by Gary Crew
Augustus liked this house. It felt like home.
Because adults stared and children laughed, Augustus rarely went out, his books his constant companions. Having exhausted King Tut and read his way through Egypt, he moved on to other civilisations, selecting them according to their architecture. He did not, however, equate this interest with monumentality, being equally fascinated by the modest Zulu kraal as he was by the spires and towers of the Gothic cathedral. So he thought on the significance of size, and how he was both constructed, and constructed himself.
I am not so much a building, he thought, as a space that might be filled. And when he had given that notion due consideration, he modified it. I am not so much a space that might be filled, he thought, as a space that, being filled, whether with ideas or emotions, then fills others. As a flute perhaps, being filled with the sweet composer’s breath, yields yet sweeter music to fill the hearts of those who hear.
So Augustus grew.
One morning, as the boy sat on the front steps of the cottage, Rosa stopped at the wooden gate and turned.
‘Augustus,’ she said. ‘Do you sit there all day?’
‘Sometimes,’ he said, shading his eyes with his book.
‘Wouldn’t you like to come to the library with me one day? You could, you know. On the train.’
‘People would look at me,’ he said.
‘People look at me too.’
‘I’ve got nothing to wear,’ he said.
‘Would it make any difference?’
‘I’m reading a book,’ he said.
‘We’re going to a library.’
She’s getting smarter, he thought.
Rosa bought Augustus a pair of lederhosen, with accompanying frilly shirt and red felt Tyrolean cap, in the bargain basement at Cribb and Foote’s, and next day they caught the 8.05 to the library.
‘I look stupid,’ the boy complained. ‘I hate this outfit.’
‘Next time buy your own,’ Rosa growled, shoving him into a carriage.
Among other horrors encountered on that visit, Augustus recalled struggling up a flight of sandstone stairs with Rosa half dragging, half lifting him by his left elbow, muttering: ‘You’re going on thirteen now, so try to act like an adult, okay? This is good clean work, using my brains for once, so I want to keep it. You got that?’
For all Rosa’s loving kindness, Augustus was struck by the words graven above the entrance:
LIBRARY
SILENCE
His heart fell. Where there is silence, he thought, there is no song. And where there is no song, I die, but struggle as he might, Rosa dragged him in.
Confronted by the precipitous oak accessions desk rising sheer before him, he gazed up, wondering if boiling oil might momentarily cascade from that battlement, or a bottomless moat might burst, yawning, beneath his feet. Nor could he see any end to this fortification, neither to the right nor the left, and he gripped Rosa’s hand, reduced.
‘Big, eh?’ she whispered, reaching up, and lo, a secret door opened, disguised in that self-same wall, and he wondered at the trickery, as to who was trying to deceive, and why.
‘Isn’t this a public library?’ he asked, mystified by the barrier.
She pushed him through.
Beyond was worse. What were these monoliths cluttering the interior, these timbered stations rearing, island-like, from the bare wood floor; the temporary dwellings of those who manned the wall?
He stumbled between them as through canyons, expecting a hail of arrows or, had they been from an earlier age, a pterodactyl swooping, jaws agape. Nor did the black lianas (telephone cords, were they?) spiralling from these towering walls encourage him as they writhed and clung at his touch, his flesh creeping as he slunk, shoulders hunched, in the shadow of his leader.
‘There are three Assistant Librarians,’ Rosa whispered. ‘These are their desks,’ and without further warning Augustus was unceremoniously whooshed to land on a slab of oak the size of a battlefield.
‘This,’ observed Rosa, stepping back to reveal, ‘is Miss Blotting, one of the three. She is in charge of the Fiction catalogue.’
Miss Blotting was indeed a librarian, her hair a grey and marbled coronet plaited and pinned above her head; her face a papery triangle, likewise grey and marbled, stretched, rack-like, over her cheek bones; and her teeth, grey and marbled, grinning headstones.
‘This,’ whispered Rosa, whooshing him again to span the canyon between, ‘is Miss Blank. She is in charge of Nonfiction. And this,’ whooshing again, equally unceremoniously, though not without some expectation, ‘Miss Bland. She looks after newspapers and magazines.’
