The Grandest Bookshop in the World

by Mellor, Amelia

  ‘No,’ said Pearl. ‘The other day, this tall man came into the Arcade looking for Pa. I thought he was a stage magician, so I asked him to show me a trick, and he made the paper bird fly out of his hat. But now I wish I hadn’t – he was creepy, and he –’

  ‘Shh!’ Pa threw a wary glance at the wagtail, as if it might be listening. He put his hand on Pearl’s shoulder and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘How long has it been watching you?’

  ‘Since he was here. Today is the third day.’

  ‘Does it come into the flat?’

  Pearl looked a little startled. ‘No, but this morning when I walked out, it was waiting for me.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Vally was beginning to feel left out, and a little unnerved. ‘It’s only paper, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Pa in a loud, wooden voice, as if he was acting in a bad play. ‘Come on. Let’s leave the parrots to their dinner.’

  ‘Why can’t you write it away?’ Vally asked.

  ‘I can try,’ muttered Pa, steering Pearl and Vally away from the clearing.

  ‘I tried to magic it away, too,’ Pearl said. ‘I wanted it to disappear, but I only made its head invisible for a few hours.’

  A headless bird. Vally winced. Horrors like that were the reason why sorcery ought to be studied and practised meticulously, the way Pa did it. Pearl should not have been allowed to play with magic any more than she was allowed to play with matches.

  Pa kept one hand on Pearl’s and Vally’s backs, all the way to the Fernery door. Now and then, he peered over his shoulder. Vally did the same. He glimpsed the wagtail once, then again. The sense began to crawl up his body that the wagtail was somehow much stronger than it appeared.

  Right on the Fernery doorstep, Pa tripped. Vally heard his knee clunk on the bluestone. He let out a dreadful moan.

  ‘Pa!’ Pearl dropped to her knees. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pa through clenched teeth. ‘Go on, you two.’ He limped through the door behind his son and daughter. As it closed, Vally searched the green gap for a flash of black and white, but the wagtail was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Well, now.’ Leaning on a bookshelf, Pa ventured a smile. ‘I think we’ll let the sprinklers take care of that.’

  He was trying to pass it off as a game, trying to pretend neither of them had seen the panic in his eyes. Maybe Pearl was fooled, but Vally wasn’t. His Pa was afraid – as afraid as he’d been at their sister’s deathbed. And there was more white at his temples than Vally had ever noticed before.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A FUNNY OLD MONKEY

  Pearl’s father called his Book Arcade the Palace of Intellect. The rest of Melbourne sometimes called him Old King Cole. Ma’s favourite spot in the shop was called Queen’s Corner, where she liked to ‘keep an eye on things’ – which really meant having tea and plotting marriages between the staff. So if Pa was the king, and Ma was the queen, that made Linda the princess, Eddie the prince and Vally the duke.

  Pearl didn’t want to be a duchess, though. A duchess sounded poncy and a bit useless. She preferred to think of herself as a marchioness, which was the next rank down. She didn’t really know what a marchioness did, but she liked the idea of marching around with pet lionesses, and didn’t want to be corrected. Anyway, Ruby was born before Pearl, so she should have been the duchess.

  But being a poncy duchess was better than not being a Cole.

  If her Pa had not been so clever as a young man, he might have kept searching the goldfields for his fortune forever.

  Instead, he had noticed that it wasn’t the prospectors making their fortune, but the shopkeepers. The miners had needed something to drink, but beer made them violent, and river water made them violently sick. So he’d started Cole’s Cordials, and painted his sign on the back of a frying pan.

  If he had not been so hopeful and bright, he might have stayed on the lemonade cart, amid the noise and dirt of the goldfields.

  Instead, he’d believed in something better. So, working as a field botanist and photographer, he’d rowed down the Murray and round the coast to Melbourne. His seeds had been accepted by the director of the Botanic Gardens, Sir Ferdinand Jakob Heinrich von Mueller. When that money ran out, he’d sold pies in the wild carnival of Paddy’s Market.

  If he had not been so curious, he might never have spent time in Melbourne’s libraries. If he hadn’t spent time in the libraries, he might never have written his first pamphlet, which he sold with his pies. If he hadn’t done that, he might never have met the customer who’d sold him the shelf of old books. And if he hadn’t done that, he never could have turned his pie stand into his first bookshop.

