Excerpt from Charlies’ Diary
29th June 2001. Her face was radiant as she slept. It always is when she is asleep – the face of an angel. We’ve been here for a week and I haven’t missed the city, she hasn’t missed her social crowd even though she painfully reminded me on a number of occasions before we left of all the parties and events that she would miss by coming here with me. Still, we had a beautiful dinner last night – romantic and exotic, simplistic and erotic, as she so eloquently put it. She is much better with words than I. Maybe she should have written this diary for me? It would be so much more exciting to read and perhaps things would have turned out differently? Tomorrow. Tomorrow is the big day. Tomorrow I will end it all. Finished. End. Finito. No more mulling over the fate of whether we are in love anymore or not. The climax will be catastrophic.
Charlie turned the page slowly and squinted at the brightness of the page. He lowered his pen to the blankness of today.
30th June 2001. Okay, I’m ready to do it, end it once and forever. Here she comes now, she’s up early as she knew this was going to happen. Goodbye.
She flowed out onto the balcony, the mid-morning light retaining and even highlighting her angelic features. She lifted the Diary from Charlies’ hands and promptly sat in his lap. ‘Good morning Mr. Daniels’ and kissed him full on the lips. Charlie wrapped his arms around her and returned the kiss and when she pulled away he looked into her gorgeous grey eyes.
‘Good morning Mrs. Daniels’ he responded lightly.
‘You ready?’ she asked.
She looked at him steadily and even if she had not voiced the question he knew what she wanted to know.
‘Yes. Let’s do it,’ he nodded to her.
They both rose and walked hand in hand off the end of the balcony where a small bonfire had been prepared in the dunes, and after a quick glance at her husband, she placed the current, and last Diary on top of the other fifteen volumes already strategically arranged. Fire lighters were in place beneath them and Charlie lifted his Planet Hollywood Zippo and flicked it into life. They both watched the spluttering flame.
‘I should never have bought you that diary’ she told him, without reproach but with a hint of sadness, sympathy perhaps, in her voice. Charlie looked at her and back to the blue and yellow flames that were beginning to consume over fifteen years of his life; a solitary tear slipped down his cheek. ‘Good bye,’ he whispered.
THE STORY TELLER
Some of them pointed unkindly, selfishly. As children they were taught that it was rude to point yet now they do so as poor examples to their own children. The subject of their rudeness appears oblivious to their behaviour and he trudges past even though most of the children call his name. His eyes are hooded and look straight down at his feet as he painfully and laboriously places one foot in front of the other, slowly and inexorably aiming for his target destination like a giant Galapagos tortoise. The children revert to the silence exhibited by their gathered mothers.
He disappears into the Library front door and it is a signal for the waiting mothers to gossip about him in excited babbling voices. The children are eager to go and the crescendo increases with their pleas to unhearing parental auditory circuits – if mothers were men they could be accused of domestic deafness. Finally, as if some magic volume switch has been triggered, a solitary mother responds to her child.
‘Just sit down and wait Rebecca. You know they won’t let us, you in until he, he is ready.’
‘It’s Mr Cole Mommy, his name is Mr Cole.’
‘Yes, yes dear’ her child is dismissed. ‘Where do you think he comes from?’ she asks another of the Mothers who by some miracle is not already engaged in conversation.
‘Don’t know. Nobody seems to know.’ The rest of the mothers have also stopped talking, just in case there has been a breakthrough about the mysterious Mr Cole – there was no way any of them wanted to miss the smallest tit bit of information. ‘Even Mrs Stevens the Librarian doesn’t know.’
‘So how long has he been coming here?’ a third mother asks, one who has only recently moved into the area but whose child had been attending this library session with a friends’ daughter for over four years.
‘The Library opened in 1996, September I think it was, and it was only a matter of weeks after that,’ Rebeccas’ Mom replied.
‘A man, that man Mr Cole, has been coming here every Saturday for nearly six years and nobody knows anything about him?’ the third mother asks with a mix of absolute wonder and total disbelief plain as day on her face.
Instead of a reply almost all of the women look at each other and simply shake their heads.
‘He’s good lookin’, I know that!’ squeals Rebeccas’ Mom, and they all break into excited laughter and babble now about how he is probably great in bed, but he does what he does because he used to be married and his own wife and kids were tragically killed. ‘Bec Honey’ her Mom asks, ‘has he ever said anything about himself at all, you know, where he comes from or anything like that?’
The women are immediately quiet again. They all wait as if their next breathe is dependent upon little eight year old Rebeccas’ response to her Mother.
‘No Mom’ the babble begins again at once, but almost supernaturally ceases as Bec speaks again. ‘There was this one time when Billy Smithers cried.’
Rebecca stopped talking because she realised that there was over twenty pairs of adult eyes peering at her, searching her face, hanging on once again for lifes’ breath. She was only eight and her little lips pursed – the attention was scary. A tear scrabbled down her cheek from one eye and her lips began to tremble.
‘It’s alright Honey’ her Mom squatted down and wrapped her arms around Bec. ‘Go on, it’s okay.’
‘Billy Smithers he cried and … sniffle … and Mr, Mr … sniffle … Cole just said to him that it was okay to cry … sniffle … to go ahead, cry and that we would all cry too so that Billy wouldn’t feel so bad. He, he … sniffle … said that he, Mr Cole … sniffle … had seen too many tears already, but we should all still go ahead and he would try too, for Billy…. sniff.’
After a moment’s hesitation the verbal analysis began again. This time they stopped only because the horrible realisation dawned upon them all at once. Billy Smithers had been going to the library on these special days for only a month. He only went for a month because he had died – his whole family had died. The entire Smithers family perished in a house fire which only their Burmilla cat, Bungendore, had survived. Soft murmuring reminded those in the crowd who had forgotten, as if it were possible that such a horrendous event could be forgotten.
‘What did Mr Cole do to Billy to make him cry Bec?’
‘Nothing Mom’, Bec’s confidence was mostly restored now. ‘He just did what he always does – tells stories.’
Before any more patter could eventuate, Mrs Stevens herself opened the front door.
“Good morning ladies, morning kids’ she chirped, and began counting infant heads as they excitedly filed past her. ‘No running’ she warned, though none of them had shown any sign of doing so.
Mrs Stevens had been the Head Librarian for almost three years and a Council Librarian