Page 8 of The Bookshop Book

“I said…” Xavier took the hint and disappeared.

The girl, tall, slender, in blue jeans and a white shirt, got to her feet. I got to mine. She opened her mouth, raised a finger, and the alarm cut off. “Are you all right?”

I considered the question, patting myself as if there might be a hardback embedded in my side. “I think so.”

She looked at me as if she wasn’t entirely sure. She was, it has to be said, the most perfect woman I’d ever seen in the flesh. At a time when the only thought in any sane person’s mind would be “That was an EARTHQUAKE!” I stood lost—forgive me for stepping into poetry, and clichéd poetry at that—lost in her beauty.

Xavier reappeared. “That was…” He hesitated, looking around at the spilled shelves. “I have no idea what that was.”

“We should get you an ambulance…” The girl looked at me doubtfully.

“No. I’m fine.” I drew myself to my full height and tried to look manly, like those cowboys who take one to the arm and carry on as if the “just” in “it’s just a flesh wound” made any sense at all.

“We should call your parents at least,” she said.

I had never felt so thoroughly fourteen.

“I’m fine!” I repeated, with rather more emphasis, and less fine than I had been, given that my pride had just been shot in the face. “That was an earthquake,” I added, somewhat belatedly.

Hit by sudden realization, and with a brief joint glance at the ceiling, all three of us made rapidly for the exit. The girl ushered me ahead of her while Xavier took the lead—no “women and children first” for Mr. Books!

I emerged into the day’s too-bright too-cold bluster hard on Xavier’s heels and stopped in my tracks, looking all around.

“Excuse me?” A voice from behind.

“Oh…I…” I stepped aside and let the girl out too.

“There’s…nothing,” I said. By which I meant that there was everything and that everything was as I’d left it, going about its various days with no more cares in the world than it had had earlier.

Xavier looked at the shop window, then back down the entrance passage where just two books lay on the floor, watched by the disapproving host of their shelf-bound cousins. “That was an earthquake? Surely?”

We looked around the street once more: no car alarms, no broken glass, no cracked tarmac, not a single tile fallen from on high. Without another word, Xavier went back into the shop. This time I was last in line and we went more slowly.

In the space where the counter sat, the floor had a light covering of books, and the shelves had disgorged perhaps ten or fifteen percent of their contents. It wasn’t just a matter of tipping, since the shelves were spaced for maximum stock, and most books didn’t have the room to pitch forward without hitting the shelf above. The books had been ejected, as if pushed from behind.

The devastation—and by “devastation” I mean the work required to replace all the books, since nothing else seemed to be out of place—increased by the yard as we returned to the alcove I’d been standing in. Here, the shelves against the rear wall had lost the majority of their stock, and books heaped in drifts around their base.

“This isn’t possible.” Xavier’s gaze returned to the ceiling where the plaster, discolored by an old leak, showed no signs of cracking, let alone descending in a rush.

“It happened,” said the girl. “Ergo it is possible.”

Xavier used one long-fingered hand to cover half his face and waved the other vaguely in the girl’s direction. “My sister Olivia.”

“Charmed.” Olivia extended a hand as if she expected me to kiss it, though with a smile that said she didn’t.

“Uh.” Because I read a lot, I knew that my experience of being fourteen was pretty universal, but knowing quite how awkward, mixed-up, and generally greasy I was supposed to be didn’t help me avoid being all those things. “Red.”

They both lifted their right eyebrow by the same fraction at that, but neither queried it. I was, after all, the injured party, innocently book shopping when struck down by a veritable avalanche of secondhand literature.

I looked around, still amazed. “This is so weird.” It seemed to be my day for stating the obvious to strangers.

“Poltergeist?” Olivia asked. She had close-cropped hair, intelligent eyes.

“I have no idea.” Xavier shook his head slowly. “I mean, it’s a stupid idea. No offense.” Olivia narrowed her gaze at him. “But the equidistribution of ignorance demands that I consider it equal to all other possibilities at this moment.”

I stooped and picked up a book. A slim volume of poems by Andrew Marvell. I put it on the nearly empty shelf nearest to me.

“Oh, you don’t have to—” Olivia reached too late to intercept. “Stop him, Xavi! It’s not his mess.”