The Grandest Bookshop in the World

by Mellor, Amelia

  ‘Vally, nothing’s happening!’

  ‘Get out!’ Echo jumped off Vally’s shoulder and flew ahead, a pink beacon in the gloom.

  ‘She’s right! We’ve got to go!’ He scooped up the bouquet and threw it in his satchel as the two of them ran after her. The slippery paving underfoot shook with the impact of falling trees. The door was set, not in an ancient forest tree any longer, but in a crude painting of one over crumbling brickwork. They were almost there. Almost.

  Then a tree crashed down on Pearl, and the whole Fernery was as dark as twilight.

  ‘No!’ He couldn’t see her. He was blind from the sudden change in light. ‘Pearl!’ His eyes began to adjust, but there was still no sign of her. No feet. No blood.

  A whoosh came from overhead, as of a stick flying end over end through the air. Vally looked up in time to see a falling sword of glass, right before it plunged into his chest.

  It kept going. The shard went right through him and shattered at his feet. The pieces landed on – landed in his feet with the sensation of falling raindrops. In horrified disbelief, Vally waited for his jacket to split, for the red to spread through his clothes and his nerves to catch fire with pain. He’d been stabbed. The glass had been going so fast it went through him like a bullet. He must be dead. Nobody could survive that.

  A tree fern collapsed beside him, its fronds streaming behind it. They hit his arm. Instinctively, he flinched – but the top of the tree struck him as lightly as a sheet of newsprint. He looked on the ground behind him, where a corpse ought to have fallen. The only version of himself in sight was the strangely insubstantial body he was in. His feet had sunk into the floor, which gave underfoot like thick mud. The precious satchel had fallen through his shoulder. He tried to pick it up, but the strap slipped through his fingers like dry sand.

  He realised the lolly was still tucked in his cheek. A brief image flashed in his sparse memory – gloved hands holding a knife, writing with it in a pool of melted sugar. Special, all right.

  ‘Vally!’ Pearl’s voice was faint through the mess of branches. ‘Are you OK?’

  He looked down at himself. The fern was sticking out of his thigh, but he was breathing, and the falling glass had left no mark. ‘I think so!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Pearl, disappointed. ‘I’m not sure I am.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I think I’m a ghost!’

  A twig went through Vally’s head. ‘I’ll come and get you!’ With a deep breath – not something a ghost could have done, surely – he stepped into the fallen tree.

  The inside of it was black, and felt as thick as honey. Bubbles seemed to tingle all through his body as the wood moved through him. As he popped out beside Pearl, the tree held onto his jacket, like a bramble catching the cloth.

  ‘You can do it, too,’ she said in surprise.

  He pointed at the lolly in his cheek. ‘Where’s yours?’

  ‘I guess I was so scared, I swallowed it.’

  ‘Well, there’s no telling how long they last. Come on.’

  With a last burst of energy, they pushed through the doorway to the Fernery and landed back in the Arcade, knee-deep in the floorboards. Nothing was trembling or making noise around Vally except his body and his breath. He realised it had been some time since he had seen the paper wagtail. He hoped the trees had flattened it.

  Panting hard, Pearl braced her hands on her knees. She sniffed. ‘Ivy’s still in there.’

  ‘She’ll be OK,’ Vally said, because the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. ‘She’s disqualified. We’ll get her back. We can’t give up.’

  Pearl glanced behind her at the Fernery. No sound came from it any longer. Vally set his jaw and turned around.

  But all that was left of the Fernery was an empty greenhouse, exactly as big inside as out. Its roof was smashed in, and the rain was falling through. It held one tree fern, dead, its brown fronds twisting in spirals like old flypaper. Vally’s bag lay soaked in the mud. Save for a whiff of urine, no trace of the monkeys remained.

  ‘Pretty bird,’ said Echo sadly.

  A dark cobwebbed aviary, strewn with hay and old feathers, stood in the corner. Its back wall was solid. Vally waded through the Fernery floor. The aviary wall was covered with a dirty mural. He pushed through the bars of the cage. The paint was peeling, but he could make out trees and vines. The faded sky was dotted with the tiny silhouettes of birds. And there in the foreground …

  ‘Pearl!’

  She waded through the floor like she was fording a stream.

