by Alex North
Marie peered over her glasses at me.
“Would you be kind enough to do me a favor, Paul?”
“Of course.”
“Excellent! I like him very much already, Jenny. Right, you look like a big, strong lad, and I have a box of books out back that I could do with someone bringing in. Would you be kind enough to do that for me?”
“Sure.”
Marie retrieved a set of keys from below the counter and held them out for me.
“You can head through there.” She nodded toward the back of the shop. “Just follow the corridor. My car’s out back. Old orange Ford. You can’t miss it, it’s the only one there.”
I took the keys.
“The box is in the trunk. Be careful, though. The metal really catches the sun and I don’t want you burning your hands.” She raised an eyebrow at Jenny. “I’m sure Jenny doesn’t want that either.”
I had time to see Jenny go horribly red before I quickly shut the comment away inside my head and hurried to the back of the shop.
* * *
The last half term of school seemed to crawl by. I found myself counting the days until the summer holiday, desperate to see the back of Gritten Park for at least a little while.
I did my best to avoid Charlie, Billy, and James, and for the most part I succeeded. Not always, of course. There would be those times when I’d see them—times that never felt entirely like accidents. James would be staring at the ground, and Charlie would be smiling beside him, as though showing off a trophy he’d won.
I always looked away quickly.
Fuck them.
But even when I didn’t run into them directly, there were times when I could feel them somehow. Whenever I was near the stairs that led down to Room C5b, it was like I could sense a heartbeat pulsing steadily below me, and I found myself wondering what was going on down there. What the three of them might be dreaming up together.
But I spent as much time with Jenny as possible. We’d share her bench at break and lunchtimes, until it began to seem more like ours than hers. We’d compare notes on books we’d read and stories we’d thought of; sit and talk; sometimes stroll around the grounds together. On weekends, I’d visit her house. Her mother was always home, so our opportunities were limited, but I remember we spent a lot of time in her room, kissing and fooling around. The connection between us was blossoming. I had never felt so comfortable and relaxed with anyone—so able to be myself without worrying that being me was a problem—and the knowledge that she felt the same was enough to take my breath away.
And, of course, we’d go to the bookshop.
Marie provided us with coffee and cake, and the occasional filthy comment, but the latter became increasingly less embarrassing. Partly because Jenny and I were more relaxed with each other, but also because Marie was a little way behind us by then. But mostly, the three of us just talked. I liked Marie and took to helping her out during our visits: moving and unpacking boxes, organizing shelves.
One time, she was chatting to Jenny when a customer approached the counter. She called me over.
“Paul? Will you serve this gentleman for me, please?”
“Sure.”
I had absolutely no idea how to work the register. I pressed a few of the more obvious buttons, fumbled with the drawer, and did the math in my head.
Marie came over to me afterward.
“The summer holidays are coming up soon, right?”
“Ten days.” I feigned checking a watch I didn’t have. “Sixteen hours, ten minutes, and fifteen seconds.”
She laughed.
“Well, I was thinking. You’re going to have a lot of time free.” She glanced at Jenny. “And I figure you’re going to be in the area. So I was wondering if you’d like a job?”
I blinked, then looked around the shop.
“You mean here?”
“Let me show you how to work the register,” she said quickly.
* * *
My mother was pleased that I’d found a part-time job to occupy my time.
“In a bookshop too!” she said.
I might have expected my father to be happy as well, but I’d long since given up hope of impressing him, and if anything the bookshop part of the equation—and a secondhand one, at that—seemed to be worthy of even greater disdain than usual. But rather than being discouraged, I found myself quietly emboldened. It felt like working in Johnson & Ross somehow brought me closer to my dream.
When the holidays began, I helped Marie three days a week, and once I’d mastered the register I found the work rewarding. There were shelves to be organized, boxes to be packed and unloaded, and regular customers to begin to get to know. Marie was far less provocative without Jenny around to tease. She showed me some of the more expensive books in the shop, and even began to teach me how to recognize what might be a valuable edition myself. I liked her more and more. And Jenny had been right: Marie was full of stories. She was like a walking repository of the area’s history, and not a day went by when she didn’t regale me with some wild local tale.
Late at night, after my parents had gone to bed, I continued to attempt writing tales of my own. It was hard. While I wasn’t short of ideas, the problem came when I sat down at my desk and attempted to put them into words. Marie was a natural storyteller, and I suspected that Jenny was too. But not me. Ideas that felt good in my head came out flat and lifeless on paper. I started a lot, and finished nothing.
The rest of the time, I spent with Jenny.
