The look I gave him would have shrivelled Rasputin. Oh, it was definitely the evil eye. But I was on my own now. Mum’s face, as well as his, was wreathed in smiles.
‘Take care, Gerald,’ she giggled. ‘Mind what you say! You’ll end up in terrible trouble with Kitty.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid of Kitty. I’m not afraid of anyone. And I always say exactly what I think.’
He didn’t have to tell me. I’d already noticed. I’d not forgotten that he took advantage of our very first meeting to rubbish all my views on nuclear arms. And I’d had plenty of opportunities since then to notice he always spoke his mind – though, to be fair, he’d welly in on anybody’s side. I’d thought at first, because he was so struck on Mum, he’d end up taking her part whenever he could, and staying tactfully quiet on the sidelines whenever he couldn’t. But it turned out he wasn’t like that.
And it wasn’t because he couldn’t keep his big mouth shut. He’d proved that he could be as quiet as the grave when he chose. I was quite sure that he had never breathed a word to Mum about that spiteful essay about him I wrote for Mrs Lupey and left around for him to see. But, even so, my heart began to thump like mad when Mum finally moved the last of the laundry aside, and picked up the hammer and wrench he had laid on the table, revealing her precious scissors underneath.
‘My scissors! You found them!’
I didn’t take my eyes off him for a second. Though he said nothing at all, he did let his face break into one of those sunny smiles of his, and he shrugged very lightly.
Mum, of course, jumped to the simplest conclusion.
‘I can’t believe it! I must be going daft. Fancy putting my scissors away in the tool box!’
Still he said nothing, though he glanced at me.
‘Good thing the pipes went funny,’ Mum went on, sweeping the scissors up to safety on their special hook. ‘Otherwise these might not have shown up for weeks.’
‘That’s true,’ he said.
Only I knew precisely what he meant by that. He didn’t wink at me – no, not exactly. But one of his eyelids did flicker a little, I saw it, though I would rather have died than catch his eye, and let myself wink back.
I did feel grateful, though. He’d saved my bacon. To show him I understood that, I dropped my pile of laundry down on Jude’s, and said, scooping them both up in my arms:
‘I’ll do the whole lot, since I’m going up there.’
‘Would you?’ Mum looked pleased. ‘That’s a help.’
I didn’t wait for praise from Goggle-eyes. I took the clothes upstairs and put them away. While I was at it, I picked up all the dirty cups and bowls and plates lying about my room – there was a stack of them – and carried them down, along with the tin of stale cat food.
I found Mum rooting on the pantry floor.
‘Kitty, any chance of you getting me some potatoes?’
‘Can’t it wait till I get back?’
She looked up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the library.’
Mum frowned. She’s off libraries. She’s been off them for weeks, making life very awkward for me and Jude. She used to be dead keen. Like everyone else, she had this rosy vision of libraries as cool and silent repositories of neatly-shelved wisdom: temples of learning, gems of culture, high-points of civilization, that sort of thing. If I said I was going to the library, she’d smile and go all soft inside, and you could tell she was thinking, whatever her faults, she couldn’t have failed too badly as a parent. At least we still used the library.
Then things began to go sour. First Jude came home one day insisting Floss needed four separate injections to keep her breathing safely through the winter. When, two weeks later, a bill came from the vet for fifteen pounds, Mum asked Jude irritably: ‘Where did you hear about these injections, anyway?’ Jude answered innocently enough: ‘There was a notice on the library wall,’ and that was the start of Mum’s steady disenchantment. I thought she might march straight round there and complain.
Then, two or three weeks later, I came home destroyed because I’d stood about for half an hour, unable to peel my eyes from some terrible video they were showing over and over in the foyer about the tactics of the South African police. Mum phoned the chief librarian about that. Then Jude had nightmares for a fortnight after the old anti-vivisection poster of white mice in a cage was taken down and replaced by one far more vivid and heart-rending, featuring a cat that looked for all the world just like our Floss.
So things were set fair for trouble already. But how was I to know that only that morning Jude made the serious mistake of telling our rather touchy neighbours they ought to be worming their dog far more often (Courtesy: Library Factsheet No. 44), and Mum had only just got back from trying to make peace next door.
‘Why are you going to the library?’ she asked suspiciously, through gritted teeth.
‘I want to get something.’
‘A book?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What, then?’
I didn’t answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me.
‘A computer game? Right?’
Rumbled, I nodded.
‘That’s it!’ she shrieked. ‘That’s it! Finito! From now on that bloody library is off limits. It’s out of bounds!’
I raised my eyes to heaven. Goggle-eyes burst out laughing. Mum rounded on him directly.
‘All very well for you to laugh!’ she told him. ‘I bet you never had this trouble when your boys were children!’
I stared. I hadn’t realized he had grown-up sons.
Mum sighed. ‘You were lucky. Your children grew up in the good old days when libraries were libraries! I bet your boys used to stroll down there and spend a quiet half an hour or so choosing real books. Then they’d come home, and you’d have at least a couple of hours’ peace while they sat down and read them, cover to cover.’
Still beaming, Goggle-eyes nodded. Yes, his face said. That’s how it was back in the good old days.
‘Well, things are different now,’ Mum snapped. ‘They’re back home in under ten minutes with some daft pip-pip-pipping computer game stuck under their arm, and all you hear for hours after they get back is “Shouldn’t we play safe, and join the R.A.C., Mum?” and “Can I take classes in Serbo-Croat at the university extension, Mum?” and “What is cocaine, Mum?”’
She leaned across, and snapped her fingers in my face.
‘Well, that’s it!’ she said again. ‘The party’s over. Speaking both as a parent and a ratepayer, I have to announce that libraries are now far more trouble than they’re worth. You can just go upstairs and shelve the few tatty books you have in alphabetical order.’
‘The library doesn’t keep books in alphabetical order any longer,’ I told her.
Her mouth dropped open, honestly it did.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said softly. ‘Have the heavens fallen? Tell me, Gerald. Did I hear what my daughter said?’
‘It’s true,’ I said, before he could chime in. ‘The children’s section is all done by dots now. Red dots for teenage, blue for middle school, pink for primary and green for babies.’
‘You’re joking! You are joking! Dots?’
‘Well – little round stickers, really.’
Mum buried her head in her hands.
‘Little round stickers,’ she groaned. ‘Gerald, it’s finally happened. The barbarians have taken over.’ She lifted her head. ‘But why are they waiting?’ she suddenly demanded. ‘What’s holding them up? Why don’t they just tear down the book shelves and hurl the books into four huge piles: Boring, All right, Dead good, and Brilliant!’