The Hope (12 page)

So have I
, thought the librarian, and for some reason he was scared by that.

He spent the rest of the afternoon fidgeting at his desk, expecting Magwitch to skulk out suddenly round the corner of the D section, his leg-iron scraping along the floor, coming to terrify the life out of Pip once more. And what if Miss Havisham turned up in her mildewed bridal gown and told him to play with the vicious Estella and in the end caught fire in front of him, her hair crackling as it shrivelled to black stumps? At the prospect he shrank inside his jacket and cursed Dickens for his hyperactive imagination. The pills Dr Chamberlain had eventually given him had been no more than low-strength sedatives, but he popped a couple all the same. They made him drowsy but they did not ease his queasy stomach or his crawling sphincter. Business was slow, even for the library. Rumours of some juvenile antics, a gang war or whatever, kept most sensible people on the lower decks indoors. The old and the odd were a cautious breed. That was how they survived to become old and odd.

A sound made his ample backside leave the leather seat. A small pile of books on the desktop toppled. It was a loud tapping that came from the B section (Bacon to Bryon). He didn’t want to investigate, not really, because that was the sort of thing only idiots did, and he had visions of Magwitch sounding out the metal frames of the shelves with the end of his leg-iron, which was enough to send anyone fleeing. The tapping, quick and irregular, came and went again as he stood at the desk, knuckles white on the wood.

“Can I help anyone?” he queried tremulously. “Whoever it is, I can jolly well hear you and I don’t think it’s very funny.” He paused. “Are you looking for a book?”

The bookshelves were like the towers of a forgotten city, layer upon layer of different lives crammed high on each other, and you wouldn’t be surprised if ghosts lived there, in that city, whispering along its streets and through its alleyways and in its parks, lost children wanting to go home.

“Hello?” The librarian took two steps from the desk, to prove he was no coward. The B section was close, a few yards away. The tapping had stopped again.

“Hello? Who’s there?” The question covered up his next couple of steps forward. He was beginning to think it was one of those little sods who sneaked in when they could and ran around rearranging books and trying to find the dirty ones, although the ones with suggestive titles often turned out to be rather mundane and by and large lacking in pornographic thrills:
The Naked and the Dead,
for example, or
Of Human Bondage
, or
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

Without realising it, he had rounded the corner of the B section. He saw nothing but books, thick, thin, hardback, paperback, jacketed, bare. He leaned against the shelves to steady himself.

Icy fingers grasped his hand and he moaned, “Oh, God,” expecting to see Magwitch clutching on to him, eyes mad and wide, asking for food and shelter or else he’d eat him alive, but there was only a child’s face and a sobbing voice: “Let me in – let me in!”

“What the hell is –?”

“Catherine Linton.” Obscure, as if through an old window pane, he glimpsed the shivering girl and recoiled in horror at the desolation in those eyes. He jerked his arm back and wounds appeared in the child’s wrist, her skin slicing on thin air and blood sluicing out.

“Let go of me! Let go of me, you little shit!” he cried. Why was he in bed, in the dark, on a windswept night? Why was he wearing this ridiculous nightshirt? “Bugger off, you little terror! I know your sort, you’re only here to cause trouble.” He never had liked children, least of all wanted one of the brutes as his own. The girl kept wailing.

“It’s twenty years,” she mourned, “twenty years. I’ve been a waif for twenty years!”

“And you can stay one for the next twenty!” he yelled back. And the girl disappeared, sucked away like water down a drain back into the pool of night. The librarian scanned the floor for bloodstains, checked the books (not that he cared, of course, but they might have been damaged), and returned to his desk. He spent the next hour sitting there, glancing left, right, over his shoulder, up above, then closed the library two hours early and went to bed.

