#8 Argument

Dear diary,

My plans of asking the other staff about the poltergeist were laywaid today by their arguing. I was hanging aroud the front desk pretending to order my trolley of books, in the hope that there'd be a spare moment so I could talk to someone. Bron was helping a patron over in Community Languages, Sylvia was serving someone at the desk and Goldie was checking in items. I was about to ask her but when I saw her expression I changed my mind and kept quiet.

I should explain: Goldie is a middle-aged woman who wears neat clothes, has her rings positioned neatly on her fingers, has her hair in a neat bun and does everything... neatly. Even her conversations (which I've overheard) are tidy, as if she's pre-packaged every sentence and is just waiting for the right moment to export it into the conversation. So when I say she was staring daggers at Sylvia's red-and-black hair spiked outwards like a troll doll wearing a jester hat, I want you to imagine those daggers lined up perfectly and aimed straight at Sylvia's head.

Sylvia finished serving the patron and turned to face me and Goldie. Her powdered face and kohl eyeshadow gave the impression that she'd been recently resurrected and summoned to work in the library. She shuffled forward in her long black dress and, completely ignoring Goldie, asked if I could pass her the DVD on the next trolley. It was Stephen King's 'It'.

Goldie muttered something along the lines of "your boyfriend", to which Sylvia responded by, seemingly accidentally, slightly tilting the top book of Goldie's checked-in pile. They turned to face each other, and I realised the book and the DVD meant nothing to these two; this moment had been building up for a long time. I fled to get Bron, who Talia once nicknamed 'The Peacemaker'. I found her speaking with a patron in Greek. One glance of my fearful eyes told her everything she needed to know, and she left the patron to go break up her fellow librarians.

If this had happened outside of work Sylvia and Goldie would be rolling around on the ground tearing each other's hair out. Being inside the library, however, meant the were engaged in an all-out whispered battle of words. Goldie was wielding a scanner, darkly eyeing Sylvia who had pivoted back with arms raised in the first position of 'The Dancing Monkey' technique. Bron sighed, and walked very riskily between the two warring opponents. That act elicited both of them to start complaining with "she started it"s.

I grabbed my trolley and walked off in Teenage. When I returned twenty minutes later Bron was trying to talk to Goldie, who was staring at computer screen with arms crossed. I found Sylvia sulking in Junior. She apologsed for making me witness that, then explained that things erupted between them every few months. The self-checkout machine was still in repairs from the last time they'd fought. As she was talking I decided now wasn't the best time to bring up the poltergeist, so instead I pulled up a tiny plastic kid's chair and just listened.