The most telling indicator of his failure came in the way he had missed Bobby. It had hurt every day, a pain that bore through him like a drill. Cyborgs didn’t miss people. They were never programmed to yearn. But here was Bobby now, expecting a cyborg, and Sunny wasn’t just his best friend, he was his bodyguard. He had promised, and was only as good as his word.
“Of course I did it,” he said.
“How does it feel?”
“Good.”
“Stronger?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you even have to eat food anymore?”
“Sometimes. But only for emergency refueling.” Bobby flexed his fingers until the joints cracked. He couldn’t tell that Sunny was lying. There was no sign of it on his face.
“Good,” he said, “I have a job for you.” Sunny sat on the floor beside the bed, twisted the key in a wind-up robot figurine and watched it walk across the carpet to the door.
“You do? What?”
“I have some new friends and we need protecting.”
“From who?”
“The police.”
“They said you’d been kidnapped.”
“I wasn’t kidnapped. I went on an adventure.”
“There are a lot of people looking for you.”
Bobby sat down next to Sunny and put an arm around his shoulder. Bobby was now the bigger of the two and suddenly had a sense of how much he’d grown. It felt strange, like being able to see back in time.
“I know.” The hum of Sunny’s mother’s vacuum cleaner vibrated through the floorboards.
“So what happened?”
Bobby closed his eyes and started to tell Sunny what had happened in a way in which they’d both understand it. Stories did happen to people like him after all.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A CHILDREN’S STORY, PART ONE
There was a Boy who was trying to cast a magic spell to bring his mother back to life. That’s why, in his pockets, he had thirty locks of her hair, twelve splashes of her perfume and twenty-five cuttings of cloth that he took from her dresses.
His biggest problem wasn’t doing the magic. The Boy lived in a small house on an island that he could only reach by crossing a rickety wooden bridge. Beneath the bridge lived the Ogre and his girlfriend. They didn’t like the Boy, and were mean to him every day. The Ogre was so mean that he had killed the Boy’s mother. If the Ogre found out about the magic the Boy was planning, he would be extremely angry. He had already killed the Boy’s mother once. He didn’t want to have to kill her again.
To protect himself from the Ogre, the Boy began building himself a robot. It would be the strongest robot in the world. He started by making the legs, because without legs, a robot can’t stand or walk. When the legs were finished he made the arms, because without arms a robot can’t pick things up or carry them. The final part of the robot he needed to build was the head, because without a head a robot can’t do anything at all.
Building a robot head is tricky. It involves lots of wires, switches and buttons. Because building a robot head is so tricky, the Boy got it a little bit wrong. When he put all of the parts together, the robot’s eyes didn’t flash like he’d wanted them to. It was while he was figuring out how to fix this particular problem that something else terrible happened.
His robot was stolen.
Now there would be no one to protect him from the Ogre. When you’re sad and alone, a house you can only reach by crossing an ogre’s bridge isn’t a very nice place to live.
The Boy wandered the streets until there was nowhere else to go. He sat down beside an enormous green bush and ate some of the delicious berries that grew on its branches.
That’s when he heard a noise he’d never heard before, the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves. The horse stopped at the bush so that he too could eat some of the delicious berries. The Boy saw that it was being ridden by a Princess. She didn’t wear a crown or have long tumbling hair so strong you could climb it. This Princess was different.
When the Princess was snarled at by a nasty three-headed dog, the Boy looked into her eyes and saw that she was scared too. She wasn’t so different after all.
He took the Princess back to her castle, where he met her mother, the Queen. The Queen was the most beautiful woman the Boy had ever seen. She was caring and kind and most of all, she loved the Princess more than any one being has ever loved another.
The Queen was the owner of two animals. The first was a lazy pooch who ate nothing but chocolate. The second was a huge friendly dragon, which she let the Boy ride.
Pretty soon the Boy, the Queen and the Princess were sitting on the dragon’s back every day, enjoying the sunshine and telling each other stories.
They escaped to a small forest atop a hill and decided to rest there, where they wouldn’t be found. The Boy was beside himself with happiness. Now he’d get to spend all of his time with the Queen, the Princess, the pooch and the dragon without ever having to worry about the Ogre or three-headed dogs.
One day, they met a Caveman. The Caveman was kind to the Boy. The Queen decided to repay the Caveman’s kindness by letting him sleep curled up beside the warmth of the dragon’s belly.
When the Hunter came looking for the Caveman he panicked. They put on disguises and made off with the dragon into the night.
It was a long, long journey toward the mountains, but they got there without once being spotted, to a zoo that the Caveman remembered from his childhood. He hadn’t been raised a caveman. He had become one. People become cavemen when they have a father like the Zookeeper.
The Zookeeper was a wicked old man. He had all of the exotic animals in the world locked up inside his zoo, but he never let anyone in to see them. Instead, he kept the zoo for himself. He lived inside a huge palace beside the zoo, which had a million bedrooms, but he did not allow anyone inside that either. The worst thing about the Zookeeper was that he pretended not to recognize his own son, the Caveman, even when he stood right there in front of him.
