The Library Read online

  THE LIBRARY

  Bella Osborne

  AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS

  www.ariafiction.com

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Aria, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Bella Osborne, 2021

  The moral right of Bella Osborne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN E: 9781801100465

  ISBN PBO: 9781801100489

  Cover design © The Brewster Project

  Aria

  c/o Head of Zeus

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  www.ariafiction.com

  For The Shed Gang:

  Anne, Carol, Charlotte, Emma, Heather, Jane and Riannah

  – I love you guys!

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Epilogue

  Questions for your Book Club

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Become an Aria Addict

  1

  TOM

  My name is Tom Harris and I am invisible.

  Not actually invisible – that would make me interesting and I’m not. I’m the person others find easy to forget. The one who is lost in the crowd. To be honest it suits me to be invisible. I hate it when I get noticed and I’m thrown into the spotlight, I’d rather be lost in the white noise of life. My neck goes red and blotchy at all sorts of unhelpful moments, like if a teacher asks me a question. ‘Thomas Harris, what do you think the author meant by “We are responsible for each other”?’ How would I know? I’m always Thomas Harris at school or Tom H. Never just Tom or Thomas. It’s a really common name at my school. There are five Thomases in my year. There’s a confident one, a sporty one, a loud and funny one, a stroppy one that the girls seem to like and then there’s me, the other one.

  My skin heats up if I make eye contact with a girl. I think it might be something in my DNA that’s trying to stop me breeding another generation of invisible people. So far it’s working. It’s easier if I avoid girls. But there’s one girl that I wish I could look at without doing an impression of a tomato. She’s Farah Shah. Farah is perfect; from her black, straight-as-a-ruler hair to her bubbles of laughter. She’s smart too. She asks the sorts of questions that make the teachers think. I know she’s completely out of my league but that’s okay; most people are.

  ‘Tom!’ said Dad loudly, his ruddy face looming around my bedroom door. He waved the fish and chip bag at me. I pointed at my noise-cancelling headphones by way of reply.

  He wasn’t cross but he’d probably been calling me. He’s all right is my dad. He’s a bit invisible like me. I followed him downstairs. We don’t talk much. He works nights and I’m at school all day. He dished out the food, I grabbed the tomato ketchup and we ate it on our laps in front of the TV. We always have our meals like this. It’s just me, Dad and the TV. Mum died when I was in year four.

  I unwrapped my dinner. ‘Saveloy?’ I pointed at the alarmingly red item peering at me from under the chips.

  ‘Yeah, sorry. They’d run out of battered sausages.’ He went back to eating his.

  ‘But I hate them.’ I gave it a prod with my fork.

  ‘Do you?’ He seemed surprised. ‘My mistake. It was your mum who loved the things. First meal I bought her was saveloy and chips.’

  I was a bit surprised at that. Not that my mum like saveloys but that my dad had mentioned her. He doesn’t talk much anyway but he never talks about Mum. I guess I’d got used to not trying to chat about her because it was pointless. He’d always change the subject or simply walk away. But now I saw my chance to ask about her. It was a good opportunity because it was a workday so he’d not been at the whisky. But what did I want to know?

  I ignored the offensive saveloy and mopped up some ketchup with a giant chip. A thought struck me. ‘How did you and Mum first meet?’ I asked, turning on the old brown sofa so I could see my dad’s reaction. There was patchy stubble on his chin; he’d not shaved properly.

  He put down his cutlery and blew out a sigh. ‘Blimey, that’s made me think.’ He seemed to drift off. His eyes rested on the photograph of Mum on the mantelpiece. It’s one taken on our last holiday when we rented a caravan in Hunstanton. I love that picture of her. She’s laughing. She used to laugh a lot. We all did. I can hear her laugh if I concentrate hard but I worry that one day I won’t be able to remember what she sounded like. It’s like she’s slowly being rubbed out. Dad blinked and gave me a sorrowful look. He always looked like that if I tried to talk about Mum. I was ready for him to change the subject. ‘We met in Plummers,’ he said at last.

  ‘At a plumber’s?’ I laughed at the thought of them surrounded by toilets.

  ‘No, you goon. Plummers was the little bookshop in the high street. I was picking up the latest Stephen King novel. I made out I’d ordered it but really it was my dad’s.’ He chuckled at the memory. ‘Your mum was with her friends giggling in the romance section. We got chatting and I asked her if she wanted to go for a Coke float. I loved a Coke float, me. Why don’t we have those anymore?’

  I rolled my eyes at his nostalgic view of the old days. I knew they were my age when they got together. Soul mates he called it when he’d said a few words at her funeral. I don’t know exactly what he meant but I do know they were happy. Not perfect. There were arguments, sometimes, but nothing to spoil my memories. Dad said they didn’t have much money and that’s the only thing they rowed about.

