Chapter 1: Kind Regards
Mara Quinn had discovered, over the course of twelve years in public libraries, that there were three kinds of people who arrived before opening.
The first knew the library was closed and waited patiently.
The second knew the library was closed but stood directly in front of the glass doors anyway, staring through them with such intensity that they apparently expected shame to override the locking mechanism.
The third pulled on the handle.
Repeatedly.
The man outside Rivermere Public Library was a third.
Mara watched him yank the door for the fourth time.
Then the fifth.
He stopped, frowned at the handle as though it had personally betrayed him, and peered through the glass.
Mara lifted her coffee.
He spotted her.
His expression brightened.
Hers did not.
He pointed at the door.
Mara pointed at the sign beside it.
OPENING HOURS
MONDAY–FRIDAY: 9:30 AM–6:00 PM
The man looked at his watch.
Mara looked at the clock above the circulation desk.
9:17.
He pointed at the door again.
She took a sip of coffee.
His mouth moved.
The glass prevented her from hearing him, but years of public service had given Mara an excellent working knowledge of silent indignation.
Can you let me in?
She shook her head.
His eyebrows rose.
Mara smiled.
He pulled on the door again.
“Maybe he thinks the sixth one’s the charm.”
Mara glanced over her shoulder.
Nina Patel was sitting behind the circulation desk with one boot propped on the bottom drawer, sorting yesterday’s returns into several precarious piles. She had worked at Rivermere for six years and had long since stopped questioning Mara’s methods of customer service.
“Persistence is an admirable quality,” Mara said.
“Not when applied to doors?”
“Not when operating hours are displayed at eye level.”
Outside, the man knocked.
Three sharp raps against the glass.
Nina looked at Mara.
Mara looked at Nina.
“Your turn.”
“I dealt with the woman who wanted us to remove a book because the ending upset her.”
“She was grieving.”
“She was reading a murder mystery.”
“The grief was anticipatory.”
“She wanted us to put a warning sticker on the cover saying the husband did it.”
Mara considered this.
“Fine. My turn.”
She set her coffee down and walked towards the entrance.
The man straightened as she approached, victorious.
Mara unlocked nothing.
Instead, she stopped on her side of the glass.
“We open at nine thirty.”
“I just need to return something.”
His voice came through muffled but intelligible.
Mara pointed to the returns chute built into the wall approximately one metre to his left.
He followed her finger.
There was a pause.
“Oh.”
Mara smiled.
“Have a lovely morning.”
She turned around.
Behind her came the metallic clunk of a book dropping through the chute.
“Resolved?” Nina asked.
“Heroically.”
“Did he find the hole in the wall?”
“He did.”
“Proud of him.”
“As am I.”
Mara reclaimed her coffee.
It was terrible.
This was not unusual.
The machine in the staffroom had been donated seven years ago by a local accounting firm after they upgraded theirs, which meant Rivermere Public Library was apparently where office appliances came to spend their final years.
Mara drank it anyway.
There were principles, and there was caffeine.
Caffeine won.
Every time.
At nine twenty, Rivermere Public Library was still technically peaceful.
Mara knew better than to trust it.
The building had a way of creating emergencies when left unsupervised.
It was eighty-seven years old, sandstone-fronted and stubbornly beautiful despite decades of questionable maintenance decisions. Tall arched windows lined the original reading room. Dark timber shelves ran beneath ornate plasterwork that nobody had properly restored since Mara had been born. Brass lamps cast warm circles over long communal tables scarred with initials, scratches and one anatomically ambitious drawing someone had carved near Australian History in 1998.
The eastern extension had been added in the seventies.
Nobody spoke about the eastern extension.
Architecturally, it was what happened when a brick rectangle developed ambitions.
It contained the children’s section, public computers, meeting rooms and most of the library’s electrical problems.
The roof leaked in three confirmed locations and one suspected location.
The air conditioning operated according to a private moral code.
One bathroom tap had to be turned exactly halfway or it screamed.
There was a crack above the western window that Facilities had been “monitoring” for eighteen months, which Mara had come to understand meant everybody intended to wait until part of the wall fell off.
And somewhere beneath Local History lived a smell.
Not a bad smell.
Not exactly.
Just an old, earthy, faintly damp smell that became stronger after rain and had defeated two plumbers, one council contractor and Graham’s attempt to diagnose it by lying face-down on the carpet.
Mara loved the place with a ferocity she generally reserved for very few people.
Which was inconvenient.
Loving a public building mostly meant watching other people decide how little money it deserved.
“Mara?”
There it was.
She closed her eyes.
