Mobile Library (12 page)

The metal fence was chewed by the tires and spat back out at the end of the road.

Then they were gone toward what they did not know, and until now had not dared even imagine, in their giant library on wheels. It felt like opening a book about which they knew nothing.

•  •  •

They drove the main street that ringed the town center. Val, still getting used to the truck's tremendous size, sideswiped the occasional parked car, leaving deep silver scratches in the metalwork. Rosa laughed whenever she accidentally pressed the horn.

“We should have an adventure,” Bobby said.

“We're having an adventure,” Val said.

“Will they look for us?”

“Yes. They'll look for us.”

“Will we be in trouble?”

“Only bad people get in trouble.” Rosa cheered.

The mobile library segued into the migratory pack of the motorway, mechanical buffalo charging down the plain. Rain on the windscreen blurred the lights into an endless cable of color.

Rosa fell asleep beside Bobby. He covered her with an old blanket he found behind the seat, and smoothed it down to ensure that she was tightly bundled. There was nothing in the glove box but a flashlight, a set of binoculars, a screwdriver and an old newspaper. Every few minutes he tore out a tiny strip, rolled it up and fed it through the gap in the window, where the wind dashed away with it. He hoped that his mother would be able to follow the trail he had left. It had worked for Hansel and Gretel.

A red light flashed beside the indicator.

“We need fuel,” Val said. The mobile library's engine had begun to splutter. “And we need it fast.”

She pulled into the next roadside petrol station, where neon signs bleached their skin exotic pinks. Bobby looked after Rosa and Bert while Val searched for the cap on the tank. Numbers rose on the counter clicker as she filled it, quickly becoming a figure higher than Bobby had ever seen before. Combined with the lighting and the nighttime, the petrol station, to a child's eyes, had the air of a flashy casino. Val came back to the cab to fetch her purse from her handbag and Bobby accompanied her into the shop to pay.

The man behind the counter leafed through a magazine about fishing, appearing constantly on the cusp of a gigantic yawn. Clusters of teenage acne had formed a glistening trail from his cheeks to his neck. Val and Bobby filled a basket with chocolate bars and treats.

“Let me do the talking,” Val said to Bobby as they neared the counter.

“Midnight snacking?” the man said, running the packets across the winking red glow of the scanner. On his badge was the name
Bryan
. He had been awarded two silver stars, but it did not say what for.

“Something like that.” Val counted the change in her palm.

“A little past your bedtime, isn't it, young man?” Bobby nonchalantly ruffled a display of salted peanuts and deepened his voice to little effect.

“No,” he said, “sometimes I stay up all night.” Val laughed, clutching her sides so that Bobby knew she was faking.

“I need to pay for some fuel as well,” she said. “Pump number six.” Bryan looked out of the window across the forecourt, then at Val, then again at the mobile library.

“That truck,” he said, “it's yours?”

“Yes it is.”

“A little big, isn't it?”

“For what?”

“For, uh . . .”

“For a woman?”

“Well, they're not my words. They're yours.”

Val sighed. Bryan pretended to operate the till, pointlessly stroking its buttons.

“Actually, it's not technically a truck. It's a mobile library.”

“And you take it out at night?”

“Of course,” she said. “I'm a librarian. I wouldn't make much of a truck driver with these little, feminine arms, now would I?”

Bobby watched himself in the monitor on the wall, an inch-high column of gray and black pixels. From some angles he appeared taller than he was, and if he held his hair apart at his crown it looked a little like he was going bald. He wrongly concluded that manhood's first warning shots were being fired across his bow and silently punched the air in celebration. They were very welcome.

Val paid and they left the shop before Bryan could give them a receipt. She almost knocked over a petrol pump on the passenger side as they pulled out of the station. The checkout assistant banged balled fists on the glass, greasy skin smears smudging the pane. In the window, lent a faded glamour by the neon strobing of the signage, he looked like a showgirl seeing Vegas from a taxi cab.

