Joe drove south nonstop for twenty-four hours. The police would not be looking for a lone trucker, and if they were then they would need to separate him from the thousands of others clogging Britain’s arteries. It gave him ample time to think about Baron, for whom, and for the first time in his life, he suddenly felt nothing. It wasn’t as if the old man had died. It was as if he had never existed. He occupied the blank void. The more Joe peered into it, the less he saw. Love, hatred and everything therein could not endure.
His only communication with Val, Rosa and Bobby came through the CB radio linked to a receiver in the back of the library, where they hid and read.
Bert gazed up at Captain, who’d made a nest of books in the shelves above Zoology. If Val hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn the dog’s appetite had waned.
“That’s ridiculous,” Joe said, his voice crackling through the radio, “dogs don’t fall in love.”
“That might be so, but it’s true,” she said, putting down her half-finished sandwich. The agonizing inevitability of their capture loomed. They would be parted just as soon as they had come into each other’s lives. She wished that their story would end at this exact moment, with them together, in the mobile library, as one.
After finishing a book, Bobby would post it through the thin gap atop the window in the toilet, leaving it behind them on the road, a trail of tales leading back over the border into England. Val let him grieve for his mother, though it pained her to see him enter a process without end. Grief is a fixed point from which one can only move further away. It never disappears, there is not space in the world to get far away enough. But minute by minute, mile by mile, they were leaving it behind, until it was a speck on the horizon. Whenever they hit potholes, the mobile library’s metal walls shook and books leapt from shelves like fledgling birds learning to fly.
It was Rosa who was first able to coax Bobby out of his solitude. She sat by his side with a ream of paper under her arm and a case full of crayons in her hand.
“Would you like to play?” she asked.
“No,” he said. He reread the top paragraph of the page open on his lap. Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car by Ian Fleming. Stuck in a traffic jam, Caractacus Potts’s creation sprouts enormous mechanical wings and flies away from trouble. Bobby wished the mobile library could do the same. No one would catch them in the middle of the sky.
“Bobby Nusku, would you like to play?” she said. He turned to find that she’d written their names again, Bobby Nusku Rosa Reed Val Reed Joe Joe Bert, but her handwriting had markedly improved. Letters that hung below the line curled with neat flourish. They had been realized in an even track of sumptuous black ink. At certain points the words clung together, or piggybacked each other, as if for survival.
“What would you like to play?”
She didn’t know. Rosa hadn’t planned for what might happen next, she never did, and that was one of the many things he’d come to love about her. She reminded him that the adventure wasn’t over just yet.
• • •
“I know where we can go,” Bobby said. Val, who had been listening to Joe absentmindedly singing through the radio, switched off the transistor and turned to face him. His shape had changed since they first met, but she only noticed it now, a broadening, with sharp new angles in his outline.
“What did you say?”
“I know where we can go, where we’ll be safe.” Through the cracks she saw glorious first hints of the man that the boy would soon become.
“You do?”
“Yes,” Bobby said, grinning. He thrust his hand into his back pocket and gave Val a torn piece of paper. They were so short of options that this seemed as good as any.
• • •
They arrived near the south coast of England at mid-afternoon, where clumsy gulls fought for scraps on rooftops. A new superstore had opened up on the edge of the town, forcing the closure of the independent shops on the high street, so the residents were unsurprised by the sight of enormous trucks making deliveries on their otherwise quiet streets. Joe parked the mobile library behind a row of disused garages off the main road.
The receiver beeped.
“We’re here,” he said wearily, falling asleep on the warm leatherette.
The mobile library’s metal steps unfurled and out came Bobby, sun hurting his eyes.
“Wait for me here,” he said to Val, “I won’t be long.” He walked the length of a pathway overgrown with weeds to the street and quickly found himself out in public, alone, for the first time in months. He crossed the road to a sorry-looking house bookending a drab terraced row. Missing slates made the roof a gap-toothed mouth, the wonky chimney a chewed cigar. He approached the door, then knocked in three short, nervous bursts.
When Sunny Clay answered, there was no movement in his face. It reminded Bobby of the features carved into a totem pole. But he could tell how happy Sunny was by the way his voice rose an octave, and how tightly they embraced.
“Holy shit!” he said, closing the door behind him so that his mother couldn’t hear, then hushing his voice to a whisper. “Holy shit, Bobby Nusku. What are you doing here?”
“You told me to find you.” Sunny peered one way down the street and then the other.
“Yeah, but back then you weren’t the most famous kid in the world.”
“I am?”
“One of them.”
“I’m so happy to see you, Sunny.”
“Me too.”
“How much?” Bobby said.
“Let’s not get into this now.” Sunny pulled Bobby inside by his elbow. They scuttled upstairs to Sunny’s bedroom, box-shaped with cold exposed brickwork. Posters hung lopsided on the wall. Broken action figures fought among themselves.
Bobby pulled a package from the back of his jeans and gave it to Sunny. He tore open the paper. Inside was a copy of The Iron Man by Ted Hughes.
“It’s a present.”
“For what?”
“For becoming a cyborg. I know it wasn’t easy, but you did it. You did it.”
For Sunny, it had been a lonely summer followed by a sullen autumn. He was friendless in a new town, and it had proved hard to ingratiate himself to his schoolmates without the ability to smile. He felt like a grub unable to burst from its cocoon. Worst of all, the results of his transformation had been inadequate at best. He had a constant dull headache, his arm was weak, his leg was sore. In recent months he had been forced to face facts. He wasn’t a cyborg. He was a boy full of metal.
The most telling indicator of his failure came in the way he had missed Bobby. It had hurt every day, a pain that bore through him like a drill. Cyborgs didn’t miss people. They were never programmed to yearn. But here was Bobby now, expecting a cyborg, and Sunny wasn’t just his best friend, he was his bodyguard. He had promised, and was only as good as his word.
“Of course I did it,” he said.
“How does it feel?”
“Good.”
“Stronger?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you even have to eat food anymore?”
“Sometimes. But only for emergency refueling.” Bobby flexed his fingers until the joints cracked. He couldn’t tell that Sunny was lying. There was no sign of it on his face.
“Good,” he said, “I have a job for you.” Sunny sat on the floor beside the bed, twisted the key in a wind-up robot figurine and watched it walk across the carpet to the door.
“You do? What?”
“I have some new friends and we need protecting.”
“From who?”
“The police.”
“They said you’d been kidnapped.”
“I wasn’t kidnapped. I went on an adventure.”
“There are a lot of people looking for you.”
Bobby sat down next to Sunny and put an arm around his shoulder. Bobby was now the bigger of the two and suddenly had a sense of how much he’d grown. It felt strange, like being able to see back in time.
“I know.” The hum of Sunny’s mother’s vacuum cleaner vibrated through the floorboards.
“So what happened?”
Bobby closed his eyes and started to tell Sunny what had happened in a way in which they’d both understand it. Stories did happen to people like him after all.