  ‘Look.’ He pointed to the mural. A rainbow-faced beast stood frozen in the middle of its loping stride, with a tiny figure clinging to its back.

  Echo jumped down from the bookshelf outside and glided into the broken Fernery. She landed on the aviary and, clinging to the wire with her reptilian claws, peered into the gloom. ‘Hello, girl.’

  Pearl let out a laugh that was half a sob. ‘Somehow, I didn’t think it would be this bad.’

  ‘We solved it, though, didn’t we?’ Vally was trying to keep her spirits up, but he felt as disappointed as she looked. They were almost at the end of the game, with six bands bleached. They had lost so much. Only now that he tried to count what they were missing, he couldn’t remember it all. Was it Linda who had vanished, or Eddie? What was the place with the two-headed snake?

  ‘We shouldn’t have let her come with us,’ said Pearl hollowly.

  ‘We tried to tell her. And she did help us a bit. We might not have remembered we were primates if she hadn’t been there.’

  Pearl bent down and picked up Vally’s sodden bag. It began to sink through her arms, but she caught it and hoisted it back up, holding it to her chest. It looked like she was returning to normal more quickly than he was. She seemed about to respond when she stopped, and turned towards the door. ‘What’s that noise?’

  Out in the Arcade proper, footsteps were coming down the stairs. They were not regular steps, but frantic, uneven. No sooner had Vally heard them than a voice called out for him. ‘Vally!’ A stumble, a thud. ‘Girls!’ A horrendous bout of coughing. ‘Tell me you’re all right, my darlings!’

  Vally took a moment to recognise the voice. It sounded so old, so feeble. But it had to be Pa. And Pa was in no condition to be running down the stairs.

  Floundering in the swampy floor, Vally pushed through to the Arcade proper. The windows in the ceiling – what were they called? – showed a night sky beyond. So many of the lamps were broken or dusted over by now that the shop had a dingy look. Pa was hanging onto the railing, three steps from the ground floor. He was breathing hard, wearing only his pyjamas – and as Vally watched, Pa collapsed.

  He struggled towards his father, the quicksand floor sucking hungrily at his feet. Pa lay on his side, barefoot, on the dirty floorboards. He must have heard the tremendous noise of the imploding Fernery and rushed down to help – but this last effort had taken too much of his strength. He had never looked so old, or so thin, or so still. Vally reached for Pa’s wrist to feel for a pulse, but it slipped through his fingers. It was too hard to tell, in the poor light and from Pa’s sidelong position, whether or not he was breathing.

  Nothing for it. Crushing his eyes shut, Vally plunged his incorporeal hand into his father’s chest.

  Behind him, Pearl cried out in horror. ‘Don’t!’

  Something pulsed against Vally’s ghostly fingers. Pa was alive, but it was a feeble, fragile kind of living. It was like an ember smoking in the place where a roaring blaze had been.

  Pearl ran towards them, the bag dropping through her. ‘Stop it!’ As she arrived, she tried to pull Vally away from Pa’s body, but only succeeded in putting her foot through his head. ‘Vally, don’t!’

  He clutched her wrist and pulled it through Pa’s body, right to the core of him.

  ‘See?’ he said. ‘It’s OK, Pearl. He’s OK.’

  She recoiled, but the rapidity of her breathing was slowing. ‘We have to d
ecode the flowers.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘We have to save him, Val!’

  ‘I know.’ The floor around Vally’s legs felt less like mud than dough, now. He lifted them out and stood. ‘But we can’t just leave him. So when you think the floor can hold you, go upstairs, and get someone who can help. Ma or Linda or whoever you can find.’

  ‘Linda’s disappeared, Val.’

  ‘Right – not Linda. I didn’t mean Linda. Obviously.’ But he had.

  She left then, her footfalls mostly solid on the stairs. When he heard the front door of the Cole flat close, Vally allowed himself to relax a little. He did want help for Pa, but that wasn’t the main reason for sending Pearl out of the room. Their wonderful father was dying. Pearl didn’t need to be in the room when the moment arrived.

  Vally placed a shaking hand on Pa’s forehead, careful not to let it slip in. He was damp and cold, like a cloth left outdoors overnight. Vally began to unbutton his jacket. ‘I’m here, Pa.’ He spread his jacket over his father and gripped his hand, wishing he could share some of his strength with him as well as his warmth.

