Missing Fay

by Adam Thorpe

  Hardback, good jacket, first edition, signed by the author, who stares out like a complete jerk, cuddling an enormous flop-eared dog.

  £9.50.

  After a few days he has almost forgotten about the book, until its bulk yawns open and grows enormous, a vicious black-and-white hound springing out from its pages. The bloodthirsty snarls wake him up. He makes a cup of Horlicks with a dusting of cinnamon and pads about his semi-detached labourer’s cottage. As it’s situated on a lonely road between Lincoln and Saxilby, he keeps the lights on. A house for two. Mum chose it in the wake of Dad’s untimely death. Mike was fifteen. There was room for her loom, and she felt her teenage son needed the comfort of nature. Now that she’s in the care home, it’s all his except in name. Including the dusty loom. Plus her elderly cat, Mary-Shelley, with a slight drag to the hind legs.

  And then, in the middle of a quiet Tuesday afternoon exactly a week later, his eyes slide carelessly towards the Animals, Pets shelf. A slight lean to the serried verticals because one of them is missing. An immoderate flash of shock in his chest, which is infuriating. He goes straight out to the bargain box and finds the stray placed on top of the others, flat and twitching, but the twitching is not of its own volition. A frost-charged easterly, straight from the North Sea’s whitecaps, is also messing with his beard.

  His best friend Alex, when told, goes back to Theory 1. Theory 2, which he’s dismissed, is that Sheena Fleming is a practical joker. Theory 1 is that it’s a customer. It’s what customers do: finger and soil and leave. They do it to his electricals. He’s forever tidying them up, reboxing, recoiling, rehanging. Alex, originally from Manchester, now in his forties, runs the legendary second-hand electrical store up a dank snicket halfway down the hill. Jug-eared, so thin he almost disappears from the side, he is permanently dressed in a white lab coat smeared with grease and oil. A man of solid sense.

  They stand outside Chapter Seven, studying the box like real customers. Mike has the errant volume in his hand: on the slim side, octavo, 160 pages. The author’s signature in emerald-green ink: pretentious. A minor T V celebrity, now forgotten, with long sideburns like hirsute caterpillars. It is open at ‘First things first’. Socialise your puppy. You have until five months, after which it risks becoming a yob, barking like a maniac at everything that moves, crapping in front of shops – particularly bookshops. ‘It’s happened twice and it’s all too carefully done,’ Mike explains. ‘Too deliberate. No one except me knew it was down in the hold.’ He looks up suddenly: Sheena Fleming opposite, staring. Smug expression. Pathetic. He turns his back.

  Alex wonders aloud if Mike isn’t getting into a mither about nothing. ‘You’re sure you didn’t put it there yourself? Subconsciously. It’s your kind of humour.’

  ‘Alex, are you suggesting I’ve not got both oars in the water?’

  His friend pulls a face. ‘You just asked me that. Don’t you remember?’

  It’s possible. The first signs of senescence, slight rubbing of the boards, mildew spots. Mike is fifty-five, the book is forty. Books last longer than people, though, or he’d be out of stock. Even the crummiest paperback.

  Alex pulls out a mud-brown specimen with bowed covers and a tape-shadowed spine: Plywoods: their development, manufacture and application by Andrew Dick Wood. He bets Mike a trip to Fantasy Island that Wood’s Plywoods will be sold within a year.

  ‘I don’t want to go to Skeggy and slip on vomit.’

  ‘Fantasy Island’s in Ingoldmells, not Skegness. It has extreme rides, Mike. It’ll take you out of yourself. You need to find your inner child.’

  ‘Haven’t got one.’

  Alex smiles. ‘Worried someone’ll actually buy this, then?’

  ‘Part of the first job lot from Hemswell. When plywood was the latest thing. How about this instead?’

  It’s the Blue Peter annual for 1968. Jason and Petra in front of the ship. More dogs! Plus the cat, he can’t remember the name. The puzzles have all been done in blue biro. Yellowed square of tape on the spine head, back strip part-detached, bottom spine-end missing. Nobody will ever want it. Alex nods. ‘Done. See you on the Twister.’ They shake on it.

