Midland by Honor Gavin

Author:Honor Gavin [Gavin, Honor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908058560
Publisher: Penned in the Margins

REDEVELOPMENT

B2

So now the ww sits on a padded seat in the Central Library, sweating it out. The seats beside hers are empty. Two small books, two notebooks, the emptied contents of a polka-dot pencil case, the by-now-infamous portable stapler — the ww’s stuff is sprawled all across the spare deskspace. The ww would like to be a tidy worker, but she isn’t, she’s very messy. The metal shade overhanging the section of desk that is hers contains a bulb the ww has switched on despite there already being tons of sun coming in through the windows. The bulb isn’t properly working, even. It sobs small surges of electricity then crackles off, then beams back on again, crackles off, comes back on again. The ww is content to let it do this. It helps her think somehow. Thinking is thoughtlessness tossed back on itself. The lamp helps the ww to keep in mind the bulb the man with the bulgy eyes turned on and off in the cabin. In that sense it gives the ww what is known as ‘direction.’

The city’s cemetery, or what’s left of it, isn’t far away. Up the street (the street called New Street) and over a whip of screaming roadway, Eden is still intact, if hard to get to. It’s yonks since the bombs stopped falling.

The ww has been coming to the library for about a week now. Each morning she arrives two or three minutes before opening time, scoffs an apple as she squats, waiting, on the great stone stairs of the entrance, and then, once inside, tosses the core into the bin next to the Issue Desk. The library’s rules state that no food is to be brought into the reading room. An apple core doesn’t count, though. In the ww’s worldview, any substance that has already been masticated no longer counts as sustenance. An apple core isn’t food. It’s surplus, debris. Let the pips slip through the slim gaps in the wicker bin. Let the core’s sugary softness soak into the waste paper (there’s never much waste paper in the bins anyroad).

Across the road from the Central Library, which is a redbrick building from the previous century, an ODEON is in the process of being converted into something other than a cinema. It’s not possible to tell what, yet. From where the ww is seated, she can see the men removing the enormous O D E O N letters from the side of the building. A man descends the scaffolding carrying the D across him, slung as if it was nothing over his shoulder and balanced on one of his hipbones. The man’s workmates cluster beneath him, watching without interest. The ww notices that, so far, the ODEON clockfizzog that sits to the right of the ODEON letters — but now there are only E and O and N, and soon there will only be O and N — the clock has so far been left alone. It’s possible that it’s too integrated into the building to bother doing much about.

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