With eyebrows drawn at an inflexible thirty-eight-degree angle, the toasted ocher of Bobby’s father’s girlfriend’s foundation was a matte bed onto which she painted a single unchanged emotion. Suspicion. The egg-white wink of missed inner ear offered a fleeting hint of her true color, but her singing voice, a dull functional honk, was befitting of the new shade she had chosen. Few who tried could accurately guess at Cindy’s age, in the same way it’s difficult to know the age of a reptile thanks to its unchanging mask of scales. It was actually somewhere in the mid-twenties but could easily have been a few decades north of that, depending on the harshness of the light. She looked youngest on Saturday nights.
Despite calling herself a mobile hairdresser, people always came to her—that is, to Bobby’s father’s house, into which she had moved barely three months after Bobby’s mother left it for the final time. Though Cindy had received no formal training, her knack for recreating the styles worn by stars from pictures in glossy magazines was passable. Once a week she bleached her own hair over the kitchen sink. The damage she had done it was irreversible. Though permanently attached to her head, it did little to repel potential customers, lending weight to the adage that all publicity is good.
Apart from hair, her other primary interest was gossip. Bobby sat on the stairs listening to the conversations Cindy had with her clients. Soundtracked by the scissors’ percussive clack, they discussed rumors and invented new ones. To Bobby, the chatter was of no concern. He concentrated on one thing and one thing only: hair, theirs, cut loose and slowly floating down onto his mother’s rug. Individual strands, brown and black and brittle bottle blond, wove themselves into the wool, entwining lives that were never meant to touch. Afterward, when alone, he would pick the hairs out by hand, split them into two piles and put the piles into jars. One jar for his mother’s hair, one jar for everybody else’s. He could tell which hairs were his mother’s because they were softer and smoother. When he held them to the light they were the same color as the glow behind an angel. Collecting them took hours and made his fingertips ache, but Bobby updated his secret files every night after Cindy’s last client left and she headed to the shop for wine (she boasted of having become immune to the resultant headaches).
He kept the jars beneath his bed. He was an archivist of his mother.
Measurements formed a similarly integral part of his files, and he would meticulously catalogue them in a notebook, making the numbers as small as possible so that his father, should he ever find it in a hiding place beneath the bedroom carpet, would have great difficulty understanding what they said. With arms outstretched, walking sideways like a crab, he could make it from one wall of the house to the other in five big steps. There were eleven stairs to the staircase, thirty-eight tiles on the kitchen floor, forty-three swirls in the bedroom ceiling plasterwork and nine mini paces from the toilet to the bath. There were fifty-seven different vehicles—planes, police cars and helicopters—on the wallpaper in his bedroom, but they were only the ones he could see to count. Bobby estimated that another twenty were hidden on the far wall, behind the boxes bulging with Cindy’s belongings.
Sometimes he practiced walking around the house with the lights off. If he couldn’t be seen, he couldn’t be punished, and so in the darkness he was closest to himself. As his night vision improved, he was able to find his way around without touching any furniture, even on the blackest of nights. If he ever encountered a burglar, Bobby planned to wait until he fell over the hairdressing chair in the middle of the lounge, then stab him through the throat with the scissors. Coagulated in the carpet fibers, the blood would make the hairs more difficult to pick out. But he would do it anyway. There could be no greater indicator of commitment to his files than that.
The rug was five feet by three feet—it said so on the label—and turned from red at one end to yellow at the other, the colors of a plate after a decent breakfast. Other rugs looked plain by comparison. No wonder she had loved it.
Houses are bodies, their memories mapped by the scars left behind. Bobby drew sketches of each room with a charcoal pencil that his mother had used to draw him, and added the pictures to a special section at the back of his files devoted to art. He knew that this was the section she would enjoy most.
The black smudge on the wall above the stove marked the time she set fire to a pan of oil when his father crept up behind her, drunk and in a state of arousal. The spot was two and a half hands wide. There was a crumbly seven-inch hole on the stairs from afterward when she ran, fell and put her foot through the plasterwork, breaking her ankle. There were the divots her fingernails dug in the headboard, and remnants of the easel Bruce had smashed.
