Ella pulls up at the school and sees the group of mothers look in the direction of her jeep. She lets the girls out and leaves Maisie where she is. Celeste, upon spotting her best friend Gilly, runs straight over and hugs her. Ella walks after her with Dot’s small hand inside her own. She feels eyes on her with each step. Her heart rate quickens. She takes a deep breath when she reaches Gilly’s mum Gail.
“Hi, Gail – cold this morning, isn’t it?”
Celeste and Gilly are chattering excitedly beside them.
“Oh, hi, Ella.” Gail looks around her at the other mothers. “Yes, it’s a chilly one all right.” She moves to walk past Ella to go to the rest of the group who are standing at the wall.
Ella forces herself to continue. “Was Gilly able to do her maths homework yesterday? Only Celeste found it hard.”
“Well, she struggled a bit on question four but we got there in the end.” Her tone is polite but her eyes keep darting over to the group of women who are watching their conversation intently.
“Look, would you like to grab a coffee?” Ella blurts out, cringing inside at having to put herself out there like this. At exposing how pathetic she is in front of these women. She watches Gail as her brain tries rapidly to think up an excuse to get away from her.
“Oh, sorry, I can’t this morning.” Again her eyes look over to the other women. “I’ve already arranged to meet the ladies over there – sorry, Ella.” She plasters a smile on her face.
“Oh, of course . . . well . . . I mean any morning is good with me now that I’m not in work . . . you know . . . I’ve more time for things like that.” She feels like she is a little girl again, desperately trying to make friends in the schoolyard.
“Sure, Ella, yeah, we’ll arrange something. Okay, well, I’d better go then – I don’t want to keep the girls waiting.”
“Okay, great – well, we’ll do something soon then, I guess?”
“Sure.”
She is left standing there as Gail makes her way over to the women. She can see them talking and then all the heads turn to look at her at the same time. She forces a smile on her face and walks back to the car.
Conor is walking down the street. The easterly wind is howling up the Liffey and he ducks his face down to shelter from it. He watches the battle between wind and water as the wind tries to force the river backwards against its natural flow. He passes under the bridge at Tara Street Station as weary commuters spill out from the DART. He stops to put some coins into a cup held out by a homeless man sitting under the bridge on a square of cardboard, his legs covered with a filthy sleeping bag. He feels sorry for the city’s homeless population in weather like this.
His phone rings in his pocket and he scrabbles to take it out. It is Ella.
“What are you doing?”
“Just on my way to open up. Why?”
She sighs. “I’m the pariah of the school gate!”
“What’s happened?” He rounds the corner onto Haymarket Street.
“Well, it seems –”
“Shit!” He can see a gaping hole in the window of his shop in the distance. He starts to run towards it.
“What is it?” says Ella. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s the window – they’ve smashed the fucking window in!”
“Oh no! I’ll be right over.”
After he hangs up, he stands outside his shop, the pavement littered with shards of glass. Crumbs of glass stick under the soles of his shoes. He looks inside and sees a concrete breeze block standing upended beside the knocked-over window display of books. Pages of the books are flapping in the wind as if trying to decide which side they want to fall on. He unlocks the door and goes inside. More glass greets him there. He runs his hands down over his face and lashes out to kick a book on the floor, “Fuck!” His whole body is trembling with rage. He doesn’t have an alarm any more – he had to get rid of it because he couldn’t afford to pay the monthly monitoring charge. He does a quick check around but thankfully nothing seems to be missing. Then he rings the Gardaí again. This time they say they’ll send someone out to have a look.
While he is waiting for them to arrive, he googles ‘Dublin Glaziers’ and sets about getting a company to come out and repair the window. He feels sick when they quote him figures over the phone but he has no other option. He goes out the back and finds some cardboard boxes from yesterday’s delivery to cover up the hole. He takes a brush and starts sweeping up the glass shards. After he has done the inside of the shop, he goes out to do the path.
He sees the same three boys standing further up the street, watching him.
“What happened to your window, mister?” the smallest one shouts over.
“You bloody well know what happened it!” he roars back at them.
“Well, it wasn’t us!”
“Yeah, and it’s just a coincidence that you guys cause trouble here every day?”
“You better watch what you’re saying, mister – we didn’t break your fucking window!”
They turn and walk away and, as they do, the oldest boy turns back to look at him over his shoulder through narrowed eyes. It gives Conor the shivers.
He begins to sweep up the glass from the pavement.
Ella’s jeep pulls up by the kerb a few minutes later.
She jumps out and then lifts out Maisie who has finally fallen asleep in her car seat. Placing Maisie at her feet, she stands on the path beside him, surveying the damage.
“You’re going to have to sort this out, Conor – they’ve gone too far this time!”
