Kay’s been called into work on Sunday again. I have to go too because she doesn’t want to bother Mr Park or Mrs Moran.
‘Oh, please, Mrs Moran won’t mind!’ I say.
I want to search for the History.
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t but I bet her grumpy daughter would,’ Kay says. ‘So you’re stuck with me!’
I sigh. We get on the train and head into Perth.
Neil’s on the first-floor desk again. Kay still doesn’t trust me in the stacks so I sit with him behind the reference desk. Whenever people come up, they glance at me. One lady says I’m a pretty little thing. I take off my cat ears beanie to show her my scar.
I have theories about the last history, the one ripped from the book. I googled the word ‘quadroon’. It’s a ‘noun – dated, offensive’ which means ‘a person who is one-quarter black by descent’. I’m guessing the transcriber Henry is one-quarter black, or maybe someone he knows is. Somehow, Henry got the History to reveal the surviving stories after it was mostly destroyed. The Transcription Note at the beginning makes me think he and Chloe worked together. But in the words from the ripped bits of paper, there are mentions of pianos, violins and orchestras. Maybe his mischief had something to do with music. Maybe translating the History involved songs.
But where is the History, the real one?
‘Concentrating awfully hard there,’ Neil says to me.
‘Just thinking,’ I say.
‘Looks like some frowny thinking.’
A woman approaches the desk, holding multicoloured request slips. Neil asks for her ‘researcher’s card’ and takes the slips.
‘Thank you, Dr Horne, these requests will be delivered to the Reading Room,’ Neil says. ‘Our retrieval team should have your items in the next half-hour.’
‘Thank you,’ she says.
She makes her way up the stairs. Kay will collect the slips at 9:30 am, nineteen minutes from now.
‘Why are there three slips?’ I ask, peeking at the request.
‘They’re for rare items. One slip goes in the shelf, where the item is normally kept, the other is left with the item, and the final one is given to the staff up on Battye so they can find the item for the researcher.’
‘Battye’s the third floor, yeah?’
‘Yep. WA collection. We have a room up there where researchers can look at old and special things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well,’ Neil says. ‘This researcher has requested two bibles published in 1794 and 1843.’
‘Kay gets these, too?’
‘Yep, that’s one of the jobs of the Stock and Stack team. They fetch everything.’
Just like Archie.
I think about the History. ‘Do you have really old books here?’
‘Absolutely!’ he says. ‘We have surveys from the first fleet, we have maps, newspapers, books made entirely of vellum – that’s calfskin, you know!’
I scowl at him. ‘I know what vellum is.’
He laughs. ‘Of course you do!’
I’m annoyed he finds me so funny. ‘Where are the old books?’
‘Mainly in the rare book rooms.’
I remember the dark locked room from when I snuck into the stacks. It needed an ID card to get in. I glance at the ID around Neil’s neck.
‘Are there many rare book rooms?’
‘On every floor!’
The History of Mischief could be in one of those rooms. The History always liked librarians, and didn’t the ripped-out history mention a library?
A man comes to the desk and asks for help with the microfiche, which are mini film reels that show newspapers instead of movies. Neil gets up, points at me and says, ‘Stay put, missy!’
I watch Neil for a while. It looks like the microfiche machine isn’t working. He has his back to me. I glance at his computer.
I hop over to his chair and go to the library catalogue. I don’t know what to search so I just type in ‘mischief’. Roald Dahl, some adult novels, and some kids’ books with hamsters. I type, ‘the history of mischief’. A book about student pranks comes up. I’m not surprised. The History would hide better than that.
Neil returns. I hop off his chair. He raises his eyebrow but says nothing.
I look at the time. Twelve minutes till Kay comes.
‘Neil?’
‘Yep?’
‘That researcher will have to wait for ages.’
Neil glances at the clock. ‘Kay will be here in ten minutes.’
‘We should help her.’
He smiles, glancing at his computer. ‘So, what’s The History of Mischief then?’