‘And poetry? Who looks after poetry?’ Augustus wondered aloud.
Rosa’s eyes narrowed. ‘I warn you,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t you dare bring up the subject of song, or lyrics, or anything even vaguely to do with the poetic. This is a mining town. People hate that stuff.’
‘Hate it,’ the Misses B responded as one.
‘Ah …’ Augustus.
‘Sissy stuff.’
‘But …’
‘Got rid of it, we did.’
‘You banned it?’
‘Chucked it out,’ they chorused.
The boy could not believe it.
‘Shut up, Augustus …’ Rosa warned.
‘But the destruction of poetry spells the death of song.’
‘I want this job,’ Rosa hissed. ‘Shut up now.’
Augustus obeyed, wondering what might happen if he should pluck a pin (or three, or more), from those grey, marbled plaits; would the serpents so released rear and strike from these Gorgon skulls?
‘Augustus was asking if he could sing for you,’ Rosa lied. ‘But don’t worry, he won’t,’ and she glared, as if daring him.
‘What a dear little boy,’ Miss Blotting wheezed, peering down; then Miss Blank, ‘What a delightful child’; then Miss Bland, ‘What a perfect treasure.’
They are treating me like an infant, Augustus thought. Yet there is no womblike cave here, no piano to curl up under or emerge from, renewed. This place is as dead as a tomb. Ah, Absalom … and, leaping from desk to chair to floor, he ran between the canyons hoping to find a door or a window or a keyhole whereby he might escape.
Pausing, breathless, to check, he saw that he had corralled himself in an office of frosted glass where three people (men, were they?) sat at a circular table, each on a wooden stool, each bending forward, evidently busy.
The first was huge, his bum overhanging the stool top (had it melted, like cheese on an unsupervised grill?), his gut overhanging his knees, his chin overhanging his chest, yet this body, for all its enormity had somehow been packed, poured or moulded into a suit of grey flannel, the trousers elephantine, the coat a marquee. Had his black felt bow tie been undone and drawn from the folds of his neck, it could serve as carpet runner in a mortuary.
Augustus stood, too saddened to laugh.
But oh, that hair, that head!
A woolly mammoth might trumpet in envy at the sight of the grey, greasy mass tumbling from the pachyderm’s forehead, over his skull and around his ears to fall about his red, cratered neck. And from the head the nose: a mountain of warts, some pink, some purple, all moist and fleshy, erupting in sequence (as do geysers from a rock).
While Augustus watched agog, from the huge one’s lips oozed a rope of spittle, long and languid, almost reaching the desk top and, upon inhalation, drawing back, vanishing within those fleshy lips only to reappear, drooping, then drawing up, drooping, then drawing up, an aqueous ebb and flow well worthy of a boy’s attention.
The second person appeared much the same, only slighter.
The third also, skinnier still (a skeleton, was it?).
Yet all three were dressed alike, coiffured alike, dribbled alike. Then Augustus saw what united them, and possibly why he had stopped to stare in the first place. All three – huge, medium and cadaverous – were stamping. Not furiously, not violently, but slowly, rhythmic
ally, the right hand reaching to stamp upon a red-inked pad, then crossing the body to the left to stamp again, in concert; a musical concept which, muted though it was, in breaking the silence pleased him with its soft padded puff. But what were they stamping?
He climbed on a chair to see.
Loan cards, he observed, to verify the borrowing of poetry books!
