“So you never see other people?” Bobby asked.
“Sometimes,” Baron said, more taken with finishing his second helping than with chatting to the boy.
“When?”
“Twice a year. Once in the spring and then after the floods, before the snow, I might drive down to the village. About twenty miles if the roads are clear. Pick up provisions from the shop there, but the woman behind the counter knows I’m not one for talking.”
“What happened to your wife?”
“Bobby,” Val said, “that’s a very personal question.”
“It’s fine,” Baron said, “understandable. She died. That’s all. People die. Nothing really ends. You just get on with it.” He stared at his plate. Bobby had seen this look before, frozen on the face of his father. The diminishing ability to discern life, after there had been death in such close proximity.
• • •
As it became obvious to Baron that she would die, and the only fight that remained was to keep their unborn child alive, he had so badly wanted it to be a daughter. His wife’s beautiful face, that he loved so deeply, would be replicated then, would grow and live on in this new form of her. But instead came a son, and her face was gone forever. That, to him, was an idea worth mourning, far more so than her body in the ground. After she died, not a single other human being had been worthy of his gaze. The only way he could replicate the wonder that swelled his soul whenever he saw her face was to spend his riches on rare and exotic creatures, examples of a beauty, like hers, that only nature could make.
To him, the boy, who grew quickly, lumbering without any of his mother’s grace, had been little but a footnote on a masterpiece, a hindrance, certainly unworthy of the family title which law and tradition dictate he hand down. Where possible, he left the boy alone, and did not once let him enter the zoo to see the animals, where Baron spent most of his time. He waited for an excuse to rid himself of the boy, who was increasingly angry and volatile. It came with the striking of a match, when he was just eight years old.
• • •
“When she died, that’s when I started collecting animals. First one was a snow leopard. Can you believe that? The northern tip of Scotland, a damn snow leopard! A marvelous creature it is too. Endangered, not many left. Pale green eyes, rosette-shaped spots on their body. Can look as serene and as approachable as you like, but there’s that coldness, that violence in their eyes. The way they look, the way they seem, it’s all a trick to pull you close enough and bite you up. Now that’s something to stand back and admire.”
Rosa growled. Baron smiled, poured himself a second triple whisky then tipped the bottle toward Joe.
“Drink?”
“No thank you.”
“Oh come on. Can’t come all this way to the highlands on a camping trip and not drink a little fire when it’s offered.”
Joe put his hand across the mouth of the glass. “I’m fine.” Baron noticed a dimple creased in Joe’s chin, same as his own.
“Tell me more about the animals,” Bobby said.
Baron stared wistfully at the ceiling beams. “After the snow leopard I got more big cats. Lions, tigresses, a puma or two. Then monkeys. Then birds. Millions of pounds’ worth. You have to pay for their upkeep of course. Didn’t take long for the money to burn out. I was never good with money. This old place fell to pieces. Started selling my animals one by one, and it felt like giving a little part of me away every single time. Nothing left at all now. No money to speak of. Just me and Captain here. Can’t sell the place, wouldn’t want to. Been in the family forever. So I’ll die. To hell with it afterward, the story goes on.”
Bobby thought of Willy Wonka, handing his magnificent chocolate factory down to Charlie Bucket, the only boy who’d been good enough. He had read it to Rosa in the mobile library, her coiled up by his side, their breathing a blissful inverse synchronicity.
“A shame you never had a child you could give it to,” Val said. Baron ran his fingers through his beard, nails snagging on the knots, crumbs falling free and bouncing on the tabletop.
“Aye,” Baron said, “I suppose it is.” Joe sprang to his feet, the veins around the cartilage in his neck moving, what felt like popping candy underneath the skin.
“I need to piss.”
“Door on the right,” Baron said, draining his Scotch so quickly that the ice cubes kept their corners. He poured another, deeper this time, and swilled it, a greasy amber rib cage climbing down the glass. With each sip he grew visibly more sullen, black sinkholes opening up, threatening to swallow both his eyes. It resonated through the room, a saddening that Bobby felt first in his toes, then rising, up his legs, in his core, down his arms and filling his head.
