“He’s your father?” Val said.
“I should have told you before.” Val rested her head against Joe’s chest and heard the boom box of his heart. “I’ve something else I need to tell you,” he said.
Bert growled. He scampered to the door on the left at the rear of the room, and began scratching at the thin strip of light leaking from the bottom. The store cupboard, and from inside, a voice.
“Visitors!”
Though it was locked, Joe pulled it cleanly, screws and all, from the frame. Inside was a room twice as large as the one Baron had told them he called home.
“Visitors!” Captain scraped her claws along a wooden beam in the roof, shavings of it sprinkling through the gloom. Barely any of the floor was visible under stacks of old newspapers, pages yellowing and damp, bordering a thin path through the center. Bundles of cash were scattered about, notes and coins randomly dumped. At the far end was a huge television, tuned to a news channel, and a radio, gurgling, caked in thick dust.
“Come in!” Baron said, sitting back in a large leather armchair in the center of the room, the telephone balanced on his right thigh. “Hope the boy’s calmed down a little. Does nobody any good to get themselves as flustered as that.”
Val expected to see a picture of herself on the television screen, in the recording that Baron was scanning back and forth with a remote control. It had preyed on her mind how she was being portrayed, out there, in real life, rather than in this story she’d created. A child abductor. A pervert. A monster. And what picture had they used? Ten years before, when she’d had her passport photograph taken, the flash in the booth had misfired. Her face had been half lit, creating an oversize shadow on the wall behind her head. The resultant image was burdened with doom. Rosa’s father had left her not long before, and she had wondered whether the camera had in fact captured her accurately, as a woman followed by darkness.
What she saw was not herself, but something she had never expected to see. Joe. Or, as the caption had it, Joseph Sebastian Wiles, loomed large on the monitor, speeded, slowed, reversed and paused. His hair was buzz-cut short, his stubble shorn clean. He too had been photographed against a wall, but his had height markers down one side. Six foot four. He felt even bigger than that, stood beside her now, saying over and over, “I meant to tell you before.”
Val put her arms around Rosa and Bobby, brought them close to her, put herself between them and the man who, in the mug shot on screen, was dressed in full fatigues.
Intercut with the picture of his face (no sign of the smile she cherished, or the happy kiss-shaped eyes) was footage Bobby recognized, taken from a police helicopter of a barn in the countryside. Its spotlight circled the roof. After that came a farmer perturbed by the press attention, rubbing his forehead and fearing what was hiding on his grounds. And then Detective Jimmy Samas, who looked far too young for the job.
“Wiles, who escaped from military prison . . .”
Val gasped.
“You didn’t know? Oh my, you didn’t know!” Baron said, spinning in his chair. “That’s quite the story you’re holding back from your girlfriend there, Joseph. Though of course she comes with a story of her own. Quite the pairing. Quite a reward.”
“A troubled youth, in and out of foster homes and young offenders’ institutions . . .”
“I think she deserves to be told about your little temper. Seems you never were able to shake it. Such a shame, but I told them, didn’t I? When they came to collect you I told them, what breeze is in the boy blows a gale in the man.”
Joe pinched his temples between thumb and forefinger.
“What did you do?” Val said, clutching the children tighter. Bobby puffed out his chest and emerged from behind Val, ready to defend her, ready to strike.
“Pulped a man’s brain,” Baron said.
“It’s not true.” Joe found himself sitting on the stuffed shiny body of a jaguar.
“Oh, I think you’ll find it’s very true. Not just any brain either. His own lieutenant’s, no less.”
“You killed somebody?” Val said.
“No,” Joe said.
Baron laughed. “Dishonorable discharge. Flown straight home to military prison. Of course, when the news said you’d escaped I knew you’d come for me. I’m just surprised it took you so long. Such an angry, angry child, now an angry, angry man.” Joe sighed.
“He’s wrong. I didn’t kill somebody. I saved somebody.”
