Bookshop Girl Page 10

  Right at the front, she’s scrawled her own theories as to who the murderer is. I can just about make out the name of the publisher beneath her loopy handwriting. It says their offices are based in London

  I open my laptop and start writing an email that I’m ninety-nine per cent sure I have zero intention of ever sending. I tap away at the keyboard so furiously that I make millions of typos and stop even feeling like this is a real email to a real person.

  For the attention of bestselling author Paula Williamson,

  Don’t worry. Obvs I’m not COMPLETELY deluded – I know that you’ll never read this. I’m not actually going to send it and even if I did, you’re so busy writing books my bessie’s obsessed with that I doubt you’ll ever get a chance to read about the fall-out we had today and how she called me a bitch and I danced with Blaine (who’s really fit but really bad at fetching precious data out of crappy water features) and how I’ve ruined EVERYTHING FOR EVERYBODY. BLEUGH!

  It’s all a mess. A huge mess.

  My name is Paige and I work in a bookshop called Bennett’s, in a town called Greysworth. Recently we were told that we’d have to close down because we wouldn’t be able to afford the rent, and obviously this is heartbreaking because Bennett’s is the single best thing about being born and having to exist in Greysworth. We tried really hard to save Bennett’s. We made a petition and were doing pretty well until I managed to cock that up too. Now it’s too late and it looks like we’ll be closing for good. Which sucks. Because there’s nothing else to do around here.

  My best friend Holly is such a huge fan of your I’m a Murderer books that she writes her own theories in the margins and she can’t bear the thought of not being a bookshop girl when the third and final part of the series is published at the end of the year.

  Anyway. She’d be made up (and hopefully maybe) forgive me if she realised that you’d known about Bennett’s. If you’d known that she was there, in Greysworth, promoting your stories and sharing her love for them to anyone with ears.

  Okay, well, thanks I guess and LOL.

  Paige Turner X

  Bennett’s, Greysworth

  Without rereading it I click send.

  Piss it.

  There’s nothing to lose.

  As I retreat back into my heap of bedding, the house phone rings and I hear my brother answer it.

  Now Elliot is knocking on my door. My door. The six-foot collage of Barbie and Teletubby stickers that survived two and a half ‘I’m grown up and over this’ peel-off attempts.

  He offers me the phone but I silently shake my head.

  Holding it back to his ear, Elliot lies, ‘She can’t talk right now. Ah, okay. Yeah, right. All right, yeah. I’ll tell her, yeah …’ He absently picks at a faded Pokémon sticker. As long as it’s not the Jigglypuff one I’ll let it slide. ‘Okay. Yeah … Okay, will do. It’s Holly.’

  I hope she’s not still angry at me.

  She will be if I blow her off now.

  I take the phone from my brother and mumble something tiny along the lines of ‘Helloholly …’

  ‘Paige! Ohmygod! I want to hear all about your day in town, but before I do I just want to apologise for earlier. I’m so, so, sorry –’

  She’s speaking so fast that I reckon she’s downed every iced latte within a five-mile radius of Greysworth.

  ‘– and I just wanted to let you know that while we were at the park today, me and Jamie collected a load of signatures for the campaign! Think we’ve got well over a hundred! There was some kind of lame concert on at the band stand, so the place was packed!’

  ‘Oh, Holly!’ I wail. ‘That’s amazing!’ I’m defs going to cry again. ‘You beauty! You absolute legend! You’ve saved the day!’ I could do the Macarena for eternity, I am that proud.

  I dissolve into tears of joy, jump around my silly, childish, happy room and physically kiss the phone with relief.

  ‘Now, before I tell you about the surreal day I had in town with Blaine Henderson –’ I hear her gasp on the other end of the line – ‘I want to hear every single detail about your date with Jamie.’

  I arrived late to Posers this evening.

  Uploading the signatures Holly and Jamie collected on to the petition site took forever, and then submitting the thing took even longer.

  Sue was already splayed across the mattress when I stumbled into the studio and as soon as I noticed that Jamie had pinched my usual spot next to Holly, I had to awkwardly scrape a spare chair into position. Real subtle.