Nectar-colored streetlights trapped the stillness of entire towns in amber. The high-pressure squeeze of hydraulic brakes cut the air and set off car alarms passing by. Occasionally pedestrians stopped in their tracks at the sight of the mobile library sailing through the night. And it did feel like sailing when they built up speed, as though nothing but an iceberg could stop them. Bobby wound down the window and let the wind explore the back of his mouth. It made his teeth ache but he didn't stop. He wanted to make his insides feel as new as his outsides did.

They came to a crossroads. Freshly painted white lines sliced through the oily black of new tar on the surface. It was quiet enough that Bobby could hear the mechanics of the traffic lights buzzing, the gentle tick between red and green, as a police car pulled up beside them.

“Oh God,” Val said, “close the window.” Bobby could tell that she was annoyed because her voice lingered on that uneven middle ground between a whisper and the volume of everyday conversation. “I said close the window, Bobby. Close the window right now.” Bobby tore off another bit of newspaper and slipped it out of the gap. It fluttered through the air and landed on the hood of the police car. The policewoman inside it looked up at Bobby and smiled. He smiled back. When the lights changed, they both pulled away in opposite directions. She'd no reason to suspect he was anything other than a child whose librarian parents didn't mind him getting tired enough to be in a stinking mood all day tomorrow.

•  •  •

Bruce Nusku was too busy sobering up in the emergency department of the local hospital to notice that his son had gone missing. The gauze Cindy had wrapped around his thigh was now soaked in blood, and all he really wanted was another drink.

Had the lady who lived opposite the mobile library been more community-spirited, perhaps she'd have phoned the police. Instead she sliced up a cucumber and laid slivers of it across her eyes, before reclining on the sofa and falling asleep. She had never used the mobile library. To her it was just an eyesore parked across the street.

Bryan often met unusual people while working the night shift at the petrol station, and had been supplementing his wages by skimming notes from the till for six months. Having the police sniff around was the last thing on his agenda. Besides, for all he knew she
was
a librarian, even if her working hours were peculiar. He didn't know any librarians.

The policewoman's radio would crackle into life eventually, but not until the sun had long laid claim to the day. An amateur gardener had noticed two things about his allotment. First, it was missing some potatoes and carrots. Second, it was catching a whole lot more of the morning light than it had in the weeks previously. Having only just recovered from an operation to remove double cataracts, he assumed his eyes were to blame. Only later did he peer through the fence to find that the mobile library had disappeared. If the council had found money enough to fund it again, then he was pleased, for he often whiled away entire mornings with his granddaughter over a book or two. But he hadn't heard any news of that. He made himself a mug of peppermint tea, dwelled on it for a while, then picked up the telephone, wondering if these were the first few glimmerings of senility.

“Hello,” he said, “now, I'm sorry if I'm wasting your time . . .”

Nobody had missed Val and Rosa enough to alert anyone to their disappearance. To miss someone you must notice they have gone.

•  •  •

Four hours of steering had made Val's arms ache from her shoulders to her wrists. It was time to get off the road. She assigned Bobby the task of looking out for somewhere to stop for what remained of the night. The adrenaline had faded now, doubt had set in, and she quietly resigned herself to their being caught at any moment.

They drove down a thin country lane, a tight seam through a patchwork of barley fields, to where Bobby spotted a copse atop a hill. Val slowed the truck and pulled into a small, pretty clearing. Caught by the headlights, bluebells twinkled with a faint morning frost. The mobile library could not be seen from the road, even when the entire plot was lit by the unforgiving full beam of a passing car. The branches bathed in the red of the brake lights looked like blood trickling across the moon. Nothing keeps a secret like the trees.

They set up camp in the back of the truck, sleeping on the carpet by the shelves of children's books. Val, Rosa and then Bobby, facing the same direction, curled into the shape of a C. With the door closed they could have been anywhere, not just in the real world, but beyond it. The walls were lined with escape routes and exits, to deserts, space and oceans and to stranger places still.

