Interlude

“Every time I think about going back to it, there's always something stopping me, holding me back, and whispering ‘Don't you remember what happened last time?’. To be honest, what it's saying is completely right. I can't afford to go back. I can't afford to let anything like that happen again.”

“And why is that?”

“Don't patronise me. You know why. I must've said it a million times.”

“Humour me, then.”

“Why do I even bother, if you weren't listening the first time, you're not listening now! Goddammit all!”

“This is a safe space. Of course I'm listening.”

“At least you're paid to – ”

“You're well aware that has nothing to do with it. My job is to listen. It doesn't mean I don't care. Shall we continue?”

The man sighed.

“Fine.”

It was about twelve years ago that I first noticed... Though I didn't pay it any mind at the time. Knowing what I know now, I think that made it worse. Back when I was a student, entertainment didn't come by as easily as nowadays, so you'd always find me lounging somewhere in the small room that served as a modest library for our school. Most of the time, I was alone, and I can't say it was for no reason. I'm not the friendliest person, and in my teenage years I was a disaster waiting to happen, a bomb made of awkwardness and gangly limbs. Isn't it strange? I mean, when you're young there's very few parts of you that feel yours. My body was either miles ahead of me, or miles behind me, and I was walking around in a trance most of the time. 'What will I do now? What will I do next?' like I was watching a mildly entertaining reality show.

The library was small. I know I've mentioned that, but you have to understand how small it really was. I feel like this is one of those places you had to have been there to get. I'll try to explain the best I can, but you have to let your imagination fill in the gaps. Picture a motel room. One of those 'double' rooms that are clearly made to be singles, so the furniture, no matter where it is, doesn't leave space for two people to move simultaneously. It's dusty, even though you don't explicitly see any dust, and you know it's been cleaned before you got there. Now get this! There's a very small window, right at the edge of a wall, and you only notice it because you've been desperately searching for it. Now get rid of normal motel furniture and replace it with tall bulky shelves everywhere. The window is miraculously uncovered, however the librarian – the kind of librarian that blends with her environment, from the bulky appearance to the chalk-like complexion – is sitting at a desk squeezed in front of it. She's getting all the air you're not getting. She also has an actual seat. You're on the floor.

This is where I used to spend most, if not all, of my free time. I don't recall doing homework, but supposed I did at some point. I guess it doesn't matter that much now as it did then. I remember bravely navigating from one shelf to the next, as if one wrong breath wouldn't send it all crashing down on me. I've read most of the books there. I know that because I kept count. I had a diary, and wrote in it every day. I don't believe I've missed the one. I was very passionate, and never did things by half, which was a funny thing to believe about myself, knowing what I know now.

Sitting on the hard and arguably dusty floor whenever I pleased. No one bothered me there. Most likely because no one could comfortably share the tiny space with me. Then imagine my surprise when I paused my reading – I could feel the beginning of a headache, one of those nasty ones that don't let you look at anything for too long – imagine my surprise when I lifted my gaze and came face to face with the beady eyes of a small child. A child! I felt like I couldn't look directly at him, so I looked around hoping to find an easy to digest explanation. Maybe the librarian's? She seemed too old for such a little kid, but who was I to judge? Maybe her grandkid, or her nephew. Satisfied with my musings, I turned to the child. Only he wasn't there anymore. He'd gone. I was eager to dismiss the whole incident, so I didn't even get up to search for him, just to make sure he's alright. If I thought my reluctance was odd, I didn't dwell on it. By the end of the day I'd forgotten about everything except the way he was staring at me. In the split-second I caught his gaze, he seemed almost fond. I didn't know what exactly about me warranted that reaction.

I think it must’ve been a couple of months later that I saw him again. By that point, I didn’t have any reason to believe it was the same child, because, as I’ve mentioned, I had this strange urge to forget about it the minute after it happened. So again I’m sitting on the floor, been sitting for a couple hours at least – I had a distinct back pain – absolutely engrossed in a book. Funny, I can’t recall the title or the plot, only that it was fascinating. I think I heard a small voice, but it didn’t register, and I kept reading until I felt someone poke me in the face. I startled. Badly. Banged my head on the shelf behind me and this is when he laughed. A silly laugh, more like a giggle, that seemed to swallow all the air in the room. I swear I could feel it vibrating, as if I could reach and catch it, make a fist and keep it there for how long I wanted. I sneaked a look at the kid. He’d grown quiet, swaying gently from one foot to the other, lost in his own world, so obviously miles away that I decided to leave him be. I went back to my book, and I don’t remember looking up again until it was evening when we – me and Hilda, who always seemed to be counting down to this moment – had to leave. He was gone by then.

