Page 9 of The Bookshop Book

“If Red wants to help…”

“Stop.” Olivia touched my shoulder as I bent for another book. And then to Xavier, “You can’t exploit a customer. He’s practically walking wounded. He was buried in here when I came in.”

I straightened with another slim hardback in hand, this one still wearing its faded dustcover and sporting a rural scene where the poetry book had only bare gray boards. Something among the drooping trees on that cover caught my eye, even with Olivia standing right beside me.

“The Wind in the Willows.” I was clearly not through saying what was right in front of me. “I didn’t know there was a girl in it.”

“There isn’t,” Xavier said. He crouched and began to restock the lower levels, as if hoping to keep me going. “There’s a washerwoman. And Toad does indulge in a spot of drag—”

“This is a girl,” I said. I would have added “a pretty one,” but that wasn’t what had struck me as so incongruous. She looked scared. Properly scared. Not the sort of thing you’d put on a bucolic fantasy like The Wind in the Willows. Apologies for the “bucolic.” I use ten-dollar words sometimes. Sophie says it’s a dirty habit.

“Let me see.” Olivia took the book with a directness more appropriate for a brother than for a customer—a walking wounded customer at that. “Where?”

“In the biggest willow. Looking out through the branches, I mean.”

“Can’t see her…” She offered the book back and I took it.

“I…” No girl, terrified or otherwise. “…uh…” I shelved the book and rubbed my head, feeling for any bumps that might explain the hallucination.

Olivia, looking suddenly concerned, took my arm to help me through the book drifts, as if I were some elderly relative having a funny turn. “Let’s get you out of here. You were knocked down. You might want to go to the emergency room. Concussion can be dangerous.”

“He’s not—”

“He should get checked out!” Olivia spoke over her brother’s protest.

Xavier stood with a book in each hand. He put one on the shelf in a particular spot as if that were exactly where it had come from and handed the other to me. An Alien Heat by Michael Moorcock, complete with a freaky seventies cover: a woman’s head, on fire, growing out of a plant. “Best have a lie-down at least.”

So, clutching a new-to-me Moorcock book in remarkably good condition for a volume nearly old enough for a free bus pass, I allowed myself to be escorted off the premises by the lovely Olivia.

Outside, a brisk breeze and the imagined pressure of Olivia’s dark-eyed stare pushed me down the road. I walked on without seeing my surroundings, autopilot saving me from collision with the street furniture. I found myself more concerned with the peculiarity of the girl on the Wind in the Willows cover than with the near-miraculous “earthquake” that had had books jettisoning themselves from the shelves like the library scene from Ghostbusters on steroids.

Obviously, the book eruption had been more spectacular, more mysterious, and just plain “more.” But we had all seen it. It wasn’t an event that implied there was something wrong with my eyes or my brain. And since my childhood had presented me with front-row tickets to Mum’s mental erosion, I had always had a morbid fear that those same winds of change would blow my way one day and carry off the person I thought I was—the one I wanted to be, or had at least resigned myself to being—leaving something broken in their place, sharp angled and ready to fail anyone who depended on me.

I had seen a girl. Olivia hadn’t. She had no reason to lie, and the girl had been gone when she handed the book back. Common sense demanded it to be a trick of the light. Logic dictated that being knocked to the ground and hammered by falling books must have shaken my brain up. But logic and common sense could go jump in a lake. I’d seen her.

My autopilot wasn’t all it could be. It hadn’t walked me into a lamppost or folded me over a rubbish bin, but it had turned left rather than right, and I found myself at the extreme easterly end of the high street. Werton’s a small town and kept reminding me of that fact. From the elevation of my end of its shopping street, I was offered a view of distant hills and a glimpse of the fields that come surprisingly close to the beating heart of Werton’s commerce.

For some reason, a lone figure caught my eye. Someone out in the greenery, a man walking down the highway that after some miles cut through the town. Tiny in the distance. I couldn’t even say it was a man, but I’d have sworn it was. Out there, long past the point where the pavements gave up. Marching along, letting every passing lorry grease his hip.

I shook my head and reversed course, hoping to catch up with Sophie. If I couldn’t find her, I’d eke out a cup of tea in the Blue Flag and read my book while the world went past the window. It wasn’t much of a plan, but frankly it beat doing my homework.

I ended up at the Blue Flag. I sat down in a plastic chair with a vague sense of relief that I hadn’t found my sister and her friends. I like people, don’t get me wrong. I’m not the kind of introvert that’s literally allergic to company. It’s just that to engage with them, to laugh in the right places, to say something worthwhile or that at least gets a laugh back, even to nod when I should, all of that involves a strange kind of effort. Just being in someone else’s presence does. It’s a bit like holding your arm up. It’s not hard to do. It’s easy. And then a little less easy. And then as time wears on you’re shoring up one arm with the other and the ache has set in, bone-deep. And after a while you just need to leave so you can be alone and actually breathe.

I think of it like having a food allergy and there being only that kind of food to eat. If I didn’t like people, it wouldn’t be an issue. I’d just hole up in my room like Cole does back at the Togetherness Trust and never bother with anyone. So I sat down at the sticky table in the greasiest of Werton’s three greasy spoons with that familiar sense of relief at being alone, guilt at having taken the easy path, again, and disappointment. Relief, guilt, disappointment—the trifecta that rule my life. I’m not sure “trifecta” is the right word to use there. I’ll have to look it up later. You’ll have noticed that I like to use longer and more obscure words than are typically found in my demographic’s vernacular. It started to get me bullied in school, so I translate back to common tongue when speaking, but in my head I’m very la-di-da!

I’ve always been a reader. I’m not one of those people who make out that everyone who doesn’t read is somehow stumbling through life blind to wonders they don’t even know they’re missing. I mean, they are, but we all are. Every book read is a series of brisk walks in the countryside missed, just as every nature hike is a missed video game or soap opera or coffee with a friend. There’s too much world to inhale in the single breath of a life, and so we make our choices. Books are mine. As a teenager it’s one way to be taken seriously—not by the general public, but by the author at least. The author speaks to us all the same, and sure, what we hear might change from one decade of our lives to the next, but we’re all afforded the same respect, and that’s a rarity for a fourteen-year-old.

I’d been reading awhile when something made me look up. My grandmother—the frail one—calls it a “someone walked over your grave” feeling. A man stood at the Flag’s rain-spotted window, peering in. Homeless, by the look of him—lots of layers, the outer one stained as if he’d crawled through a ditch recently, an overfull shopping bag in one hand that didn’t look as if it were overfull of shopping.

A sudden conviction seized me. Without evidence: this man with his road-worn trench coat and his thin hair layered greasily over his skull was the same one I’d seen approaching the town through the fields, eating diesel on the main road from Oxford. He wasn’t the first homeless man to wander into the town, and we had a shifting homegrown population too, most often found down by the canal bridge, but something about him drew my attention. I’ll say it was the eye patch. That’s the easy answer. A dirty, very unpiratical, NHS eye patch. But it wasn’t that. It was the way his working eye was staring into the café, even though I didn’t think he’d be able to see much from out there. And it was the way that, although he hadn’t looked my way yet, I desperately didn’t want that staring eye to find me.

Chapter 5

The Library

“Don’t look at me like that.” The Smith continues to lay bricks, one after the next—slap the mortar, place the brick. “It can’t be the first time?”

The Muse, tall, statuesque, eyes the Smith silently, judgment in pale lavender eyes.