The Bookshop on the Corner (21 page)

Around 4
A.M.
, she saw the lights of the Land Rover scrape the roof and knew Lennox must be back, but that merely made her cross again. She heard a soft baaing as the car door opened, and a gentle murmuring, which annoyed her even more, seeing as he patently had it in him to be perfectly kind and sweet, as long as you had four fricking legs.

She was still cross when she heard the chickens start squawking two hours later as Lennox set off for work and she realized she'd barely slept a wink. Her shoulders were up around her ears; she was so stressed, it was worse than being back in the city. She pulled herself out of bed and stood in the shower for ages, but it only made her long for bed more than ever. No. She had a job now. That was how it was.

Only Surinder was sleeping peacefully on the sofa as Nina wandered over to fiddle with the expensive coffee machine in the kitchen, then stomped crossly out to the van. The weather steadfastly refused to reflect her mood and the sun beamed down in a most uncharacteristic fashion. Nina blinked and put her sunglasses on for practically the first time since she'd arrived.

A
Book for the Furious
: Nina almost laughed when she saw it because it was so precisely what she was looking for, an enormous tome of revenge stories, ranging from pouring molten silver into the eyes of a thief, to launching a pirate fleet.

I don't care, she thought. I don't care about him. But she did want to see Marek again, to kiss him again under the moon.

She sighed and glanced at her watch. Edwin and Hugh were crossing the cobbled square to sit and have a pint in the sunshine, and Nina waved to them. They waved back cheerily and asked her if she wanted to join them, and she didn't know how to explain to them that she couldn't drink because a) she was driving a van and b) it was just past eight o'clock in the morning. But she knew what they wanted really, and dug it out: the newest labyrinthine saga from the subcontinent; Hugh had developed a real taste for them. It was a thank-you, really, for everything they had done for her, helping her buy the van. Hugh would always insist on paying, and Nina would make sure there was no price written on it and purse her lips and say, I'm terribly sorry, Hugh,
that one is one pound fifty, and he would look pained and she would offer to discount it even further and he would gallantly refuse. So they got tremendously cheap books and she got to say thank you, and everyone was happy.

Ainslee was usually sidling up at this time; even though Nina welcomed her wholeheartedly every single day, the girl still acted like she wasn't wanted, creeping toward the van bent over, as though trying to hide. But today she was nowhere to be seen.

There was, however, someone else. A grubby, cheeky figure dressed in a ragged T-shirt and shorts displaying very scabbed knees: Ainslee's little brother.

“Ben?”

The child sniffed. There was snot crusted around his nose, as well as long lines on his dirty sweatshirt. He marched up to her defiantly.

“Ainslee's no' coming today.”

“Why not?”

“She's got . . . dunno.”

Nina frowned. “Well, is it something to do with school?”

“Aye.”

“Has she got exams?”

Ben shook his head. “No,” he said. “No. She's been told she can't take her exams. She's all sad and stuff. Exams sound rubbish.”

Nina looked around. The market wasn't busy yet; in her bad mood, she'd gotten up far too early after her rough night. She yawned. There were just a few old men walking their dogs, and some women sniffing the produce.

“Why can't she take her exams?” she said. “That's awful. She's such a smart girl.”

Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Dunno,” he said.

Nina blinked. “Okay,” she said finally, remembering Ainslee's horror when she'd tried to find out more about her home life. “Okay. Thanks so much for coming to tell me.”

Ben lingered. She could see he was peering inside, looking at the red and yellow bean bags. She waited a moment.

“Would you like to come in?”

“Naw.”

She paused. “Okay.”

Ben still didn't seem keen to leave.

“I think I'm going to sit out on this step,” said Nina gently. “Enjoy the sunshine. And maybe just read for a bit.”

Ben sniffed. “Hmm,” he said.

Nina was going to ask whether he had school that day, but she figured that was probably something he heard quite a lot, so she didn't. Instead, she picked up a copy of
Up on the Rooftops
—they'd sold all but two of them, including one she'd kept for herself—and took it out to the step, remembering as she did so how reading this book as a child had made her feel utterly and without a doubt that if she only met the right magic pigeon, kept St. Paul's as her compass, and didn't forget “North for truth; West for fresh; South for source, but East, ever East,” then everything would work out all right in the end.

