With full beams dipped to oncoming traffic, the mobile library snaked slowly down the lanes that sliced the country up. Joe drove. He had barely spoken since the incident in the woods.
“You’re a professional,” Val said of his driving.
“My other car’s a tank,” he said.
She let her hand settle on his thigh. The lean, solid muscle dried her mouth instantly, reducing her voice to a squeak. Joe relaxed and pondered his tremendous good fortune, but a tightening in his lower back made him wonder if it could last.
Rosa rested her head on Bobby’s shoulder. He read to her, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Rosa squawked at every appearance of the parrot, Flint, who always perched on Long John Silver’s shoulder, and shrieked as Flint’s pirate master revealed his ruthless violent side, murdering a member of the crew as part of his plan to escape with the treasure.
“Do only baddies have parrots?” Rosa asked. Bobby thought about it. The stiff beak. The beady eye. Hooked nail claws for tearing the skin.
“Probably,” he said.
“Then why don’t they fly away?”
“I don’t know,” Bobby said, “I don’t know.” Together they sang “that old sea song.”
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!” He read until they reached the light strip of the motorway, where the cars sped small around them, fish swimming in the slipstream of a shark.
Before midday, Joe turned the mobile library in at a service station forecourt and parked in the area reserved for long-haul vehicles. When he switched off the engine there was an abruptness to the way the silence arrived.
Tired-looking men came and went, but despite the days and weeks of radio news coverage, the amount of times they’d heard those names as they retuned for a traffic update, the chats they’d had with other drivers (“How the hell could a forty-four-ton truck disappear just like that?”; “What kind of amateurs do they employ as policemen these days anyway?” and “Bet she’s rolled the thing. They’ll find them against a tree in a field somewhere, that poor little bastard she kidnapped was probably dead a long time ago . . . might as well give up the search”), none of them suspected that the most sought-after vehicle in Britain was the one they’d pulled up next to. Or that in the back was the infamous Joseph Sebastian Wiles, with Rosa sleeping beside him, as she had taken to insisting on doing. He didn’t mind. In fact he adored the way she used his arm as a pillow, and he didn’t even move it when it went dead.
Morning, afternoon, evening and night become vague terms for how light the sky was and nothing more. They slept when they could and drove when they couldn’t, never staying in a single place long enough for anyone to get more than one look at them. They cut back and forth across the country, detouring to avoid towns, taking any minor road the mobile library would fit down and trying some it resolutely wouldn’t. Joe made Val cut her bank cards in half with his knife and they spent what remained of the cash as slowly as possible. They split into unsought twos, mother and son, father and daughter, and bought provisions from rural mini markets. Roadside vendors sold them freshly picked fruit and vegetables. Farm shops filled plastic tubs with cheaply priced milk. When the sun was high enough they stopped in fields to eat and rest, then picked spiky yellow seedlings from the fur on Bert’s back. They played cards and built half-finished dens they knew they’d soon abandon. Joe kept the truck in order, Val made the meals, Rosa tidied books away and Bobby fetched clean water from streams in a rusting tin bucket. They moved by night.
Every day had a different view. Cloud-thronged snow peaks on mountains in the north. Valleys in the west, green, lush and wet with mist. Lochs stiller than death and entire meadows that bowed to the wind.
Bobby read voraciously. He consumed stacks of classics Val had recommended. He discovered new books for himself, based on little more than a feeling he got when he held them and read the back cover, an itch that would not abate until it had been scratched.
Rosa listened. As Bobby gave voice to the characters, she found that a hundred friends lived inside her greatest friend of all.
Just over the Scottish border they parked the mobile library behind a disused crematorium, put on their disguises and went to a fun fair on the lip of a national park. Val and Bobby rode the bumper cars, where the first crash shunted his face into the candy floss and left his forehead sticky for the rest of the night. Joe claimed a prize of two helium balloons in an apple-bobbing competition. He gave them both to Rosa. They walked home—and it was home—along a rambler’s path surrounded by sheep, balloons tussling for position in the sky.
Everywhere they went they left a book. Sometimes they buried them, or hid them beneath a rock. Sometimes they left them on show so that they could easily be found. One was left in the center of a hilltop fort. Rosa left another in the cave walk of a gorge. Bobby gave an illustrated book about birds to a crying girl at a market, and a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (Val’s idea—he hadn’t read it) to a grumpy-faced boy whose father wouldn’t let him have a plastic ray gun from a toy shop.
