by Phil Rickman
The way Gwenda’s Bar did. Under the tawny lantern light, you walked down this widening alley of crooked bookshelves, all books priced at a pound, before you emerged into this oak-panelled parlour, which smelled like pubs used to smell, and the embrace of laughter.
The panelling was chipped and stained in places, shabby-chic, without the chic. About twenty people were drinking real ale and local wine, served at fat farmhouse dining tables with chips and gouges in them. The bar was like a butcher’s slab, lit by globular frosted lanterns, teardrops of cracked yellow light. Robin, meanwhile, was lit by most of a bottle of something from a Welsh vineyard.
Would’ve been churlish to keep refusing. They were nice people, even Gareth Nunne who’d tried to rip him off and wound up inspiring him. None of them what he’d been expecting, still figuring that the stringy entrails of his meagre knowledge of the book trade would be exposed on Gwenda’s rugged bar and publicly picked over by experts.
Her name was Gwenda Protheroe. Someone said she used to be in the theatre. Sometimes she served behind the bar, sometimes just sat on a tall stool, wearing a little black dress and a wry, sympathetic smile that was kind of sexy in a momsy way. Not long after he’d walked in here Gwenda had told him the bar was an attempt to restore the way rural pubs used to be in the old days – parlour pubs, someone’s living room where ale was served. Like the Three Tuns in Hay used to be before it was done up, back when it was run by someone universally revered called Lucy.
Not actually that long ago, apparently, but a rough old parlour pub wouldn’t be economically viable now, which was why this had become a wine bar, also serving coffee and food. But Gwenda said this was just one small retro development. In other areas, Hay was in danger of going badly wrong.
‘I hear there was a woman with plans to open a nail bar there,’ she said now.
‘Where?’
Gareth Nunne looked up from his cloudy beer.
‘In the Back Fold shop,’ Gwenda said. ‘Oliver’s shop – Robin’s shop. Seriously, a flaming nail bar.’
‘What, like carpentry supplies?’
‘You’re an old fool, Gary,’ Gwenda said fondly.
Just a trace of a London accent there. Gareth Nunne smiled into his beer, his port wine stain skin blemish laid around one eye and down into his left cheek.
‘And what,’ he said, ‘did Mr James Oliver say to that, Gwennie?’
‘Well, I’ve heard several versions, but some might’ve been made up, so I won’t pass them on. Yet.’
Nunne turned bleary eyes on Robin.
‘He know what kind of books you’re gonner be selling?’
‘Leave the boy alone,’ Gwenda said. ‘He doesn’t need to worry about that.’
‘No, come on, what did you tell him, Mr Thorogood?’
‘Uh…’ Robin shrugged. ‘I just said books. General books.’
‘So you didn’t mention The Teen Witch Style-guide—’
Robin threw up his hands.
‘Aw, you just had to pick on that one. It’s a book I did some creepy Goth drawings for, is all. They dumped a dozen copies on me.’
‘Get off his back,’ Gwenda said. ‘A bookshop’s a bookshop. Teen witches are fine by me. Not that you find them much any more.’
‘Period value?’ Robin said.
‘There, see, he’s learning.’ Gwenda smiled at him. ‘So you’ve been an illustrator, then, Robin?’
‘Gwenda, sweetheart.’ A murmur. ‘This is the man who gave form to Lord Madoc.’
It was Gore. Welsh rugby shirt, white jeans.
Gwenda looked blank.
‘The Intergalactic Celt?’ Gore said.
Robin gazed uncomfortably into his glass. Gwenda raised a forefinger.
‘Hold on, those the books you used to collect when you were a kid? The warrior chappie with big hair? Great pile of them down the bottom of your wardrobe?’
‘I know it wasn’t really aimed at kids,’ Gore said to Robin. ‘But I was a precocious reader. Man, I wanted to be that guy. What happened to him?’
‘He finished,’ Robin said tightly. ‘The writer adopted a new pseudonym and started something else that didn’t need an illustrator.’ Felt his fingers forming fists. ‘The way no one seems to need one any more.’
‘That a fact,’ Gore said.
