by Adam Thorpe
The shop opens late, at eleven. No one seems to notice. The city isn’t in crisis, full of wailing sirens, although some minor roadworks a few doors down get him wincing as the jackhammer starts. He could begin at eleven as a rule, stay up after the bewitching hour and sleep in. Or do an early spot of gardening to stop himself becoming a Lincolnshire lout. Prune the roses. The garden has not been at its best since Mum moved to the home.
His only buying customer is a gaunt young bloke in a charcoal-black coat who seems familiar, but Mike has no desire to chat. Spot on his nose, needs dealing with. Maybe a boil. The youth hangs about in front of the Animal, Pets shelf, so Mike keeps a wary eye. Eventually he’s handed Kitty Love, to his surprise. Hardback. Stock photos of cute kittens, a pink bow adorning the fluffy feline on the cover. Present for a younger relative, presumably. Spine in good condition, pages clean.
‘Call it two fifty.’
‘Wow. Cut-price. Reverse inflation. Celebration time. Funny to think that raptors kill small cats. Like, we’re all prey to something, even if we’re predators ourselves. Mother Nature takes no hostages?’
Overcome with a flash flood of nausea, Mike tells him he has to make an urgent phone call. Give them an inch of rope, they’ll hang you with boredom. ‘Have the book on me.’
He picks up the phone and dials the home. It can always guarantee a few long minutes of medical detail. The young man turns to leave, trailing a strangely supercilious smile below a pair of eyes that look like the twin entrances of a railway tunnel. He opens the door and the jackhammer’s urgent stutter grows a lot louder. ‘Fuck off, roadworks!’ He’s grinning into the room.
Mum is very ‘settled’ today. Increased dosage, probably.
Listening to Your Dog hasn’t moved an inch.
He picks up a MISSING poster at the police station (‘It all helps, sir’) and pins it on his corkboard, next to Baltic Poetry and Pancakes Day.
Fay Sheenan looks directly at him. Now that’s a coincidence: Sheena, Sheenan. Life can be stranger than fiction, mate. In fact, Fay’s emerald-green eyes follow him wherever he goes. Even when he’s at a sharp angle. Sliding round to the side. The toothy smile. The dapple of freckles on the nose. Disconcerting.
A temporary measure until things calm down.
He checks the Animals, Pets shelf regularly. No change! However, he has this strange sense now that the book is just a material object. Not all books are. Over the years, from time to time the bound and glued wodges of paper, board, card, leather and ink, nothing in themselves without a visiting intelligence, lifeless as stone, have all started shouting, bursting into a combined bedlam. Thank God it’s only ever been a split-second awareness. All those impacted words, like the energy of the sun in coal. Mike’s harem, Alex calls it. (He won’t tell Cosmina that.) Mike suspects that Alex himself, however, has never had anyone, male or female. Not part of Lincoln’s gay scene, nor any other scene. Sexless. Man-child. In love only with his gadgets, his machines, his screwdrivers. Mike doesn’t probe.
Cosmina’s afternoon shifts for March and April are on Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. A cluster. Otherwise he has to visit in the morning or over lunchtime, or impossibly late on Friday to catch her night shift. She has Saturdays off. Unless he changes his opening times or simply closes the shop on Thursdays (an unimaginable revolution), he won’t see her before Sunday. He has to endure the desert sands between now and then.
Listening to Your Dog is grounded, it seems. So it was bloody Sheena, the tarty toerag. She’s only come in here once, late last year, a few weeks before the brat did a bunk, and that was to shout at him from out of her fresh tan. The incident! Admittedly he has never stepped over her threshold. Chalk and cheese. Paper and rain. Sometimes there’s overspill from her fancy boutique in the form of upmarket mums looking for an ‘original’ Beatrix Potter, Dr Seuss, Tove Janssen, their offspring intent on hand-printing pages with slime and chocolate. ‘They begin at £350,’ he enjoys telling them. But then the mums have come straight from Mother Hubbard – whose name is pure irony.
A client in a grey blazer over a white T-shirt is browsing the Travel shelves today: probably a Londoner, judging by his red sneakers with zips up the side, his snazzy jeans, his handsome urban cool. He emerges from the Asia section with a big glossy hardback of photographs from Nepal, The Land of Mystery. What he really wants to look at is the Patrick Leigh Fermor in the window: a crisp first edition of A Time to Keep Silence. Mike reaches over the iron rod and plucks out the book. ‘I quite like Fermor,’ the customer says in a shy voice that no doubt serves to get people jumping about in some hip agency. ‘Have you actually read this one?’