Bobby imagined how proud his mother would be of his archives when she returned. They could use the notes to re-create the house to these exact specifications, except up on top of a mountain. Inside, it would be identical. Lime-green curtains in the lounge, chocolate-brown borders ringing the walls. Cream tiles on the kitchen floor betraying splats of dropped food. The same gap between the cupboard and the fridge, three inches across, where lost items could always be found. But when they opened the back door there would be clouds on the lawn. Eagles would nest in the drainpipes, and he’d scoop snow from the peak for pure washing water. The world would be their garden, just as she had promised.
Days felt longer with her gone. Bobby chased the slowing hours round his watch. Until his mother came home, only one other person in the world knew about his files. His name was Sunny Clay and he was Bobby’s best and only friend. He was also his bodyguard. That’s why he always wore a shifting mask of bruises, the colored lumps changing, a violent ode to coral reef.
• • •
Bobby arrived at Sunny’s house on the first Saturday morning of the summer holidays. Everywhere glimmered reminders of the amassed blank days ahead, on which he and Sunny could impress any fantasy they wished. Excitement’s hot tickle rushed down Bobby’s spine, until Sunny finally answered the door with a familiar look on his face.
“Hello, Bobby,” he said.
“Hello, Sunny,” Bobby said.
“Do you know what today is?”
“I know it’s Saturday. Is that going to be enough of an answer for you?”
“Not really,” Sunny said.
Bobby sighed. He hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and hitched up his jeans. “Then you’d better tell me.”
“Today is an important day. Today is the day that we commence Phase Three.”
Bobby had been dreading Phase Three. Phases One and Two were difficult enough. Bones had been broken. Blood had been spilled. It wasn’t very relaxing. However, they had made a plan, a mission, and there was no backing down. When it was over, Bobby Nusku would never be picked on by anyone, at school or by his father, ever again. Sunny would become a cyborg by the end of the summer holidays, and then he’d be able to protect Bobby with all the extra strength and speed being half human, half robot would bring.
• • •
It had been Sunny’s idea, and though he claimed it a long-term ambition, it had come to him shortly after he and Bobby met. Sunny had approached Bobby in the playground at school and asked if he knew anything about making tunnels.
“Tunnels?”
“Yes, tunnels.”
“Not really.”
“Then you can pick it up as we go along.” Bobby presumed that Sunny had an ulterior motive. He was considering running away when Sunny stretched an open palm out toward him. When Bobby finally opened his eyes he was surprised to realize that he hadn’t been struck. They shook hands, and Bobby was impressed by the strength of Sunny’s grip.
Sunny had been watching Bobby all week. He had watched him skulk alone around the perimeter of the fields at break time. He had watched him try to avoid three older boys, who had chased him across the football pitch. He had watched one of them trip Bobby into the mud, not once but twice, and followed him unseen into the bathrooms, where he had attempted to clean his shirt in the sink, only to make it worse.
He recognized loneliness when he saw it. Noisy crowds that swirl around the silence in the center where you sit. An irrepressible ache made by the melody of other people’s laughter. The breadth of the canyon between you and someone you can reach out to touch. He too had felt as if he had radioactivity trapped in his bones.
Sunny was large for a twelve-year-old. Bobby on the other hand was slight, waspish and the color of milk. He looked like he needed a friend no matter what shape they took, and so this new arrangement was mutually beneficial.
“Come with me,” Sunny said, and Bobby walked proudly behind him toward the art department, trying to match the exact timing of his steps.
“Why are you making a tunnel?” Bobby asked, as they reached a brick wall, sheltered from view of the playground by a thornbush.
“So that we can get out of here. You want to get out of here, right?” Bobby’s first thought was of the trouble they would be in, just as his mother had raised him to think. Embarrassed, he put his hands on his hips and tried to stand up tall and straight.