  If only Vally could remember why Pa was dying, and what it had to do with the Arcade. He wondered if he was going around the bend. Where had today gone? Why couldn’t he remember?

  With a slam, Pearl burst onto the second-floor balcony and leaned over it. The dirty gas lamps threw strange shadows on her face. ‘Val, they’re gone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ma and Eddie.’

  Vally reached for something to believe. ‘They could have taken Neezer for a walk.’

  ‘The furniture is gone, too.’ Her voice trembled. ‘The Obscurosmith has taken the flat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CLEANED OUT

  Only dark squares remained on the bedroom floors where the beds had been. A scrap of fluff lay in the space left by what might have been a chair. The flat looked like it was ready for someone else to move in, except for the dust. Like a layer of mould, it coated everything. Without the pictures and books and souvenirs from faraway places, it was hard to see that the Cole flat had ever been a home. Not even the curtains remained. Pearl could no longer remember the pattern on them, nor what shape the dining table had been. Her bedroom might have been the one next to the kitchen, or the one at the end of the hallway. In one room, a bit of pencil graffiti was now laid bare, inside a darker square on the wallpaper where some furniture must have blocked the sunlight. It showed a wonky drawing of a cat.

  Vally crouched to read it. ‘Rip Tome. Who wrote this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Pearl didn’t remember ever having a cat. They’d had a dog, definitely. Ebenezer was a leash-puller and a duck-botherer and a hand-slobberer. But she didn’t recognise Tome.

  ‘Maybe it’s Rest in Peace, Tommy.’ Vally straightened up. He had a slightly lost expression, as if he wasn’t quite sure if he was allowed to be there. ‘I wonder who used to live here.’

  ‘We do,’ said Pearl indignantly.

  ‘Right.’ Her brother looked away. ‘Of course.’

  No blankets were left in the flat, but Vally discovered a smelly old tartan thing in a cupboard in Pa’s office. At first, the office looked like its ordinary eclectic self, undamaged by the game. But then Echo grabbed a book with her beak, and pulled it off the shelf. As it fell open on the ground, Pearl saw that the Obscurosmith’s mark was here, too. All the words had vanished – not only from that volume, but from all of them. Some books and articles spread on the desk showed pictures of monkeys, but no text; not even page numbers. What looked like Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man could just as easily have been Pa’s own Lulene and Jacko in Monkeyland.

  Outside the office, glass crashed.

  Pearl groaned. ‘Not the Whipping Machine again …’

  But it wasn’t the Whipping Machine. The exhausted Arcade could no longer hold up the pictures on its balcony galleries. They were plummeting, one by one, to shatter and crumple among the ruined books. By the time Pearl and Vally had dragged their father to his office on the blanket, the last stripes of the rainbows were three-quarters gone. Pearl found Vally’s satchel outside the Fernery, where she had dropped it. She found the bouquet, a little crushed; and the flower dictionary, somewhat damp.

  ‘Sweet pea,’ she said, for they were easily identified by their bonnet-shaped flowers and velvety pods. ‘What does that start with?’

  ‘S, W.’

  A, B, C, D … It was slow going, with so much reading practice taken away, but Pearl found S eventually. Sum– … sun … swall– … sweet pea. ‘Delicate beauty.’

  Vally eased a cushion under Pa’s head. ‘Can you leave that for a minute?’

  ‘I’ve got to find out where the next round will be.’

  ‘The next round of what?’

  ‘The game, Val.’

  ‘This isn’t the time for games.’ He gestured at the darkness beyond the office window. ‘It’s the middle of the night, and this poor old man needs our help!’

  Slowly, Pearl lowered the dictionary. ‘What did you say?’

  Again, that lost look on her brother’s face, like a passenger on a train platform in a new town. ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You called Pa the poor old man.’

  ‘Well, he is our old man,’ said Vally, too quickly. ‘You know – your old man, your father.’

  Pearl crossed her arms. ‘You’ve forgotten him.’

  ‘I have not!’

  She should have guessed this would happen. ‘Yes, you have. The Arcade is Pa and Pa is the Arcade, and you’ve forgotten them.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten!’ Vally insisted, but his voice ran up to a high, frantic pitch that gave him away.

  ‘Where’s Queen’s Corner?’ asked Pearl flatly.