  Instead of returning the wanderer to the Animals, Pets section inside, Mike leaves it in the box, slotting it between a bilingual German-English number of Welder’s World magazine (there are about twenty more in the basement, 50p for the lot) and the book about plywoods. Someone’s about to make a nine-pound profit, but he no longer cares. He glances up: Sheena is a shadow in her window, watching him. He gives her a minimal wave. She doesn’t wave back but turns away into that alien interior flocked by dwarf humans with super-size larynxes.

  People do not flock to Mike’s shop. There is a certain seepage from the outside world. He smells that outside world on the eddies of air that seep in with them: a faint whiff of fry-ups, with the occasional overspill from the rendering plant at Skellingthorpe. Mostly the same faces, over and over, accumulating the marks of age. Their medical histories, catheter and all. Their polite verbal pogroms of Poles, of chavs, of people saying ‘duck’ to each other. And their jokes. Rib-ticklers about bookworms, illiterates, low-flying combat aircraft, Poles, chavs, people saying ‘duck’ to each other. They don’t buy anything and they expect you to laugh.

  So the next alteration is less surprising. On Monday morning, after driving into town through a fresh and glittering world emerged from a Sunday of heavy showers – catkins on the hazels, crocuses and daffodils glowing on the verges, a peacock butterfly just missing the windscreen – he carries the box out and notices it has been rearranged, except that there never was any arrangement. Alphabetically, with Wood last, straight after Welder’s World (no author, so by title). There, of course, is Listening to Your Dog by Cecil Bigstaff. It follows the opener, A Laboratory Manual of Semi-Micro Inorganic Qualitative Analysis. An error because Edward Arnold is the publisher and you shouldn’t count the article, definite or indefinite. Reassuringly amateur. Smiling, he places it second to last, its author being one E.T. Thompson. The Blue Peter annual is in third position, being similarly authorless.

  He can’t remember how the box looked when he took it inside on Saturday. Not like this, though. This has a touch of reproof about it. Not quite the Dewey system, but a suggestion that he’s a lazy sod compared, say, to bloody Oxfam.

  He now begins to keep a proper eye out, but he is no surveillance camera. Alex offers an antique black-and-white model from 1984 for a fiver: ‘Makes everyone look like a phantom.’

  ‘Then what does it make real phantoms look like?’

  ‘Oh, you’d just come out invisible, Mike.’

  Maybe the culprit is a child. All children are half feral, but even most local urchins know their alphabet. He hasn’t been one himself for about four decades. Or maybe he never was – despite the fading photos, despite what his mum would tell him when she still had her marbles. He’s always suspected brats of nicking the odd book from the box, in the mistaken belief that they’re making 50p.

  A thin little ginger-haired rat scuttling about. The thought frightens him for some reason. It couldn’t really be her, could it?

  Or else it’s someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Mike thought at one point many years ago that he was an OCD sufferer, but it was just the result of what he dubbed the categorisation complex. There are books that don’t quite fit any shelving category, and he learnt not to care after days of agonising over a loopy personal memoir about the Avebury circle – Archaeology? Body, Mind, Spirit? Mathematics? Memoir? Mysteries? Nature? New Age? Parapsychology? Religion? He left it in Oxfam eventually, losing a potential £4.50 (bumping on the corners, tears, some foxing). He then vowed NOT TO CARE, and the shop began to take on its charming air of disorder, its reputation spreading to London via the snaking rails of the commuter line. ‘All you need,’ said Alex, ‘is an integrated online presence. Then your London fans don’t even need to trek out here.’

  ‘Fix it,’ said Mike to his astonished friend.
/>
  It took two years. It has made no difference: city folk like to breathe deep of the shop’s scented mustiness, creak its planks, nod confidentially at the Beard, chuckle at the framed Lear poem, stand bowed over deckle-edged antiquarian tomes or some near-worthless Penguin paperback with a coffee ring on its green cover and feel they have been time-lapsed into a yesteryear when everything was solid, sensuous and real. They finger, gently and lovingly, the full set of the 1973 Encyclopaedia Britannica, the shelves groaning under its gravitas, while holding numberless if less sanctified Britannicas in that little casket in their pocket called a mobile phone.

