“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.
CHAPTER NINE
THE CAVEMAN
Morning hours vanished somewhere inside the books. Bobby read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, amazed that a man whose name he couldn’t pronounce might write a story that seemed like it was written just for him. Like the young prince, he too found the adult world strange. He too saw very few certainties in it. Afterward, Val shaved Bobby’s head. The blade tickled as she pulled it over his scalp.
“Stop fidgeting,” she said, “or I might slip and cut your ear off.” Thick brown locks fluttered to the ground, in keeping with the seasons.
“Are we all going to shave our heads?” he asked.
“In terms of us hiding in plain sight, I’m not sure how effective it would be.”
“But there is no one here to hide from.”
“We’re going to need to go and get supplies. I think the sooner we do that, the better.”
She and Rosa put on floppy hats that concealed most of their faces. Bert, though invited, opted to spend his time sleeping beneath the mobile library, hiding from the high-hung mist.
The three walked down the long country road, which dipped and twisted at the seam of the fields. A postman idled by. Gray plumes of smoke rose from a lone collapsing chimney. This quaint caricature of English country life reminded Rosa of the Enid Blyton books Val had read to her in the mobile library. She put her arms around Bobby’s shoulders with a sisterly affection, but Val couldn’t help wonder whether people would be more convinced they were siblings had they fought with bared teeth.
The elderly woman in the grocery shop complimented Val and Rosa on their hats.
“Don’t see many people with them in the village,” she said, as if they’d just ridden into town on the back of a mammoth. Val spotted a small thatch of loose hair on Bobby’s collar and plucked it off before the woman noticed. They bought milk, orange juice and three luscious apples. The woman gave Rosa and Bobby each a lemon-flavored lollipop, the reason why her shop had long been a fixture for the children in the village.
As they were leaving, Bobby spotted an image he recognized on the front of the newspaper. It wasn’t the main story, which featured a photograph of a familiar face, Detective Jimmy Samas (he appeared even younger than he had before, if that were possible). Instead it was tucked two-thirds of the way down the page in a slim column on the right-hand side. A picture of him.
• • •
The box had been labeled “Miscellaneous” by his father, but the contents were actually united by a theme—they belonged to his mother—and so were anything but. This was Bobby’s favorite box of things in the whole world, and formed the centerpiece of his files. To anybody else it was just an umbrella, a hair dryer, a camera . . . life’s accrued detritus. But he knew that it contained parts of her, as fundamental to her being as arms, legs, teeth and eyelashes. The umbrella. She carried it even in the sunshine so that Bobby’s neck would never burn. This was her soul. The hair dryer. She would train it on him in the mornings, warming up the air when it was too cold to get out of bed. This was her heart. And the camera. It still had film in the back of it, pictures she’d taken, memories she’d wanted to keep. This was her mind. Sorting through it after she’d gone, he realized that he could rebuild her out of this. He could make her all over again.
There were four photographs left on the roll before it could be developed. A few weekends after first meeting, Sunny and Bobby took it to the The Ponds. His mother would have liked Sunny, especially when she saw how he protected her son, so Bobby took a photograph of him stirring the pea-green algae of the ponds with a stick. He took another photograph of the flowers that grew in the damp ground. She had cherished their delicate audience when they stole away together for a picnic.
Sunny took a photograph of Bobby trying to shimmy up the trunk of the tallest tree he could find, but he slipped at the vital moment and landed on his arse in the mud. Both were convinced the results would be too blurry, and so needed to ensure that the final photograph was one Bobby’s mother would want to keep forever when she returned. A memory indelibly written in love’s stubborn ink.
They walked to Bull Rock. Nobody else called it Bull Rock. That was a name they had given it. From a certain angle, on the far end of the lake, two smaller shelves of stone rose like a bullock’s thick horns. When the water’s reflection bounced off the surface, it looked, when they tried extra hard to see it, like the hoop of metal puncturing a bullock’s nose. Sunny and Bobby climbed to the top. They could see the far clouds dyed rose by the sundown, and a chevron of geese swinging over the treetops. They could see the dull fog that hung over the town, and the mist made of midges that moved across the water. They could see their entire world from the spot where Bobby once sat with his mother and watched it, planning their escape. A photograph of her favorite view, with Bobby all grown up standing in front of it, would make a perfect addition to his files.
