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  The churn of mud moving.

  The rustle the bush made as she reached out for Bobby and struck it.

  As he discovered shame, the dark being inside us that emerges, hunchbacked and groveling, into the light, Rosa Reed, the girl he’d been too embarrassed to be seen with, was a meter away in the dirt, discovering fear at the very same time.

  Only when he’d heard them run away, not laughing but crowing, was Bobby able to stand.

  Rosa lay on her back, where they had pressed down on her arms and shoulders hard enough to leave an imprint of her shape in the mud. Her mouth, nose and ears were packed with dirt. The streaming of her eyes ran erratic red routes through the soil stuck to her face. Bobby took her hand and pulled her to a sitting position, then began clearing the mud from her airways with his fingers. He used his sweater to scrape clean her ears and nostrils. Rosa cried. Thin pink threads of blood teemed beneath the skin around her eyes. They were glassy where she had retreated from them, to somewhere else, somewhere better, whatever garden we go to in the mind.

  “I’m sorry, Rosa,” he said.

  It took all of his strength to help her stand, and what loose soil remained in her hair and on her clothes quickly tumbled to the ground. He hoisted her arm around his shoulder and she sobbed so loudly that by the time they reached her front door it was already opening.

  A woman stood behind it. Her skin was pale, with dark hair and eyes, the stormy design of a Gypsy Madonna. Rosa clung to the woman and for a while they cried into each other’s necks, mud now stuck to them both.

  Rosa had begged her mother to be let out of the house to play, enough that she had finally, reluctantly, relented. It was that simple decision, one of millions over the years, which the woman knew she’d regret for the rest of her days. This was her experience of motherhood, something you can be good at for a lifetime, but only need be bad at for a second.

  A gray cloud swallowed the sun. The woman looked up at Bobby and spoke with a will so strong he swore he could see it as a color in the iris of her eyes, the greenish purple of wet snakeskin.

  “What happened to my daughter?”

  “Some boys came,” he said. “They held her down and filled her mouth and eyes and nose with mud.” The woman went inside the house and emerged with a bottle of water. Rosa, still unable to catch her breath, held her head back and allowed her to pour its contents into her mouth and over her face. Eventually Rosa took the bottle, and the woman came toward Bobby. She put a hand around the back of his head and forced him to look up at her. Above her head the dark cloud that trapped the sun inside it formed a sullen halo.

  “These boys,” she said, “were these boys your friends?”

  “No,” he said, but, still racked with shame, even he thought it sounded like a lie. She pinched harder. “I don’t know who they were. I didn’t see them.”

  “You tell me the truth. Did you do this to her?” She pointed toward Rosa. Bobby shook his head. Two tears fell from the woman’s face, hot ants landing on his hair.

  “No.”

  “Because I will kill you if you did.”

  The words tumbled out of Bobby. “I was scared. I hid. And I’m sorry.”

  “God help me I will break every bone in your body . . .”

  “No!” Rosa shouted. The woman let go of his neck. Rosa opened her dirty clenched fist and inside it was the piece of paper bearing their names. The woman took it and read aloud.

  “Bobby Nusku.”

  “This is Bobby Nusku,” Rosa said. “Bobby Nusku is my friend.”

  The piss stain on his trousers was lightening, but was still visible, his cowardice drying on the cloth. The woman had seen it. This circle of his shame complete, he ran as quickly as he could. When he got home, there was nobody there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE QUEEN

  Bobby opened the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, pulled out a bottle of bleach and found that he wasn’t quite strong enough to twist the child lock. The corrugated lid scored his palms. Frustrated, he grabbed the next closest bottle he could find and, with the coarsest brush, scrubbed the piss from his trousers. When his father and Cindy got home from their anniversary dinner at a local Chinese restaurant, they could tell by the smell of lemons that Bobby had used her most expensive shampoo—reserved for her best clients—and ruined her nail brush. When she got angry the skin on her neck pulled taut, bringing all of her features into sharp focus. She demanded Bobby be punished, but he ducked under his father’s outstretched arm and fled as quickly as he could.

