Twelve Stories

by Paul Magrs

  They both loved the bare boards and dusty windows of the Exchange. They both loved getting off the bus and walking down the main road, where it was all fast food places and warehouse furniture stores. They both loved making their way to their favourite shop, tense with anticipation. Both knowing that the stock would have changed since the previous Saturday. In the days between, all the books would have jumped out of their homes and changed and switched about. That was why the shop was so dusty. Why the air was filled with motes of unsettled dirt and air and flakes of skin. Because of all the activity, the traffic, the exchanging going on. Always something new to read. Something you’ve never heard of. Something you always meant to read.

  The two of them could sense this, walking down the main street towards the shop, which was lit and waiting. The man behind the counter had his jazz records playing. He was tapping his glass-topped desk with both plastic arms, almost jauntily.

  There was a woman who didn’t care what her grandson read. Let him take anything he wanted. It was all there for the choosing. How was she meant to know what was suitable or good?

  He was working his way through the stacks. She’d watch him searching, all confident. He was ferreting about. He would hoik and hoard up books in his arms, snatch things out into the air with small grunts of surprise, of pleasure.

  There was a woman who watched the line of golden light under her grandson’s bedroom door at night. She was pleased he was burning electricity, all hours of the night. She knew his granddad would be cross if he saw the light burning. She was proud of the boy, though, when he arrived each morning, all panda-eyed at breakfast. Not wanting porridge, not wanting eggs. Wanting Gatsby. Wanting Jude the Obscure. Wanting The Dark is Rising, Salem's Lot.

  There was a woman who wished she could read in her bed all night, too. She wanted to read till her eyes were smarting and flicking involuntarily from side to side. She wanted to fall asleep reading, and let the words decant themselves into her head.

  The old man was suspicious. The house was too quiet. He didn’t hold with reading that much. It sent people funny. He’d seen such things before.

  The Guardians, The Malleus, The Midwich Cuckoos, The End of the Affair.

  How long before the boy went all Camus and Kafka? How long before he got all disenchanted? Because this is what books would bring you: bother.

  Catch Twenty-Two. A Farewell to Arms. Doctor Who and the Daemons.

  Books gave you ideas.

  This the old man knew. In his wisdom. His long years. Navy. Steelworks. Factory. His seeing the world. Knowing better than some old wife and a soft-headed grandson. Heads in books. No real clue about the world out there. The old man, embittered, cadaverous, sucking on woodbines, barley sugars, tutting at the dust mites, the expense, the pensive silence of their house…

  This the old man knew. All the big mouths he’d ever known, those thinking they were better than him, those thinking themselves above their station, all of them were tied up in books. Blokes in bunks in the bowels of ships. Union blokes pointing to paragraphs in books to back up their points. All of them rabble rousers or depressives. None of them really happy in themselves.

  Or nancies, of course. That’s where books led, too. He’d looked at the books in the boy’s room and they made him tut and shake his head. They weren’t the sort of thing a boy should read. Girls’ books. Women’s books. Not men’s stories. Not at all. If men liked anything at all, men liked proper page-turning thrillers. Maybe war, maybe science fiction. Not this kind of stuff the boy went in for. Men didn’t like mushy stuff.

  Not this. Not Emma nor Maurice nor Orlando nor the Stud nor the Bitch nor Evelina nor Pamela nor Our Kate nor nowt.

  There was a woman who slept perched high up on an old brass bed with her cadaverous old man and she wished and wished he’d let her put her bedside lamp on. She longed not for some secret demon lover, but just a little illumination through the wee small hours. But the old man wouldn’t have it. The merest spill of light on his closed fids would plague him and spoil his rest—which he deserved; which she wasn’t to ruin.

  There was a woman who lay in the dark, full of resentment, seething on the rock hard mattress, hating everyone. Watching words blurring past on the underside of her eyelids—too fast to read, too fast to notice.