He had his hands curled around Gwenda’s shoulder, like doing a massage. Jeez… they were an item? Gwenda and Gore, who had to be fifteen years younger?
‘Cover designs get done in-house with Photoshop and other… similar money-saving devices,’ Robin said. ‘Talent-saving devices. The days when commissioned artwork was part of the creative process, when books were illustrated by legends like Mervyn Peake, that’s history. The days when you’d do a full-size painting for a book or an album sleeve, and the original was worth good money… that’s over.’
Robin unclenched his fists. An uneasy silence had broken out.
He swallowed some wine. His face felt hot. Mistake. Hadn’t intended for this to surface. Not so soon anyway, because it was one explanation of why he’d felt driven to open a bookstore. And what kind of bookstore it had to be. And he’d been sitting on this, thinking it was gonna make him look stupid.
‘I take it you don’t like publishers very much, then, Robin?’ Gwenda said gently.
‘It’s… one reason why we’re here. We came over one day, and I’d just been kicked off of what I’d figured for a long-runner, replaced by some kid with an Apple Mac, and I’m feeling pissed because I love books, and… and I’m thinking second-hand, that doesn’t do publishers any favours.’
His face felt redder than Gareth Nunne’s birthmark. Looked up to find Nunne giving him a level stare that was not unfriendly.
‘No need to apologize about that, man. Not yere. You’re right. We’re no good for publishers, and they know it. They love the Hay festival to bits – good publicity for new merchandise. But they don’t like the town so much. Or us. Specially us. They say they do, but they bloody don’t.’
Jeeter Kapoor was pulling out a stool, sitting down at the table opposite Robin, refilling Robin’s glass.
‘Be better for publishers if all our stock got bleedin’ pulped. Better if we all got closed down, replaced by one big book-chain branch that only sells new and shiny.’
Robin looked up at the globes of light, a line of them like planets. Felt that everybody in here was tuned in now, waiting for him to say something. Somebody started to clap, and it got taken up. Somebody patted him on the back.
‘Finish the bottle, Robin,’ Gwenda said. ‘On the house.’ She looked around, meeting eyes. ‘Well, he is, isn’t he?’
‘What?’
‘Starting to sound like one of us.’
Robin glanced from face to face, unsure whether they were winding him up. He heard a throaty laugh, turned and met the eyes of Connie Wilby, a comfortably heavy, elderly woman with a shop in Lion Street. She lit a cigar, the smoke drifting into the inglenook beside her.
‘We started asking customers if anything had gone wrong with their e-book readers. Or if they’d been accidentally broken or dropped in the bath. And could they pass them onto us, in exchange for free real books. And we put them all together and we all brought hammers one market day and battered the guts out of them. An e-book massacre. Great fun. Great therapy. Luddites? We’re not Luddites, Mr Thorogood, we’re bloody aesthetes. Four bookshops shut down last year, replaced by shoe shops and frock shops and number five – but for you – would be a bloody nail bar.’
Gareth Nunne sank some beer.
‘You smell it in the air sometimes, boy.’
He burped. Robin looked at him. All he could smell was the rich smoke in the air around Connie Wilby. The smell of old pubs. She pulled from her pulpy lips the slender cigar she was puffing in blatant contravention of the law of the land, and gave Robin this lavish smoke-wreathed smile.
‘Never been banned in the Kingdom of Hay, Mr Thorogood.’
‘The beginnings of decay,�
�� Gareth Nunne said,
‘Huh?’
‘What you can smell.’
‘We gotta stop it,’ Robin said. ‘We gotta fight!’
His fist in the air like freaking Che Guevara. He was halfway smashed. His head sang, the yellow lamps were fused into a sweating necklace of light and somebody was talking about a drowned old man, a floater in a waterfall.
‘And that was Peter Rector? Thought he was dead and gone years back. Peter Rector out at Cusop? All these years?’
‘Gone now. Peter bloody Rector.’
Robin saw Gwyn Arthur Jones coming in, dipping his head under the hanging lantern, silently taking a seat at Connie Wilby’s table. Taking out a pipe and tobacco, saying nothing.
