But he was here now. That morning he had set out to feed Captain at dawn with a cluster of nuts held tight in his hand and discovered the bird to be flustered.
“Visitors! Visitors!” she had said. Baron had ambled out into the light and stood in the center of the zoo, between the cages that once kept the pumas and the jaguars apart, looking up to where the sun’s first rays stroked the roof. He couldn’t quite see its composite parts from that distance, the dangling bags of hair, cloth and junk that comprised Bobby’s files, but he knew that whatever it was, it hadn’t been there before. It was enough to convince him he’d need his air pistol, and he’d need it quick. Visitors. Visitors indeed.
• • •
“Baron is a funny name,” Bobby said.
“Ach, never mind that. Care to tell me what you’re doing here?”
“Living here, I think.”
“Oh, you do now, do you?”
Amused but unwilling to show it, Baron opened his palm flat and let Captain choose a seed. “And where might you have come from, to be living here?”
Bobby suddenly felt very small. Perhaps it was the grandness of the building they were in, or that the man was a giant of Hagridian proportions.
“I’m a wizard living within the ordinary world of nonmagical people like yourself. I have been invited to attend a special school that will teach me how to refine my magical skills. And also to play quidditch.”
“Quid-what?”
“Quidditch. It’s a sport. You fly around on broomsticks to catch the golden snitch.”
“Golden snitch?”
“I came here to practice because there is so much space. Less chance of hitting a tree.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds like quite an adventure.”
“It was.”
“Especially for a little boy alone.”
Bobby pursed his lips and wished he had a spell up his sleeve.
Unused to company, particularly such young company, Baron gave Bobby a slap on the shoulder, attempting to reassure him that he’d not just dropped anybody else in trouble. After all, they were many miles away from the nearest outpost of civilization. There was no way the boy had gotten there alone, unless he had actually flown in on a broomstick, or whatever it was he had said. Baron had remained unconnected from the world for a long time, but felt pretty sure sport hadn’t evolved in such stupendous bounds as the boy described.
Bobby wasn’t hugely reassured by the slap, which had hurt, but he recognized Baron’s kind intentions in the rambunctious gesture. All he feared now was how Joe might react to the interloper, based on previous form. He had visions of him garroting Baron, stringing him up until his feet left the floor. He knew that it was his job to calm him, like George had Lennie. For Val’s sake, if no one else’s.
They walked the corridors to the bedroom at the far end of the landing. Baron, wisely, Bobby thought, had agreed to let his young charge undertake the physical act of waking Joe and Val, and gave him the key that opened their bedroom door. They slept in S-shapes. Bobby saw that beneath the sheet they were naked. Joe’s body, against hers, was so much hairier and bigger than his own, which was all awkward corners, a jigsaw of hip bones and ribs.
“Joe,” he said, squeezing Joe’s bicep.
“Huh?” Joe, still half-asleep, licked the dryness of his lips. “What do you want?”
“I want you to not freak out.”
“To not freak out about what?” Joe opened his eyes and was quickly alert, a military response to waking that had been implanted deep within his psyche.
“Is it the police?” he asked.
“No,” Bobby said. Val groaned, reluctant to relinquish her grip on the deepest sleep she’d had in years.
“Then what?”
“There’s a man here, with a beard. It’s his parrot . . .”
“Actually,” Baron said, standing at the foot of the bed, Captain now balanced on his shoulder, “she’s a macaw.” Joe leapt up off the mattress and onto his feet, penis dangling from the mossy darkness crowning his groin. “Rest easy,” Baron said. “How about we go and have breakfast.”
• • •
Bobby, Joe, Val and Rosa sat at opposite sides of a wide dining table in the west wing kitchen, apparently the only part of the entire estate still supplied with electricity. Tall stacks of newspapers lined the walls, some soaking up the ceiling’s incessant dripping when it rained. In one corner an armchair buried in blankets stank of the smoke belched by an open fire, its shape scorched into the hearth. This was where Baron burned toast in a griddle, using bread he had made fresh that morning. Captain flew about the rafters. Val was amazed she’d not been killed by the smoky fug in the air.