“East, ever East,” she said out loud, eyeing Ben carefully. He was affecting an unconcerned look but still hadn't moved away.

Hattie, a local woman she'd gotten to know with four children under five and a look that occasionally said “kill me, kill me now,” came bounding up.

“Oh my God, you're here early!” she said in delight.

“So are you,” observed Nina.

“Are you joking? It's nearly eight thirty; I've been up for four
hours. As far as I'm concerned, it's lunchtime . . . Euan! Stop that! Leave that dog alone! Tildie! Tildie!”

In their buggy, the twins set up a cacophonous roar. Hattie didn't go anywhere without a halo of crumbs around her, and outside the van was no exception.

“Are you doing story hour?”

Hattie was constantly trying to persuade Nina to do a story session that involved her leaving all the children there, but Nina strenuously refused, muttering “Health and Safety” as a warding-off spell, to which Hattie had once sadly responded, “Well, I don't mind if you lose
one
of them, I've got loads of others,” and then laughed it off a little too shrilly.

Nina blinked. “I'll do it if you like, but you have to stay.”

“Just one tiny spa break?” said Hattie. “That's all I ask. Just one teensy-weensy forty-eight-hour break in New York?”

“I wish that was within my magical book powers,” said Nina. “Actually, I can recommend some globe-trotting glitzbuster stuff if you like. Might help.”

“Yes!” said Hattie. “I'll read it in the two seconds a day I have to spare. Normally just before they discover I've locked myself in the bathroom.”

Nina sat back down and started reading aloud from
Up on the Rooftops
, and the twins quieted down immediately—not because they could follow the story, but because the soothing cadence of somebody reading always had a transformative effect on babies; Griffin's theory was that children were evolutionarily engineered to listen to stories, because it stopped them from wandering off into the woods and getting eaten by hairy mammoths.

And as the three children in the story found themselves stranded on the top of their building, after climbing the thousand steps, she couldn't help but notice scruffy little Ben edging
closer and closer, until he was sitting cross-legged right in front of her at the foot of the steps.

At the end of the chapter, she closed the book to great sighs, particularly from Hattie. “I love that book,” she said. “Thank you. Ten minutes of peace and quiet. That is my record this decade.”

Nina smiled. The children started clamoring for more.

“Oh good,” said Hattie. “The bakery's open. I'm going to go and get them all sticky. Then we can have a bath. Surely that will take me up to nine thirty. Just out of interest, and absolutely nothing to do with anything, what time do you open a bottle of wine of an evening slash afternoon slash lunchtime?”

“See you later,” said Nina, smiling and tactfully prising a set of very sticky fingers off the book.

“I'll take one,” said Hattie.

There was only one copy left after this. Nina looked at Hattie.

“I need it,” said Hattie.

“Okay,” said Nina, rather regretfully selling it.

She watched them all clattering noisily over the cobbles, somebody wailing.

“What happened, though?” said a little voice by her feet. “What happened next?”

Nina looked down. “Well, lots of things,” she said.

Ben pouted. “I would like to know,” he said. “Have they made it into a film?”

“Yes,” said Nina. “But the film is terrible.”

“Why is the film terrible?”

“It's not really the film's fault,” said Nina. “But you know when you're watching a film you feel like you can see what's happening?”

Ben nodded.

“Well, that's one thing. But when you read a book, you feel like you're in it.”

“Like a computer game?”

“No. Not like a computer game. Computer games are fun, but you're still just looking at stuff and pressing buttons. Reading is being in stuff.”

Ben squinted. “Like actually being there?”

“Like actually being there. You plug straight into the writer's brain. It's just you and them. You experience what they experience.”

Ben looked at her for a while, then scuffed his sneaker on the pavement. There was a long pause.

“That sounds no' bad.”

Nina figured she needed more coffee, and poured some from her thermos. Then she brought out
We're Going on a Bear Hunt
and looked at Ben.

“Want to have a look?”

Ben glanced all around the square to make sure nobody was looking at him and there weren't any other boys around. Then he shrugged.

“All right.”

“Well, come and sit down here.”

And the two of them sat on the steps in the morning sunshine and painfully, slowly, and with much grunting from Ben, made their way through it.

