That morning, she had tangled with Emily over her smoking. It wasn’t like her to lash out like that, particularly at an adult. It had been the fatigue talking.
In the three weeks she’d been at the Green Man, O had gotten into the habit of leaving the door at the foot of the stairs to her room open a little at night. She wasn’t exactly afraid of being alone up there, but she’d heard noises – noises she couldn’t put a name to. They’d start up as soon as the house was still. It was probably nothing more sinister than mice moving in the walls or raccoons scampering across the roof. But her imagination had different ideas.
Last night she’d gone to bed, as usual, with her copy of A Treasury of Great Poems. She had made her way safely through the seventeenth century without so much as a mention of madness. But as she entered the eighteenth century, all that changed.
It was the Age of Reason. Poetry was considered a decorative art. Those poets who dared search for deeper truths were scorned. Isolated and ignored, they did the one thing any sane person would do – they went mad.
Suddenly mad poets were everywhere – William Collins, William Cowper, Christopher Smart, William Blake. An epidemic of madness. Christopher Smart composed his long poem Song to David while confined in a madhouse. Denied the use of pen and paper, he scratched the verses on the walls of his room with a key.
William Blake claimed to be in communion with the spirit world. He spoke in a matter-of-fact way of the spirits of dead poets who visited him and inspired his own poems. He said everybody had the ability to experience visions and simply lost it through neglect. Most people thought he was mad, and he lived in poverty and obscurity for most of his life. Despite that, he wrote some of the most beautiful lyrics in the English language.
O drifted off to sleep while she was reading. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sleeping, when suddenly she woke with a start, her heart pounding. There was a smell of roses in the room. Could it have drifted up from the back garden? she wondered. Or had Emily crept into her room to check on her while she slept and left a lingering scent of perfume behind?
She fumbled for the lamp by the bed and switched it on. The book was lying on the floor. The sound of it falling must have woken her. She lay back against the pillow, trying to calm herself.
Then she began to hear the noises again. They sounded like footsteps, moving stealthily around on the deck outside her room. She thought of the fire escape snaking up the side of the building and wondered if someone had stolen up it. She had the terrifying feeling that if she went to the window and threw back the curtain, she would find someone staring at her through the glass.
She lay awake for ages, too afraid to go and see if there actually was someone there, too afraid to fall asleep in case there was. Finally she got up and carried the boxes that had come with the room over in front of the door to the deck, stacking them six high and two deep. No one would be coming through there now without her knowing.
It was nearly four in the morning before she calmed down enough to close her eyes. Immediately she dropped into a dead sleep.
So when O stumbled downstairs that morning, she hadn’t been in the best of moods. Which explained the blowup at the breakfast table when Emily went to light her cigarette.
A few hours and several cups of coffee later, she was still feeling that the world was not quite solid underfoot, that a heavy thump of her foot on the floor of the shop would shatter the brittle shell and send her hurtling into the dark.
The bell above the door tinkled periodically as people drifted in. Not that all of them were customers. Some were regulars, friends of Emily who dropped by for a chat. Others were browsers, who came in, took a turn or two around the shop, and left empty-handed.
Some people were drawn in by the display of books in the window, others by the books in the dollar bins outside, where Emily banished all books she didn’t want. Some were students, some were businesspeople, some were residents of the neighborhood. Whoever they were, not enough of them were buying books.
In her brief time there, it had become clear to O that the shop was in dire trouble. It was a miracle Emily was able to make ends meet.
Some things were beyond their control. The neighborhood had changed. People’s interests had changed. Not as many people were buying secondhand books. In fact, there were more people wanting to get rid of their book collections than there were people buying books. Hence the boxes of books Emily kept buying rather than see them thrown out.
There was nothing much that could be done about all that. But about other things, there was. Earlier that day, while O had been up the ladder shelving books, a young woman in her late twenties had wandered into the shop. Sunglasses perched on top of her head, expensive haircut, classy linen skirt, designer sandals. Obviously one of the café crowd, looking for a little something to read while sipping her latte on a patio in the sun.
The woman didn’t venture far into the shop. Her invisible antennae had already alerted her to the fact that she was in alien territory. She gravitated to PAPERBACK LITERATURE – front room, rack nearest door, alphabetical by Author. It was like dipping your toe in the water at the beach without actually going in.
She scanned the outermost books on the rack, picked up one, and fanned through it. A puff of dust rose from the book, visible even to O atop the ladder. The woman ran her hand over the cover of the book, then looked at her fingers. She peered down into the dingy display window, up at O on her perch, then quietly returned the book to the rack and made her way out the door. The bell rang with an unmistakable finality behind her.
At that moment Emily, oblivious to the entire incident, called out to say there was another pile of books to shelve.
As O shelved the books, already moving with more confidence through the collection, she found herself feeling a strange mixture of emotions. She felt embarrassed by the condition of the shop, embarrassed that she had been dismissed in the same breath as it had been. At the same time, she felt angry – angry at the woman for being so shallow; angry at herself for being so vulnerable; angry at Emily for letting the shop slide so.