“Read to us,” Bobby said. He chose the biggest, oldest-looking book he could see, one that would seem to suit the scale of events that had unfolded. He handed Val a heavy hardback copy of
Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville, with dog-eared burgundy trim.

Bobby listened to the words. They were not coming from her mouth, but from somewhere in the middle of her body. Rosa and Bobby put their ears to her chest, rising and falling to the rhythm of her lungs. Neither of them spoke until she stopped reading, exhausted, just as Starbuck exhorts Ahab one last time to desist from chasing the whale through the sea.

“Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”

“Does this story have a happy ending?” Bobby asked.

“There is no such thing as an ending,” she said. “Good things come out of bad things and bad things come out of good things, but it always continues. It's as in life. Books are life. There is just the part you read. They start before that. They finish after it. Everything carries on forever. You are only in it for those pages, for a tiny window of time.”

•  •  •

The metal walls of the mobile library stored the morning heat. Outside, they cleaned their teeth with mineral water. Val cooked breakfast on a small gas stove she had bought years before, part of an unrealized dream to take Rosa camping. Hot fat bubbles burst on burnt sausage skin.

“Are we going to live here now?” Bobby asked.

“I don't know,” Val said.

“I'd like it if we did.”

Bobby fetched the binoculars from the glove box in the cab and lay in the long grass on his back with Rosa flopped across his belly. They tried to catch golden leaves as they fell and made Bert snuffle out chestnuts from the undergrowth. Val strung up the conkers with old bootlaces that they spun around their heads, pretending to be helicopters. They played chase until they were out of breath, then teased a beetle that had wandered into their path, until it disappeared in the dirt. By dinnertime Bobby had pronounced it “probably the best day of my life.” When Val lit a fire and they read each other stories, he was sure. He studied the lines beside her eyes as they wriggled in the flicker of the flame, and wished that he had his own so that Val might think him wise.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“You should never ask a woman her age,” Val said, “but seeing as it's you I'll make an exception. I am forty years old.”

“That's kind of ancient.”

“I'm a museum piece all right.” The heat of the flames had made her woozy.

“How come you're not in love?”

Val toasted another marshmallow. Hot white goo dripped down the stick. She had never had these conversations with her daughter. On more than one occasion this fact had broken her heart.

“How do you know that I'm not?”

“Are you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Who with?”

“With Rosa.” Rosa draped herself around her mother's shoulders, assuming her outline as readily as silk.

“But I mean with someone else.” The brittle wood in the fire cracked like small animal bones.

“I guess it just didn't turn out that way.”

“Why not?”

“Who knows?”

“You must know, you're forty.”

“Age does not wisdom bring.”

“You sound like you're talking backward.”

Val blew on the marshmallow and tested its heat with the tip of her tongue. “Were you in love with Rosa's dad?” Bobby asked.

“We were in love with each other, when we married.”

“You were married?”

“I had a ring and everything.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. A whole other life ago. I told you, the story starts long before you get there. It will go on a long time after you've gone.” Bobby considered the comment.

“You must have been a grown-up for a very long time.”

“You could say that,” Val said. She snapped a fallen branch across her knee and tossed into the flames the end that Bert didn't walk away with. The fire belly-danced across the ash. “When he met Rosa he decided that loving a little girl like her would be too much work for a man like him. Even though Rosa gives love unconditionally. When someone thinks that way, well . . .” It seemed as though she might say something else, but she was content to listen to the owls, as if they would finish sentences on her grateful behalf.

“I think you're wise,” Bobby said.

“Then maybe I am,” she said.

“I think you're wise too, Val,” Rosa said.

“Then I definitely must be!”

Rosa combed Bert so that his coat reflected the moonlight. They read ghost stories with torches under their chins, throwing the shadows of their noses over their foreheads. When they heard noises coming from the woods, they scared each other with talk of wolves and hungry bears, but nobody believed that they were really there. Outside of the three of them the world didn't exist anymore, and neither did the monsters in it.