The Library Of Despair

Piers entered the darkened library cautiously, and slowly crouched down. He removed firstly one shoe, then the other. And then another. He picked up the soiled footwear and, holding it at arms length, walked towards the librarian's desk. A narrow shaft of green light from the central stairwell fell across the room, troubling the stained and woodwormed surface. Piers left his shoes on a small shelf below the desk, between an ink-stamp and a pile of damaged books. He picked up the ink stamp and set the date to 31st February, 1982. Piers Morris P'Tlangue hated librarians.
Both his mother and his father had been librarians. Before it happened. When she was a young academic, Carol Bennett had fallen in love with books, and whiled away the hours in the college library, reading Spinoza mostly. Because she was that type of person. The type of person who ends up becoming a librarian. Peter Gordon, on the other hand, didn't care much for libraries. He went into the college library once during Fresher's week, and sort of got lost. By the middle of his second year he had still not found his way out, and so figured he might as well get a job there to pass the time.
They met in the library. After a romantic afternoon spent inking each others pads, and getting dewey-eyed decimals, they were engaged to be wed. During this time, a baby was left on the loan enquiries desk. After much wrangling (and other cowboy activities), they persuaded the chief librarian to let them adopt the infant, so long as they paid any outstanding fines that might have arisen. Peter and Carol briefly toyed with the idea of giving the baby a double barrelled surname, but eventually decided upon P'Tlangue. For some reason or the other.
The schooldays of their adopted son had been traumatic. Many children teased him, and made fun of his unusual name. Most of these jokes were of the 'short-bridges-often-found-along-seafronts' variety. Bastards. Piers hated his parents, and as a result, had a strong dislike for librarians of any sort.
Piers Morris P'Tlangue peeled off one of his socks, and sponged it across a red ink pad. Once he felt that the sock had soaked up a healthy quantity of the evil red ink, he scrawled the word TURMOIL across the desk, then went off to photocopy his arse.