Mobile Library (6 page)

“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.

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.

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 houses.” 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.