I go to sleep. I toss and turn for a bit and think I am just going to lie awake in bed all night. Then it is morning and I get up and take the dogs into the garden before making breakfast. I think I could live like this forever, but by the time it is lunch I am bored out of my head and nothing is on TV.
It’s ten-to-two when I decide to get the bus into town and go to the library.
I walk into the library through the swinging metal gate that has always been there for as long as I can remember. I go over to the computers. You have to book when you want them on most of them, except one. The one at the end you can log in for fifteen minutes without booking, as long as it is free. I log in and go to my e-mail account. I download the file I have sent to myself and print off five copies. This costs me £1.50 in total, and I push my coins, one-by-one, into the machine to release the pages that tell the story of my whole working career. Double-spaced with education, work experience, employment history, references and contact details. Just stretching to the two-page mark. I collect them together and go to the desk at the far end of the library to ask if I can borrow a stapler. There is a woman there in her late forties. Crows feet are embedded at the sides of her eyes. She hands me the stapler reluctantly, like I am about to use it in some perverted sex act. I take them stapler and my ten pages of A4 paper and go and sit in one of the big comfy chairs in the magazine section.
At a table near me, a man sits with a stack of different newspapers. He looks like he’s in his sixties but his clothes are very youthful. Grey hair pokes out from underneath his cap and he has round, John Lennon-type glasses on. I pretend to read for a bit because I want to see just how closely he is reading the newspapers in front of him. I can’t tell if he’s reading any section in particular. Maybe he is researching something. I push my curiosity to the side for now and start to staple the pages together.
I finish stapling the pages. I hold them together, up right, and tap them against my knees to straighten them out before placing them in my bag.
I walk over to the CD section. I’m not really too sure why I am looking through them. There’s nothing there I want to listened to. Most of the CDs booklets are tattered and torn and where in the charts about seven years ago. I wonder why I am wasting my time looking through the CDs and again turn to leave. The classical shelf is facing me and the eyes of old portraits of men in wigs meet me. I look back at them and step up to the section marked ‘M.’
The entire ‘M’ section is filled with double and triple CDs of music by Mozart (Wolfgang Amadeus). I look through them one by one then go back to some, pick up two at a time and compare. To be honest I don’t have a clue. CDs are a pound for a week. I take one with two violins on the cover over to the desk along with the stapler that is still in my hand. The woman at the counter grabs the stapler and the CD and then asks me bluntly for my card. She scans the card and CD and then asks me for the pound. She thrusts her arm out at me with the CD and my card at the end. I take them and say thanks. She says ‘thank you’ while clicking away at something on the computer screen in front of her.
I think it must be quite nice to be a librarian. I tell myself to look for library jobs when I get home.
It is five o’clock and the library is almost about to close. Having not eaten since breakfast my stomach now feels like it is digesting itself. I start walking home.
Walking home from town takes about forty minutes. At the thought of a forty-minute walk some of my friends would call a taxi or their boyfriends and get home this way. But I don’t mind. I don’t even mind that I have to walk next to a busy road most of the way. To the other side of me are the subtle variations of suburban front gardens. Tulips, fir trees, brick wall, rose bush, hollies, wooden fence, landlocked boat. Then I look over the other side of the road, in a gap between a row of trees. The view stretches for miles and there are untouched fields folding over each other. Green, yellow, brown, orange. I enjoy every step.
It’s ten-to-two when I decide to get the bus into town and go to the library.
I walk into the library through the swinging metal gate that has always been there for as long as I can remember. I go over to the computers. You have to book when you want them on most of them, except one. The one at the end you can log in for fifteen minutes without booking, as long as it is free. I log in and go to my e-mail account. I download the file I have sent to myself and print off five copies. This costs me £1.50 in total, and I push my coins, one-by-one, into the machine to release the pages that tell the story of my whole working career. Double-spaced with education, work experience, employment history, references and contact details. Just stretching to the two-page mark. I collect them together and go to the desk at the far end of the library to ask if I can borrow a stapler. There is a woman there in her late forties. Crows feet are embedded at the sides of her eyes. She hands me the stapler reluctantly, like I am about to use it in some perverted sex act. I take them stapler and my ten pages of A4 paper and go and sit in one of the big comfy chairs in the magazine section.
At a table near me, a man sits with a stack of different newspapers. He looks like he’s in his sixties but his clothes are very youthful. Grey hair pokes out from underneath his cap and he has round, John Lennon-type glasses on. I pretend to read for a bit because I want to see just how closely he is reading the newspapers in front of him. I can’t tell if he’s reading any section in particular. Maybe he is researching something. I push my curiosity to the side for now and start to staple the pages together.
I finish stapling the pages. I hold them together, up right, and tap them against my knees to straighten them out before placing them in my bag.
I walk over to the CD section. I’m not really too sure why I am looking through them. There’s nothing there I want to listened to. Most of the CDs booklets are tattered and torn and where in the charts about seven years ago. I wonder why I am wasting my time looking through the CDs and again turn to leave. The classical shelf is facing me and the eyes of old portraits of men in wigs meet me. I look back at them and step up to the section marked ‘M.’
The entire ‘M’ section is filled with double and triple CDs of music by Mozart (Wolfgang Amadeus). I look through them one by one then go back to some, pick up two at a time and compare. To be honest I don’t have a clue. CDs are a pound for a week. I take one with two violins on the cover over to the desk along with the stapler that is still in my hand. The woman at the counter grabs the stapler and the CD and then asks me bluntly for my card. She scans the card and CD and then asks me for the pound. She thrusts her arm out at me with the CD and my card at the end. I take them and say thanks. She says ‘thank you’ while clicking away at something on the computer screen in front of her.
I think it must be quite nice to be a librarian. I tell myself to look for library jobs when I get home.
It is five o’clock and the library is almost about to close. Having not eaten since breakfast my stomach now feels like it is digesting itself. I start walking home.
Walking home from town takes about forty minutes. At the thought of a forty-minute walk some of my friends would call a taxi or their boyfriends and get home this way. But I don’t mind. I don’t even mind that I have to walk next to a busy road most of the way. To the other side of me are the subtle variations of suburban front gardens. Tulips, fir trees, brick wall, rose bush, hollies, wooden fence, landlocked boat. Then I look over the other side of the road, in a gap between a row of trees. The view stretches for miles and there are untouched fields folding over each other. Green, yellow, brown, orange. I enjoy every step.
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