The Bookshop on the Corner (2 page)

T
he problem with good things that happen is that very often they disguise themselves as awful things. It would be lovely, wouldn't it, whenever you're going through something difficult, if someone could just tap you on the shoulder and say, “Don't worry, it's completely worth it. It seems like absolutely horrible crap now, but I promise it will all come good in the end,” and you could say, “Thank you, Fairy Godmother.” You might also say, “Will I also lose that seven pounds?” and they would say, “But of course, my child!”

That would be useful, but it isn't how it is, which is why we sometimes plow on too long with things that aren't making us happy, or give up too quickly on something that might yet work itself out, and it is often difficult to tell precisely which is which.

A life lived forward can be a really irritating thing. So Nina thought, at any rate.

Nina Redmond, twenty-nine, was telling herself not to cry in public. If you have ever tried giving yourself a good talking-to, you'll know it doesn't work terribly well. She was at work, for goodness' sake. You weren't meant to cry at work.

She wondered if anyone else ever did. Then she wondered if maybe everyone did, even Cathy Neeson, with her stiff too-blond hair, and her thin mouth and her spreadsheets, who was right at this moment standing in a corner, watching the room with folded arms and a grim expression, after delivering to the small team Nina was a member of a speech filled with jargon about how there were cutbacks all over, and Birmingham couldn't afford to maintain all its libraries, and how austerity was something they just had to get used to.

Nina reckoned probably not. Some people just didn't have a tear in them.

(What Nina didn't know was that Cathy Neeson cried on the way to work, on the way home from work—after eight o'clock most nights—every time she laid someone off, every time she was asked to shave another few percent off an already skeleton budget, every time she was ordered to produce some new quality relevant paperwork, and every time her boss dumped a load of administrative work on her at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon on his way to a skiing vacation, of which he took many.

Eventually she ditched the entire thing and went and worked in a National Trust gift shop for a fifth of the salary and half the hours and none of the tears. But this story is not about Cathy Neeson.)

It was just, Nina thought, trying to squash down the lump in her throat . . . it was just that they had been such a
little
library.

Children's story time Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Early
closing Wednesday afternoon. A shabby old-fashioned building with tatty linoleum floors. A little musty sometimes, it was true. The big dripping radiators could take a while to get going of a morning and then would become instantly too warm, with a bit of a fug, particularly off old Charlie Evans, who came in to keep warm and read the
Morning Star
cover to cover, very slowly. She wondered where the Charlie Evanses of the world would go now.

Cathy Neeson had explained that they were going to compress the library services into the center of town, where they would become a “hub,” with a “multimedia experience zone” and a coffee shop and an “intersensory experience,” whatever that was, even though town was at least two bus trips too far for most of their elderly or strollered-up clientele.

Their lovely, tatty, old pitched-roof premises were being sold off to become executive apartments that would be well beyond the reach of a librarian's salary.

And Nina Redmond, twenty-nine, bookworm, with her long tangle of auburn hair, her pale skin with freckles dotted here and there, and a shyness that made her blush—or want to burst into tears—at the most inopportune moments, was, she got the feeling, going to be thrown out into the cold winds of a world that was getting a lot of unemployed librarians on the market at the same time.

“So,” Cathy Neeson had concluded, “you can pretty much get started on packing up the ‘books' right away.”

She said “books” like it was a word she found distasteful in her shiny new vision of Mediatech Services. All those grubby, awkward books.

Nina dragged herself into the back room with a heavy heart and a slight redness around her eyes. Fortunately, everyone else looked more or less the same way. Old Rita O'Leary, who should probably have retired about a decade ago but was so kind to their clientele that everyone overlooked the fact that she couldn't see the numbers on the Dewey Decimal System anymore and filed more or less at random, had burst into floods, and Nina had been able to cover up her own sadness comforting her.

“You know who else did this?” hissed her colleague Griffin through his straggly beard as she made her way through. Griffin was casting a wary look at Cathy Neeson, still out in the main area as he spoke. “The Nazis. They packed up all the books and threw them onto bonfires.”

“They're not throwing them onto bonfires!” said Nina. “They're not actually Nazis.”

“That's what everyone thinks. Then before you know it, you've got Nazis.”

With breathtaking speed, there'd been a sale, of sorts, with most of their clientele leafing through old familiar favorites in the ten pence box and leaving the shinier, newer stock behind.