  If he had not been a man of so many wonderful qualities, Ma might have decided not to marry him. She might have stopped writing him letters, and travelled back to Tasmania.

  And then Ma would have been unhappy, and Pa would have been all alone, and Pearl Adelia Cole would have been born Pearl Adelia Shufflebottom.

  But Pa was clever and hopeful and brave. He had done all of those things. He made shiny bronze tokens with messages of wisdom on them, and scattered them around the street for people to spend at his Arcade.

  Best of all, he was kind. His Funny Picture Book did have a picture of Cole’s Patent Whipping Machine for Flogging Naughty Children, but that was just a joke. He had only ever hurt a child by accident: the time Eddie launched a springy toy snake near a horse in the street, and Pa had yanked him out of the way as the terrified animal bolted. He stood up for the Rational Dress Movement, those sensible ladies who wore baggy trousers to ride bicycles and play tennis. He denounced prejudice of all kinds. The People Everywhere In The World Whom You Do Not Know Are Just As Good As Those You Do, his medallions read.

  And to prove to the world that it was true, the Arcade had a rainbow staff to match its rainbow sign. The jeweller was Indian. The Tea Salon staff were Chinese. And Mr Gabriel, head of Non-Fiction Enquiries, was a Mauritian with vitiligo. Pearl liked the words Mauritian and vitiligo very much, even if she wasn’t sure how to pronounce them.

  So the Cole children woke up every morning in a beautiful bookshop filled with monkeys and music, perfume and china, toys and sweets, magic and rainbows. The city was on their doorstep, all the clanging trams, shouting push-cart vendors, and buskers playing their hearts out. The Coles didn’t even have to go to school: Ma and Pa disagreed with the methods of discipline. Linda, Eddie and Vally chose to go. Melbourne’s grammar schools had team sport and choirs and other teenagers, which outweighed the teachers’ canes and the frequent boredom. Pearl and Ivy preferred to be schooled at home, where their parents and tutors encouraged them to study what interested them most. The Coles had dessert every day. Sometimes it was crisp apples. Other days, it might be luscious peaches. Always, there was a game.

  ‘I can put a hole through your hand and it won’t hurt a bit,’ Ma might say. The trick was to roll up a piece of paper like a telescope, look through it with your left eye, and hold your right hand in front of your right eye, so the hole and your hand lined up as one image.

  Other times, when dinner was cleared away, Pa would announce, ‘The perfect thing to finish off that lovely meal is a bit of smelly cheese.’ He’d pat his pockets, feign horror and shout, ‘By heavens, I’ve lost it!’ Everybody would run around the flat, pretending to search for the cheese. Instead, they would find a bag of lollies behind the couch cushions, or strawberries hiding under the lid of the piano – as long as Ebenezer, Vally’s slobbery mastiff, didn’t find them first.

  But on Tuesday night, there was no Smelly Cheese Game. Instead, Pa claimed that if anyone climbed onto the table, he would bring them down upon a feather.

  Eddie leaned back in his chair. ‘You can’t make a person float down from the table on a feather. Bet you a shilling.’

  ‘I’ve told you what I think of gambling, Eddie,’ said Pa. ‘And I’m a man of my word. I will bring whoever stands on that table down on a feather.’


  ‘It takes career magicians ages to work up to making a person fly. Years of practice.’ Eddie took a bite from his nectarine. ‘There’s an American bloke who says he’ll give a thousand dollars to anyone who can stay more than six inches off the ground for thirty seconds. No one’s done it yet.’

  ‘And if they think about anything other than flying while they do it – boom!’ said Vally. ‘They hit the deck. What’s the point of flying if you can’t enjoy the view?’

  ‘Go on, Ma,’ cried Ivy. ‘Let’s see him bring you down on a feather!’

  Eliza Cole couldn’t speak, for snorting with laughter. A lady of her comfortable proportions drifting through the air would be a sight indeed.

  ‘Down on a feather,’ said Linda thoughtfully. ‘You never said fly, did you, Pa?’

  ‘I still don’t see anybody on the table,’ Pa said.