“Left a bit,” Sunny said. “Right a bit. Now crouch down so that we can see the lake and the town behind you at the same time.” Bobby knelt in position on the cold rock, his ears lit up by the sun. “Ready? One, two, three.”
There was
a click and a whir as the film wound back, but the whiteness of the flash remained in Bobby’s eyes. If he’d known that one day this photograph would be on the front of a newspaper, he might have cleaned the mud from the arse of his jeans and washed his hands in the water of the lake.
Less than a year later Cindy had relegated the photograph to a small frame atop the fridge, where it couldn’t be seen. That was where the police had taken it from—the most recent photograph of Bobby in existence.
• • •
Bobby, Val and Rosa walked around the village for a while. Crumbled ruins of a castle wall braced against the wind where a farmer tended two horses. One of them was pregnant, the oak-colored barrel of her belly swinging as she ate.
A cottage where a famous poet was born had been turned into a museum of her life. They shadowed a group of tourists, mostly older couples. Bobby imagined that he and Val were married, though he was unsure exactly what this meant and it made him feel a little odd. All he really wanted to be was the kind of man who could repair anything she asked him to. On Rosa’s insistence they bought pens from the gift shop and decided to make their way back to the mobile library while the afternoon sun was still approaching its peak.
“Here,” Rosa said, coming to a standstill outside an old tearoom. The cupcakes in the window had been arranged around a display stand in the shape of a helter-skelter. She pushed her fingers against the glass like she could reach through the surface and take one. “I want a cake.”
“I’m afraid you can’t have one,” Val said.
“Yes I can.” Rosa clenched her fists and rubbed the back of them against her forehead. She made a strange chuntering noise, as if incanting a temper.
“Come on,” Val said.
“No.” Rosa ground her teeth, punched herself in the chest, and then in the face, fighting something inside her angrily waking from hibernation. Val had warned Bobby about Rosa’s tantrums, but he was never prepared for the ferocity with which they arrived. Her face flushed a violent crimson. She slammed a hand against the window and shouted, but the words were clumped together to form one long and indistinguishable roar. Val made a grab for Rosa’s wrist, but Rosa swatted her away.
A woman emerged from the shop, shocked to find Rosa standing there in distress.
“What on earth’s going on?” she said. Rosa swung her foot, narrowly missing the woman’s shins, and kicked a hole in the rotten wood at the bottom of the door frame. She smacked the glass again. It wobbled, and Val could hear it, like the chime in the air after a gong is struck. Inside, the tearoom was busy with tourists. Val could see them watching through the window.
Another woman joined the first in the doorway. She said something, but she couldn’t quite summon from her tiny frame a noise that could compete with Rosa, now shouting at the top of her voice. Rosa barged past the two women, almost knocking them to the ground, clambered into the window display and kicked the cake stand to pieces. Outside, Val, Bobby and the two women watched thick dollops of cream drip down the glass. Val, scattering the confetti of apologies behind her, chased Rosa into the shop, leaving the two women staring at Bobby with their mouths wide open. Across the street hung linen flapped on a breeze that never made it to his skin.
“You,” the first woman said, “I’ve seen you.”
“You haven’t,” he said, “I’m not from around here.”
“You must be,” she said, before turning to her friend, “musn’t he?” Bobby thought about the mobile library, imagining it rearing up behind him like a trusty steed. Of the hundred stories he now knew, the only one that popped into his head at this very moment was the one he’d read most recently. There were others more believable, less fantastical, more fitting, but under pressure of the scenes unfolding they had vanished, as if they’d never been written at all.
“No,” he said. “I am not. This is not even my home planet. My home planet is tiny. It is an asteroid the size of a house. I have been exploring the galaxy. I’ve met a king with no subjects, a man who believed himself to be the most admirable on his planet even though he lived there by himself, a drunk who drank to forget the shame of being a drunkard, a businessman who said he owned the stars, a lamplighter who lit the same lamp every minute and an elderly map maker who had never explored the world he claimed to have mapped.”
The more Bobby talked, the more he felt like the Little Prince, even posing as if a crown was perched proudly on his head.
“Oh . . .” said the woman, but Bobby didn’t let her finish.