  Her old man beside her, getting a proper night’s sleep, was hating her in return. Hating her for even suggesting she bring her dirty old books in here, into their room, into their marital bed. The very thought gave him the horrors. He couldn’t see how it was sanitary. Books were full of mites and lice and he would imagine them creeping out of the spines of her books, marching in formation down the snowy scoop of the duvet, across the old woman’s ample lap… straight over him, into the luxuriant grey hairs of his nostrils, his earholes, the parched crevices of the rest of him… Contaminated in his own bed! By dirt and germs and his old woman’s dirty books! And him who slept in the bowels of ships in hammocks during the war with a hundred other men! If he can’t have a nice clean bed now in his extreme old age then that just wasn’t good enough!

  Her old man beside her knows that she feigns sleep and, when she thinks he doesn’t notice, she gets up and creeps heavy-limbed onto the landing in her voluminous night gown. She sneaks and creaks past the bookcases on the top landing, past the piles of books on the stairs, on the sill of the hall window, by the cases in the downstairs hall, to the front room. There she sits by the gas fire for the balance of the night, till the sun comes over the terraces opposite and floods through the double-glazing, the net curtains, making her blink and look up from whatever it is she’s reading. Dirtying her fingers with smudgy pages that others have pored over. Wearing out her eyes just to get to another last page. Another birth, death, marriage. Another anti-climax or a cliffhanger. Another unresolved The End.

  She likes to finish her books by Saturday, so she’s ready for her trip to the Great Big Book Exchange. All of this her old man knows. He knows more about her habits than she thinks.

  There was an old woman who was learning to give away the books she read. To exchange them back, to take new ones. She was learning to live without them hoarded around her.

  A Farewell to Arms! There was once a woman who made herself blush bright red, taking that particular book to the counter of the Great Big Book Exchange…

  There was a woman who stammered and blushed as the man with no arms took it in his stride. He’d heard all the jokes and barbs and jibes before. And he never thought for a second his best customer would deliberately hurt his feelings.

  (She didn’t know it, but he sneaked messages into certain paperbacks, hoping she would buy them. He underlined certain lines. Certain phrases. Some of them, perhaps, innocuous by themselves. But to the close reader, perhaps, they would add up to a set of secret messages. If she was looking for them. If she looked in the right place. He didn’t want to push his point of view. Didn’t want to wave it under her nose. He trusted the power of love. The charm of a secret cipher. Above all, he trusted a reader of novels. He knew how one novel led to another and how, sooner or later, she would pick up the books that lay in wait for her. She would pick up his secret messages. And maybe he didn’t mean them after all. Maybe it was just a game. Maybe his code was far too difficult to crack. In this way he hedged his bets. And the two of them never spoke about it. His Saturday girl knew all about it, though. And so did the grandson, who often read the novels that Winnie had finished. These two young people found the underlined sentences. They saw that they joined up to form a message. And they started to think, as any reader does, with utter selfishness, that the messages were addressed to themselves. Winnie was far too modest to think any such thing.)

  The man with the two strong, plastic arms wished that his arms were real. He wished they were more flexible. He wished they had more feeling in them.

  He was well-adjusted and he was resigned to his semi-artificial lot. But it would still be GOOD it would still be BETTER it would still be LOTS OF FUN if
he was able to do the following with TWO REAL ARMS AGAIN!

  Take hold of a woman properly. He meant, of course, in a nice, sexy, loving way, of course. He would hold her in a dancing cheek-to-cheek sort of a way with the lights in his small sitting room turned low. They’d dance with just the pale light of the cinema across the road coming through the Venetian blinds. His arms would rest lightly—and full of feeling—against her warm back.

  Heat up his favourite Heinz ravioli at lunch time and be able to stir the orangey parcels in the pan with his spatula without burning any. Tricky with no feeling in your hands!

  Turn pages of novels without ripping any.

  Do his underlinings as easily, as neatly, with as much surreptitious aplomb as he likes. Oh, his mind can find the loaded sentence, the sweetest sentiments, the most delicate hints, and double entendres, but he isn’t always great at underlining things. Sometimes he’s crossed words out inadvertantly, trying to guide his pen. Fancy! Crossing things out when he was trying to draw attention to them!

