Bookshop Girl Read online

  The ankles are bare and skinny.

  Two long legs. Two legs that seem to go on for miles. Black jeans, ripped on one knee, but not the kind of rip that Topman cut into their clothes on purpose.

  Holly giggles and Adam tuts, but I need them all to shut up because something huge is happening here and I’m not sure what it is yet.

  I’m well aware that my mouth is hanging open. I’m catching flies. I can’t tear my eyes away from the Big Reveal behind this shutter.

  It gets stuck and Tony motions for Adam to give him a hand. ‘As if head office aren’t giving us enough grief already! This is exactly the kind of thing they expect from our underperforming branch!’

  Tony isn’t even muttering any more. He’s pretty much wailing. And I can see the sweat on his head.

  The more the shutter rolls up, the hotter I feel. Sweaty and cold at the same time.

  The boy behind the glass is not the kind of crusty nose-picker we usually find around here.

  He’s kinda cute.

  In fact, he’s very cute.

  He’s tall and his shoulders hunch slightly. His hair is dark and thick and longish but not long long.

  Tony yanks the door open and spits, ‘What do you think you’re doing?!’

  The Boy speaks and time stands still:

  ‘I-I’m sorry, I’ve just been here reading. I didn’t realise you were closed.’

  He pushes his hair back when it flops into his eyes. In his other hand he holds a large hardback.

  It’s a book on Egon Schiele. Ooooh. Freaky nudes. Yes. Oh God, yes. I want to talk. I want to tell him about how much I love Egon Schiele’s portraits. About how I wrote an essay about him before Christmas for the Art History module we did with Mr Parker and how isn’t it crazy that those paintings were done such a long time ago but really not a lot has changed. Bodies still look like bodies, right? I want to talk. I want to say so much. I want to ask him who the hell he is. But I’m stunned. Well and truly stunned into silence.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the announcements?’ Tony isn’t taking this well.

  The guy shrugs and shakes his head. His beautiful head.

  ‘And you didn’t think it was odd that all the lights just turned off?!’ Tony’s ready to blow.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  The boy looks over at me and when we make eye contact it feels like I’ve stuck my fingers in the sockets and pulled the hairdryer into the bath all at the same time. Wow.

  ‘Why didn’t you just get out when we told you to?!’

  I’m totally looking him up and down. This is shameless. If I was some creep at a bus stop behaving this way, I’d totally tell myself to get lost right about now.

  Nikki puts her hand on Tony’s shoulder, like she’s some East-End barmaid preventing a punch-up in the Queen Vic.

  ‘I think you should leave.’

  ‘NO!’

  For a split second, I’m not certain whether I said ‘no’ out loud or just thought it in my head.

  But then Holly starts creasing up and Adam frowns a ‘what?’ at me and I realise it wasn’t inside my head; it was out of my big fat lips and audible.

  The Most Beautiful Boy In The History Of The World walks along the high street; away from me as Tony asks if that was a friend of mine.

  ‘No. No. No, I mean, no, Bennett’s can’t close. That’s what I meant when I said “no”, so –’

  Tony exhales dramatically and picks the cigarette up off the ground. Oh God. It’s well beyond the three-second rule now. He holds it to his lips and lights it up. None of us are willing to challenge or ridicule him on this; we just watch in disbelief as he turns back to the shutter.

  ‘Did you just see that?’ I claw on to Holly’s wrists as we walk, wanting confirmation that I didn’t imagine that beautiful, mythical creature of a boy.

  ‘Ummm, yes, who is he?!’

  ‘He is – I don’t know who he is! But I have to find out! Where did he go?’

  ‘Did you see that way he looked at you? OH EM GEE.’ Holly swoons as she slumps onto the side of the sculpture monument thing outside the empty BHS.

  ‘What? How did he look at me?!’ I didn’t imagine it! I didn’t imagine it!

  Holly does her best impressions of him swinging his head round to me and doing some intense stare. It’s ridic but it’s hilarious.

  ‘Oi, c’mon, you two!’ Adam reminds us, calling from the gaggle of booksellers trudging in the opposite direction.

  We file into the Bridge Cafe. There’s wooden panelling and framed landscapes on the walls. And wipe-clean seats and artificial flowers in vases alongside bottles of ketchup and mayo. It’s familiar. It’s just up the road from Bennett’s. It’s The Place to gather for a WTF-Just-Happened meeting.

  We’re hit by that fatty smell that when you’re starving smells delicious, but otherwise is just pretty gross. The kind of smell that makes you try hard to breathe through your mouth and think about washing the clingy stink out of your hair as soon as you get home.

