by Maggie Gee
‘Shirley,’ said the woman with an enormous smile that revealed big teeth and polished pink gums. She took both Shirley’s hands in hers, and squeezed them hard, meaningfully. ‘I know this is a difficult time for you. And Thomas. I’ve heard so much about you, Tom.’
‘Thomas,’ Darren corrected her, swiftly, annoyed.
‘You’re not American,’ Shirley said. She smiled at Susie, wanting to help her.
‘I’ve lived there fifteen years,’ Susie said. ‘My mother thinks I sound completely American.’
‘Where are the children?’ Shirley asked. Darren had two children by each of his first two marriages. Susie’s face registered it as a reproach. ‘I had – I mean, we had – the kids last weekend. Both lots actually. They’re great. But kids aren’t good in hospitals.’
‘I didn’t mean …’ Shirley trickled away. ‘I’ve never met them, believe it or not.’
‘Darren,’ said Thomas. ‘Long time no see.’ He had got to his feet to greet his friend. They were almost the same height, two tall, dark men. After an awkward pause, they shook hands vigorously, like two boxers not exhausted by their fight.
‘Darren always said you two were like brothers,’ Susie remarked, encouragingly.
But a voice cut in from behind their backs, a new voice, thin, resentful, nasal. ‘I’m his brother,’ Dirk complained. ‘I’m his brother. He hasn’t introduced me.’
Shirley couldn’t escape him. He butted in, anxious, albino under the angry fluorescent.
‘Dirk,’ said Darren, switching instantly into a social smile, his tan creasing. ‘It’s great to see you. You disappeared. This is my little brother, Susie. You were by the bed, but you suddenly vanished –’
‘Had to go to the toilet,’ Dirk said, simply. ‘I thought you’d have waited. Hello, Shirley.’
And then they were all there, the whole family.
‘How long is it since we were all together?’ Shirley asked, but nobody answered, busy finding chairs, stowing coats and bags, glad of the respite from each other.
All of us are here. Me, my two brothers. We were never all together. We don’t know how to do it.
The café was quietening down at last. The locusts had eaten, and were flocking away, muttering ferociously, back down the corridors, a flapping of jaws and creased white wings. The Whites were left at their table in the window, lost in a desert of royal blue plastic, Darren still too wound up to sit down, Susie perched gingerly, an acid-pink flamingo, on a chair she appeared to fear was dirty, Shirley feeling like a giant by comparison, clumsy, creamy, too heavy to move, Thomas disappearing to fetch a pot of tea, and Dirk sidling grimly round the table to escape the women and be near his brother, his brother who was taller, richer, browner, Darren who was more of a man than him.
‘So that’s a full house,’ Shirley repeated brightly. ‘All the family together at last.’
Not true, of course, she realized at once. The next generation wasn’t there. None of them had met Darren’s children. Shirley herself didn’t have any. And if, by a miracle, I manage it with Elroy, I doubt if this family will ever accept them – And Dirk – is Dirk. Impossible.
Without any children they were curiously stranded, middle-aged people who were children themselves.
And where were the parents? No Dad. No Mum. It foreshadowed the future, when they would be gone. So who was meant to look after them?
Thomas put the teapot in front of her.
‘I’ll be mother,’ said Shirley, gratefully.
THE SHOP
14 • Thomas
‘One-Stop Shop!’ It still struck Thomas as strange to see the large yellow notice on the front of the library, though it had been there for two years now. A library, after all, was not a shop. That was the point of it; you borrowed, then returned, and the things you borrowed belonged to everyone. The ethos of shops was opposed to libraries … As he’d tried to explain to the councillor who unveiled the plan for the One-Stop Shop, in one of the long Monday morning meetings that left them scratchy with frustration and boredom. ‘It’s a question of perceived social need,’ said the man, who had already used the phrase a dozen times. ‘We have to react to social need. We don’t want to get too hung up on books.’
