Mobile Library by David Whitehouse

that gave Bobby goose pimples. He didn’t talk much, and when he did it was mostly about the everyday ins and outs of his solitary profession.
    Bruce never worked without a bottle of denatured alcohol tucked into the pocket of his tool belt. He liked its ruthless functionality, how it was the shark of the ethanols. He had spent his entire adult life painting and decorating, and in doing so he had used denatured alcohol as a weapon against almost all of his professional banes. Not just paint, but ink and dust. Even mealybugs, which had overrun the solarium of a florist whose skirting boards he had painted. He had used denatured alcohol to disinfect the cracked skin on his heels before draining an angry-looking blister. He had employed it as a germicide by rubbing it into a persistent cold sore that clung to his top lip like a baby koala. He had even poured it into the glistening wound left when he severed the little finger on his left hand by trapping it in the metal hinge of a foldaway ladder. The surgeons did not commend his efforts when he arrived at the hospital carrying his finger in a beakerful of it. By then it had killed the skin cells, serving fine as an antiseptic for the wound but destroying what had once been there. Still, they were impressed that he had driven himself to Accident and Emergency.
    What he liked best about denatured alcohol was that, despite its potency—or rather because of it—its manufacturers still had to put something in it to stop people from drinking it. It was called denatonium benzoate and was the bitterest known chemical compound. Unpalatable to humans, they used it in animal repellents and nail-biting preventatives. Without denatonium, people would drink denatured alcohol even though they knew that it could make them blind or even kill them. Some people still did. What a thing, that you could still love it no matter what ruin it brought. Bruce respected that about it, and deep down hoped the same principle could be applied to him.
    â€œYou know this is a waste of time,” he said. “The beach will be cold and strewn with dog shit. Everywhere will be packed with tourists. You won’t even be able to see the view for the clouds.” He pointed at Bobby. “And he’ll be wanting everything he sees in every shop. We’ll be dragging a screaming child down the seafront in the wind. I don’t consider that a holiday.”
    â€œIt’ll be a holiday from this,” she said.
    They didn’t speak again until the next morning as the cases were being loaded into the car, when she tried to soften him up with her special buttery diction. She asked him to take a photograph of her and Bobby leaning on the hood. She held her son in her arms. It took a long time for the flash to go off. Bobby could feel the bump inside her belly. Even though she was changing she was always the perfect shape for him.
    Bruce agreed to put the radio on but the air-conditioning was broken, so the windows were open and the wind whipping at their ears meant they couldn’t hear the music. Bobby amused himself by picking leather from the back of his father’s seat, rolling it up into little balls and making tiny pyramids that collapsed in his hand whenever they hit a bend. His mother had taught him that counting was a good way to make the voice in his head louder than their arguments, so he counted the balls, then the dials on the dashboard, then the bugs’ bodies splashed across the windscreen.
    After two hours they pulled into a service station forecourt. Bruce got out, slammed the door and walked away sucking on a cigarette. The smoke made pretty designs in the air. He headed to a bar inside a hotel that catered to lonely traveling salesmen and truckers who had decided to stay parked up for the night, rather than face another mile of the road’s endless trundle, a sight seared into their every waking minute. Bruce ordered a glass of port, which the barman found in