Dr Chamberlain had a joke that he was a man of considerable patience – the Captain, the priest, folk from the upper decks. Get it? Patients. In fact, his patience was less than considerable and this librarian was just about pushing it to its limits. Chamberlain recommended that he go to a psychiatrist, not a physician, although the librarian had pointed out testily that there was no psychiatrist on board this floating asylum and they ought to have consulted him first, he’d have told them what kind of medical help they needed to keep a million people healthy, certainly not an inexperienced quack who couldn’t recognise a serious case when he saw one.

Dr Chamberlain smoothed his hair back and asked the librarian to leave. There was nothing he could do for him.

The librarian visited the chapel next and met the unctuous Reverend Chartreuse, who was all tea and sympathy as he listened to the librarian’s story and said he would do what he could, until he discovered the librarian did not attend chapel services with any degree of regularity (not at all, if the truth be told), at which point he grew somewhat formal. It took a lot of persuading to convince him this was genuine demonic infestation, plus a promise to attend chapel for the next four Sundays, a promise the librarian had no intention of keeping, before Chartreuse agreed to come down and exorcise the library.

Armed with a phial of holy water, the Reverend stalked the length and breadth of the library, muttering some dog Latin formulae and sprinkling the floor until he ran out of water. He smiled, said, “See you next Sunday!” and departed. The library seemed none the better for its ecclesiastical spring-cleaning.

The librarian contemplated putting a “Closed Until Further Notice” sign on the door, but “Further Notice” was a huge cop-out. He might never come back at all, and he might even be missed by someone – that grinning old woman, for example.

He sat behind his desk and waited for the library to spring its next trick on him.

He waited three days. On the afternoon of the third, after the day’s sole visitor had left bookless, singing came to the librarian’s ears.

It was a song of swollen buds and rich folds of red petals and spring shoots so green they were almost phosphorescent. He stood up involuntarily and had to stoop to ease the pressure of his trousers against an erection that had sprouted like an overnight mushroom. He hurried as best he could towards the source of the song, the T section (Taine to Tzara), but his progress could most kindly be called a waddle. The rhythm of the song was repeating itself faster and faster, building up to a soaring melodic climax, and the librarian was wincing as his erection enlarged at every step and threatened to burst his zipper.

Buds and petals and shoots.

He fell into a woodland world where thick-bracketed branches blotted out the sun, and life – mammals, birds, insects – thronged in every bole of every trunk and every tussocky hole in the earth. He was in a dark glade and at its centre, framed by the intertwining trees, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

Tennyson, he thought, you randy old bugger.

The singing died as she saw him. In her fine spun-thread hair was twisted a gold tiara and clinging to her was a dress of translucent material that, in covering up her body, drew attention to that which it hid, breasts, nipples, the curve down towards her thighs, the shadow where they met, oh Christ!

The woman fell at his feet and kissed them, crying: “Trample me, dear feet, that I have followed through the world, and I will pay worship. Tread me down and I will kiss you for it.”

The librarian groaned and exploded into his Y-fronts, nearly fainting with the ecstasy.

The vision was gone and he was sitting on the floor, spent, sticky, shamed, guilty, embarrassed.

But at last he understood what was happening.

The librarian began giggling.

A few people, not many, were puzzled by the new and erratic opening hours of the library. Although they were regulars as such, they had grown used to the place being open without fail 09.00 to 17.00 and now it irritated them to have to plan their visits to accommodate the two hours a day, not consecutive, during which they were allowed access to browse and at the end of which they were unceremoniously hustled out. Complaints to the librarian brought only stubborn intractability, a blank stare, sometimes downright rudeness. It was none of their business and if they didn’t like it they could start up a library of their own. Gradually they stopped coming altogether. Nothing could have pleased the librarian more.

Every day he ambled along the shelves choosing his read for the day. Spotting a book he wanted, he would stand by it and concentrate, not too hard because it didn’t work that way, but hard enough to winkle the story out of hiding. Usually he got what he wanted but the library could make up its own mind and often chose something else from the same section that suited his mood better. The story would live and he would live in the story.

Feeling bored? Try one of the thrillers: cars, girls, guns, chases, girls, more girls.

