Shelf-space

This is a tragedy, but I’ll try to keep it light. I got a job. Not a tragedy in itself, but we will get to that. The job was in the north. The far north. Beyond the far north. The isles beyond the northern most tip of the mainland. I really just wanted out of the city so had been applying for jobs in the western islands, the highlands and, yes, the northern isles, and this was the only success. I was sure it said in the advert that relocation expenses would be met, so it was a real pain when they told me that there was no cash for someone to move to a job as lowly as the one I was taking. They didn’t put it like that, obviously. So, if you were rolling in money and taking a job up there where you might be rolling in even more money; they would pay your expenses. If you didn’t have two pennies to rub together, well, tough, pay your own way. The theory was that they should hire locally for the kind of job I’d be doing, but, then, if they could’ve, they would’ve. I mean that since they had been unable to get someone local, then they should have been willing to help me out with the move. That’s fair isn’t it? Not that I had much. Living in a rented, furnished flat, I wasn’t moving beds, Welsh dressers or ottomans or dining tables with six matching chairs. No absurdly large sofas, no big bits of technology. Sounds a little Spartan. I even had the landlady remove a two-seater sofa because it was more than I needed, she replaced with an armchair. A pink armchair.
The only real possessions I had were books. The hall was full, the living room and bedroom pretty much full too. I did have some other stuff: small television, CD player, bits and bobs. But books were the main thing. So I called up a movers and asked them how much to shift my stuff and nearly dropped the phone. What, are they using Rolls-Royces to shift people’s possessions? Porsche pantechnicons?
No way could I afford that. I don’t drive and didn’t know anyone who could hire a van and would put that much effort into driving all that way as a favour, even a paid favour, to me. Maybe should have socialized more instead of having my head stuck in a book all the time. But then I wouldn’t need someone to help me move all these books.
There were a few second-hand bookshops not far from the flat. I’d occasionally had to sell the odd book now and then when flat broke, though other times I made myself flat broke spending my last few pounds on a book. But this was going to be wholesale slaughter. Retail slaughter.
I thought that I could save the poetry, those slim volumes , you can get a lot of them in a suitcase. But the fiction would suffer a fate worse than verse.
I decided that I would sell all the books at one shop. It was bad enough having to sell them without hawking them around several places. It is a cruel and harsh world where a simple working man can’t even keep his books. I could just imagine a passer-by deriding the guy with the bag of books…’what good did they ever do you? Your head is full of tales and your pockets full of nothing‘. Ah, the old ‘do not read poems; read timetables’ line. Well they trashed the public transport systems anyway, a timetable now might as well have been written by Lear for all its realism, Edmund I mean, not King…I’d get an arm about his neck in a half-kidding, half-serious half-nelson and tell him that these books had changed who I was, had played their part in making me who I am, what I am…’yeah’, he’d say, ‘ someone who can’t afford to keep his books.’ I’d gracefully pick up the bag of books and go on my way, maybe quoting something appropriate under my breath. Remember to look something up that I can memorise easily.
I chose the likeliest shop, the one that sold the kind of thing I was selling. I filled a bag and made the first trip. It didn’t help that this shop was run by the glummest bunch you could meet. It always seemed strange to me, twenty years or so I’d been coming here and it was the same three or so people running it. How could a small second-hand bookshop provide a living for these three? And miserable like a wet afternoon on early-closing day in Dunoon. Do they still have early-closing days? Is there still a Dunoon?
On the way to the shop, I thought it was like the film the ‘March of the Penguins‘…the British with the Scotts, as usual, making up a large contingent, English and Irish, no Welsh, sorry, the French, including one very large miserable figure and half a dozen Parisian types who seemed to be marching in tight patent-leather shoes, a Knight of Spain, confused, the Russians, a mix of prince, pauper, radical and criminal, the Americans, some in trench-coats, some in jeans, even one with a wooden leg , and a couple of others with hats pulled low very camera-shy, you couldn’t see their faces at all, I think they liked it that way. There was non-fiction too. What an unpoetic term, I suppose that’s the idea. Most were reprints, histories of the second world war. I didn’t feel too bad about moving those along, after all, they were just about mass slaughter rather than the depths of souls. The war books went unbought, they weren’t interested in reprints. So they ended up in Oxfam, which was a bit ironic what with them being about aid for those countries we fight our wars in now so as to avoid destroying all our lovely European real estate, art galleries and all that. But the fiction they gobbled down. The staff usually hung around in a little sitting room area at the back of the shop, leather armchairs, standard lamp, there for staff only, none of this friendly nonsense of chain stores. I’d dump the bag and affect interest in the nearest shelves. Then, obviously, start seeing things I’d have to resist buying. Turn round and the rejects are at one side. I’d have taken this, he said, but the pages are loose. Damn, should’ve noticed that, glued it up. So The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution’, ends up Oxfambound. After a few selling trips over a week or two, the shop began to resemble my own flat before the clear-out began. I thought that maybe I could wander downstairs one day and hide somewhere, come out after closing and sit in one of those armchairs, read a few pages each of those books that were once mine. But with my luck, I would stumble into a sub-basement that would be part of a salt-mine. I’d be forced to work there with only the thought of the great novel I would write about my experience if I ever got free. I think salt-mines came to mind because the staff always seemed a bunch of old Stalinist types, the last leaves on a withered tree, who had set up the shop with the last monies in the kitty, before throwing in the towel against steroid suffused capitalism. The fat cats won out; they’d bought the judges.