“Of course.”
“And you’ve seen prison films?” When Sunny’s father walked out on Sunny and his mother he left behind a considerable library of old movies on VHS cassette. Sunny had made an education of staying up late and voraciously consuming them.
“Uh-huh,” Bobby said, not sure what Sunny even meant.
“Then you’ll know as well as I do that tunnels are the only way out.” Sunny leaned against the wall, stroking the brickwork so that the cement turned to dust on his fingertips.
“But this is the wall to the art department. If you tunnel through this, you’ll be breaking back in.”
“Wrong kind of tunnel,” Sunny said. He lay on his stomach on the ground and reached into the base of the thornbush, from where he produced a box containing two stolen tins of black paint. Bobby glanced down at the ground, which he sensed move further away from him. This, he reasoned, would be his view from the gallows. Regardless, he didn’t want to desert Sunny. He wanted to climb on his back and throw both fists into the air.
Sunny daubed the semicircular outline of a tunnel onto a wall, as he’d watched Wile E. Coyote do in countless Road Runner cartoons. This Bobby had seen, though he wasn’t brave enough to point out where he recognized it from, hoping he might be wrong, and that Sunny wasn’t crazy. Sunny thrust a brush into Bobby’s hand and told him to start helping fill its empty center black.
“This isn’t going to work. You do know that don’t you?” Bobby said, liberally splashing the paint onto the wall.
“Incorrect,” Sunny said, “this tunnel will get me out of school today.” Bobby admired the fervor of his new friend’s belief. Even if it was misguided, it was enough to convince him. And that was all Sunny wanted to do. He knew full well the plan was stupid, but in that hour, the timid boy he’d watched retrieve the contents of his bag from the marshes at the back of the field had scarcely looked over his shoulder. He hadn’t needed to.
“Do you want to come over to my house later?” Sunny said.
“To your house?”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“For dinner.”
“Your parents wouldn’t mind?”
“It’s just me and my mum.”
“Oh. Well, okay then.”
“Okay,” Sunny said, “good.” He rolled up Bobby’s right sleeve and, with the thinnest paintbrush he could find, daubed an address onto his forearm. Then they both turned toward a rustle in the thornbush, and Mr. Oats appeared, spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth.
“What the hell have you done?” he said. Spooked, Sunny turned and sprinted into the tunnel, knocking himself unconscious. He lay spread-eagled on the floor, coated in black paint. The tunnel had gotten him out.
They spent that entire weekend watching Sunny’s father’s movies in the attic, thrilled by the fact that their ages were far lower than the numbers framed in red on the front of the cases, gorging on chocolate and long sherbet straws. On Bobby’s insistence, Sunny fetched what toys he had from the cupboard in his bedroom. All of them fitted inside a battered shoe box, which Sunny opened with a sickly mixture of dread and embarrassment, stalling as he peeled back the lid. But Bobby, unlike any friend Sunny had invited home before, never commented on how dated the few toys were, or that some were held together with sticky tape. In his hands the green plastic soldiers came to life, and eventually even Sunny stopped seeing their missing limbs.
Neither mentioned how reluctant they were to part when Bobby slowly gathered his things and prepared for the short walk home.
“I can protect you from those boys at school,” Sunny said.
“What?”
“I can stop them.”
“I can. I can walk with you to and from school every day. I could come to your house and collect you in the morning, and afterward I can walk you all the way home.”
“No,” Bobby said, knowing that he didn’t want Sunny to meet his father, “that’s something we definitely can’t do.” They shook hands again. “But thank you.”
Sunny ignored his mother’s pleas to go to bed. That night he watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The indestructible metal skeleton, coated in a faux-human flesh, protected the boy, John Connor, at all costs. He had an idea and immediately began taking notes. In order to execute it properly, it would need to be done in three separate phases, otherwise he would probably die. Having his entire skeleton replaced with steel in one single operation was, by any standards, too ambitious.