Joe returned, his face doused in cold water, goose pimples struck across his brow.
“I think I’ll have that whisky now,” he said.
“Good show!” Baron said, helping himself to another. Rosa and Val opened tins of rice pudding, which they warmed in a pot above the flame. They added brown sugar for flavor. Captain flew back and forth through the steam. They ate quickly, before the air could cool it. Val noticed the spoon shaking in Joe’s hand, tapping against the rim of his empty metal bowl.
“You okay?” she asked.
“He’s fine!” Baron said, his accent broadening as the volume built. Joe placed the spoon on the table, aimed in Baron’s direction.
“Must be entire wings of this place you haven’t been in for years,” he said.
“Aye. Doubt I remember where all the rooms are these days.”
“I saw the roof has caved in on some of it. And there’s tree roots growing through the ground in the basement. There’s a little nursery or something down there.”
“That’s right, never used. It’s a grand old building, that’s for sure. But, these things decay. What’s history without ruins?”
Joe’s knuckles whitened through the flesh on his hand, like teeth bared by a vicious dog. “You could fix it up. It’s not too late.”
“A pointless endeavor. I’ll be dead soon. Can hardly take the old place with me, now can I?”
“But you’ve so much here. Seems a shame not to share it.”
“I told you, I shared it, with my wife.”
“But to not have children . . .”
Baron dropped his own spoon in the bowl with a clang that slowly bled out into silence. “Would you say it was greedy?” he said.
“Well, I . . .”
“Greed is a funny word, isn’t it? One man’s greed is another man’s right. It’s what the world’s fueled by, greed, what makes it go round. More money, more land, more worth than your neighbor. Isn’t that how the planet has always turned.” Baron hovered two inches above his seat. “So what is greed?”
Joe flinched. He’d been frightened of his father as a boy. It came back to him now, though he tried to hide it, a sawing inside his chest. His size, his age, his strength meant nothing. He was a child again, contorting to fit into his father’s shadow. “I don’t know.”
Val had never seen Joe this way.
“Please, gentlemen,” she said, confused by the turn of their exchange. “Perhaps you’ve both had enough whisky for now, huh?” Baron ignored Val, and a little of what had scared Joe crept beneath her skin.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “Greed is an intense and selfish desire for something that isn’t yours.” He was standing over Joe, leaning down to bring their faces close together, and Bobby saw the likeness. “But this house is mine. All of this, the land, the zoo, the food we now eat, is mine. So it can’t be greed, can it, if I own it? Greed can only be felt by someone who wants what isn’t theirs. Like this house, for instance.” He coughed into his fist. “So tell me, Joseph, where is the greed now?”
Joe unshielded his eyes and peered into his father’s, creased with rage. “You recognize me?” Val and Bobby froze. Baron ignored them.
“The moment I saw you.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
/>
“Of course not. Thought I’d give you the opportunity to apologize first.”
“Apologize?”
“For your temper. Or don’t you remember?”
If he had ever intensely and selfishly desired anything, it had been his father’s affection. Locked outside the zoo alone, hearing the calls of animals whose majesty he could only imagine, lighting that match had seemed as good a way to get it as any. He had set light to the outer wall of the maze. The wind had run with it, burning down one hundred and fifty meters of hedgerow before there was no further to spread.
“I have nothing to apologize for,” he said. Val wrapped her fingers around Joe’s arm, but he began to unpick them.
“Then you’re wanting me to apologize for sending you away? Is that it?”
“No . . .”
“For packing off an angry, unmanageable, unpredictable, dangerous little boy into the care of people who could help him, and care for him and keep him safe?”
“You didn’t want me. You didn’t want me to have this place. You didn’t even want me to have your name.”
