Chapter 38 #2
A day later we found the library. Maybe that was the miracle, or perhaps the miracle was that for the most part its roof was still doing its job and it hadn’t fallen in.
It was where Bear Shirt had said it was, north of the river which we crossed by switching back on ourselves where our M-way met another one and crossing the broad sweep of water on it.
Cat didn’t like the view as we did so. Too close to the sea.
The library was like Bear Shirt had described it: A palace, wide set, old and stone-built with pillars and balustrades on the roof and a curved entrance on top of which was a green dome.
All the windows had been boarded up a long, long time ago, probably to protect the vulnerable glass windows and keep the inside safe.
It reminded me a bit of the Bunker, once we got inside, the succession of dark rooms, but that came later as we settled in to our new home.
On first arrival I got a shock when I looked up because for a moment, I thought there was someone on the tip of the dome, but then I realised it was a statue of a woman in a dress, holding out a book with one hand while keeping her hair in place with the other.
And when we got closer, we found there was another woman, this time made of stone, sitting on top of the main door, looking at a map.
Somehow these two women, still looking over the building, one thinking, one offering, made me happy and sad at the same time.
They’d had a long wait with no one accepting their welcome or thanking them for the watch they’d kept.
Mind you, I was so tired and relieved that anything out of the ordinary seemed to make me emotional.
The building overlooked a deep cut where the M-way sliced through the city centre, just before it curved away.
That cutting had saved it too, because the buildings to the east of the concrete walled ravine the roadway sat in had acted as a firebreak, so the library looked across the wide roadway at gutted buildings that had not burned in the recent fire, the one whose ruins we had walked through, but in one far enough away in time for vegetation to have begun to sprout on the roofless wall-tops and strangle the tilted facades that had been slowly tumbling into one another for years, blocking the gridded roads that had once – according to the detailed city maps we found in the library – made an orderly grid of what now was a tangled wilderness of stones, glass and steel overlaid with weeds, brambles and healthy saplings.
We found the library but no people, nor any sign they had been there recently.
And despite the immensity of derelict buildings spread all around us, we found no people apart from those statues and some others we came across as we explored in the weeks that followed as we settled into our life in the library.
Although we never quite settled in, not thinking we’d really be there for good.
We still kept the plan of finding Bear Shirt’s group or their island.
And true, it might have looked like settling in if there had been anyone watching other than those statues, but in my mind, we were resting up after a long journey, and preparing for another one if nobody came by the library.
I never really thought they would, not deep down.
It was only what I’d overheard Bear Shirt say about the map room and the library that gave me the sliver of hope that they might.
I’d found the map room on the first day and it was as they’d described, a room neatly crammed with maps and charts of everywhere in the world, from as close as the neighbourhood around the library itself to as unimaginably distant as maps of the stars themselves, neatly kept and still well-ordered.
The whole building was well-ordered like that, except for in a few places, some where the weather had got in, others where people had made camp in the past. The place was as much a maze as a palace, and it went down as well as up, though the boarded-up windows made the upper levels seem as subterranean as the basement levels.
And books, there were books everywhere – books on the shelves where they were meant to be, and piles of books snaking along narrow passages, taking up floorspace where they were not, I think, designed to be.
There was an actual maze of books in the pillared entrance hall, where someone or some people had stacked books – children’s books mainly – into switch-backing spirals that double- and triple-backed on each other, making it hard to find the central space hidden at the centre of the maze, which was a big round room with a couple of beds in it, right under the arc of the rotunda.
You could lie on those beds and look up at the inside of the dome which was all flaking now but once had been swagged with plaster flowers and panels, with a grand spiral staircase leading to the upper levels. I liked that space.
The babies liked the book-maze too and always seemed calm in there, though I did worry about them toppling the walls if they pulled or tugged at them too much, or even just fell against them, but they were always quiet in the cocoon of books.
And once the girl had got her hand on a big, oddly shaped picture book printed on boards not paper, called In the Moominhouse: A Lift-the-Flap Moomin Story, she fell so in love with it she never wanted another one, while her brother showed little interest in books.
I showed it to her because I remembered how Storm had liked the big white hippo shaped characters, I guess.
This book the girl loved opened out so the inside pages looked like the inside of a house, and she would spend hours turning the pages with her chubby hands and looking at us in the hope we’d read her the words again.
Cat and I knew all about Moomins not just because of Storm, having read the more grown-up books when we were little, and perhaps because we had loved the funny characters in our turn, I always took time to read her the story which involved tracing a red kite string through the house to find a kite, meeting lots of friends along the way.
The girl had such a fierce attachment to the book that she’d go to sleep clutching it.
She liked it so much we even thought about calling her after some of the characters.
Maybe we should call her Snork Maiden, I said.
Or Little My, said Cat.
We never did though. Maybe we never named them because there was just us and one was a boy and the other a girl, so there was never any chance of confusion. Or maybe we were too tired to do so. I can’t remember.