The next morning, Sunny waited by the tunnel. He found that, like all his ideas, his enthusiasm for it had diminished as quickly as the paint had dried in the weekend sun. All of his ideas, that is, but this new one, which he knew he’d see through to the end no matter what as long as he had a little help.
When Bobby arrived, Sunny beckoned him from the bush. As he came closer Sunny saw that his shirt was again covered in mud, and that a mixture of snot and tears had blurred the dirt on his cheeks. A solitary droplet of blood glistened in his left nostril.
“What are you doing here?” Bobby said, forcing his foot flat on the ground to stop his leg from shaking.
“I have a plan, and I need you to help me with it,” Sunny said.
“What kind of plan?”
“To protect you.” He opened his mouth to say that he didn’t need protecting, but no sound emerged. Sunny stepped out from behind the bush in time to catch Bobby, who sobbed with force enough to send ripples through them both. “I’m going to become a cyborg.”
Even through his anguish, Bobby struggled to stifle a laugh.
Reckless as it may have been, Phase One had nonetheless gone as hoped. Sunny positioned two chairs in his garden, resting his right leg across them. They placed sandbags on either side of his ankle to hold the foot in place, then laid a sleeping bag beneath him as a rudimentary crash mat. Bobby rolled up a towel so tightly that it creaked and pushed it into Sunny’s mouth, who clamped his jaws shut. Just as they had practiced, Sunny nodded three times to let Bobby know that he was ready. The third nod was Bobby’s cue to leap off the shed onto Sunny’s leg, snapping both the tibia and fibula clean in two. The jump was swift and accurate. Birds fled the echo.
Sunny pretended that he had fallen from the shed and landed awkwardly. The surgeon told him it was one of the cleanest breaks he had ever seen. Sunny thanked him, confusing everyone in the operating room.
With steely resolve, Sunny soldiered through the months of pain that followed, emerging with precisely what he and Bobby hoped for: beneath the shiny twist of scar tissue on Sunny’s leg—six inches long and almost the shape of Italy—was a stiff metal rod. Solid. Indestructible. The first part of Sunny’s skeleton had been replaced.
Phase Two wasn’t nearly as successful. X-shaped scarring mapped the spot on Sunny’s forearm where the smashed crumbs of bone swam around inside his skin. Though he’d had a metal rod fitted, the arm remained twisted and weak. The sledgehammer had been too unwieldy for Bobby, half its size, to control, and both Sunny’s mother, Jules, and the hospital staff were more reluctant to believe his lies about what had happened. Regardless, they had achieved their aims for Phases One and Two. Having come this far, nothing could deter them from seeing the plan through to completion.
• • •
Before Phase Three commenced, Sunny declared it important that they didn’t work on an empty stomach. Bobby, always pestered by hunger, was happy to hear it. Inside the fridge sulked a large lemon cheesecake. They each gobbled up a generous slice. Bobby licked his teeth until the sugar buzz subsided, methodically hunting down all residual zing. His father never allowed food like this at home. He wouldn’t even let Bobby chew bubblegum. He said that if Bobby swallowed it, it would stick inside his guts for seven years. Bobby imagined his rib cage as an explosion of color. He was fine with that. When he was with Sunny it was how he felt on the inside.
They took two bottles of Coca-Cola and sat on the wall in the front garden beneath the lip of the gutter. The sky was as dirty as a pigeon wing. It started to rain. Petrol-poisoned puddles shivered on the road. Traffic crawled by, car windows steamed with muddled hieroglyphics. Sunny licked the palm of his hand and swiped it upward over his brow.
“What if you don’t like me when you’re a cyborg?” Bobby asked. As much as Bobby appreciated Sunny’s efforts to protect him, he feared losing him as a friend far more than any schoolyard beating.
Sunny pushed his tongue against his front teeth, maggoty pink lumps pulsing in the gaps.
“That’s the part of my brain I’m going to keep,” he said.
