by Adam Thorpe
It is almost afternoon opening time, but Hannah is approaching, her neck swaddled in a bright-blue scarf purely for the look. She bears a takeaway coffee in a paper cup from Quickies, the unfortunately named sandwich place a few doors down. She does this every so often, but he’s never grateful, not only because the coffee is foul (cheap and watery, tasting of its paper container), but because it puts him in her debt. ‘For me? Hannah, thank you. Take a book from the box in return.’
He glances down, runs a quick, nervous eye over the battered spines. Herself Surprised; Farmer’s Glory; This Was My World; Meet Me at Midnight … Gone, gone! Safely down in the cathedral crypt like an entombed corpse! A graven martyr! Hannah is as over-grateful as she is overnice, flicking through the poor rejected souls as if it’s Christmas: ‘Oh, I so love second-hand bookshops, but I daren’t enter or I’d have to be surgically removed!’ She pulls out Approach to the Ballet, a seriously edgeworn hardback from the 1950s. ‘Perfect. Thank you so much!’ He wonders why it was ever in there: it’s probably a collectable. He is trying to prise off the coffee’s plastic lid without burning his fingers. ‘You do ballet, then?’
‘Cripes no, I was whizzy at it when I was six or something, but I’m far too fat these days.’ Hannah only says this because she is slim and lovely, and knows it, apart from an attractive fleshiness to her belly. But Mike can’t stand her teeth-grating presence for more than a few minutes. ‘Hey,’ Hannah goes on (as she always does), ‘this is perfect for decor. The shop’s. Casually leaning on the pepper-pot shelf. Awesome. Thank you so much.’ He is still struggling with the lid, but the paper walls of the cup are too flexible. ‘No,’ says Hannah, touching his hand. ‘It’s got a sip lid – you sip it through that little hole.’
She meets his bewilderment with a shiny-eyed gaze over a pitying smile. If her chatter didn’t test him beyond endurance, he would have fallen madly in love with her at first sight. She is as pleasant and smiley as his mum was, before her affliction, but the latter only talked sense.
How did his mum’s affliction begin? ‘I’ll make us tea,’ she’d say as he came in from work, only to find the tea cosy already harbouring a now tepid and over-brewed pot. ‘Oh, silly me.’
‘Never mind, Mum, join me in the ministry of the terminally vague, along with most of my customers.’
He sips through the hole in the lid, which is half off and therefore unstable, spilling a little of the contents. What he really wants is his favourite Samuel Johnson mug and the usual teaspoon of coffee granules boiled up in milk on the dented pan in the basement, stirred to a sepia creaminess and dusted with cinnamon, a little umber island in the middle like a spinning galaxy. That’s how his day starts. If it doesn’t start like that, the day is always hopeless.
She is looking up at the multi-paned, proto-Dickensian bay window, in which reside (at present) two of his favourite wares, displayed on wire easels: a signed morocco-bound slightly foxed Kipling and a rare edition of Wilkie Collins’s Basil: a Story of Modern Life, one page of which is badly browned by a now skeletal pressed flower, the vegetal fragrance still detectable whenever Mike brings his nose to the cleft between the pages.
‘Oh,’ she cries, suddenly pointing, ‘look at that simply divine doggy book. His wonderfully awful haircut and totally cheesy sweater!’
Mike follows the line of her slim finger, extended by a dark-purple and very sharp false nail. With a familiar electric flash from toes to scalp, he spots the addition at the back, like a ghoul in a group photo: that idiot with his sideburns, bouffant hairdo and Zappa moustache in a thick polo-neck sweater with diagonal stripes, crouched with an arm around the vast dog and gazing out, stupid and intense, with a hazy English field beyond. The book is leaning against the horizontal metal rod that Mike installed himself two decades back, a subtle separation of window display from the shop’s bowels.
‘Christ in Heaven,’ he growls, to Hannah’s surprise. He has spilt more coffee because his hand is trembling.
He leaves her clutching her ballet book on the pavement, the door jangling to a close. He stares at Listening to Your Dog as if it’s a rucksack left on its own in a train station. Hannah is watching him through the grubby panes. He smiles dimly at her, raises his paper cup, then retreats to his cubbyhole where customers pay at an ancient mahogany desk. He has sticky liquid on his hand – he has to wipe it before touching any book, even that book. The box of tissues in the cubbyhole is empty. He groans, descends to the sink in the basement.
