An Imperfect Librarian (17 page)

I stand up from the table to face her. “Idle curiosity? Is that how you see it?”

She's rummaging in the porch looking for something. “Either that or you need to go away and deal with your problem.”

“I've heard that one before.”

“Maybe it's time you listened to their advice,” she says.

“Not when it comes from someone I don't trust.”

She opens the door partway. “Trust has a self-fulfilling character about it.”

“Exactly.”

“I have to feed the horses, bring the dogs to the vet for shots, et cetera, et cetera. I have my hands full with more than I can cope with, and, to be honest, since I know that's something you demand of me, I don't have time for a relationship where trust is an issue.”

She pulls the door sharply to a close, like an exclamation mark jabbed onto the page with the fine point of a pencil.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I
'
D BEEN WISHING FOR
A hostile Saturday with raging winds, rain on the verge of a breakdown, the kind of day when people are warned to go out only for emergencies. Instead, the temperature and the colour of the sky are record-breaking. It's ideal weather for rowing on the pond or visiting a cove. Everyone is looking for an excuse to be outdoors and what better excuse than the People for Privacy rally? I arrive just as it's ending.

Francis works the crowd with the charm and conviction of a politician. “Personal freedoms have to be safeguarded!” he shouts.

I wear a baseball hat, sunglasses and Cyril's old fly-fishing vest over a t-shirt to blend into the crowd. I sit on a bench near the side of the field so my height doesn't give me away.

“Monitoring of cellphone use, financial surveillance, insurance companies checking on health information: Our rights and freedoms are threatened every day.”

The Frisbee and ball traffic frighten away the birds. The
squeaking sounds of swings and the shouts of children playing interfere like static with his speech.

“The next time someone is entering your information into the computer, ask questions: Who sees your personal information? Is it cross-linked or connected electronically with other information? How will it be used? What are you going to do about it? Protect your information!” He points a finger at the crowd of no more than twenty-five or thirty.

They applaud and chant as they walk away. “Pri-va-cy! Pri-va-cy! Pri-va-cy!”

Someone reaches from behind and cups hands over my sunglasses. “Aren't you a sight with that get-up,” Edith says. “Halloween's not for another month.” She makes herself comfortable on the bench next to me.

“What did you think of the rally?”

“I think it's a good idea you're disguised,” she says. “You should wear those glasses more often. Although, I love your brown eyes.” She takes the baseball hat that Cyril lent me and puts it on her head. A gust of wind blows it onto the field. She chases after it. She's out of breath when she hands it back to me.

“What about our friend Francis?” I ask.

“Francis has two friends in the world and I'm not one of them,” she says.

“I'm surprised he has that many.”

This time, she borrows my glasses. “The Chief is one and the other is you-know-who.”

“No idea.”

She turns her head side to side checking the view through the glasses. “Norah Myrick is his...” She pauses then imitates quotation marks with her fingers. “Friend.” She waves to someone. “Be right back.” She hands me my glasses then runs over to a woman. They hug and talk.

I stretch my arms over the back of the bench and cross my legs while I wait. Halfway across the field, Francis is stuffing his loudspeaker into a bag. He throws it over his shoulder and walks away with a woman on either side. My arms start to feel stiff so I stand up from the bench. I walk towards the hotdog stand. One of the members of the privacy group goes by. I turn the other way then go back to the bench. The woman Edith is talking to walks away.

“Sorry about that,” Edith says to me. She takes her sweater off the park bench and lays it over her shoulder before she sits. “It's cooling down, isn't it?”

“What did you mean by
friend
?”

“Right after her father died, she threatened to sue the library if we didn't give her the original of every shred of paper her father donated to the archives. She said he never meant to leave us the originals and that we, or more so I, took advantage of the fact that he wasn't well. He
was
forgetful. There's no doubt about that. But I'm sure he was in his right mind when he donated the materials.”

“How do you make the leap from there to Francis?”