“The Guards are on their way.”
“Have you got someone to come and replace it?”
“Yeah, I have a guy calling soon, but I just don’t have that kind of money lying around. I’ve already had to ask the landlord to wait another week for the rent.”
“Don’t worry – I can pay for it.”
“I can’t ask you to cover the cost of a shop window, Ella!”
“Look, you can pay me back again when things are a bit easier for you – or your insurance might even cover it.”
He rests the brush against the timber shop front.
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep it going, Ella. My customers are dwindling and the rent is killing me.”
“The recession is crippling everyone but, if you can ride it out, you’ve got the bones of a really good business here.”
“Look around you – it’s just a street of empty units and apartments – I’m so far off the beaten track.”
“But what about the offices up the road? Surely they bring in some footfall during the week?”
“Hardly any. Come on, let’s go inside.” He sighs heavily.
They go into the shop and Ella goes out the back and puts the kettle on. She comes back with two mugs and places one down beside him. The bell rings and a customer enters. She is an older lady who lives in the terrace of houses behind the shop.
“What happened to your window, love?”
“Some gangsters threw a block through it.”
“That’s desperate – and you’ve such a lovely little shop in here. It’s great to see someone trying to make a go of it instead of all the empty shops one after the other.”
“Thank you.” He is about to add a sarcastic comment about how he is glad that he is making the streets look nice for everyone else even though he is drowning in a sea of debt, but he stops himself just in time. That would be a sure way of getting rid of whatever customers he has left.
“Those builders ruined this street, so they did! They forced out all the small businesses that were here since I was a young one. Then they builded all these fancy shops – and all of them empty bar your own! Anyway I could be here all day giving out about that shower – I’m looking for a book on how to get a baby to sleep properly –”
“Aren’t we all!” Ella sighs, wearily nodding at Maisie who is still sleeping soundly, catching up on the sleep she missed the night before.
The woman
smiles. “She’s a lovely little thing. How old is she?”
“Five months.”
“My daughter had a baby three weeks ago and they’re not getting a minute’s sleep. I said I’d call in here and see if you’ve anything that might help her. She’s desperate at this stage, so she is.”
“I feel her pain,” says Ella.
Conor leads the woman over to the shelves where the parenting books are. He shows her a few of his popular titles and she reads the back covers for a few minutes before choosing one. Conor takes for it at the till.
She nods at the window. “There’s no call for carry-on like that. This place is getting worse, full of scumbags now, but when I was growing up it was a lovely place, full of decent honest folk.”
“Ah, I suppose it’s like everywhere – a few troublemakers give a place a bad name.”
She nods. “Well, I hope you get it sorted.”
Maisie wakes up soon after the customer leaves and Ella takes her up in her arms. “Come here, little one.”
Maisie looks around, her sleepy eyes adjusting to the light.
“Hello, Maisie,” Conor says. “Did you have a good sleep?”
“Of course she did! Wasn’t she making up for the hours she lost since ten past five this morning! You don’t know how lucky you are getting a full night’s sleep every night.”
“Yeah . . . maybe.” His face darkens.
“Hey, don’t worry, we’ll get your window fixed soon. Did you ever manage to get a book club going?”
“Yeah, I’ve a few names now so I’ve one starting soon, I hope.”
“You see! All that will help, I bet you. And I can help you to design a few posters. What do you reckon?”
“God, listen to you, you should go into consultancy.”
“Yeah, well, you never know, now that I’m unemployed . . . ”
“I just feel like everything that I’ve worked so hard for is slipping away from me.” His voice wobbles. “I’m killing myself working seven days a week and for what? I’ve nothing to show for it.” He wishes Leni was here. She would know what to do. She would tell him to stop feeling sorry for himself and to get his act together but he just can’t seem to do it.
“Here, c’mon.” She reaches up and puts her arm on his shoulder. “‘Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise,’” she says softly.
“Les Mis?”
She nods. “Well done.”
“Well, it would want to start rising pretty soon!”
Chapter 13
A few days later Conor is working through a stack of paperwork when the door opens. He stands up to greet the customer but instead he is confronted with a small boy of around six or seven years of age. He isn’t one of the usual three but he has that same look about him. He is wearing a knock-off of a Nike hoody with the slogan ‘Just Do It’ emblazoned across the front, his tracksuit bottoms are too short and Conor can see an inch of bare skin above his white ankle socks. He is wearing round glasses and his sandy hair is falling down over his eyes.
Not another one, Conor thinks. He feels the rage build inside him. He can’t cope with any more of the brazen children around here. They seem to be getting younger and younger and are afraid of nothing.
The boy strolls into the shop as though he is any ordinary customer.