  So Pearl kicked off her shoes and climbed up into the middle of the table, to cheers from her sisters. She didn’t know what to expect. It could be magic, or it could be a trick. There was no way of telling with Pa – or indeed, the Arcade. A coin appearing from behind her ear was a trick. The bookshop’s tendency to roll a ladder towards you when you needed one was magic. But when she asked, Pa always said the coin was magic, and the ladders were nothing but smoke and mirrors. Pearl wasn’t as gullible as Ivy, but she wasn’t as sceptical as Ed, who had the imagination of a beetle. And she couldn’t help feeling the tiniest bit nervous as Pa took a long white feather from his pocket, and began to wave it about. Would he lift her down, with her toe touching the feather? Or would he have to shrink her to fit on it? What would he imagine? What would he say to make it come true?

  ‘By all the powers of wind and weather,’ he chanted, ‘I bring this child down on a feather!’

  And, laying it in her hands, he pointed to the base of the feather, where the fibres were soft and fluffy. ‘There you are, Pearl. That’s the down.’

  Linda, Eddie and Vally groaned as one.

  ‘Bring me down on a father instead!’ Pearl said, and jumped on him.

  This was not clever of her. He was a wonderful Pa in every way, but at sixty, he was not a young one. As he began to buckle under her weight, there was a knock at the front door. Ebenezer barked, shockingly loud. Pearl fell on her bottom on the carpet: skirts up, frilly combination-suit on show. She wasn’t hurt – in fact, she began to laugh – but her father looked alarmed.

  ‘Pa?’ Linda stood up from the table. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I …’ He glanced at the door, then at Ma. ‘Sorry, dear – I’d better go and see …’

  The laughter was dead by the time he left the room. Vally struggled to hold Ebenezer’s collar. ‘Down, Neezer! Shush!’

  The dog strained towards the door, growling.

  ‘Evening, Cole,’ purred a voice from the front door. ‘Not disturbing you, I hope?’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Linda whispered, but the others looked mystified. Pearl could see them trying to puzzle it out. The Arcade was open until ten o’clock, but the staff always called Pa ‘sir.’ Friends and relatives usually telephoned first. Ma wasn’t holding any concerts or seances until next month.

  Pearl knew that voice, though. It belonged to the strange man, the one who called himself the Obscurosmith. The one whose paper bird had been watching her.

  ‘You said you’d leave the others alone,’ said Pa under his breath. ‘If you can’t keep your word, I don’t want anything from you.’

  ‘And I’m well, thank you,’ said the Obscurosmith airily. ‘I thought you’d be pleased to hear my news.’

  ‘Cole?’ Ma said – she never called her husband Edward. ‘Aren’t you going to invite our visitor in, darling?’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Pearl before she could stop herself.

  ‘Pearl!’ Linda began, aghast, but Vally hushed her.

  ‘… tremendous success,’ the Obscurosmith was saying. ‘But have I come at a bad time?’

  ‘Oh – not at all,’ Pa said. ‘That is … that’s excellent.’ He ducked his head back into the dining room. A peculiar spark was dancing in his eyes. ‘Just popping down to the office, dear. Won’t be long.’ And, whisking his top hat off the polar bear that served as the family coat rack, he followed the stranger outside.

  In the baffled silence, Eddie dropped his nectarine pit in the empty fruit bowl. ‘What’s he up to this time?’

  They all mused on their father’s history of peculiar stunts: the flying-machine contest, the incident with the soap mountain, the city-wide scramble to find Cole’s Pot of Gold and win the free books …

  Vally ruffled Ebenezer’s fur. ‘I don’t think we could guess in a million years.’

  Pearl worried about her father until bedtime. When he came to say goodnight to her and Ivy, though, Mr Cole seemed pleased with himself. Pearl looked up from the pages of Captain January. ‘Who is that man?’

  Her father hesitated a while. ‘He used to work near my stall at Paddy’s Market. He sells things you can’t get anywhere else.’

  ‘What sorts of things?’

  Pa smiled, in a way that made Pearl unsure of whether or not he was spinning a yarn. ‘A beautiful singing voice. A look into the future. But it might cost you three of your teeth, or a day’s good luck. And he doesn’t care if you come off worse.’

  Pearl’s spine prickled. ‘What does he need teeth for?’

  ‘Just how he works his magic, I suppose. Some people find conviction comes more easily when they concentrate on an object, or a group of objects.’

