The Northern Clemency (53 page)

There was a new security check at the entrance, a sort of arch detecting some small slip of metal in each book. Until six months ago, you could still get a small book out in the inside pocket of your parka, hidden in the orange quilted lining, as Tim’s bookshelves at home demonstrated. Quite big books, too, though he couldn’t now remember taking the illustrated survey of European reptiles, and it had been so long since he’d looked at it, he’d often thought of smuggling it back in. But he didn’t know if the detecting device worked in both directions, or just when you were leaving.

The girl at the entrance was settling herself for the morning. It was the blonde one, the Alice-in-Wonderland one with the hairband and the high-necked dresses with flowers on them. Tim knew all her dresses. She raised her head a little when he came in, but not enough to look at him. Some of the other librarians did look at him, the older ones, boldly, and making comments to each other, but she never did.

He made his way to his place. Marx had had his desk in the British Library where he wrote all of
Das Kapital
, a copy of which Tim now
had in his plastic bag, the book bag. Tim had his own table, D3. It was in the politics niche. The compressed thoughts of ideal lives rose lavishly around him. Politics was not a school subject, and though in other niches, schoolgirls attempting revision nested with their notes in their round, vacant handwriting, whispering and giggling, the only people Tim ever shared a table with were serious idealists, their lives’ works in frayed plastic bags too. It was good to have left school. There was nobody here to mark what he did, and his own approval was unalloyed by dissent. Sometimes he thought of showing one of the old men over the table the sheer body of his notes, preparing for something, he didn’t know what, just knowledge in the urgent spiky handwriting, half pressing through the thin paper. He knew his own handwriting so well and approved of it so much. He could effortlessly construct their ideal responses.

Taking his seat, he placed his bags on the table before getting out his block of blank lined paper, and his copy of the first volume of
Das Kapital
. It wasn’t the mock-shouty edition Penguin published, but the fat blank one, the size of your hand, that a small English publisher kept going by the Soviets published. The cover was thick and flocculent, like beige blotting paper, and the title printed in plain red ink. He put the bags underneath the table. He’d spent a good deal of time making it look read, before bringing it out in public. But now he really had worn it down with reading, little vertical lines next to important points, stabs of exclamation marks next to really important points, all like streaks of blue rain at the edges of each page.

On the other side of the table, Mad Mary was putting down her books and bags. She was a regular. Recently, he’d even started having his sandwich with her, though she had nothing to talk about except her neighbours’ unreasonable complaints about her six cats. “I ask you,” she always ended up, “is it really too much to ask for, to be left in peace?” She had an exploded air: her hair, the contents of her pockets, her stuffing almost escaping from the gaps in her surface, held together inadequately with safety-pins and amateurish tacking. She must have been nearly fifty, and spoke sometimes of her mother with unspecifying regret. Where she lived, he didn’t know; or what she was working on. She liked to build up piles of books about anarchism, truffling through them, snuffling with amusement for, surely, Tim’s benefit. She wouldn’t speak to him until she was settled, and he watched her, muttering, “Let’s see—ah—I think …” gather twelve books, one by one, laying them carefully on the table. Tim regretted, as ever, not
foiling her in some small way, perhaps by claiming that biography of—who?—Ba-ku-nin, he read upside-down, before she got here.

“Good morning, Tim,” she whispered noisily over the table when, at last, she was settled. “Awful developments
chez
Brewster. I’ll tell you later what the swines said to me last night.”

“Oh dear,” Tim said, and got his head down, with his blue biro chewed to bits at one end, not encouraging her.

The library filled steadily in the course of the morning. By twelve thirty, he was hungry, and faintly radiant with the sense of absorbed wisdom. How right Marx was! How he saw through everything! If only people could be given the opportunity to read what he said, everything surrounding them would crumble into dust, and something never yet seen on the face of the earth would come into being to solve everything. He rummaged in his bag for the foil-wrapped sandwiches and the little Thermos of tea. It was a nice day, and he’d have it sitting on the wall outside the theatre. Better, he genuinely couldn’t remember what the sandwiches were this morning. A nice surprise. Mad Mary was too fast for him and, pretending to be finished with her work at exactly the same time as him, entirely by chance, stood up with her own lunch bag in her fist.