His mother, Jules, appeared, draped in the shadow of her umbrella. A kind, quiet woman, she worried about only two things, the ailing health of her parents, who lived hundreds of miles away, and the remarkable talent of her only child to injure himself in such dramatic fashion. She spoke slowly, hoping that her words might worm their way inside his ears somehow.
“Are you hearing me?”
“Uh-huh,” Sunny said.
“Then what did I just say?” He wriggled. She clipped him around the side of the head, but only lightly. She knew how easily he broke. “I said stay off the scaffold.” The scaffold had been erected around the house while the windows were replaced. Bobby and Sunny were already conspiring—silently, as only children can—exactly how they were going to scale it. Even when she made them promise, hands on heart, they were wondering how high they might get.
“Sunny, honey, I only tell you to do things because I love you, you know that, right?”
“I know.”
“Except for when I tell you to tidy your room. I do that because you make a damn mess and I’m sick of it.”
“I know.” Jules stroked Sunny’s hair.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too, honey.” She said goodbye to Bobby and walked slowly toward town. As she left, Bobby felt guilty enough to whisper an apology she didn’t hear. Guilt was an emotion he knew well. Adults mistook it for impeccable manners.
The boys climbed a plaster-spattered ladder to the third story of the scaffold and threw broken brick chippings off the side, penny-whistling bomb sounds and growling in their throats to make explosions. From there the town was a dull procession of chimneys, muted by a drizzle that made it somehow futureless, but also without history. It existed, as did its people, in a moment it wanted to escape. Sunny’s tunnel didn’t seem such a bad idea from up on high.
Sunny tried to take off his T-shirt, but Bobby had to help feed his head through the neck hole while he bent like a disobedient marionette. Sunny’s left arm was still limp; the plaster cast had been removed only a few days before. They could feel the metal through the skin, a cold stiff lump of hard-won achievement. Wet, his body glistened. There was already something robotic about it, lithe and functional, the efficient engine of youth.
“Let Phase Three commence,” Sunny yelled, proceeding to the far end of the platform three stories up. A sick feeling in his stomach, Bobby’s knees buckled. Phase Three, the final phase, was to have metal plates installed in Sunny’s skull. Had they waited any longer, the scant regard for danger enjoyed by young boys might have waned. Without danger, boyhood is undone.
Sunny rocked back and forth on his feet, and as assuredly as he might step into a warm bath, he began running toward Bobby. His arms rose like wings on either side of his body, but Bobby could tell by the writhing eels of the muscles in his jaw that he was already having second thoughts.
“Abort! Abort!” Sunny said, grinding his heels into the wood. But the surface was slick. There was no time for him to stop. Bobby grabbed him by the ankle and rammed a shoulder into his knee, which locked and spun Sunny’s leg to the left. This only seemed to give him more momentum. Sunny seemed briefly, gloriously weightless as he left the scaffold’s edge. He took to the air in near silence, scuppered only by the songbirds mocking a boy’s imitation of flight. Upside down and tumbling toward the earth, he said, “I’ll protect you Bobby Nusku.”
Sunny cracked his head on the jut of a long, sharp metal pipe protruding from the scaffold—breaking his fall—and then dropped the remaining nine feet to the ground, where he hit the patio with the sickening thump of a boxer punching a side of beef. Blood formed a deep red maze in the cracks between the paving stones, an eerie puzzle with Sunny the prize in the middle. The balloon of nerves swelled in Bobby’s craw, filling his insides and threatening to prod his guts out through his bottom.
Right then, Bobby learned of the dizzying nausea that arrives in the wake of a freshly made mistake. Mistakes are those moments when we grip the future so hard that it breaks, and we know we must build another future from the pieces, but one that shall never be as good. Bobby wondered how many pieces there would be, and if any would be too small to pick up.
• • •
Jules returned to find Bobby cradling her son’s broken head. In her panic she pushed Bobby to the ground, and became blind to everything but the boy, whose skull moved beneath her fingers.