  He spent the evening in his bedroom, frantically gathering things for his mother’s return. It had been a while since she’d left. He wasn’t sure exactly how long, but he was sure that she’d come back soon. Of course she would. She had never let him down before.

  Underneath his mattress, hidden inside the lining, was a scalpel he’d taken from his father’s tool belt. He used it to cut a small square of material from every one of Cindy’s dresses. In the event that she ran away and changed her identity before Sunny the cyborg was up and running, robbing Bobby of his shot at vengeance, this would make life simpler. By slipping the square into the hole in the cloth, Sunny would be able to confirm her true identity. Then he could destroy her. Have fire dance in circles at her feet, scorch her skeleton, and leave nothing but a black mound of ash inside her clothes where her body used to be. Perhaps then she would feel foolish for her flammable hair.

  Bobby had never been this angry before. His mother always taught him that anger was a wasted energy, that it was better turned to love. But it felt good, coursing through him, cooking his blood. He wanted to cut himself, let it out, spurt a great red arc across the room. Watch it cool on the cold windowpane where he now saw his reflection, a swarm of veins in his temples. The same as his father. But he didn’t want to be like his father. Not now, not ever. How strong must a man’s legs be, Bobby wondered, to always carry this deadweight of hate in his gut?

  Hidden in a rusty biscuit tin at the back of the wardrobe was a wedge of old family photographs. While the scalpel was still sharp enough, Bobby cut his father’s head out of each and every one.

  He carefully placed all the new samples in the empty cereal box and numbered them individually for his files. Then he turned off the light and waited in the darkness for everybody else to go to sleep. It didn’t take long. Their bed was creaky and old, grinding to the choppy rhythm of their brief, passionless sex. Afterward, snoring. Happy anniversary, he thought.

  Creeping, as quietly as he could, he went downstairs to watch television. On the news they showed a helicopter chasing a spotlight through some fields. The farmhouse where the police had been looked lonely against the pinpricks of the night’s celestial entertainment. Bobby switched on the subtitles so that he could understand what the man—Detective Jimmy Samas, according to the captions—was saying. He was a young man. Too young, Bobby thought, to have such an important job. Usually the news was comprised of bulldog faces talking, jowly politicians and baggy-chinned union officials. The detective didn’t seem long out of school and he looked embarrassed, or perhaps just sick of the rain. Still, he reassured everyone watching at home, “While the trail has gone cold for now, be in no doubt that the hunt will go on.”

  Birds sang in the dawn. How glorious it must be, Bobby thought, to forget the day that went before and wake up full of song.

  • • •

  Drizzle, a fine cobweb veil, the streets a cobalt mirror of the sky. Bobby wandered. Flower beds half dug, empty graves on the roadside, with a sculpture, scratched and rusting, the headstone for a dead town. He walked the long way around, to nowhere specifically if you asked his legs, but his heart knew where it was going—to the place he had thought of all night.

  “Bobby Nusku,” said the woman. He enjoyed the way she pronounced his name. It was nothing like the way his father said it, as if hacking at the words with his tongue.

  “Hello,” he said, staring at his shoes. He was pleased to see his piss sta
ins had been washed from the ground by the rain.

  “What are you doing out here? You’re soaking wet,” she said. She hooked the wet ringlets of his fringe from his forehead with a dainty finger. “You’ll get sick.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I called the police about what happened. They came to speak to Rosa. I didn’t know where to find you.”

  Bobby scratched the back of his leg with his toe.

  “I have something to tell you.”

  “Well in that case, you’d better come in.” Bobby hesitated. “I know that Rosa would like to see you. My name is Valerie. Valerie Reed. But you can call me Val. Everybody else does.”

  Val Reed draped a soft red towel around Bobby’s shoulders and sat him at the kitchen table. Boiling the kettle, she let the steam stroke her face, then spooned chocolate powder into a mug and poured the hot water on top.