“I thought one might go to the Peace Gardens today,” she said, in her grand, throaty gurgle. “I don’t suppose you’d care to join me?”

“Why not,” Tim said wretchedly, only hoping that the Sparts weren’t outside, selling the paper, to witness his horrible friend again.

“The most frightful thing happened,” Mad Mary said, sweeping out of the library. It was an oddity of hers that, while working, she was hot on shushing anyone who made a noise, even an accidental dropping of something, but as soon as she stopped, she would scamper through the library talking at normal volume without noticing that she, sometimes, was being hushed in her turn. “Those awful neighbours of mine. They said that Arthur had done his business in their garden. They came round and accused me, face to face. Well, of course, they don’t know Arthur from any of the others, they think all cats are the same, and they didn’t say Arthur, naturally, but I knew it was Arthur they were accusing.”

With a series of encouraging hmms, Tim got Mad Mary through the doors and down the library steps. The Sparts weren’t there, thank goodness; probably down Fargate supporting the comrades’ struggle in the mines. Mad Mary’s story wended on. It seemed to be heading towards actual violence but, as most of her stories did, ended up
demonstrating her absolutely admirable grasp of the issues involved. Still, she was an anarchist.

They ate their lunch on a bench in the Peace Gardens, people staring at them as they passed, a teenage boy with his mad granny, listening to her stories of cats. Afterwards he gave her the slip, walked three times round the City Hall before returning to the reference library. The Alice-in-Wonderland girl was out, having her lunch. Tim thought of going straight to the swimming-pool, but his mother’s warning about cramp and death if you swam after eating intervened. He went back to his desk.

After lunch it was never the same and, to be honest, he footled with Marx for an hour or two, his head bent over the rumpled book with its stains and deliberate coffee-mug rings, not taking much in, just enjoying the thought of himself reading Marx and how he must look to everyone else. The girl at the desk. His eyes went repeatedly over phrases; he came back in his head to Mad Mary and her seven cats. He was not sure what he thought, what he ought to think, about animals and their rights. Trudy thought one thing; Stig thought another. They’d argued about it, whether it was at the root of everything, or whether it was a distraction, even if it was a symptom of something else. Stig and Trudy had gone on, quite late into the night once or twice, in Trudy’s flat on the fourth floor with its twinkling view of Sheffield and the remote hoot of the last trains into the station at the bottom of the valley. Tim wasn’t sure what he thought. But there was something to be thought about ownership, and private property, and Mad Mary’s seven cats were definitely that, in a sort of illusory way.

He always started to get a little sleepy around three.

Tim packed his things, trying as ever to look as if he was just popping out with both his bags and would be back soon. A “goodbye” with Mad Mary often turned into a hissed revival of her last anecdote, now that she’d had time to brood further over it. But today she just waved vaguely.

The swimming-bath at Glossop Road was usually quiet between three thirty and five. The school parties had gone, and the few after-work swimmers not yet arrived. It was an old bath, with still some slipper baths in the basement—he had no idea whether anyone still used them, now that everyone had bathrooms at home. He thought of the 1930s, a grand pity coming over him as he undid his shirt in one of the many little lobbies and odd square corners of the changing rooms. He’d never much enjoyed coming here from school—he was always a
bit shy, and hadn’t liked the noise or the violence or the smell of mould everywhere, ascending the joints in the tiles like trained creepers. He liked it now, though: the stern square ford of the disinfected trough at the exit, the ugly bluish light from over the swimming-pool, always with one humming on and off, throbbing like a migraine, and the weird ranks of seating in the gallery for some swimming gala that would never happen.

The bored hunched lifeguard, in flip-flops and faded red trunks, a whistle hanging between his knees, didn’t look up from his book as Tim tripped out, shivering a little: it was always cold in here, and sharp with the unregulated stink of chlorine. The first few days of the month, after they’d tipped a new load in, it really made your eyes sting; then again, by the end of the month, you hesitated about getting in sometimes, it was so ammoniac and cloudy with other people’s clandestine piss. There was an old love, ploughing up and down like a shabby tugboat, and a couple of kids, mucking about. At the shallow end, a regular stood, the water just at his huge thighs; he was one of the length-murderers, churning up the whole pool with twenty lengths of bloodthirsty butterfly. Just now, he was having a pause, or about to begin, or just about to finish, his insect-goggles and skull cap taking away any personality. Tim hated him.