The trickle of water must have hidden the tinkle of the bell because the floorboards above are creaking. Unless the door hasn’t been opened at all. He gazes up at the beams. Last night, in the deepest middle of it, he woke with two original lines of verse in his head. Idly, as if to dictation, he completed the fragment, from two lines to four over a Horlicks down in the kitchen, scribbled it all in his notepad and then went straight back to bed. This occasionally happens because Mike at one time wanted to be a poet more than anything else – encouraged by his mother, for whom, along with weaving, poetry was everything, especially the works of A. E. Housman. Of course he failed, failed himself and totally failed his poor mum. This morning he found the scribble and assigned the lines to memory, partly as a way to exercise the latter’s battered powers.
Will I leave my dreams and go,
Or should I gather them to me now?
Might you be there to greet me, so
I know just where, and why, and how?
He finds himself repeating the lines down in the hold. He’s in a mess. It will either be Hannah, wondering how he is, or a customer, the first of the afternoon, infuriatingly bang on opening time. Give me a break! He retrieves his coffee and mounts to the upper world. No sign of Hannah. Deborah Phipps, a loud-voiced retiree on the arts festival committee who likes her drink, looks up. ‘Good gracious, Michael, you never struck me as the takeaway type. Did I disturb you down there, in your secret takeaway hideaway? Spot the rhyme!’
The ribbed paper cup sits shamefacedly in his hand. It’s a relief, for once, to see the dreadful woman.
‘Sorry to disappoint, Deborah.’
‘Do you still have the Solti biography? I’ve had breakfast with him on two occasions, both memorable.’
‘You were only in here the day before yesterday. It’s not greatly in demand.’
‘Oh,’ says Deborah through her signature snort, like a trumpet with a sock in it, ‘do you keep tabs on us all? You should do OAP discounts, by the way.’
‘You know my policy on discounts. Same with deposits.’
‘I do indeed. ’
The tall elderly lush disappears into the Music section at the back, huddled along with Fashion, Textiles, Psychology and so on in its own narrow niche, the L of the ancient floor plan. He is glad of her company, for the first time ever. Someone must have known exactly where to find the offending tome and brought it back from the cathedral shop. On the other hand, every one of his books sports a Chapter Seven slip, with the address and a tiny woodcut of his distressed frontage. He must have left it in by mistake: what a useless criminal he would be! Maybe it was left when he was on the loo before opening time: a helpful verger, popping in and not knowing what to do with it. He switches on the radio in the cubbyhole and drops the paper cup into the waste-paper basket; it seems to explode. He is slopping up the mess with loo roll, swearing under his breath, when Deborah emerges from the back.
‘If you’re doing so badly, Michael—’
‘Who says I’m doing badly?’
‘You should have filter coffee, wicker chairs, that sort of thing. Like that marvellous place in Much Wenlock. Philosophical and literary debates. I’ll chair them.’
He straightens stiffly. ‘I could just have customers who actually buy books,’ he says, staring her down. She has the icy blue eyes of a death-camp guard. Deborah has a problem with money. With spending it.
‘Oh, listen. I thought it was. Panufnik. I adore Panufnik. Sinfonia Sacra. “Hymn to the Virgin”. The poor m
an’s reputation just disappeared when he fled to England, having been numero uno in Soviet Poland. Can’t you turn it up? It’s hardly background music.’
He swivels the tranny’s volume knob on a crackling blaze of static. Not just a bus shelter with books now, but a concert hall.
She unrolls a poster. ‘Now, I’d be grateful if you’d do your bit for integration and put this up somewhere prominent.’ BALTIC POETRY AND PANCAKES DAY. Last year’s had been an unexpected and rip-roaring success: heaps of grilled sausages from Estonia, Latvian almond cakes shaped like pretzels and some equally delicious Lithuanian doughnuts. He sold a few books too.
‘You ought to do one for Romania,’ he says.
‘One step at a time. Poland’s in the wings, for next year.’