  Vally’s hands fell to his side with a slap. ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘What’s Queen’s Corner?’

  ‘Pearl, please …’

  ‘Who’s the Queen?’

  He clicked his fingers. ‘Victoria!’

  ‘The Queen of the Book Arcade!’

  ‘Oh, I know this one, I swear.’ He gripped his head in his hands, digging his fingers into his hair. ‘I’ve definitely heard of a Book Arcade …’

  ‘Ma is the Queen!’ Pearl snapped. ‘And Queen’s Corner is her favourite spot, and it’s on the … it’s right upstairs!’

  ‘You can’t remember it either! You’re just as bad as me!’

  ‘Really? What was our sister’s name, then?’

  The look of relief on his face was painful to see: at last, a question he could answer. ‘Ruby Cole!’

  ‘Her full name.’

  ‘Ruby … Ruby … uh, A-adelia?’

  ‘That’s mine.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘It was Angelina!’ Pearl shouted, louder than she meant to. ‘Her name was Ruby Angelina!’

  ‘Don’t yell at me!’ Vally said, matching her volume. He balled his fists against his thighs, and the lost look returned. ‘What were we talking about?’

  Pearl exhaled hard through her nose. ‘You’ve got no idea what’s going on, do you?’

  ‘We are in … a study.’ He looked around at the books, the lamps, the pictures, the telephone. ‘Have we been here before?’

  There could be no denying it. Vally’s memories of the Book Arcade were gone. Somebody once had described memories to Pearl as marbles, or perhaps it was gravel. But how had all Vally’s marbles trickled away, when Pearl still had enough left to know where she was? Nothing was sticking for him, not even things that had only just happened. He was older. He ought to have more memories of the Book Arcade to lose. After all, he’d been a walking, talking child when the Arcade had opened. Pearl hadn’t been born yet. He’d been seven when they’d moved from the old house to live at ‘Pa’s shop’. Pearl had only been four. If their six years living in the Arcade hadn’t evened the score, he should have had more memories to lose.

  Only, six was a much bigger part of ten t
han it was of … twelve? He was twelve, wasn’t he? And not only had he lived outside the Arcade longer than Pearl, he was out more often. Visiting friends. Hanging around with Eddie. Riding his bike. And school. Days and weeks and months of school, while Pearl was at home with Ivy, learning by the Cole method.

  ‘I’ve lived here longer than you.’ It came as a wondering whisper. ‘I still have some Arcade memories left … and you’re all cleaned out.’

  All the staff had been picked off and driven away. Pa was dying. Ma and Linda and Eddie and Ivy were gone. And now even Vally was helpless. Pearl was the only one left.

  ‘This would be a nice office if somebody tidied up,’ said Vally, with a vague sort of sadness. ‘Have we been here before?’

  She rose and went to the door. ‘You already asked that.’

  Vally looked down. ‘There’s a man on the floor.’ He cocked his head. ‘Shouldn’t we help him?’

  ‘We are helping him,’ said Pearl bitterly. She didn’t like the new Vally. He was like a stranger – a stupid stranger, who couldn’t do the simplest things and didn’t know their father. ‘Do you even remember who I am?’

  ‘Of course I do, Pearlie!’ His mouth parted in a wide smile. ‘I’m not going to forget my family, just because I’ve been away for a little while.’ The smile faded. ‘In fact, where have I been?’

  Pearl offered her arm to Echo. The parrot sidled up her arm and gave her ear a friendly bite. Opening the office door, Pearl looked out. The last of the lights on the second floor showed the last sliver of pale purple on the rainbows. She stepped through, into the miserable Arcade.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Vally started to get up. ‘Don’t go without me! I don’t know the way home!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Vally,’ Pearl said, closing the door. ‘I have to.’

  The latch clicked into place. Her hand lingered on the doorknob. She didn’t want to leave Pa and Vally in there. Even though it was frustrating and hurtful to be around them, to see them so diminished.

  A wail of despair came from within the office. ‘Where are you?’ She hadn’t even stepped away from the door, yet Vally had forgotten that she was right outside. A loud thud made her jump back – a kick, or perhaps a fist. Vally’s breath was shallow. If he wasn’t crying, he was close to it. ‘She’s gone, she’s gone, they’re all gone …’