The Stopping Place

by Helen Slavin

  In the winter the library takes on a bookish cosiness. The darkness outside is sparkled by the lights of the buses as they pull up and the brash fluorescent lighting we have in here makes everyone look paler, harsher. Except for Martha, who looks more porcelain and fragile. The carpet smells different too; it begins to hold the damp of the puddles that are trodden into it from outside, and people’s coats and jackets have that winter-time coldness smell woven into their fibres. Martha has an Astrakhan coat, a tulip-shaped creature she bought at the vintage shop in the city. I want to steal that coat. I have to put my hands in my pockets over that coat.

  It’s been so cold of late I’ve wondered if the lake might freeze over. I was daydreaming about swimming under the crusted surface in the darkness when Joachim arrived to go online. He sat Gulliver-like at the computer, the chair too small for him, his long legs folded, knees almost under his chin. A couple of moments passed while I flicked through a copy of Fauna Britannica that had just come back in, before I reshelved it. The staffroom door was creaking open and closed as Harvey organised extra chairs.

  The author events are held in the children’s library, for the floorspace. It’s at the front of the building, there is a big half-moon window and the whole room curls round. It reminds you of a chapter house in a cathedral. There is even a domed ceiling to match the one in the main library. I love that dome, the sky is always visible. The council hate it because the flashing always needs attention and in bad weather the rain drips straight through to Geography 910.

  Martha was just coming through from the lobby with the cases from the wine shop, so when Joaquim had a problem there was only me to deal with it. It was nothing really, just some glitch on the server. Martha came over with a glass of wine. ‘Here you are Ruby, something deliciously French,’ she said, and then seemed to give me a knowing little look, a sly wink. She walked back towards the children’s section and I saw in the on-screen reflection how she nodded something to Harvey and he looked over.

  Then Joaquim’s screen flickered into life; he was connected and I left him alone. I have an instinct for that. I know when it is time to go.

  Kenchikuka

  Architect

  ‘I said I needed this section on A3.’ Mackenzie Tierney screwed up the page slithering out of the photocopier. He had rushed into the library looking for Martha to do some last-minute photocopying for some meeting and had found only me.

  ‘You’ll have to do, Rosie.’

  Mackenzie Tierney is crisped and clipped and tall enough to block out the light when he stands before you. Salt and pepper hair shaved to number four. A set square of a man disguising physical confidence under expensively bagged clothing. A leather jacket, a linen shirt. Sometimes when he approaches the desk his eyes are so dark brown they are deeper than black. It is as if he isn’t real, that somewhere inside the thin dark tunnels of his eyes lurks the real Mackenzie Tierney. That inner person is a very bad idea.

  I caught the elevation as it rolled off the copier, handed it to him and looked directly into his face, or tried to. He was looking down, about to make a note on the original with one of the library’s green Venus pencils. My hand shot out.

  ‘Don’t.’ I hadn’t intended my voice to sound so like a slap. Tierney looked up. If you were useful to him he would see you, otherwise his gaze glanced across your surface. You were a smudge on his lens.

  ‘Calm down Rosie, it’s pencil. It’ll rub off.’ The dark eyes bringing me into charmed focus. Yes, I see you now, you will be beautiful if you will just behave for me. He reached again, jabbing the pencil at the plans.

  ‘No.’

  This time he shook my hand off. Like a cobweb. ‘I don’t have time for this.’

  I grabbed his hand as tight as I dared, shaved my voice down to a steely whisper. ‘Mark that and I’ll throw you out.’

  ‘Oh for pity’s sake, get serious Rosie.’

  I snatched his pencil from him and threw it. Harder than I planned. It broke against the wall.

  ‘Ruby,’ I said.

  He gave a supercilious look and then began to riffle and crumple his way through another set of plans.

  ‘What are you going to do to Kite House?’ I asked above the clacking of the photocopier.

  ‘You’ve seen the place? It’s a wreck.’