At this point a sister or two…actual sisters, not like dames out of Hammett or Chandler, started saying that they would have stored books in their attics, but them broads! they waited until the books were gone before making the offer. Now the flat seemed twice as large and far smaller at the same time.
So now I’m far away in a practically bookshop-free town. I have one bookcase. One! there is a suitcase of books at dad’s which is divesting its contents on each visit, and purchases are slowly beginning to repopulate the shelves. Next time I might just rob a bank to keep the books with me.
This happened a year or so ago. They’ll all be gone now, the books I sold, they will have flown off the shelves like racing pigeons from coops at the start of the race. I should be glad, I suppose, that people are discovering some of those writers now, those novels, individual pages, single lines that change your life forever.

Cats and X-rays

Three days in and he was bored out of his skull. Appropriate enough, he thought, as I’m surrounded by them. He didn’t just mean those on the necks of his colleagues; but the images of thousands of x-rays and cat scans in the filing room that he was now working in, a windowless department of a big city hospital.
Skulls, tibia, fibula, ulna, radius. He could picture little girls reciting the words in some playground skipping game: Skulls, tibia, fibula ulna, radius, phalanges, vertebra, patella. Tibia, from the word for flute because they used to use them to play on. That’s some good recycling, he thought, picturing now a couple of honeys tootling out a tune on his leg bones after his death. Maybe before, he mused, if, say, he was in a terrible accident and lost his lower legs, which were immediately rendered down and sent off to the flute factory. Could happen. He didn’t mind the bone; but the thought of pictures of soft tissues made him feel a bit off. The term, too, ‘soft tissues’, like there was something clean and hard about the bone stuff and something ineradicably gelatinous and disgusting about the other.
He was soon filing in his sleep. He asked his manager if he could claim overtime pay for this and she said ‘In your dreams,’ which was a bit predictable, he thought, before planning how to fill out the necessary paperwork while asleep.
He overheard the porters…naw, she’s a Rain Man. So no conversation for the porters like loquacious taxi drivers. What kind of way is that to talk about someone? Bleedin’ troglodytes, porters…only football could interest them…..small of stature and mainly tattooed, but that wasn’t fair, some were kind in their foul-mouthed manner, maybe less scary than smooth-talking and icily polite doctors.
Trying to find a file he thought that maybe they should have a photograph of the patient on the cover like the back cover of a novel. Herein is some of the work of a particular genius, but the novels would nearly all be horror stories, grand guignol, ‘orrible murders..
Passing the time when sorting files by making up bands…lots of James Browns…they don’t feel good.
Ghost shadows on smoky film. The underlit filing room seemed to take on the smoky dimness of the films as if they were leaking. The management didn’t want to spend money on new lights because they knew the whole place was soon to be history..
As he searched for one film or another he thought that, given the city’s ageing population, it is no surprise that many of the names are seen now as old-fashioned. Men seem nearly all James or John; women, Margaret, Jessie, Jeannie. One day the Jades and Ashleys, Deans and Waynes will conjure up the image of aged faces. Others stand out; a Scaramangas One man is named for the battle of Cambrai; or a summer idyll spent there, but no, he was born in 1918.
Names of colours black brown grey white green…no-one called purple or tope or beige. Mr Camel meet Mr. Teal. People called glass wood steel…how come steel and no brass or bronze? No iron? That statue of bronze that came to life…Talos…in the stacks. People as colours and things. A couple of people with the surname Hailstones!)
As he moves among the stacks he thinks of the myriad radio, television, cell phone waves passing through him and the stored images. Perhaps future technology will be able to pick up his image on those films, if any are still to be found.
