by Adam Thorpe
‘I wasn’t worried at all,’ he mutters, dismayed. ‘Only admiring.’
Anyway, what use is he to her, to this sensual, passionate, slender young woman? Who could have been a film star or whatever, with those looks? And then, at the door, she turns and says, ‘You are so lucky, Janie my darling, with having such a helpful son.’ And gives him a brief but dazzling smile that he is too taken aback by to acknowledge, but which pitches him into the torment of adoration all over again.
He can’t sleep. The announced storm is over the sea and closing in, the air full of electricity. His neat grey beard itches, more than before the crop. Why does she sound so mature? Is it a nurse’s thing? She’s young enough to be his daughter. Come on warmer, a voice murmurs in his ear as he’s slipping into sleep, come on warmer. It brings him up short. It could be the first line of a poem: Come on warmer, come on warmer, like a full brush upon the snowy paper. Something like that. A brush full of burnt sienna. A loaded brush. A loaded brush upon the snowy page. He used to take watercolour lessons out in the Wolds, half the age of anyone else. She is his Muse. He smiles to himself. These things happen. Poetry curled in the dungeon of his soul, wakening to the light.
Sleep is instantaneous, and the keel slides up the shore of day with scarce a bump until a clap of thunder hauls him fully awake. The rain is released as from a series of Olympian buckets and after breakfast he has to run the few yards to the car. Alex, who enjoys such calculations, has measured thirty-three inches of precipitation by the evening. A cruelly wet and chilly April so far, and we’re well over halfway through. Every book in Chapter Seven is microscopically damper than at the beginning of the month. Sheena’s Daily Mail hangs like a wet tongue out of her letter box. With luck it’ll be unreadable, tear to soggy strips in her fingers.
The next visit, and there’s no sign that he has occupied so much as a cupboard in the mysterious palace of Cosmina’s mind.
‘Sorry, Mr Watkins, do you know how you’re fixing a puncture?’
He doesn’t, not without a puncture kit. She knows a bike shop but that’s back in Lincoln. At 10 p.m. he loads her bike in the back of the van and drives her home. They talk mainly about his mother. His heart is a tom-tom in a tangled jungle. Try to be polished, he tells himself. No, try to be cool. ‘Do call me Mike, by the way.’ Home is a shared house in Shakespeare Street, near the football club on what he tells her is the wrong side of the tracks. Shared with a female friend, thank God. At least she’s well south of the Monks Road area, one of the poorest in Europe and with a population to match. He doesn’t tell her that, of course. Too close to the immigrant bone. Although he might advise her to avoid the road at night. Scary-looking types. Alcoholic derelicts, addicts, the lot. Muggings galore. Welcome to England!
There’s a late-opening pub two doors up. ‘I’m parched. How about a drink, Cosmina? You deserve it.’ It’s all perfectly natural. Unless the tom-tom lets him down with the excitement and he has a coronary.
He strains to hear her, although they are seated opposite each other at a small table. The music, his lousy ears and the yowling clientele – mostly in their twenties – combine to render human intercourse almost impossible. What he does find out is that her father was brought up in the Jewish district of Bucharest, in a street where there were three synagogues and which is now a wasteland for cars to park on since Ceaus¸escu flattened the entire area in the late 1980s, wrought-iron balconies and all. ‘Oh, sounds like any British city in the 1960s and 70s,’ he comments. Her parents were rehoused in a new North Korean-style apartment block off what was then called the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism. She is having to shout and he doesn’t catch every word but is completely entranced. Mike feels by his second or maybe third pint that this is probably the best evening of his life, that he has spent too much of the latter scowling out at the world from behind a wall of decrepit reading matter. She drinks a couple of spritzers. The young male yowlers keep glancing at her. He’s never felt so strong, so male, so young, so interesting. When she asks him about his childhood, he avoids telling her about the wicked monks or his father’s protracted demise from a burst of shrapnel decades before. ‘Basically, the most exciting thing you could hope for was a trip with your parents to the big shops in Sheffield. Redgates toyshop, Pauldens for everything, Saxone for shoes. Later, it was Violet Mays for records and Sexy Rexy for polyester shirts. What a name! The shirts stank when your sweat hit the synthetic cloth as you grooved about to your Hawkwind vinyl. La Favorita for coffee. The arcade, what was its name – Barney Goodman, that’s it – for throwing your paper-round earnings away, then a matinee in the Classic Cinema. Oh, and the Old Blue Bell to get truly pissed in for the first time.’ He goes on maybe too long. It’s way past midnight. He scratches his chin and chuckles. ‘Sorry, I get carried away. Nostalgia.’ But it’s one of his tape loops and he couldn’t have stopped it, and she’s nodding and smiling in a totally un-English way: no sourness, no contempt.