“It’s about patricide,” Val said, “he might get a kick out of it in a few years’ time.”
“Patricide?” Bobby asked. It sounded to him like a drink. “What’s that?”
“Something you’ll never need to worry about.”
When needed they bought cheap clothes from charity shops. In a tourist-friendly village where the air carried the odor of compost, Bobby chose for Rosa a purple velvet cape that might once have been a curtain, and she picked for him a hat with corks dangling from it, the same as a kangaroo might wear in a cartoon.
“What a darling family you have,” the lady behind the counter said to Val. Her makeup was white and patchy, like sea wash breaking on sand.
“We’re on an adventure,” Bobby said, and Rosa repeated.
“We’re on an adventure.”
“I bet you are!” Her eyes thinned. She recognized the girl, but why? It wouldn’t crystalize.
“You do such a good job. I bet it can’t be easy,” the lady said to Val.
Val smiled. So many people had said this to her in the past, as if her daughter were a machine she had to operate. Such a peculiarly hurtful thing to say. They left before the lady could piece the memory together, and it went to the graveyard of thoughts that are never fully formed.
“That’s the key to good camouflage,” Joe said as they wound down the mobile library’s metal steps. “People only ever see what they are looking for. And if we look like a family, if we behave like a family, then we become a family, we are a family.”
And that’s exactly what they did. Val and Joe held hands. Warmed though she was by the tandem of it, Rosa was unable to spot the signs of two people falling in love. She had never seen or even heard of it. Love, for her, was constant. It didn’t come or go, grow or subside. You didn’t fall into it, you didn’t fall out. It was the nook of her mother’s armpit, cheese melting on a hot baked potato and the way Bert guarded her meals without ever snatching from the plate. It was how she felt about Bobby Nusku. It didn’t develop, it was there and now, with no past or future at all. It just was.
Val was experiencing it very differently. Feelings she’d suppressed for years were rising up, seeping through her pores, sitting there in puddles like surface oil on a south Californian rock. Bobby had noticed. Val, as she changed her underwear behind the shelving marked Biology, uplit only by the desk lamp, was ravishing. She had a smile on her face. She was a puzzle solved. He decided not to tell her what he’d seen take place between Joe and the man. His overriding urge, for her to be happy, remained paramount. He could keep Joe in check. He could protect her if he needed to.
They drove for days, Joe searching for a hint of a landscape he recognized, anything that hadn’t changed in the two decades that had passed since he was last in rural Scotland. Fields collapsed into shores lapped by solemn stretches of water. Soon they stopped seeing people, or even lights on distant houses that they mistook for low stars.
“It’s near here, I swear it,” Joe said, in bursts of confidence spurred by a bend in the road, or the gulp as they drove across a humpback bridge. Occasionally he’d stop the truck, stand in the road and scan the view through the box of his fingers. Then he’d shake his head and they would keep on going, Joe scouring every turn, braking and checking every lane. “I promise you, it can’t be far.”
It was the end of a long day, one that began before the first blasts of orange combed the sky. There was damp in the air and everything was as moist as a cucumber heart. They were near the sea and far north, but unsure exactly where. In the stormy center of a tantrum, Rosa had thrown the atlas from a bridge into a fast-running river, so there was no way of knowing.
“Oh no,” Val said, tapping the red flashing light in the shape of a petrol can blinking behind the steering wheel. They parked. The white sides of the library were splattered with mud and Rosa’s cape was already tatty at the trim.
“What do we do now?” Bobby asked. Val moved four copper coins around in her hand.
They climbed down from the cab. Bert idly watched a rabbit hop inside a hollow log, then licked sea-salty wetness from the bark.
“We don’t do anything,” Joe said, pointing through the trees to a flat gray dam, creaking with the weight of water pushing. He wiggled his finger to show that he meant for them to look beyond the fog, where they could just about see a large structure atop the steep incline of a hill. “We’re here.”
“A castle!” Rosa said, loud enough to make Bert scuttle back inside the library.
“Almost,” Joe said, snapping his fingers. Bobby had thrown so much paper out of the window that there were no pages left between the covers of the physics textbook on his lap. His trail had lasted just long enough.
They waited by the roadside while Val reversed the library down a thin winding trail into the pines. Joe wove leaves and branches through the grille to disguise it, but there were no tracks there, just unblemished earth where nothing came nor went. Bert dug with his snout and found the bones of a bird. Even he had sense to leave them undisturbed, that there were some places people—or dogs—just didn’t belong.
