The Hope Page 9

  Christ, but this was a big place! Huge, and not a porthole in sight, stuck in the middle of nowhere with black walls and inadequate lighting. Rows of shelves receded into the distance, so high you needed a ladder to reach titles only halfway up, and hadn’t he nearly broken his neck on more than one occasion? They didn’t pay him much danger money. Come to think of it, they didn’t pay him much money at all. He could have got a decent job, entertainments officer or some such useless nonsense. Damn it, he could earn more working behind a bar! But no, he thought he could put his education to some use down here, cataloguing and cross-referencing, dividing and sub-dividing.

  The heaters had been on the blink for two months now and his repeated requests for a janitor had met with bluff disregard. He was only the librarian, wasn’t he, and who read books these days? Answer: old people and odd people – the two characteristics usually went together. And though there were enough of both on the Hope, even they had better things to do. So why build a library on this bloody boat? He could have told them (if they’d asked him) to save their money, use the space for a massage parlour or a strip club or something of that ilk.

  How did that joke about janitors go? He couldn’t remember a sod these days.

  He fumbled with the date stamp, numb fingers unwilling to do what they were told. He could not even lick them to turn pages in case they got frozen to the paper. The stamp slipped from his hands and left half of the date in one corner of the flyleaf, no bloody use to anyone. Sod it. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Who’s going to want to read that again? All that snow and comradeship, it made him sick. Miserable bastards, the Russians. There was one no N deck, Alexei Something-or-other-onov. Never smiled. Wife dead, screwed around a lot, drank vodka as if he wanted to kill himself, often to be found with a floozy on his lap, and he never smiled! Was he ill?

  Careful, careful. Thinking about floozies was giving him a hard-on, and he wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it until the library closed.

  Three people were wandering through the rows of shelves, letting their eyes pass over the titles, waiting for one to leap out and catch their attention. It was a fact, the librarian noted, that the more lurid titles went out the most often, all the Gothics and the science fiction. He detested Gothics and science fiction.

  Eventually two of the people left without even glancing inside a book. They had probably come to relieve the boredom for an hour, because libraries gave you an excuse to wander round and look vacant and there was no one to see you except that dickhead librarian with his thick-rimmed specs and an upper lip like a bird’s beak. The third, however, came up with a paperback edition of Romeo and Juliet in his hand and plonked it on to the librarian’s desk.

  “At last,” said the librarian humourlessly.

  “Is it good?” asked the man. He was shaped like an avocado, had a carefully clipped moustache and spoke with an Italian accent.

  “If you’re into death, families and sex, yes.”

  “Excellent. I believe it is what I need.”

  The librarian stamped it, controlling his hands enough to render the date almost legible.

  “I myself can do without the first two,” he remarked.

  “Thank you. Don’t you want my name?”

  “To be honest, I gave up taking down names four years ago during an efficiency drive. You return the book or you don’t, I don’t give a toss either way. It’s not my book.”

  The Italian looked at him, perplexed. Was this an insult or not? Did this man know who he was talking to? But the librarian’s face showed not a trace of insubordination or malice, just a frank incuriosity. Signor Bellini gave him the benefit of the doubt, thanked him curtly and left.

  “Bloody wop,” the librarian muttered.

  It was 16.47, too early for official closing time, but who was going to check? He switched off the desk lamp and got out of his old leather-covered chair. God, his back was stiff. They could have got him a decent chair, couldn’t they? He only had to sit in it all day, they might have thought about that.

  He took one last stroll along the central aisle, glancing right and left along every row to see if there was anyone who had crept in without his noticing, some stopper wanting somewhere to bed down for the night, or a brat.

  And by Christ, there was someone! In the D section (Dante to Dumas), a stooped, limping man with a rag tied round his head and broken shoes and a great iron on his leg. The librarian was suddenly hot beneath his jacket, very hot, and his breath came faster than steam from an old engine. He gave an odd squeal. The convict had seen him and spoke with a tongue that was gravel, coals, salt-licked wounds, broken stones.

  “Hold your noise! Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”

  “Help,” the librarian said timidly, wishing he had a guardian angel to hear him.

  “Tell us your name! Quick!”

  “Er…” It was strange how, in moments of acute stress, one could not do the simplest things. The other night a whore had asked him if he was looking for a good time and he had been unable to answer her, as if the idea of looking for any sort of time had been whisked out of his brain. She had smartmouthed him and he had walked briskly off, not sure if he even remembered his own name.

  “Once more! Give it mouth!” snarled the convict.

  But he hadn’t said anything!

  “Show us where you live. P’int out the place.”

  P’int out? Where did this man think he was?