The youngest girls talk of their nightly boozing. One asks him, during an argument with her friend over who looks the youngest; what age she is. He knows she is twenty-one but thinks she looks twenty-five, the drink already beginning to take its toll, but says fifteen to keep her happy, meanwhile thinking that she has the mind, not the face, of a fifteen- year- old. She says, one day, that she is looking forward to going home to a long bath. He tells her that, given her shape, a wide bath might be better. She just laughs because she knows there isn’t anything wrong with her shape.
At tea breaks, some go out to smoke, some to collect chairs and place them in a corridor with a view of the outside world. To be more exact, it is a view of the Victorian cemetery; the Necropolis, the city of the dead. He thinks that passers-by must think them all fixated with death, but they just want to see some sky. The horizon is heavy with mausoleums.
The swishing noise of the trolleys’ rubber wheels on corridor floors like water rasping past a boat’s prow…the stretched out passenger, often hollow- cheeked, oblivious, seeming closer to death than life, the trolley a boat, the corridor the Styx, the porter Charon. He went home and continued his reading of The Iliad.
He heard someone advise on how to book a patient for an MRI, Magnetic Resonance Imaging. They should ask the patient if he or she had ever worked with metals, usually it was men; men who’d worked in heavy engineering before most of it went west or more accurately, east, the shipyards and foundries, the works producing engines and ships and big stuff for the oil industry. If they’d ever had a bit of metal in the eye they couldn’t get the MRI because the fragment would heat up and blind them. And women were told not to wear make-up because it sometimes had traces of metal in it and it could fry the face aff ye missus.
As the autumn drew on the whole thing became more depressing. He only had one pair of boots and they squeaked horribly. He couldn’t walk down a corridor without people looking up, back, round. Patients waiting to be x-rayed or CT’d watched him pass to the accompaniment of cacophonous squeaks. Maybe, he thought it will take their mind of the procedure and what it might reveal, just for a few seconds. Squeak squeak; one year, squeak, squeak; six months, squeak, squeak; don’t even bother going home. It got to be too much and he changed to a seasonally inappropriate pair of rubber soled trainers. Now he could catch them all unawares.
He managed to keep a check on his boredom. The angry young man had long become an irritated ageing one. One day, though, it was just like old times. He managed to lose it with a woman over the source of the River Tay.
‘Near Balloch? I don’t think so. More likely Loch Tay, don’t you think?’
She knew she was wrong, turned to another worker and started to ask her wasn’t it irritating the way that this one always had to be right?
He couldn’t stand being discussed as if he wasn’t there. And also couldn’t stand people being wrong about the source of rivers. So he told her to shut it and not address him again, nor even mention his name to anyone, to do some work for a change and stop peering round her computer at him like some stupid fat owl. His voice and face went very tight, vision blurred and blood drained from his face. Why do some faces go red with rage and some white?
He didn’t want to rag-doll anyone. In fact, he wasn’t sure what the term meant. ‘It’s when you take the piss out of someone, give them a really hard time, like kicking around an empty track-suit’, he was told.
He rag-dolled the river woman when she wasn’t there. Made jokes that would long survive his presence and be quoted against her. The river woman wasn’t popular. Like when she claimed that she’d been sitting on a beach in Turkey and some young local lads had thought she looked like Princess Di. Like she had actually expected anyone to believe that! Balloch!
As the digitalisation progressed the file-room got ever quieter. The workers themselves seemed to become obsolete, analogue, as anomalous as a ticking clock on a spaceship Some were wiped, left and weren’t replaced.
He felt some regret for the film. He realised one day that they reminded him of the films he had printed from when he worked, years before, in a photographic lab., pictures he printed from large-format glass negatives donated by shipbuilders to the museum of ships…warships on sea-trials swiftly moving down the river dark and dangerous outlined against the snow-covered hills. Images of creaking ribs and plates long rusted to nothing. Others were of the rich interiors of ocean-going liners showing wood-panelled walls, fine carpets, and enormous hothouse plants all to make the ship seem a gentleman’s London club and not a frail ship on a savage sea.
On his last day it rained heavily. As he walked up the corridor which connected the old hospital with the new buildings and which was lined on either side by windows streaming with rain, he held his black, wet, unfurled folding umbrella to one side. He noticed that ahead of him were several people similarly carrying black, wet, unfurled folding umbrellas, a line of them, the short dark umbrellas loosely pendent and dripping onto the corridor floor. It was like a procession of warriors returning from battle, the severed heads of their enemies swinging from one hand.