As she does at 4:45pm every workday, Hortense Roberts parks her Hyundai I30, closes the front gate, and balances a bag in her left arm while jiggling the keys in her right. She lifts open the door and her 8 year-old Staffy, Little Dorritt, rushes past her down the three steps of her post-war fibro home (as he does at 4:45pm every workday) to do a proper wee in her front yard.
Hortense is named, perversely, after the jealous maid in Bleak House. Her parents, D’arcy and Bronte, had seen it on TV, and just liked the sound of it, oblivious to the problems both syllables would cause her as an acne-scarred teenager.
She sits at her Laminex table, opens her bag and takes out four more discarded school library books.
Her boss, the school librarian, Sharon Knowles, has led the library’s rebranding into a Knowledge Management Centre (after all it’s 2010) and runs seminars on using Google Scholar and the many excellent non-google search engines.
Hortense (who worries over Dewey decimal classifications) was crestfallen when barcodes replaced cards with the names of students written in them, then when computer-generated emails replaced the manual reminder system for overdues. Next it will be book stacking.
One by one, books are being taken from the shelves and being replaced by e-resources, DVDs and USBs. But books are as alive to Hortense as Dorritt: her companions, her friends, her family, her familiars. She can’t bear that they should go off to Lifeline, where they will be shredded if they aren’t sold. So, for 10 years she has been taking them home from work when they are discarded - Roberts the robber.
Today, it’s The Day of the Triffids, The Shipping News, Snow Falling on Cedars, the Reader (the spine of which opens naturally at the scene that all the boys read).
Now, her house is full of library discards: stacked two abreast in and on top of her shelves, in piles on the floor behind the couch, in front of the TV, in her kitchen on the table, beside the microwave and on the bench, unsorted on the single bed in the spare room, in great stacks along the walls in her bedroom, in the corners of her hallway, in the garage, and even in the laundry, on shelves beside the Vanish and the Sard and the Preen, and in great piles on the laundry floor, next to the dog poo mat, under the gaze of the closed circuit camera, through which, via the magic of the internet, she watches from her desk at the library, coffee cup in hand, as Dorritt drops his load, without fail, every workday at 9:45.
The books watch on too, spines broken, the pages loose from years of adolescent reading, the polypropylene or mylar wrappers cracked and peeling, the catalogue ID fading in the sunlight, on the flyleaf of every book, three words, in a purple ink stamp: ‘Withdrawn from Circulation’.