Mobile Library Page 5

  Half an hour later, three of Cindy’s friends arrived. The women stayed up late drinking wine and chuffing cigarettes, celebrating Saturday night in a way that suggested it was something other than an inevitability. Smoke slunk its way up the stairs, filling the corners and hanging from the ceiling. It crept beneath Bobby’s bedroom door to where he lay with his ear to the carpet like an Indian chieftain listening for the distant rumble of hooves. He coughed four times with his mouth buried in the soft flesh of his arm, so that nobody would hear.

  Once Cindy’s friends left and before his father got home, Bobby went downstairs to collect samples for his files. More accurately, they were for a subsection of his files built around a diary he kept which detailed everything that had taken place in the time since his mother had gone. Where possible, the names of everybody who came was logged, next to simple line sketches of their face in portrait and in profile, and a brief description of what they were wearing. Bedtimes were recorded. Receipts and bank statements were salvaged from the waste bin and preserved. That night he found a precious trove of artifacts. Pocket mirrors lined with gunky white residue. A mascara wand with eyelashes trapped in it. A packet of chocolate penises, one half eaten and left out to melt. He knew that his mother would want to know every last detail of what she had missed, and the more physical evidence he had the better.

  Gee Nusku had painted these ceilings. She had carpeted these floors. For Bobby, this house was her, these walls her rib cage and within it her heart. He would keep it beating until the day his own stopped dead.

  Despite working on his files all night he was not tired when his father returned, though he hid beneath his duvet until Bruce again lost consciousness on the cold bathroom floor. Bobby was still not asleep when the sunshine searched his bedroom. He was far too excited for that. For the first time in weeks he had somewhere to go, and friends who would be waiting when he got there.

  • • •

  Early on Sunday morning, disco-ball dewdrops lit up the grass. Bobby didn’t visit The Deeps often. Wide cars lined the streets. New houses emerged from the grounds as if built and held together by the vibrant flower beds that surrounded them. White marble lions stood guard, wooden beams split faux-aged façades and somewhere, in what Bobby imagined was a magnificent garden, he could hear the impatient trickle of a small fountain. Even the clouds seemed to be on their best behavior. Pearly, plump and still, waiting to be captured by a calm hand’s loving watercolor. Bobby assumed that no one around The Deeps was half eating chocolate penises, let alone leaving them out to melt.

  First he spotted Bert, then Rosa, then Val following behind them. Rosa gave him a tight bear hug and he tried not to show how much it hurt. Val removed a jangling cluster of keys from her handbag to unlock the gate.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it.”

  “I’m glad you came too,” Rosa said, and Bobby smiled. They slipped through the gap one by one.

  The mobile library was the biggest vehicle Bobby had ever seen. He counted sixteen wheels, a couple of spares stowed above the axles for luck. The cab at the front bore a smile in its grille of silver teeth, and twin horns of exhaust piping curved up into the sky.

  “Are you a librarian?” Bobby asked.

  “Oh,” Val said, “I wish.”

  They walked to the rear of the truck, where Val twisted the key in the hole and let Rosa press the button. With a loud clunk, the giant steel door burst open and transformed into a staircase that wound down to their feet.

  Inside the library, books were stacked on shelves floor to ceiling on three sides. Bobby had never seen so many, or even imagined that they existed in this number. The column of space running through the center of the truck was ribbed with sets of smaller bookcases forming a simple maze leading to the back. The carpet was woven from hostile burgundy fibers, except for an area at the rear where it was thick and woolen. To Bobby it felt equal parts forbidden and mysterious. Already, he didn’t want to leave.

  Rosa sat down and emptied out the contents of her bag. She took a pen, put the lid in her mouth and forced the curled-up end of her tongue inside it. Then she wrote Rosa Reed, Val Reed, Bobby Nusku over and over in her notebook.