  Now I’m still out of breath, desperately trying to catch up with the rest of the class by sketching the curve of Sue’s fleshy back.

  ‘Great. Thank you, Sue; you can relax now.’ Clive sets his graphite stick down on the ledge of his easel. ‘Let’s take that tea break, shall we, gang?’

  Break time already? Guess I was even later than I thought.

  Blaine stretches out of his chair. ‘I see you’ve dried off since your paddle in the fountain …’

  ‘It’s not funny!’ I plead.

  God, last time I saw him I was a total wreck, crying like a baby as I fished my Bodyform pads and broken dreams out of the water. ‘I’m sorry I left in such a hurry …’ I explain. ‘Did you get in trouble with those police officers?’

  ‘Pfffft! Nah, “pigs” don’t scare me. I’m not worried about them. They’re just puppets. Part of a machine.’ He snarls, places an unlit cigarette between his lips and winks, before swaggering out of the studio. His secondhand brogues tap along the paint-splattered floor.

  Still swooning, I turn to Holly who is giving the back of Blaine’s leather jacket some seriously filthy looks.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.

  ‘I still think it sucks that he basically threw your stuff in the fountain and that you’re the one who ended up getting in there to get it back …’

  ‘He didn’t throw it in there, Hols. The lads on the bike –’

  ‘Well, pretty much.’ She narrows her eyes and taps her pencil on her sketchbook disapprovingly. ‘I’m not sure about that Blaine Henderson. I don’t trust him.’

  Jamie joins in, laughing under his breath. ‘I know what you mean. He seems a bit pretentious, doesn’t he? He loves himself a bit too much.’

  OMG! I really don’t appreciate Holly bringing this up in front of Jamie. Since when did he become the invisible third member of our gruesome twosome?!

  Sue pads over to us, robe on. ‘So what’s the latest from our splinter group of bookshop activists?’

  ‘We’ve submitted the petition!’ I cheer, remembering that, as much as the lovebirds sitting here have hurt me by slating Blaine, they are responsible for saving the petition, and saving me from suffocating in my snotty, tear-stained duvet cover.

  ‘Fan-tas-tic!’ Sue claps her hands together. ‘It’s a waiting game now.’

  Waiting is not my strong point. I’ve spent a lifetime rattling presents under Christmas trees and Googling plot spoilers to my favourite TV shows.

  ‘Don’t leave it too long, though,’ Sue warns, tidying the wild strands of hair that fall into her eyes. ‘Direct action. That’s what needs to happen. If they won’t pay attention to everything you’ve done so far, you need to do something, a campaign stunt, that they will have no choice but to sit up and pay attention to. If your petition doesn’t get the message across, then it’s time to take a more forceful approach.’

  ‘No more Mr Nice Guy!’ says Holly, laughing and totally getting onto Sue’s wavelength.

  ‘You can still be civil, peaceful …’ Sue clarifies. ‘You mustn’t forget your principles. Taking direct action is the next step. It’s giving civil disobedience a bit of welly!’

  Blaine and Clive breeze through the door in a cloud of smokers’ coughs.

  ‘Right, let’s get back into it, Posers! Sue, what do you fancy? A long or a short pose next?’

  I’m making marks on my paper. Marks that kind of resemble Sue. Evidence that I’m drawing, but I’m not on Sue at
all. My mind is on anything but Sue.

  How could Holly and Jamie think that Blaine is pretentious?! Untrustworthy?!

  They probably just don’t get him.

  He’s not really like the other lads around this town.

  He reads all the books I want to read when I’m at work.

  He’s arty, and intellectual, and he’s an anarchist.

  He’s perfect for me. I’m pretty sure we’re meant to be together, so Holly and Jamie will just have to get used to it.

  While I steal glances at Blaine throughout the class, those two words, ‘direct action’, are dancing around my head like two drunken aunties at a wedding.

  Direct action.

  Of course.

  I squint at the cracked screen on Holly’s phone while we stand behind the till. The campaign video she uploaded last week has had hundreds of hits, and comments are still rolling in: people offering their support, wishing us well.

