Two Sets of Books

By Ruairi Murphy

Set in Hobart public library, Two sets of books contains eight stories, each exposing the astonishing secret lives of the staff. A book shelver burns down the library out of love. A technical support officer recreates a woman in an illegal sex videogame. A mute librarian is slaughtered and eaten in a vindictive fantasy. A home service courier gives an elderly widow an offer she can't refuse. An archivist attempts to save a woman's life with a rare book. A children's librarian uses the power of story to learn who is abusing a child. A young librarian is seduced into killing a paedophile. A security guard deciphers book titles to prevent an armed robbery. Sex, drugs, cannibalism, arson, armed robbery  this is not the library as you know it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ruairi Murphy
• Release date: Oct 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645198812

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Ruairi Murphy Publishing

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ISBN: 978-0-6451988-1-2

This is a work of fiction. Some institutions, businesses, and places are mentioned, but the characters and happenings are imaginary. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is coincidental.

Copyright © 2021 Ruairi Murphy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

Earlier versions of the following stories have appeared previously:

‘The swim back’ in S Nourmanesh, R Edwards & S Preston (eds), The third script: stories from Iran, Tasmania & the UK, Transportation Press, 2016.

‘Takeaway librarian’ as ‘Fast food librarian’ in B Walter (ed.), Seven stories, Inscrutable Press, 2017.

Book design: Lynda Warner and Tracey Diggins.

For Tracey

CONTENTS

THE SWIM BACK

UNDERWORLD

TAKEAWAY LIBRARIAN

SPINELESS

BUTTERFLY

STORYTIME

MIDDLEMAN

DISINFORMATION

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THE SWIM BACK

I DON’T KNOW WHY it’s so hard for everyone to understand why I burned down the library—they’re acting like they’ve never been in love.

There’s a massive hole in our living room window. It’s shaped like a comic kapow bubble. Kapow!—someone hurls a book through our window in the middle of the night. A hardback, a real nugget of a thing. Dad binned it and won’t say what it was. Something someone didn’t mind parting with, Mum says—Danielle Steele.

She’s out with the Dyson again, trying to lift the glass from the carpet. I tell her not to bother, I’ll take it out with my feet. She doesn’t laugh—turns out you can’t joke about self-harm after you’ve tried to kill yourself.

She and Dad have decided to leave the window as-is for today. They want people to see that things are out of control. First the mailbox, now the window. What next? Their son, apparently.

So, I’m under house arrest, by order of the matriarch. She kills the Dyson and tells me it’s time to change the dressing on my leg. Then she tells me to go to another room, away from the draft. Nothing doing. If she’s going to keep me home, then I get to choose the view. It was through a window that I first saw Annabel. It’ll be through this broken window that I see her for the last time.

I was a book shelver. When someone removes a book from the shelf, we shelvers call the space that remains a window. Windows are gold for shelvers. Windows mean you can re-shelve a book a) without having to shift aside other books, and b) with only a passing glance at the spine label. It turns a seven-to-nine-second task into a two-to-three-second one. That might not sound like much, but it adds up when you’re shelving hundreds of books.

I should also mention, just quietly, that I was the best shelver in the library. I could send more books home in an hour than anyone else. 287, if anyone’s counting, which of course I was. Officially, all shelvers were paid the same hourly rate. Unofficially, you got a bonus for consistently hitting 250 in an hour. That bonus wasn’t a lot—about the same as a tin of Coles homebrand carrots—but back then I was chasing every cent.

The previous summer, my uncle had promised to sell me his 1982 silver BMW 3 Series Coupe 318i (look that up if you need to—you won’t find anything more beautiful made of metal). The catch was that I had to raise the funds by Christmas or the beamer was out on the open market. The whole thing reeked of my parents—another sponsored attack to teach me the value of hard work and goals—but I was in just the same. That silver pig-nosed prince was going to take names and phone numbers. Especially phone numbers.

But as my dad always says, when you put your head down and push paper and plan for the day when your life will begin, fate just steps right in and swings good and proper for your balls. Well, the first time I spied Annabel though a window, fate threw me an atomic kick, had me down on my knees and doubled over. That’s basically where I stayed: half in pain, half in worship.

The crazy thing is that Annabel never should have been a shelver in the first place. She loved books. That’s the last thing you want in a shelver. In the interview, if anyone says ‘I love reading’ or ‘I’m crazy about books’ that should be the death knell. Shelvers are grunts. We’re alphanumeric robots. We’re the engine of the library. Those who pause to admire the coal risk a stalled returns’ area, and that riles everyone, especially the technicians.

Anyway, there was Annabel, floating past a window like a vision, a siren, and it did for me. I left Earth that day. I launched. I was in orbit, a rogue satellite—limitless, weightless, and in tune with the whole world.

I had to be near her, had to be with her, had to win her. It was all I thought about. And I knew I could shoot for all three via Pyramid.

Every seasoned shelver played Pyramid. The rules were simple: the library had two wooden pyramids, each with three tiered shelves, where about a dozen books could be displayed. Starting on the hour, you and your co-pilot each took a pyramid, stripped it, then loaded it up with whatever books you thought people would borrow. You replaced any that were taken, and at the end of the hour you subtracted any that remained from your score.

Annabel went wild for it. What’s more, she loved to win, which was fine by me because I knew how to lose—when you shelve for three hours an afternoon, several times a week, you get to know the class presidents from the freaks and geeks. I went down like the mafia was paying me. I couldn’t help it—every seat in my stupid heart sold out at the thought of seeing Annabel’s winning smile.