“Nina.”
“Printer Three.”
“No.”
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“It’s Printer Three. The answer is no.”
“It’s smoking.”
Mara opened her eyes.
“That feels like information you should have led with.”
“I did.”
A thin grey curl rose from behind the public printer.
“Fuck’s sake.”
“Beautifully put.”
Mara put down her coffee.
Printer Three was a large grey machine of uncertain age that had survived three library managers, four council restructures and an incident involving a child, a cheese sandwich and Tray Two.
It had been threatening death for months.
Apparently, this morning it had committed.
Graham Whitaker stood beside it holding the plug.
“I disconnected it.”
“Good.”
“I also found the fire extinguisher.”
“Less good.”
“I know how to use one.”
“That is precisely what concerns me.”
Graham looked offended.
At seventy-two, he was Rivermere’s longest-serving volunteer and possessed two defining characteristics: an overwhelming desire to be useful and absolutely no fear of consequences.
“I was in the SES.”
“Twenty-three years ago.”
“Fire extinguishers haven’t changed.”
“Neither have you. That’s the problem.”
Nina snorted.
Graham pointed at the printer. “It made a noise first.”
“What kind?”
He thought about it.
“Mechanical.”
“Useful.”
“Like a grinding.”
“Better.”
“Then a pop.”
“Worse.”
“Then the smoke.”
“Excellent. Full narrative arc.”
Mara crouched beside the machine without touching it.
The smell of overheated plastic was unmistakable.
She sighed.
Another maintenance request.
Another reference number.
Another email explaining that yes, the library did actually require functioning printers because, despite Rivermere City Council’s apparent belief that every resident possessed a laptop, printer, scanner, reliable internet connection and innate understanding of online government portals, a significant number did not.
The library printed résumés.
Rental applications.
Centrelink forms.
Court documents.
School assignments.
Medical referrals.
Immigration paperwork.
Funeral programs.
Colouring sheets.
Photos of people’s dogs.
Once, memorably, eighty-six pages of evidence relating to a neighbourhood dispute about a jacaranda tree.
It didn’t matter whether Mara thought something needed printing.
It mattered that somebody did.
“How many working printers now?” Graham asked.
“One.”
Nina corrected him. “One and a half.”
Mara looked at her.
“Printer Two does colour if you threaten it.”
“That does not constitute half a printer.”
“It responds to authority.”
“It jams every eleven pages.”
“Ten if double-sided.”
Mara stood.
“I’ll lodge it.”
Nina made a sympathetic sound.
They all knew what that meant.
The council maintenance portal.
A website so hostile to human interaction Mara suspected it had been designed as an experiment in psychological warfare.
She returned to the circulation desk, opened her laptop and logged in.
Three-factor authentication.
Password.
Verification code.
Another password for reasons known only to God and Information Technology.
Then:
PLEASE SELECT REQUEST CATEGORY.
Mara selected Equipment.
PLEASE SELECT EQUIPMENT TYPE.
Printer.
IS EQUIPMENT ESSENTIAL TO SITE OPERATIONS?
Mara stared at the question.
“No, Darren,” she muttered.
Nina glanced over. “Who’s Darren?”
“I’ve decided whoever designed this is called Darren.”
“Seems unfair to Darrens.”
“They’ll recover.”
Mara clicked YES.
A text box appeared.
PLEASE PROVIDE DETAILS.
She began typing.
Printer Three has experienced an apparent electrical fault resulting in smoke from the rear of the unit. Printer has been disconnected from power and removed from public use. This leaves the branch with one reliably operational public printer.
She stopped.
Deleted reliably.
Typed it again.
Deleted it.
Professionalism was mostly the art of removing adjectives.
She submitted the request.
THANK YOU. YOUR REQUEST HAS BEEN LOGGED. Reference: RM-44871.
“Twenty-nine,” Mara said.
Nina looked up.
“Maintenance requests?”
“Outstanding.”
“Jesus.”
“Twenty-nine including Printer Three.”
“Do they know?”
“I imagine the twenty-nine emails were a subtle clue.”
At nine twenty-eight, the first regulars began collecting outside.
Mrs Donnelly.
Mr Chen.
Two university students.
A mother with a pram.
A teenage boy Mara knew was completing his schooling remotely and came most mornings because his house was too crowded to study.
A man who used the computers to apply for jobs.
A woman Mara recognised from the refuge down the road.
The usual Monday crowd.
At nine thirty precisely, Mara unlocked the doors.
Mrs Donnelly entered first.
“You’re late.”
Mara looked at the clock.
9:30:04.
