The woman chewed her gum loudly, grumpily. She looked at her phone. ‘I don’t know. They’re all closing down round here, aren’t they, the libraries?’ She inhaled sharply. A moment later: ‘Yeah, okay, there’s Harrow Road Library, down there – same bus. You’ve got to cross the road though.’
‘Thank you, thank you. I’m so pleased.’ He smiled at her; and then, against all the odds, she gave him a smile back. As he stepped off the kerb, in his excitement he had forgotten how slowly his limbs moved – he felt a stabbing pain in his knee. The woman grabbed him, firmly but gently, ‘Chill a bit, you need to look both ways first.’ She checked right, she checked left, she checked right again and gave him a nudge when the coast was clear.
On the other side, he turned to look for her, his hand held up in a wave. But her bus had arrived, and he was already forgotten.
As the 92 came to a stop in front of him, he clambered on, pulling himself up onto the deck with all his might, tapping his Oyster card on the reader. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the driver, ‘please tell me where to get off for the Harrow Road Library.’ He enunciated the words as though it was a Highly Important Place of Interest. The bus driver looked at him blankly.
‘Ealing Road stop,’ he replied eventually.
‘Thank you, my friend, thank you. Today’s quite a big day for me.’
Chapter 2
ALEISHA
‘ALEISHA,’ THERMOS FLASK DEV tapped his hand on the desk. ‘I’m out for the rest of the day. Look alive a bit, if you can. I know this isn’t Tiger Tiger or wherever you kids like to go these days, but people still expect good customer service here.’
Aleisha was slumped over the desk, her expression moulded into her ‘resting bitch face’， as her brother so lovingly liked to call it. She looked up at Thermos Flask Dev, without bothering to sit up to attention. Thermos was her manager. A tall, rather scrawny, sweater-vest-wearing Indian man who could be irritating, but over whom she also felt slightly protective. In the library he was The Boss. The librarians ran around after him, trying to please him, even when he was just sitting in the corner drinking from a Thermos flask （she always wondered if there was actually booze in the Thermos flask because they had a swish – well, sort of – coffee machine in the staff room. Why would he need to bring his own?）。 But outside, she imagined that he shrank by half, because the outside world, especially Wembley, wasn’t quite so accepting of Thermos-flask-drinking-all-year-round-sweater-vest-wearing men who loved to boss people around. She worried people might shout at him on the street if he was walking too slowly, or barge past him and spill his ‘coffee’。
‘Don’t worry, boss, it’s completely dead today.’
He raised his eyebrows at her, but he couldn’t disagree. A few children, whiny and loud, had been in earlier with their uninterested parents. They’d taken out one book each and promised to pay their overdue fines the next time they came in. Those fines （20p and 67p） had been sitting on the account for the past three months, set to become fines forever unpaid. Aleisha let it slide – she had no urge to police this. This wasn’t her dream job （was it anyone’s?） – she was just working here for the summer. She’d finished her exams in May, so this was literally the longest summer of her life.
‘Do people even still use libraries?’ her schoolfriends had asked her when she got the job. So quiet. Dying. Boring as hell. She’d tried for a job in Topshop in Oxford Street – for the discounts and for a chance to get out of Wembley for a bit. But this is where she’d ended up. ‘It’s a place of peace,’ Thermos Flask had said to her after her interview. ‘We pride ourselves on that. Lots of libraries have been closed down recently, I’m sure you’ve heard all about it, and we’re doing everything we can to highlight to the powers-that-be how vital this space is for our community.’ His arms were open wide, basking in the library’s stuffy silence. ‘Lots of our regulars come here for that lovely sense of quiet companionship, you know? Your brother used to love that about this very special place too, didn’t he? How is your brother?’
Aleisha nodded and shrugged in response. Her older brother, Aidan, had worked here when he was her age. ‘The people are endlessly fascinating,’ Aidan had said to her when she’d told him she’d actually got the job. ‘Like, just watching people sit and be quiet, or browse, or whatever, when they don’t realize they’re being watched … It’s like, I don’t know, no one’s trying to be someone they’re not in a library.’