  Val found cleaning fluids in the cupboard behind the counter, fluorescent and upright like fireworks waiting to be lit. While a bucket filled with hot water, she polished the tops and edges of the two smaller blocks of shelving, Science Fiction and Biography. Once the water had cooled she added a dash of bleach, and Bobby watched as she mopped the stairs. Wrung out, the mop was a perfect length for knocking down the cobwebs that had collected in the high corners around History. Then she cleaned the lavatory.

  “Sometimes,” she said to nobody in particular, “I worry that life is just the journey between toilets.”

  With the carpet vacuumed, Val invited Rosa and Bobby to sit outside on a few old deck chairs under a retractable awning above the entrance. They shared the sandwiches she’d made that morning. Bacon, lettuce and tomato on a springy rye bread that seductively reassumed its shape when squeezed. Hunger had scooped a hollow in Bobby’s belly and he ate quickly. Rosa threw her crusts to Bert, who wolfed them down without even bothering to chew.

  “Is the cleaning done?” Bobby asked.

  “Cleaning is never done,” Val said. “All the while you’re cleaning, someone else is dirtying. There’s always other people, Bobby, and some have grubby hands.”

  “I won’t dirty anything.”

  “I know,” she said, and smiled.

  “Val,” Rosa said, putting her head to Val’s chest as if listening in on a conversation inside her rib cage. “Where does the library go?”

  Bobby enjoyed observing Val and Rosa as mother and daughter. It was already obvious to him that they had established routines, ones he would never wish to interrupt, and that was how they got through the days together. He could tell by the way Rosa reclined on Val’s lap and closed her eyes that she asked this question every week, even though she knew its answer verbatim.

  “Well, now that it is nice and clean, somebody will come on Monday morning and drive it to a different place so that the people who live close by can come and borrow some books with their library cards. Then they will drive it to a different place every day until next Friday, when they leave it here so that we can come and clean it again on Sunday morning. Except they might stop it soon because it costs too much money.” Val ran her fingers through Rosa’s hair with a gentle scissor action, coming to rest at the top of her back. “Mobile libraries aren’t just trucks like ours. They have them all over the world, and in some countries, they use animals instead.”

  “What animals?”

  “Well, in Kenya, in Africa, where it is very hot all of the time, they use camels. The Camel Library Service. They have twelve camels, and the camels are big and strong so they can carry really heavy bags on their humps. Between them they can carry around seven thousand books, and they deliver them to all of the people who live in all the little villages all over the desert.” Rosa twisted the fingers of her left hand in the palm of her right. “Can you imagine, all of the camels slobbering over the books with their big horrible tongues?” Val stuck her tongue out as far as she could and flapped it around. Rosa laughed. Bert retreated underneath the rear axle, licking the last of the dew from his paws. “In Zimbabwe, which is also in Africa and is also very hot, they have a library in a cart that is pulled around by a donkey. He must be a big donkey because he has to be very strong to pull all those books. Do you know what else he has to be strong to do?”

  “What?”

  “Ee-or!” A plane passed, lost in the swirl of the clouds, only just loud enough to drown out Rosa’s giggles. “In Norway, which is always a bit cold, they have one on a boat so that they can take the books to all of the old people who live on little islands. And in Thailand, where it is warm and rainy and they have jungles, they use huge elephants to take books to all the people who live too far away in tree hou
ses.” Val brought her arm to her nose like a trunk, pursed her lips and made a noise reminiscent of a trumpet. “Which would you prefer? I think I’d prefer the elephant. It’d be able to reach all of the books on the high shelves.”

  “The elephant,” Rosa said, then she took off and jumped into the biggest puddle she could find. Water exploded around her feet, soaking her trousers from ankle to knee.

  “I like your library,” Bobby said.

  For a moment, Val had forgotten he was there. “Thank you for coming. You can take some books if you like.”

  Bobby was unaccustomed to receiving gifts, and his first instinct was that he’d need to pay. His father would never let him have the money.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “For reading, of course. As long as you bring them back next week.”