“He fell,” Bobby said, “it was an accident,” but it was as if she couldn’t tune to the frequency he was using, that she’d changed to some emergency channel, the unique language shared by a whale and her lost calf.
“Call an ambulance!” she screamed. “Call an ambulance!” Bobby rooted through her handbag for the house keys and ran inside to use the telephone.
An ambulance spirited Sunny and his mother away. Bobby was left sitting in a puddle on the ground. Rain turned it from blood red to the gray of the others around it.
He waited there all night until Jules returned, alone, at dawn. Dark bags hung beneath her eyes. Tears clotted her lashes. Bobby threw his arms around her waist and sobbed against the warm pillow of her pelvis. He held her hands and prepared to be told that his best friend was dead.
“He was awake, for a while,” she said, staring at the wall.
“For a while?”
“Long enough to say it was an accident. That it wasn’t your fault.” Bobby crumpled at her feet. “Come,” she said, “I’ll drive you home.”
He cried for the entire journey, leaving a sodden clump of tissue in the footwell. As the car pulled into a space outside his house, he spoke the words he had only heard in the movies Sunny had played for him.
“I am deeply sorry for your loss.” Jules pinched Bobby’s earlobe and tugged, gently, as if she might produce a coin from behind it.
“Bobby, honey,” she said, “I think you’ve misunderstood me. Sunny isn’t dead. I mean, he’s not well, but he’s not dead.” Though she was crying the chime of her laughter filled the car. “My boy is indestructible, it seems.”
• • •
Sunny had never been in hospital this long before. Eventually Bobby was permitted to visit. Given his presence at her son’s continuing brushes with death, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for Jules to consider Bobby a bad omen. But, knowing how happy seeing his friend would make Sunny, she slipped a note through Bobby’s door the moment he was well enough to receive him.
This wasn’t the first time Bobby had visited Sunny in hospital. Navigating his way to the children’s ward was easy using the back corridors, past the morgue and the kitchens, one of which always smelled of boiling vegetable water and old men’s skin. Bobby zipped his hood tight around his face so that only his eyes were visible and slunk into the ward behind a porter’s cleaning trolley.
Three rooms down on the left he found Sunny, chemically dazed, and was quickly met by the inescapable realization that he didn’t look quite the same anymore. Something had changed. He still had two eyes (peering out from the centers of bruised purpling circles), a nose (broken) and a mouth (missing five teeth). He was still bigger than all of the other boys on the ward. His head had a slight dent in it, hinted at beneath the bandages, but nothing to explain the overwhelming sense of changed physiology. Bobby couldn’t be sure what, but something wasn’t right.
“Hello,” Sunny said. His voice was deeper and wetter and stuck in his mouth, face slack and creeping down his skull. Only then, when he could no longer use it, did Bobby realize how big Sunny’s smile used to be.
Sunny offered Bobby a grape—his arm and hands still worked, evidently—but Bobby felt it rude to take it all, so he had half and gave the other back, nestling it on Sunny’s tongue. It fell off and rolled under the bed. The sound of laughter came from Sunny’s mouth, in time to the rhythmic jerking of his chest, but there was no reflection of it in his expression. It was as if Bobby was hearing Sunny’s thoughts. The muscles in Sunny’s face no longer worked, an avalanche of synapses blocking this specific neural pathway. Bobby wanted to reach inside himself, tear out whatever it was Sunny now lacked and hand it over, still bloody and twitching in his grip.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be stupid,” Sunny said, “this is the best thing that could possibly have happened. How many cyborgs do you know who walk around smiling all of the time?”
“I don’t know any cyborgs, apart from you.”
“Well, trust me. Cyborgs don’t have feelings. Like the Terminator. That’s why they strike fear into the hearts of their enemies.” Bobby stroked the bedsheet. It was rougher than he’d thought it would be and he hoped it wasn’t irritating Sunny’s skin.
“Bobby,” Sunny continued, “I got my metal plate. I am complete now. Nobody can ever hurt you again.”