Bismark and the librarian

You hear the bell. Ms Cotraine’s mouth hangs partially open, as if she’s listening to an air raid siren, or checking to find if the upper dental palate has worked loose. You leave. It’s the library or the canteen on the second floor. A Techie college has a small library with three stacks of books and a bored librarian with a City in Guilds in hairdressing, module one, and the mandatory blonde hair, with orange tips optional. She rubs at the cuticles with some kind of torture device and bends her gaze around and past you. The librarian may not be able to see you, but the bits she can’t see doesn’t impress her. She waits until you disappear.

'Have you got Bismark and the Development of Germany?’ you ask.

She smiles, showing her brace and the full range of her white capped dental work.

‘It’s a book.’ You’re giving her a prompt, but the way she moves her lips and flicks her tongue makes you think she wants to be in some kind of movie.

‘Nah.’ She shimmies out of the swivel chair and stretches her powder-puff pink cheeks into something that could be a smile. All four-foot ten of her perfect body is on display, but with her bigged-up hair, she looks tall enough to topple. She’s wearing a red bra and bustles her breasts at you through her white coat. You don’t know where to look, so you look at her breasts. ‘We don’t do German books,’ she adds helpfully.

Your face is as pink as hers and you panic and say the wrong thing. ‘It’s not in German. It’s in English.’

The librarian sniffs. Shrugs. Bites her bottom lip. She turns and pulls open a card index. You can see she’s consulting the fiction section. ‘How do you spell Bismark?’ she asks.

You spell it phonetically, 'B-I-S -M...' She nods and snatches open the drawers for XYZ.

‘I think you might want the name of the author,’ you suggest.

Her fingers stop ferreting through the XXX mid-talon. ‘You know the name of the author?’ She says it with something like awe in her voice, as if the author is a personal friend, somebody that might be a real person.

It’s your turn to shrug. The radiators on the walls are on an experimental setting. Only cold- blooded lizards and beauticians with their plastic faces can withstand it. You take off your crumpled green Parka and wrap it around the blue plastic bag at your feet. You pull off your thick cross- knit wool sweater and let it fall as a final two-tone, red and sickly yellow, offering to the plastic bag. You feel your armpits sopping through your shirt like an old sock in a dog’s mouth. You think she might be able to smell you from four feet away and you snatch at the white request cards on the counter to hide your embarrassment. ‘You got a pen?’

She nods, without moving any part of her body, not even her head, towards a stick of a pencil, thickly chained to the desk, for your own safety.

You quickly scrawl BISMARK AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF GERMANY.

The librarian scratches at her head, takes a seat in her padded swivel chair looks at your face and yawns. You look for a seat you can pull over and sit at the desk, but there isn’t one, only two work benches bolted to the floor, near the window. So you try and lean and drape yourself over the desk in a way that seems perfectly natural in its unnaturalness. The librarian drills her butt into the chair and swivels one way then the other, her legs trying to find the right position to help her hands find the right card, the squeak, squeak, squeaking of the chair distracting you and making you think Bismark and the Development of Germany might not be such a good idea. Up this close her heat baked smell is a leaked bottle of cheap perfume at the bottom of a bag and something older and muskier. ‘Is that Bismark with a B?’ she says reading your thoughts and rewarding you with a flash of her braced teeth.

You take a step back and half-trip over your jacket, jumper and plastic bag. ‘Yeh,’ you say, trying to sound casual.

‘And is this Bismark…’ she wets her lips as she thinks it out. ‘Is this Bismark with a B, the author?’

‘Yeh,’ you say, momentarily confused. ‘No,’ you shake your head and the confusion away. A short whelp of a laugh slips out, catching her unaware so that she almost seems like a real person, ‘the author’s Ian Anderton.’

Her neck lets her head fall slightly to the one side. ‘And this Ian Anderton…he’s not Bismark?’

Another whelp of laughter settles the distance between you and she’s looking at you with the kind of animated attention that she reserves for someone trying to sell her thirty kinds of red nail polish.

‘Well, he’s a kind of Bismark,’ you say. ‘A Bismark of the…’

But it’s too late. Her face has crumpled and set like soggy sugar. ‘Ian Anderton,’ you say soberly and write down IAN ANDERTON below BISMARK AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF GERMANY.

The librarian is all card index business now. She looks up Ian. She looks up Anderton. She checks out the Bismarks, but can only find a reference to Bisexuality. She taps her finger on it and her cat eyes peer at you in her peripheral vision.

‘No,’ you nod. You don’t have the heart to tell her that Bismark would be in the fact or non-fiction catalogue. You were sure she’d think you’d made him up. There’s a desk with fiche that’s worth checking later.

‘No,’ she says emphatically, smacking her lips with the denunciation. ‘No Bismark. No Germany.’

You snatch at being witty, ‘that’s exactly what Ian Anderton says.’

But she does that face, with the full lips and pulls the pencil on its chain towards her, in case you snatch and go on the run with your ill-gained booty.