  ‘I hate waiting around to hear back from the council,’ I moan. The fact that the urgency of our situation doesn’t seem to be being taken seriously is really grating on me.

  ‘Did Take That teach you nothing, Paige?’ Adam jests. ‘You’re lacking in what Gary Barlow would refer to as “a little patienc—”’

  ‘Take That? Gary Barlow?’ I frown. ‘What are you talking about?’

  He shakes his head and says something about forgetting ‘how young’ me are Holly are before continuing. ‘It’s only been two days since we submitted the petition. The guidelines did say that it could take as long as five working days to get a response …’

  ‘Time’s running out, though!’ I tap at the imaginary watch on my wrist. This is our last week of trading according to the notice period that Mick Morgan from head office gave us just over three weeks ago.

  It’s making me anxious.

  After what Sue said about direct action, I can’t help but feel like rather than waiting for an answer, twiddling our thumbs, we need to try something else.

  ‘Okay so, guys, I’ve drafted an open letter.’ I open the notebook I started scrawling in this morning when Mr Abbott approaches the desk, pink cherryade stain on his white moustache.

  ‘Any new books on pig farming?’

  We have already explained to him that no new books are being delivered at the moment, but he’s not getting it.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Abbott. We don’t have any new pig books.’ I smile and try to be as polite as possible, even though I know how long this could go on for, and I know exactly what line’s coming next.

  ‘I think I know a bit more about pigs than you do!’ That glimmer in his pale eyes as he smiles.

  ‘Yes, yes, I imagine you do.’

  He sighs and stands propped up by his walking stick. A heavy, quilted Barbour jacket is wrapped round him, despite it being one of the hottest days of the year.

  We watch him shuffle over to his seat by the window and Holly asks, ‘What is a, a what? An open letter?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, so I’ve seen a few of them on my online travels into activism now … and basically what I’ve gathered is that it’s a letter addressed directly to the person you’ve got beef with …’

  Holly snorts. ‘Beef! Like Shayleigh and Charlotte Evans!’

  Of course. Throwback to Year Eight when two girls in our class organised a huge fight by the shops because Shayleigh had accused Charlotte of texting her boyfriend.

  ‘OMG yes! Exactly like that! So, like, remember how Charlotte Evans wrote that long post on Facebook about how she had beef with Shayleigh?’

  ‘Like I’d ever link your boyfriend he’s so crusty!’ Holly does an outstanding impression of our classmate that makes me wish our CCTV was in operation so that I could relive it again and again.

  ‘And in that status, Charlotte addressed Shayleigh, and she wrote down exactly what her beef was and what she was going to do about it, but we could all read it so we all knew what was going on; that’s kind of like an open letter!’

  ‘Brilliant!’ She claps her hands in excitement.

  ‘So, I was thinking, if we write an open letter to the council and we tell them about the petition, and the support we’ve gained so far, and that it would be a humungous loss to the high street if they let the plans for demolition to go ahead …’

  ‘Yes yes yes!’

  ‘Then we post it online, on our blog, and we share it, and we get other people to share it, and the fact that so many people have read this letter, puts extra pressure on the council to act on it …’

  Adam nods and strokes his beard. ‘I mean, it’s not like the council own Bennett’s or these premises but … they do have the power and the authority to challenge plans to demolish us …’

  ‘Exactly! They also have a responsibility to communicate the fact that the people of this town do want a bookshop on their high street. We’ve got the petition to prove it.’ I beam with pride. ‘On top of that, they must be aware of the number of jobs that will be lost if we close, and the fact that we’d be another shop pushed out of the centre because of “high-street regeneration”, which so far only seems to push businesses out of town when they can’t afford to rent a space.’

  I pass the notes to Holly and her eyes skim over my messy handwriting.

  She grins. ‘I love it!’

  I knock on the open door to the manager’s office.

  Tony looks up from his desk. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Tony. Could I use your printer? The one on the shop floor has finally snuffed it.’

  He blinks. ‘Well, is it work related?’

