body, inviting Bobby to prod its downy bloat. “See,” he said, “it’s okay.” It was so warm to the touch that Bobby felt jealous when Joe put it in his jacket. He fantasized that he too could take a chicken’s life with such virtuoso control of brute strength, and reveled in a mischief that reminded him, happily, of Sunny Clay.
They hiked down a waterlogged rambler’s path to the outskirts of the village. At the back of a bakery was a small tower of boxes containing unsold stock. Joe hid behind a fence and watched the baker take a cigarette break. When he’d finished, Joe reached over and took a box from the top of the stack. They went back out into the fields to survey their bounty.
“If we get caught stealing we’ll be in big trouble,” Bobby said. He bit into a doughnut. Custard oozed from the end.
“You never read Robin Hood?” Joe said. “Surely they have that in your mobile library.”
“Yeah, I read it.”
“I’m sure the merry men stole from time to time.”
“They didn’t steal almond croissants.”
“Hungry’s hungry. And hungry is what we’re all gonna be very soon unless you and I act like men and do something about it, merry or otherwise.”
Joe had eaten five doughnuts to Bobby’s one when the clouds cleared and a rainbow watermarked the sky. Their clothes dried quickly in the sun and were soon stiff and uncomfortable, Bobby’s T-shirt chafing the tender flesh on his tummy. As they walked Joe plucked the chicken and flung feather darts at the horizon. Bobby snapped a pink rose from a bush and put it in his pocket for pressing later.
“You’re a florist now?”
“It’s for my mother. I’m going to put it in my files.”
Joe had observed Bobby working on his files. He recognized the boy’s longing. With hard-skinned palms impervious to thorns, Joe tore out another handful of roses and put them in his coat with the chicken.
“Then you might as well have a whole bunch.”
From the meadow they could see the rows of gardens at the rear of the village. An old lady hung the washing while her husband dutifully carried the basket.
“Bingo,” Joe said, “disguises.”
“Disguises?”
“We’re thieves now. On the run.” Bobby thought of George and Lennie, traipsing across the outskirts of a California plantation like brothers, watching each other’s backs. When the couple had gone, Bobby kept lookout while Joe took every last item from the line, underwear included, and carried the heavy wet stack out into the barley fields. Bulky and worn, the jacket fitted him neatly. Bobby wore the old man’s flat clap and a threadbare cotton shirt so big his hands barely made it past the elbows. Joe held a turquoise patterned dress up to his body and swished it around like a tango partner.
“What do you think?” he said.
“Not your color.”
“Not for me, smart ass. For Val. A gift.”
Until now it hadn’t occurred to Bobby that Joe might have some romantic affinity with Val. The thought brought him out in prickly heat. “She hates turquoise. Reminds her of the Caribbean Sea.”
“What’s wrong with being reminded of the Caribbean Sea?”
“She nearly drowned in it,” he lied.
Joe tossed the dress to the floor and Bobby made a mental note of its exact whereabouts—twenty-eight paces from the tree, perpendicular to the electricity pylon—so that he could collect it come nightfall.
Joe put on a pair of the old man’s gray pinstripe trousers, tying the waist with string, then smoothed his hair to the side. “What do you think,” he asked Bobby, “disguised?”
“Kind of.”
Joe rummaged through his pockets.
“Then maybe I’ve got a better idea.” He was holding a switchblade inches from Bobby’s face, close enough that he could feel the metal’s coldness reflected on his skin. “How about you give me a trim?” Joe handed Bobby the knife and squatted down beside him. The pump of an artery throbbed in Joe’s neck, tender, slit-able. Shaking, Bobby wound the mane around his hand and shaped it into a ponytail.
“Get a move on, will you? I don’t want a perm,” Joe said, “slice it off. We can tidy it up back at the ranch.” The blade hit the column of hair with force enough, but the angle was skewed, so Bobby sawed through it with the corrugated edge. Eventually the golden rope of hair came free in his hand, and the knife felt more like a sword.
“Good boy,” Joe said, tidier, the two buds of his ears now visible and making him instantly more human. Bobby instinctively stuffed the hair into his pocket.
They walked back the long way, over fields and out toward the bypass, where factories, warehouses and a homeware depot formed a small, depressing-looking business park. Reject piles of broken furniture and dented paint cans littered the yard. They made their way back to the mobile library, declaring their booty enough.
• • •
Joe stripped and gutted the chicken, tossing the liver and heart to Bert. They cooked it over the fire, slathered in what was left of the barbecue sauce, and ate it with doughnuts for dessert. The night froze their words in mist, so they put on as many of the stolen clothes as they could and took it in turns to read stories to each other. Rosa rocked in the warmth of the flame.
Bobby picked up Of Mice and Men and read the last few pages. Though he was sad that George had shot Lennie, he knew that it had been for the greater good, so that Lennie didn’t suffer. He wondered if he could kill Joe should he need to, and tried to remember into which of his pockets Joe had put the knife.
“It’s your turn, Joe Joe,” Rosa said.
Joe’s tongue curled a
mouthful of smoke into an S-bend. “I’m not one for stories,” he said.
“Come on,” Val said. “Rosa will pick one for you.” He shook his head. Bobby envied the authority he mustered.
“I told you,” he said, “not for me.”
“Then tell us what’s in Scotland.”
“Huh?”
“Scotland. When we found you, that’s where you said you were headed.” Joe flicked the cigarette’s clubfoot into the embers.
“A house.”
“A house?”
“The house. More of a mansion, if I’m honest.”
Bobby wolf-whistled. Unable to copy him, Rosa said “Switzswoo” in a pitch that sent Bert scuttling around the camp.
“Saw it when I was a child,” Joe said. “Never forgot it. Right beside a dam, and the clearest blue loch you’ll ever see, I swear. Damn thing’s a mirror made of water.”
“Who lives there?” Rosa asked.
Joe lit another smoke. “That’s the thing. I doubt nobody lives there anymore. Whole place is empty, I reckon. Some decrepit country pile, falling down to nothing. Needs a lot of love. Whole tanker full of paint, ten thousand nails and all the time in the world, but I could fix it up all right. Then it’d be total privacy. No one goes that far into the wilds for a crumbling old wreck of a house like that.”
“What do you mean you saw it?”
“Moved around a lot as a boy. Different homes, different families. Went hiking in the mountains one time. Just came across the place, standing up in the fog like a castle or something. Always promised myself I’d make it back there one day.” Rosa smiled. “Want to know the best bit? Whoever lived there had their own private zoo on the grounds. I swear, on a still day when the wind wasn’t screaming havoc in the hills, you used to be able to hear the lions roaring, and the parrots squawking and the . . .”
“Bears growling?” Rosa said.
“Exactly. Grrrr. Heard them all from the other side of the wall. Always wanted to find out for myself where all those animals lived.”
Val blushed. It had been a long time since she’d seen another adult talk to Rosa in a way that made her respond in kind, or even really talk to her like a fellow human being, but there she was, rolling around at the feet of the man from the woods, dressed in stolen clothes. What did it matter if Joe was spinning a yarn? They had come this far. To hell with the truth. Lit by only the flicker of a fire, everything is the same, more or less.
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