Tim lowered himself into the water—he wasn’t a diver, he’d leave that kind of showing-off to Daniel and the insect-faced professionals—and, after a moment, stretched his arms out behind him to the rail, hunched up his legs against the wall, and kicked off. It was a steady breast-stroke he did; he knew it was a rubbish one, with his head achingly up and his ladylike circular sweeps, all out of time with each other. Before he was halfway up the pool, just at the point where the painted blue letters thrillingly indicated six foot, his own height, there was a heavy crash behind him and, as it were, a vast swallow as the butterfly-merchant launched himself. In five more strokes, he’d overtaken Tim; ten yards from the far end, he performed an immense gymnastic twist, sending half the pool up Tim’s nose. Tim carried on manfully, doing three lengths at a time before pausing, but after eighteen, he’d had enough and got out. The lifeguard had never looked up from his book the whole time, and had read five more pages.

“So, what did you get up to today?” Malcolm said, letting Tim into the house after him.

“Nothing much,” Tim said, dropping his bags on the floor of the hall.

“Well, you went swimming,” Malcolm said patiently, gesturing towards the bag with the towel in it.

Yes, I went swimming,” Tim said.

“Did you go to the library?” Malcolm said. “I see you’ve got your books.”

“Yes,” Tim said in a silly voice. “Yes, I did go to the library.”

”Did you remember to sign on?” Malcolm said. “It’s a Wednesday, isn’t it?”

“No,” Tim said. “Strangely enough, I didn’t remember to sign on. Because amazingly enough it isn’t today that I sign on. It’s next Wednesday. You only have to sign on every other Wednesday.”

“Oh,” Malcolm said. “I thought it was this week, for some reason.”

“You probably weren’t listening,” Tim said, making as if to go upstairs.

“That must be it,” Malcolm said calmly. “I saw some friends of yours today.”

Tim paused, halfway up the stairs. His face, when he turned, was instantly full of loathing. “Oh, yes?” he said, snarling. “What friends of mine would that be, then? Were they my Russian friends, you know, the ones in the Kremlin? Or the Chinese ones, like Chairman Mao?”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Or was it some other sorts of friends, like Fidel Castro, you’re talking about today?”

In some ways, Tim had a point, Malcolm conceded; that was, in fact, usually who he was referring to when he mentioned Tim’s “friends,” far-away old men, ruining their countries. “Actually,” Malcolm said, “I meant real friends of yours. I saw what’s-his-name—Stig, isn’t it? He was standing on the street selling his newspaper and collecting money.”

“Yes,” Tim said, though he hadn’t known that Stig had been out today. “He’s doing his bit. For the miners.”

“So I gathered,” Malcolm said. “He tried to ignore me, but I bought a copy of his paper.”

“Very funny,” Tim said. “I hope you choke on it.”

“I enjoy it,” Malcolm said. “I think they have the best television pages.”

This was a joke: the
Spartacist
contained nothing but three or four shrieking calls to order, denunciations of anything to hand, and a few
contemptuous paragraphs here and there giving an individual take on major news stories of the day. Trudy’s lurid twenty-word account of the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana was still enjoyed by all, three years on. Most of the articles tended to finish at the end of a line, though not often at the end of a sentence, let alone a paragraph, but their conclusions were usually fairly clear.

“And how’s the job hunting going?” Malcolm said.

“There are no jobs,” Tim said. “There’s no point in looking.”

“You’ve got A levels,” Malcolm said. “You could find a job if you tried. And what are you going to say at the dole office when they ask you?”

“I’ll tell them the truth,” Tim said.

“You’ll make something up, you mean,” Malcolm said. “There’s no point in refusing to look for work because the revolution’s nearly here, you know. Anyway, when the revolution comes, they won’t put up with idle sods like you refusing to work, they’ll send you down the coal mines.”