  That’s how two plastic arms can make you feel, though! Clumsy! Destructive! The spoiler of all you desire!

  Sometimes he was quite carried away by the romance of himself. The quiet, tidy, invisible excitement of being him. Watching which novels Winnie took away with her. Playing Ella Fitzgerald on his record player. Spending whole days in his dusty shop. Sipping smokey coffee and waiting for her to arrive.

  Once there was a woman who appreciated everything about him and everything he did. She thought both he and his shop were magic. She’d have crawled on broken glass to get there on a Saturday afternoon. She said that, once.

  Luckily, all she had to do was take the bus.

  This is what you do to get around the place. In this county you have to take the bus everywhere. It’s how the world works, and if you don’t know how the buses work, well, then you’ve had it.

  Once there was a woman and her grandson and they had the bus timetables round their way off by heart. The grandson was well-nigh hopeless with facts and dates and formulae for school-work, but he knew the times and stops for the double deckers and coaches, the Expresses, the Road Rangers. He knew when and where he was with the X50, the 213 and the 723.

  Maybe he should be thinking of learning to drive himself, maybe having a little car of his own. He’s nearly seventeen now and he could learn. He could have a runabout that he could use to get their shopping in. They could go to Asda and load up a whole week’s worth of messages at once. But he has no faith in his ability to learn. His gran knows he’d be too timid and stopping at every unexpected thing. He’d be letting them all go past him. Letting every other driver push past. He wouldn’t be forceful or sure enough.

  Look at it this way. This place is best seen from the steamy windows of the bus. It might take a bit longer, getting place to place, but you do see life! You see all sorts!

  There was a woman and her grandson and they’d been round all the nearby towns on the buses on Saturdays. These were their trips out. Sitting on the tartan seats, keeping themselves to their- selves, holding their brown paper bags of novels on their laps. Up and down the hills on long journeys on B-roads, through closed-down towns and villages and estates. They’d clambered off in bus stations reeking of fumes and red hot chips. They’d gone straight away to share a pot of tea in the cafe in the market place. Scalding it down before going off to check out their favourite places for books. Cancer, Heart Foundation, Animal Rescue, Spastics.

  There was a woman who wondered how people could simply toss their books away. Did they think that books became useless once read? Used up? Or did they think the story stayed trapped safely inside their heads?

  There was a woman who knew that the stories gradually leaked away.

  There was a woman whose favourite shop wasn’t the Cancer or the Spastics. It was the Great Big Book Exchange and only the man there, the man with the two plastic hands, could gently coerce her into giving books back. Only with him did she see the sense in parting with books. It was part of the bargain. She got to take part in the great big exchange. Only if she brought them back. And really, she’d have said or done anything, anything, to come back to his shop each Saturday, again, again.

  (What to Put in. What to Leave Out.)

  November 28th

  On the train to Durham for this meeting. Fellas from Leeds come and sit by the women dolled up for their day out Christmas shopping. Some gentle flirting as they all eat their sandwiches. One man in his fifties, in denim and white socks, showing pictures out of his wallet. ‘And this… this is a pound note.’ It’s ripped in half. It’s from thirty years ago. His wife ripped it in half, the night they met. It was a lot of money then. ‘She were drunk. She says, ‘Give me a pound and I’ll show you a joke. I’ll make you laugh.’ I gave her the pound note. She ripped it in half and gave me it back.’ The woman opposite asks him, ‘And you’ve kept it? You’ve still got it?’

  ‘Thirty years. When was the last time you saw a pound note like that?’

  I think all I ever write about is losing stuff and finding it again. Or never getting it back.

  Loss and time and love and books.

  December 1st

  You’re happiest when you can write a story out of order. When you can let it grow by cutting in from different angles, disrupting time and narrative and continuity. You like to use still moments and return to them, develop them, flesh them out and fuse them together.

  Let your ordinary characters have extraordinary thoughts. They should surprise themselves.