• • •
Lieutenant Brass, perversely, had been the closest thing to a father figure Joe had ever known. Not that he’d provided affection, quite the opposite—he was a stern, unpleasant man—but to his credit he was stern and unpleasant consistently. If Joe’s life in the foster system had lacked anything up until he joined the army, it had been consistency. That was the reason he had signed up. It would be a place where he’d find discipline, with people who might be able to help him control his temper. And it had worked. Consistency was what the lieutenant provided in spades. On that final tour of Iraq, ten months of death and skull-clogging sand, the lieutenant had grown wilder. Until one day, on a Baghdad rooftop baked by a tyrannical summer sun, he had finally gone haywire, his brain as good as stewed by war’s barbarous chug.
“He was trying to make me shoot a boy, screaming it into my ear, to pull the trigger. To execute him. A boy.” Recalling it now, Joe could feel the press of the gun’s stock on his shoulder, see the crosshairs splitting his vision, and past them, the wispy black fluff that bedecked the boy’s top lip. “He was unarmed. So I refused. I wouldn’t shoot. The lieutenant was angry that I had ignored him in front of all the other men. He attacked me.”
Baron jetted a brown slug of sputum at the floor. “Lies. You’re an animal who should be locked in a cage. You always were. No son of mine.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Joe said to Val. “I’m telling you the truth.”
The lieutenant beat Joe until the flesh around his eyes closed over. The other soldiers stood around in shock, powerless to help. He wrestled the rifle from Joe’s grip and took aim at the boy himself.
The shot rang out, but Joe had shoved the barrel aside just in time. Furious, the lieutenant aimed the gun at Joe.
“I hit him. Just once. But that was enough,” Joe said. The lieutenant dropped the gun and flopped limp across Joe’s chest like a puppet whose strings had been snipped. Joe saw nothing in the shallow pools of his eyes.
The boy was spared. But the lieutenant was not. Joe felt like he had as he watched the maze burn, looking out upon a world that had changed in those few seconds, one that would never change back. He knew then that whatever specter followed him would do so for the whole of his life.
“You killed him?” Val asked.
“No,” Joe said, his eyes wet and overflowing, “he’s alive.”
“Barely,” Baron said. “The poor bastard is a cabbage. A vegetable in a chair eating slop through a straw.”
“I saved the boy,” Joe said, “I saved the boy.” He began to weep. Val went to him, cradled his head and stroked her fingers down his neck with a lightness of touch he’d never experienced.
“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
“I know,” she said, “I know.”
“Ach, woman, don’t tell me you’ll forgive him this. You’re a bad man, Joseph, a violent man,” Baron said. The pistol’s metal chilled his thigh. “You’re a wanted man. I knew that I was right to get rid of you. Never lost a moment’s sleep over it.” This was a lie. Guilt had corrupted Baron’s slumber on many occasions, and it came again over him now, watching his son cry in Val’s arms. He was jealous, and this irritated him far more than any child could.
“And you, woman, only a person like you could forgive a man like him.”
“Shut up,” Joe said.
“Kidnapping a wee boy away from his father . . .”
“I said shut up!” Joe could feel the tears giving way to anger again. Though it was cold in the room, sweat covere
d his face.
“Letting him carry a big jar with her hair in it. Not even telling the poor little bastard that his mother was dead.”
“Shut up!” Joe rose to his feet. What joy it would be, to tear the tonsils from his father’s throat. What a pleasure it would be, to feel Baron’s blood on the soft skin between his fingers, to hear his breath ebb away.
“Kill me,” Baron said.
“I will.”
“You should, Joseph, you should. That’s what you came all this way to do.” Joe imagined the sound his fists would make as they smashed the bones beneath his father’s flesh. He took him by the neck.
“Stop,” Bobby said. Joe halted, grip tightening, and turned.
“Huh?” he said.
“Baron isn’t your father, because you are nothing like him.”
Joe looked at the boy, with Val beside him. He looked at Rosa, and Bert. The way they were stood, in that certain order, like a family portrait hung above a fireplace in an ornate frame. With space behind for him. It brought him to his knees.
“Let’s go,” Val said.