  Chapter Seven’s distressed frontage is not affectation; it has stayed still while the rest of Totter Hill has moved on, the street’s scrubbed period architecture frequently used for film shoots. The building’s owner, from whom Mike has rented for over twenty years and who keeps the flat above (separate entrance) as his pied-à-terre, is too rich to bother with minor matters like upkeep. He resides in the British Virgin Islands, wherever they are, and comes back about once every three years to have his skin cancer dealt with. Mike likes it that way; the facial bush, which educated locals call Tennysonian, developed out of sheer neglect. ‘You could always shave it off, go for a new, snappy young image on the website,’ Alex advised. ‘Do I see bird shit on your collar, by the by?’

  There was an old man with a beard,

  Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! –

  Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren,

  Have all built their nests in my beard!

  Mid-week, the glorious spring sunshine enduring through occasional blustery attempts to extinguish it, he steps into the big outdoors and finds the box’s contents rearranged in reverse order – beginning with Wood, ending with Bigstaff. He checks the latter for clues: inserted matter, scribbles, a sketch of a dog pissing on a book. A wry Post-it. Nothing. His hands tremble as he puts it back. He is seized with a desire to act. He has to take the wretched thing somewhere he isn’t known. The charity shops all have CCT V cameras and go on red alert at his Ben Gunn look. Here’s Mike the treasure hunter! These days, they are too canny. Oxfam’s website dismays him. What’s the point in going on?

  ‘The point,’ Alex reassured him in the pub, ‘is the shop. Your shop. It has soul. It is human. Like mine. We are the last of a line.’

  Meanwhile, someone is playing around with his head. By Friday the box has been rearranged by title. Listening to Your Dog is sandwiched between Legacy of Kings and Meteorology for Glider Pilots. He pretends to descend into the basement only to scamper up again abruptly, startling the customer whose guilt he wrongly suspected. This darkens his reputation for eccentricity even further.

  Like a boy detective, Mike scatters flour on the spine and cover.

  ‘What are you looking at my privates for, Mike?’

  ‘I’m looking at your hands. Show me your hands.’

  ‘From off your stock, friend.’ Alex spreads his fingers wide. It is dust. Very unprofessional. ‘You need an assistant.’

  Having an assistant worked quite well for a few years. Students, gap-year types, unmoored graduates. Qualification: an affection for books. Motivation: preferring to wield a feather duster in the warm and dry to a broccoli-cutting knife in the cold and wet. He paid them a pittance on the understanding that their CVs would be boosted by ‘trimming the sails on the Marie Celeste’, as one Oxford-bound wag put it. These days he’d pay them nothing, for the same reason, and call it an internship instead of slavery. Anyway, Mike was able to nip out on errands without closing the shop, and the opening hours began to coincide with the typewritten paradigm on the door. The dust diminished. The pan in the kitchenette below would be properly decrusted of porridge. Heavy boxes were shared and his back improved, even if it got no straighter. One of them even suggested using Coca-Cola to destain the loo bowl, which he thought was cheeky.

  Another pair of eyes would definitely be useful, given the present circumstances. Sharper, younger, fleeter. He pictures a pair of wine-dark eyes, a sylph-like form behind the counter, and the dust banished. His own Eurydice. Could there be another one like her? She was recruited some four years back, for the summer. Her smile, her saffron cardie, her fresh loveliness threw back a curtain on the gloom and increased the number of male customers.

  The light golden hair on her forearms. The wink of wet on her lips. The astonishing smoothness of her young skin. Mike almost started to believe in God, as he would on country walks or when reading his favourite passages from Shakespeare. For who else could create something so lovely? And I’ll go to bed at noon. Chloe was drifting through a fine arts degree at the university proper and this merely added to her attractions, put Mike in mind of Botticelli (absurdly, since she knew very little about the great masters). He considered inviting her along on one of his fenland hikes, sharing his binos and conversing, pointing out the circling buzzards waiting to zoom in on a field mouse. Mike knew nothing of modern youth; she knew nothing of literature. Or birds. If I could write the beauty of your eyes … Then she graduated and was swallowed by Manchester.

  He can’t possibly stretch to an assistant these days, although it would be a welcome luxury. Internet orders mean an increase in wrapping and posting, activities which he loathes. Can young people wrap precious things in brown paper, impeccably, these days? One wonders. Work experience and unpaid interns are more trouble than they’re worth. There’ll never be another Chloe. Never. Missed the train on that one.