‘Deborah, do you have a dog?’
‘A lovely little cat called Robert. The poor thing has weak kidneys.’
‘It’s all the same,’ Mike says. He removes Listening to Your Dog from the window and thrusts it at the woman, to her astonishment. ‘It’s an amazing work, a collectable, and I want you to have it. With my apologies.’
‘Apologies for what?’
‘For never having precisely the right book in stock. The book that you would actually buy. So I’m giving you one. I’d be incredibly happy if you’d accept.’
‘I do believe,’ said Deborah, glaring at him, ‘you are taking the mick. And given that I am a regular customer …’
Mike is alone again with the last moments of the Sinfonia Sacra. He sits behind his desk in what Alex calls the Imperial Throne (carved baronial chair in honey-coloured oak, Victorian, picked up for a fiver long ago) and closes his eyes, drowning in the trumpets’ final summons, their call to prayer and battle. Someone is playing a game. He hopes they are a stranger to him. He turns the radio down. Listening to Your Dog is still in his left hand. He expects it to twitch or turn rotten and send gangrene creeping up through his forearm as in an M. R. James story or some idiotic horror film.
He leaves the book on his desk in the cubbyhole. It’s better visible, out in the open. He pictures himself driving down to Mablethorpe and hurling it into the sea. That’s the answer! Add to the litter on the Lincolnshire coast! Or let it be taken by the currents to Siberia!
It’ll come back. Like driftwood. Salt-swollen and cracked. Leaving a puddle on the old coir mat by the desk, with its barely legible WELCOME ABOARD, or on the new coir mat by the door (a gift from Alex: It’s NICE to be NICE). Or it’ll wait in a corner, crouched and growling, ready to give him a heart attack.
Tonight is care-home night. He tries to go two or three times a week and once at the weekend. He managed to jot down the personnel’s shift rota for the months of March and April: the Romanian nurse called Cosmina will be there until ten this evening. If he coincides with her no more than twice in a week, it won’t look too suspicious – too much like courting. She also does night shifts and morning shifts, but they are hopeless for him.
He spots Sheena taking another cigarette break. She’s started smoking again. Of course it’s that pestilential woman from across the way. Who else could it be? She’s three paces across the cobbles, the sloping lane is that narrow; she has a motive, vengeance. That half-feral girl did a bunk, possibly in distress, back in January. But he had nothing to do with it! Nip in, nip out. Coast clear. It’s been going on exactly a week; it feels like months.
The girl’s face taunts him from almost every shop in Lincoln, but the posters already seem overfamiliar. Some have been taken down, presumably as more details have emerged of the girl’s home life, her truancy, her being caught shoplifting in a community supermarket on the day of her disappearance and ‘a string’ of similar offences, including petty drug-dealing on behalf of her renegade stepfather, initially arrested on suspicion of murder (another cock-up by the brainless boys in blue). No way was Chapter Seven about to display a MISSING poster. Pointless, anyway, given the light footfall. Sheena must have noticed that he wasn’t displaying Fern, or Faith, or whatever her name was. Is. Teaching him a lesson.
He ought to have a word with the woman. No, better: he can give her the book. Fly the white flag and hand it over. Quits. It’s so obvious it shrieks.
The next time she’s having a fag, he steps over, the book tucked out of sight in a hessian bag. Her latest catch, Paul of the shoe shop, can’t approve of the smoking. He’s always been pretty uptight about clean living, would buy the odd cut-price tome about yoga or vegetarianism over the years. Now he’s crippled, as you’re banned from saying. That must be truly terrible, but Mike never knew him very well. He wasn’t the chatty type. Maybe it was because Mike never bought the man’s shoes. Overpriced and made out of fungus or something.
‘Sheena, hi, how’s things?’
Her eyes narrow abruptly under their blue-shaded lids. Her ample cleavage is braving the chill, for it is, as usual, uncovered. The woman’s a tart!
She picks a shred of tobacco off her painted lip and tucks the hand under her other arm.
‘I see you had that dragon to keep you busy first thing.’
‘Deborah Phipps? Never buys a thing. She’s all bluster. Comes in for the company. One of my best customers, as we say in the trade.’