‘An account of his stays in various monasteries. Spell-binding language, even if you dislike Catholicism as much as I do, which is a lot.’ He snaps his mouth shut. Mike’s five years among sadistic tonsured pederasts who liked to feel their frocks flap around their ankles is judiciously reburied.
The man starts to flick through the book. He pauses on a page and brings it closer to his face. ‘It was a wonderful room to wake up in,’ he reads out loud. ‘Dreamless nights came to an end with no harder shock than that of a boat’s keel grounding on a lake shore.’
‘To be honest, most of it’s as good,’ says Mike.
The man looks up. His striking hazel eyes are shining. ‘I’d like to live like that. I keep plugging away in bloody Hammersmith and sleep very badly and wake up feeling shit. This book is talking to me. The first sentence I saw.’
‘Bibliomancy,’ says Mike. ‘A type of divination. Opening a book at random to see what comes up. Sortes Sanctorum, if you use the Bible. The Romans used Virgil or Homer.’
The man slowly shakes his head. He is slightly stubbled.
‘Bang the bongos, that’s amazing.’
‘Lovely first edition,’ Mike continues. ‘Still with its dust wrapper, almost no shelf wear. A spot of rubbing on the spine tips and corners, otherwise very clean. Demand is rising for Fermor.’
The bell tinkles. It’s Alex. Mike would like to shoo him away. The sales pitch can’t be interrupted, you have to keep the pressure lightly applied.
‘How much again?’
‘Two hundred. I’ll let it go for a hundred and eighty but no lower.’
Snazzy jeans thinks about it, turning the pages less imperiously because it might be his at any moment. Mike finds his honeyish scent intrusive but pleasant, like an expensive cigar. The man’s mobile is bound to go off, smashing the sale’s delicate construction. Sorry, I’ll come back another time. Hello? Hello? Yes, it’s me …
Ingvar Lidholm’s Kontakion on the radio. The right atmosphere. Alex is hovering in his lab coat and sticking-out ears looking as geeky as ever, holding two sherbert dips. Please, not now. Mike scowls at him, mouthing Go away.
‘Yup, it’s a deal. Oh, and I’ll take this as well,’ the man says, tapping a book that he has left on the table. Mike hadn’t noticed. From the 50p box.
It’s the 1968 Blue Peter annual with the yellowed tape on the spine head, half-detached back strip and all the puzzles done. Incredible. Mike, feeling generous, says he’ll throw that one in. He adds that if the local Lincolnshire poet, Lord Alfred Tennyson, is of any interest …? Or speaking of dogs, he’s got a classic, signed by the author, Cliff Bigstaff. Sorry, Cecil. Cecil Bigstaff. Cecil Bigstaff himself. Do you have a dog, by any chance …?
Alex has gone, doubtless in a huff.
‘Er, I’ll take those three vols on Lincoln Cathedral too. How much?’
‘They’re scarce. We’ll say a hundred.’
‘Done. And the Nepal book. That’s for my son. Gap year.’
‘It’ll take up most of his rucksack,’ Mike quips, gratification bubbling in his chest.
The man is turning over its smooth pages: impossibly lofty mountains and impossibly ethnic locals in smudgy clouds of incense, stimulating reader inadequacy as much as inspiration, at least in Mike’s case. Anxiety in the man’s. ‘Joey’s going for six months,’ he says. ‘
I am frankly shit scared. Earthquakes and avalanches.’
‘Tell him it’s a present from me.’
What’s four pounds fifty? And it’s one of those stupid super-wide formats that stick out of any shelf, however deep.
The man murmurs his thanks, sounding embarrassed. ‘Hey, I’d love you to write in it. Just put For Joey and then your name. If that’s OK? I’ve told him about this place,’ he adds, glancing at the cuttings.
Happy Journeying, Mike scribbles after the lad’s name. ‘And I’m sure he’ll be fine.’
Known as far as Hammersmith. That’s a galaxy away.
Alone again, Mike turns to Fay and gives her a wink. Everything from now on is going to go very right. Sunday is only three days off. He scratches his voluminous facial growth, months thick. His lips are no longer visible. He seldom washes it, let alone grooms it. It is probably seething with its own indigenous life. He might as well own a poodle. He needs to move on.