  “I can just take them?”

  “As long as you promise not to lose them, or rip them to pieces.” What books there were in Bobby’s house had long been stashed in the attic by his father, who said they made a mess of the place. Besides a car repair manual and a Gideon Bible taken from a hotel, they were mostly picture books his mother had gotten for him as a toddler. She taught him that they were precious. He still associated the smell of their pages with her voice, and the quiet creak of a hardback spine with the warmth of her bosom on his cheek.

  “I promise more than all of the other promises added together forever.” He crossed his heart and showed her that his fingers were spread so as not to jinx the deal.

  “In every book is a clue about life,” she said. “That’s how stories are connected. You bring them to life when you read them, so the things that happen in them will happen to you.”

  “I don’t think the things that happen in books will happen in my life,” he said.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “You just don’t recognize them yet.”

  It started to rain. Val gestured for Rosa to come inside. Picking up Bert, his body falling limp in her arms, she started toward the library. Bobby edged his deck chair a little closer to Val’s, so that their legs were touching.

  “It’s nice to have a new friend,” he said, and she agreed, already suspecting that the word nice didn’t do his arrival in their lives justice.

  Val let Bobby borrow four books, even though he didn’t have a library card. He promised to take care of them, and he did, by hiding them in a place where no one would ever find them. At the back of the wardrobe behind the boxes of his mother’s stuff, with his files.

  One of the books, The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, was about a little boy and a giant robot who become friends. Bobby wondered if this was a clue about his life. He was the boy and Sunny was the robot. He wished more than anything that he could share it with Sunny. By now, Sunny would be able to scan the book with his eyes in five seconds flat and memorize it forever.

  Bobby was so busy reading the books that he fell behind on the upkeep of his files. He forgot to count the empty bottles. He failed to log what times of day the door slammed. Women came to have their hair cut and he didn’t even note their names, or which celebrity’s hairstyle they wished to emulate.

  He wanted to be in a book, to have an adventure. But his story seemed set. There was no point in its ever being read.

  • • •

  When he woke the sky was newborn pink. Waiting for his father to go to work was infuriating—Bruce was always running late, funneling black coffee into his throat, mustering appetite enough to swallow breakfast. Bobby noticed the skin around his father’s eyes speckling, the yellowness of his cheeks. How hilarious it would be, he thought, if on his mother’s return she didn’t recognize the man to whom she was still married.

  As soon as his father had gone, Bobby went straight to Val and Rosa’s house, Val made breakfast, comprising many things he had never tried before. Spinach. Poached eggs. A white cheese that crumbled in the warmth of his fingertips.

  “What would you like to do today?” Val asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bobby said, “what is there to do?”

  “We could go to the park?” Bobby shook his head. “You don’t like the park?”

  “I don’t like it as much as I like it here.”

  Every week, Val allowed Rosa to choose a book from the mobile library, and since discovering a beautifully illustrated edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, she had clutched it tightly to her chest. On the cover, rendered in frail gold leaf, was the image of the Cheshire Cat’s grin. Each tooth carried a letter, executed in elegant calligraphy, combining to spell out the heroine’s name. It took Bobby a few seconds to realize that Rosa wasn’t just showing it to him, but urging him to take it, to open it and read.

  “I can’t read it to you,” he said.

  “Why?” Rosa asked.

  “I just can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .” Any excuses he could think of seemed to scatter as soon as they came to him, like a child kicking away a ball it wants to pick up. Rosa thrust the book into his lap and opened it on the first page. Bobby looked to Val for help, but she took off her slippers and reclined in her chair with both hands behind her head. Rosa mimicked her mother and they both laughed. Sighing, Bobby finished the last of his toast. He began to read aloud. Alice, bored on the riverbank, chased the clock-toting White Rabbit down the rabbit hole and got lost in a room with many doors.

  “Do the voices,” Rosa said. Val snatched the book from Bobby.