‘Bluster. That’s a nice word,’ she says reflectively. Not sardonically. Mike feels an unexpected twinge of affection for the harpy. Unbelievable!
‘Here.’ He produces the book from the bag. ‘I want you to have this. It’s been weighing on my conscience.’
She looks down at it but doesn’t move a limb. Not a tremor of guilt. ‘I don’t have a dog.’
‘It’s not that. It’s the book Fern tried to, um, remove. Faith, sorry.’
Sheena stares at him. ‘It’s the thought that counts. But you can give the book to Fay yourself.’
‘Fay. That’s it. She’s not here,’ he pointed out, discomfited by her stare. Of course it isn’t Sheena. She’s an adult. She’s beyond such things.
‘Oh, she’ll be back. A bit wiser.’ Sheena taps her forehead. ‘I sense it. That she’ll be back. No worries. I told her I was an ever-open door.’
Swing-door Sheena, Mike muses. Lincoln’s very own Circe. No, Lady Audley. Jezebel, anyway. He can see Fay looking at him from the shop’s interior. Maybe he should relent and put a poster up. Might make a difference.
What on earth was he becoming? Someone who believes in ghosts? But Fay isn’t a ghost. As Sheena says, she’ll be back, breathing and fully fleshed and ready to call him nasty names again.
‘Let’s hope so,’ says Mike, giving up.
Sheena’s large eyes are gleaming in the soft afternoon light. A watery sniff now. Oh, God.
Turning on his heel brusquely, as if fearful of contagion, he crosses the divide back into his own domain and slips Listening to Your Dog into its former place in the Animals, Pets section. With a furtive air, like a reverse shoplifter.
At the care home that evening, while Mum’s having a nap, something unexpected occurs. Cosmina has a chat with him about Romania.
His heart does stuff that it’s not used to: swelling and contracting, for instance. She is alone and lost, far from her family. He is alone and lost too, but in the land that he was born into. With a charming old cottage crying out for scenes of domestic bliss. Books, an open fire, a Rayburn (although he mostly uses the microwave). He has so much to offer her, and she has even more to offer him that can’t be quantified. She likes going to rock concerts, there are big music festivals in her country which she never missed when she was living there, taking along her father. Nine Inch Nails, Above and Beyond. You escape yourself! He nods as if going to rock concerts is his favourite pastime.
From now on it will be. As it once was. After all, why are his ears so lousy? He was at university in Sheffield! Descending every week into the sticky-floored, acoustic jacuzzi of the Limit nightclub, squeezed between a chippie and a sweet shop, scouring his lugholes with the likes of Siouxsie and the Banshees or the Cramps. Mike Watkins, long black hair,
jumping up and down like a madman. Over thirty years back. There’s a lot people don’t know. Cosmina has never heard of the Cramps. Or Siouxsie, for that matter.
He comes back home and makes his Horlicks and sits until two in the morning staring into the fire, Mary-Shelley purring on his lap. He can hear wedding bells. They ring for you. Chloe never fired his heart, only his imagination. Somehow, half of his bottle of Jameson slips down his throat, merely adding to the blue flames of unrequited love, his heart a Christmas pudding and applause all round. He could hire Cosmina’s eyes to keep watch, but she has a full-time job and he can’t afford to pay her anyway. Unless they were to marry and she became his business partner. We’re all as one in Europe: he’s looked it up, and in January 2014 – in less than two years – Romanians won’t even have to have a work permit. They’ll be a proper part of the family.
He chuckles inwardly, as if he’s divided into two people. One romantic, one a total cynic. Then he harrumphs. Like a character out of Trollope. Your number’s up, mate, once you start to harrumph. One obstacle to love is that he can’t imagine a woman kissing him without a shiver of disgust. His own disgust. Imagine kissing himself! Ugh. What a thought. So how could anyone else do it? He’s always thought this, ever since his first bout of acne at fifteen. Or maybe since his father died. Around the same period. Cosmina’s exquisite face moving slowly towards his own, the bearded gargoyle. Maybe he has to begin loving the gargoyle. Start with the mirror. He holds his crystal glass up and looks into its bevelled flank. Ugh. Thank God for the beard.