  Rosa came downstairs from the bathroom, where Val had been bathing her.

  “Hello, Bobby Nusku,” she said, and he was surprised by how delighted she seemed to find him sitting there. She held his hand, and he noticed that her fingernails glowed the white of hospital linen. Bobby had never seen anyone so clean. It made him grossly aware of the dirt that had dried inside his ears. Val opened a bag of marshmallows. He took one and enjoyed how it fizzled on his tongue.

  “What do you have to tell me?” she said.

  “I have a friend,” Bobby said. “He’s a cyborg.”

  “A cyborg?” Val smiled. “What a useful friend to have.”

  “He’s still being built at the moment, but as soon as he’s finished, I can get him to kill those boys for you.”

  “Oh, well . . . I’m not sure anyone should be killed.”

  “Then how will we stop them from doing it again?”

  “Bobby,” she said, “it’s very kind of you to want to look out for Rosa like that, but believe me when I say that there are many, many other ways.”

  A dog waddled into the room, stubby and flanked by thick tubes of flesh. His eyes were pink and drooped so that the exposed flesh beneath the fur caught spikes of light as he moved. In his mouth was Val’s old wristwatch, which he had taken a liking to chewing. The mangled leather strap hung from the sides.

  “Hello, Bert,” Rosa said. Groaning, he dropped to the floor, having realized long ago that his survival didn’t depend on his cooperation. Val wrestled her watch from his jaws and placed a biscuit close to his mouth. He scooped it up sideways with his tongue, leaving a semicircle of glistening drool and crumbs on the linoleum.

  “The police won’t do anything,” Bobby said. “They come to your house and then they go away again.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I’ve seen it.” The screech of chair legs pushing back across the floor made Bert run away. Val stood.

  “Are you hungry?” she said.

  “Yes,” Bobby said.

  “Then let me make you something to eat.”

  Rosa and Bobby watched cartoons. After a while they tried to play hide-and-seek but abandoned the idea because Rosa only wanted to have whatever role Bobby assigned himself, the hider or the seeker, circumstances in which the engine of the game failed. He counted that she had written his name beside hers seventeen times in a notebook. The letters fluctuated wildly in size, never making it to the end of the page before being herded together by an invisible lasso.

  Val called for them to come downstairs and they were met with a delicious-looking spread of salmon, slightly flushed, potatoes the size of eggs framing a collapsing knob of melting butter and weird green spears Bobby had never seen before. She explained they were called asparagus and would make his wee smell strange. Rosa laughed.

  “Val Reed,” she said, “sometimes you are funny.”

  “You’re sure your parents won’t be wondering where you are?” Val said to Bobby, a rock salt snowflake settling on her lips.

  “Yes,” Bobby said, pushing a wedge of lemony salmon into the well beneath his tongue.

  “I’m sure that’s not true. You should call them.”

  “My father isn’t in.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “We don’t know where she is.”

  Val formed an O shape with her mouth, the lips undulating to make the circle bigger, then smaller. Unbeknownst to her this happened perfectly in time with Bobby’s heartbeat.

  “We have ice cream.”

  “My father says that I’m not allowed to eat ice cream.”

  “No,” Val said, “he’s mistaken. You’re allowed to eat as much ice cream as you like, whenever it takes your fancy.”

  Rosa, Val and Bobby ate ice cream on the sofa. They watched Disney films until Rosa fell asleep. For Bobby, the hours passed quickly and happily.

  When Val left the room to let Bert into the garden, Bobby watched through the window. It was dark outside and his breath made misty blooms on the glass. Tripled, his reflection chased itself around the pane. By the time she’d returned Bobby had switched off the television. There was no sound but the buzzing of appliances half-alive. The toaster. The bulb. One red eye in a shallow state of sleep, waiting, hoping to be woken.

  Val looked handmade, Bobby thought. The pinched bridge of her nose glowed. It was elbow shaped at the end, and her chin was neat and square.