Baron was nauseous. Another whisky, but one he could barely swallow. He rose from his chair, took the air pistol from his pocket, and shuffled toward where the four of them were locked in embrace.
• • •
Rosa’s tantrum had approached quietly. The argument had made her anxious, and she’d pinched circular bruises on the soft skin around her hips. She had, for the first time in her life, consciously tried to contain it, and largely succeeded, until what turned out to be exactly the right moment. Seeing Baron approach Joe from behind, the pistol aimed and cocked, she launched herself at his midriff, sending him crashing into a mound of newspapers and out-of-circulation coins.
Winded, clutching his ribs, Baron couldn’t quite find the air he needed to say Captain’s name as he watched the bird swoop down from the rafters, land on Joe’s shoulder, and be carried out of the room.
• • •
The police finally came forty minutes later, having passed no vehicles, save for a white truck on the roads. Baron’s mansion was not an easy place to find. It took them a further thirty minutes of searching the many rooms to locate him, where he’d been left, looking at the ceiling.
“You’re sure about this?” Detective Jimmy Samas said when he arrived. Looking around, at the sad sight of the old man, he couldn’t quite believe this was the most concrete lead they had. Baron refused to pretend he enjoyed being questioned by a whippersnapper.
“Of course I’m sure.”
“And he was with others?”
“Yes. The woman and kids from the mobile library. Been plastered all over the news for weeks. You’d do well to pay attention in your line of work.” Detective Samas was used to condescension from his elders. It had started to bore him. Being bored, patronized, or both he could handle. What he didn’t appreciate was being lied to.
“How could that be?”
“You tell me. You’re the detective.” Samas should have been at home, with his pregnant girlfriend, watching television, their legs beneath a goose-feather quilt.
“And you didn’t see the mobile library?”
“No.”
“So they’re not even in it anymore?”
“Drove it into the dam for all I know. Wouldn’t put it past that crazy bastard, to finish them all off, just because he couldn’t beat me. Anger issues, you see. Trawl it, find out for yourselves.”
Detective Samas closed his notepad and looked around the room. He couldn’t wait to leave, and was thankful that he only had one final question.
“Mr. . . .”
“Baron, just Baron.”
“Of course. Baron. Are you any relation to Joseph Sebastian Wiles?”
Baron mopped his rear molars with his tongue and found a crumb of moist, stale bread.
“No,” he said, swallowing it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE ROBOT, PART TWO
Joe drove south nonstop for twenty-four hours. The police would not be looking for a lone trucker, and if they were then they would need to separate him from the thousands of others clogging Britain’s arteries. It gave him ample time to think about Baron, for whom, and for the first time in his life, he suddenly felt nothing. It wasn’t as if the old man had died. It was as if he had never existed. He occupied the blank void. The more Joe peered into it, the less he saw. Love, hatred and everything therein could not endure.
His only communication with Val, Rosa and Bobby came through the CB radio linked to a receiver in the back of the library, where they hid and read.
Bert gazed up at Captain, who’d made a nest of books in the shelves above Zoology. If Val hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn the dog’s appetite had waned.
“That’s ridiculous,” Joe said, his voice crackling through the radio, “dogs don’t fall in love.”
“That might be so, but it’s true,” she said, putting down her half-finished sandwich. The agonizing inevitability of their capture loomed. They would be parted just as soon as they had come into each other’s lives. She wished that their story would end at this exact moment, with them together, in the mobile library, as one.
After finishing a book, Bobby would post it through the thin gap atop the window in the toilet, leaving it behind them on the road, a trail of tales leading back over the border into England. Val let him grieve for his mother, though it pained her to see him enter a process without end. Grief is a fixed point from which one can only move further away. It never disappears, there is not space in the world to get far away enough. But minute by minute, mile by mile, they were leaving it behind, until it was a speck on the horizon. Whenever they hit potholes, the mobile library’s metal walls shook and books leapt from shelves like fledgling birds learning to fly.