LITERARY CRITICISM – front room, left wall. She clambered up the ladder to the high shelves and squeezed one of the books Emily had handed her onto the already teeming shelf. From here, she had a bird’s-eye view of the shop. Emily was sitting at her desk, smiling up at her in approval. O’s anger melted and she managed a weak smile back.
For better or worse, the two of them were in this together. Emily hadn’t let the shop slide because she’d wanted to. She was not well, though she did a good job of denying it. And she was getting older. Most people her age had already retired. But what was she to do? This shop was her life; she was in every dusty corner of it. Not only did she work here, she lived here. If the shop went under – and it seemed just a question of time before it did – what would she do? Where would she live?
O’s vantage point from the top of the ladder suddenly gave her a new perspective on the problem. She was sure her father had no idea what he was sending her into. Emily was very good at candy-coating her situation. Her letters had not talked about the books that were accumulating at the bottom of the shelves for want of space. Her phone calls had not let out that little puff of dust that the book in PAPERBACK LITERATURE had let out. She was good at hiding the truth. She had always been a woman of secrets, and now the greatest secret was that under a veneer of stubborn independence stood someone in need of help.
Then and there, O decided she would do everything in her power to resurrect the Green Man. She couldn’t do much about the changes in the book business, but she could do something about the dust and disorder that had settled over the shop.
She could clean the windows, vacuum the display area, lay new felt down in place of the dingy, sun-bleached stuff that was there now. She could paint the outside of the shop; maybe even give the Green Man sign a facelift. Just thinking of it all was exhausting. But she started down the ladder with a new sense of purpose.
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It was then she noticed a tall lean boy, with deep hooded eyes and an unruly shock of dark hair, browsing through the bargain bins outside the shop. He was dressed all in black, with a knapsack draped over one shoulder. Something about him captivated her from the start. She couldn’t keep her eyes off him.
O decided the feather duster needed shaking. She scrambled down the ladder and out the front door. The boy didn’t bother to look up. She gave the duster a brisk shake. The dust plumed off it. He still didn’t look up.
She thought about asking him if he needed any help, but by the time the thought made it from her mind to her mouth, he had wandered off down the street. She drifted back into the shop with the dust, wondering if this qualified as an encounter.
She spent the rest of the morning moving the dust around and rehearsing all the brilliant things she might have said.
13
O had been barely one month at the Green Man when, one morning over breakfast, Emily casually announced she had a doctor’s appointment and wondered if O could open the shop and take care of things until she got back. She’d be just a couple of hours, she said. The thought of being left on her own at the shop for the first time filled O with panic, but in a moment of madness, she said she thought she could manage.
At ten o’clock sharp, with the cashbox tucked under her arm, O headed down to the shop. She switched on the lights, flipped the sign in the door window, and stepped outside. As she was cranking out the awning to give a bit of shade, she glanced up at the Green Man.
He looked back at her through his squinty eyes, and the vines spilled from his mouth in a silent greeting. At first she’d thought his forehead was furrowed in anger, but now she imagined it was only fatigue. He had seen many things over time. Since his face was carved on both sides of the sign, he looked forwards and backwards at once. He saw things coming, saw things going. He looked into the future, peered into the past – and swung back and forth like a doorway between them. She wished she could climb up closer to him. If she could just see him face-to-face, she felt some of the mystery surrounding him might fall away.
She dragged the bargain bins out and parked them in the shade under the window. As she tidied up the books a bit, her eyes kept drifting to the shop next door – Gigi’s Patisserie. She had to force herself not to wander over and look in the window. Look in the window, and it was game over.
All it took was a little self-control. She headed straight back inside, fetched the duster from behind the desk, and walked briskly up and down the aisles, running it smartly along the edges of the lower shelves until they shone. The shop smelled of some sweet, gooey, chocolaty thing Gigi had been baking that morning.
She suddenly remembered that the bargain books had looked pretty dusty. It had been hot and dry for the past few days, and the dust from the street settled on them like crazy. She was certain no one wanted to look through bins of dusty books. She’d better give them a dusting, too, while she was at it. She headed back outside.
O was just going over them a second time when the door to the bakery opened and Gigi came out, carrying her signboard. Gigi was a perky young thing, with flaming red hair, piercings running up both ears, and a ruby stud in her nose. She had a sweet French accent that turned even a simple good morning into an event.
“Hey, O,” she said.
They had met. Several times. A considerable portion of the Green Man’s profits flew directly from the battered cashbox in the desk drawer into Gigi’s till.
“Hi. What smells so good? I’ve been drooling all over the floor inside the shop.”
Gigi laughed. “Chocolate éclairs,” she said, pointing to the signboard where she’d written the daily specials in her curlicue writing. “Would you like to try one?”
“I shouldn’t.” Recently, she’d been trying to wean Emily off Gigi’s decadent desserts in favor of carrot and celery sticks. She could use a little weaning herself.
“Don’t be silly. It’s on the house. It’s the least I can do for smelling up your shop. Fred’s just putting them out now.”