I left my search open.
He shrugs but smiles. ‘Okay.’
He goes back to his work. Closes my search. Checks his email. Nine minutes till Kay comes.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
He shrugs, as if it was nothing. ‘Is it old?’
‘What?’
‘The History of Mischief.’
I think for a moment. I don’t want anyone else to find it. ‘It’s a secret.’
Neil nods. ‘Okay.’
Lunchtime comes. Kay buys us cheese and salad sandwiches from the café. I ask if she can look in the rare book rooms for the real History.
‘No,’ she says.
‘Please?’
‘No, it’s impossible. There’s no listing on the catalogue and you can’t search every book in the stacks. It would take years, even if you just went through the rare book rooms.’
‘You looked it up then?’
‘Shut up and eat your sandwich.’
Neil’s on the Battye desk after lunch. A grumpy librarian complained that I was behind the desk and it was ‘unprofessional’, so he can’t look after me anymore.
‘Can I trust you to be in the workroom and NOT go into the stacks?’ Kay asks.
‘If you buy me a muffin.’
She gives me $4.50 and I buy a raspberry and white chocolate muffin. She’s retrieving items on Battye too, she says, but she’ll check on me at random intervals.
I count to thirty. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.
I leave the workroom. Kay only said I wasn’t allowed in the stacks.
I take the stairs up to Battye, practising all the excuses in my head if she catches me. I go up to the desk and find Neil. He smiles at me.
‘You’re going to get me in trouble,’ he says.
‘Will you help me find The History of Mischief ?’
He grins. ‘Sure.’
Neil’s clever. He tells me you can’t go into the rare book rooms without a reason. The ID reader logs who you are and when you went in there. Then you have to write down what you were getting and at what time in a diary, so the bosses can check if you’re doing the right thing. So he waits. He tells the other librarian on Battye that he has a tummy ache and has to go to the toilet a lot. He checks all the floors, gets any rare book requests. Then he gets me.
The first rare book room we investigate is the one I saw when I snuck into the stacks last time. It’s very cold. He turns the light on and writes down the request details in the diary. He gets the requested book and rips off the yellow part of the slip, leaving it on the shelf where the book lived.
Most of the books are in green boxes. On the spine of the box, it says the title and the year, all in gold letters. Neil says they are archival boxes.
I gaze at the shelves. It isn’t what I imagined. Even with the light on, it’s still dark. The books are hidden away in their special boxes, neatly filed in order on the shelves. I thought it would be more, well, like the libraries in the movies with leather books and spider webs.
‘The History would probably be hiding in a box that had a different name,’ I tell him.
‘Hmm, well, we can’t check every box. Have a quick look and see if anything jumps out at you. If it’s really a history of mischief, I bet it would leave clues.’
I look on the shelves. I think of the symbol on the History’s title page. Nothing.
‘This is mainly science and a bit of history,’ he says. ‘I’ve got another request for a bible. That’ll be in another room. There are much older books in there. Shall we check?’
The second rare book room is on the other side of the first floor.
‘It’s a mess,’ Neil says as he taps his ID on the card reader. ‘Things are being rearranged at the moment.’
This is more like I imagined. The smell of leather and off honey is strong here. The books are not in boxes. They’re just sitting on the shelves, some in piles. Neil finds the requested book, leaves the yellow slip and notes down what he’s taking in the diary.
‘One day,’ Neil says, ‘the requests will be digitised.’
He sounds sad about it. Then he shows me the requested book. It’s in a foreign language, but the letters look English.
‘Latin,’ he explains.
I look around, searching for the symbol of the History. I pick up many books, open them carefully. I look for ones that are water-damaged. When I open them, I find pictures of angels and swirly letters. Neil shows me one where the words are in black and red ink but there are beautiful coloured flowers and fancy borders. The letters at the start of paragraphs are painted in gold.
But still, no History. Neil returns me to the workroom and takes the requests up to the third floor. Kay drops by six minutes later.