  Eugh. Just because he caught me making multiple copies of Phil Mitchell to stick to the inside of Holly’s locker that one time, he questions this. Guess I’ll never live that one down.

  ‘One hundred per cent genuinely work related,’ I assure him.

  I want to print more copies of our open letter.

  It’s been shared widely on social media since we posted it, and I’m now thinking of distributing paper copies around the town centre.

  ‘Right, okay then.’ Tony gets up out of his chair and hovers while I click around on his desktop.

  He’s got one of those cork pinboards above his desk. As the printer groans into action, I notice a curled-up photo (I’m guessing it’s from the early nineties by the size of his glasses) and in it Tony is holding some sort of award and actually smiling. In the short time that I’ve known him Tony’s seemed distracted and stressed and unhappy. An image of him smiling seems so unnatural. Like when you see a baby bird before its feathers have grown. All pink and veiny and bald. Like, you know it’s a bird (or your manager) but something just looks wrong.

  ‘When was that picture taken, Tony?’

  ‘What?’ I’ve irritated him. ‘Oh God, years ago. Some awards thing.’ He dismisses it by waving his hand, fiddling about with a stack of books that have piled up on top of the filing cabinet.

  ‘What award did you win?’

  He mutters something that I can’t hear. ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘BOOKSELLER OF THE YEAR.’ When he makes eye contact he looks annoyed, then embarrassed.

  ‘Wow. Congratulations!’

  ‘Um, thank you.’ He adjusts the broken glasses on the bridge of his nose. That was another little glimpse into the Secret Tony he keeps under wraps: the former Bookseller of the Year who started out like we all did, as someone with a devotion to those funny things with words and pages in them. Now he’s crushed, squashed by management and buckling under the pressure.

  Maxine knocks impatiently on the office door and doesn’t wait for a response before rushing in. ‘Tony, we need you downstairs. One of the elderly gents has had an accident in the armchair. I’m sorry I can’t clean it up. Not today. It’s a number two.’

  Tony holds his silvery head in his hands. ‘JESUS CHRIST!’

  I’m concerned that he might just explode right there. Then we’d have customer bowels and Tony’s scrambled innards to clean up. And neither of us are prepared to do that.

&n
bsp; He takes a deep breath and starts tearing through the cupboards to find some cleaning equipment, breathlessly seething. ‘This is the exact sort of behaviour that head office expects from this branch! People using us as a bloody toilet!’

  Maxine and I watch, lips pursed, before Tony eventually comes up with a yellow J-cloth and a bottle of Dettol. Oh dear.

  ‘Right! Show me where it is then!’ The two of them bustle out of the office, and leave me here, leaning back in the wheelie chair behind the desk, cool glass of water in hand, as if I’m running the place.

  EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!

  Oh God!

  Without thinking I sipped from the glass of water only to realise, far too late, that it wasn’t my water at all. It wasn’t my glass. It was a cup full of Tony’s cold, mouldy coffee.

  How disgusting! I spit it back into the mug without even thinking about it. I’m gagging and dribbling over the computer keyboard.

  Oh no, I’ve swapped saliva with Tony. My lips have been where his lips have been.

  I look around at the room and recoil in horror at a million dirty mugs, all containing various levels of cold coffee. Dear Lord.

  I take a desperate swig of my own uncontaminated drink. An attempt to wash away any Bookshop Manager Bacteria.

  The office phone rings.

  Oh God. It’ll be like those old eighties horror films where hormonal boys morph into werewolves and terrorise the hallways of their high schools. Instead of growing fur all over my hands, my hair will shrink and turn grey. My shoulders will hunch. I’ll become bitter and direct all of my grump at teenage bookseller girls.

  The phone bleats again. Maybe when I go to answer it, Tony’s voice will come out of my mouth? My gross, infected mouth that tastes like three-week-old coffee.

  I pick up.

  ‘Hello?’ Phew, I’m still me! I touch my body, and pat myself down to reassure myself that the poison hasn’t finished me off just yet.

  ‘Hello, am I through to Bennett’s Bookshop?’ A woman’s nasaly voice is on the other end of the line.