The green gilded spine

Arcadie reaches for the sturdy old book with the dark green spine. It’s tucked snugly, obstinately almost, on the top shelf, too many inches away for her to reach without extending as far as she can and stretching herself into a cramp. Arcadie blows a sigh of exasperation at her four feet eleven inches and glances down the narrow corridor of books to see if there’s anyone else lurking. All is quiet in the library’s dark aisle. Lost in the far reaches of this damp and untellingly dark Wednesday afternoon.

“Damn it!” Arcadie puts down her leather satchel, checking again to ensure no one is watching, then with dexterity that her gym teacher would be proud of, she wedges both feet onto the bottom shelf of the hefty wooden bookcase and reaches for the troublesome tome.

She’s just got some purchase on it, her fingers tucked over the top of the spine, and then…

“Shhh. That’s what I’m telling you…”

The sound comes from the other side of the bookcase. A voice that’s muffled, audible only due to the library’s intimidating silence. There’s a shuffling of feet, then the sound of books sliding from their sleeping places on the tightly packed shelves.

“Don’t put it there. It’s too bloody obvious.” A second voice, rasping and slightly broken, reminding Arcadie of the sounds a jackdaw had made that morning, trying to free itself from the rat trap under her neighbour’s hedge.

Arcadie pauses. Breath caught in her throat, her fingers poised, small pink creatures clinging to a precipice. She doesn’t move.

“I’ll beg to differ. If we don’t want to misalign with the next passing, then here is absolutely the correct place.” The first voice again, a woman, Arcadie is certain of that. Her accent isn’t local, she speaks eloquently, doesn’t drop her H’s and enunciates every syllable. Arcadie can’t see her but she imagines the shapes her mouth makes, probably coated in vivid red lipstick, as she articulates.

Jackdaw voice responds. “They know this place too well. Did you even check to see if we were followed? I tell you now - they were about the place last night.”

“Why do you say that? I honestly don’t know why you have to be in a permanent state of perpetual paranoia.”

Arcadie lets out a quiet breath. Her legs ache where they’re wedged against the shelf, a tremor beginning in her ankles. The fingers of her right hand are still firmly placed on the book she’s been seeking whilst her other hand clings to the dusty top shelf. It’s critical that she takes the book home with her this evening. Her grandfather won’t stand for any more delays.

“If they find it like that, they’ll think it’s a mistake,” says lipstick voice. “An incorrectly archived object. They’ll put it back.”

“And if they read it?”

The sound of pages being carefully turned carries over the top of the bookcases, a whisper amongst the shelves.

“Then it becomes accurate and we will have no opportunity to change it. It will be rewritten and…” the woman pauses for a second, and then… “we both know what that means.”

Arcadie’s fingers tighten involuntarily on the book’s spine. As she tugs it forward towards the edge of the shelf, she can feel its weight, both physically and in some other way too, as though the contents are inexplicably more than could ever be possible. She senses that the book has been waiting for a long time. Existing through the days, months, years. Anticipating the moment it would eventually be lifted. And now it has been…

“It will be taken for the final time...” The rasping voice of Jackdaw completes the musing of his companion. The words are simple in their own standing, but Arcadie can sense the weighty significance in their meaning, even though she has no concept of what that is.

With her attention straining, trying to hear and make sense of the couple’s words, Arcadie falters for a moment. Her foot slips.

The faintest dragging followed by a thud. The sound of her rubber soles against wood, echoes in her ears, scraping against the shelf and landing on the parquet floor. She freezes, heart hammering, but neither voice reacts. Red-lipstick woman continues, seemingly unaware of the unintentional eavesdropper in the next aisle.

“Which means,” she says, “that it’s already too late for one version of events. All we can do now is make sure that it’s only discovered by the most appropriate pair of eyes…”

A pause. Then a sigh, irritated but resigned. “You always say something cryptic like that.” The ragged male voice. Dejected. Defeated.

“And I’m always correct.”

Sufficiently recovered from her tumble, Arcadie feels the need to become small, to be as insignificant as it’s possible to be. She eases herself down towards the dusty floor, her back against the bookcase, the heavy green book cold and dusty in her lap as she pulls her knees in. Dust motes drift in the weak light from the windows above her, and all is still. From here, she can see the toes of two pairs of shoes on the other side of the bookcase - one brown and scuffed, the other pointed and polished, impatient, tapping.