‘You doing okay?’
I nod. I pick at the muffin as I wait for Neil.
He comes twelve minutes later with more multicoloured slips. ‘Private archives! We need to enter via Battye. It’ll be hard to sneak around Kay, so I asked Lily to get her to help find some scores in the music stack.’
‘You didn’t tell Lily about the History, did you?’
‘No, just said the requests were … well, I told her they might make Kay sad, and asked if she could distract her and let me do them.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
Maybe he said the requests were about death or car accidents. As we walk up to Battye, a librarian walks by and smiles at me. I wonder if everyone knows who I am, if they all know what happened. Maybe that’s why Neil’s helping me.
Once we get to Battye, Neil leads me to another set of stairs. We go up, towards another stack. Neil uses his ID card. For a moment, I think I see Kay’s picture. He puts the ID back in his pocket quickly so I don’t get a chance to check.
This stack is different. There are big books covered in paper that looks like marble cake, and cardboard boxes that have ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY OF’ such and such on them. Neil calls me over to another door, one that has a glass window. I peer inside. It’s completely dark.
‘Only a few people in the whole library are allowed in this room,’ he says. ‘You can’t request anything in here. We just keep things here to protect them.’
‘Like what?’
‘Very old things. Things from when white people first came to Australia. Single books that are the only remaining copy on earth.’
The History has to be here.
‘Can we go in?’
‘We can’t. My ID won’t let me.’
‘Can we try?’
‘If I do, it’ll log that I tried and I’ll get in trouble.’
I rest my forehead on the glass. Feel how cold it is. I listen for the whispers Lou heard. All I hear is the air-con humming.
Neil says something about getting the requests. He moves around the archives, tearing yellow slips and leaving them on shelves. He shows me a folder of letters. One of them is for a man who was hung in colonial times. It’s decorated with yellow flowers. The paper is so white, like new, but the ink looks old.
‘This is cool, hey?’
I shrug. ‘We’ll never find the History, will we?’
Neil closes the folder carefully. ‘Maybe it doesn’t want to be found.’
I think of Lou and Chloe. ‘Maybe.’
‘To be honest, I didn’t think we’d find it,’ Neil says. ‘It was worth looking, for sure, but I thought you’d enjoy seeing the secret parts of the library more than anything.’
I look back into the dark nothingness of the rare book room.
‘Plus, librarians here are pretty big sticklers. If The History of Mischief was here, it’d be on the catalogue. I bet your book is somewhere else, waiting for you.’
‘Can I still look?’
‘Maybe. Kay’s going to get mighty suspicious with me getting her requests though. Let’s give these ones to the researchers and go back to the first floor, hey?’
We give the letters to the librarian in the researchers’ room. Then Neil takes me back to the workroom. Kay returns and tells me we’ll go in the next hour. I try to listen for whispers.
When home time comes, she takes me down to the discard bookshop.
Neil walks past and spots us. He beckons Kay over. Kay tells me to wait in the bookshop. I do, but they’re closing. As I come out, I see Neil and Kay swapping IDs. I was right! Neil did have her card.
‘Thanks for today,’ she says to him.
‘No worries,’ he says. Then he spots me. He looks guilty.
On the train, I tell Kay I’m angry she made Neil play with me like I’m a little kid.
‘I did no such thing,’ she says. ‘I caught him dropping you off at the workroom after he’d taken my requests. He convinced me to let him take you around the stacks looking for the History. We swapped IDs so it wouldn’t look bad that he was doing my requests.’
I say nothing.
‘Did you find anything?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe you should have researched the last histories.’
We sit in silence for another two stops. I imagine Neil getting busted by Kay. I remember all the pretty old books.
‘I didn’t say thank you to Neil.’
‘That’s okay. He knows.’
We arrive at Guildford. We go to Alfred’s for dinner and sit by the fire outside, eating burgers and chips. It rains, but it’s only a few drops so the fire still burns. We go home smelling of smoke.