  That was true enough. Kite House stood above the town and once upon a time it had commanded the view. Then, as they built the plastics factory and the dual carriageway, the windows at Kite House had been boarded up as if to close its eyes against the march of industry below. I thought it looked like a house asleep. I liked to walk out there and look at it in the rain, loving the sound of the water dripping and pattering in the broken gutters as I sheltered inside the old laundry.

  ‘That’s not an answer,’ I heard myself snarl.

  Tierney looked up sharply. ‘There isn’t an answer. Nothing’s set in stone yet.’

  ‘Oh. Is that code for, “I’m razing it to the ground to build contemporary urban living space”?’ I hoped I’d managed to keep my voice low.

  ‘Listen Rosie, this project’s at a delicate stage. I hope I can trust you with…’ Something metallic glinted in his eyes. ‘Can I trust you?’

  How do you operate eyes like that? My God, the optical nerve of it!

  ‘Doubt it.’ At first I wasn’t certain I had replied aloud. But Tierney wasn’t listening, had accepted that I was bending to his will. Moved on. Busy now, reckless in his hurry with the documents, letting them slither and slide from the table as he sorted through. I squatted onto my haunches to salvage them from the floor; he stepped backwards, his heel almost nipping my fingers.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t see you down there.’ An apology delivered down the ridge line of his fly. ‘No damage done I hope Rosie.’ His eyes lashed across me, smart and smirking. I stood, placed the rear elevation on the table.

  ‘Rita,’ I said, more tersely than I’d intended.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ruth.’

  He didn’t like this game.

  ‘Roxanne.’

  I enjoyed what I’d managed to do to those eyes.

  ‘Roberta.’

  A flicker of uncertainty crossed Tierney’s face, then he looked away, began screwing up more bits of paper, ripping it all off the feed. Tossing it over my head towards the bin. I could feel the concussion of air his hand made beside my cheek. Felt his eyes upon me.

  ‘Let’s do this again shall we?’

  Instead of stepping beside me, he reached round me, corralling me in his arms as he lifted the photocopier lid and adjusted the document slightly. His fingers drummed on the control panel, the pinkie ring catching in the light.

  ‘Show me, Rosie. Which button do I press?’

  ‘Rhiannon.’

  Behind me he stalled for a nanosecond. I pressed the green button. Concentrated on green, green for calm. He hovered as if he might lean forward, then moved sideways, back to ravaging the plans.

  ‘This. This…Two of these …’ Tierney lowered his voice as if he’d remembered he was in the library, ‘…second thoughts, can you do me three of everything so far?’ He checked his expensive watch against the clock above the desk. ‘I’ll be back in an hour…oh and this, I forgot…This side elevation of the laundry block…Three again if you could Rosie…?’

  ‘Roger.’

  Tierney’s eyes flared for a second, unsmiling. Then he was striding off, wheeling round a few steps later to tap at the watch. ‘An hour.’

  He was wearing odd socks. One green tweedy, the other black. I flipped up the lid and lined up the plans of the laundry block as Tierney’s hands swooped into my hair, tilting my head up, and his mouth planted a showy kiss on my forehead.

  ‘You’re a star, Rodge.’ And he was gone.

  * * *

  I was astonished when Mrs Atkinson materialised and asked if I would come down to the archive. I looked at her stupidly for a moment, stupidly enough for her face to register regret that she’d asked me. Then I
recovered my momentum and before I knew it I was clacking across the lobby and heading down the stairs. I hadn’t noticed the stone gargoyles until then, carved into the finial on the stone banisters. I noticed that as Mrs Atkinson moved down the stairs she touched the nose of the gargoyle, as if for luck. Surreptitious, a tweak of the nose as she reached for the banister.

  Downstairs is not somewhere I’ve been before, except for the time when we had the builders in and we had to use the emergency toilet. We passed that room, filled to the ceiling just as I remembered with old manila folders. Mrs Atkinson isn’t just the Senior County Archive Officer. She’s a hoarder.