“I was an old man even then, Joseph. What was I meant to do? That’s what you want an apology for, is it?”
Joe stood, expanding to his full size. “I don’t want an apology.”
“Then it is as I thought. Greed, pure greed and nothing else. You’ve come to lay claim to the house and the grounds, haven’t you? You’ve come because you want what you selfishly and intensely desire to be yours. My name. Baron.” He banged his fist down on the tabletop, scattering the crumbs that had grouped there as if waiting for a sermon.
“Please,” Val said, her voice wavering, “you’ll frighten the children.”
“Ach, sit down, woman,” Baron said. Bobby, the hairs on his neck spiking like a layer of frost, saw spit twinkling in the wire of Baron’s moustache.
“Don’t talk to her like that,” he said.
“Come now,” Baron said, flopping back into his chair and slugging Scotch from the bottle, “Harry, Bobby, whatever your name is. I don’t think a child will be telling me what to do.”
Joe scanned the table, the spoon, the bowl, the knife. He imagined ramming it into the old man’s abdomen, his intestines spilling forth. Red jellyfish wobbling on the floor, Bert ravenously gobbling up the meat. His fists began to tremble, and the muscles in his legs pulled taut as he prepared to launch himself across the room, directly at the old man’s throat.
Then out of the corner of his eye he saw Bobby, his head shaking slowly from side to side, a blink that lingered closed, then opened to reveal those deep brown eyes, that calmed Joe like no one and nothing had managed to before.
“Well, let me tell you,” Baron said, one hand beneath his cape, drunkenly fumbling for the air pistol in his pocket, “you’ll never have what’s mine. It belongs to a family you were never part of.” Joe saw how grief had wizened the old man. He almost felt sorry for him, but only for a second. “You were never my son, Joseph. Your connection to this family died with your mother.”
Bobby bolted back from the table with a piercing yelp, his shirt soaked through with sweat, and sprinted from the room.
• • •
One two three four five six seven. One two three four five six seven. One two three four five six seven. The crash and crumple of the metal, the smashing of his head through the windscreen, the landing of his body on the car stopped right in front of them, he heard them perfectly.
Bobby sat up. He ran his palms down his arms, over his legs and through his hair. No cuts. Not even a scratch. He waited, concussed, for the taste of iron on his lips, blood filling his mouth, but it never came. The scene was tranquil. There is no greater serenity than that which exists in hell.
Fragments of glass scattered across the motorway, crumpled metal folded over burnt rubber. A hubcap rocking on the road. Bobby was elated by the petrol fumes. The car, where he had been just seconds before, had jackknifed. Sharp steel stabbed through the smoke.
Bruce Nusku climbed out of the twisted driver’s side door, nose busted open by an airbag. Unsure as to exactly where he was, he coughed, once, twice, three times, then ambled to the concrete wall at the side of the motorway and sat down in the dent where they’d struck it. A bloody trail zigzagged at his feet.
Bobby felt a great rush of sympathy for his father, crimson soaking through his clothes. He wanted to hold him. He wanted to apologize for what they’d not yet done, so he did, right there on the road.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“You’re sorry?” Bruce said, blood burning at the root of his tongue. “For what?”
“We were going to run away at the beach. We were going to ask you to buy us an ice cream, and then we were going to run away so that you never saw us again.” Bruce rubbed his head and spat a tooth across the white line.
“That’s okay,” he said, “that’s okay.”
Bobby walked around the car to the passenger door.
“Mum,” he said through the metal, “I told him. Even though I promised more than all of the other promises added together forever, I told him.” He pulled the handle. She slumped to the side, held in the chair by her belt. His mother was dead, and the baby inside her. But she looked alive still, and at peace, how he had never seen her before. He kissed her on the lips, soft, a cherry freshly plucked.
