The Library Fire

I’m not sorry. Let there be no doubt, I burnt down the library and I’m not sorry. They don’t need this confession, it was irrefutably me. I need this record of events, as an explanation of memory. Mam likes pop psychology- she’d call it closure.

Mam says I am clever but easily influenced. I imagine at her safari of coffee mornings she’ll talk about how I am a ‘good egg’ who fell in with the wrong crowd and all that crap. She still won’t have told them about Tom, too ashamed I imagine. Now I disappoint again- by ruining the opportunity I had at Westlands. I still can’t believe it was my very last day; I’d imagined a last game of footy in the quad maybe, not this. Nobody seemed to give a shit. There were no foolish last day antics, just me and Tom sat at one of the study tables at the back of the library like any other stormy Sunday. I should have been feeling happy right? But I wasn’t. It all felt too normal, like tomorrow all this would be the same with or without me.  Ms Honeysett would still wheel the book trolley down the Science aisle, leaning on it like a Zimmer. Tom, who had another year, would still thumb through the large Britannica Encyclopaedia to pass the time.

 That day he flicked through it glumly and, without looking up, asked me what I’d learnt here. I said I’d learnt three things. First, a bit of carpentry. Second, Canteen food is shite. Third that I am a physics formula; Maternal expectation + Reality = Disappointment (me). Tom didn’t laugh, he normally would. The same thing was obviously bugging both of us. What would we do without each another after this day? I was staring at Tom, watching his eyes gulp the bold titles and diagrams in the encyclopaedia, grateful I guess for distraction. I knew it wasn’t just him I was going to miss either; stupid things like the whitewash walls, the echo of the corridors, the shabby wooden gym, even the staff. A song lyric played in my head, ‘don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone’. I hate that song. If something goes it’s because you let it go, there is always a choice somewhere along the line I figure.