He drives very steadily and measuredly back to the cottage but still gets home in record time.
Well, I know the road blindfold, officer!
Mary-Shelley, waiting for him on the sofa, is not impressed. Her chin stays firmly on her paws, eyeing Mike with one large hawk-golden eye, the pupil retracted to a minimal and very wary vertical slit.
He did not lunge, in the end. She thanked him politely on the doorstep and vanished into the little terraced house like Eurydice into the Underworld, leaving him staring at the front door, its red paint chapped and peeled like the sunburnt skin of an adventurer.
You look quite good. He gives himself an inner thumbs-up.
He fishes out his own ancient bike from the basement – he uses it for local deliveries, part of the service – and pedals over to Shakespeare Street at lunchtime on Saturday between hesitant showers. He has a crisp Keats Poems (Everyman, of course) in a plastic lunch box in the pannier and a jar of Mum’s last batch of home-made marmalade from 2008. His van would have given the wrong image, reminded Cosmina of the care home, that scrunch of gravel disturbing the eerie calm. He waits ten minutes at the level crossing for two goods trains of inordinate length, thus doubling his journey time. His plastic cape crackles around him and appears to have a leak.
She’s not in. Why should she be? She has Saturdays off. She gets out and about. He should have phoned.
The rest of the weekend is a literal washout. An East Midlands monsoon. Even the primroses on his lawn look grey. On Sunday afternoon he stubbornly walks several miles through it, his face soggy again with wet. Some of this wet may, for all he knows, be self-supplied and salty. Sunday supper is a packet lasagne for one, scalding from the microwave. He sits in the shop on Monday and frowns at people. Both of them, to be precise. He’s behind with his website orders. People who order by Internet are lazy sods. By the end of the morning he feels he’s sitting on a thistle.
Fay looks on with that smile twisting into a smirk. She approves. There are knotty oak beams behind her head. Of course, the snap would have been taken in Sheena’s place. The brat really bothers him; she seems to be eyeing his every move. Yet she’s on his side now. In collusion! His unpaid assistant! Work experience! The book has ceased its peripatetic life, staying put for weeks, happy in the menagerie of the Animals, Pets section. This makes it worse, because he’s actually grateful. He could take the poster down. But he doesn’t dare. Not because he’s afraid of Sheena, but of the possibility that she might not have been the culprit, after all. Too earthbound. Never a trace of her sickly perfume, for instance. If he were to tell anyone else other than Alex, they’d put him into a clinic or keep him in the community on medication.
At the height of it, having read an article online about adolescent girls being unwitting poltergeists, he searched on the web for exorcists and found someone in Grantham calling herself a spirit rescuer, coaxing earthbound spirits ‘back into the light’. Out of the gloom into the great outdoors. Ursula would be bringing along her grandmother, dead for ten years
, and Archangel Raphael, guider of lost souls. The only spirit needing rescue, he decided, was his own.
Next to the poster, his clippings grace the corkboard like old blooms on a grave, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight for about twenty minutes on clear days. NEW BOOKSHOP FULL OF OLD CURIOSITIES. MIKE’S TAKING ON THE GIANTS. THE MUSTY SMELL OF SUCCESS. Their nasty paper is urinously tanned, crisp and curled at the edges; the colour photo in the Sunday magazine article of 2001 has not so much faded as fogged up: ECLECTIC AND CRAMMED WITH KNOWLEDGE: AND THAT’S JUST THE OWNER! He looks amazingly younger in his ungreyed and pre-crop brown beard, though wearing the same open plaid flannel shirt that still does duty, albeit now minus one button and frayed at the collar. He loathes being photographed or filmed: it shatters the vague illusion (as he once put it after a few pints with Alex and Alex’s many friends) that he is not a freak of nature. ‘You’re not a freak of nature, Mike,’ they all chorused faux-sympathetically like nurses.
Nurses!