Now, as the days went on, they were meant to be packing up the rest of the books to ship them to the central library, but Griffin's normally sullen face was looking even darker than usual. He had a long, unpleasantly scrawny beard, and a scornful attitude toward people who didn't read the books he liked. As the only books he liked were obscure 1950s out-of-print stories about frustrated young men who drank too much in Fitzrovia,
that gave him a lot of time to hone his attitude. He was still talking about book burners.

“They won't get burned! They'll go to the big place in town.”

Nina couldn't bring herself to even say Mediatech.

Griffin snorted. “Have you seen the plans? Coffee, computers, DVDs, plants, admin offices, and people doing cost–benefit analysis and harassing the unemployed—sorry, running ‘mindfulness workshops.' There isn't room for a book in the whole damn place.” He gestured at the dozens of boxes. “This will be landfill. They'll use it to make roads.”

“They won't!”

“They will! That's what they do with dead books, didn't you know? Turn them into underlay for roads. So great big cars can roll over the top of centuries of thought and ideas and scholarship, metaphorically stamping a love of learning into the dust with their stupid big tires and blustering
Top Gear
idiots killing the planet.”

“You're not in the best of moods this morning, are you, Griffin?”

“Could you two hurry it along a bit over there?” said Cathy Neeson, bustling in, sounding anxious. They only had the budget for the collection trucks for one afternoon; if they didn't manage to load everything up in time, she'd be in serious trouble.

“Yes, Commandant Über-Führer,” said Griffin under his breath as she bustled out again, her blond bob still rigid. “God, that woman is so evil it's unbelievable.”

But Nina wasn't listening. She was looking instead in despair at the thousands of volumes around her, so hopeful with their beautiful covers and optimistic blurbs. To condemn any of them to waste disposal seemed heartbreaking: these were books! To
Nina it was like closing down an animal shelter. And there was no way they were going to get it all done today, no matter what Cathy Neeson thought.

Which was how, six hours later, when Nina's Mini Metro pulled up in front of the front door of her tiny shared house, it was completely and utterly stuffed with volumes.

“Oh no,” said Surinder, coming to the door and folding her arms over her rather impressive bosom. She had a grim expression on her face. Nina had met her mother, who was a police superintendent. Surinder had inherited the expression. She used it on Nina quite a lot. “You're not bringing them in here. Absolutely not.”

“It's just . . . I mean, they're in perfect condition.”

“It's not that,” said Surinder. “And don't give me that look, like I'm turning away orphans.”

“Well, in a way . . . ,” said Nina, trying not to look too pleading.

“The joists of the house won't take it, Nina! I've told you before.”

Nina and Surinder had shared the tiny row house very happily for four years, ever since Nina had arrived in Edgbaston by way of Chester. They hadn't known each other beforehand, and had thus been in the happy position of being able to become roommate friends, rather than friends who moved in together and then fell out.

Nina lived in some worry about Surinder finding a serious boyfriend and moving out or moving him in, but despite a large number of suitors, it hadn't happened yet, which was useful. Surinder would point out that there was no reason to think she was the only person this might happen to. But Nina's crippling
shyness and solitary habit of reading all the time meant they both felt reasonably sure that Surinder was going to get lucky first. Nina had always been the quiet one, on the sidelines, observing things through the medium of the novels she loved to read.

Plus, she thought, after another awkward evening chatting to the clumsy friends of Surinder's latest paramour, she just hadn't met anyone who compared to the heroes of the books she loved. A Mr. Darcy, or a Heathcliff, or even, in the right mood, a Christian Gray . . . the nervous, clammy-handed boys to whom she could never think of anything funny or witty to say really couldn't compare. They didn't stride over Yorkshire moors looking swarthy and furious. They didn't refuse to dance with you at the Pump Room while secretly harboring a deep lifelong passion for you. They just got drunk at the Christmas party, as Griffin had, and tried to stick their tongue down your throat while bleating on for hours about how their relationship with their girlfriend wasn't actually that serious really. Anyway. Surinder was looking furious, and worst of all, she was right. When it came to books, there simply wasn't the space. There were books everywhere. Books on the landing, books on the stairs, books filling Nina's room completely, books carefully filed in the sitting room, books in the loo, just in case. Nina always liked to feel that
Little Women
was close by in a crisis.