“Eh no, you don’t,” Conor says, walking towards him and putting his arm out to stop him. “Get out of my shop.”
The boy looks taken aback and stops dead.
Conor puts his hands on the boy’s shoulders and turns him back around to face the door. “Go on, go – I’ve had enough of you lot causing trouble.”
“Sorry – I only wanted to look at the books, mister.”
Close-up, Conor notices that chestnut-brown freckles are sprinkled across the bridge of his nose.
“Well, you’ve looked, so you can go now.”
The boy turns and looks him in the eye before walking out of the shop. Conor feels the tension wind tighter as he stands at the window and watches the small silhouette with the sunken shoulders as he walks off down the street.
The phone rings on the desk beside him, interrupting his thoughts.
“Conor, it’s Robert Gordon here.”
His heart sinks. Robert Gordon is his landlord. “Hi, Robert.”
“I just checked the account there, Conor, and the rent hasn’t hit again this month?”
“I’m sorry, Robert, I just don’t have it – can you hang on another couple of days and I’ll see what I can do?”
“Look, this is happening every month now, Conor. I know you have your troubles and business is tough at the moment but it’s tough on all of us. I’m getting it in the neck from the bank because now my mortgage payment on the property will bounce. They won’t give me so much as an inch – they’re gone so nervous that they’ll move in on me if it’s late again.”
“But I just don’t have it – if I had the money I’d pay it –”
“Well, I can hardly go back to my bank and tell them that!”
“Look, the rent is killing me, Robert, and my window was smashed in a few days ago – is there anything that you can do for me on it?”
“I’ve told you before, Conor, it’s just barely covering the mortgage – I’m not making a penny on it. I would help you if I could, but I can’t afford to take the hit either. I don’t like reminding you but you were the one who signed your name on the lease . . . ”
“Don’t I know it,” Conor says wearily.
He hangs up on him and holds his head in his hands. He doesn’t know what he is going to do. He sold his car a few months back. He didn’t really use it anyway but it had been nice to have there if he ever wanted to go somewhere. He couldn’t afford to run it any more, so it had to go. Selling it had helped to keep him afloat for a while. When Leni was here they were never flush but one of them was always able to cover the bills if the other was having a bad month. Now he is on his own, trying to survive and keep a roof over his head on a business that is losing money. He has nothing left. Nothing.
Chapter 14
Three Years Earlier
They stand looking around the concrete shell. Copper and white plastic pipes stick up randomly from the dusty grey floor.
“It’s hard to imagine what it’s going to look like,” he says, looking at the shop front that has yet to be glazed and instead is just boarded up with wood.
“Nonsense, that’s what your imagination is for! Close your eyes.” Her words echo and bounce around the four walls.
He looks at her. “I can’t.”
“Go on, do it!” she orders.
So he does as he is told and closes his eyes.
“Now,” she says, “just imagine that behind you will be your desk with some shelves, on your right you’ll have some lovely dark-wood floor-to-ceiling shelves and the same on your left. Maybe you’ll have the children’s section here and then comfy chairs so people can sit down and read too. Then exactly where you are standing now there will be freestanding shelves – you know, with self-help books, maybe travel books too. Now can you see it clearly in your mind?“
He opens his eyes again and lets them adjust to the light. She comes up and puts her arms around him. Her blonde hair is pulled up messily into a loose bun. He likes when it’s like that as he can see the contours of her face properly – its Germanic angles, the fullness of her lips, the small crater in her forehead left behind from when she had chicken-pox at the age of eight.
“I just know it will be amazing. Have you decided on the name yet?”
“Well, I was thinking since we’re on Haymarket Street – what about ‘Haymarket Books’?”
“I like it – it’s better than ‘Conor’s Bookshop’ like you were going to call it,” she laughs. “I’m so proud of you, Conor. Leaving your job to follow your dream like this.”
“Well, it was your idea that I should give it a go.”
“But, still, you have done all of this yourself. Just think – in a f
ew weeks all this will be transformed into the best bookshop in Dublin.”
“In Ireland!”
“Of course, in Ireland,” she laughs.
He pulls her closer towards him. “I hope it all works out now,” he says anxiously.
Although he is excited, the worries of failure, the twenty-five-year lease, the figures and targets that he needs to meet just to break even and then the loan repayments too, have been keeping him awake at night. He worries about his inexperience in the industry – yes, he loves books and has worked as a bookseller, but is that enough? He is not a risk-taker by nature and, if it wasn’t for Leni’s unwavering belief in him, he probably wouldn’t even be doing this. Everything he has – their entire future – is staked on this working out.
“It will. I know it will. You will be great, Conor.” She rubs his arm. “Come, let’s get food. I’m hungry.”
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