He gets up, unpins the clippings and carefully secretes them in a drawer. They feel as brittle as thin toast. That’s a quiet revolution. The corkboard shows their absence as vague ghostly shapes, where dirt hasn’t settled. He looks down and sees traces of egg on his cardigan. Rest-home egg. Mum likes being spoonfed, sometimes.
Spasms of showers after the weekend deluge, the street still gurgling with run-off, the box safely indoors. His second customer in the last hour, a silver-haired woman in slacks, unknown to him, leaves after half an hour’s browse with only a cheery wave. A relief, as she kept pulling out the hardbacks with the tug of an arthritic finger on the top of the spine. Mike felt the damage in his nape. He’s given up actually snapping at people these days. He’s mellowed in his middle age. He feels a lot clearer without the cuttings.
Cosmina. The first Romanian he’s ever met. Incredibly attractive name. Like Bathsheba. Bathsheba Everdene. Yes, there is always reading. He finds Far from the Madding Crowd on the Classic Fiction shelf. Murder and attempted suicide! Unwanted pregnancies! Miscarriage! Runaways! Thomas Hardy did not flinch. Fay is staring at him knowingly. Fanny Everdene, of course. God, kid, supposing you ran away because you were with child? Who knows what your ilk get up to? The stepfather, the drugs! (Heroin, apparently. Local swanky businessmen involved. Big-time farmers, even.) For Mike the local estates are far-off planets. He is deeply ignorant. He is poor old Boldwood, never Gabriel Oak.
He closes the cheap Penguin paperback and returns it to its place. Incredible that it should contain so much within its flimsy cover (light wear, creases like white hairs down the spine). Hidden now. Silent. Ready to erupt in the mind for three quid. Sometimes the thought of all those characters crouched between covers scares him. Thousands of them, when you think of it. Good and evil and in between. Unfathomably evil in certain cases. He’s got five editions of Macbeth. He takes out the most precious, although it’s unsellable: a single volume of a Shakespeare Collected: London, 1785.
There was a fire over Christmas in a manor house in Norfolk known to have a fine library, and he swooped, but other predators had got there first – the type that scour the obituaries then offer grieving relatives derisory sums for vast and marvellous collections, boxing-up included. He was left with the detritus. He cradles the ravaged Macbeth in his hand. Nothing left but the guts: namely, the undamaged text block, its spine like charred bark, the glue split by the heat, small patches of the sewn endbands exposed, while the leather covers and boards have gone completely, revealing undamaged marbled endpapers. Yet the words become more charged, somehow, looming out of this wreckage. Come to my woman’s breafts, And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring minifters, Wherever in your fightlefs fubftances You wait on nature’s mifchief! He buries his nose in it and breathes deeply: an incense of soot and rag paper, the trapped port-and-tobacco fug of a Georgian study with horsehair wigs and languid hounds. Or was the sweet port smell emanating from the ink? Ink made from gall nut, not breast milk!
Cosmina sometimes emits a whiff of perfume, when it’s not overwhelmed by the care home’s tang of bleach and other olfactory horrors.
Surfacing, Mike feels the present like an abdominal pain. Almost everything good has been thrown aside – horse-drawn waggons, dew ponds, hay stooks, folk remedies, small bookshops, flowering meadows, letterpress printing, looms. The list is endless. The villages of England used to be sleepy, grassy little places. Now they’re metalled and scrubbed, sub-picturesque drive-thrus. They’ll do the same to countries like Romania; they are already doing it to Poland. Intensify! Advance! Grow up, you ignorant peasants! Or starve!
Sightless substances. That’s exactly what all these characters are. Just that. They exist, they outlive their authors, numberless and teeming, but they are invisible. He finds himself staring back at Fay. She goes on staring at him in turn, green-eyed and mocking. What if she’s a sightless substance now? God forbid. But she’s too garish for that, somehow. She’s completely of our benighted present. So out of place in here, he can’t bear it. Never read a book in her life. No. She wanted to, but he stopped her. Stopped her outright. Teaching her a moral lesson! Now he can almost hear her voice, shrill as a whistle. Wanker! It’s a jingle hanging in his mind, a plucked stem of cleavers, a blackberry thorn, a kind of intimacy. A cheek, anyway.
And then, turning at the door and glaring at him as he went on remonstrating, ‘Shut the fuck up, you piece of shit!’
A tongue on her. A tongue blistered by the poison of her upbringing. By the violence of gutter-level England. All out there, crouching, its thighs trembling, tattooed and drooling, only just held at bay on a straining leash.