Joe carried Rosa up the steep side of the dam and then they walked across the top hand in hand. On one side was the lake, on the other a drop into nothingness. An uneasy thinness comprised the line between two fates.
At the gateway to the towering country pile, its crumbling brickwork, wild garden and holey roof, they stood and stared. It was just as Joe had described. They shimmied over the outer wall to find a long gravel driveway writhing toward the door. A grandiloquent expanse of oak, it would have been impressive even if it were not set into the foreboding gothic archway, disappearing on either side into the mist. Bobby had never seen a bigger building. Its intricate corners hid magic in shadow. He was relatively sure they’d stumbled across Hogwarts.
In the center of the door was a large brass knocker carved into the shape of a bat. Rosa slammed it down on the wood three times, then hid behind her mother.
Joe pushed the door ajar. “Hello!” he said. An echo scurried away from him.
The entrance hall was long enough to cast the back wall in darkness. Faded portraits of long-dead men had tired of never being looked at. Now the paint was brittle and chipped. Vines grew through the cracks around the windowpanes and leaves blown in rotted on the dirty floor. It was difficult to know where the outside ended and the inside began. Rosa and Bobby yelled at the top of their voices, but the words were returned in ever quieter echoes. Clocks showed time that never passed.
Rosa opened a cupboard and climbed inside.
“We can live here, Val,” she said.
They stalked rooms lined with dusty furniture, sticking together in case they got lost. Labyrinthine corridors curled around spiral staircases, and in the furthest corners the building was reclaimed by the grounds. Even the weather crept in, clouds somehow wafting between the rafters, condensing then dripping from the beams. Bobby let the cold drops fall into his mouth.
They passed through an impressive library. Almost all of the books were old, chocolate-box gold and green with covers thick and dusty, shelves too tall for even Joe to reach the top. It smelled different from the mobile library. The pages had broken down, and now gave off the scent of a good-quality vanilla absolute, giving Bert a ravenous desire for ice cream.
There were too many rooms to assign a unique name to each. Bobby passed through the filthy drawing room, with its curved chaise longue and green baize billiard table, to find that the next room was almost identical. Taxidermy gathered in packs, a deer with its own forest of antlers and snow foxes frozen mid-prowl. He ran his fingers across the sharp combs of their teeth. Their tongues were waxy purple, clammy to the touch. Above them an eagle stretched its wings to full span.
Into the next room, a kitchen, with a pantry bigger than any room in any house Val had ever lived in. There were enough tins of food to last a year or more, and a musty smell that made Bobby’s lungs kick against his chest. Joe swiped a finger across the dining table then blew a thick layer of dust from the tip.
An hour later and they had still only searched the manor’s east wing. Joe smashed apart an antique table and used its broad stanchions to seal the front door closed. With what wood remained he built a fire while Val blocked drafty windows using sandbags from an unfinished conservatory.
Bobby investigated the basement, guiding Rosa through the darker corridors in night mode. Piles of junk sagged with the onset of damp. Mold ate cardboard boxes and spiders scuttled by. They found engines and chains, batteries and belts, a dismantled vintage motorbike, each part stripped, painstakingly spread out on a dust sheet and then abandoned. Everywhere were mechanical items, none loved enough to work.
Another basement room, smaller this time, colder, had been painted pink a long time before. On the widest wall was a stencil of a girl holding two balloons and floating away into the sky, but being held down by a small dog pinching her sock in its teeth. In the middle of a room was a crib, cobwebs layered across it, collapsing under the weight of trapped lint. Then a rocking horse, its hollow chest now home to only insects and a bird’s nest long deserted.
Rosa pulled a photo album from an expensive but unloved chest of drawers. Leafing through it, a story of strangers emerged, a man surrounded by exotic animals, but there was no beginning, middle or end to the story, just snapshots of an unknown narrative.
Joe appeared in the doorway.
“You shouldn’t be down here,” he said.
“Why not?” Bobby asked.
“It’s too gloomy. These are someone else’s memories—someone else’s story. Not yours.” He pulled from his pocket a large silver key. “I found this. Let’s see if we can find what it unlocks.”
• • •
The garden was vast and the grass had grown out the markings of what was once a perfect croquet lawn. A fountain over a pond in the middle was dry and caked with bird shit. Joe beat a track through the wild pasture and piggybacked Rosa over the sod—a sight Val found pleasing. She held Bobby’s hand and they followed close behind. They reached the wall at the bottom of the grounds, alive with climbing plants and tall enough to mark the perimeter of a high-security prison. Above it, the steel sky of a Scottish evening.
