The next day, at Estella’s behest, they ambled over to St. Annes Library to “assess the situation further.” The local news records were always the best place to start, she had told him as they walked. In reply, he leant over and furtively complimented her left ear;
“You seem to know a lot about this lark, Stella.”
She beamed, flattered.
“I always wanted to be like Nancy Drew, I did. Except, you know - less shite.”
The library was a humble little husk that had managed to survive recent government cuts, though only in a nominal sense. Upon entering, it took the visitor a rather discernible effort to locate actual books. What predominantly met the eye were rows and rows of videos, DVDs and compact discs; the borrowing of these happened to come at the price of a small daily charge, and so the library carried on its burdened trawl, shoulders hunched against the storms of apathy.
Bob had to admit, though – he didn’t really deserve to feel judgemental of any of this. He could not recollect the last time he had held a book in his hands, let alone read one. In his twenties his escapes into fiction had been both unremitting and voracious. He had spent long nights soaking mental pores with stories after long days spent working on the telephone at the taxi garage. Bob had never subscribed to the books which other young men at the time devoured; he had found the escapes they promised inherently limited by the very realism and modernity that they displayed as testament to their radicalism. He had instead found refuge in moth-eaten horror comics and stories of the macabre, the preserve of boys half his age. These tales of ghostly highwaymen, wayward ghouls, and rotting homunculi spoke to a part of him that reality seemed to dismiss. He treasured them for what he saw to be their un-dead magnanimity; they offered an alternative to the querulous vice that clamped his desperate brain by way of the days’ constant telephone calls from so many apparently different kinds of people who were ultimately all so similar in their desire to merely travel from point A to point B. These ghosts with whom he spent the night pointed ectoplasmic fingers towards a somewhat darker letter, and God, did he love them for it. Every night fiction found him and occupied a horizon stretch that had seemed to invite the luxury of unqualified indulgence at the time and was only revealed as a snare to wasted life through the bitter spectacles of hindsight.
On the last day of his third decade, however, Bob put down his evening books suddenly and indefinitely for something that he had never, and would never, be able to view as a waste.
She was a pretty little thing and, when she smiled, her smile was a true smile. It confronted him with a goodness that was almost discombobulating in its perceived lack of ulteriority. This is not to say, however, that it was the simplistic grin of a doe-eyed child, lips smeared red, who wanted a strawberry lollypop and got a strawberry lollypop is happy it has obtained said strawberry lollypop. Far from it. It was instead the smile of a decidedly adult someone who, when faced with a number of much easier alternatives, chooses to carry on smiling anyway. In this sense, then, the only thing displayed through her stretching cheeks besides happiness was a decisive recalcitrance, a firm yet magnanimous “ sod you” to forces in whose interest it was to challenge her optimism, be they boredom, disillusion, even bereavement. It was this optimistic rebuttal that so appealed to him, that so drew him in and made him want to widen his own mouth and attend her party; a dance against the darkness, a revelry in the light. brown had grown to know Rosalind, had grown to care about her, and then one day – neglecting rather than forgetting to watch his step – he understood that he had utterly and unequivocally fallen headlong into the cushioned trap of love.
The ears of his memory often noted a nostalgic refrain when Estella spoke of the pulpy fantasy in which she took so much pleasure. He enjoyed indulging in this harkening back for two reasons. Firstly, it reminded him of that pleasure he had taken in spending time on his own, by his terms and for his own enjoyment and damn anybody else should they think otherwise. Secondly, it allowed him to mentally inhabit an imagined time wherein he was yet to meet Rosalind, so that this time by itself wasn’t all that there was. There was more to come, which meant that it was Estella who held within glowing clenched fists the burgeoning seeds of an impossible promise, prophesying a future that had already died.
In these jittering hands she now held five sepia-toned copies of the Lytham St. Annes Gazette, and was motioning him over to the table over which she now spread them out before her. He sat down and scoured their front pages: she had selected two editions from the late sixties, one from 1986, and one from 2008. The latter was not discoloured due to age, he noticed. Somebody had spilled what must have been a gargantuan cup of coffee all over it. He looked at the photo on the cover. The caffeinated smear had bestowed the leader of the opposition with a face even more amorphous that it had been before.