So the One-Stop Shop, the public face of the council, had simply come to perch, inelegantly, just inside the front doors of the library, where previously there were book displays. The librarians had resisted the loss of territory, but now they were almost used to it. Thomas reflected that the notice chimed well with one Suneeta had installed on the stairs: ‘Customers may expect to be serviced rapidly and politely by library staff.’ Visions of swift and silent sex performed by librarians on special tables.
In Thomas’s lifetime, the official term had changed from ‘readers’, to ‘borrowers’, to ‘users’, and now to ‘customers’, which somehow meant less. Not that it mattered. They were ‘punters’ to the staff.
Did he like the public? – Occasionally. At any rate, he believed in them. But thank God you only had to be on the Inquiry Desk one hour in two, on a rota. You couldn’t hide, sitting out at the front, though having the computers did help them to look busy. There was a combination lock on the librarians’ office, where they worked and chatted out of public view, put on it after one of the alcoholics burst in with a can of meths and a lighter, in the eighties … Thomas wasn’t a coward, he had never been a coward, but libraries did attract people with grievances. That young man King, the other day, with his long list of inflammatory titles. The old man who came up to the desk this morning and hissed, full of spittle, ‘How do you spell “action”?’ When Thomas told him, he stared in disbelief, then shouted in a fury, ‘But where’s the s? Where’s the bloody s?’
And then there was what they called the Irish Question, which arose every morning with the daily papers. The South Irish Recorder was so popular that it had to be kept at the Inquiry Desk, and issued only in exchange for a deposit. The arguments, sometimes actual tussles, arose when two punters asked to read it at the same time, or when someone was late returning it, or when the object offered as a deposit cost less than the price of the paper … Thomas had been handed, in the past two weeks: one glasses case, mended with sellotape; one pack of tooth-picks, three-quarters empty; one handkerchief, soiled with recognizable fluids; a bag of boiled sweets; one wrinkled green pepper. When he objected to this last item, the woman who offered it got in a rage. ‘It’s … unsuitable,’ he said, firmly. ‘Well what is suitable?’ she asked, red-faced. But he merely knew he’d reached the end of some line. ‘Not greengrocery. Sorry, madam.’
Fortunately Thomas was the stock librarian, so he spent much of his time at the back, at his desk, in the pleasant shared office, out of public view, leafing in a warm leisurely daze through the approval lists for possible acquisitions. His budget was small, but he still enjoyed spending it. He had to balance whim with service to the public, so he dutifully checked on past issue figures. He needed guaranteed crowd-pleasers to disguise the odd book on postmodernist theory … Because the accountants did have a point – they had to keep the usage figures up. And the usage figures were going down, slowly but surely, year by year.
Suneeta Patel was fifty, easily, broad and soft, though she sometimes talked and acted like a hippy teenager. He liked her sibilant, caressive whisper, and her round golden arms, indeed most of her, though she teased him for being a ‘book-man’, which meant, in new library parlance, ‘dinosaur’. She had worked here since the eighties, though she wasn’t a qualified librarian, but she knew more than anyone else about the information side of things, the whereabouts of nursery schools, doctors’ surgeries, Job Shops, yoga classes, sports centres, aromatherapy … All the touching hopes for self-betterment that the public brought to the library. She came and perched distractingly on his desk, which pushed out the rounded curve of her flank. (He hadn’t had sex for … months? years? His thoughts slipped fleetingly across to Melissa. He usually saw her several times a week, either in the street
or on the stairs, but for some reason this week had been a desert.)
‘Thomas. Did that crazy come in for his notes? The one who wrote all that heavy stuff about race?’
‘Oh. Yes. W King. He was young. Good-looking. Bit scary, to be honest. He’s ordered all this stuff about lynchings.’
She widened her eyes, in a parody of fear, and squeezed his hand, which he found stirring, despite the pain as her rings dug in. ‘Watch yourself, Sweet Pea,’ she purred. ‘Just call Suneeta. Suneeta will protect you … By the way, how’s your friend who had the thingy?’
After a pause, he realized whom she meant. ‘Alfred? Went to see him yesterday,’ he answered. ‘In hospital. He didn’t seem too bad. The family all came.’
