The Library Closes

The notice went up in the window on the fourth of September. It had been printed in an office eight miles away and it said that the Farrow Street branch would close on the thirty-first of October. It was the size of a postcard, and it was taped slightly crooked.

Vernon Ash had been the librarian there for nineteen years. He knew that Mr Okpara only read history, that the Fenner twins had to be separated in the reading room, and that the third shelf on the left had been damp since a pipe burst in 2011.

Sadie Millar is nine and comes in on Wednesdays after school. She borrows four books and returns three, and the fourth always turns up the week after. She read the notice slowly, twice, and then asked the only sensible question. "Where do the books go?"

Vernon told her the truth, because she would have found it out anyway. Most of them would be moved to the central library. Some would be sold for twenty pence each. A few, the ones nobody had borrowed since 2016, would simply not be kept.

"Which ones?" said Sadie. Vernon showed her the list on the computer. She read it with her finger, the way she reads everything, and then she went to the shelves and borrowed two of the books on it. "Now they've been borrowed," she said.

The crates arrived in the second week of October, sixty of them, stacked in the storeroom. Vernon packed in the mornings before the doors opened. The trolley was used until one wheel came off, and after that the crates were carried, which took longer and hurt more.

People came in who had not come in for years. A man in his fifties returned a book he had borrowed in 1998 and asked what the fine would be. Vernon looked at him, and at the book, and said the machine had already been switched off.

The mobile library would come to Farrow Street on alternate Thursdays from November, between two and four. Vernon put a second notice in the window with the times on it. Mrs Okonjo, who is eighty-one, asked whether the bus had steps, and it does.

In the storeroom, behind the crates, Vernon found the old card index. It had not been used since 2004 and nobody had thought to throw it away. Every card carried a stamp, and some of the stamps were older than he was.

He showed it to Sadie on the last Wednesday. She turned the cards for half an hour and asked why people had written their names in books. Vernon said that was how it had been done before there were computers, and that it had worked perfectly well.

On the last afternoon eleven readers came. Nobody made a speech, which Vernon was grateful for. Mr Okpara brought a tin of biscuits and stayed forty minutes. The Fenner twins sat in the reading room at the same table for the first time and did not argue.

At five Vernon locked the door and put the key through the letterbox of the office next door, as he had been instructed to do in an email. The building was sold in February and is now a dentist's, with the old shelves still on the back wall.

Vernon works at the central library now, on the first floor. The card index was not sent there; it went home with him, and it stands in his hall. Sadie has one card from it, with a stamp from 1961, and she uses it as a bookmark.