The Caveman wanted to tie the Zookeeper up, but he didn’t, because he realized something very important that the Boy had tried to teach him all along.
Family is where it’s found.
Family doesn’t have to be a father, a mother, a son or a daughter. Family is only where there is love enough. For them it was there, in that unlikeliest group of people . . . the Boy, the Queen, the Princess and the Caveman.
They left together on the back of the Dragon while the Zookeeper watched all of his animals escape—even his beloved bird. He was the loneliest man in the world.
They went as quickly as they could. They had a robot to find.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE ROBOT, PART THREE
Sunny ran his fingers down the side of the mobile library. It appeared far bigger than it had on the television news, and was a dirty white, not the green he remembered.
• • •
Weeks earlier, Detective Jimmy Samas had visited Sunny at his new home. Mrs. Pound had identified Sunny as Bobby’s only school friend. His mother made the young-looking detective take three pieces of shortbread she had baked that morning. One was enough but he had been too polite to decline. By the time he’d finished the third he felt sleepy. While she explained why they had moved south—to be closer to her ailing parents—he had closed his eyes for a second too long and almost fallen asleep. When he opened them again she had finished talking.
“Huh?” he said.
“Oh, I was just saying, the move might be good for Sunny here, too. Been in the wars, haven’t you, honey?” The detective looked at the boy. Nobody had warned him about Sunny’s condition, and so he was faced with a child he just assumed to be extremely serious. Little unsettles like a serious child. To lighten the mood he made two jokes, neither of them particularly funny. Sunny would still have smiled if he could, if only to put the detective, to whom he’d taken an instant liking, at ease.
“Have you heard from Bobby Nusku?” the detective said.<
br />
“No, sir.”
“Has he ever spoken to you about a lady named Valerie Reed?”
“No, sir.”
“Or any boys at school that he might have had a problem with?”
“No, sir.”
Flustered by the case, and by an argument earlier with his pregnant girlfriend about the amount of time he was spending away from home, the detective slapped his clipboard against his knee. It had been a gift from the man whose job he had taken over. Detective Samas didn’t like using it. He thought it made him look like a politician, and thus, on some subconscious level, annoying and untrustworthy. In his line of work, having people assume such character traits exist isn’t beneficial for getting results. He used it anyway, so as not to offend a man who wasn’t even there.
“Do you have any idea why Bobby Nusku might have run away from home?” Sunny thought for a while, long enough that Detective Samas assumed another answer in the negative.
“Have you been to his house?” Sunny asked. Detective Samas looked up from his list of questions at the boy, who had chosen to sit on the rug by his feet.
“I’m sorry?”
“Have you been to Bobby Nusku’s house?”
“Yes,” the detective said, remembering the coldness of his room, the scorch over the hob and the hole in the plasterwork. Remembering his father, spiced booze vapor on his breath, a broken television. The size of his hands. The angry stump of a missing finger. Talking to him, he’d identified a tone in his father’s voice that he hadn’t been expecting to hear. Only later had he been able to identify it. Relief. Relief that the boy was gone.
“Then you already know the answer.”
“I do?”
“Yes.”
“And what is it?”
“He hasn’t run away from home. You can’t run away from what you don’t have.” The detective declined another piece of shortbread. He thanked Sunny’s mother and locked his briefcase, deciding never to use the clipboard again.
“One last question,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Could Bobby be headed here?”
Sunny shook his head, comfortably aware that no lies would show through the dead mask of his face.
“No,” he said, “he doesn’t even have my new address.”
• • •
Bobby insisted Sunny press the button at the rear of the mobile library. He was suitably impressed as the mechanical steps wound out to greet him. Val appeared in the doorway. She also looked different from the way she had on the television. Soft, wholesome, good. She had her arms around him before he could speak.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said.
“Likewise,” Sunny said. She had been all over the news. An attractive, white female criminal (a kidnapper to boot) overshadowed even the story of the escaped military convict, whom Sunny was baffled to see climb out of the cab, yawning. “This is Joe,” Bobby said. Sunny thought of the story that Bobby had told him and shook the man’s hand. He thought of the reward offered, and how it could never be enough.
Next he embraced Rosa, and a new sensation came over him. He hadn’t expected it, or ever really known it before. At first he couldn’t quite define what it was. She asked what his first name was and then wrote it down in her notebook. Watching her shape the letters, looking back at his face as if painting a portrait, he slowly pieced it together. Rosa hadn’t noticed his palsy. She hadn’t traced the fallen half moon of his mouth, or the heavy sack of his bottom lip. She had embraced the other, the inside, with a purity so tangible Sunny swore he could feel it pressed against his chest. It was lovely and warm, a bath at the end of a hard day. A tear seen by no one tumbled from his eye and down his cheek. He did not feel it.
Finally he was introduced to Bert and Captain. The patch of skin on Captain’s underside was healing nicely.
“Visitors!” she said, dancing to a pop beat tapped out on the wood with the stiff bullet of her beak.