Augustus steadied himself for a better look, standing on a chair as he was, and noted that these cards were all the same – the very same three – one stamper stamping before sliding the card to his left where his partner did the same. So the cards – the very same three – went round and round the table as the stampers stamped, a hand reaching, a hand stamping, as had been done for years, judging by the cards all red with ink and the unoiled creaking of the skeletal one, and the bodily diminution of the thinner one, and the well-rounded blubber of the leviathan, who was evidently new. Which made Augustus think, Do they stamp until they are dead, I wonder? And his hand went to his mouth as he realised, This is all to add to a lie. There are no poetry books in this library yet they stamp the cards to pretend that there are … Looking this way and that he saw no person, no borrower, no reader of any kind, and he wondered again at this lifeless place: this library without poetry, this library without readers, this building without sound, save for the Gorgon’s hiss or a soft stamped puff. Looking up directly, searching for a book or a poem or a song, he wondered at the shafts of light beaming from above, not bright, never celestial, but grey as flannel, ribboning down, unravelled bolts crisscrossing in space, flecked about with drifting dust. He stood quite still to look again, steady …
And so he saw: beyond these murky shafts a balcony protruded; a gallery with a railing – much like one he had seen in a photographic work on the architecture of Victorian railway stations – appearing and disappearing out of that miasma of dust motes and grey flannel bolts and shafts of smoggy light, and he wondered if a library book might lurk there; if a poetry collection might be filed there, a manuscript even – a word, he would accept – secret on a shelf in that forbidding place; too distant, too high, too dim for human presence.
Leaping from his chair, he ran towards a flight of iron steps, leading up, he hoped, towards that gallery and the possibilities so promised.
The metal handrail was cold to his touch, and he withdrew his hand, fearful. He had little experience of metal, none at all of its steely cold. He touched again, assessing, sensing no life, no warmth. The legs of his mother’s piano were wood, handcrafted from an organic being – a living thing – a tree. The keys of the piano were ivory, crafted from organic matter – a tusk – part of the body of an animal: a living thing. But this metal, this mass of mineral – this tube so cold – what life had it known? What pleasures? What joys? What poetry of wind, of sea, of sun; what pleasant language had brought it to be? He gripped the rail tight, deliberately subjugating its careless form to the human heart, declaring, ‘Void of life though you are, you will help me,’ and so he climbed, the stair treads, webs of iron, rising ever higher, ever assuring him (each footstep clattering), that if he went on he would find that gallery, but each staircase opened on to a landing and each landing opened on to a staircase and so he climbed, clattering and puffing, ever upward until at the seventh staircase (perhaps the ninth or the eleventh – who could count in that confusion?) the landing expanded to become that distant gallery he had seen from his chair below. Setting foot upon it, he gripped the railing to look down.
I have no feeling for steel, he realised. It’s too cold for the poetic, too hard. Even the splinters of Miss la Vie’s verandah yielded more romance than this. Yet surely there is a poem, a song – if sung right, if sung to perfection – that would recreate this place?
Looking down through the miasma of dust and fog, he could make out nothing of substance; not the Gorgons, nor their battlements, nor Rosa, nor the Stampers Three, nor the staircase that had bought him here, and gripping the railing tighter, he sighed and stood tall. This is a clerestory level, he told himself. A clear story level. I am safe here. I am clear. I will find that poem, that recreative song …
Until the thought struck him:
LIBRARY
SILENCE.
Even as he sighed, hopeless, he noticed a protrusion from the wall (an eyrie, could it be?) and in that steely pod, a human shape; some mean-fleshed body clad in a sexless cardigan, grey hair knotted in the obligatory plait, the nose severe, the chin lowered, the lips pursed, the eyes small, peering through pince-nez into the morass below. Stamped in grey plate (tin, was it? Or poisonous lead?) upon this creature’s desk, the chilling word:
LIBRARIAN
‘I have seen stony Gorgons,’ Augustus sobbed. ‘I have met ghastly stampers. Surely this is the very Murderess of Song!’
Yet as he wept, the circus came to mind, the sorrow he had known there: that time at the willow down by the dribbly creek, and the song he had sung that day; he remembered that awful house, the bitter mango, the jewelled hand, sad Absalom, the lonely death of the Blue Butterfly, and the songs he had sung for them.
I will sing, he thought, wiping his cheeks. I will bring the life-creating joy of song to this deathly place. That is what I do. On pain of destroying my own life, I must not forget that. I am an instrument which, being filled with the sweet composer’s breath, yields yet sweeter music to fill the hearts of those who hear. I must remember that, for my own sake, for my own future, if I am to have one, as I will when I have sung myself to grow.
And wiping his eyes, he looked up.