“Put two and two together. As soon as they announced the archives would be merged with Special Collections, we never heard another word from Norah Myrick. Francis more or less took over my position. They claimed I didn't have the resources to manage the archives properly. They didn't know what they were talking about.” She waves to someone again. “Just a second.” She walks over to talk to a man.

I recognize him from the library and wave. He doesn't recognize me. I lean back on the bench and watch a boys' soccer team. They look like five-year-olds wearing eight-year-olds' uniforms. A man blows a whistle and the boys crowd around him. The parents sit on blankets or fold-up lawn chairs along the sidelines. When I was in school, I wanted to be on a sports
team but I didn't bother to try out. “You'll only get hurt,” Papa said. He knew from experience what it was like to be too tall, too skinny and too uncoordinated on the field.

“That was Peter Harrison from circulation,” Edith says. She reaches her arms into the sleeves of her sweater. “Wife's in chemo. Breast cancer. God help us. Another one.”

“Is that it then about Francis' second friend?”

She puts her hands on her waist and turns to face me. “You're some curious, aren't you? What have you been doing all summer? Tell me.”

A ball rolls under the bench. I throw it out into the field. “Nothing. Why?”

“Did you visit Blackhead by chance?”

“Maybe.”

“It's an itsy-bitsy world. Can't keep secrets from Edie.” She nudges me with her shoulder.

“I'm not sure what secrets people in Blackhead have about me.”

“You'd be surprised.”

“What are you getting at, Edith?”

A young girl passes by with a metal detector. Edith throws a toonie in her path. “Thanks, miss,” the girl says.

“You still haven't answered my question about Blackhead, have you?”

“I bought something at the store, yes.”

“That's a long way to the corner store when you live on Gower Street.”

The girl with the metal detector goes past again. She points it towards Edith. I throw her what I have in my pocket – a dime and a nickel. She ignores them.

“Let's get a hotdog before the guy leaves,” Edith says. She grabs my arm to drag me up from the bench. We walk over to the stand and wait in line. We take the two-for-one special,
all-dressed. I eat leaning against a tree trunk. A leaf blows into my relish. Someone in the apartment building across the street closes a window. Edith pulls a tissue from her sleeve then wipes the corner of my mouth. “You had a gob of mustard there.” The wind rustles the leaves in the branches above our heads. A young couple rolls up their blanket. They lay their toddler in a stroller and jog across the field. I poke my hands in my pockets to warm them. Edith twines her arm into mine. “Come for supper. We'll go downtown afterwards, make a night of it. Just as friends. What do you say?”

“I'm really not in the mood. Thanks, Edith.”

She lets go of my arm, looks for something inside her purse, then pulls out her car keys. “Too bad. We would have had a great evening. By the way, you're not the only gentleman who visits my cousin's store in Blackhead for baking powder and ladies' scented soaps.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

She looks over her shoulder as she walks towards the cars lining the road. “That's up to you to decide.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

L
ONG BEFORE THE END OF
October, scarecrows, pumpkins and skeletons sprout like dandelions in front gardens. Cyril tells me about his plans to install speakers in the front windows to play Halloween sound effects. Mercedes puts a stop to it and they settle on miniature pumpkin lights around the front door. “None for me, thanks anyway, Cyril. No, not around the ceiling pipes either.”

At the library, there are no pumpkin lights, though mid-term exams have given students a ghoulish pallor. Reading Room activity is at its peak. I'd expect Henry to be drooling over the view. Instead, he's staring into space, or more rightly, into his coffee cup. I wouldn't be in a good mood either if I'd spent the summer caring for a dying father, if my son and daughter-in-law had split up and my teenage grandson was caught shoplifting cigarettes. “That's the good part,” Henry says about his two-month visit to Ireland.

“I bought some new coffee from Auntie Crae's, if that will make you feel any better.”

“Since when did you ever brew a cup of coffee that would make anyone feel better?” he says. “You're a fine one to be talking about feeling better. Look at you. You'd think after the beautiful summer here on the island you'd have a ray of sunshine in you but you're dark as the arse of a black hole,” he says. “I hope you aren't hanging out with that Reading Room woman, because if you are, I won't help you anymore.”

