A Lifetime in Spy School

By Oz Hardwick

We meet again in a different library, as if we’re spies in a gritty 60s thriller, talking like adults but with our thinly–disguised childness cracking through. As arranged by anonymous bosses, she is carrying
paperback novels by Mauriac, Gide, and Fournier, while I am pretending to read up on the development of vaulting in medieval British cathedrals, from Durham’s brick barrels to Lincoln’s crazy liernes. We were younger then, we say in sync, and swap the smiles we’ve not worn for a long, long time. No one is watching. The shipyard gates are rusted shut, she says, as someone starts a drunken song but is silenced by a librarian who looks too young to remember books. The coast has changed beyond all recognition, I reply, with the precise intonation the script demands. No one is listening, though uniformed guards smoking sour cigarettes are unwinding barbed wire to string across
windows. The door is narrow, she says. York Minster’s wooden vaulting facilitated an exceptional span, I reply. Outside, a car chokes into reluctant life. Illegible pages flutter like Russian snow.