“He’s the one who told me to come here, to your teashop in a village on Earth. And now I have met you.” Val emerged from the shop, dragging Rosa—plastered with cake—behind her. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
The two women watched them walk all the way up the street in the wrong direction. Once out of sight they waited in a dank alleyway beside a pub, then climbed over a fence and cut across five freshly churned fields. Soon their socks were moist with mud.
“What did you tell them?” Val asked.
“That I was the Little Prince,” Bobby said. He expected Val to be angry, but she laughed, embraced him, and landed a kiss on the soft flesh of his earlobe. By the time they arrived back at the mobile library Rosa’s tantrum had evaporated. But for the cherry squashed into the fabric of her coat, no one would have known anything unusual had happened.
“And that’s how it goes,” Val said. “The story carries on.”
• • •
Bert was nowhere to be seen. Val checked the mobile library. Rosa searched the cab. Bobby crawled beneath the truck and around the tires, finding nothing but a half-eaten biscuit and the shape of Bert’s profile in the grass. They stood at the edge of the woods and called his name. Rosa rattled a tin full of his favorite snacks. All that came back was the buzzing of insects, heard but not seen, as though the leaves themselves were humming.
Seeing Val upset, Bobby swapped his shoes for wellingtons and wandered further into the trees. He tapped a stick against trunks and rustled bushes as he passed, actions that he thought a man might do.
“Bert!” An echo carried his voice away with it. When he’d walked so far that he could no longer see the mobile library, he mournfully returned without the dog.
Val made a fire as the night drew in. She held Rosa, and no one spoke of anything much.
Expecting the wail of sirens to bomb into the clearing at any moment, to fill it with red and blue, Val wished they could all disappear into the woods like Bert. Until this excursion she’d not strayed far from home, and had certainly never broken the law. At camp, when her school friends had taken boys back to their bunks, she had faked an asthma attack and slept in the medical bay. She’d remained a virgin until she met Rosa’s father—someone special—whose specialness had drained from him with startling speed, the lights still off, the sheets still damp.
Val had never been late paying the electricity bill. She barely even swore. Only recently, once Rosa had become slightly less dependent, had she found time to examine opportunities not taken. And there were many. Meeting Bobby had marked a sea change in her thinking. What better motive to rebel than granting this boy a reprieve from a rotten start in life, even if it did turn out to be fleeting. She felt a tremendous, soaring sense of freedom that not having a job exacerbated, but it was intermittently disrupted by the same six words rolling around inside her head. Where has that bloody dog gone?
Close to midnight, Bert casually sauntered out of the darkness and sat down next to Rosa, who hugged him so hard he dropped what had been in his mouth—a dirty pair of rolled-up green army socks. Val asked him where he had been, and whose laundry basket he had pilfered, like he might draw her a map of the area. Bert yawned and padded up the steps of the mobile library, reminding them all that it was way past their bedtime.
• • •
The next morning, nestled in the nook of the cab, Bobby read Stig of the Dump by Clive King while Val washed their clothes—and the new socks—in a bucket of water, hanging
the dripping goods from the bough of a tree.
Bobby kept his files clean and organized, and started to design for his mother the most comfortable bed imaginable, made from the ripped-up pages of the mathematics textbooks and an intricate bedstead woven from twigs.
“Look,” Rosa said, pointing. Bert waddled once more toward the woods. He was old and slow, so they caught him up easily, leaping over roots and slinking under brambles. Bert didn’t seem to mind that they were following him, but paid no attention when Val tried to make him stop. At a brook they presumed he might give up, but he jumped its width without breaking stride.
They walked until the canopy of the trees was thick enough that the daylight only dripped through, where they came to a storm drain. Beside it was a pile of sodden rags and a collapsed tent, teased by the wind, opening and closing like an unhealthy lung.
Bert sat down next to a large mound of leaves, whipped up and dumped by the wind.
“I think Bert might be going a little senile,” Val said.
“What does that mean, Val?” Rosa asked.
“Silly. Because he’s old. Like your mother.”
Val tugged on his tail to try to make him stand up but he jammed his snout into the undergrowth and pushed mud around with his nose. “Bert, come on,” she said, “it’s time to go home.”
“Yeah, Bert,” Rosa said, throwing a stick in his general direction, “stop being senile, it’s time to go home.”
Suddenly Val screamed, stumbled backward, tripped over a cluster of toadstools and landed on her behind. Bobby moved to help her.
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