“I'm not seeing Norah Myrick. Elsa's the problem right now. She's split up with her Brutus. She's been sending me emails almost daily.”

“Is this the Viking Vixen who cuckolded you with another Amazon? What would she be wanting with the likes of you? Your semen? Don't be letting your sperm go to your head. There's a good one for you.”

“I don't know what she wants but I've decided to go to Norway to tie up some loose ends. I'm leaving on the November eleventh long weekend. I'll visit with Tatie and Papa while I'm over there.”

“If you asked me, I'd say you're scrounging for an excuse to avoid your priorities.”

“Remind me not to ask.”

“Sharpening your tongue over the last few months, were you?”

Of all the months, weeks and days, my memory is trapped in the five or ten minutes in Norah's kitchen.
I don't have time for a relationship where trust is an issue
, she said.

“I've been focusing on my priorities more than you realise. I figured out that Francis owns the Crimson Hexagon and that he visits there at odd hours of the morning, that–”

“You're the one who knows most about how our information is managed. Once that privacy policy is passed, you could find yourself with a new title: Dr. Carl Brunet, Data and Information Control Manager, Privacy Protection Services
for the King Edward University Library, Lackey for Francis Hickey. Will you like that, with Francis for your boss? ‘Yes, Mr. Hickey. Sorry, Mr. Hickey. Right away, Mr. Hickey. Lick your ass, Mr. Hickey?'”

“More like, ‘Stay off my case, Mr. Hickey. Hand over the Special Collections inventory, Mr. Hickey.'”

“I applied for the position of Head of Special Collections when it came up three years ago. I should have been the obvious choice. I'd been here longer. I have more experience,” Henry says.

“Why did they give it to him?”

“Because he sucks as much as he fucks. I challenged him once. He was presenting a report on Special Collections to Library Council. He put forward a motion to approve a fifteen percent increase in his budget. I argued against it but Francis knew how to manipulate them. He cracked a lame joke that had everyone laughing at my expense. Something about the likes of Irishmen working at ‘Mis-information Services.'”

“A fifteen percent increase to do fifteen percent more of what?”

“Everyone assumes the Reading Room's a bastion, an Alcatraz, with its fancy security features, the no touching this, no copying that. The real threat is the Trojan horse on the inside. He struts around the library, Head of the People for Privacy, protecting the public good, defender of basic rights. My fucking belly he is.” Henry grabs his belly, one hand on either side and shakes it. “It's about time someone pruned the prick.”

I turn away from the view of the Reading Room to face him. “Let me get this straight, Henry. Are you trying to rehabilitate me and save my project or are you simply–”

“All that boring Bibliomining banter. I have more sympathy for this privacy stuff. As for rehabilitating you, the curve is steep,” he says, his arm raised up before him as if I couldn't understand without the gesture.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

A
FTER MEGABYTES OF
M
ESSAGE BLOCKED
for this recipient,
followed by my declined invitation to share fatherhood with Brutus, Elsa announces that she misses her husband, me, Carl Brunet, recent recipient of the outstanding-cuckolded-husband-of-all-time award. The same Carl Brunet who'll soon have a hint of a lean to one side from poking his hand in his pocket to rub the two smooth beach rocks between his fingers.

I squander a fortune on an overpriced ticket, dump what clean clothes I own into a backpack then board the plane for a weekend in Norway. I forget to ask for an aisle seat to avoid the aerial view of the ponds and meadows that remind me so much of Cliffhead. When I arrive in Heathrow, I visit a bookstore while I wait for my connection to Oslo. I end up in the history section even though I never read history books. I walk past the duty-free shop with its promotion on cognac. I'm tempted to ask if they know how well it mixes with partridgeberries. I fall asleep on the plane until the bumpy
landing in Oslo jolts me awake. The passengers push to debark. I stay behind, half-asleep, half-wondering how I ended up on the other half of the world.