The unreturned book

On her first evening as caretaker, Mara was given three keys, a torch and a rule.

“Leave the window above the east doors alone,” said the departing caretaker. “Everything else, you may switch off.”

He said this in the ordinary voice people used for loose floorboards. Mara watched him cross the wet pavement and vanish into a bus. Then she looked up. Behind the window, far above the library’s locked doors, a small amber lamp was burning.

The building had five floors. The key ring had four keys. When she asked the security office about the upper room, they told her there was no upper room.

For six nights Mara cleaned the desks and straightened the chairs. She learned which radiator clicked like a fingernail against glass. She learned that the last person to leave was usually a student called Ivo, who carried more chargers than books. She learned that a library after closing was full of sounds, but none of them felt lonely.

On the seventh night she found a book on the returns trolley.

It had a blue cloth cover, no title, and a date stamped neatly on the first page: tomorrow.

She turned the page.

At eleven forty-two, it said, the woman in the yellow coat will remember where she left the envelope.

Mara checked the clock. Eleven thirty-eight.

Four minutes later somebody knocked on the east doors. A woman in a yellow coat stood outside, rain streaming from the end of her nose.

“I know you’re closed,” she said through the glass. “I only need to look under a chair.”

The envelope was there. Inside it was a photograph of a man standing beside a half-built boat. The woman held it with both hands.

“It was the only copy,” she said.

After she had gone, Mara opened the blue book again. The sentence had changed.

The woman in the yellow coat remembered.

Above the doors, the amber lamp flickered once.

Mara put the book in her coat pocket and went looking for a fifth staircase.