• • •
Night had fallen, stars blotted by clouds, and the grounds were lost in darkness. But Bobby could see. He ran shoeless through the long grass, hurdling nettles and stones. Fifteen seconds to the fountain in the center of the gardens, the waterfall heckling from a distance. Twelve hops up the twenty-four steps to the east wing’s grandiose doorway. Seven strides along the hallway wall, stopping halfway to edge around the grandfather clock that tolled no longer. Through the drawing room, past the downward slope to the old servants’ quarters, to the staircase that spiraled up through the floors. Six minutes, forty-three seconds to the loft, and out of the hole caved in the roof, to his files suspended from the thick hunk of the chimney stack by a length of sodden rope.
• • •
On the ground, Val, Rosa and Joe were frantically searching. They explored the zoo, Bert sniffing for Bobby’s scent but thrown by the lingering odor of lion that permeated the bars. Rosa checked the reptile pen. Val scoured the insect house. Joe entered each and every cage, pulling rotting hay bales from the alcoves where the bears and apes once slept. There was no sign of the boy.
Joe started toward the entrance of the maze, until Rosa began cheering.
“Bobby Nusku! Bobby Nusku!” She pointed at the figure on the roof, neatly framed by the moon.
Bobby looked down at the ground, eyes round as an owl’s. He could see everything as clearly as if it were day. He stood with his hands on his hips, legs apart, eighty feet or more in the air.
“Don’t,” Val said. “Wait for me.” He saw her lips move and wanted to kiss them. To know how different from his mother’s they might taste. She ran into the house, and Joe positioned himself to catch Bobby, just in case.
Val arrived on the rooftop out of breath.
“Bobby,” she said, “come down from the edge.”
“She’s dead,” he said. He raised his fist. In it was the rope tied around the bag, which he swung around his head like a propeller, the swoosh of it cutting up the air. He let go of the rope, and his files, hair, cloth and all, sailed off over the grounds, landing with a crash somewhere deep in the maze. The moon made glowworm trails of the tracks falling down his cheeks.
You must remember there is no such thing as an ending. Good things come out of bad things and bad things come out of good things, but it always continues.
Val stood behind him and he fell back into her. Her boy.
• • •
Below, Joe sighed, and let relief envelop him. Rosa held his hand.
“I love you,” she said.
How differently he’d turned out from Baron. What had been poured into the mold of the
boy had not emerged in the cast of the man. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Joe felt the snick of pride in his throat. Baron had been right. They were not family.
He would not kill him. There are fates far worse than that, and to be left here, alone, deprived of this love that he had now, was just one.
A glint caught his eye, somewhere up there, by the roof. He could not see Bobby’s dark form any longer, but something had moved, just slightly, in the wind. He scanned for it again, and with the patience of a sniper eventually found it by the gutter.
“Up there,” he said to Rosa, “do you see that?” Rosa followed the line of his arm to the tip of his finger.
“Yes,” she said, squinting, “I see it.”
“What is it? Is it that stupid bird?”
“I know what it is.”
“So tell me.”
“A wire.” As quickly as that it came clear into view. A copper cable feeding into the building, and off in the other direction toward the flat plain of the horizon on the opposite side of the house, where Baron had not taken them on his tour. There, a moonlit metal spike in the distance, was a pylon, and another, carrying the voice of his father, through the cable, south toward where civilization had waited two decades for word from Baron, the northernmost ex-zookeeper in Britain. He had a telephone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE BIRD
By the time Joe and Rosa made it back to Baron’s living quarters he had gone.
“We have to get out of here,” he said, “and we have to do it right now.” Rosa, in her silence, understood. She began gathering their things. When Val and Bobby joined them the four embraced, their heads pressed together. Joe knelt, straining to bring himself down to Bobby’s height, his neck dipped to get there.
“Are you all right?” he asked. Bobby nodded, letting Joe ruffle his hair.
“Are you?” Joe rose, bigger now, as if more of him had come from deep within the ground.
“We need to get out of here. Gather everything that’s ours. Anything that isn’t, leave behind. We do not want it.”
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