Page 61 of Go Lightly

‘What is this place?’ Ada asked and Stuart said, ‘It’s the library. We’re going in but I wanted you to take in this view first.’ Ada didn’t know what he expected of her but it was definitely something so she said, ‘It’s great. Very grand?’ Stuart let out a grunt of a laugh and said, ‘OK, good, wait until you see inside.’

Ada had the same feeling she’d had as a child when a kindly friend of her parents would buy her a puzzle for Christmas. She was a smart kid and did well at school and it only followed that she would enjoy puzzles. But what she really enjoyed was experimenting with lipstick and hanging upside down on monkey bars and Sweet Valley High and getting dunked under waves and sneaking downstairs to watch Buffy when her parents had gone to bed. As an adult, every man she dated insisted on buying her novels or, if they were feeling particularly superior, biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt. The older ones planned first dates to cafe bookshops and the younger ones read to her from Plath and expected her to relate in ways they never could.

Ada assumed Stuart was on the same track here. Sexily bookish young women were wet as hell for dark musty rooms full of first editions and creaking chairs. Ada couldn’t remember the last book she’d finished. It might have been the Ali Smith one that Mel had packed for her that day in July when they went to Cornwall and lay stubbornly on the beach together despite the temperature never quite hitting twenty. On the late-night drive home, Mel said, ‘What an awful day,’ and Ada laughed and laughed. The next week she got a yeast infection that she swore was from sitting in her damp swimmers on the rock-strewn shore and she blamed the discomfort on ‘this pathetic damp country’, which Mel took pretty well. Actually, she didn’t think she had finished her book that day because she’d decided to learn how to cartwheel again and made Mel watch as she fell over and over, bruising her hands and knees. But here she was in the shadow of a library with an eager artistic boy waiting for her to react.

Still, when they went inside, Ada was impressed. She had assumed that it would be ‘lovingly restored’ as every building in England seemed to be. But instead the entrance was filled with digital kiosks and noise. Ada looked up and saw suspended metal paths leading back and forth to different floors, spiralling above her like the inside of a shell. She said to Stuart, ‘Wow, this is not what I expected,’ and he said, ‘I know, no one expects it.’ She said, ‘It feels so … modern,’ and he said, ‘Liverpool is a very modern city,’ and no one in the UK ever bragged that their city felt new so she liked Stuart for doing so. He took her hand again and said, ‘I didn’t tell you this, but like a week into us messaging our wifi went out at home and none of us knew who to call to fix it and our landlord was being useless. I didn’t want to use up my data so I would come here and hang out most of the day using the wifi, applying for jobs and messaging you. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. I guess I figured “aspiring artist who spends his days pining in a library” might seem … too much.’

This was the longest Stuart had talked to her while making eye contact and she felt very briefly appalled. She imagined him sitting in this public building waiting on her while she lived her life and she was embarrassed for them both. But she had got on a train to Liverpool so who was she to judge? She took a deep breath and chose romance instead.

‘You are too much but that’s OK,’ and he grinned and said, ‘Come on, we’re here on a mission.’

They turned down one of the twisty halls and emerged in a round wooden room covered in books and low lighting and spiralled staircases. It looked much more like the boring libraries of Ada’s imagination but she forgave that because it appeared in the middle of a modern building.

‘This is the reading room, it’s very famous,’ he said. It was like finding Narnia out the back of a mall and she said that to Stuart, who said, ‘I’ve only ever been in a mall in Australia,’ and then he started to wind his way up a flight of stairs.

They reached the upper level of bookshelves, still looking out on the central space filled with readers and writers. Stuart was walking with purpose and stopped in front of a row of leather-bound books. He ran his finger along and pulled out a heavy one, the text on the cover spun in gold. Ada leaned over to see the title but he pulled it away from her. ‘Not yet, let me find it first.’ He flipped through the pages, not looking up, and Ada had a moment to feel the incongruity of her presence in this warm golden room with this fidgety length of man. ‘Here,’ he said and she looked.

Stuart was holding the book open and she saw, for a moment, just columns of small print. A little more focus and she realised she was looking at names.

‘Is this … a baby name book? And … why?’

Stuart impatiently pointed to a passage halfway down. She read.

‘ “Orion. Rising in the sky or dawning. The mighty hunter and son of Poseidon. A bright, well-known constellation that lies on the celestial equator.” ’ Stuart dropped down to the floor, still holding the book, rapidly tucking his legs beneath him and leaning against the shelves. Ada followed him down and leaned in to continue scanning the page then she said, without looking up, ‘How did you know this book was here? Do you secretly have a lot of babies that need names?’

There was silence and then Stuart said, ‘It’s because I looked for you in here.’ He flipped the pages back and the book fell open to a list of ‘A’ names as though it had been bookmarked. ‘Ada,’ he said, tracing the words with one finger. ‘ “Ada from the Germanic ‘Adel’ meaning nobility.” ’ Ada put her hands over his and brought it to her heart. He kept his eyes on the page. ‘ “Or from the Hebrew … adornment.” ’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘let’s go with the Germans on this one.’ The light in the room turned suddenly from yellow to blue and Ada looked up as fat drops of rain started to hit the round skylight in the centre of the ceiling. ‘Looks like we’re trapped here,’ she said, as the outline of Stuart’s fingers tattooed themselves on her chest and then he kissed her.

When he leaned back, she looked at the book and said, ‘Loving Gabby is complicated, but loving a baby I’ve never even met is easy. Isn’t that kind of fucked up?’ And Stuart said, ‘Why is it complicated to love your sister?’ Ada flipped a few more pages of the book, not taking it in, and felt a little embarrassed about criticising someone who had just given birth. But not embarrassed enough to refrain.