The strength of my feelings for her frightened me. It was strange to think that at the beginning of the school year I’d barely noticed her at all. Now I could hardly stop thinking about her. My heart beat oddly, as though my pulse had been taking secret classes and learning fresh and unfamiliar tricks. When we weren’t at her house, we walked slowly around the streets of her part of Gritten. She showed me the park she’d played in as a little girl, the shops she remembered that weren’t there anymore. On one level it was all inconsequential, but the intimacy rendered each detail vivid and special. The weather was hot and bright, and I suddenly found myself noticing color everywhere. Summer was coming. A world that had previously been drab and gray was growing more vibrant by the day.
And I didn’t see Charlie or Billy or James at all.
All these years later, when I first saw Jenny upon returning to Gritten, she reminded me there were good memories for me here as well as bad ones. That was true. All of them were here, as I fell in love for the first time. The three weeks at the beginning of that holiday are the happiest of my whole life.
It was in the fourth that everything went wrong.
TWENTY-EIGHT
NOW
Walking into Johnson & Ross again after all these years brought an almost overwhelming explosion of recognition.
The exterior might have been rejuvenated, but so little had changed inside. The shelves and cabinets were all filled with books, many of them so old and worn that it was easy to believe they were the same ones that had been here back then. The smell and the atmosphere were exactly as I remembered. Every sensation was so intense that I recalled my first visit here, and how it had felt like coming home, and for a moment I wondered if that could have been some impossible flash-forward from then to now. A buried memory emerging not from the past but the future.
I made my way a little unsteadily down the aisle.
There was nobody at the counter. As I glanced around and listened, there didn’t seem to be any other customers in the shop either. It had often been like that when I’d worked here. In less busy moments that summer, I would just sit quietly, breathing in the books. There had been times when it felt like I could hear the pages around me rustling slightly, as though the stories within were shuffling softly in their sleep.
Marie couldn’t still be here, could she?
I didn’t know which answer to that question made me more apprehensive. That she had moved on, or that I might be about to see her again after all this time
.
How would either of those make me feel?
A noise from the back of the shop.
“Be right there,” a woman’s voice called. “Bear with me.”
My heart began beating faster. It’s not too late, I thought; even now, I could turn around and be out of here before she appeared. But I forced myself to wait. Finally, she emerged from between the stacks. She was visibly older—that bleached blond hair cut short, and now naturally white—and she was walking a little awkwardly, but to my eyes she was as unchanged as the shop itself.
Marie wasn’t expecting to see me, of course, so there were a couple of seconds when she peered at me blankly, perhaps thrown by the intensity with which I was looking back at her. But then she recognized me, and she broke out in a smile that sent the crinkles at the corners of her eyes flaring wider.
“Paul.”
She walked over slowly, then hugged me.
How was it going to feel to see her after all this time?
Again, it was like coming home.
* * *
Marie turned over the sign in the door to CLOSED, then made us both coffee in the small kitchen area behind the counter.
“There’s no cake, I’m afraid.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”
“No. But it certainly looks like you could do with the coffee.”
Did I? I still felt tired from this morning, but I hadn’t realized how obvious it was. Maybe that was another reason the police had thought I was losing my grip on things.
“I’ve not been sleeping well.”
“Understandably. It can’t be easy.”
“I’m glad you’re still here,” I said.
“That’s not easy either. I’ve hung on for as long as I can. I don’t think I’ve got much left in me, though.”
“I don’t believe that for one second.”
She smiled, then blew on her coffee and took a sip.
“I’m sorry to hear about your mother, Paul. She’s a lovely woman.”
That surprised me. “You know her?”
“A little. Not well, but she used to come in here quite a lot.”
I thought about that.
“It seems like she’d become quite a reader.”
“After your father died. Yes.”
I nodded to myself.
My father had been tough and unforgiving, a man who worked the land when the jobs were there, but always seemed more proud of the way the land worked him, as though hardness achieved through suffering were something to covet. Books had never made sense to him—and so neither had I, his quiet, bookish son, always squirreled away upstairs, lost in the stories of others or fumbling to create tales of his own.
I remembered the photograph I’d seen of my mother as a child, lying in the sunlit grass with a book open before her. And I found it easy to picture her, freed from my father’s disapproval, finally pursuing a suppressed passion for reading. It might have been a comforting image, but instead I thought of a lonely woman, desperate for contact, searching for solace and connection in the only places she could find them, and a tremendous surge of guilt went through me that I had not been one of them.
You never show me anything, Paul.
“How was she?” I said. “Recently, I mean.”
Marie hesitated.
“It’s fine.” I sipped my own coffee. “I want to hear. I already know she was confused a lot of the time.”
“Yes. Sometimes she was.”
Marie put her cup on the counter and looked down at it thoughtfully. We both knew she had told me something in the past that had led to unimaginable consequences, and I could see she was weighing the effect her words might have now.
“Go on,” I said.
