Another Life Altogether Read Free

whispered hisses of the librarian echoed against the high ceilings. It was always too hot, filled with the musty smell of aging paper and the force of suppressed coughs. The bookshelves were visited largely by pensioners—women with frosted hair and shopping bags, men who blinked behind big-framed National Health glasses and wore clothes that seemed too big. The newspaper and magazine section was inhabited by unemployed men with folded, gray faces who, despite the grimacesof the librarian, drummed their nicotine-yellow fingers against the tables, as if the library were merely a waiting room and they were impatient to get on with the real purpose of their visit in some better place beyond.
    I loved the library. I loved it for its spacious quiet, the way it was possible to discern each step and shuffle and sigh against that soothing backdrop of calm. No one would yell or scream or cry there, and if they ever dared I knew that the tight-lipped wrath of the librarian would come crashing down on them, as heavy and as crushing as the weight of all those books. I loved it because it was a refuge from school, a place where I had only to navigate my way around the ingenious precision of the Dewey decimal system rather than complex and cruel social hierarchies. But most of all I loved the library because that vigorously imposed silence implied an awe of something far bigger than me, than all of us. It showed the deepest regard not for our need to talk or belch or scream—not for the silly chatter of little children, the gossip of older women, or anyone’s gasping need for a cigarette—but for those stacks and stacks of books and the words and worlds that lay inside them.
    That afternoon, I claimed a desk in the reference section, having planned to do the homework Mr. Cuthbertson had given us—a series of questions about the tidal patterns of the River Humber. Instead, I pulled out the
Reader’s Digest World Atlas
. I thumbed through its thick pages and found myself tracing the route for my mother’s cruise ship. After chugging cheerfully away from Hull Docks, I decided, she had sailed into the North Sea, around the fat-bellied coast of East Anglia, past the Thames, and into the English Channel. Soon, she’d be making her way around the coasts of France, Portugal, and northern Spain. She’d stop in Calais, where she’d do a bit of shopping and, like all the English people who went there, load up on cheap French wine, perfume, and crunchy baguettes. Then she’d find herself exploring the coast of Southern Europe and taking in the entire Mediterranean. I recognized the names of places like Barcelona, Marseilles, Nice, Monte Carlo, the islands of Corsica and Crete, the cities of Athens, Venice,and Rome. Undoubtedly, she’d meet millionaires and high-stakes gamblers, racing-car drivers, fashion models, and perhaps even get to see the Pope make a speech from a balcony in Vatican City. Then, exhausted by the excitement, she’d venture back into the Atlantic, where her journey would continue. She’d travel all the way around Africa, India, Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, China, Japan. Then on to the Americas: Canada, the United States, and all those South American cities with mysterious, multisyllabic names—Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Tierra del Fuego. And perhaps then she might go on to the South Pole after all, leaving Cape Horn to sail past giant icebergs toward the massive continent of Antarctica.
    When I arrived home, I found my father in the living room, sunk in his armchair, hidden behind his copy of the Hull
Daily Mail
. I knew he had been to see my mother earlier, and for a moment I wanted to ask him how she was and if they were taking care of her. But that might mean he’d ask me if I wanted to go and visit her at the hospital, and, more than anything, I did not.
    “Make us a cup of tea, can you, love?” My father spoke from behind his newspaper. “News is on in a sec, don’t want to miss it.”
    The BBC News was