  ‘She loved to read, did your mum.’ He looked at the photograph again.

  ‘I remember her sitting on my bed reading me bedtime stories.’

  He gave me a watery look. ‘Books never interested me. Do you read much?’

  I shrugged but he expected more of a response. ‘Just the stuff school makes us read.’

 
He looked around the small dim living room. It had hardly changed since Mum died. Just that it was a bit neglected and more of a mess.

  What he’d said gave me something to think about. Girls liked romance novels. I wondered if that was still true?

  ‘Right.’ Dad checked his watch. He needed to leave for work. ‘You going out?’ He always asked me this and I always shook my head. I never go anywhere in the evenings. I have a couple of mates but we play FIFA on the Xbox. We can do it from the comfort of our beds so why would we go out? Playing Xbox with my mates makes me feel less of a sad case stuck here on my own. ‘Okay, then. I need to be making tracks. Lock up and I’ll see you in the morning.’ He gave my shoulder a squeeze as he passed and took my dinner plate out. I’ll do the washing up before I go to bed. It’s how we do things: Dad gets tea; I wash up. I put the washing on; Dad does the ironing.

  My mates moan about their parents all the time. How they want to control their lives, never let them out of their sight and get on their case. I always agree and say my dad’s the same but he’s not. He is annoying when he goes on about bills, politics and the state of the roads but I guess I do stuff that annoys him too. I could go out tonight and he’d not know where I was or what I was doing and he’d be okay with that. But I’ve no reason to go out. I’m invisible.

  *

  I was woken by the toilet flush. Dad was home from work. I cast a blurry eye at my alarm clock: 6.37am. I pulled the covers over my head. It was Saturday so I went back to sleep. Dad would go to bed soon. It must be well weird to have to work at night and try to sleep in the day, like being forced to be nocturnal. Although I’m getting a taste of it thanks to some bloke in America challenging me on Call of Duty and keeping me up until 3am. I settled back down and tried to go back to my dream about Ariana Grande.

  I rolled over and checked the clock again: 11.58am. That’s more like it. Dad’s alarm would go off in two minutes. He only grabs a few hours on a Saturday morning so that he can sleep on a Saturday night. I heard his alarm start. That was my cue to get in the shower before he did.

  Dad was getting coffee when I came into the kitchen. ‘Afternoon, son.’ He tried to mess up my hair but I dodged out of the way. I finished off the half bottle of apple juice from the fridge and dropped the bottle in the recycling. ‘I’m walking into the village. Do we need anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Magic beans,’ said Dad, looking at a bank statement.

  ‘What like those half sugar ones?’ I hate those reduced sugar baked beans. They taste like crap. ‘Oh, right.’ I got the pantomime reference a little too late.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, then he opened a cupboard and shook his head. ‘Crisps and biscuits but only the cheap ones. Okay?’ He handed me five pounds.

  I grabbed my rucksack, earbuds and coat and I left. I’m glad he didn’t ask me why I was going into the village. I’m not sure it’s my best idea but it’s worth checking out. A few kids from my school live in the village but nobody I’m friends with. Farah Shah lives between my village and town. I don’t know how I know that. I’m not a stalker; it’s just something I heard and chose to remember. Farah is in some of my lessons but we don’t speak. She’s the popular girl. All the boys want to go out with her and all the girls want to be her. I’d like to be able to say hello without turning into something that resembles an overripe vegetable.

  *

  I kept an eye out for her, just in case, as I walked past the row of shops: a barber’s, a hairdresser’s – of the old lady variety – post office, art gallery (go figure) and corner shop. On the other side of the road there’s the pub – the Limping Fox, where Dad used to go – an Indian restaurant, which is apparently well nice, a florist and a printer’s that was almost never open. There were a few people about but I kept my head down and nobody noticed me. It was February and it was cold so no one was hanging about.

  It was a short walk past the village green and its olde worlde stocks that the tourists loved and the giant cedar tree that everyone fretted over when we had high winds. Tucked behind a row of terraced cottages was the village library. It had been years since I came here. I must have been at primary school. It looked exactly as I remembered it and there was something reassuring about that.

  According to the fancy stone over the door the library had once been the old schoolhouse and was built in 1837. It had automatic door buttons, which weren’t here the last time I visited. I stepped inside and the warmth overpowered me. There was a blow heater above the door and I moved quickly out of the way. Coming in from the cold the blast of heat was nice at first but if I overheated I’d sweat and I hate that. Inside it had barely changed. It still had the high ceiling with its wooden-beamed roof trusses, arched windows, rows and rows of books and that aroma that only libraries have.