“She would ask after you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. There were times when she thought you were still working here. And then other days when she’d be looking for books by you. She kept saying I needed to get some of your books in. She always told me they’d fly off the shelves.”
I didn’t reply.
“I said I’d try, of course.” Marie smiled. “I told her I thought we’d had a couple in before, but they’d already sold. That kind of thing.”
“That must have been … hard to deal with.”
“It was never hard to be kind to your mother, Paul.”
No, I thought. It wouldn’t have been. Because my mother herself had always been kind, not just to me but to everyone. The knowledge brought a burst of sadness. It occurred to me now that I had wasted so many years, and that there was so much I wanted to say to her while there was still time for her to hear.
“She had lots of friends, you know,” Marie said. “She wasn’t unhappy. And she was very proud of you.”
“She had no reason to be.”
“Well, now. I’m sure that’s not true.”
I fell silent.
You’re going to be a writer, I think.
Once upon a time, I had imagined that too. But I remembered a day that year, just before the end of the final term, when I had come downstairs to find an envelope waiting for me. Even from the kitchen doorway, I had recognized my own handwriting on the front, along with the stamp I’d stuck to the corner. In the weeks after sending my short story off to the competition, I’d done my best not to think about it, telling myself the story wasn’t very good, that it wasn’t going to be accepted, and that there was no point in getting my hopes up. But the knowledge it was out there had still created a soft fluttering in my heart, as though a bird were living there. It felt like a part of me had left this place and gone off into the world, and deep down I had allowed myself to imagine it might find a home out there.
When I opened the envelope, the short story was inside, along with a form rejection slip expressing regret that, on this occasion, my submission had not been successful.
I remembered reading it a few times, and how it had felt like whatever had been living in my chest those past few weeks had died.
“I teach a bit of creative writing now,” I confessed to Marie. “That’s one part of what I do. But I don’t actually write anymore.”
“That’s a shame. Why did you stop?”
“Because I knew I would never be good enough.”
But that wasn’t strictly true. The reality was that I’d never worked hard enough to find out, and I should be honest about that.
“After what happened, it felt like there was only one story that would ever matter. And I don’t think I’ve ever had the words to write about that.”
“Perhaps that will change.”
“I don’t think so. It’s not a story that has an ending.”
“Not yet.”
I thought about the people poring over the case online. Complete strangers who were still determined to solve the mystery of Charlie’s disappearance even after all these years.
“There’s been too much water under the bridge,” I said. “It’s ancient history now. All a long way behind me.”
Marie smiled again.
“I don’t think time works that way, Paul. As you get older, it all begins to blur into one. You start to think life was never any kind of straight line. It was always more of a … scribble.”
She laughed quietly: a throwaway comment. But the description struck me. Everywhere I looked in Gritten, I could see traces of the past beneath the details the years had etched on top. Places. People. The past was all still there below the present: not a line, but a scribble. However much you tried to forget it, perhaps without realizing it you were only ever running in place.
I was about to say something else—ask more about my mother, the books she had liked, the things she had said—when my phone buzzed in my pocket.
A call from Sally.
I answered it. And then I listened, and found myself responding in the right places, quietly and formally and almost out of instinct. Marie watched me the whole time, her face full of sympathy. Because she knew.
When
the call ended, all the questions I had been intending to ask a minute earlier had deserted me. There was only really a handful of words left to speak, and I did so blankly.
“My mother died,” I said.
* * *
Sally wasn’t at the hospice when I arrived, and a nurse showed me up to the room. She was respectful but professional. I’m so sorry about your mother, she told me in the foyer, and then didn’t speak at all as we walked together. There were no doubt countless formalities and procedures to attend to, but it was clear from her manner that those could come later.
For now, there was simply this.
We stopped outside the door.
“Take as long as you need,” she said.
Twenty-five years, I thought.
It was quiet and peaceful in the room. I closed the door gently, as though I’d walked in on a person waking slowly rather than someone who never would. My mother was lying on the bed, the same as always, but while her head was propped up on the pillow it already looked slightly lost in the cushion of it. I sat down beside the bed, struck by the absence in the room. My mother’s skin was yellow and as thin as tracing paper over the contours of the skull beneath. Her eyes were closed and her mouth slightly open. She was impossibly, inhumanly still. Except not she at all, I thought. Because this was not my mother. Her body was here, but she was not.
There had been occasions during my previous visits when her breath had been so shallow and her body so motionless that I had wondered if she’d passed. Only the soft beep of the machinery by the bedside had convinced me otherwise, and even that had seemed like a trick at times. That machine was silent now, and the difference was completely profound. I’ve never been a religious man, but some spark of animation had so obviously departed this room that it was difficult not to wonder where it could have gone. It didn’t seem possible for it to have disappeared entirely. That didn’t make any sense.