Arcadie doesn’t dare to breathe. She questions whether she should have simply crept away, hopefully unnoticed. But the duo’s conversation has tapped at an unopened door somewhere in the recess of her thoughts and memory. Of course, she doesn’t know that, but something tells her to stay where she is… and to listen.

In her lap, the book hums. Not so that Arcadie can hear it, not exactly, but she can feel it through her skirt, a low vibration that settles into her bones. As though it has some sense of belonging… She must get the book home so that she can hand it to her grandfather. He’s been waiting for such a long time and Arcadie feels as though she’s constantly letting him down. But it’s taken a lot of determination to get this far. And she will get the book to him. She pauses in her thoughts, and then, against her better judgement, Arcadie opens the cover. Just enough to glimpse inside.

The library card pocket, tucked away where time has been hiding between the years, reveals itself inside the front cover, yellowed and worn with age. Her eyes catch immediately on the stamped dates, blue ink fading to grey.

She reads the last one twice.

14 OCT 1976

Her stomach drops.

That date lives in her like a wound that will never heal. She doesn’t need to be reminded of it. It is recited every year in her grandfather’s careful, deliberate voice. The night when the roads were slicked and greasy with rain and branches hung dismally from the trees. The darkness in the sky, the vibrations across the landscape that fell and rose in time with an unseen force. Six-year-old Arcadie being woken by her grandfather with the news that broke her life into two jagged halves… before and after.

The day her parents had died.

Arcadie’s fingers tremble. The book tilts slightly, pages whispering to one another as though remembering themselves what had happened on that dreadful dark October night.

On the other side of the shelf, the woman’s voice pricks the silence, staccato between the beats of the library’s intangible atmosphere.

“Someone’s here.”

Arcadie’s blood roars hot in her ears. The drum in her chest begins to thrash out a beat that she can’t control. Tiny hairs on the back of her neck creep and crawl in a way she’s never experienced before. Her trembling fingers trace the faded gold script of the book’s spine.

“I told you this was a bad idea,” the Jackdaw snaps back. “I said the timing was wrong.”

“The timing is never wrong,” the woman replies. “Only people are.”

Shoes shift. The pointed ones angle, just slightly, toward Arcadie’s aisle.

“They must be his, then,” rasps Jackdaw, asserting the notion.

“Yes,” comes the painted answer. “That was rather the point.”

Arcadie presses the book to her chest instinctively, as though to shield herself. Her grandfather’s face swims up as she closes her eyes - the way he watches her sometimes, measuring. His insistence that she learn dates, patterns, repetitions. How his study smells faintly of old paper and furniture polish. The way he constantly requests material from the library that she can never find, and his latest words. ‘Bring me the green one with the gilded spine. Don’t let anyone see you take it.’

She had thought it was grief talking. The inability to accept what had happened. His muddled eccentricity. A sad old man with wild fixations.

Now she wonders what had taught him to be so obsessed. So afraid?

“If they read it now…” the rasping man begins.

“They won’t,” the woman says. “Not yet. They've already done the important part.”

“And what’s that?”

Another pause. Arcadie imagines red lips curving into a smile.

“They've moved it.”

Something clicks, horribly and elegantly, into place. The scuffle of books she’d heard earlier. The careful misplacement. The argument about where it should sit.

Arcadie closes the book, slowly, reverently, as if it might bite. She questions whether she should put it back, whether this old and mysterious volume was ever supposed to be discovered. She sits very still, the green cover now warm against her palms. She listens as the shoes retreat, one pair reluctant, the other exuding confidence in their step.

“Tell him,” the exasperated Jackdaw voice mutters as they go, “that next time, I won’t agree to this.”

The woman laughs quietly. “There won’t be a next time. Not if they finish what they’ve already begun.”

Silence returns to the aisle.

Arcadie remains on the floor long after they’ve gone, the book in her lap, her life up until this moment rearranging itself around a single stamped date. Somewhere deep inside the pages, she is certain, something has just been fixed in place.

And at home, upstairs in his study, her grandfather is waiting.