  Monday, just before lunchtime. Listening to Your Dog is propped up against the window, the author grinning gormlessly out. It’s ghostly pale from the flour, but he searches in vain for fingerprints. It could have been any of the passers-by shadowing the many panes of the bay window. And there was him popping down to the basement too, several times.

  Sheena is currently having a fag. It can’t really be Shagger Sheena, can it? It can’t be Lego-ver, surely? She looks at him as if concerned for his health. He decides to address her. They haven’t spoken in months. Not since the incident in January. He scarcely has to raise his voice to be heard across the cobbles.

  ‘Sheena, was someone here just now?’

  Pause. The bastard has addressed me. ‘What, you mean waiting?’

  ‘Fiddling with my box. It’s been going on all week.’

  ‘I thought it was meant to be fiddled with.’ She laughs, sending across a puff of magnolia scent mixed with tobacco. She’s jollier these days. More irritating. Daft not to have spoken before. ‘Just a bloke walking past. Something nicked again?’

  ‘They didn’t stop?’

  ‘I’ve only been here a couple of minutes.’ The cigarette pauses at her mouth. ‘Mind you, 50p is 50p, I suppose. It all adds up.’

  She can’t have asked someone to do it, can she? One of her myriad lovers.

  He slips back inside, flustered. Again he’s made a fool of himself. The jingle of cap and bells. His mind is decided.

  The cathedral’s shop is in the crypt, its halogen spots glittering on all-glass cabinets and gleaming off pale pinewood display cases. He fails to locate the books at first among the glass and china ornaments, the pin cushions and key rings, the baskets full of fudge and the rolled-up fascimiles of Magna Carta: he is looking for spine-crammed shelves. Beyond, in the far corner, a few glossy volumes are facing out in a display case, as if online – no more than ten or so.

  He places his volume casually on top of The Legend of the Lincoln Imp, hiding his action from the security cameras with his body. The new arrival could be misread as Listening to Your God, although the faded photo on the cover is a giveaway: that grinning oaf with the large sideburns in an awful sweater, hugging a hound. Well, he might be God, who knows? Why should God keep up with the times? Only mortals bother with such trivia.

  No one approaches him. He is not seized by a uniform.

  He ascends to the main concourse and parks himself in a pew. It is lunchtime, the service over, but he isn’t hungry. He is ageing and useless an
d full of the wrong assumptions inside this shadowy majesty of limestone. William the Conqueror again, making sure we all feel cowed. My castle isn’t quite enough, mes chers; they need divine reckoning too, those Anglo wimps. The nave looms high above him. He has not been here for at least two years. His fleshly life crouches as his spirit soars up to the gilded roof-bosses, the height shrinking them to fancy buttons, their patterns imperceptible without binoculars.

  He keeps those for the birds. God’s true miracles. On his way out through the minster garden he notices a robin on top of Tennyson’s head.

  He does feel a little smug the next day, with a curious confidence that God’s house is the best sort of security. Even though he knows God is a figment of the universal imagination to keep the howling black emptiness of the universe at bay.

  He humps out the trestle table and then the 50p box with a spring in his step. The early morning sun that glittered on dewy webs in the grass around the cottage is now, by lunchtime, actually warm. No one has seen anything like it. It’s been a week of blissful blue skies, perfect for the Red Arrows to scribble their smoke trails over, and it’s only the end of March. ‘Welcome to Florida!’ cries a passing wag, face vaguely familiar as so many are. Totter Hill is not a suntrap, the buildings either side see to that, but at midday his patch is bathing in liquid gold. Hannah further down is showing her midriff again, scrubbing the cobbles in front of her shop, something he ought to do much more often.

  He waves at Hannah, who looks surprised. He must make an effort to be more sociable. Sheena actually waved to him today. I thought it was meant to be fiddled with. Jezebel! Tits heaving, absurdly short skirt! He raised a hand coolly back. The sunshine’s waking obscure corners in his obdurate soul. He should have opened a shop in Provence or Greece. There is a nurse at his mother’s care home, a young Romanian woman with lampblack hair. It makes him think of Tennyson’s black ashbuds in the front of March. Her name is Cosmina. He is quite sociable with her, it has to be said. At least he makes an effort. They only coincide when she’s on the afternoon shift. He is old enough to be her father, but in her presence he feels more like her brother, or (better) cousin. She doesn’t seem interested in books, however. Or maybe not in used books. Hateful term, like used tissues.