‘You got any Lord Madoc novels in your shop, Robin?’ Gore Turrell said, an arm around Gwenda’s waist.
‘Dozen, maybe.’
‘Consider them sold.’
‘Naw… no way. You fixed our sign.’
‘It was an honour,’ Gore said.
Robin felt his eyes fill up, struggled to his feet.
‘Think I could use some air.’
30
Blowtorch
SO, OK, HE was not exactly smashed, but far from sober, he’d admit that. No fit state to drive and that truly was a problem, the truck being their only vehicle. No way he was getting pulled over, losing his licence for at least a year.
So getting home tonight – not a prospect.
But, Jesus, there were times he might’ve cared more.
It was nearing midnight, a waxing moon and stars on show – not much light pollution from Hay, no traffic, no people. When Gwenda’s bar had closed and his drinking companions had gone home, Robin had walked the empty sloping streets, up and down stone steps, across cobbles, for over an hour, intent on clearing his head.
But his head had only filled up with the town. Starting with the Gothic clock tower, starlit, moonlicked, a fairytale touch like out of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Otherness.
He limped away from it, up a steep street to where the road divided, the junction watched over by the small statue in the apex of a building. He now knew this was Henry, first of the Tudor kings who’d passed this way after landing in West Wales, en route to his destiny.
More narrow streets, more hanging signs, and the next thing was the Buttermarket, like a Greek temple, with its locked iron gate. And then the sign which said Bear Street, bringing to mind an old photo he’d seen in one of the history books of a poor dancing bear brought into Hay as entertainment on market day.
The bear began a fractured dance, like in an old silent movie shot against stone walls, streetlights and the obsidian mirrors of darkened windows. Robin backed away, half closing his eyes, the town and its isolated lights breaking down into blown-up pixels of colour.
He stood his stick against a wall, opening out his hands, letting himself dissolve into the pattern. Trembling in that emotional place where, if things were good, your senses could sometimes soar. Nothing to do with Betty’s condition, this was a painter’s thing, beginning with an intense desire to discover, translate, interpret.
Feeling yourself into a place. He’d known it in the countryside, at dawn and twilight, but never in a town before. Couldn’t afford to paint it like Hockney did in Yorkshire, using several canvases fitted together, so he’d make do with a single sheet of white-primed hardboard on which images would be overlapping, details of Hay coalescing or superimposed one over the other. One glance, and you’d take in the whole town, subliminally. The town on a hillside, streets which had seemed parallel but in fact curled, one into another. He’d looked at them on a large-scale map and seen that the centre of the town actually formed a heart-shape, roadways like veins wound around it.
He followed a wall to the market square, directly under the jagged cliff-face of the castle, and it was here that the twinge had taken him, curling around his spine. Unable to move until it began to fade.
But it was in these moments of ebbing pain that his vision had begun to burn again, only so much more fiercely, like a blowtorch stripping everything before it, whole centuries crumbling away like worn stucco and he was close to crying aloud in this kind of atavistic ecstasy, as if the hours he’d spent in Gwenda’s bar had been a kind of initiation and now the town itself was admitting him.
Into its heart, the heart of Hay.
Was this possible?
* * *
Back under the clock tower, quivering inside, Robin sat on the edge of the terrace below the Granary. To his right Barclay’s Bank, to the left Golesworthy’s country outfitters. The bank was the only representation on this street of a national business. There were two or three other banks in Hay, but no chain stores that Robin had seen so far. A medieval town holding out against empty progress.
Betty said calmly in his ear, ‘Do you know how much you’ve had?’
‘Too much.’ Robin abandoned his original plan to say it was wine from a Welsh vineyard, how potent was that gonna be? ‘And I don’t see any cabs. And if I did, we’d have to get another cab in the morning to collect the truck. I fucked up.’
‘No kidding.’
‘In our position, do you turn your back on people who wanna make you feel welcome? Bottom line is I now know a whole bunch of booksellers.’
‘Better get a room somewhere, hadn’t you? Book into a hotel or a B and B.’
‘What?’ Robin changed ears with the phone. ‘No way.’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what all that costs in this town in high summer?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Listen—’
‘There’s a coat and some old sacks in the truck.’