“Four seconds.”
“I could have died.”
“You still may.”
Mrs Donnelly beamed.
“You’re dreadful.”
“And yet you keep coming back.”
“The books are free.”
“There it is.”
Within ten minutes, the library was alive.
Not loud.
Libraries were rarely silent, despite what people who didn’t use them seemed to imagine.
They breathed.
Pages turning.
Keyboards clicking.
Children whispering with all the subtlety of small aircraft.
The scanner beeping.
Chairs scraping.
The muted conversation of people helping one another.
A printer beginning its daily campaign against humanity.
Mara moved through it all.
She helped Mr Chen enlarge the text on a government website.
Found a dinosaur book for a four-year-old who specifically wanted “the ones that eat everybody.”
Explained to a university student that no, being enrolled at university did not exempt him from paying forty-three dollars in overdue replacement charges for a textbook he had lost.
Reset a password.
Unjammed Printer Two.
Threatened it.
Nina had been right.
It worked.
At ten forty-six, Mara finally returned to her office.
Office was a generous term.
It had once been a storage room.
Possibly a cupboard.
There was enough space for a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet that prevented the door from opening fully. One narrow window looked over Bellweather Street.
Mara sat.
Her coffee had gone cold.
She drank it anyway.
Her inbox showed forty-three unread messages.
Three were council newsletters.
Delete.
One invited her to a webinar titled Future-Focused Community Spaces: Doing More With Less.
Delete with prejudice.
Two concerned rostering.
One was Nina sending her a photograph of Printer Three with the subject line HE DIED AS HE LIVED: INCONVENIENTLY.
Mara saved that one.
Then she saw the email.
From: Office of Community Infrastructure
Subject: Rivermere Civic Precinct — Preliminary Site Review
Priority: High
Mara stopped.
There were certain combinations of words in local government that appeared harmless to civilians.
Preliminary site review was one of them.
It belonged to the same family as strategic opportunity, service optimisation and community consultation.
None meant what they sounded like.
All had teeth.
She opened it.
Dear Ms Quinn,
As part of Rivermere City Council’s ongoing review of civic assets and long-term infrastructure requirements, Council has commenced preliminary investigations into future opportunities within the Bellweather Street precinct.
Given the age, condition and projected maintenance requirements of the Rivermere Public Library facility, the site has been identified for inclusion within the initial review area.
Mara read the paragraph twice.
Then once more.
The coffee cup stopped halfway to her mouth.
She continued.
The review would assess asset sustainability.
Community utilisation.
Alternative service delivery models.
And—
There.
Potential redevelopment opportunities.
Mara sat very still.
Outside her office, a child laughed.
The scanner beeped.
Someone asked Nina where the bathrooms were.
The library continued existing with absolutely no awareness that somewhere in the council building, somebody had reduced it to a site.
Mara kept reading.
No formal decisions have been made at this stage, and stakeholder engagement will occur as the review progresses.
Of course they hadn’t.
The review represents an opportunity to ensure civic infrastructure continues to align with Rivermere’s evolving housing, commercial and community needs.
Naturally.
Mara leaned back.
“Motherfuckers.”
There was a knock.
Nina appeared in the doorway.
“Professional environment.”
Mara turned the laptop towards her.
Nina read.
Her expression changed.
“Oh.”
“Mm.”
She stepped into the office and read further.
“Potential redevelopment?”
“Apparently.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means exactly enough to mean nothing if anyone asks them.”
“Mara.”
“It means they’re looking at the land.”
Nina looked through the narrow office window towards the front of the library.
Bellweather Street sat on the other side.
Beyond it, cranes punctured Rivermere’s skyline.
The city had changed rapidly over the past decade.
Old warehouses had become apartments.
Corner shops had become apartment towers with cafés underneath them.
Car parks had become apartment towers without cafés underneath them.
Entire blocks had disappeared behind temporary fencing and returned eighteen months later wearing glass balconies and names like The Bellweather Residences.
Rivermere needed housing.
Mara knew that.
She wasn’t stupid.
She saw the rental notices pinned to the community board downstairs. She helped people complete housing applications. She watched families move further out because they could no longer afford to live near work, school or relatives.
Development was not the enemy.
But neither was every square metre of land required to justify its existence by producing rent.
Nina looked back at her.
“The library sits on a huge block.”
“I know.”
“Near the station.”
“I know.”
“And Bellweather’s already zoned—”
“I know, Nina.”
Silence.
Mara rubbed a hand over her face.
“Sorry.”
“No. Fair.”
She looked again at the email.
“Maybe it really is preliminary.”