Estella held a finger up by her ear – she had forgotten something, evidently - and dashed off behind some shelves. Bob was afraid to touch the papers lest he jump the gun of Estella’s presentation before she returned, so he sat at the table staring at the politician’s lopsided jowls for a good five minutes, until Estella reappeared – or at least, until her legs did. Her torso and head were completely eclipsed by the stack five books she rested against herself. She was, he judged by her somewhat seasick movement, in very real danger of falling over if she attempted to carry them any further, and, relieved, she slammed the pile down onto the papers with an almighty thunk. Bob and Estella looked around sheepishly, but they discarded their guilt, recognising its anachronism - the very likelihood there was anybody in here trying to read who didn’t have hearing as bad as they did was a rather remote possibility. The books were titled, in alphabetical order, Celestial and Extra-Astrological Phenomena and How to Interpret Them by F.R. Wolfe, Cthaat Aquadingen (Bob couldn't make out the author of that one, but Estella told him the title meant 'Things of the Water'), Far Encounters: Extraterrestrial Implications of Astral Projection and the Multiverse of the Mind by Marie Melville , Moon Cycles and Their Bearings on the Soul: An Investigation into Cosmic Communion by Archimedes T. Horne, and Precautionary Procedures: Failsafes in Preparation for the Coming End by some personage spartanly monikered ‘Z’. He noticed that she had also picked herself up a copy of The Time Traveller’s Wife - Ness had recommended it to her, she said. She liked a good cry.
“What do we do with all of this, then?”
“We do the fun part. Each of these papers contains within it a report of strange lights spotted over the bay, and each paper also contains within it an obituary for somebody who went missing the night before. They concur, like. So I say we should note the concurrences.”
She said “concurrences” strangely, retaining the long ‘u’ of the original verb her Lancashire brogue had italicised in enthusiasm. He grinned at this, an indulgence that revealed decrepit tombstones of teeth at odds with the boyishness of their frame. “You’re suggesting they were kidnapped by Marvin the Martian?”
“No, Bob. I don’t think they were abducted” – she both corrected and judged him here – “by Marvin the Martian. But don’t you think the coincidence is a wee bit on the peculiar side?”
“But what about all of this codswallop?” He motioned towards the clunkily-labelled tomes.
She appeared to consider and reluctantly confirm the validity of his question before answering that “a little bit of extrapolatory affirmatorical corroboration never hurt anyone.”
He shook his head at this in a mock disapproval, understanding on a conscious level what she now signalled for him: a liaison with life.
“You aren’t half a silly sod, you know that?”
She beamed right back at this. “It’ll be something to do, though, won’t it?”
Her logic was, once again, irrefutable. Though his limbs and mind were already fatigued by the trip to the library, he reached for the paper.
They sat in that library for hours that day, poring over and comparing page after page. Bob hid the occasional yawn with a turn of the head, intent on maintaining the momentum of her quixotic crusade. Annotating, cross-referencing, investigation and exegetical reasoning wiled away the hours until twilight’s shadows crept in through the building’s bay windows and further adumbrated the texts over which the scoured.
There was a cough by his left ear. He looked up to see a bored-looking teenager glowering over him, motioning to his watch. While on any other occasion Bob would have been insulted by the ageism, it had taken a rather concentrated effort in his tiredness throughout the last hour to keep the letters on the pages in front of him from floating off the page, so he welcomed the intrusion. He nudged Estella’s shoulder, and whispered – though they were the only people still in the place – that it was probably best that they leave.
“Tell him they can wait another few minutes.”
He implored her once again, only to be met with a similar response. The spotty youth continued to glower. Finally, exhausted and more than a little bored, Bob placed his hand down firmly over the page Estella’s gaze was in the middle of imbibing.
“Enough is enough,” he said.
She stopped reading, then, and looked up at him, the gloss of her pupils slipping from recrimination to lament.
Though Estella was already sat hunched over, Bob could swear that he saw her shoulders sag.
Estella pushed her chair back, then, and stood. She walked out of the library without another word, leaving them alone at the dusk-clothed table. Bob knew that there was nothing left to say.