  She turned sharp left into a side room, dark despite the long fluorescent bulb. You couldn’t see where the walls were because the floor-to-ceiling steel shelving was packed with archive boxes, all shades of manila brown, faded and dusted with age. Some of the very oldest ones were creamy coloured, like parchment. The boxes with copperplated labels were the first, and then there were successive varieties of typewriting stretching forwards through the ages. I wondered who the archive officers had been back then, if they had thought about their handwriting outliving them.

  ‘I need you to reorganise the photo library.’ Mrs Atkinson’s tone of voice was different down here and she had been talking for some moments before I realised it was reverence. She was outlining her plans.

  ‘…alphabetical by place and then we can cross reference to specific town events and festivals, I’ve been making a list for a reference point. Not all of these festivities have survived. I thought we could collate the information and maybe pull in the museum curator on this. Have you met Winn?’

  I looked blank. This should have been another moment where Mrs Atkinson doubted her choice of assistant, but actually she wasn’t aware of me. Here, this was her territory, she had descended to Wonderland.

  ‘I’ll go and ask Harvey to rig up the scanner in here and we can save them all to disk.’ She turned in the doorway. The corridor light shone on her glasses but couldn’t shine on the crack in her voice. ‘We can’t lose any of this Ruby, not one face.’

  * * *

  Not one face. Thousands. As I worked my way along the top shelf, the lids lifted on young men at the roller rink, prisoners of war digging potatoes at a local farm. They looked out at me from the past and I travelled. I liked the boot shop with all the hundreds of pairs hanging outside the windows. I liked the butchers standing outside their shop, the sheets of pork ribs like xylophones in the window.

  The town was beautiful then, or so it seemed to me from my warm and well-fed twenty-first-century viewpoint. But looking closer, even the young men looked old somehow, behind their wiry moustaches. The women all pinched at the waist and pinched in the face. I thought of how life would be then, a life of childbirth and toil. A world without washing machines, your only detergent the sweat of your brow.

  Mrs Atkinson did not give me her Lost Boys file that day.

  Mrs Atkinson, who until about this time I had always considered to be a bit of a harridan, cold and reserved, did have some fellow feeling. I don’t know why she handed it over in the end. I think it was that she couldn’t stand to scan them in, she couldn’t bear to look on all those faces and know that out of all the men at the station, all the hundreds of men trailing down Fore Street like some carnival parade, only twenty-seven of them came back.

  It was much later that I learned that she knew all the names, had spent years sifting through electoral rolls and census returns and newspaper stories to find them all. She was supposed to be writing a book and she had all the information, had even made trips to France to assist with some identifications.

  I didn’t wonder that day, but I wondered later, what she found of herself in all that history, in all of that tragedy. That day, I sat in the ribbed room and scanned, the light on the scanner bed blinking and shining like the thousands of sunrises and sunsets between them and me.

  Hashi o wataru

  Cross the Bridge

  The supermarket had only recently taken to opening late. Until then if you couldn’t get there before eight o’clock you had to starve. And if you could get there before eight o’clock, most other people in town seemed to have had the same impulse. Now they’re open twenty-four hours you can often go and find no one in there at all, apart from Jean on the tills.

  I’ve always found the supermarket a kind of refuge. No one really notices you, so intent are they upon their sausage selection process and squidging fruit to see if it’s ripe. You can hide behind your trolley.

  Tonight there were balloons about, which should have made me suspicious. But it could have been Custard Awareness Week or a promotional tasting for the new cooked-meat deli selection. Last week there were skinny blonde women here, in skin tight hotpants and thigh-length white boots, promoting a new plastic bread. As if women who wear skin-tight hotpants ever eat anything as prosaic as bread, and certainly not plastic industrial bread. Blondes in skinny hotpants drink vodka and teeter through the world tempting you to reach out and topple them over.

  And the background music didn’t give me a clue either, although I did find myself thinking about things I shouldn’t as I leaned into the freezer for the minted peas. It was a selection of eighties pop ballads about love and longing. Maria McKee demanding Show Me Heaven as if you might find it in aisle five with the baking foil. But that’s normal. I didn’t even notice that people were standing by half-empty trolleys talking to each other. I should have looked at the contents of the trolleys.