  “Come on Rosa,” she said, “give the poor boy a break.”

  Bert, upset by the kerfuffle, waddled past them into the living room, the mangled remnants of Val’s leather watchstrap a macabre tongue hanging from his lips.

  “To the den!” Rosa said, grabbing Bobby by the hand and following Bert into the living room that overnight she and her mother had completely transformed. Suspended a few feet from the ground was a false ceiling of sheets and blankets, hoisted atop upturned sofa cushions and stacks of pillows from the beds upstairs. Beneath that, a catacomb, into which Bobby crawled behind Rosa, imagining a labyrinth that expanded forever. Val listened to them laughing and wondered what was so funny.

  “Val,” Rosa said, forcing her head through the gap between two cushions in the wall of the den. Val was sitting on the stairs admiring their handiwork.

  “Yes?”

  “Can Bobby Nusku come and live here with us?” Bobby stopped dead. Val saw the hump of his back rising and falling underneath the sheets.

  “Oh, I think his father would be wondering where he is.”

  “He won’t,” Bobby said.

  “How do you know?”

  “One time I stayed out all night because I thought I’d killed my friend Sunny.”

  “All night?” Bobby could tell that Val thought he was exaggerating.

  “Yeah. I sat on his doorstep until the morning when his mum came home.”

  “And nobody came looking for you?”

  “Nobody,” he said. Val looked at the den and realized that she wanted to be in there with them. She felt like Alice, full of EAT ME cake, too big to fit through the door.

  Bobby appeared at the far end of the room, beside the fireplace, where he had widened an entrance to the den that she would easily be able to crawl through.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Come on,” he said. Val dropped down on to all fours and shuffled, self-consciously, across the carpet toward him. With each inch she moved forward she regressed another year. “Go in,” he said. So she did, reminded of how it felt when she was a little girl, when she and her father would play in the attic, and he would bury her in blankets and pillows until she giggled so much she could barely breathe. Rosa took her hand and led her to the center of the den. There, she found what they had been laughing at. Bert, licking the leather watchstrap’s lacquer from his teeth, a luminous Cheshire Cat grin of his own.

  • • •

  On hot days they laid a blanket out on the plush grass
in the garden and had a picnic. When it rained they stayed indoors and took turns reading aloud.

  Bobby taught Val how to keep a ball in the air using just her head and she taught him about psychology and sociology. How people work on the inside and out. About experiences and what they make you do.

  “I haven’t had any experiences,” he said, “I’m not old enough.”

  “Sadly,” Val said, “that’s not how experiences work.”

  “How do you know so much? Were you a professor before you were a cleaner?” She smiled and the tuning fork of his heart hummed.

  “I wanted to be. Or something like that. Instead I clean around the textbooks and take them home to read afterward. I suppose I’m my own professor. But really I’m just a cleaner.”

  “Well, it’s like you said, the world always needs cleaners. There is always someone making things dirty.”

  Val caught a laugh in her throat before it could cleave open her lips. Rosa dangled treats in front of Bert’s nose, but he remained unimpressed by their half-hypnotic twizzle.

  When the weather was warm enough they went to town. Every time Bobby recognized somebody from school, he walked beside Rosa with his jaw pointed upward at the sky. For the first time in his life, he felt pride and confidence, those twin spires that rise from the soul when you have a good friend.

  One day they saw Cindy drinking coffee and eating chocolate cake with another woman, her hair not even slightly reminiscent of the film star’s it was intended to be. The indistinct memory of a tattoo had blurred on her forearm, a permanent dark green mess. Bobby slowed to hide behind the ballooning ruffles of Val’s dress as they passed by, and though convinced he’d made it, they had moved out of step. He had been seen.

  Two thoughts entered Cindy’s mind. The first was how odd it seemed that Bobby was with the woman and her disabled daughter who lived at the end of the road. She considered calling Bruce, but knew better than to disturb him while he was working. The second was that she should finish her cake, which was delicious.