‘That’s very good,’ she said, nodding approvingly. ‘Family just has to be there for you.’ Her almond eyes were elongated with an upflick of jet black eyeliner that looked as if you could peel it off whole; her lips were crimson, cushiony, with little soft lines of tiredness at the edges. ‘My daughters’, she continued, ‘are education-mad. We wanted them to be graduates, yes. But they forget what matters in life: family, innit?’
‘I suppose you’re right.’ He didn’t know what to answer. He was an only child, and his parents were dead.
‘Too right I’m right. Have a peppermint.’ And she sashayed away, smiling seductively over her cushiony shoulder.
Sighing, for Suneeta had been married for three decades, had seven children, and would never be for him, Thomas trudged downstairs to look at the shelves in the History Section, which were getting tight. Triage was part of Stocks as well, and he sorted titles, to go for disposal almost automatically, thinking of the Whites.
It wasn’t exactly happy families, last night. Darren White, the People’s Friend, blowing his top at that poor woman on the counter, and snapping at his wife as if she was a servant. Poor little Dirk, with his four sugars …
Shirley had changed for the better, though. So – bien dans sa peau. So confident. And glossy, and pretty, and prosperous. She seemed so – calm. When all the others were nervous. I felt I wanted her to – be my friend (oh be honest, I wanted to sleep with her).
Her breasts were nice. Her cheeks were nice. Her skin was soft and nice like May’s, nice, nice, the niceness of women … Later, May’s face, looking down on Alfred. The shine of a woman who loves a man.
I would like that. I’ve never quite had that. I had a wife, but she didn’t light up.
By the time he had finally reached Alfred’s bedside, the ward had been closing down towards night, and a nurse came round with a chinking trolley. ‘Do you want something to help you sleep?’
May had said, ‘Horlicks. He always likes Horlicks.’
The nurse ignored her. ‘Mr White, Alfred, would you like something?’
‘He doesn’t like pills, if that’s what you mean. Alfred never has sleeping pills.’
‘Hang on,’ said Alfred, eyes suddenly wide open. ‘I will have something. I did last night.’
‘Alfred,’ May protested. ‘You could never stand pills.’
‘He moans,’ said Alfred, pointing down the ward. ‘Every hour or so, he starts this moaning. And there’s a woman who wanders about. You wouldn’t get a wink of sleep in here.’
May said nothing as nameless pills rattled into a tiny plastic beaker, but when Alfred took them, she caught Thomas’s eye, mouthed ‘Tranquillizers’, as someone might say ‘Heroin’, and winked, to comfort them both. ‘You’re looking tired, Thomas. Working too hard with the books, I suppose.’
It was gratifying someone knew libraries meant work. Wonderful May. She was often at the library. And she had quite a collection of her own books, too. Once she had showed him her Tennyson. The bookplate said ‘May Hill, IVA. For Promising Work. Form English Prize.’
May’s smile. ‘Your mother would be proud of you. Alfred is pleased you’ve come to see him. He’s just a bit sleepy. Exciting day.’
Alfred opened his eyes, frowned, concentrated. ‘I’m not asleep. I’m not tired …’
‘Thomas, dear,’ whispered May. ‘I think I’ll pop and have a word with the doctors.’
‘Not tired,’ Alfred muttered, doggedly, but furred with sleep, slurring slightly. ‘Ni’, Darren. Good boy …’ His eyelids sagged.
‘Thomas,’ he had gently corrected him, but May frowned, shush. Then she bent over and kissed Alfred’s hand, very lightly, as if it were precious. ‘Wait here a mo’,’ she said suddenly to Thomas, and darted off after a passing doctor.
But Alfred, Thomas saw, was asleep, so he went to fill the water-jug. In the kitchen, though, he got trapped in conversation with a little man with an infected hip who was desperate to talk about the Queen Mother. ‘She was up and walking the very next day. They get a different quality of care, you know.’
Thomas was half-jogging down the corridor, eager to get out into the clean night air, when he bumped into a body, someone soft, in the shadows, someone he realized was quietly weeping –
It was May, with her hands covering her face. May, with the tears streaming down between her fingers.