“It must be here somewhere,” Joe said, plunging his hand into the ivy to feel the rough scratchy surface of the wall.
“What are we looking for?” Rosa asked. Joe smiled.
“A door.”
“Like in The Secret Garden?” She and Bobby had read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett together as the mobile library had rolled over the Scottish border. Though she hadn’t been able to articulate it to Bobby, she imagined herself as the young Mary Lennox, the book’s heroine unloved by her selfish wealthy father, who is healed by the gardens she finds one day while playing with her skipping rope. She was, for the first time, outside herself, and this new terrain, her imagination, was a secret garden of her own.
Joe looked to Val for an answer. She nodded.
“Exactly, like in The Secret Garden.”
Bobby counted that they’d walked four hundred and eighty-three steps along the wall before Val stopped them in their tracks.
“Here,” she said, pointing to an area behind the foliage that was not the raw-meat red of brick. She parted the ivy to reveal a green wooden entry. Joe hacked around the entrance with his knife, and the lock creaked as he turned the key. As soon as it had opened, Bert ran, faster than he had in many years, and disappeared into the acreage of a dilapidated private zoo. Val opened her eyes wide.
“I didn’t believe you,” she said to Joe.
“I can forgive you for that.”
Astonished, Val sat down on a decrepit bench. In every direction, gothic wrought-iron cages taller than men, with signs above them, for lions, leopards, chimpanzees; hundreds of animals that existed behind thousands of bars. Now the cages were empty, gingered by rust. Doors swung in the breeze. There was a sense of sudden abandonment and the haunting that emptiness brings.
Rosa made animal sounds for every sign she could, growling at the tiger enclosure and arfing at the seal pen. Bobby kicked a stone along the main walkway and imagined the zoo’s former splendor, filling the cages with the animals he had read about in the mobile library. What a grand sight it must have been. Past the reptile house, where rare iguanas had lamp-bathed on heated logs, and an alligator, who had only emerged from the man-made marsh for a taste of warm, living lamb. An aquarium, where he pictured dolphins sharing a tank with tropical coral, now had broken glass and spent crab shells strewn across the floor like bullet casings. Vacant cabinets housed nothing but sawdust, and a cold ditch where the rainwater collected overflowed with floating bilge.
Bobby set off in search of Bert. He checked the barren penguin pool, and an enormous cage that the sign promised was once the playground of a grizzly bear. He found a small clump of hair in there, and put it in his pocket for his files. His mother was bound to be impressed by genuine bear hair. He remembered a faux fur coat she had owned that his father had burned in a bucket in the yard.
Bert sat looking up at the spectacular and curious thing he’d been able to smell since he got out of the mobile library, now made flesh before his very eyes. He didn’t necessarily want to eat it. It was more that he wanted to hold it in his mouth. Regardless, it was making him drool, and his tongue hung out like the inflatable ramp on an airplane. He’d never known a smell like it before. Artificially flavored dog food often strived to achieve it, but no scientific mind could re-create a scent like this for a nose as finely tuned as his. He wanted more than anything to be on the same side of the mesh as it. For Bert, a dog old enough to know that very little was worth his effort in the end, this was a desire of profound intensity. It was worth all the effort he could muster.
“There you are, Bert,” Bobby said, entering the disused aviary. Only then did he see it, a glorious blue and yellow macaw. It had a curved, charismatic bill, strong legs and sharp-clawed zygodactyl feet. When it spread its wings, Bobby gasped.
“Visitors,” the macaw said, a word it had learned from its mother before she’d died of psittacosis, the parrot fever that had eventually wiped out the inhabitants of every cage in sight, except for him.
Joe, Val and Rosa came running when they heard Bobby calling their names. No one could explain where the bird had come from or why it was there, but they were all mesmerized by the vivid punch of its colors. Joe rattled the rusted padlock, its metal far too thick to slice through with his bolt cutters.
“Well, I’ll be damned . . .”
“Can we keep her?” Rosa said. She read out the macaw’s name from the small brass sign on the wall. “Can we keep Captain?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. Bobby noticed that he had paled and put it down to a fear of birds. He’d heard a girl in his class at school claim she had a phobia because a pigeon flew close to her face as a baby.
