Chapter 38 #3
The big reading rooms in the wings of the library had glass and metal roofs and were pretty intact after all the time that the city and the world had been empty.
So they were brighter book-lined spaces than the rooms with the boarded-up windows, with shelves reaching from floor to ceiling with walkways round them at a higher level.
It was, in its way, a magical space. And perhaps because each of those thousands of books had been made by different people at different times, it still felt more human-sized and somehow sacred than any of the smaller churches we’d ever found ourselves exploring.
The churches told one story, usually all about the man on the cross behind the altar.
You felt this place told all the stories, if you only had time to read them.
And time was – of course – what we didn’t have.
We were stuck between stay and go, sit out the winter at least in our library palace, waiting on a very long shot, or travel on north and try and find the island.
Staying had a lot going for it, because it turns out a city is a good place to live when the people have all gone, especially as the last generation clearly worked together and turned what the map called Parks or Gardens into big public farms, so they could feed themselves when the shops emptied and supplies from further away stopped as there was no one to bring them, or maybe even grow them.
Which meant there were apples and potatoes and carrots and big hard bobbly things that might have been turnips all running wild where once they’d been laid out in neat rows.
The dying remnant of the city had worked together to feed themselves, and a century and more later the traces of their work fed us too.
There was a park called the Botanic Gardens only twenty minutes’ walk from the library, and though you had to be careful of the giant collapsed greenhouse that was itself as big as a church, that was where the most edible stuff was still growing.
I picked potatoes and cabbages and filled a big wheeled red cart that I found inside the library and had mended enough to use instead of the horse, who I felt deserved a rest with them.
I brought my pickings and diggings back to the library to store them in case we stuck with Plan A and needed to stay the winter.
And closer in there was another park, a big one where I kept the horse, making a new paddock where it had room to graze, but – thanks to an old chain-link fence strung across the space to protect more growing-beds – couldn’t escape from.
The goats I just fitted with their bells and let them roam free on their hobbles.
The babies liked potato and carrot all mashed together, and for a few weeks we were happy, I think.
At the back of my mind I think I knew the chance of Bear Shirt’s people coming to raid the map room was very wishful thinking, but perhaps the simplest truth of it all is that I didn’t have the energy to acknowledge that truth right then.
I got my strength back, and with it my irritation with Cat and the secret shame I carried inside me about it got less and less.
Of course, that made me feel a different kind of guilt, in that the treacherous thoughts I’d had about my only-one were just the result of fatigue.
And fear probably. Unlike her, who was actually hurt and hopefully healing.
Getting my energy back allowed me to think about how terrified I’d been that she wouldn’t wake up or ever talk to me again, and so count my blessings and get my focus back on what was important.
All the houses around us on the unburned side of the city did distract me though.
Maybe they helped me get better too, because I started to feel the strong desire to go inside and search all those abandoned places.
Each home, each house or flat was as full of story as a book, if you knew how to read the abandoned possessions and pictures they held.
Cat was adamant I shouldn’t go into any buildings I didn’t have to, because that was how accidents happened, with floors rotting out beneath you, or ceilings collapsing on you.
I knew she was right and made myself walk past all those enticing blank windows in the sandstone facades that lined the walk to the Botanic Gardens every day.
And though I knew she was correct, I felt she would have joined me in a few adventures inside the untouched spaces if she’d been her old self.
I felt a bit alone because of this, although the one person who did seem to share my growing fascination was the girl baby, who I would catch pointing and giggling and waving at blank windows on the sunny side of the street, as if she was trying to make her brother see what she could see.
It’s just reflections, said Cat.
I know, I said.
There’s nobody there, she said.
I know that too, I said. But there might be treasures inside. We could—
Don’t be greedy, she said.
And I understood what she meant. We were lucky and we were living in a sort of palace full of a different kind of treasure.
But I still felt a strong urge to explore.
I hadn’t had this feeling so strongly before, Cat told me it was the product of sleeping where we did, surrounded by actual books in the book-maze, in that I began to see the city as a different kind of library.
I now think she might have been wrong about what the baby was laughing at, but maybe she was right about me and what was pulling at me. But as things turned out, I never got the chance to find out.