Reserved, Not Assigned

The key sticks in the lock, as it has stuck every morning for six years, and I give it the half-turn back and the lift that Cutter’s Row requires. Drizzle runs off my hood into the collar of my jacket. Behind me a tram bell clangs at the bottom of the slope, and the launderette across the road is already breathing steam onto its own window.

I wheel the bicycle in through the staff door, past the mop bucket and the box of withdrawn atlases, and prop it against the back-corridor wall where the damp patch is shaped like Tarrowmark with the northern islands missing. Wicker crate, one bungee cord. A stranger’s initials still scratched into the frame.

The radiators begin as soon as the boiler catches. Knock, a pause, knock-knock. Like someone at the door who has decided to be patient about it. I take the brass key from its nail and go along the ground floor bleeding them one at a time, a rag under each valve. The first spits air, then a thread of brown water. The second gives nothing. The third I do twice. When the knocking dies in the periodicals room it leaves a quiet so complete I can hear the green reading lamps humming, and the two dead bulbs in them not humming.

The staff room smells of burnt toast from yesterday. On the fridge door, taped at all four corners with the care of someone who expects it to be torn down, is a single sheet on council letterhead. Notice of Branch Review. A table of three names. Cutter’s Row sits second, between Marsh Lane and Tannery Steps, in a serif face I would put at about 1990, slightly condensed, set by someone who did not love it.

Not my problem, I think, and the thought arrives already filed. I stand there with the damp rag in my hand and look at the filing. Then I take the rag to the sink, wring it out, and correct the label. Mine. Pending. I peel back one corner of the tape and press it flat again so the notice hangs straight.

The bell on the front door rattles at 8:44. Sixteen minutes early, which is what it always is.

Mr Orrel is on the step under the dripping porch with his tram-driver’s cap pulled down and a carrier bag of unidentifiable contents held against his chest. Forty years on the number nine line. He says he can still feel the rails in his sleep, and he does his sleeping here.

“Not open yet, is it,” he says, in the voice of a man who knows exactly.

“Not officially.” I hold the door wide. “The kettle’s not on yet either, but the radiators are talking again. Periodicals is warm.”

He nods, as at a timetable, and goes in. I settle him into the wing chair by the shipping gazette, the one with the sagging left arm, and he is gone before I have laid the cap on his knee. His mouth falls open. His breathing finds a rhythm somewhere near a tram’s.

On my way back to the desk I find the yellow sticky note on the monitor, in Mrs Dagg’s slanted capitals. She is at a regional meeting, again, being brave on our behalf. ELARION. PERIODICALS IS NOT A DORMITORY. PLEASE MOVE ON ANY SLEEPERS BEFORE 10. Underlined twice.

I read it through. I take a pen from the pot and write beneath, small and level: Library policy §4.2: all persons may remain on the premises for the purpose of reading. Mr Orrel is reading very deeply. —E.Q. I stick it back on her monitor at a slight angle, which in me is practically riot.

The drawer sticks, too. I need a pen for the date stamp pad’s log, and the pot has only dead ones, so I open the top drawer and there they both are.

The contract is on top, three pages, the National Library crest embossed at the head, my signature at the foot in blue-black that has not quite dried to the colour I meant. Cataloguing Officer, Grade Two. Commencing the first Monday of the new year. Beside it lies the envelope, cream laid paper, a little yellowed at the corners, sealed with a flap that has never been lifted. Imbry’s looping hand, the one that wrote shopping lists and the backs of soup-kitchen rotas: For Elarion, for when the door opens.

I have looked at the handwriting enough that I could forge it. I have not once looked at the word when.

The drawer closes with a push of my palm. The pens stay unfound. I square the date stamp to the edge of the blotter, roll it to today’s date, and set it down.

At 9:00 I unlock the front doors, and the damp, bright, ordinary morning comes in.

---

Liddet arrives at ten past eleven with the rain still on her, a battered parka over scrubs the colour of old mint, and the smell reaches the desk before she does: hospital soap, the sharp pink kind, and under it frying oil and smoke. She holds up a greasy paper parcel like a warrant.

“Two eel rolls. Don’t say you’ve eaten. You’ve had toast. I can tell by your face.”

“My face doesn’t say that.”

“It says dry toast, standing up.” She is already walking to the children’s corner. “Story time’s at half eleven, so we’ve got twenty minutes before the toddlers come and I have to behave.”

The whale carpet is a faded blue with one white eye, worn bald where a generation of knees has knelt. We sit on its lower lip, our backs against the low shelf of board books. She hands me the larger roll without looking, which I register and do not remark on. The paper is translucent with grease. The eel is hot and dark and sweet with smoke, the bread soft enough to give. It is the best thing I have eaten this week. I do not tell her that either.

“Twelve hours,” Liddet says, chewing. “A man came in with a fish hook through his thumb and wanted to know if it would affect his insurance. Then a woman with a kettle burn, then three lads from the cranes. I got home at eight, lay down, and woke at ten like something fished up out of the Pell. Dead weight. Didn’t move. I sleep like a drowned thing, El. I’d win prizes.” She licks her thumb. “Haven’t dreamed in years, either. Properly years. The Undreaming would have me as a mascot. I’d wear a little sash.”