  It was plausible. Linda, for one, used small objects for her sorcery – mending broken eggshells, commanding silk handkerchiefs to tie themselves in knots. But Pearl didn’t quite believe that the Obscurosmith bothered with party tricks like that.

  ‘He sounds like a swindler,’ said Ivy, in her gap-toothed lisp.

  ‘A what, my darling?’

  ‘A swindler.’ Ivy bounced onto her knees. ‘Like in The Emperor’s New Clothes.’

  ‘Even I couldn’t get away with strutting around Melbourne in my birthday suit.’ Pa sank down on the foot of the girls’ bed.

  ‘Not there!’ Ivy cried.

  A fleeting sorrow crossed their father’s face. A pang of jealousy shot through Pearl’s chest.

  Ivy had been four years old in 1890. She must have known Ruby wasn’t coming back. But, a week after the awful day, Pearl had come into the playroom to find Ivy conversing with nobody. Was it a ghost? Could they talk to it, perhaps, at one of Ma’s seances? No, Ivy had said; Ruby wasn’t a ghost, she was imaginary. She was Ivy’s imaginary friend.

  Pearl had wanted so badly – still did – to be in on the game. It wasn’t fair that only Ivy was allowed to see Ruby, speak to her, play with her. But it was like trying to conjure by copying someone else’s style. It was Ivy’s special knack, and Pearl didn’t have it. Imaginary Ruby was naughtier than the real one, and not as clever. Whenever Ivy was accused of sneaking biscuits or breaking a plate, Imaginary Ruby took the blame. It was an angry Linda, thirteen then, who had put Imaginary Ruby in chains. Seeing Ivy chatter happily to thin air made their parents blink a lot and announce that it was a bad time of year for hay fever. From then on, Ivy had never asked anyone to set an extra place at the table. Nor did she speak to anyone who wasn’t there when in the company of someone who was. But sometimes, in the girls’ bedroom or the playroom, or when she thought no one was paying attention, she still made space for her imaginary sister.

  Tonight, Pa didn’t question it. He rose, and made to sit down on Linda’s bed beside them. ‘Here?’

  ‘Here,’ said Ivy, patting a spot that was nearer to the head of the bed.

  ‘Good!’ The cheer in his voice sounded almost genuine this time. Pearl went back to her book. ‘Now, shall I read or tell?’

  ‘Tell, please.’ Ivy snuggled close to his body.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ said Pa, taking a deep breath, ‘there was a funny old monkey who had six young monkeys. There was on
e white monkey, and one black monkey, and one yellow monkey, and one red monkey, and one blue monkey, and one green monkey.’

  Pearl had outgrown Pa’s monkey stories, but she couldn’t help listening. The cadence of his voice, with its occasional Kentish sparkle, was the sound of home. She liked the way he always left the red monkey in.

  ‘One day, all the monkeys were leaping and swinging through the jungle, when the red monkey slipped and fell through the canopy. And though they searched and searched, the other monkeys couldn’t see her, and it seemed that she was lost forever.’

  Ivy’s brow furrowed. ‘Pa, I changed my mind.’

  ‘Ah! But that’s not the end of it. You see, by and by the old monkey met a little bird. And the bird said he might be able to help with their problem of the missing red monkey. And the old monkey said that would be very kind of him. So the bird flew off, over the rivers and under the thorns, and do you know what he found?’

  ‘The red monkey?’ asked Ivy. Pa had never told this version before. The bird was new.

  ‘He did! And she was quite as lively and bright as she had been the day that she had tumbled down through the canopy. In that tangled jungle, she hadn’t been able to find her way back home.’ Pa stopped, and Pearl was afraid that he might be upset again, until he raised his fist to his mouth to cough. It was deep and hoarse – which was unusual to hear from Pa because he didn’t smoke.

  Pearl looked up at him. ‘All right, Pa?’

  He patted his chest hard and cleared his throat. ‘Losing my voice. It must be from yelling at you rotten kids all day.’

  The idea of Pa yelling at them for being rotten, or yelling at all, was so silly that Pearl and Ivy had to giggle. In the next room, one of the boys did the same.

  ‘So,’ said Pa. ‘The little bird led the red monkey back to her family, and they were all very happy, and ate bananas –’

  ‘Grapes,’ said Ivy. Grapes didn’t grow in the jungle, of course, but the Arcade monkeys liked grapes better than anything.