Baron unscrewed the lid from a jam jar.
“Got strawberry. Got raspberry. Made them myself. That, I’m afraid, is your lot.” Bobby covered his toast with a combination of the two, disguising as best he could the bitter char. Val spun Baron a tale, about them camping, running out of fuel, leaving the car, being lost, finding the house, thinking it was empty.
“Which,” she said, “I guess it mostly is.”
“Aye, I suppose you’re right.”
“Have you been here a long time?”
“All my life.”
“With only Captain for company?”
“Since my wife died, aye. And then the animals of course, one by one, by death or by sale. Captain is the last bird standing. Only one I never could bring myself to sell when the money ran dry.”
“No children?”
“No.”
“Do you have a television?” Joe said. He hadn’t realized it, but he’d been jabbing a fork into the fleshy bulb of his thumb so hard that blood was rising to the skin.
“Me? Nah. Never. Waste of time. Don’t need one. No signal up here anyhow.”
“A radio?”
“No radio, no. Just be dead noise and shipping forecasts in this part of the world, right? I’m no fisherman.”
“What about a telephone?”
“No cables up here. No aerials, no antennas, no satellites. No one to call.”
“So how do you stay in touch with people?”
“Now,” he said, “what point would there be in that?”
Captain swooped down and landed on the table. Bert watched her eat the crusts Rosa had set aside for him.
“Where’s the bathroom?” Joe said, clutching his gut.
Baron pointed to the far end of the room, where two doors flashed in the strobe of a flickering lamplight. Joe approached the one on the left.
“The other one, on the right,” Baron said, “unless you wanna piss in a store cupboard. If you do, there’s a mop and a bucket at the back of it. Be sure to put them to use.”
Joe stood at the bathroom sink, twisting the taps to fill the basin with icy-cold water. He removed his shirt, and observed himself in the full-length mirror hung beside a bathtub coated with grime. Shifting his head slowly from side to side he had to concede that, yes, in this light, from that angle, he did look a little like his father. But only a little, around the eyes, and the slight boomerang shape of the mouth. Clearly it was not enough for him to have noticed. How hard must the calluses around Baron’s heart be, Joe wondered, to not only deny his existence, but then fail to recognize his son as he stood before him now.
Dunking his head beneath the water line, and holding it there until the cold spiked him with brain freeze, he wondered how old Baron must be. Ninety or more, perhaps, and enduring, alone, in the cold like a boulder on an unreachable stretch of the coast. At least, with no television, he wouldn’t have heard about Val, Bobby and Rosa, or the missing mobile library, and so, for the moment, they were safe. That was Joe’s number one priority, their welfare, and as he couldn’t bear to be parted from them now, their continuing evasion of capture.
If Baron hadn’t been privy to the news, and thus heard about Joe’s escape from prison, there would have been no reason for him to expe
ct a visit from his son. It had been twenty-two years since he left, after all. But on returning, it seemed to Joe like only yesterday that he had watched the maze burn down to the ground, knowing that he’d still feel the heat of the flames on his face well into the future. And he could, crawling up his cheeks. He splashed his face again.
Most amazing of all was the realization he was experiencing only now, that he had not wanted to find the house empty after all, or hoped for his father to be dead. He’d wanted him to be alive, withered and old but alive, so that he could kill him, with those giant damn hands they seemed to share.
• • •
Bert watched Captain bobbing on the sideboard, entranced by her curious tics.
“Dog!” Captain said. “Dog!” Rosa had only ever heard about two animals talking to each other, in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and it had been nowhere near as funny as it was now that it was coming true.
“Amazing the things she keeps in that little old bird brain of hers,” Baron said. Val finished her toast.