Sunny’s neighbor, Mr. Munro, watched from the upstairs bathroom window of his home that backed on to the lot of garages. This was where he spent most of his time these days.
• • •
A pink evening sky struck out the day’s crisp blue. Sunny waited until his mother had left for his grandparents’ house before emptying the cupboards and fridge of food. He tipped the lot into an old sleeping bag, which he dragged across the road and down the path to where the mobile library hid behind the garages. If they rationed it sparingly, Val calculated that it would be enough food to last them for a week.
Sunny and Bobby crossed the petrol-stained gravel to the garages on the far side. Nobody came here anymore, even the local errant youth could think of ten better places to go. Whoever had owned the garages, in a time when the area had promise, now only used them to store junk, had abandoned them or, Sunny guessed, died. The entire plot, about the size of half a football pitch, and with rows of lock-ups on either side stopping it being fully seen from the street, was dirty and overgrown with weeds. Brickwork crumbled and when it rained you could smell rust.
Sunny used a crowbar he’d hidden in the bushes to jimmy open a garage with a dented door, where behind the rusting shells of an old washing machine and a mattress’s skeleton of springs he had constructed a secret den. It was comprised of a broken stool, torn world map pinned to the wall and a wind-up radio that only received a Gujarati-language station he’d established was devoted to cookery.
“Welcome to headquarters,” he said. Bobby noticed the sole chair facing the map, as if it were the view from the porch of an old folks’ home. This scene was made all the sadder for knowing that it was where his best friend spent so much time alone.
“It’s excellent.”
“It’s a little messy but it will do. I was wondering if news of you would ever surface. I was going to plot on the map where you’d gone with colored pins and strings.” Bobby sat down on an upturned bucket, split down the side, buckling under his weight. They reminisced about school. Sunny did his impression of Mr. Oats (even funnier now that his face retained a hint of misanthropy). Despite the months apart there was no space between them, no lost tooth, no hole tender to the tongue that had returned to explore it.
“In the story you told me,” Sunny said, “did the Boy ever find the Robot?”
“Yes,” Bobby said, “he did.”
Sunny rubbed his forehead. He had been hoping for a different answer. “I’m not a robot, Bobby. I’m not a cyborg. I’m not anything. I’m just a boy with some metal in his arms and legs whose face doesn’t work. I’m not a part of the story. That kind of thing doesn’t happen to people like me.”
“You’re wrong,” Bobby said, “I know you’re wrong.”
For the next three hours they went to work tidying up the garage. Bobby scrubbed the walls clean of cobwebs clagged with dust. They cleared the floor of scrap. A tumble dryer, a fridge, the washing machine, white goods once deemed essential by someone, but now forgotten. Sunny repaired the rip in the map with parcel tape. Bobby tightened the stool’s wonky leg. Joe came to help, salvaging wood from old furniture and using it to build a set of shelves. Val filled it with books from the mobile library and soon Sunny had quite the collection of his own. Rosa told him which he might like best.
Bobby went into night mode. He jacked up the doors of the other abandoned garages and sifted through what detritus had been left there. Before long Sunny had a scuffed leather office chair, an oak desk with a scratched marble finish and a Persian rug only one-fifth eaten by moths. It smelled musty, but that would clear if he hung it up to air. In the corner was an empty liquor cabinet in the shape of a globe. Next to it, positioned to appear as though it was inspecting the Indian subcontinent, was a life-size dressmaker’s mannequin. He even had a sofa, threadbare in places but comfortable enough, perfect for sleeping.
By the time they had finished, and Sunny had stolen the padlock from his mother’s garden shed to secure it, the garage was transformed. Baron’s drawing room,
eighty feet wider, with opulent pillars holding a ceiling aloft among the gods, could never have housed half its soul.
Joe rolled a perfect cigarette from the tobacco pouch Sunny had stolen from his mother’s handbag and they stood back to admire their handiwork. As a final seal of approval, Bert walked four complete circles and lay down on the rug. Captain perched on his back, kneading his flesh with her talons.
Night fell, silencing the birds in the trees. Val made cocoa so hot it scalded their tongues, and the cookies they ate tasted of burnt sugar. The mobile library glinted orange under a solitary flickering streetlight. So dim was its glow that none of them, sitting on the steps blowing steam from their mugs, noticed Mr. Munro peer over the wall that separated the garages from the street. Arthritis riddled his hips, and it took him far longer than he would have liked to get home. Reaching his front door with glacial pace he searched his pockets for the key and realized that he had locked himself out. His only hope of getting to the telephone and calling the police would be to climb over the rickety back fence. With the reward money, he’d be able to afford a new one.
• • •
After such a lonely few months, Sunny reveled in the company of his new, and old, friends. Seeing Bobby’s affection for Joe, Val and Rosa, and the way they repaid it so wholly, he knew these weren’t the people on the news. They were the Caveman, the Queen and the Princess.
They sat outside the mobile library. Joe, still exhausted from the drive, held Val tightly, kissed her and announced that if he didn’t sleep soon he’d fall over.
“Good night, love,” she said.
Mobile Library Page 19
