Rooms Extract 6: ON LIBRARIES

LIBRARY ARCHETYPES

Bubble gun. Outside, on Mare Street, he pushes a trolley stocked with plastic toys and a sound system playing all the hits, occasionally stopping to make bubbles. How does he look? Pouches of grey skin, cheeks going both out and in, a broken roman nose and cupped spine, a walking gait as though each time his legs are breaking through a stuck door. Perhaps hair, but perhaps not.

Outside The Library. My fingers are dead from Reynaud’s (ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather). A man with the air of an Irish actor has his hands doubly, sleeved and pocketed, and his eyes tucked away elsewhere. He is talking to someone on the phone and I suppose that’s where his sight has landed.

Electric Lights. When I enter, a guard asks why I used the revolving door instead of the automated one. I explain my thinking about heat loss (efficiency being a life-long interest). He prefers another answer, which I agree to.

He tells me the story of his life in terms of electric lights beginning as a child watching the lights of the Victoria Park Fair, indicating his young height with his hand.

Graphic Novel. He is here most days, always on the very cold ones. He has with him a backpack that carries all his belongings, including a roll-up sleeping matt. He can keep all his books at the library, which must be good for his back.

Study Hard. A quiet space is challenged out of dryness by a high, calm voice, slightly nasal and almost singing: hello students, study hard, you won’t be as bad as me if you study hard. His kind of face can smile without the need of smiling. His swagger, his luminous work jacket — it all comes as relief.

M ore Advice. In bursts, he talks. A giant bottle of Boost at his desk. The security guard lingers, but his bursts are short and useful. That’s how you become successful. A long life, with longer left ahead.

Friends. Looking at the desk in front of mine, I read my neighbour’s Cambridge textbook. A series of writing tasks — she catches me reading them, eyes clutching lids, but has forgiven me.

Same Table. A man comes in every day and sits at the same desk. We develop a system for quiet waving, until one day he breaks it. Beckoning me over, he points to a typed message on his computer. I’m not sure I can wave anymore.

A Pity It’s Terrible. Out in space, over the shoulder of a man across from me, I see some developing erotic poetry. In huge font he writes: spooning a woman exhausted [with] warm spunk dribbling [while thinking of] ways to say I’m leaving you. He keeps turning round to see if I’m looking.

Accent. A man sneezes. He makes all the correct pronouncements of an archetypal sneeze, and expelled with other stuff, his full accent is shared in the library’s hush.

Library Spin. Between General Fiction B and General Fiction C, a space in the shelving is forced by a cartoonish, structural pillar. A scarfed woman slips between the gap, her hand gliding as she moves. Months later, a librarian moves the same exactly, but her shape is momentarily trapped.

The building’s shape and our belief in libraries keeps us moving this way and that.

They’ll Get Theirs. A girl with a pleasant, open face walks towards me, and leans in as though to confide. I made my face an invitation. People like her, they’ll get theirs, she tells me — her confidant, and walks away.

Some mysteries go unsolved, but I spend time making reasons, glazing the words in my book.

Sinner. A woman’s back is at a 50-degree angle from her legs, her torso balanced on a sholley. A young boy stares down the aisle. She talks to the occupied librarian, and he walks around the desk and helps her into a chair, still talking to his previous charge. Her voice is rising, tremulous, full of woe. A bus, no, two busses, receiving emails, threats from the library saying she must learn. Her voice is crackling, but she is getting closer to her point. Her slow steps, her age, her accent — can’t be ignored. She is not from here, she says. She has lost her library card, it is a sin. The librarian disagrees with a strict matter-of-fact that is a comforting refutation.

M ean Librarian. More specifically, the man who flirts with her and the woman who yells at her, I mean really yells.

W restling Fan. Huddled on his own around a screen, he’s in the best of his company. Quiet retorts and humour, laughing reflexively at his reactions, he loops himself into a quiet company. His grunts mimic those

of the wrestling men, those two bare men that slam each other to soft earth.

Forgotten Glasses. A toddler wearing sunglasses walks up to a tall man looking at DVDs. Hiya (said to the room in general, then to him specifically). He looks at her, and launches a five minute story about having forgotten his glasses, and buying a pound shop pair in order to read DVD titles, but they’re no good, no good. He ends his detailed spiel by saying anyway have a nice day, and the toddler, who had lowered her sunglasses to watch the man talk, slips them back up her nose and waves bye. The man hums and continues looking at DVDs and the toddler returns to her otherwise-busied mother.

Needs A Hat. Seen on a number of occasions making circuits of the large library room and counting with a pointed hand each person sitting at a desk or soft chair. Upon completion of his circuit he reports the number back to Graphic Novel man, and begins again. He is counting the competition for hostel beds.

Electronics. A man has five electronic devices all in a line and separate sheets of worn out paper with tiny, handwritten lists in different mediums (but no pen or pencil). The devices: an old phone, two scientific calculators; one electronic diary; one spell checker with buttons that beep.

He moves between papers and devices, typing at each in turn. Results produce neutrality, consternation, slight amusement and occasional, wide and definite smiles.

This is the answer to someone else’s mystery. Where has he gone? He’s in the library. We’re all in the library.

IN THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT Night comes down and nobody makes that much of it, neat and hammering, rain finds itself in sound. Bouncing darkness on bright plastic chairs, hard and pliable, our backs become all craned then separate.

Windows make returns of dolloped light, flecked and rippling. This is the night, and the rain that helps you.

You discover absences, notice that your parents are missing, notice that your siblings are no longer children stacked with you in your bedroom.

Dryness is gone, and with it, things like after-school evenings, or Saturdays with Cilla Black. Ae fond past; the murky ok. Memory isn’t watertight, spills its scoops of light from windows. No one you knew is here now.

Your hand on the back of your hand gets no warmer. Occasionally bluer, you’re getting your blood back in the hot food bay at Sainsbury’s.

One evening you read that time is a product of heat’s passing, and still the rain comes down, pummelling hard earned pavement corners till their cracks well up.

Inside remembers the shape of nothing that’s held in this room, the books all lost places, stamped front pages that no longer matter. Bleared by sound, your site of imagining stretches.

There is a targetless, remembered-in-the-morning loss. Days that shudder by are marked by each new hand on the shoulder, each new head on the doorstep, or pummelled corners. A clump of things present as just regret in general. And the rain comes down, and the roof might cave with it, but nobody makes that much of it.