“You’d have to attend. They meet Thursdays.”

“I work Thursdays.” She says it lightly, and the lightness has a seam in it, and I see the seam and let it be. Half the city sleeps like that. It is in the weather reports, practically, along with the salt and the estuary pressure.

She wipes her fingers on the paper. “So. You’ve not answered my texts.”

“I answered two.”

“You sent a thumb. That’s not an answer, that’s a gesture. I asked if you were coming Sunday and you sent a thumb, and then I had to ring Mrs Pardew downstairs to find out whether you were alive.”

“I was at work.”

“On a Sunday. When did you last go anywhere that wasn’t this building? Don’t tell me the bakery. The bakery’s on the same street.” She waits precisely one second. “The tip? The fish market? The pictures? No. You went nowhere. Last month you went to the dentist, and you went because the tooth was a tooth you’d have had to explain.”

“The chipped one doesn’t hurt.”

“That’s not my point and you know it’s not.” She is watching me, the tired eyes steady in her sharp, tired face. The heron on her forearm shifts as she pulls her sleeve back. “You’ve got a look. You’ve had it for about a month. Like a man who’s carrying a full cup across a room.”

There is a sentence in my mouth. It has a crest on it and a start date. I turn the remainder of the roll over, find the last curl of eel, and say, “The radiators knock more in September. It’s a known effect of thermal expansion in cast iron. I’ve been bleeding them since half eight. Possibly it’s that.”

She looks at me for a long moment. Her mouth opens, and I watch her decide against whatever it was, the effort of it visible in her jaw, as though she has lifted something heavy and set it back on its shelf. “Right,” she says. “Radiators.”

“They’re very persistent.”

“I’m sure they are.” She stands and brushes crumbs off the parka onto the whale. Down the corridor a pushchair wheel squeaks and a small voice announces, to nobody, that it is a big fish. Liddet pulls her hood up. “Sunday. Not a thumb.”

“Not a thumb.”

“Bye, El.” Her hand lands on the top of my head, briefly, rough in my hair, the way it did when I was eleven and she was seventeen, and then the doors thump behind her.

I sit on the whale’s lip with the grease-spotted paper in my lap. Beside it, folded neatly, is her half of the roll. She has eaten the smaller end and left me the rest of hers, the whole fat middle where the eel is thickest, and I have not noticed until now that she gave me both.

---

The retired catalogue stands against the workroom wall like a sideboard from a better family: quarter-sawn oak, sixty drawers, brass pulls gone brown at the thumb-edge from a century of thumbs. The council wants it gone by the end of the month. The council also wants the cards in the system first, which is why the third week of September finds me with a drawer on the desk beside the keyboard and a mug of tea going cold on a stack of withdrawn atlases.

I key. Author, title, imprint, collation, call number. The scanner is broken, so every card goes in by hand, and I have found a rhythm in it that is almost like sleep: eyes to the card, fingers to the keys, card to the left-hand pile, next. Drawer 31 is mostly agricultural pamphlets. Notes on the Draining of Fen Pasture. The Kitchen Garden in a Wet Climate. Someone in 1954 typed a lowercase l for a one and never corrected it, and I correct it for them now, seventy years late. Rain ticks on the skylight. A radiator two floors down gives its dull, patient knock.

Card 212 of the drawer is not typed.

It is written in blue-black ink, in a looped hand that leans into the wind. The descender of the y curls back on itself like a cat settling. I know that y. I have seen it on the backs of envelopes, on the inside of the bread-bin lid where she wrote flour Weds, on a hundred shopping lists that said eels (not the big ones), lamp oil, something for Elarion’s chest. The soup-kitchen hand. The hand that wrote the rota on the church hall door for forty years.

I keep my own hands moving. That is the useful part of procedure: it asks nothing of the face. I pick the card up by its edges, as I would any card, and read it.

There is no author and no title. Only a call number, centred, and underlined once, hard enough to dent the stock:

Ψ 000.0 / VOID.04 : 40 : l.

No, that is not right. I am misremembering it already, and I make myself look again. It is a plain Hallick number, ordinary on its face, a class and a decimal and a shelf-mark, except that the class sits in the block the scheme withholds. I type it into the system anyway, because that is what the drawer asks of me.

Invalid classification. Record not saved.

I try it again, slower. Same grey bar. So I get up, which is a small act of rebellion in itself, and take the Fourth Schedules from the reference shelf. They are heavy, buckram-bound, the spine lettering rubbed to ghosts. The block is on page 212, which I decide to find funny later. Reserved, not assigned. A void number: kept empty on purpose, the way a street plan keeps a gap for a canal that was never dug. Nothing is, or ever has been, classed there.

I sit down again with the card squared in front of me.

The question is narrow. That is how I put it to myself. The only question is how a number that cannot exist came to be written on a card that did. A mistyped digit I would forgive. This is not mistyped. It is underlined. And an error that I have seen, and left standing, is an error I have signed off on, as surely as if I had put my initials in the corner.