On the way home he stops off at the new Romanian shop on the edge of town and buys a packet of spicy sausages, a six-pack of Kalnapilis beer and a jar of green walnut jam. The place smells exotically foreign.
That evening, after his delicious supper, he clips away at his beard until it is no longer eccentric. Neither is it hipsterish. His face seems to emerge, blinking, into the light. His mouth is liberated, lips fatter than he remembers. He uses it to sing along to a couple of tracks on A Kiss in the Dreamhouse. Incredible: he remembers most of the words. Handcuffed in lace, blood and sperm / Swimming in poison … The needle sticks and he thumps the bare floorboards outside the bathroom with his foot: it works. He feels twenty years old.
Apart from their pallid prisoner-in-a-dungeon tint, his overall looks are revealed as being acceptable. Why the Hell did he stick so long with that absurd accessory? That ridiculous backwoods mask? There is a pile of brindled curls on the bathroom floor sufficient to stuff a pillow.
‘Michael,’ he remembers his mum saying in her soft voice, when he came back with it from his first year doing English at Sheffield, ‘don’t you think you should shave more regularly? Or are you growing a fashionable beard? I’m not sure I like men with beards.’ They were sitting having tea in the cottage garden. Fitful sunlight. He asked her what was wrong with bearded men. ‘Oh,’ she laughed, looking up at the hazy cirrus, her long weaver’s fingers rippling in the air. ‘That’s a long story! You do whatever you want. Far be it from me to dictate.’
Later that summer, among the photo albums, he found a loose snapshot featuring his mother on a horse with a dark-bearded, thickset young man holding the bridle, in long boots and braces. Me with Dan was written on the back. A long story, no doubt. She looked about nineteen, her hair black as night. She has no photos of herself as a child: she was taken in by Dr Barnardo’s at the age of four. She believed her unknown mum was from Poplar. On leaving the orphanage, Janie Watkins remade herself. Mike has always marvelled at her indomitable courage, her capacity to look forward. Now he wonders if death wouldn’t be kinder.
He’s nervous of what Cosmina might say about his new look. But she isn’t there on Sunday. His heart nosedives. She has emigrated back to Romania, claims Bronwen, one of the other nurses, whose fat smugness Mike finds as repellent as her body odour. ‘Ooh, you’ve gone all pale.’ She laughs. ‘April fool! No, our Cosmina’s got one of them so-called migraines,’ she adds with an attempt at withering scorn. ‘Did your beard fall off or what?’
The person who has taken up residence in his mother’s head is more abusive than usual and calls him Magnus. It’s because Cosmina isn’t there.
‘What’s my own bloody name then, Magnus?’
‘Janie. Janie Watkins. I can read you some Shelley?’ She adored Shelley, once.
‘Not on your nelly. Go fuck yourself, Magnus.’
It’s as if Mum’s early, mysterious years before the orphanage have erupted into the daylight, smelling of coal and gas and outdoor lavatories.
‘Oh,’ says Sheena, addressing him across the lane on Monday. ‘Hello stranger. You look quite good,’ she adds, with a note of surprise.
He mumbles some inanity and scurries back inside. You look quite good. They probably said the same to the Elephant Man when they put him in a suit.
The Blue Peter bet lost, and it being Good Friday, as suitable a day as any other for a painful and protracted death, Mike spends his windfall on the trip to Fantasy Island at Ingoldmells, with Alex driving calmly between the leafless hedges. The sun’s out, but there is a thick frost clinging to the winter cabbages, the churned mud frozen in shock. ‘It’s getting warmer,’ Alex reassures him. ‘Spring is champing on the bit.’
He gets drenched on Log Flume, all but vomits on the Twister and thinks he is going to die on the Odyssey, hurtling and looping and corkscrewing through the sky at the equivalent of sixteen storeys up, an icy sea wind adding to the drama. He screams primally, to his dismay, when spun round very fast and upside down on Amazing Confusion. Alex’s face, when he glances across to look, is an alien’s, quivering like a blancmange. But Mike does get in touch with his inner child, just as promised – reliving the terror (thrashings from the holy brothers at St Bartholomew’s, his Catholic grammar, their concomitant threats of Hellfire – Mum and Dad entirely ignorant). The humiliation, too. The ghastly fumblings. I have been one acquainted with the night.
‘Robert Frost, Alex. A very suitable name. Can I go home now? Please?’