“If you can help us get ourselves some fuel, we can get out of your way,” she said, “with our apologies of course, for breaking in here in the first place.”
“Nonsense!” He rubbed his chest, which was sorer by the day. He was already convinced he’d soon be seeing his last Hogmanay. “You stay here as long as you need to, you hear? No point you all camping out there in the cold when I’ve got all these walls going unused. I’m sure Bert agrees with me, don’t you Bert?”
“But Mr. Baron . . .” Val said.
“Just Baron.”
“Baron, we wouldn’t want to be any trouble.”
“Please, missy. Nothing troubles me anymore.”
Joe emerged from the bathroom, beads of cold water icing his forehead. He felt more relaxed, but not so much that he couldn’t feel his temples throbbing like full-term pupae.
“Joe,” Val said, “Baron kindly says we can stay a while.” Joe lingered, half eaten by the shadows thrown from candlelight beneath the taxidermy.
“You don’t need to . . .”
“Hush,” Baron said, “I insist. Now, I know you’ve already been for a walk around the grounds, but how about an official tour from the northernmost ex-zookeeper in the land?”
• • •
Captain rode Baron’s shoulder, her movements attuned to his as if she were another limb. He led them to the western edge of the property. Ashen clouds grumbled, dismal light sapping glimpses of purple from the thistles. Before them was an enormous hedgerow maze, once awe-inspiring, now overgrown and impenetrable. Had they gotten close enough they would have seen that the branches beneath the newer leaves were still blackened by fire and smoke.
Doglegging the maze was a lake, sidling round the zoo and running off into the distance, crumpling like tinfoil beneath the sky’s moody gray. When the wind dropped they could hear ducks quacking, and if they listened extra hard, Baron’s shallow breath.
Rosa stood beside him, examining the trowels of his palms. She took his right index finger in her grip. Baron flinched, but let it stay.
“There,” he said, pointing to a bird of prey overhead that had unsettled Captain with its glare. “A falcon. Nests up on the cliff face out that way, by the sea. A decade or so ago, when I wasn’t such an old man, I’d have climbed down there and taken its eggs. Tasty, with enough salt and pepper.”
They walked down across the gardens, long since manicured pathways now formlessly unkempt, and turned through a side entrance Baron used to access the zoo. Bobby looked at Baron’s face—beard, brow and burst capillaries—how it had weathered as wonderfully as the landscape around them.
“My name isn’t really Harry Potter,” he said. “He’s a boy from a story. I’m just a boy.”
“Right,” Baron said, confused.
Val and Joe walked some distance behind the others, watching Rosa hold Baron’s hardened fingertip.
“Stroke of luck, huh?” Val said.
“What?”
“Baron, being here. I mean, the guy’s clearly as mad as his parrot, but seems we’re safe with him at least.”
Joe grunted, which Val mistook for his agreement.
• • •
“Largest private zoo in Europe,” Baron said, rattling a stick between the bars of the orangutan cage. “Primates and big cats mostly. But sea life also, and insects. Oh, and birds of course.” He tickled the bright plumage on the back of Captain’s head.
“People could come in and see them though, surely?” Val asked.
“Oh no. Private meant private. For my eyes only.”
“But why?” Bobby asked, his arms down by his sides.
“Some people collect stamps. Some people collect art. I collect animals. Collected, should I say.” Baron paused beneath a dirty metal sign, swiping the middle of it clean with his sleeve.
“A western lowland gorilla,” he said. “Beat his chest so loud it sounded like the footfall of a monster. And here, three macaques, lightning-fast little things, screaming for breakfast, screaming for dinner . . .”
“And in here?” Bobby said, leaning over the fence around a cutaway of pool with a tiled plinth in the center.
“Sea lions. An amazing creature the sea lion. Throw them a ball, couple of fresh fish, happy all the damn day. They need no more than that. Much preferable to children, wouldn’t you say, Valerie?” Val smiled politely, but said nothing more as they walked to the far end of the zoo and back.