Fred was a pastry chef who had been around the business for years. Gigi had hired him after a series of friends who’d come to work with her had all drifted off to less demanding work. Running a bakery was a killing business. Gigi and Fred were in the shop at five every morning, baking for the day ahead. Then, at the end of each day, they prepared the dough for the next day and let it rest overnight.
O followed Gigi into the bakery. Fred was arranging that day’s baking in the window and gave her a friendly nod. Gigi had the most delicious window in Caledon. You could put on five pounds just looking in it.
Buttery madeleines, coconut-filled macaroons, crispy palmiers, gooey apple tarts, and tiny petits fours with pale pastel icing were ranged on the gleaming glass shelves. Inside were still more treasures: lemon tarts topped with chocolate strawberries and drizzled with apricot glaze; napoleons layered with rich pastry cream sandwiched between delicate sheets of golden puff pastry and sprinkled with icing sugar; melt-in-your-mouth butter cookies with bits of candied cherry on top; plump blueberry turnovers sprinkled with sugar; and decadent chocolate pies.
And, today, there was a tray of mouthwatering chocolate éclairs piped full of pastry cream and dipped in chocolate fondant. Gigi took one from the tray and put it on a napkin.
“Here you go. Let me know what you think.”
“I think I’ve just died and gone to heaven.”
Back inside the shop, O crawled into the bunker that was Emily’s desk and switched on the radio. As she waited for the first customer to come through the door, she tallied the sales for the previous day and tidied the top of the desk as much as she dared. The chocolate éclair shrank down quickly to a sprinkling of crumbs on the crumpled napkin. She buried the evidence at the bottom of the wastebasket, where Emily would be unlikely to find it.
Feeling guilty, she grabbed the broom from the corner and did a quick sweep of the shop. Emily had been at the Green Man for so long that there were no longer any bare spaces on the walls. Pictures and posters and old flyers covered the ends of the bookcases and filled all the gaps between.
Most were pictures of poets – black-and-white plates that had come loose from old books, picture postcards, framed photos leaning on slack wires from the wall, looking down in quiet dismay at the clutter accumulating on the floor below. She recognized some, but many were simply nameless writers, dust settling on their unfathomable faces. Emily talked about these dead poets as though they were still here, as if their pictures somehow summoned their presence.
O paused in the poetry section in front of a daguerreotype of a young woman seated by a table with a book on it. One of the young woman’s hands hung over the edge of the table and caught at a small posy of flowers in the other, in a silent, somehow desperate gesture. It was as if every part of her wanted to flee and she was held still by sheer force of will.
They had been introduced. Emily said this was the only known photo of the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, who had spent the better part of her adult life hidden away from the world, refusing to venture beyond the high hedge that surrounded her parents’ house and fleeing to the safety of her room when visitors came to call. O added her name to the list of mad poets.
The poet was dressed in a long-sleeved dark gown trimmed with lace at the neck. Her hair was parted in the center and drawn back over her ears. Her eyes were large and penetrating, and her lips were full. She seemed poised on the brink of speech.
The bell above the door jingled, jarring O back into reality. A young couple walked in carrying coffees. One of them was talking on a cell phone. O retreated behind the desk. They wandered around the front of the shop awhile, drifted into the back room, then finally came to the desk and asked if she had anything on computers.
They didn’t know how funny that was. Obviously they hadn’t seen the sun-bleached sticker on the front door – a picture of a computer surrounded by a red circle with a slash r
unning through it. Emily was a bit of a fanatic when it came to computers. “Mark my words,” she was fond of saying, “the computer and the book are not friends.” Not only was there no computer, there was no television upstairs in the flat, either. Living at the Green Man was like taking a giant step back in time.
When she told the couple they had nothing on computers, they looked at one another in disbelief. As they made their way to the door, one of their phones rang and they both went for their pockets. The bell tinkled into silence behind them.
O busied herself with some books Emily had left for her to go through. One was on the figure of the Green Man. Emily had stuck a little note to it – Thought you might be interested in this.
She had just begun to flip through the book when she heard what sounded like a faint swish from somewhere inside the shop. Looking up, she wondered if someone could have stolen in without her noticing.
From the desk you could see only down the center aisle. The side aisles were obscured by the mountain of books on the desk, and the security mirrors mounted on the wall above them were too dimmed with dust to be of much use.
“Hello?” she called. There was no answer. She returned to the book. It was full of Green Men – carved on the tops of columns in old churches, hidden under the seats of choir pews, leaning out from the lintels above ancient doorways. Some of them looked much more frightening than their Green Man.
A few minutes later, O heard the swishing sound again. This time she got up from the desk, more curious than nervous. With the bakery right next door, mice were a fact of life in the Green Man, and Psycho was a touch too weird to be much of a mouser.
She stamped her foot to frighten any tiny intruder back into its hole and heard what sounded like a light patter of footsteps in response. She walked to the near end of the left-hand range. Peering down the aisle, she thought she caught a glimpse of something rounding the corner at the other end. It was just a glimpse, and the light diffused through the dusty window gave everything at the front of the shop a ghostly glow, but she could have sworn she’d seen a figure in a long gown.
The Green Man Page 6