Through a coal-streaked window he saw outside. That is the rear of the building, he understood. And what appears to be a pile of mullock … But such was the murk and grime streaking the pane, he could see no more. Climbing down, tread after weary tread, he understood. I need to explore this place, as I shuffled through that sawdust, trod in that dung, back beneath that big top; as I crawled in that dirt, back there, beneath that whorehouse …
So he did, until Rosa called him home.
When Stan came in from the pit they sat together on the front steps, staring down at the crazy path.
‘Stan,’ Augustus said, ‘I went to the library today. I hated the place. I thought I was going to die.’
‘But you didn’t, eh?’ Stan said.
‘No,’ Augustus replied. ‘I’m sitting here next to you.’
‘So?’
‘So I might have.’
‘Hmmm?’
‘It was horrible. I couldn’t find a song.’
Stan rested his elbows on the stair above. ‘Augie,’ he said, ‘you aren’t s’posed to sing in a library.’
‘I know that. But the place was so cold. They reckoned their poetry books had been chucked out because no-one wanted to read them. Not in a mining town, anyway.’
‘Dunno ’bout that,’ Stan grunted.
‘What?’
‘Them miners in Wales sing in choirs, hey?’
‘Maybe …’
‘Never sung a song meself,’ Stan admitted. ‘But didn’t you tell me you just know the right song for the right place. No matter where?’
‘This place was dead.’
‘So you was scared, eh?’
‘I saw a skeleton.’
‘Go on …’
‘And Gorgons, made of stone.’
‘When I went to school,’ Stan reflected, ‘if I remember right, Gorgon weren’t made of stone. I thought that she turned the ones she looked at inta stone. But I was stupid, eh?’
‘No, Stan. No …’
‘Augie,’ Stan said, putting his arm around the boy, ‘I reckon the place just got to ya. I reckon you lost your nerve. You gotta go back. You gotta find your song. Like before. Remember that mango tree? That Miss la Vie …’
Within a month (perhaps three, perhaps seven, maybe more), Augustus found the courage to return to the library.
‘Is it true that they disposed of the poetry books?’ he asked Rosa as she set herself up at Accessions.
; ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she sneered. ‘The Misses B were having a go at you. You’re such a child.’
‘But last time I was here …’ he began, then fell silent. How could he explain the Stamping Men and their weird ritual of forever validating unborrowed books? So he said, ‘Sorry to be a pest. I’ll have a little wander …’
Having negotiated the Valley of the Gorgons and the Circle of Stampers and electing not to climb that cast-iron stairway to the grey, misty gallery in the clerestory, he stumbled upon a circle of steel set into the hardwood floor.
‘What’s under this?’ he muttered. ‘A secret repository? A hidden cache of poesy?’ and stooping, he gripped the ring, wrenching it upwards with all his might.
‘Ugh!’ he gasped, catching a whiff of foul air. ‘Dung! I know it from the circus.’
But what was dung doing beneath that library floor? And why, indeed, was there a trapdoor opening into this morass? Pinching his nostrils, he dropped to his knees and peered in.
There were stairs leading down: steep but negotiable. Ladder-like.
Taking one last look to see that the coast was clear of pterosaurs or other monstrous beings, he turned about to venture in.
The descent was perilous, the stench overpowering, the pit beneath deep and dark. Hand over hand he clambered, tenuous tread after tenuous tread, his fingers stiff with fear.
‘There might be something,’ he breathed. ‘Some repository. Some cache. Some answer.’ Finally he made footfall, unnervingly soft. ‘Manure, for sure,’ he muttered.
And it was.
But not like that circus dung. Not fresh, not gaudy with yellow straw. No. This was old. This was not even elephant dung. Nor tiger. Nor ostrich, nor ape, nor seal, nor bear.
A band of grey light oozed from a casement, thick with grime. He bent to see. Horse! This was horse manure. In heaps. In piles. In mounds. But here? Beneath a library? Why?
As he peered into the gloom, he made out the shape of a glue-factory nag (no …), and a wagon, commodious too (never …) and a voice hailed from the darkness, ‘Rosa? Rosa, my darling, is it you?’