Amelia Higginbottom sat behind the desk in the Brian Clough Memorial Library in Leeds as she had done every working day since she left school at the age of eighteen. Her parents had not wished her to go to university believing such places to be dens of vice and iniquity entirely unsuited to a girl brought up as a strict Wesleyan Methodist.
The library was not busy. People rarely entered. Occasionally some brave soul would approach the door, stare at the name then back away ashen faced.
Amelia Higginbottom often wondered why. Alderman Brian Ebenezer Clough, a local Victorian philanthropist and benefactor, had endowed the library in 1896 and it had sheltered many a child and adult with a thirst for knowledge until those fateful days in 1974 when his ill fated namesake had taken charge of the local football club. Neither the club nor the library had ever recovered.
Amelia lived a sheltered existence: the library, the small flat in Headingley where she had lived since the mysterious demise of her parents and John Lewis's on The Headrow were the limits of her world.
But underneath that prim exterior: the short black hair tied in a bun, the horn rimmed spectacles, the face devoid of artificial aids to beauty, the tweed suits and the sensible shoes, lay a mind in turmoil; a mind bursting to be free, a mind searching for adventure.
As she did every day at precisely four in the afternoon she stood up, walked to the end of the library and behind the bookshelf that held the works of Virgil and started to unfasten the buttons on her blouse.
Joe hardly gave her a second glance. Hunched over the library's one and only computer he was transcribing a sheaf of neat typewritten pages. If you didn't know better you might have taken him for some sort of fusty academic putting the last touches to a thesis on mediaeval Irish or the finer points of the French revolution, but you would have been wrong. He worked as a filing clerk at the Ministry of Benefits and today was his day off. His chance to post his stories on the internet.
His discovery of the internet had transformed his life. Prior to that he had typed his naughty stories on his old Remington and kept them all in a big lever arch file. But nobody else had ever seen them. Then at last the Brian Clough Memorial Library had got hold of a second hand computer and Joe's life had been transformed. He had found a site where people posted naughty stories and he took great pleasure in transcribing his life's work and making them available to the great public.
Even people as far away as America and New Zealand read them!
There was never anybody else in the library to see what he was doing, but even so he had learned how to change the font colour to white so that the screen looked entirely blank.
He had learned to touch type at college after leaving school. A good secretary is never out of work, his mother had told him. And she had been right. So he was always confident he was typing accurately.
Behind the volumes of Virgil, Miss Higginbottom was down to her bra and knickers. Her life provided little by way of thrills, but she had found this way of adding a little spice to her mundane existence. An existence that had had little by way of spice since Mr Sidebottom had bussed her under the mistletoe at the librarians' Christmas party way back when.
It was the thrill of possible discovery that was so exciting. Not that the chance of anyone coming in was that great, there was only that bloke tapping away at his blank screen, and who in this part of the world would ever want to read Virgil in the original Latin. Not for the first time she wondered what on earth the sainted Alderman Clough had been thinking of filling his library with books like that. It was safe. She could carry on. Her pulse speeded up a little as she unclipped her bra.
Joe paused as second. He was pleased with his progress. He thought he would call into Harry Ramsbottom's, 'The Premier Fish Restaurant in the North', on the way home and pick up haddock and chips, and perhaps some mushy peas, yes he deserved some mushy peas.
Amelia had never gone this far before. Usually she lost her nerve when she got down to her knickers, but today she had decided to go all the way. It would be so thrilling to be completely nude and to know that only a few yards away there was a man sitting there oblivious of what was happening.
She thought about the man. He was good looking in a rather timid vulnerable way. Rather quiet and unassuming. What was he doing tapping away at his blank screen. He never left the computer. He never came to look at the books. There wasn't any risk. Well just a tiny one, that was why there was a little thrill. But did she dare?
She was already topless. She was almost there. With a final surge of courage she took hold of the waistband of her knickers and pulled them down.
Joe was almost finished. The story was almost ready for posting. The girl in his story was naked. He always had naked girls in his stories, and she was lying in a mossy dell beside a tinkling waterfall, but it needed something extra, something to add a bit of class, something to make it literature. Then it struck him. That quotation from Virgil, that was it, from The Ecologues, what was it again? He searched his memory, "Muscosi fontes et somno mollior...". 'Somno mollior' what though? What was it that was softer than sleep? He racked his brains but it just wouldn't come to him. Then a thought struck him. The sign at the end of the last row of shelves, the one behind which Miss Higginbottom had disappeared a few minutes ago, read 'Classics - Greek and Latin - Virgil'
Of course. He could go and look it up.
Amelia was nude. She'd done it. For the very first time she'd gone all the way. She stood up straight. Now that she'd gone this far she wasn't going to rush to put her clothes back on. She would stand there and count to sixty.
Joe walked quickly to the end shelves, his rubber soled shoes making no noise on the thick carpeted floor.
Amelia stood there petrified. It had been a million to one chance. A million to one, but it had happened. She had been caught.