But then she got smug, and I got careless. We began to make wagers on the games we played, small things like little favours or chocolate bars—stuff I would have killed to be able to do or buy for her without any excuse. I even let her win a monopoly on shelving the children’s picture books, which was the Sunday stroll of shelving. But when she proposed a month-long immunity from rounding up orphan library baskets, I practically fell over myself and said I’d do three months of orphan duty against a picnic in the botanical gardens, just the two of us.

I’ll never forget the look on Annabel’s face when I said this. It was the first time I had to let out my sails a little. If everyone is a sailboat and love is the wind (mum’s wisdom this time) then I was a master at trimming the sails. I could push myself forward in any breeze. I didn’t care when the wind dropped, just as I didn’t care where I was going or how deep the water was. So, when Annabel hesitated, and her gaze momentarily fell away from mine, I just eased my hold on the sheet and glided on.

After Annabel reluctantly agreed to the bet, all I could think about was dappled sunlight on her skin, the sound of her voice in the open air, the smell of her hair among all those flowers, the shape of her body reclined on a blanket. Especially the shape of her body. It was in this dreamy state that I laid out a bunch of A-list celebrities on my pyramid that day. I’m not kidding—I’ve never seen books move faster. I tried to recover, to load back up with no-names, but that just made the whole mess worse. There was no masking what had happened: I’d hustled her.

It was raining like crazy when our shift ended that afternoon, one of those summer storms that drops an ocean in a quarter hour then quits. When I came down the stairs, there was a crowd waiting it out in the foyer. Annabel had vanished from the library a little while before. After the Pyramid fiasco, she’d gone all three wise monkeys on me: no hear, no speak, no see. No less than I deserved, but more than I could take. On top of falling on my sword like that, right at the kill, it was all too much. The rain closed me out. I was a few steps into it when something inside me finally gave, and I was done going anywhere but nowhere.

I think back to that moment a lot. I imagine Annabel watching me from her place in the crowded foyer. I imagine her smile as she slipped off her jacket, stepped out into the rain and raised it above our heads. I replay her eyes looking up into mine, her putting her mouth to my ear and whispering that never before had anyone given her a sweeter apology. And finally, I see myself: too spaced to realise her mistake, too happy to care, just beaming right back and knowing that somewhere, somehow, my paperwork had finally come through.

My whole life I’d felt like I’d been filling out endless applications for leave from life’s control group. Up until that moment, every single one of those applications had been rejected, and that meant every day was just like the one before. And then, Annabel. Annabel-the-asteroid. Annabel-the-end-of-my-world. A firestorm ripping through me and spouting in its wake nothing but courage and hope and truth and kindness and beauty. All inside me, every waking moment—an endless bloom.

—

I’ve got my first court appearance tomorrow morning. I’m pleading guilty, so apparently that just leaves the sentencing. The lawyer and the psychiatrist my parents hired assure me I’ll only do community service, albeit copious amounts. But the newspaper was talking about six years for the break and enter, and three for the fire. That’s not even funny. Dad doesn’t think so either. He told me to not even bother turning up tomorrow unless I’m prepared to tell the truth. Massive ten-four on that, but which version? I’m serious. Everyone always craps on about relationships being a battlefield, but no one ever talks about the fog of love.

You want the truth? Here’s part of it: for a long time, I didn’t let myself remember much about Annabel beyond that fairy-tale rainy afternoon outside the library. That was the point beyond which I redacted all memories of our time together. Absolute madness, because those memories were the only candles left in an otherwise dark cave. But I’ll be damned if I knew what else to do—they were taking all my oxygen!

Of course, the darkness is no better. All you see are monsters. The girl you love laughing too hard and for too long that time her sister made fun of you. The girl you adore wearing her geisha mask when you haemorrhaged your heart in front of her. Towards the end, the girl, who you only ever wanted to make happy, turning to stone whenever you reached for her, as though your fingers were little Medusa heads. This is the nightmare carousel in my mind, spinning from the moment I open my eyes in the morning till well after I close them at night. A twenty-four-seven news cycle—all tragedy, all the time. Welcome to my day.

I suppose one of the things they’ll want to know tomorrow is, why New Year’s Day? Why did I spark my book bonfire just after the fireworks on the wharf ? Why did I ring in the new year on the first floor of the library getting hauled unconscious from the flames by a firefighter? Well, that’s an easy one. Same reason that once upon a time I went anywhere—because I knew Annabel would be there.

She and Captain Wonderful showed up at the library just after eleven thirty. The street was deserted, and I watched from behind a bus shelter as his car—a Nissan Silva for Christ’s sake—idled at the kerb. I thought they must have spotted me, but then Annabel stepped out from the passenger side, slammed the door and, her face twisted with fury, yelled something through the window. Then she turned and ran (in the way that she does, all flowing hair and arms) toward the back of the library. I waited for Wonderful to follow, but he didn’t. It was beautiful. For the first time in a long time, I think I smiled.

—

The first time I saw them together, they were walking into the cinema. There was Annabel (looking incredible in the black pinafore dress that she’d bought in Melbourne on our first trip there together) and, attached to an arm around her waist, was the living, breathing, flexing incarnation of my nightmares. Wonderful kissed her hair and spoke something into it. She laughed and looked up into his eyes. And that was it.