• • •
“He wouldn’t tell me why he’s called Baron,” Bobby said to Joe as they repaired to the east wing for the afternoon. Val and Rosa helped the old man, wheezing, up the hill.
“It’s not a real name, like mine or yours,” Joe said. “It’s a title. A hereditary peerage. Like King. Or Duke. His father was a baron, and his before him and his before him. They passed it down from one to the other, right through centuries of male lineage, until, I guess, they got to this one, and he decided to keep it all for himself.”
“Decided?”
“Yes, decided.” Joe coughed.
“You don’t have to become your father, do you?” Bobby asked, nearing the doors.
“No,” Joe said. “No you don’t.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE FAMILY
The feast was Val’s idea, a show of gratitude for Baron’s hospitality. He protested. “Ach, please.”
She insisted.
“Then if you really must. I’ll bring what whisky I have, and Captain shall supply her own seeds.” His laughter filled the drawing room.
Despite his best efforts, subtle though they were, Baron couldn’t get any time to himself for the rest of the day. The children followed him around constantly, the boy with incessant talk of his mother and a ridiculous story about a cyborg he claimed to have built but not yet seen, the girl with a fascination the young reserve for that which they perceive to be ancient. Patience was a virtue Baron lacked. He had been on his own so long that this part of him was out of practice, and like an unused muscle it was weak. It took a concerted effort to smile and nod, pretending that company was something he enjoyed as a change, but really he was just biding his time until he could return to peace and quiet.
Bobby tended his files to make sure nothing had blown off the roof overnight. Bar a slight tear to the bag—a snag on a tile—they had come through largely intact.
In the early afternoon Joe and Bobby siphoned fuel from a spare tank Baron kept behind the stables for a dormant generator. They pushed it across the dam in a wheelbarrow, down to the mobile library, splashes of it staining Joe’s boots.
• • •
Before sundown, Joe went grouse hunting again. The rustle of the reeds by the lakeside proved seductive, cathartic even. He sat down to smoke a cigarette. The hiss of the burning tobacco reminded him of the time he’d watched the maze burn to cinders. Same air. Same light. Same time of year.
Val and Bobby sat on the steps that meandered down the slope to a brook, endin
g in the cymbal rush of a waterfall. He laid his head down on her lap, the heat from her thighs on his neck.
“You and Joe could adopt me,” Bobby said. “Then we’d be able to tell everyone who we were and we wouldn’t need to hide anymore.”
“I’m not sure they’d let me adopt you, Bobby. I’m technically a kidnapper, not to mention a large-vehicle thief.”
“But you’re my family.” Val brought his wrist to her mouth and kissed it. A twist in her womb, a small blade cutting quickly, the pain of knowing that it was where he should have come to exist. Her child. This boy. A story started in the wrong place.
“Will they catch us?”
“No, they won’t catch us. They only catch bad people.” She didn’t know if she was lying anymore. Rosa appeared and folded herself around them both. Family. A puzzle of people.
• • •
Comparatively speaking it was a feast indeed. Particularly for Baron, who had subsisted on a diet of homemade soups and overly salted preserves for more than twenty years. Any decent food he’d had delivered had been fed to the animals, too many of them, until the money had dwindled to near nothing. He had sold most of them, the rest perished, and that money had lasted this far. He only hoped Captain would die first. The thought of the bird grieving in the rafters brought on an unquenchable despair. He’d not experienced a relatable sadness for anything that didn’t have paws or wings since the death of his wife.
Fresh vegetables from the grounds—potatoes, carrot, an errant leek—mixed with the grouse, and some aged stock Val discovered in the pantry, made for a nicely hearty stew. Baron baked more of his homemade bread, and they used that to wipe their plates clean. Bert reclined beneath the bench, eating the scraps Rosa dropped between her legs. Captain opted for her usual spot, occasionally scratching her side against the hard skin of Baron’s ear.
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