Maggie Gee - The White Family

‘Shirley,’ said the woman with an enormous smile that revealed big teeth and polished pink gums. She took both Shirley’s hands in hers, and squeezed them hard, meaningfully. ‘I know this is a difficult time for you. And Thomas. I’ve heard so much about you, Tom.’

‘ Thomas ,’ Darren corrected her, swiftly, annoyed.

‘You’re not American,’ Shirley said. She smiled at Susie, wanting to help her.

‘I’ve lived there fifteen years,’ Susie said. ‘My mother thinks I sound completely American.’

‘Where are the children?’ Shirley asked. Darren had two children by each of his first two marriages. Susie’s face registered it as a reproach. ‘I had — I mean, we had — the kids last weekend. Both lots actually. They’re great. But kids aren’t good in hospitals.’

‘I didn’t mean …’ Shirley trickled away. ‘I’ve never met them, believe it or not.’

‘Darren,’ said Thomas. ‘Long time no see.’ He had got to his feet to greet his friend. They were almost the same height, two tall, dark men. After an awkward pause, they shook hands vigorously, like two boxers not exhausted by their fight.

‘Darren always said you two were like brothers,’ Susie remarked, encouragingly.

But a voice cut in from behind their backs, a new voice, thin, resentful, nasal. ‘I’m his brother,’ Dirk complained. ‘I’m his brother. He hasn’t introduced me.’

Shirley couldn’t escape him. He butted in, anxious, albino under the angry fluorescent.

‘Dirk,’ said Darren, switching instantly into a social smile, his tan creasing. ‘It’s great to see you. You disappeared. This is my little brother, Susie. You were by the bed, but you suddenly vanished —’

‘Had to go to the toilet,’ Dirk said, simply. ‘I thought you’d have waited. Hello, Shirley.’

And then they were all there, the whole family.

‘How long is it since we were all together?’ Shirley asked, but nobody answered, busy finding chairs, stowing coats and bags, glad of the respite from each other.

All of us are here. Me, my two brothers. We were never all together. We don’t know how to do it .

The café was quietening down at last. The locusts had eaten, and were flocking away, muttering ferociously, back down the corridors, a flapping of jaws and creased white wings. The Whites were left at their table in the window, lost in a desert of royal blue plastic, Darren still too wound up to sit down, Susie perched gingerly, an acid-pink flamingo, on a chair she appeared to fear was dirty, Shirley feeling like a giant by comparison, clumsy, creamy, too heavy to move, Thomas disappearing to fetch a pot of tea, and Dirk sidling grimly round the table to escape the women and be near his brother, his brother who was taller, richer, browner, Darren who was more of a man than him.

‘So that’s a full house,’ Shirley repeated brightly. ‘All the family together at last.’

Not true, of course, she realized at once. The next generation wasn’t there. None of them had met Darren’s children. Shirley herself didn’t have any. And if, by a miracle, I manage it with Elroy, I doubt if this family will ever accept them — And Dirk — is Dirk. Impossible.

Without any children they were curiously stranded, middle-aged people who were children themselves.

And where were the parents? No Dad. No Mum. It foreshadowed the future, when they would be gone. So who was meant to look after them?

Thomas put the teapot in front of her.

‘I’ll be mother,’ said Shirley, gratefully.

‘One-Stop Shop!’ It still struck Thomas as strange to see the large yellow notice on the front of the library, though it had been there for two years now. A library, after all, was not a shop. That was the point of it; you borrowed, then returned, and the things you borrowed belonged to everyone. The ethos of shops was opposed to libraries … As he’d tried to explain to the councillor who unveiled the plan for the One-Stop Shop, in one of the long Monday morning meetings that left them scratchy with frustration and boredom. ‘It’s a question of perceived social need,’ said the man, who had already used the phrase a dozen times. ‘We have to react to social need. We don’t want to get too hung up on books.’

So the One-Stop Shop, the public face of the council, had simply come to perch, inelegantly, just inside the front doors of the library, where previously there were book displays. The librarians had resisted the loss of territory, but now they were almost used to it. Thomas reflected that the notice chimed well with one Suneeta had installed on the stairs: ‘Customers may expect to be serviced rapidly and politely by library staff.’ Visions of swift and silent sex performed by librarians on special tables.

In Thomas’s lifetime, the official term had changed from ‘readers’, to ‘borrowers’, to ‘users’, and now to ‘customers’, which somehow meant less. Not that it mattered. They were ‘punters’ to the staff.

Did he like the public? — Occasionally. At any rate, he believed in them. But thank God you only had to be on the Inquiry Desk one hour in two, on a rota. You couldn’t hide, sitting out at the front, though having the computers did help them to look busy. There was a combination lock on the librarians’ office, where they worked and chatted out of public view, put on it after one of the alcoholics burst in with a can of meths and a lighter, in the eighties … Thomas wasn’t a coward, he had never been a coward, but libraries did attract people with grievances. That young man King, the other day, with his long list of inflammatory titles. The old man who came up to the desk this morning and hissed, full of spittle, ‘How do you spell “action”?’ When Thomas told him, he stared in disbelief, then shouted in a fury, ‘But where’s the s? Where’s the bloody s?’

And then there was what they called the Irish Question, which arose every morning with the daily papers. The South Irish Recorder was so popular that it had to be kept at the Inquiry Desk, and issued only in exchange for a deposit. The arguments, sometimes actual tussles, arose when two punters asked to read it at the same time, or when someone was late returning it, or when the object offered as a deposit cost less than the price of the paper … Thomas had been handed, in the past two weeks: one glasses case, mended with sellotape; one pack of tooth-picks, three-quarters empty; one handkerchief, soiled with recognizable fluids; a bag of boiled sweets; one wrinkled green pepper. When he objected to this last item, the woman who offered it got in a rage. ‘It’s … unsuitable,’ he said, firmly. ‘Well what is suitable?’ she asked, red-faced. But he merely knew he’d reached the end of some line. ‘Not greengrocery. Sorry, madam.’

Fortunately Thomas was the stock librarian, so he spent much of his time at the back, at his desk, in the pleasant shared office, out of public view, leafing in a warm leisurely daze through the approval lists for possible acquisitions. His budget was small, but he still enjoyed spending it. He had to balance whim with service to the public, so he dutifully checked on past issue figures. He needed guaranteed crowd-pleasers to disguise the odd book on postmodernist theory … Because the accountants did have a point — they had to keep the usage figures up. And the usage figures were going down, slowly but surely, year by year.

Suneeta Patel was fifty, easily, broad and soft, though she sometimes talked and acted like a hippy teenager. He liked her sibilant, caressive whisper, and her round golden arms, indeed most of her, though she teased him for being a ‘book-man’, which meant, in new library parlance, ‘dinosaur’. She had worked here since the eighties, though she wasn’t a qualified librarian, but she knew more than anyone else about the information side of things, the whereabouts of nursery schools, doctors’ surgeries, Job Shops, yoga classes, sports centres, aromatherapy … All the touching hopes for self-betterment that the public brought to the library. She came and perched distractingly on his desk, which pushed out the rounded curve of her flank. (He hadn’t had sex for … months? years? His thoughts slipped fleetingly across to Melissa. He usually saw her several times a week, either in the street or on the stairs, but for some reason this week had been a desert.)