It was Rosa who was first able to coax Bobby out of his solitude. She sat by his side with a ream of paper under her arm and a case full of crayons in her hand.
“Would you like to play?” she asked.
“No,” he said. He reread the top paragraph of the page open on his lap. Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car by Ian Fleming. Stuck in a traffic jam, Caractacus Potts’s creation sprouts enormous mechanical wings and flies away from trouble. Bobby wished the mobile library could do the same. No one would catch them in the middle of the sky.
“Bobby Nusku, would you like to play?” she said. He turned to find that she’d written their names again, Bobby Nusku Rosa Reed Val Reed Joe Joe Bert, but her handwriting had markedly improved. Letters that hung below the line curled with neat flourish. They had been realized in an even track of sumptuous black ink. At certain points the words clung together, or piggybacked each other, as if for survival.
“What would you like to play?”
She didn’t know. Rosa hadn’t planned for what might happen next, she never did, and that was one of the many things he’d come to love about her. She reminded him that the adventure wasn’t over just yet.
• • •
“I know where we can go,” Bobby said. Val, who had been listening to Joe absentmindedly singing through the radio, switched off the transistor and turned to face him. His shape had changed since they first met, but she only noticed it now, a broadening, with sharp new angles in his outline.
“What did you say?”
“I know where we can go, where we’ll be safe.” Through the cracks she saw glorious first hints of the man that the boy would soon become.
“You do?”
“Yes,” Bobby said, grinning. He thrust his hand into his back pocket and gave Val a torn piece of paper. They were so short of options that this seemed as good as any.
• • •
They arrived near the south coast of England at mid-afternoon, where clumsy gulls fought for scraps on rooftops. A new superstore had opened up on the edge of the town, forcing the closure of the independent shops on the high street, so the residents were unsurprised by the sight of enormous trucks making deliveries on
their otherwise quiet streets. Joe parked the mobile library behind a row of disused garages off the main road.
The receiver beeped.
“We’re here,” he said wearily, falling asleep on the warm leatherette.
The mobile library’s metal steps unfurled and out came Bobby, sun hurting his eyes.
“Wait for me here,” he said to Val, “I won’t be long.” He walked the length of a pathway overgrown with weeds to the street and quickly found himself out in public, alone, for the first time in months. He crossed the road to a sorry-looking house bookending a drab terraced row. Missing slates made the roof a gap-toothed mouth, the wonky chimney a chewed cigar. He approached the door, then knocked in three short, nervous bursts.
When Sunny Clay answered, there was no movement in his face. It reminded Bobby of the features carved into a totem pole. But he could tell how happy Sunny was by the way his voice rose an octave, and how tightly they embraced.
“Holy shit!” he said, closing the door behind him so that his mother couldn’t hear, then hushing his voice to a whisper. “Holy shit, Bobby Nusku. What are you doing here?”
“You told me to find you.” Sunny peered one way down the street and then the other.
“Yeah, but back then you weren’t the most famous kid in the world.”
“I am?”
“One of them.”
“I’m so happy to see you, Sunny.”
“Me too.”
“How much?” Bobby said.
“Let’s not get into this now.” Sunny pulled Bobby inside by his elbow. They scuttled upstairs to Sunny’s bedroom, box-shaped with cold exposed brickwork. Posters hung lopsided on the wall. Broken action figures fought among themselves.
Bobby pulled a package from the back of his jeans and gave it to Sunny. He tore open the paper. Inside was a copy of The Iron Man by Ted Hughes.
“It’s a present.”
“For what?”
“For becoming a cyborg. I know it wasn’t easy, but you did it. You did it.”
For Sunny, it had been a lonely summer followed by a sullen autumn. He was friendless in a new town, and it had proved hard to ingratiate himself to his schoolmates without the ability to smile. He felt like a grub unable to burst from its cocoon. Worst of all, the results of his transformation had been inadequate at best. He had a constant dull headache, his arm was weak, his leg was sore. In recent months he had been forced to face facts. He wasn’t a cyborg. He was a boy full of metal.
Mobile Library Page 18