Finally they got up. Ben looked like he might almost say thank you.

“Where are you going now?” Nina asked carefully. “Are you going back home?”

Ben shrugged. “Maybe.”

Oh Lord. Nina thought again that she really needed to call social services. Or someone. But Ainslee had begged her so hard.

“You could go to school,” she said, as gently as she was able, feeling as if Ben were a timid animal that might bolt at her touch. “You know. If you liked.”

“The other kids are mean,” said Ben. “They call me dirty.”

He was, undeniably, dirty. Nina sighed. She would slip a little more money to Ainslee, suggest she bought him a new shirt.

“You could wash in the coffee shop,” she said. “They wouldn't mind. And just go to school. Ignore those other kids. Who cares about them?”

“I hate it,” said Ben. “It's just stupid people saying stupid things and telling you to eat vegetables and stuff.”

“I know,” said Nina.

She watched the little figure pad across the square—he did go into the coffee shop, she noticed—and then the next of her customers arrived. Farmer McNab came in once a week and bought four space westerns—fortunately there'd been a lot of them in the boxes, because it was a narrow interest that wasn't getting any new input anytime soon. She'd tried to move him over to either real westerns or space opera, but he was having absolutely none of it, so now she'd e-mailed Griffin and was desperately trying to source anything online that had a picture on the cover of a cowboy wearing a space helmet. By the time she'd dealt with Mr. McNab's queries about how one tamed a Martian horse (neutron reins), she'd lost sight of Ben.

She worried all morning, serving a long line of people, many, she was pleased to see, absolute regulars.

“This is your fault,” said Mrs. Gardiner, brandishing a huge saga about a Native American woman who'd been magically sent back in time to the court of Henry VIII, who had promptly set
about attempting to make her his seventh wife, with pulse-racing results. “You've got me hooked on these book things.”

“Good,” said Nina, but she was still thinking about Ben when Surinder turned up to whisk her off to lunch.

“The lucky thing about you . . . ,” began Surinder, watching Nina's eyelids droop as they sat in the little pub garden and ate cullen skink, a fishy, creamy soup with which they'd both become horribly obsessed, accompanied by rough brown bread and locally smoked salmon, which tasted so different from the oily, rubbery stuff that Nina was used to on the rare occasions she could afford it from the supermarket that it might as well have been a different food altogether.

In the sunlight, with half a lager shandy in front of her, Nina felt her horrible mood start to lift a little.

“What's lucky about me?” she said. “Because I don't feel very lucky.”

“Well, you can just finish for the day now, can't you?” said Surinder. “You've sold a bunch of stuff. You can go home and take a nap.”

This hadn't occurred to Nina, who tended to work a full day from force of habit, not to mention being unable to shut the shop if there was even the slightest chance of another sale. After years of working in public service, it had come as a bit of a surprise to her how genuinely interested she was in running a business; seeing what worked, looking at stock, and, of course, matching the right book to the right person. It was the same joy she had always felt at the library, but somehow, watching people leaving with books they could keep forever was even more profound.

“Oh yeah,” she said.

“Well, can't you? You're making enough, aren't you?”

Frowning, Nina explained about Ainslee and Ben.

“Oh God,” said Surinder. “You should just report it.”

“But Ainslee begged me not to.”

“Yes, but you don't know what's going on,” said Surinder. “It could be really, really awful at home. There could be some evil stepdad doing horrible things. She might have Stockholm syndrome or something. Kids are weird like that: they'll defend their family even if it's completely messed up.”

“Yeah,” said Nina. “Yeah.”

“So, last night . . . ,” said Surinder, leaving it hanging.

“Argh,” said Nina, dropping her head. “Oh GOD.” And she told Surinder everything.

“Oh,” said Surinder. “Well, Lennox might be right. I mean, why hasn't Marek invited you anywhere normal?”

“Lennox is a judgmental arsehole.”

“Or Marek's sending all his money back to his family.”

Nina didn't reply.

“Oh come on,” said Surinder. “What did you think would happen? Marek was going to take you boldly in his strong and manly arms?”

Nina didn't want to answer that either.

“What, he was going to lay you down and give you a doing on the floor of the cab?”

“You don't need to be so explicit.”

“It's what you were thinking, though.”

“It's been AGES! AGES!”