“It is.”
Nina blinked.
“You sound surprisingly reasonable.”
“Preliminary means they haven’t decided what they’re doing.”
“Right.”
“It does not mean they haven’t decided they want to do something.”
There it was.
The difference.
Mara had sat through enough council meetings to recognise it.
Nobody announced they were considering closing, relocating or redeveloping a public service by saying, Hello, we’re thinking of getting rid of this.
First came the review.
Then the report.
Then the options.
Then consultation after three of the four options had mysteriously become financially impossible.
Then everybody stood in a fluorescent meeting room and pretended the outcome had not been visible six months earlier.
Nina folded her arms.
“What do we do?”
Mara looked at the email again.
The final paragraph requested confirmation that council representatives and external planning consultants could attend the library the following Thursday to undertake an initial site inspection.
There was an attachment.
She opened it.
Eight pages.
Maps.
Property boundaries.
Building footprint.
Maintenance projections.
Land valuation.
Mara’s jaw tightened.
“Preliminary,” she said.
Nina leaned over her shoulder.
“Oh, fuck off.”
“Exactly.”
The land valuation was highlighted.
Not the library.
Not the collection.
Not annual visitation.
Not programs delivered.
Not public computer usage.
Not the hundreds of people who walked through the doors every day.
The land.
Mara scrolled further.
At the bottom of page six was a name she didn’t recognise.
Prepared in consultation with: Reid Urban & Planning Legal.
“Who are they?” Nina asked.
“No idea.”
Mara copied the name.
She would find out.
Below it was another.
Harbour & Vale Development Consortium.
That one she knew.
Everybody in Rivermere knew Harbour & Vale.
Their logo was currently stretched across half the construction fencing in the city.
Nina read it too.
“Shit.”
“Yes.”
“You think they want this block?”
“I think I don’t enjoy seeing a developer’s name on a preliminary council document about my library.”
“Technically the council’s library.”
Mara turned her head.
Nina held up both hands.
“Sorry. Horrible time for accuracy.”
“The worst.”
Mara returned to the email.
At the bottom, beneath three paragraphs of polished administrative nothingness, sat the sender’s closing.
We appreciate your cooperation as Council considers opportunities to ensure the precinct continues to serve the evolving needs of the Rivermere community.
Kind regards,
Melissa GrantDirector, Community Infrastructure
Mara stared at it.
Kind regards.
There was nothing kind about that email.
There rarely was.
She clicked Reply.
Nina saw it.
“Oh no.”
“What?”
“That face.”
“What face?”
“The one you make before someone receives an email they’ll forward to their manager.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You absolutely do.”
Mara began typing.
Dear Ms Grant,
Thank you for advising me that Rivermere Public Library has been included in Council’s preliminary review of the Bellweather Street precinct.
Before access is arranged, could you please provide the full scope and terms of reference for the review, including the specific purpose of the proposed site inspection, the parties attending, and the nature of Harbour & Vale Development Consortium’s involvement at this stage.
She paused.
Nina read over her shoulder.
“Very restrained.”
“I’m capable of restraint.”
“I know. It frightens me more.”
Mara continued.
Given the reference to the building’s projected maintenance requirements, I would also appreciate copies of the assessments and costings relied upon in preparing the attached document. There are currently twenty-nine outstanding maintenance requests associated with this facility, several of which have remained unresolved for extended periods, so I am particularly interested in understanding how deferred maintenance has been treated within Council’s assessment of future costs.
Nina inhaled sharply.
“Ah.”
“What?”
“There she is.”
Mara ignored her.
She added one final paragraph.
Rivermere Public Library provides essential services to a substantial and diverse section of the community. I trust that any assessment of the site will give appropriate weight to the services currently delivered from the facility, rather than considering the property solely in terms of its redevelopment value.
Thank you in advance for providing the above information before Thursday’s proposed inspection.
Mara stopped.
Read it once.
Removed solely.
Put it back.
Then she reached the closing.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Nina waited.
Mara typed.
Kind regards,
Mara Quinn
Head Librarian,
Rivermere Public Library
Nina looked at the screen.
Then at Mara.
“You know normal people actually mean that.”
Mara clicked Send.
The email disappeared.
“Sounds exhausting.”
Outside her office, Printer Two jammed.
Someone called her name.
The phone began ringing.
And eighty-seven-year-old Rivermere Public Library carried on around her, blissfully unaware that someone had just put a price on the ground beneath it.
Mara stood.
“All right,” she murmured.
She picked up her cold coffee.
“Let’s see how much trouble we’re in.”