On the drive back, his gastric juices settling after the whirlpool, he tells his friend the latest news (the book in the window, the poster, the hip poseur in snazzy jeans and zip-up sneakers), like someone recounting long-past battles from the comfort of his sitting room. He has not yet spoken of the original clash with Sheena, let alone of his brief encounter with the flame-haired runaway; Alex is always telling him to lighten up, tick the generosity box. He should have let the girl keep the bloody thing in the first place.
‘I saw the poseur,’ remarked Alex. ‘You never noticed me. But then he was a handsome sod. By the way,’ he went on quickly before Mike could expostulate, ‘I’m not sure they’d have allowed you on the Odyssey with your old-style beard. Could’ve got caught in the machinery.’
Mike anticipates recounting it all to Cosmina, making her limpid blue eyes widen with wonder, but one of the inmates up the corridor chooses to die noisily surrounded by a gaggle of even noisier relatives and he hardly sees her. Mum scowls at the chocolate egg and six-pack of ginger ale (her favourite drink) that he’s brought along; she doesn’t open her mouth either to eat or talk. ‘She won’t touch anything fizzy,’ Bronwen tells him with an air of intense satisfaction. The telly’s showing some poor young milkman being offered a wad of cash if he’ll do his round in a pink top hat and flowery apron, among other humiliations. A Year in the Life used to be one of Mum’s favourite programmes, uncharacteristically, even when it deteriorated into total trash. Now she couldn’t care less, ignoring the audience’s shrieks and screams. He watches it vicariously: it reminds him of when Mum was hale. It belongs in an ancient tradition. Degradation and irreverence. Did Shakespeare watch the bear-baiting next door? Bound to have done, now and again.
He goes back home with the six-pack and makes himself a Gordon’s gin buck. It’s so oilily pleasant: the juniper mingling with the ginger, the lid of lemon knocking his upper lip, the overall alcohol level levelling his mind to a satisfying mush. He’s survived. You need diversions from existence. An induced coma, for instance.
On Easter Sunday Mike with a headache instead of a rucksack walks twelve miles in the Wolds through a landscape of tender greys and ends up in an isolated pub he’s never tried before, sipping timorously at a pint of Yella Belly Gold. If the advertised roaring open fire were more than a damp log smoking on embers, he’d feel sufficiently Lawrentian to find a meaning in life. But at least his head is full of nettled paths and lone churches, sweeps of early corn, knolls and dips of rough pasture against nothing but the sky swept by cirrus, as if the entire co
unty is lying on a high Himalayan plateau. A pair of circling buzzards, a sparrowhawk, loads of crows, spirals of noisy rooks, the usual. His calves brushing early cow parsley beside the thickening woods. Fitful sunlight for an hour at midday, a bit of mizzle, then both again at three, the weather with no idea what it’s up to. Nepal would be a good idea. Tibet even better.
The book – the book – stays put on the shelf. A synonym for the state of play with Cosmina. She is always busy, with a mere glance into Janie’s room just to check. Short of staff. Maximum profit for the owners of Snowdrops Care Homes (who apparently live in Ibiza). Inmates ill or expiring just at the wrong moment. Cosmina has not noticed the loss of half his facial hair. He is not the centre of her universe. Not even a twinkle on the night’s starr’d face. And then, two weeks later, the sun shafting dramatically through Turneresque skies charged with imminent storm, she has to take his mum’s blood for some test or other, and she asks him to hold the brittle wrist as the needle probes the faint vein in the crook of his mother’s arm amid the blotched and sagging folds.
‘How is it called, what you feel with this?’
Mike feels slightly faint, watching the needle pierce the storm-coloured skin. ‘A prick?’
‘Yes, thank you. Just a little prick, Janie my sweetie.’ The two of them are so close he is all but resting his lips in the cormorant plumage of her hair. His bare forearm – he’s rolled up his shirtsleeves in the care home’s hot fug – brushes her soft pale cheek. Mike’s heart swells like an old leathery balloon become smooth and beautiful.
‘You’re a qualified nurse then?’ he comments in what he considers an admiring tone.
‘HCAs are allowed to do such simple things,’ she says defensively, the syringe now almost full of his mother’s crimson juice.
‘HCA?’
‘Healthcare assistant. Please, don’t you worry for your mum. There we are, Janie. You didn’t hurt one bit, did you?’
His mother glowers, mute for once, her toothless mouth a crumple of grievance. The dentures were hurled at the wall yesterday: he has to sort out the insurance.