‘You can’t sleep in the bloody truck!’
‘No, but I can take the stuff into Back Fold. Roll up some of the old curtains, make a pillow.’
Pause.
‘Not a good idea.’
‘It’s not cold, Betty. And this is my fault. And, like… why would it not be a good idea?’
‘Because I’m not there. And you have injuries. And you’re pissed.’
‘Just beyond passing a breath test is all. My senses are all functioning. In overdrive. I walk fine… fine as I ever walk. Not gonna be a prisoner of this. I can fit a key in a door. And the point is I have to do it. It’s right.’
‘You don’t have to do it at all. We’ve sold the bungalow.’
‘Huh?’
‘They came to look, they made an offer.’
‘Jeez! How much?’
‘Even first time round, it wasn’t a bad offer, but—’
‘Did they confirm it? Did they sign?’
‘I said we’d think about it and they—’
‘There’ll be others. Nobody takes the first offer. If we hold out, we can maybe get closer to the asking price.’
‘They came back not long afterwards with an offer of very nearly the asking price. Did you get that?’
‘I…’ He clamped the phone hard to his ear. ‘You’re saying…?’
‘It’s a done deal, Robin.’
‘Holy shit!’ His head had gone back, his eyes raised to the clock tower, and its face was a warm moon. ‘We’re… we’re saved! We can make this business sing.’
‘So book into a hotel,’ Betty said.
He felt tears on his cheeks, like the dew of a new morning. It was turning around. All in a few hours. Home. They were home.
‘I love you, Bets.’
‘Listen,’ Betty said. ‘The Black Lion do rooms. They’re probably still open. Or the Swan. Celebrate. Get a good meal or something.’
‘I don’t have enough money.’
‘Do it on the bloody debit card! What this has done, it’s bought us some time, Robin. We have time to get it right. Please.’
Robin was walking up the street in a giddy euphoria, up from the clock tower towards the market square. An eccentric arrangement, the clock tower actually below the market square so if you wanted to know the time you had to go seek it out, peer around
corners.
Weird. He loved it.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you we got the sign up? Not easily, but when you need help, these guys just appear.’ Not telling her what nearly happened; it hadn’t happened, and it was his fault anyway. ‘So how about we open tomorrow? Just open the doors, see what happens? Knowing that when the deal goes through we can buy a pile more books.’
‘Yes. Whatever. Meanwhile, book into a hotel, Robin. This is about letting go. Get a good night’s sleep, come home early tomorrow and I’ll be ready to go back with you, and we’ll talk on the way.’
‘OK.’
He walked raggedly under the statue of Henry Tudor, to the castle wall. Beyond it, the remains of the medieval keep was gazing jaggedly down from the highest point of the town. The hole where the portcullis had been was crudely boarded up. Like a wooden gag. He looked away, carried on past the war memorial, along Castle Street, where several shop windows had posters opposing plans by some supermarket giant to move into Hay, wipe out all the small food stores, clothing retailers, household electrical dealers. Bring in the big and the bright and the shiny and the new, piss all over the old.
Robin had a blurred memory of Connie Wilby, who’d spent the whole night smoking cigars in contravention of the law of the land, taking him on one side, telling him why big and bright and shiny and new were words with no meaning for the Hay economy.
‘You still there, Robin?’
‘Yeah, I’m here.’
And he was here. Standing in the entrance to the alleyway called Back Fold.
‘Get some sleep,’ Betty said.
Hay Castle was lofting up in front of him, moonlight-vast, all of its ages fused together by the shadows, the chimney stacks like the backs of hands turned black.
Different place at night, nobody else living this end of the alley. Jeeter Kapoor was with his wife and kids in a ground floor apartment in one of the new stone-clad blocks across town.
Robin carried this old UK air-force greatcoat he’d brought from the truck, the coat so stiff with age and disuse it almost stood up by itself when he put it down, along with three cleanish hessian sacks and a flashlight, to the door of Thorogood Pagan Books. He leaned his stick against the door to fumble for his keys, and there was a sour smell all over him, and...