Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Shelf That Listens
She reads aloud to nobody, and the bookshelves have begun rearranging by the theme of whatever was read that evening.
- dated: "Autumn, year unrecorded"
- narrator: "Nadia Poll, home help"
- reliability: unreliable
9th of the month. Mrs Farroux asked me again to read to her before I go. She has cataracts in both eyes and the radio's gone dull, so I did what I always do, picked whatever was nearest on the shelf and read two chapters over the washing-up. It was some old sea stories. She mostly slept. I said goodbye at the door and she said, thank you, dear, that one goes with the others now.
11th. The shelf has changed. I am sure of it because I dust that shelf every Tuesday. Last week the sea stories were squeezed at the end between a hymn book and a broken clock, all facing the wrong way. Now they sit in a tidy block of their own, spines out, four more sea stories behind them that I never saw before. Mrs Farroux says they have always been there. Her nephew says the same. I counted the books while the kettle boiled. Twenty-six. I dust twenty-two.
16th. I read her the garden poems this time, on purpose, to see. She liked them better than the sea ones, I think, though she nodded off in the middle of the second one. When I left I straightened the garden poems back into the middle of the shelf where they were, between the atlases and her late husband's ledgers, and said nothing.
19th. The garden poems are at the end again, in a neat row, and there are three more with them. I know two of the new ones because I found them in a box in the hall cupboard weeks ago and put them back in the box. They are on the shelf now. The box in the cupboard is open and empty. Mrs Farroux heard me in the hall and called out, is that the reading done, dear, and when I came in she was smiling at the shelf, which she cannot see.
24th. Today I did not read from the shelf. I brought my own book from home and read that, a novel about a hospital, nothing to do with her. She dozed. I did the washing-up, said my goodbye at the door. From the hallway I could hear, faint behind me, the little sliding noise of hardbacks being moved along wood. I did not go back in.
26th. I read aloud to nobody this time, standing in her kitchen with the door open so she could hear it from her chair, some chapters of the hospital novel again. I wanted to be sure. When I came to leave, my own book was missing from my bag. In its place on the hall shelf, spine out, neatly between the sea stories and the garden poems, was my book, and two more like it that I have never seen in my life. Mrs Farroux called out, would I be reading the same one next week, dear. I said I would. I have written it in my round book. I do not like to think what I will find in my bag if I do not.