I check the cataloguing manual, all four hundred pages of it, and find what I expected: nothing. Procedures for damaged cards, procedures for duplicate cards, a flowchart for cards in languages the branch does not hold. No paragraph for a dead woman’s handwriting on a number that is not there.

The light in the skylight goes from grey to a tired yellow. I key forty more cards. I do not read any of them.

At closing, with the drawers slid shut and the lights off along the landing, I find the card in my hand again, and I do not remember picking it up. Professional stubbornness, I tell the empty workroom. A loose end. It goes into my breast pocket, behind the lanyard, and lies there against my ribs, weighing nothing, like a held breath.

---

The basement of Cutter’s Row has one working tube, and it flickers on a rhythm I have stopped hearing and now cannot stop hearing. Stack 40 is at the far end, past the boiler and the crates of withdrawn encyclopaedias. The floor is painted concrete, the paint worn to bare grey in a path that leads nowhere I have ever needed to go.

The card says 40 : l. Stack forty, left. I count bays with my knuckles against the uprights, as Dovrin taught me to do in another life, in another branch. One. Two. The Lacuna Shelf has eleven bays by the floor plan, and I know the floor plan by heart, because I drew the last revision myself. I count again from the other end and arrive in the same place, which is a small comfort and a large problem.

The position falls between bay six and bay seven. There is a pair of steel uprights, and between them, a hand’s breadth of dark and a smell of cold stone, like the inside of a well. Nothing is shelved there. Nothing could be.

I stand with my hands in my jacket pockets, which is how I stand when I want to touch something and have decided not to.

Then I look at the shelf beside it, because that is also procedure: check the neighbours. Bay six is the usual tide of the unrecorded. A swollen cookbook. Three paperbacks with their covers torn off, a child’s atlas, a ledger with a rubber band gone to tar. And at the end of the shelf, tucked flush against the upright as if it had been leaning there for years, a small cloth-bound volume the colour of strong tea.

It is not in the day-book. I would know. I run the Lacuna log.

I take it down by the spine, then think better of it and hold it by the boards. The cloth is worn at the corners to a pale weave. Inside the front board there is a bookplate, no bigger than a playing card, engraved with a heron standing over an open book. Its beak is down, as if it is reading. The copper has bitten a fine line, finer than any printer I know would manage now. Under it, in blue-black ink, in a hand that leans into the wind:

Imbry Quellow.

The y curls back on itself like a cat settling.

I do the sensible thing first. I tell myself where it came from. After the funeral I boxed her shelves, nine cartons of them, and carried them here on the bicycle in three trips because I could not bear to put them in a van. Donations. Some must have gone astray in the sorting, and a mis-sorted book ends up on the Lacuna Shelf, as everything does. That is the whole of it. It is a book. She owned a great many.

But I hold it, and her name sits under my thumb, and for the length of one breath I let it. The kitchen. Flour on the tap. A voice calling up the stairs that my tea was going cold, and was I reading again, and what was it this time.

One breath. Then I put the breath away.

The book has no call number. There is no spine label. It is an unrecorded return with a gap waiting for it, and I am a cataloguer with a book and a slot, and I cannot think of one procedural reason not to put the one in the other.

I crouch. The dark between the uprights is the width of my palm, and I slide the book in, spine out, gently, the way you settle a sleeper.

It fits. That is the first wrong thing. Then the shelf boards on either side begin to part, not with a crack, but slowly, with the dry unhurried sound of a page being turned in an empty reading room. The gap widens past my hand and past my shoulders. The steel uprights do not bend. They simply stop being where the gap is.

Light comes through. Not the tube’s stutter. Gold, level, warm-coloured though I feel no warmth in it, the light of five o’clock on a street I have never walked. It lies across my shoes. It lies on the toe of my left shoe, where the stitching has come undone.

I do not decide. I want that on the record. I stand, and the floor is simply no longer the thing in front of me, and I am through.

Silence, first. Then scale. Shelves go up on every side, white-spined and orderly, climbing past the reach of any ladder, past the reach of the light, until they are only a suggestion of vertical. The air smells of dry paper and iron and stone after rain. Somewhere far above, something small and quick turns over once, like a page.

The tidy part of my mind begins to catalogue. Classification: unknown. Condition: immaculate. Provenance: —

Then I see him.

He stands between two columns of shelving, ten paces off, so still I took him for part of the architecture. Tall, gaunt, grey-streaked hair bound hard at the nape. Armour of lacquered pasteboard, stamped with a seal I almost know, scuffed and mended and mended again. An ironwood staff held upright, as a man holds a thing he has held for a very long time. His face is long and tired and entirely without surprise.

He has watched me arrive. He has watched the whole of it: the gap, the light, my unsteady shoe.

I have the card in my breast pocket. I can feel its edge against my ribs. I open my mouth to ask who wrote it, who put that number in a drawer, who left her book where I would find it.

He looks at me, and then, very slightly, he looks at the book in my hand, which I do not remember taking back.

He says nothing at all.