Feeling depressed? Tumble into
Tom Jones
and a simpler era when love conquered all and Tom conquered all women.

Feeling frisky?
Lolita
.

Feeling bright and witty? Engage in the intellectual cut-and-thrust of dinnertime conversation in Peacock’s funny little novels.

Feeling a bit too bright and witty? Travel up the sombre Congo towards the heart of Conrad’s darkness.

The librarian fought the greatest warriors, feasted on the finest food, fucked the most beautiful women. It did not matter whether he lived or died, whether he was one character or dozens, for at the end he would wake up, the day’s adventure done, the back cover shut in his head, exhausted and content.

He was living the books he had read and all their tastes, sensations and pleasures were his. The world of the
Hope
became as much a dream as the world of books. He had to eat, sleep and shit in the real world, but these were minor inconveniences and barely registered. He didn’t notice when strangers started to wrinkle their noses as he passed them by, either on the way to or back from the library, but he didn’t much notice the need for a shower or a shave either. Sometimes a stranger might wave in greeting and he realised it was someone he knew and he was compelled to grunt something back, but he took to going around without his specs on to prevent that sort of thing happening too often. And that was another blessing, because he didn’t have to ruin his eyes by reading Lilliput print now. No more headaches and unsightly red pressure marks on the bridge of his nose.

Pretty soon he was sleeping in the library on a narrow camp bed so that he could start in on another book as soon as he woke up. It was a pity he could only live books he had already read. He tried a Gothic novel once to see what it was like –
Frankenstein
was supposed to be tolerable, wasn’t it? – and found it was no use. Nothing happened. No matter. As the doctor had said, he had read all the books he wanted to read, and some of them were worth reading several times over.

He woke one morning in the library with his face cold and his back tender. He would have to do something about getting a decent bed down here. Sometime. Maybe.

The only decision he made that morning, apart from the decision to piss in a corner instead of in a toilet, was to close the library permanently. What good was an open library if none of the ungrateful bastards came any more? Screw them. He scrawled a sign saying “Closed for Good” on a piece of scrap card and tacked it to the door. He turned the key and put it in one of the desk drawers. There.

All that remained was to choose the book of the day and get stuck in. He decided to try for
Robinson Crusoe
as he felt like a little sun, sand and sea air, man back to nature, that sort of thing. He made his way to the D section, recalling how this was where it had all begun. Since his encounter with Magwitch, he had been back to read
Great Expectations
all the way through, right to its eloquent and bittersweet ending. He selected Defoe and relaxed, concentrating as hard as he needed, not too hard.

He was in a forest. There was a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf, and then he met a great poet whom he was to follow as the evening thickened.

This was not
Robinson Crusoe
. The librarian was not unduly worried. The library had chosen something else. So what?

A city. And there was weeping here, so much pain it filled the air like a colour in the sky, red or purple. The air was electric, thunderous, crackling with the cries and the wails. He was being led somewhere. Downwards. Into circles.

He knew this place.

The promiscuous. He belonged there, all right, but they were going further down and all he wanted to do was return to the daylight, bask in it just one more time, but the air was black now and the crowds all around were vague, tortured outlines.

He knew this place.

The gluttons. He belonged there too, but the descent continued, his guide – Virgil – explaining and cautioning in an elegant, poetic tongue as they trod spiral paths. The librarian began to choke on the air and it tasted of sin and stank of putrefaction.

Virgil said, “Here,” only that wasn’t in the book.

Strange.

The sullen. The librarian’s feet would not move and looking down he saw he was knee-deep in slime and the slime was rising. No, it wasn’t rising, he was sinking and it was up to his thighs. Around him the surface heaved and bubbled. There were faces straining to stay above it, hands breaking free now and then to claw in supplication before being dragged under again.

The slime was at his crotch.

He belonged here. Yes, he could admit that. He deserved this for ever.

But he did wish he had finished reading Dante.

The library was empty and quiet. On the door hung a sign, letters scrawled on scrap card: