This is me, stacking up all the books in the my own bookshop that I am taking home for myself to read first.
Illustration by Pierpaolo Rovero
This is me
Month: September 2020
It’s all right, just done me hands at the doctors
A couple came into the shop together, but he tried to leave. She said, ‘No, stay, Frank’, and he did.
She said to me, ‘It’s all right, just done me hands at the doctors, Frank, do your hands’, and he did.
Then she said, ‘This is very nice here, but I’ll think we’ll go get a cup of coffee instead’, and they did. But they came back.
She loved books. ‘Vanity Fair, I loved that on the television, the blond guy. That actor, he was gorgeous, do you know the one?’ But I didn’t know it.
‘I’ve read 22 biographies of the stars. Now that Yoko – she was a terrible, terrible person. It’s now wonder he was the way he was. It’s because she was terrible to deal with.’
She stood at the counter, dignified and straight and kind, and told me about various things. She bought Vanity Fair, a biography of Vanessa Redgrave, David Copperfield, The Harp in the South, The Constant Gardener and Pinocchio. Then she turned to find Frank, but he had left the shop.
She said, ‘He’s got hearing aids, but I swear he still can’t hear anything, especially me.’
I thought that this was probably true. She darted out of the shop, was swift in the doorway, she flitted past the window to their parked car. Here, through the window I could see Frank, leaning against the passenger side, smoking.
She said loudly, ‘Frank, you have to pay for the books, that’s what I said, remember.’
He said, ‘I’m ready. Where’s your stuff?’
They came back in, and she picked up her books from the counter, he handed me a credit card. She sighed and frowned, but he looked unperturbed. He winked, paid, and said, ‘All done Mrs.’
Illustration by Marius van Dokkum
It’s raining. There’s a man pacing up and down….
It’s raining. There’s a man pacing up and down outside my shop. His phone is on speaker. I can hear the phone speaking back to him, a thin stream of information, like a pilot giving air directions, and none of it making sense to anyone else.
‘The things they get away with down there is ridiculous.’
The phone answers what sounds like a long list of facts.
‘You can times that by five, mate. The problem is… the problem is… what they don’t realize is…’
The phone speaks back. Agreeing.
The man is pacing, agitated, up and down. It is still raining.
‘I contracted it all out though. It’s such a hassle. Turns out that – ‘
The phone interrupts.
‘Yes, yes, yes, yes…is it though?’
The phone delivers a short lecture, this time without interruption.
‘All right buddy, better let you go.’ The conversation ends. The man, wearing an orange safety vest, muddy boots, and a beanie, picks up his coffee from my windowsill and strides away.
It’s quiet again. It’s dark and raining, not right for September. There are long heavy trucks outside, slow and creaking and hissing. But now they have all stopped. This is unusual, and I look out. There’s an orange indicator going somewhere out of my sight, the rain and the hot orange light flicker and flacker all over the front of the shop. K and S Freighters are stuck out there, massive and shining, then a huge carrier with cows looking out at the rain, a soft wall of eyes, then a cement mixer with its wet belly turning slowly, then a bus.
Someone walks past whistling, a bright light idea uninterested in rain.
When the sun comes out, it is warm, its light has gold edges that are told in the puddles, the puddles read it swiftly in gold lines with metal stops. The puddles are flints. People look down, then up and shade their eyes.
Everyone becomes a jogger, simply everyone. They have to cross the road. The sun has dropped abruptly, rain again. I stand at the window and look out. People run rustily, puffing dramatically, eyes screwed up, legs lifted high to avoid the spray, laughing because there is so much water, and because we need it. My town, thirty minutes away and always dry, lay on its back this morning drinking heavily, weighed down by liquid, the trees hanging sodden, their roots and toes alive with water and digging for more.
Customers come wheezing in, happy and unbothered, ‘Do you have book two of Tim Severin’s Viking stuff?’
The trucks drag nets of spray behind them. A child in a car parked just outside the door has his arm out of the window catching the drops. He is on his knees. He puts his head out. A drench catches him, and he shakes and shakes, alive with nourishment. Somebody inside the car speaks, and he abruptly withdraws.
Another child, on the footpath, is being a duck. I am startled because his duck sound is so real, so loud and so close.
‘He’s being a duck, Grandpa.’
There’s a whole family out there. They’ve been to the bakery and are noisy with paper bags and loaves of bread and coffee.
‘Show Grandpa how you’re being a duck.’
The child is wearing soft thick clothing, red and dark blue, and tiny stout boots protect his webbed feet, and he quacks and quaeks and hoots.’
‘Hey, come here duck’, says Grandpa.
But he does not want to get into the car.
Grandpa, who drops to help the youngster, gets a boot in the side, and the son, the father, takes over, stern. ‘Get in. Now. Get in. Stop it.’
Now the ducky is in, fitted into a duckling seat, the rain runs down the windows and I can see him making duck hands to himself, and there are little arrows of sun smoking down and making a sheen of warm green emeralds on the top of their lolly green car, and then another truck goes speeding past sending us all us a new version of the same water.
Mafia Cats
“We’re the Mafia cats
Bugsy, Franco and Toni
We’re crazy for pizza
With hot pepperoni
We run all the rackets
From gambling to vice
On St Valentine’s Day
We massacre mice
We always wear shades
To show that we’re meanies
Big hats and sharp suits
And drive Lamborghinis
We’re the Mafia cats
Bugsy, Franco and Toni
Love Sicilian wine
And cheese macaroni
But we have a secret
(And if you dare tell
You’ll end up with the kitten
At the bottom of the well
Or covered in concrete
And thrown into the deep
For this is one secret
You really must keep.)
We’re the Cosa Nostra
Run the scams and the fiddles
But at home we are
Mopsy, Ginger and Tiddles.”
Mafia Cats by Roger McGough, from Selected Poems
That place we went to on the weekend
It was hot and busy and crowded and flushed. We were outside. It was a distillery, warm with weekend, choked with visitors, and looked like this:
Waiting staff were running, running, running. Weaving and carrying triple trays, balancing, enquiring, eyes flicking from table to table reading the needs.
Families. Trooping to their tables in lines. Senior members at the front, the young people trailing, checking the exits and their phones. The correct smiles. Parents, early meetings with a son’s new partner, tense. The young woman wanting to please but already brittle.
Us. Old friends, easy.
Next to us, one long long table of a thousand women, a hundred different ages swaying toward each other.
You can tell the family groups. They all use the hand sanitizer and order drinks early. So nice to be together.
A child bounces on a chair and drops a crayon. Everyone at that table looks fondly at the child. He turns his head from side to side to side, unaware, involved with crayons, rich colours, apple green and plum purple split.
The Covid Marshal swirls in the centre of the arena and checks and counts and rotates again. He is frowning. He frowns all afternoon. His shoes are worn out.
You can tell the friends groups. They enter in hilarious clots, it’s a great day. They have many jokes. They joke about the hand sanitizer.
The family groups, the young people, have silly faces. The cousins look at each other. Their parents are a little wooden, especially if their parents are there. The olds have faces of resignation…what the fuck does it all matter now. The young men wear pink shirts and socks and look desperately over their shoulders and then back at their phones. The girlfriends look at each other’s dresses. Then look away again.
The waiters are puffing. The sun shines down. A long plank of icy glasses passes us at head level, the beers glowing honey, oak, ruby, wheat, sand, cream, chilled…
The recipients (on a nearby table) for the plank of beers look up, their eyes softening, their voices lifting, friendly now and liking everyone on the table.
The child bounces on his chair, colouring in. The crayon on the ground is softening.
At the table of a thousand women is a thousand colours. There are impossible heels striking the beautiful ground, jewellery swinging, hair soft, fragrant and metres long. One young woman is late and she must walk in while everyone watches, their eyes flick up and down her form as she walks in on powerful hips and meaningful heels. She is greeted by an older woman with a light frown. All the younger women pause and watch the older woman’s face, they read that face, the old face, and take in the information. The old woman and the young woman hug, they exchange cheeked kisses, five times, six times, seven times. Then everyone relaxes. They sway in and out of magnificent colours, peacock blue, gold and ruby, emerald, blood, earth, invisible shocking pink, punched silver. The long, long fragrant hair, the hot sun, the cold cups, and the phones that need to be checked. Pictures are taken. The old woman is seated. She is still, glancing here, there, slowly, not needing to know anything. She already knows. The girls totter behind her, glancing carefully.
It is hot. Hotter. We eat fabulous things. We must move our table into the shade. The waitress is anxious, she glances across the day at the Covid Marshall and he bends over his list, frowning in his worn out shoes.
Everywhere, people in groups take photos, leaning in, drawing back, adjusting things, assessing things, frowning, showing rows of too enthusiastic teeth. Chilled white wine smiling and looking at red wine that swirls sulky and resentful in roundy glass chambers, amber ciders, gold bubbles, shouting at a table in the distance, cold water in forest brown glass jugs, a falling out on the next table, ‘Well go home then…’, and the staff sweeping bravely through the rows, the Covid Marshall frowning, and the child drawing and the blue crayon on the ground melting, a delicious soft and urgent message.
Painting by Milt Kobayashi
Whence…..?
“Whence did the wondrous
Mystic art arise?
Of painting speech
And speaking to the eyes
That we by tracing magic lines
Are taught
How to embody
And colour thought.”
William Massy
The Origin and Progress of Letters
1763
Art by Liz Y Ahmet
You got caught
The sky behind the trees is silver and bright – so bright it hurts your teeth to look at it. The wind is cold. People coming past the shop do it fast, collars up, faces prepared.
A young mum gets caught in a brief chilly shower that lasts the exact time it takes her to cross the road with a pram, a baby, a toddler, two bags of shopping, a drink bottle, and a toy white rabbit that gets dropped on the shining road half way over.
The child wails.
There’s a tradesman outside my door, waiting it out with coffee. He shouts:
‘You got caught in the rain.’
She shouts, ‘I know, it’s terrible.’
The rabbit lies there, its eye a desperate button.
He dashes and scoops.
‘Thank you, thank you so much.’
‘No worries.’
Illustration by Margaret C. Hoopes
My door, again
I wrote this blog three years ago. Since then, my door has been fixed. It is ordinary, appropriate and dull now. I had forgotten how it used to be.
“Visiting my bookshop means a complimentary struggle with the door. It is not old or new or beautiful. Everybody finds the door difficult except for Dick who is 94 and said that he’s gotten through worse doors in his life.
The door opens sulkily on a wheezing breath and then stops abruptly, its hinges allowing it no further; it will bruise a pram, thud a shoulder and remove confidence. Then it won’t shut at all. This door will creak and croak back to the last half inch gap and rest there for ten seconds and then abruptly shatter the peace of the shop with an impossible crash. People will jump in horror and stare at me and at the door, holding their books, their hearts and their lives in place with one hand over their chests. Each shopper thinks it is their fault. Sometimes the shock causes them to put chosen books back, and then I think that I should just remove the door and not have one.
My door can also stay half open, holding its breath and this bitchy balance for at least two hours and then crash land into the door frame like a truck hitting the building. One young man said he had a door like that at home, and that they do this because the closers are fucked. All the old heavy doors do it. Also the hinges could be fucked. He examined the hinges and said that they were not fucked.
My door will not let a pram out. Mothers, shopping, toddlers and prams are mixed together in a hot doorway jam, trying to exit. They always apologise as if it is their fault. It isn’t ever their fault. They will crush their prams to cardboard rather than be unkind about my door. The door stands there rectangular and exultant.
My door likes to lose its stupid doorknob in every tenth shopper’s horrified hand. The golden bulb throws out the screw quietly and slides off just as the door opens one inch. Then it will smash spectacularly back into the door frame and ruin a day. People always think they have broken my door and they apologise over and over again as the door expands ready to do it again.
But small children can reach the lower handle. They love the heavy, solid move of it. They love the smooth glass and press their faces on the cold clear slab. They will open and shut the door over and over, bang and bang and bang without going in or out. If it crashes unexpectedly, they love it.
Parents, making important reading choices, call out to their children: don’t make trouble.
I feel that, when assaulted by such enthusiasm, the door withdraws in consternation. I urge the children silently to keep going. Tap the glass, open the door, peer out and shout hellooooooo to an empty street. Push on the wood, but it won’t close. So lean in panting, chest to wood, kick it, push it until it gives way with a sullen and furious small click, defeated.”
The child who slipped outside the shop without his parents noticing
The door opened and closed, soft, final. The child, who had been inside my shop looking at books with his family, slipped out turned and stared back through the glass, his eyes soft and kind and accurate, finding his family again.
The father is just inside the door, and his face, upon looking up and seeing his child on the other side of the door, and realizing it was his child looking in at him, moved in tiny electrified muscular movements of confusion and terror.
The child’s face sparkled with satisfaction – seeing his family in there, while he is out there, and the father fleetingly frozen and unable to work out what to do next, ‘Why are you out there? You can’t go out there. Why did you go out there?’ And suddenly the whole world is irrelevant because his child is on the wrong side of the door, ie where he is not.
The father leaped the chasm, the wolves, the fire, the danger, and the train tracks and swept the door wide and towered there, ’You can’t be out there.’
The child expanded with absolute joy and came back in.
The mother browsed gently on.
They gathered together and the father, exhausted said to her, ‘Are you finished?’
But she says, ‘No, she isn’t quite finished yet.’
Menopause; a pause
The four of us all met somehow at the counter in my bookshop. Me seated, my friend standing, her friend leaning, another lady, here. That word comes up: menopause
and we all make “the face”, and our shoulders move slightly in outrage. The temperature of our bones glides (again) upward, silent and inappropriate, as confused as ever, keeping pace with life and not sympathetic. But we laugh and shout and laugh. We agree triumphantly that bras never fit. We have many ideas. Nothing can defeat many ideas.
Eventually one lady leaves, trundling her groceries and things out of the door in a little trolley. Her shoes are excellent; soft, and stitched and kind, looking after her, the person that wears them.
The Book Keeper Book Shop 