Now would be a great time to mention that besides reading, I’d also spend my time writing religiously in my diary. I didn’t trust anyone in my family not to go looking for it, as they knew it was a big deal for me, and they were absolute vultures! It wasn’t until I found my big sister leafing through it and breezily reciting entire passages that I came up with the quite ingenious idea of leaving it in the library. I was the only one there, after all, and, as I’ve said, not the most interesting person. Even if someone found it, I doubted they’d get a kick – or the resemblance of one – from it. You might ask me, was it anything of value in there? A deep dark secret? An embarrassing crush? Not at all. A very awkward stream of consciousness that bore the mark of my ambitions to become a writer? More like it. A complex auto-characterisation that could, in a hypothetical situation, be the starting point of a real person’s psyche? Truer than it sounds.

The third time I saw the kid, he plonked down in my lap and said in the sweetest voice, ‘If we meet each other in Hell it’s not Hell’. I blinked, and he was gone. It’s safe to say that the only way I didn’t go mad with fear is I must’ve been…what do you call it? When you can’t understand what’s happening so you just stop living it for a while, until you can cope with it, except obviously I can’t, because I’m here. I’m sure it has a name, I just can’t remember. Don’t tell me! Let’s just move on, I’ll come to me. So my mind immediately tried to make sense of those words. They sounded too good to be his. Very creepy, but also what you’d find in a book, or at least a graffiti somewhere. I’ve mentioned I write down every book I read, so my natural response was to open my diary and search for a clue, if not an explanation. I was understandably surprised when I’d found the actual quote – by Geoffrey Hill – scribbled, almost like an afterthought, about a month before. I wasn’t sure I believed in coincidences, but I also didn’t know what to believe, so I let it be.

He kept bombarding me with quotes after that. He’d appear at the oddest times – but always in the library – and whisper or shout or giggle them at me. I didn’t look them all up, but from what I did, I could tell they were all things that I’d read at some point, and felt a kind of way about a particular sentence so I’d jot it down in my diary. There was even a time when I didn’t have to look it up, because I knew it as intimately as you know the most embarrassing moments of your life – I knew it because I came up with it.

Whatever was happening, somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of him as ‘the kid’, and started thinking of him as ‘my kid’. Proud teenage parent. Well, as much as I could parent a blink-and-you-miss-him kind of kid. I definitely grew attached. I started to look forward to his visits, and he must’ve realised that, because he started lingering. More often than not, he’d gurgle entire paragraphs made of different sentences I’d written. It was as entertaining as it was odd, because they weren’t in any order that I could decipher, so he’d end up saying stuff like ‘It's startling, really, you've been taught that everything around you has a fixed trajectory, a fixed beginning, a fixed end. Mom made a mean cookie yesterday!’ in a sing-song manner. He was the most fun I’d had in ages, and I don’t know how to feel about the fact that I still haven’t found anyone more interesting than my kid was. I can’t remember when I started carrying apples and crayons in my backpack instead of schoolwork, but I’m sure I got him a cat plushie and wrote about it just to hear him say he liked it. At that point, I’d added two and two and came up with a vague understanding of how it worked: everything I wrote in my diary would somehow end up part of him. He was me, but he was also himself.

He was friendly, for sure. I think he even ended up chatting with Hilda, and she’s never said a word to me. There were moments where he’d show emotion so genuine I could instantly tell he didn’t learn it for me. He had absolutely none of my breezy, medium-sized self-loathing. I was glad. When I heard about the fire, I was suddenly empty. Entirely devoid of emotion. The whole world could burn, for all I cared. They said it was an accident, some student dropped a match somewhere in the library and – damn that ridiculous room – that was it. How do you accidentally pull out your matchstick box, light one up, and drop it? You can accidentally do only one of these. None of the books were salvageable. There was no one inside. I never saw the kid again. Never wrote another word.

“That good enough for you? Happy now?”

“How do you feel?”

“Like every other time I’ve told this story. Like you don’t get it.”

“Your experiences are yours alone, and I could never understand them the way you do. It seems that

whatever happened affected you deeply. Maybe give writing a second thought?”

“Will you finally believe me then? When you see for yourself what I can do? Don’t answer that.”

A pause. The man sighed.

“Fine.”

“I'm glad you've decided. This is definitely a step forward, one you should be proud of taking. I look forward to reading your work.”