Thomas wanted her to stop, very much, very badly. There was a smell of disinfectant, and the sluice room gurgled, gurgled in the distance.
‘I just saw his doctor,’ she said, when she could speak. ‘I don’t think the news is very good. Don’t say anything. Don’t tell the children.’
Oh euphemism, oh sad non-speech.
‘May, can I walk home with you?’
‘I don’t want to be a nuisance, but Dirk’s already gone.’
They walked through the wind not saying very much. Thomas took May’s arm, feeling she might blow away in the darkness … But he knew that no one could make things right, no one could lift the terrible weight that had swooped in one awful second, landed.
May had said goodbye at the clanking gate outside the little terraced house in the thirties street, the mean street, where they had lived for most of their lives. It was not unlike his parents’ street, though the latter had been gentrified; loft extensions, magnolia-trees, obsession with restoring the original details, whereas May and Alfred’s street was still tearing them out. Little brilliant florets of thirties’ stained glass, sweet-shop red, sweet-shop green, still shone in May and Alfred’s hall window, but the front door had been replaced by an aluminium horror with two dazzling slabs of glass. May stood in its glare and turned grey-white.
‘Thank you, Thomas. Now you get off home.’
‘Shall I come in and make you a cup of tea?’
‘I don’t want to be a trouble to anyone.’
That was always their fear, that they’d be a trouble. ‘No trouble,’ Thomas said, and followed her in.
It was very warm, and smelled of washing, which was spread across all the radiators, burnt toast, and polish, and age, and damp, and other hints; fruit drops? Earth? It smelled of old people, to Thomas.
‘Coo-ee,’ she called, ‘anyone home?’
He appeared before them at the top of the stairs, hands spread out in mock benediction, bright blond bristles catching the light, a thuggish Christ waving a bottle of beer. Completely different from the sullen child Thomas saw behind the counter in the newsagent’s. He didn’t look wimpish. He looked – what? – vicious. Thomas felt, I mustn’t leave her with him. Which was ridiculous, of course.
He remembered Dirk vaguely as a whiney baby whom Shirley carried around like a doll. (Was there another memory? Something unpleasant.)
‘Dirk, dear,’ said May. ‘You’re home.’
‘Yeah … jus’ got back.’ He was out of breath. His tiny mouth panted.
‘I’ll make us cocoa,’ she said to him. Thomas suddenly sensed it was her son she wanted. The sorrow, the secret of the sorrow, was for him. It was family business. They would draw the curtains –
She drew the curtains. Thomas slipped into the dark.
‘Death is part of life, my darling,’ Suneeta said, when he complained about having to get rid of books. It
was always tempting to send them to Purgatory – the ‘Reserve Stacks’, three dingy portakabins somewhere north of Utterley Road – rather than direct to the fires of hell, sealed in a black plastic rubbish bag. ‘Death is part of life,’ he silently assured the small sad faces of the banished authors. Once the shelves got tight, of course there had to be disposals. All the same, today it seemed – barbarous. History of the Empire. Part One: Expansion … Ethics in Post-War British Business … Into the Future With Hope: The Welfare State in Post-War Britain. Thomas felt shifty and shamefaced, carrying the heavy bag through the library. Was he a barbarian, like those he dreaded?
He had felt afraid, on the streets last night, startled not far from Alfred’s gate by a mob of white skinheads in leather and chains, jostling, giggling, surging onwards like a knot of oiled seals diving over and under, looking for someone, blaring with laughter, barking for someone, he hoped not him – past the phone-boxes with the smashed glass walls still lying in tiny chunks of ice on the pavement, past the Methodist church whose strip-lit noticeboard was covered with black hieroglyphic graffiti, yelling on down towards the Park, a pack in full cry, baying for blood, boys who didn’t know the rules, vandals who tore up the rules … Yobs, but they roared like murderers.
Thomas hefted the bag right out of the library, though normally he’d leave it for the cleaners to dispose of. Doing my own dirty work, he thought. I’m not a bad person. I do contribute. He dropped the heavy weight in the skip. Some kind of animal scuffled in the shadows. Cats, rats –