‘OK, so one Christmas when she was like fourteen, I think, so I was ten or eleven, she got a new bike and she was like really happy about it. She had a kid bike but this was a full adult bike and she liked being alone and doing stuff alone and I guess this made that easier. So it was a nice thing for my parents to do for her. But then after lunch when we were supposed to be cleaning up – OK so she usually didn’t clean up anyway, but I thought maybe she would on Christmas – anyway, she got mad at my dad for … I can’t remember. It was nothing, nothing I would ever even think about getting mad at. And she got on her bike and cycled away. She was gone until like ten at night and we spent a big bit of the afternoon calling people, trying not to make it obvious that Gabby had fucked up our day but also trying to find out if she was, like, there and … she came home in the end and she didn’t get in trouble really. But then I never got a bike for Christmas after that.’ Stuart had watched her talk the whole time and she felt something like pathetic and had a mad brief instinct that she should unzip his trousers, create a diversion. But instead she said, ‘That sounds so fucking stupid,’ and Stuart said, ‘No, she sounds like kind of a mad bint, honestly. No wonder you hated her. But maybe the baby will chill her out.’ And Ada cringed at the word ‘hate’ but she didn’t correct him.

They stayed on the floor for some time and turned the pages of the book, pointing out the names of people they knew and names they loved and hated. Ada checked her phone at one point for an update from her mother but found she had no reception and chose not to connect to the wifi. After a while she said to Stuart, ‘I feel bad for reacting so weirdly to the baby being born and to his name and everything. Did you think I was nuts?’ She asked this as though the incident had been several years ago and miles away rather than that same day and around the corner. But it felt distant to her because that had been before they kissed and more importantly it had been before he had showed her that he thought of her a lot in this library. A message over borrowed wifi, a mention of her name in text.

Stuart said, ‘I thought you were nuts from the first time I saw you on stage and you were telling the woman in the front row to leave her husband and run away with you – do you remember?’

Ada didn’t really but she always found it safer to flirt with straight women in the crowd than straight men, though safest of all was gay men.

‘I sort of do?’ she said but Stuart was still talking.

‘Everything you’ve done since has been crazier than the last – you messaged me back and then you decided you liked me and then you agreed to come to Liverpool and then you cried on the steps and then you kissed me. Does any of that sound sane to you?’

Ada considered how little this list took into account Stuart’s actions in messaging her in the first place but she moved past it and started to sing under her breath, ‘ “Does that make me crazy, does that make me craaaaazy,” ’ and on the second crazy she raised her voice slightly and Stuart clamped his hand over her mouth. He was laughing until she touched the tip of her tongue to the centre of his palm and he released a deep, bass sigh. He removed his hand and they breathed at each other. Ada broke first.

‘Is there still time to go to the exhibition at the Tate today?’ Stuart looked past her and she realised he was checking a clock on the wall. His eyes went straight to it, she noted.

‘We can get there for an hour or so if we leave now. That’s probably not enough time.’

Ada stood up. ‘Can you take me to the water then?’ She looked up through the skylight to confirm that the rain had stopped and saw it was clear, a brighter grey.

Stuart walked more slowly this time and tried to hold her hand but he couldn’t settle there. He shifted to gripping her wrist, then her waist, then bunching up the base of her hoodie and holding on. He slipped his hand into her pocket then withdrew it like he’d touched something sharp, and at one point he laced his fingers through the split ends of her hair and she wondered if he’d pull. But he took them out again and as the air cooled around them, he pulled her towards him in a sideways tackle of a hug that reminded her of her father.

The streets blurred by mostly without colour, when a flash of red up ahead pulled Ada out of her head. As they got closer, she realised she was looking at Chinatown, not her Chinatown but a Chinatown nonetheless and she asked Stuart about it. He glanced over and said, ‘Yeah, we have lots of good food here,’ but that wasn’t what Ada wanted. She wanted to talk about how there were Chinatowns all over the world, how she’d lined up with her friends on weekends in Sydney to buy Morning Glory notebooks and Emperor’s puff rolls. How she’d trawled through London’s Chinatown until she found soup dumplings that felt like home and how strange it was for someone who wasn’t Chinese and who’d never been to China to seek comfort in their food and places. But Stuart wasn’t stopping and she didn’t know how to slow him down. He kept walking and on the corner, he popped into an off-licence and she followed him and thought about telling her sister about the beautiful Chinese arch, like and unlike their own.

There was a brief back and forth about whether to get red or white wine. Ada hadn’t planned to drink until later but when she said that Stuart thought she was objecting to the choice of red so got a bottle of white too. Ada said, ‘Picking the second cheapest bottle, a classic move, I respect it,’ and Stuart said, ‘What?’ and it became horribly frozen between them. Then Stuart said, ‘Are you hungry?’ and she was so he got two packets of crisps and Ada took them cheerfully, hoping this wasn’t dinner. Then Stuart asked if she wanted to split the cost now or figure it out later and she felt fifteen again as the woman behind the counter observed her sympathetically. She paid it all and waved him off when he tried to give her cash and they walked out of the shop, him first, her bumping gently against the swaying rack of Haribo by the door.

There was no ease between them. Ada could put most people at ease, and that was usually enough to make her feel at ease as well, but she felt that comfort with Stuart was out of reach. He was walking ahead of her again, on, quickly, towards the water, and she trailed behind, apologising to the woman on her phone who Stuart had banged into as he passed. She thought of Sadie and then she didn’t.

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