Shut the fuck up, you piece of shit!
Now why should Sheena dictate to him what he displays in his shop? Deborah Phipps’s poster for Baltic Poetry and Pancakes Day was about his limit. Where’s his authority? Where’s his pride? His sanity, even – believing the red-haired foul-mouthed little scrag had anything to do with that hip guy and the Fermor deal, like an ancestral hearth goddess … O, that way madness lies! Let me shun that!
Anyway, the big-chested harridan barely notices him these days, his clipped beard notwithstanding – buried as she is in her new mobile phone, sending texts to her boyfriend or googling or whatever. Hardly ever using his own bottom-of-the-range Nokia mobile, purchased merely to be available to the care home in emergencies, he finds all this messaging lark a mystery. But it makes life easier in the narrow street. Not wondering what to say, when or when not to greet.
Wa-anker!
Shut the fuck up, you piece of shit!
Whispered now, not screamed. Whispered is worse. Right in his ear. He springs from the chair, seizes the MISSING poster by the side and yanks it away, ripping it from its drawing pins, which hold fast. Scrunching it up in both hands. A new decisiveness. He will not be in thrall to some blowsy bloody slag of a shopkeeper, exhibiting her giant mammaries! Four corner shreds are all that’s left. He removes the drawing pins with some difficulty and the shreds fall like confetti.
The scrunched paper ball sits in the waste-paper basket, a green eye still visible, watching him as if through a keyhole.
Wanker!
Oh, sod it.
He takes the basket out to the tiny yard at the back and tips its contents into the wheelie. He comes back feeling even clearer and bolder and glances at the Animals, Pets shelf. He glances again for confirmation.
A leaning aft of the neighbouring tomes. A crevice. A fissure. A crack that seems to enter his head, the kind of crack that the rain gets into and worsens, putting the whole structure into danger.
What’s he to do? Search the whole shop? Didn’t he check this morning? Or was that yesterday? Something is nibbling his neck like an over-affectionate Mary-Shelley. It’s called fear.
The book is not in the 50p box, which is still inside, its contents arranged as they were before, by title. He feels an icy draught through the flush of panic. No sign of Sheena. Anyone could have come in while he was out in the yard.
He trusts people. That’s why the redhead brat so annoyed him, why he reacted as he did. She broke that trust. She didn’t understand the rules. Steal from Tesco’s or WH Smith’s, fine, but not from struggling Mike’s. Not from Chapter Seven, for Chrissake. It’s all he’s got. He reaches into the drawer for his emergency hip flask, rarely resorted to. His grandfather’s originally, to screw courage to the sticking post in the mud of the trenches. A quick swig to calm the nerves. Noiseless, on tiptoes, the brandy circulates through him, quelling the cold, stoking the embers.
He slips the flask back as the bell jangles. Oh no, it’s Derek Bintwell. Retired architect, desecrator of (among many others) Grimsby, Nottingham and King’s Lynn, owner of the oldest cottage in Lincolnshire (a thatched jewel in the Wolds). The old man hobbles sweetly in with a dangerously wet umbrella. Mike usually cries, ‘Ah, the Visigoths have arrived …’ and Derek takes it on his stubbly chin with a smile. This time Mike cries, flushed with courage, ‘Ah, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu has arrived!’ and the joke doesn’t work.
‘I was intending to have a peep in your treasure chest,’ Derek says in his quavery voice. ‘The Tennyson. The wife’s at the hairdresser’s,’ he adds conspiratorially, like someone conducting an affair. His wife is younger than him: a red-cheeked beaming bundle of knitwear called Claire. ‘No rain damage? I was quite concerned. They’re still pumping down by the Witham.’
This is a familiar ritual. A locked glass-fronted cupboard holds the first editions – Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Woolf et al., and Derek likes to finger them. Mike finds the key in his desk drawer and gives the cabinet’s ancient door a little tug, shivering the spotted glass. He pulls out the precious volume by its slender spine: Poems, Chief ly Lyrical, with Tennyson’s modest rather childlike signature crouched on the title page. The sumptuous deep-blue leather binding (Riviere, c.1950), each corner blossoming with embossed gilt, is cradled in Derek’s arthritic fingers as he turns the pages. At £1,150 it is beyond the means of even a retired architect, but the man’s eyes are as wide as ever, and one day he will crack.