  Maybe it was the smell but something made my eyes go all watery. I don’t know if I would ever be able to explain the feeling – like a giant wave of muddled emotions crashing over me. I always felt happy when I came to the library. It was a time I had Mum to myself. It was the thing we always did together. No matter how busy she was we always went to the library and I loved it. I loved her. All those feelings had come back in a rush. A part of me wanted to run for the door but something inside me wanted to stay. Wanted to turn back time and be that little kid again. Safe and happy.

  I remembered the last time I was here with Mum. I could almost picture her scanning the shelves for her favourite authors. I’d chosen a book about dinosaurs along with some others and I wanted to sit down and read them all. I used to read a lot back then. I blinked to clear my eyes and began checking the place out.

  A few older women who were sitting around a table paused to see who had come in. I pulled my rucksack off my back and headed for a seat in the far corner, undoing my coat as I went. I sat down and surveyed the library. It was a big space. I remember the layout being different. There was more shelving in the middle to make lots of sections; now it was all open-plan. It was quiet. There was a children’s area where a mother and a little girl were sitting next to each other. They had two piles of books in front of them. The little girl pouted. I could guess what was going on. I was like that when I used to come here with Mum. I wanted to take home all the books, not just what my library card would allow.

  I realised I was smiling at the memory and I stopped. I flicked my hair over my eyes and from the safety of my fringe I carried on looking about. The ladies at the table all had copies of the same book in front of them and they were deep in discussion. There used to be an extra high desk where you checked your items in and out. But I had been smaller then so maybe it hadn’t been that high. It had gone, replaced by a wooden podium with a screen on the top. A woman with a blue lanyard was standing there tapping away at a keyboard. I guessed she was the librarian.

  I started feeling a bit more comfortable but it was still uncomfortably warm. If Farah came in I didn’t want to be sweating. I took the bottom of my T-shirt in my fingers and gave it a waft to get some air to my armpits. Such a relief. I kept my earbuds in so hopefully nobody would come and speak to me.

  I scanned the shelves nearest to me. K to O. A sign above said “Fiction”. I craned my neck. Was that it? Fiction, Non-Fiction and Children’s? No crime section, no biographies and, most importantly, no romance? I could have asked the librarian, only I couldn’t. Not without going all radish-like and triggering Olympic-level sweating. I guessed the romance novels were mixed in. That changed my cleverly thought through plan a bit. Although looking around the library, the distinct lack of anybody else my age was also an issue.

  It was weird being back here. Apart from the overenthusiastic heater there was something nice about it. I know nice is a rubbish word – my English teacher tells me that all the time. But that’s how it felt. Nice. It was familiar even though I’d not been inside for years. The smell of books lingered in the air. I’d forgotten that. As a kid I used to breathe it in. The library had been somewhere really special and I guess it still was – it wa
s me who’d changed.

  I got that prickly feeling that someone was watching me. I instinctively turned my head and one of the ladies at the table was scrutinising me. She had wild grey hair and a colourful swirly top. We eyeballed each other and the introvert trapped inside me screamed. I looked away. My neck started to feel warm again and I gave my T-shirt another waft. I guess I looked a bit suspicious. I’m more conscious than most that people get twitchy around teenage boys. They think we’re all either on drugs or about to nick stuff. I glanced behind me. There was a book with a pink swirly spine. That was probably romance. I pulled it out and had a look. I Owe You One by Sophie Kinsella. Yep, that looked like the sort of thing my mum would have read. I read the blurb on the back cover.

  I glanced up. The woman at the table was still staring at me but now looked intrigued. That wasn’t good. I looked down at the book. Studying a romance book made me look suspicious. I swallowed hard, twisted around and returned the book carefully to the shelf. When I turned back someone was leaning over me.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked the librarian. Crap!

  I was no longer invisible and I didn’t like it. ‘Err, err. Umm.’ Usually I could form words. The woman was waiting, her eyebrows slowly rising in question. Pull yourself together, Tom.

  I took a breath. ‘I um. I…’ Deep breath. ‘I’m looking for books.’ Well that sentence was the work of a complete genius. I tried a brief smile. ‘Didn’t you used to have sections? Like crime and romance?’ I couldn’t keep eye contact any longer. It was exhausting.

  ‘Yes, we did but this seems to work quite well. We have sections for new releases by genre over there.’ She indicated the shelves by the door. ‘And there’s quick reads, large print and audio next to them.’ I’d completely missed those.

  ‘Right, thanks.’ I glanced up briefly and hoped she’d see me as a lost cause and give up.

  ‘I saw you looking at the Sophie Kinsella.’

  ‘What?’ I remembered the pink book on the shelf behind me. Kill me now. If spontaneous combustion is real let it happen to me this instant. My head was definitely hot enough to explode.