  He wasn’t tall, that was the first thing that struck me about him. He wasn’t stooping to talk to me like some do. He was stocky, Celtic, and you knew that if you ran your hand across his back you would feel the broadness of his shoulders under his shirt. He was wearing a fancy coloured silk tie that he had changed into; the white shirt had come straight from work, from an office where he did something useful and everyday. Not a hero, not a fireman or a police officer. He looked like a salesman or a pen pusher.

  He hadn’t bothered with a trolley, or even picked up a basket. He was just standing there, with his dark raincoat on, looking soggy round the edges, but anticipatory. He was watching me lean into the freezer and I straightened quickly, moved on without looking at him.

  It freaked me out that he was already by the cheese counter when I arrived there. Could he teleport himself? He did have a small package of cheddar—the woman at the till was sticking the label on it. He took it but didn’t move away. So instead of asking for the Jarlsberg that I wanted, I looked the cheese over as if none of it interested me, and moved on.

  He moved with me. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. My heart seemed to be beating fit for two people.

  ‘You look as if you’re shopping,’ he said then. I looked at him, and he smiled. A genuine smile, his nerves fraying it a little at the edges. ‘You’ve actually got shopping in your trolley.’ He eyed the minted peas. The toilet rolls. The box of tampons.

  ‘This is a supermarket isn’t it? Or have I pushed through the wrong door and ended up in the casino?’ I could hear my own voice as if I was listening on the radio. It was brittle and it put him off. Slightly.

  ‘I’m sorry. You really are shopping aren’t you?’ He looked puzzled, as if he was trying to save me from embarrassment. I nodded and was cruel enough to hold his gaze. I wanted to scare him; looking people right in the eyes, unblinking, generally does it. He made as if to turn away and then turned back, nonchalant. Just giving me directions for the ring road.

  ‘Tonight is singles night, you know. If you happened to be shopping for something…not on the shelves.’

  Then I noticed his badge, a traffic light with the amber light coloured in. A bright primary-school orange. A woman with nothing in her basket but a pair of black stockings pushed past then; she too bore a badge, a flashy green-for-go.

  He stood there in my silence. ‘Only if.’ And he gave his edgy smile again. There was a heavy moment of silence broken by a shrill fuck-me laugh direc
ted at the muscular teenage boy on the butcher’s counter.

  ‘Judd,’ said amber-light man, and offered a hand for a formal handshake. I looked at it in silence. He managed a face-saving edgy smile before heading down the nearest aisle, past the washing powder. Then he took a couple of steps back and actually picked up a packet of washing powder.

  I abandoned the trolley by the shampoo. Panic crowded me, my throat thick as the doors hissed open. Outside, the white carpark lighting seemed to cast a fog and I looked about, unable to find my bearings until I focused on the technical college, beacon bright at the end of the street. A redbrick palace clearly visible from the edge of the supermarket carpark. And then it seemed that as soon as I thought about it, I was standing in the doorway to the classroom.

  Setsuke had already begun, and the Monday night strangers turned to look at me. Setsuke only smiled, her hand graceful as she gestured that my usual seat at the back had not been taken.

  * * *

  Later, I got off the bus two stops early. I like to walk in the dark, to be in the parallel universe of night. I don’t really understand why we don’t all walk around at night. The air smells better, as if all the scents of the day trap themselves, accumulate. Sound carries further too or perhaps there is just more room for it because all the cars are in their driveways and people are submerged in the babble of TV. I enjoyed the sound my boots made on the pavement, powering me forwards. My calves aching as the road climbed in front of me.

  Inside the hallway I caught my skirt on that bloody bike again and went flying. The scrawny bloke from the third floor owns it. He’s tall. And he stoops as if the world is just not the right size for him. The bike was taking up almost all the floorspace as usual, because he doesn’t really care about whether anyone can get past, he’s always more bothered about whether the derailleur is pushing against the gas meter cupboard. He’s got an ironing board down here now too. What a minimalist palace he must live in. It must be bordering on Zen perfection.