Mobile Library: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Whitehouse is the author of Mobile Library and Bed, winner of the 2012 Betty Trask Prize and published in eighteen countries. He has several TV and film projects in development with Film4, Warp, the BBC, and others. In the UK, he writes regularly for the Guardian and The Times and is currently the Editor-at-Large of ShortList magazine.

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Mobile Library

CHAPTER ONE

THE END

Lips, sticky, not how his mother kissed. He only considered the difference in their ages whenever he tasted her makeup.

“Are we in trouble?” Bobby asked.

“No,” Val said, “not anymore.”

The white cliffs of southern England spread out beyond them, disappearing where the blues, sea and sky, coalesce. High up in the cab of the mobile library, they could not see the land below them, just the ocean’s ceaseless loop, as if they were driving an island through the sea to a faraway place. Hemmed by a crescent of police cars to the cliff edge, bulbs flashed, helicopters chopped up the air. When the sirens fell mute, he saw her, exquisite in the dim dashboard light.

Rosa rested her head in the shallow pool of sun on Val’s lap. Bobby’s stomach gurgled.

“Are you hungry?” Val asked. The noise, a purr, came from another compartment inside him, one contented, not troubled by bubbling chambers of acid or some such bodily thing.

“No,” he said, and kissed her again.

• • •

Detective Jimmy Samas, chase-weary but enlivened by its imminent conclusion, stood by his car. He knew the other officers were waiting for him to issue an order, but he could not conjure one. It was a high-profile investigation. His job was to lead it, and so his colleagues presumed he would know what to do. They were wrong.

At times he felt too young to do his job, though this was precisely why he was good at it. His boyish nature and blemishless skin provoked sympathy in others. Sympathy is an invaluable asset in the business of negotiation. People immediately felt sorry for the fresh-faced boy sent to do the work of a man, and it was in this second of distraction that Detective Samas was usually able to free a hostage, or talk a man down from a ledge.

The gummy gnaw of tiredness made it difficult to concentrate. He considered his priorities. Continual reassessment of the objective at hand had formed a major part of his training, and he did well to remember that now, his eyelids pinching in spasm. Chief among his concerns was the safety of the two children, Bobby Nusku and Rosa Reed, aged twelve and thirteen respectively. Regardless, a hundred and one other problems crackled in the heat of his mind. For starters, there was the woman, Rosa’s mother, Valerie Reed, who at any moment might drive the truck into the sea. Who knew where her mind was? Evading the law, whether willfully or not (that remained to be seen), was a mightily stressful business. First-time kidnappers, particularly single mothers with an otherwise clean record, would feel that anxiety more keenly than most. A wrong move on Detective Samas’s part could prompt disaster. He watched a live news crew setting up behind the police barrier and unstuck his collar from the sweat beading on his neck. Televised disaster, at that.

Besides Ms. Reed, of course, there was the not insignificant matter of the man Detective Samas had reason to believe was hidden in the back of the vehicle, and whose pursuit had shorn sleep from him for months. He put the bullhorn to his mouth but didn’t squeeze the trigger. Instead he appreciated a calm that exists only by the sea. The jeer of diving gulls and the tide washing the rocks. He took a deep breath, trying to co-opt its serenity.

The mobile library formed the trailer of a semitruck, the type that rattled teeth as it streaked by on the highway—a real gumtingler. Originally painted pea green, the library was so long that Val could barely see its rear end in the wing mirror, just the rusting skirt of its livery. Rolling through the countryside it appeared, to a squinting eye, as a mirage moving on the breeze. Now the white emulsion with which they’d covered it was flaking, and this original bed of color could be seen again, along with the words Mobile Library, returning like a memory once forgotten.

On the side was written its weight, twenty tons. Many months previously, as they had sat on the mobile library’s steps watching zigzag jet trails carve a blushing summer sky, Val had said twenty tons is what a whale might weigh “if you could catch it and slap it on the scales.” Rosa had hooted with delight. They had read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick together. To her, with the sea view now before them, it appeared that the story was, in some tiny, beautiful way, coming true. Searching the foam breaks of waves for glimpses of the whale’s silver hump breaching, or a blowhole spouting, Ahab’s heart (that madly seekest him) was now Rosa’s, beating as if her imagination might fill it with joy enough to burst. How quickly, she wondered, would the mobile library sink, when the whale smashed its chassis and dragged it down into the sea? She would not need to wait long to know.

“I love you,” Bobby said, and Val flinched like she had never before heard those three words strung together in that certain painful order.

As the sun rose, heat beat out the cab’s cool air. Bobby’s T-shirt clung to his belly, a transparent skin over the pale smirk of his scars. Bert panted, sweat collecting on the glistening black cherry of his nose.

• • •

Detective Samas had not accounted for the presence of a dog. No mention of it had cropped up in the case notes. Only now that it had been sighted by the police helicopter humming overhead, and the news relayed to him over the radio clipped to his belt, was he even aware of its existence. A dog! How had this been overlooked? Even a detective as sharp as he could not be in complete mastery of the details in such a sprawling case. This was precisely the kind of oversight he’d been desperate to avoid. Animals were far more unpredictable than kidnappers or fugitives. Generally speaking, he found that the less hairy the variable, the better. He imagined it savaging his testicles as he tried to calmly negotiate the children’s release. Contemplating the job ahead had already prompted the first dreadful needling of a catastrophic migraine. Switching off his mobile phone in case his girlfriend went into labor and called, he felt momentarily guilty. Bad timing, he supposed. There was a job to do.

• • •

Nothing happened for a while. The mobile library stood strangely dormant, surrounded by police cars on the clifftop, existing in the uneasy lull before the future comes. Val had never looked forward much before. To her, the future was a Magic Eye picture, always disappearing whenever she verged on fully grasping its shape. But she could see it clearly now. It was beautiful and full of love and she wanted it, but it had never seemed further away. Perhaps it was she who was vanishing.

“We had an adventure,” Val said, like it was over. “That’s all we ever promised to do.”

A warm film covered Bobby’s eyes. “Like in a book,” he said.

Bobby looked in the mirror and saw the detective’s reflection as he approached. He had seen him before, on the television news, and noticed the red flecks in his moustache, a neat copper awning for his lips. The detective’s shirt was crumpled, as if his clothes had gone to sleep without him.

• • •

Running through a mental checklist of everything he knew about Valerie Reed, Detective Samas realized that it amounted to more than he knew about his own girlfriend. Rather than saddening him, this epiphany buoyed the detective with renewed...