  “That’s enough TV for one day,” Val said. “Our eyes will come out of our heads.”

  “Does that really happen?” he said.

  “No, not really. At least I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t know because I don’t watch much TV.”

  “You don’t? That’s unusual. I thought all kids watched lots of TV these days.”

  “Not me.”

  “So what do you do? Do you read?”

  “My dad doesn’t have many books.”

  “Oh.” Val looked at her daughter, chasing a dream around behind her eyelids. “You should go,” she said, “it is late.”

  “It’s okay,” Bobby said.

  “You don’t have a home time?”

  “No.”

  “Then what would you like to do?”

  Bobby thought about it. “We can talk.”

  “Talk?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “About what?”

  “You’re the lady,” he said, “you can choose.”

  Val couldn’t decide whether there was a better or worse person to confide in than a child. On the one hand, the advice he could give was limited. On the other, the solace offered was profound. It had been a long time since she’d had a meaningful conversation, and three weeks since she’d exchanged purposeful words with anybody apart from Rosa. On occasion, when Val spoke, the sound of her voice constructing sentences took her by surprise. She struggled to remember her own phone number, so unused was she to sharing it. The friends she’d had at school were gone, Rosa’s birth the catalyst for their slowly backing away. They were uncomfortable with Rosa’s disability and how the extra demands of it affected the group whenever they got together. She supposed they could not have been her friends at all. There was, at least, some satisfaction in that.

  These days she looked forward to visiting the doctor. As cold as his hands were, small talk was a welcome respite from the otherwise lengthy nothingness. Sometimes she considered faking symptoms, just to feel that rough chill against her body and talk about the changing of the weather.

  But this, sitting here with the boy, seemed like a glimpse into the world of real life, one that she never really got to be a part of. She and Rosa had an existence with its own reality. This peek at another made her curious. And talkative. Before long, Val had told Bobby a lot of what little she had about herself to tell. The warmth of his companionship lingered like the imprint of a pillow on the skin after a good night’s sleep.

  Though he enjoyed spending time with Val, Bobby felt strange for reasons he couldn’t explain. It was as if she was staring, studying his face, and he found it difficult to maintain eye contact with her for long
periods of time. As he buttoned his coat he realized why it seemed so unusual. She wasn’t looking over his shoulder.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Bobby said.

  “Sure,” Val said, “anything.”

  Bobby paused for a second, arranged the words in his head, checked their order and the way they sounded, what they meant in his mouth and her ears, making sure the specifics were perfectly tuned. “You promise you won’t be offended?”

  “How can I know that until you’ve said it?”

  “It’s just that I’m interested . . .”

  “Then ask.”

  Bobby swallowed. “What is wrong with Rosa?”

  Val thought, and for more than a minute they sat in complete silence, him wishing the words were attached to his voice box with string so that he could reel them straight back into his throat.

  “Nothing at all,” she said, and then held his hand.

  • • •

  Val fetched Bobby’s shoes from the cupboard beneath the stairs. Scuffed and worn, their size reminded her how young he was, how old he seemed.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “Tomorrow you should come to work with me.”

  Val tore a blank page from Rosa’s notebook and quickly scribbled a few words on it, which Bobby craned to see. As she reached across her daughter to hand it to him, the paper fluttered against Rosa’s sleeping breath.

  Bobby glanced at the paper, and saw the words mobile library, with an address. Somewhere that he had never been.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE NON-FIRE-BREATHING DRAGON

  Bobby assumed the whole neighborhood could hear his father and Cindy fight. He could make it out from halfway down the street. This one was especially loud, enough that he could sneak in and retreat to his bedroom without being noticed.

  Peppered by the gunfire of slamming doors, the argument had a number of false endings, only to ferociously reignite out of silence. Finally reaching a crescendo, Cindy screamed and Bruce hurriedly left the house. From the upstairs window Bobby watched him go, climb into his van and speed off down the road. This was how their fights always ended, though Bobby noticed that they were getting shorter, her eyes blacker.