Issues and Returns

      Janine Ashbless

      Don’t they say, ‘It’s always the quiet ones you need to watch’? Well, I was a quiet one all my life. With three older brothers, I never had much choice. I wasn’t going to be able to cause as much ruckus as them, and there was always someone saying to Mum, ‘At least you’ve got a nice quiet girl now.’ So being quiet was what I was good at. That’s what I was told.

      As I grew up, I was biddable at school too. I was nice little Kelly, always plodding steadily on. But, when I got my first proper job, I discovered that there’s such a thing as Too Quiet.

      I ended up working in a university library, you see. I thought it’d be right up my street. I like books, and it was a steady predictable job where you weren’t expected to be extroverted. A quiet job.

      Quiet? It was like being buried alive. All day I’d sit at the ground-floor desk dealing with books being issued and returned. I’d scan them and check the computer record and stamp them out. That was it. There were six of us on shift at the desk but we weren’t allowed to chat to each other because we weren’t supposed to disturb anyone. Not that there was much to talk about. Nothing ever happened. All the other library workers were women. The middle-aged ones were dully married and the young ones acted and dressed like they were middle-aged. The highlight of my day was morning coffee, because if it was a staff member’s birthday she’d bring in packs of biscuits to share round.

      Seriously, that was the most exciting part of the working day.

      The only thing that reassured me I wasn’t already dead was watching the students. At least they were worth looking at – well, some of them – and most were only a bit younger than me. I liked the boys in the hockey shirts best: not as burly as the rugby players but cuter, and with rock-hard calves. And, although there were banks of computer terminals and an online catalogue which they were supposed to be able to handle themselves, the ones in the sports shirts were usually a good bet for coming up and asking for help.

      There was one other part of the daily routine that made it bearable, and that was straight after lunch when I reshelved the returned books. I could disappear upstairs among the stacks with my trolley for maybe half an hour. Hey, at least I was walking about instead of sitting behind my terminal. I shelved books under Sociology, Biosciences, Modern American Literature and Spanish. I would snatch a few minutes reading here and there if I came across an interesting title – I’m always curious – but mostly this time mattered because I could stretch my legs and escape from the scrutiny of Ellen, the librarian in charge of Issues and Returns. She had a grey bob and a sour expression, and she thought I needed to buckle down with more dedication instead of watching the clock. She didn’t know that, when I was staring blankly into space like that, inside I was screaming with frustration.

      You see, I like being quiet. But I like me being the quiet in the eye of a hurricane. I found that out the hard way. I like to be surrounded by noise, and life, and – let’s face it – by men. Maybe it’s because I grew up with clumping, arguing, messy brothers. In the near silence of the library, I just found myself getting more and more uptight. And horny. Oh, I was bitterly horny. I’d sit behind my desk surreptitiously eyeing up the students, my face composed to blank, feeling the heat itching between my legs. I’d frig myself desperately every day in the staff toilet, snatch a silent hurried orgasm, then pat my flushed cheeks with cold water before emerging again. I sometimes wondered if the others guessed what I was up to in there, or sensed the heat on me, but I didn’t care enough to stop. Some days the jittery arousal was so intense it bordered on the painful; I swear that if I hadn’t blown off sexual steam I would have exploded.

      Too much quiet. Like an astronaut dumped into hard vacuum, I could feel the blood boiling in my veins.

      Then one Friday I found the book. Well, I didn’t so much find it as have it shoved under my nose on the Returns desk. I’m not going to say what it was titled, but according to the cover it was a collection of lesbian sadomasochistic fiction. Slightly shocked, and feeling a thrill of curiosity, I stacked it on the trolley to be sorted later. But I managed to steal a look at the number on the spine, and felt a clench of triumph and odd excitement as I realised it was in my shelving area.

      You’ve got to realise I don’t have any interest in girls. Or pain, either. But the very idea of this filthy book was so outside the normal bounds of my imagination, so taboo, that I had to know more. So that afternoon when I picked up my trolley I was buzzing with excitement. In the lift, I only dared sneak a quick look to check it was still there: white spine, red lettering with a jagged transgressive font. A punk book with a dangerous attitude, that font said. I squirmed inside. That day, I shot through my rounds as quickly as I could, and ended up on the fifth floor with only that one left. I even took it as far as the correct shelf. Then I cast a furtive glance around me. I was alone.

      The fifth floor is always quiet. I was in a blind corridor formed of bookshelves, with only a padded chair against the far wall. There were no windows, and the grey metal shelves made eight-foot walls and the ranks of books soaked up most sound. The faint hum of a fluorescent light was the only thing that came to my ears. I opened the book.

      I was lost, at once. This was a whole new world to me, and I was carried away. I didn’t understand all of the vocabulary: it was an American book and I didn’t know what Crisco was,