Her carefully selected pants, handbag and shoes showcased the varying shades of beige. The precise crease that ran down her pants suggested an intimate familiarity with the heat settings of the household iron. She hoped he would notice her efforts.
Her shoes chaffed against her ankles, permanently bloated and pink from the immeasurable steps back and forth across the kitchen floor. They were now red raw as she breathlessly followed her photographer husband around the park. She was always chasing after something – the kids, a living, time. Her rosacea stained face looked expectantly towards him searching for an understanding of her silent exhaustion but he took no notice of her, only pausing to survey the light and fiddle with his camera’s shutter speed.
“An American in Paris, how romantic” she thought when her husband had finally mumbled his okay to their first overseas trip. An American in Hyde Park, was not so much.
…
It is stone cold quiet. The warm sun is filtered through the misty, frosted glass ceiling, allowing only light in. Under the watchful eye of the greying security guard, each sound – the slow unzipping of a backpack, the careful measured taps of a laptop keyboard or the turning of a page, was made apologetically. They did not mean to cut through the thick blanket of silence, promise!
Books line the walls of Mitchell Library, like any other library but these books are special, holding the beginnings of our young Australia – Australian Bush Ballads, Captain James Cook: A Biography, Voyages of Discovery. These books are elevated above a common walkway, only accessible by narrow stairs and with the permission of a librarian. One wonders how often this permission is granted, or even how often it is asked for, given the heady smell of yellowing pages, dust and the slow decay of paper, of words – when you first walk through the doors.
