It took me a minute to locate her, illuminated by a patch of moonlight in the shallows of the river. She was standing eerily still. Billy was nowhere to be seen.
‘What are you–’ I took a step toward her and she lifted her hands. Before I could ask what was going on, something rose to the surface of the water beside her – a sliver of pale, unmoving flesh.
‘Fern,’ I whispered. ‘What have you done?’
FERN
Every Tuesday morning at 10.15 am, I am stationed at the front desk of the Bayside Public Library. The front desk is usually my least favourite post, but on Tuesday mornings I make an exception so as to have a clear view to the circular meeting room where Toddler Rhyme Time takes place. I enjoy Toddler Rhyme Time, despite its obvious vexing qualities – the noise, the crowd, the unexpected direction a child’s emotions can take at a moment’s notice. Today, Linda, the children’s librarian, is regaling the toddlers with a vehement retelling of The Three Little Pigs. Imaginatively, she has chosen to forgo reading the book, and is instead acting the story out, alternately donning a fluffy wolf’s head and a softer, squidgy-looking pig’s head with pale blue eyes and a protruding snout. At intervals, Linda emits an impressively realistic-sounding pig’s squeal, so shrill and penetrating that it makes my toes curl in my sneakers.
The children, on the whole, appear enraptured with Linda’s recital, the only exceptions being a newborn screaming wildly on its mother’s shoulder and a little boy in an orange jumper who covers his ears and buries his face in his grandmother’s lap. I, too, am absorbed in the performance – so much so that it takes me several seconds to register the woman with pointy coral fingernails who has appeared at the desk, clutching a stack of books against her hip. I roll my ergonomic chair slightly to the right so I can still see the children (who are now helping Linda blow down an imaginary house of straw), but distractingly, the woman moves with me, huffing and fidgeting and, finally, clearing her throat. Finally, she clicks her fingernails against the desk. ‘Excuse me.’
‘Excuse me,’ I repeat, rolling the statement around in my head. It feels unlikely that she is actually asking to be excused. After all, patrons are free to come and go as they please in the library, they don’t have to ask for the privilege. It’s possible, I suppose, that she’s asking to be excused for impoliteness, but as I didn’t hear her belch or fart, that also seems improbable. As such, I conclude she has employed the odd social custom of asking to be excused as a means of getting a person’s attention. I open my mouth to tell her that she has my attention, but people are so impatient nowadays and she cuts across me before I can speak.
‘Do you work here?’ she asks rudely.
Sometimes the people in this library can be surprisingly dense. For heaven’s sake, why would I be sitting behind the desk – wearing a name badge! – if I didn’t work here? That said, I acknowledge that I don’t fit the stereotypical mould of a librarian. For a start, at twenty-eight, I’m younger than the average librarian (forty-five, according to Librarian’s Digest) and I dress more fashionably and colourfully than the majority of my peers – I’m partial to soft, bright T-shirts, sparkly sneakers and long skirts or overalls emblazoned with rainbows or unicorns. I wear my hair in two braids which I loop into a bun above each ear (not a reference to Princess Leia, though I do wonder if she found the style as practical as I do for keeping long hair out of your face when you are a woman with things to do). And, yet, I am most definitely a librarian.
‘Are you going to serve me, young lady?’ the woman demands.
‘Would you like me to serve you?’ I ask patiently. I don’t point out that she could have saved herself a lot of time by simply asking to be served.
The woman’s eyes boggle. ‘Why do you think I’m standing here?’
‘There are an infinite number of reasons,’ I reply. ‘You are, as you may have noticed, directly adjacent to the water fountain, which is a high-traffic area for the library. You might be using the desk to shuffle documents on your way over to the photocopier. You may be admiring the Monet print on the wall behind me – something I do several times a day. You may have paused on your way to the door to tie your shoelace, or to double check if that person over in the Non-fiction section is your ex-boyfriend. You might, as I was before you came along, be enjoying Linda’s wonderful rendition of The Three Little Pigs–’
I have more examples, many many more, but I am cut off by Gayle, who approaches the desk hurriedly. ‘May I help you there?’
Gayle has a knack for turning up at opportune times. She has fluffy blonde hair, exceedingly potent perfume and a thing about bringing me lemons from her lemon tree. I once made the mistake of saying I’d enjoyed a slice of lemon in hot water and since then I’ve barely gone a day without a lemon from Gayle. I’d tell her to stop, but Rose says people enjoy making themselves useful in these small ways and the best thing to do is to thank them and throw the lemon away. Bizarre as it sounds, Rose tends to be right about these things.
‘Finally!’ the woman says, and then launches into a story about how her son left his library books at the beach house and then it got fumigated so they weren’t able to collect the books until yesterday and now they’ve incurred a fine and, also, she’d like to extend her loan, but the book has twenty-seven reserves on it! Twenty-seven! As far