Val noticed the damaged feathers on Captain’s underside, where he had scratched himself with his beak. At the back of the enclosure a hole had been smashed through the wall, so that the macaw could fly away, if it ever wanted to. It was in the cage as a matter of choice.
“I suppose we’ll have to,” she said. Rosa and Bobby embraced in cheer.
“Visitors! Visitors! Visitors!” Captain said, his head bobbing from side to side.
• • •
Joe finished barricading the unused doors of the house. Everywhere Bobby went he could hear the thumping of the hammer. He climbed a ladder into the attic and from there through a hole onto the roof. Still he could make out the faint pounding of metal on wood. He had presumed climbing the scaffold and leaping from the shed onto Sunny’s leg would have prepared him for dealing with heights, but he’d been wrong. As the sky turned purple, he feared he’d be struck by lightning, or be close enough to thunder to then get scared to death.
He trod carefully, six steps, along the guttering, a dizzying drop beneath him (two and a half double-decker buses, his conservative estimate), recalling Sunny’s tips for bravery. The tiles were wet, kissed by highland dusk, so he tied the rope around his waist to the chimney stack. From here he could see for miles around, north, east and west, across the ground, past the zoo, mountains in one direction and a moody blue sea in the other. There was no light but stars, and no voices besides Captain’s in the distance, still talking to Bert, who had refused to leave her side.
Frosty wind spiked Bobby’s ears, painful things to have so thoughtlessly tacked to his head in this weather. But it would be worth it. He strung together the swatches of his mother’s dresses, bagged the hair and tied the lot together with twine. Then he decorated the roof as diligently as one might a Christmas tree, the strange bunting flapping, noisily slapping the slate. He saw the sweeping majesty of nature before him and knew, this time, he didn’t need to pray. The land was prayer enough, miles of beauteous proof that someone must be listening.
• • •
Joe found a hoard of air pistols in a stand-alone cabinet and went grouse hunting in the gardens. His training as a sniper in Iraq was a time he mostly remembered for the spectacular states of boredom achievable when waiting for someone to kill. Perhaps that was what drove the lieutenant crazy, he thought, though he knew, deep down, that it had been the death, the danger and the loss that thronged them daily, that woke them from the deepest recesses of sleep. He quickly picked off two young birds. It felt good to shoot something, to feel anger and make a bedfellow of its much-needed release. Wasn’t that why he’d come here? He picked up the carcasses and headed toward the house.
• • •
Dinner—grouse, tinned fruit and rice pudding before an open fireplace—was the best they’d had in weeks. Joe found a gramophone, its scratched brass neck protruding from a jumble of warped vinyl, and wired it to a battery he’d uncovered in the basement. He played records, swing numbers that convinced Bobby joy had been mechanically trapped in the plastic, and they danced. Rosa’s frock puffed as Joe swiveled her around his hips, her body falling limp in his arms. Next he took Val, held her and swayed side to side, while Bobby, Rosa and Bert watched from a pudgy old sofa. Everything outside the room could have fallen away, into the molten center of the earth, and it would not have mattered. Not one of them had enjoyed this feeling previously. The perfect choreography of family.
Bobby’s stomach gurgled, content. He closed his eyes. If there is no such thing as a happy ending, then end the story now.
Joe poured a double Scotch from a grubby bottle, surveying the fingerprints still impressed on the glass. The fumes of sickness filled his mouth, but in the fug of it he couldn’t decide whether they were a result of the booze, or the question of whether these were the fingers of the person who had kept the macaw so gloriously alive. Surely not.
Another drink, and then another, just enough to drown the persistent inquisitor living inside the thick walls of his skull.
Bobby retired to his own enormous, secluded bedroom at the far end of the hall.
Rosa went to sleep in a charming room above where they had danced, the floor still warmed by the toasting of the fire. In the corner stood an exquisite handmade doll’s house. Through each window scenes of everyday life were played out by wooden figurines, eating, sitting and reading. Joe was sure she would cherish it, much more than its previous owner.
Finally, Val fell asleep on the chesterfield sofa. Joe carried her, legs around his waist and head rested in the crook of his neck like an exhausted child, to the master bedroom. Decked in showy gold trim and with a purple muslin-draped four-poster freestanding in the center, it was a sight befitting the faded opulence of the manor. He laid her down on the dusty sheets, the mattress creaking, brought back to life.
“Where are you going?” Val asked. He grasped the shiny ball of the doorknob.
“To bed,” he said. She rolled aside, opening up a space just his size beside her. He twisted the ball right until it was locked.