  A churchyard, sprung about with nettles, tombstones of crumbled stone, and beyond, flat and featureless marshland. The librarian knew this place, but only as somewhere he’d never been. And he was inhaling its salted air and the sweet scent of decay, with a nose as sensitive as a cat’s or a child’s, not deadened by years of smoke and grease. The ground was springy and he felt unsteady on his feet, which were used to the steel walkways and bare floors and the ponderous roll of the Hope.

  “I … I’m not sure what you mean by home. Sir.”

  “You young dog,” said the man, licking his lips. “What fat cheeks you ha’ got.”

  “Fat! You insolent pig!”

  “Darn me if I couldn’t eat ’em,” said the man, and for no accountable reason shook his head, “and if I hadn’t half a mind to’t!”

  This was absurd, quite absurd. The librarian didn’t have to stand there and listen to the ravings of a madman.

  “Now lookee here!” said the convict. “Where’s your mother?”

  “It’s none of your business, but she’s not here, if you must know.”

  That had done the trick! The convict started and ran off a few yards before looking back over his shoulder with eyes that would have curdled the librarian’s blood, had he not been running in the opposite direction, short legs pumping the spongy soil, and thwack!

  He found himself on his backside on the floor of the library, nursing a bruised bicep. Columns of books rose up over him, titles gleaming on bindings. The Hope vibrated the fat of his buttocks.

  What the hot holy hell had happened?

  The librarian rose shakily to his feet and brushed dust off the seat of his trousers. Twenty years of solitude had finally caught up with him. He had cracked. Taking a nervous peep behind him, he saw only books (Dante to Dumas). But he had recognised the convict and the churchyard, though he had never been near either in his life.

  “Magwitch,” he said to himself, and inspected his watch. 17.03. The bars had opened.

  The bars had closed by the time the librarian was pissed enough to contemplate his brief, disturbing encounter. With every glass, the possibility that he had nodded off and dreamed the whole thing became increasingly desirable. Not just desirable, but probable. He had often gone to sleep mid-sentence in a book and come to ten minutes later with the unshakeable conviction that he had been in a small boat for days grappling with a huge fish or that the pigs had taken over his farm. Some books sent him to sleep so often he had given them up halfway through – Paradise Lost for example. Wh
at monumental tosh that was! And The Divine Comedy. He hadn’t managed much of that. Reading Dante was like reading the ship’s safety manual, but less funny and less useful.

  But the smells and the feel of earth beneath his shoes! The convict had appeared so solid, so vivid…

  “Penny for them?” A tart. Christ, she was ugly! He thought he said “Fuck off”, and either he hadn’t or she was especially stubborn, because the next thing he knew was that he was in her cabin and she was undressing him and undoing his flies and he threw up on her head.

  “I feel like a rat’s bottom.”

  “You look like one.”

  The ship’s doctor, Marcus Chamberlain, had the librarian lying on his back on a narrow couch, naked except for his Y-fronts, which could have done with a wash. Looking down his body, his tits and his blotchy pink belly, he wondered how clean his feet were. Dr Chamberlain was feeling his skull and seemed to know what he was doing. He was fresh-faced, seamlessly handsome, and his hands were cool and dry.

  “Have you banged your head recently?” He sounded as if he had discovered a clue.

  “No.”

  “Oh. No, of course not.” Disappointed. “Banged any part of your anatomy?”

  “Only my arm. And that was after I’d had the hallucination.”

  “Um. After. Well, that’s no good, is it? Domestic problems?”

  “No wife.”

  “No domestic problems. I’ve got it! Alcohol. You’ve been hitting the hard stuff, haven’t you?”

  “No. Yesterday evening was the first time in months I’d gone on a real binge.”

  “But you’ve been drinking heavily?”

  “No.”

  “Steadily?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” Dr Chamberlain took out his stethoscope, clamped it into his ears, placed the other end to the librarian’s chest, frowned, turned it over and listened again. “That’s better. Your heart sounds OK. Overworked?”

  “Hardly. I just sit at a desk for eight hours a day.”

  “And you say this hallucination was from a book?”

  “Great Expectations, yes. Word for word. I looked it up this morning. Pip meets Magwitch the convict in a churchyard, and –”

  “Yes, yes. Put your clothes on. I can’t see anything wrong with you, but I’m going to prescribe a course of pills.”

  “What pills?” asked the librarian, struggling with his shirt in his eagerness to hide his body.

  “Hang on, I’m thinking.”

  “Are you a trained doctor?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Really?”

  “Well… No, actually. I was apprenticed to Dr Macaulay, and he died before I could finish my training. But I’ve read all the books.”

  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 infesta
tion, 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.