  You’ve been caught up for such a long time in the idea of transformative magic. What about out and out realism again? Fidelity to the real world. Maybe you could work from actual conversations, recordings. You did that three years ago. Conversations with your Big Nanna. You went back to Jarrow and sat on her settee, talking with the tape recorder going. Realism’s upsetting. When you record stuff like that, it’s like there’s no point in anything made up.

  January 2nd

  The light shining round the edges of the bedroom door. When my stepfather’s mother moved in with us she had the narrowest bedroom in the house and she kept the light burning all night. Her husband had died and she walled herself into that tiny room. Barricaded herself with paperbacks. She had indiscriminate- tastes. Or broad ones, anyway. I remember her reading ‘Battlestar Galactica, Hemingway, Gone with the Wind. We had to go back to the Big Book Exchange in Darlington every week, looking for Gone with the Wind. She was obsessed with finding a copy.

  That became our favourite book shop in the world. The whole family had to go, every Saturday afternoon. I was learning to read voraciously. The system in that shop involved the stamping of little grey library-type cards with credit. It was to do with returning your books. Of course, we always kept ours and bought more.

  You mustn’t get rid of books.

  The walk-in cupboard at the top of our stairs bulging with books and comics in bin bags. There was hell on when I went in to explore. These should be the portals to other dimensions. Except they’re not. They’re just cupboards where old books, comics, games, clothes are kept. ‘Don’t go dragging all that mess out.’ But they should be magical portals, of course. Growing up was the process of realising that that’s all metaphor and that the portals you find are fictional; these dimensions imaginative. Is that a let down?

  Is it disappointing? And does it lead you to wanting to spend your whole life inside books?

  And is that even possible?

  January 3rd

  You bought a lot of secondhand books in the North East, over the years. Taking buses everywhere, in huge, grand loops, up and down hills, through villages, new towns, old towns, market towns.

  The boy is orphaned and goes to live with his grandparents in a town like Fenyhill. She’s a school dinner lady in the school he has to go to now. The granda is mean-spirited. Throwing the kid’s things on the fire. Bringing out the gran’s temper so that one day she hits him with a pan and thinks she’s kil
led him. The Granda’s family live next door—his common daughter, her boorish husband, and nasty kids.

  Gran sits up all night, lights blazing as she reads. She takes the boy book-shopping with her. And she tells him the tale of the girl from her street, where she grew up. The girl a little older than her, from the streets near the arches in South Shields.

  (Remember being told that story on Boxing Day? About someone’s two-year old—the kid who was really articulate about her flashbacks she was having! Describing South Shields in the 1930s! Everyone who heard her swore down she must be a genuine reincarnation.)

  The poorest kids in the street. One reader finds another. Now she’s a millionaire bestseller and lives in a big house. The boy wants to reunite them. Oh, she wouldn’t want to know me. She wouldn’t remember all them years ago. And he thinks his Gran is guarding against disappointment. What if Ada Jones rejected her old friend? What if she rejected all of her past?

  It’s enough for his Gran to believe that one of them, once, managed to escape the circumstances of their lives.

  The boy feels like he’s been flung back a generation. His Granda wants him to leave school early, to work in a garage or somesuch.

  Some dreadful accident to do with Granda. And they have to flee because of it?

  Oh, God. As soon as you start PLOTTING it always turns melodramatic. You shouldn’t even bother.

  Granda won’t let them go out the house on one particular crucial day. Perhaps the old novelist friend Ada Jones is doing a book-signing in Darlington. The boy has tickets so his Gran can be there. Gran thinks it’s all foolishness, but she’s touched he’s organised it. And maybe it’s a veiy middle-class, excruciating literary lunch in a hotel. Melon balls and parma ham and Ada Jones being very grand.

  The evil Granda thinks his wife has a fancy man and his nan- cyboy grandson is aiding and abetting her. And how did the boy get the money for the tickets for the literary lunch? He SELLS something of Granda’s. He takes Granda’s stash of vintage pom to the Great Big Book Exchange. Of course, the boy has noticed that the books are just a front for the sex shop behind the beaded curtain. (Gran is completely oblivious to this. Just as we were—we thought it was just a nice bookshop. Then one day… What’s this? Another room!)