'You're Mr Who again?'
'Lester. I spoke to you before, I think.'
'Not to me.' She begins to sort through items hidden by the counter. 'Local papers from 1912 and 1913? She's found you a couple.'
'Is one of them the Chronicle?'
'I thought she told you it hadn't been published for decades by then.'
How could I have misread or misremembered the name of the paper I bought at the fair? There seems to be no other explanation, and perhaps it will prove to be one of the newspapers on microfilm. I ask to look at 1913 first, and the librarian ushers me to a microfilm reader. As the slaty screen grows twilit she inserts the spool. 'Just give us a shout when you want the next one,' she murmurs. 'Well, not a shout, obviously.'
'I'll gesture if you like.'
I thought that was a little wittier than the collapse of her smile implies. 'I'll come and whisper,' I try undertaking, but she heads even more speedily for the counter. I wind the front page of the New Year's Day edition of the Preston Gazette onto the monitor. At once there's a dismayed cry, and the screen turns blank.
'It's crashed.' That was the cry, and for a moment I imagine that I'm staring at a dead computer. The room has grown darker than the overcast afternoon, and everyone who was working at a monitor is looking towards the counter. Somewhere large and stony, men and their echoes are chortling. 'I'll see what's happened. I don't think it's anything to laugh at,' the tall librarian says and hurries out of the room.
I seem to hear her footsteps multiply as they recede around the balcony. I could imagine that several versions of her are following various routes. By the time she returns, more than one customer has left the reading room. 'We're sorry, everyone,' she says. 'They must have drilled through something. We don't know how long they'll take to fix it.'
This drives out all the remaining members of the public except me. I haven't travelled half the day to give up so easily. I peer at the screen, which is playing a game of appearing to glimmer while it darkens further, until the librarian says 'I'm afraid we have to ask you to leave.'
'You surely aren't blaming me for anything.'
'It's a health and safety issue,' she says and removes the microfilm.
The rest of the building feels emptied even of laughter, unless that is biding its time. As I dodge around the chipboard pillars I have an unwelcome sense that someone may be hiding silently behind at least one of them. I hurry downstairs with my echoes, which are leaving me uncertain whether I can hear muffled chuckles, even when I press my ear against the door that isn't to be used. In the vestibule I pace around the figure shrouded in plastic, but of course nobody as tall is hiding behind it – nothing is. I desist when I notice that a man in overalls surely too large for efficiency is watching me from the balcony. His face must be pale with dust from the reconstruction, an effect that emphasises the redness of his wide amused mouth. I gaze at him for some seconds, which feel like a contest to discover who will move first, and then I head for daylight.
I blink and shiver as I step out beneath the grey wadded sky. The route to the station leads past an open market beneath a cast-iron roof. I'm not about to be tempted to search the tables and give myself no time to go home. All along the street beyond the market the stores are tricked out for Christmas, and some are emitting jolly songs. The merry competition merges into whiter noise as I follow one of the old side streets down towards Winckley Square.
Each side of the street is a rank of tall brown houses pressed together. Some of the rotund front windows are strung with coloured bulbs, others are occupied by trees that flare like warnings that the night is over the unseen horizon. In the cross-street where I used to live, two incarnations of Father Christmas squat on opposite roofs to confront each other with unyielding good humour. My parents' window sports a lone festoon so dusty that the bulbs seem in danger of sputtering out every time they light up. The edge of a step crumbles under my heel as I climb to the door, which is so faded it can hardly be called black, and poke the large round rusty bellpush.
I can't remember how the bell sounds, and I don't hear it. Nevertheless my father calls 'Someone's here' and opens the door at once. He's wearing an ancient pale-blue cardigan, of which the outsize wooden buttons are the only aspects to have kept their shape, and brown corduroy trousers with frayed muddy cuffs. Both garments have some trouble containing his stomach. His face is well on the way to round, and I wonder if its heaviness makes it hard to operate, since it bears no expression and produces none. Is it possible that he doesn't recognise me, or would he prefer not to? He appears to be so much more interested in the street behind me that I hardly feel I'm there. I'm opening my mouth in case that helps me think of a remark when he says 'Isn't someone with you?'
The sudden chill on the back of my neck isn't a breath. The plastic grin that meets me when I twist around belongs to Father Christmas on a roof. 'Not that I know of,' I retort.
'I thought you were supposed to have said on the phone you were bringing her.'
'I only said I'm living with her. She hasn't come today.'
'Oh.'
Before I have time to deduce what rebuke this contains, my mother cries 'Who's that? It isn't, is it?'
Her voice is faster than her approach. She repeats the questions and variations on them as she limps along the hall. She's dressed in the kind of discreetly striped suit she might have worn while she and my father were teaching. Over it she wears an apron striped like a portion of the suit viewed through a microscope. Her face surely can't be longer, but it's decidedly thinner, like the rest of her. I have the distracting notion that my parents have tried to emphasise their comical contrast, not least since her grey hair has grown maniacally uneven while his is reduced to a very few strands that barely span his piebald cranium. She stumbles to grab me, crying 'Come here. I knew you wanted to be home.'
Her hug is so fierce and bony that it's painful. It smells like a memory of Christmas dinner. Eventually she relents, only to redouble her force while my father watches like a viewer who has arrived too late to understand a film. At last she steps back to look me up and down. 'He's so much older, Bob. Whatever's been wrong, let's not let it be wrong any longer.'
My father shuts the front door, enclosing us all in dimness. I have a disconcerting sense of being confined somewhere smaller and darker until my mother urges us to the kitchen. 'What do you want to keep you warm?' she asks me as eagerly. 'A cup or something stronger?'
I could respond that the kitchen is hot enough. She's apparently too familiar with the old black iron range to have it replaced. Its heat is trapped by all the wooden panels that seemed to frown on my childhood, and even by the windows that would look out on the narrow L-shaped yard if they weren't opaque with condensation. 'Tea would be fine,' I say.
'Shut the door, then, if nobody else is coming.'
As she lifts a mug from the lowest wooden hook beside the thick stone sink and limps to the ruddy earthenware teapot, my father mouths 'Don't mind her. She's getting like that sometimes.'
I can't hear a word, but my mother swings around. 'What are you saying, Bob?'