  I’m not hungry. This is rare. I’m ready to blame my lack of appetite for fried things on the sad circumstances that brings us all here. I mean, it’s a massive shock so it must be that, right? It’s not that since that ABSOLUTE BEAUT of a boy looked me RIGHT IN THE EYES my stomach has felt like it’s been flipped upside down. Like that feeling you get when you drop from the highest point on a Thorpe Park rollercoaster.

  ‘To Bennett’s!’ Bruce, one of the Bennett’s old timers, holds up his mug of builder’s tea to make a toast.

  ‘Twenty years …’ Tony speaks to the table. His head is propped up by his elbows. ‘Twenty years … to become a “casualty of the high street” …’

  Holly insisted she was ‘too devastated to possibly order a milkshake’ but lo and behold, within seconds of mine being slammed onto the tabletop, her Rimmel London lips are slurping on my straw and she’s downing my drink.

  ‘But we can’t just let this happen!’ I say.

  I don’t know what would happen if Bennett’s actually went. I can’t imagine any shop that would take its place. In fact, the saddest thing is that maybe nothing would take its place. The high street is made up of more empty units than open shops. Is there really a queue of businesses lining up to pay an even higher rent to a swanky new space?

  And if Bennett’s Greysworth was to go, then we’d have to get a train to the nearest bookshop. And I wouldn’t get a staff discount or first dibs on any of those books. I wouldn’t be able to sit behind the counters in those bookshops, pretending to actually enjoy coffee and dipping into a book that makes me look sophisticated and intellectual.

  Holly’s Best Mate Telepathy kicks in when she whines, ‘We can’t close now – the third and final book in the I’m a Murderer trilogy isn’t published until the end of the year, and I still don’t know who the murderer is!’

  Holly’s into really gory crime thrillers. Even more so since we started at Bennett’s and she’s had open access to all those books that are banned from our school library.

  This shop has been part of my childhood for as long as I can remember.

  I think about all the Christmas book tokens I’ve splurged there, the hours I spent with Holly on the way home from school. Part of the reason we were employed at the same time was because Tony couldn’t tell us apart; he’d only seen us together. ‘Joined at the hip.’ We’d sit back to back reading passages from saucy romance novels to each other until we’d be interrupted. Then we’d try to look sensible, which is way harder than it sounds when the last words you uttered were ‘throbbing member’.

  I shake away that thought as my colleagues round the table talk. Holly pours low-fat sweetener on the table and moves it around with her fingers making it into the shape of a sad face. Sugar tears.

  Throwback to when we received phone calls from Bennett’s to say they wanted to offer us part-time jobs. It was almost too good to be true – being paid to spend time in a bookshop, with my best friend! We danced in the corridor at school an
d Bitchy Mrs Bradley swung the music-room door open and told us to keep it down, didn’t we have revision or something more important to be getting on with? We didn’t revise that night, instead we bought a huge bag of candyfloss and scoffed the lot until we felt like we might be too sick to turn up for our first shifts.

  ‘C’mon, you lot …’ I start up again. ‘Didn’t you hear what Mick-whatever-his-name-is said? We’ve got four weeks before they kick us out and knock the place down. So we’ve got four weeks to do something to change their minds …’

  Adam winces. ‘Do you really think anything we do will change their minds?’

  Tony isn’t joining in. He drains the last bit of his coffee and gets up to order another.

  Bruce raises his eyebrows. ‘It could be worth a try …’

  ‘Thank you, Bruce!’

  ‘We don’t exactly have anything left to lose, do we?’ Maxine agrees.

  ‘It won’t be as easy as you might think, Paige. It’s all about money. The landlords will make more of it on rent once they’ve got us out of the way and built some flashy new units …’ One of the blokes who works Monday to Friday tries to reason with me. I didn’t expect everyone to be so negative. So afraid that we could fail.

  ‘Well, okay …’ I place my hands on the sticky tabletop, to try to get my thoughts in order, and I instantly regret it when the vinegary residue sticks to my palms. ‘In an ideal world, who would want to stay at Bennett’s for longer than the next four weeks? Raise your hand.’

  Eight out of eight isn’t bad.

  ‘Okay, so, let’s say something, publicly, about staying open. Let’s tell people that we don’t want to leave.’

  Tony glares at me. He looks … irritated. Like I’m saying all of this to cause trouble in some way. I’m not. I’m trying to save his shop. Our shop.

  ‘It’ll work out. We can work it all out.’ I nod, trying my best to reassure him.

  Holly shouts out ‘Yeah!’ in BFF solidarity.

  ‘We could do something, I’m not sure what yet, but like a protest, or a petition –’

  ‘A petition would be good.’ Adam nods in agreement.

  ‘We can’t be the only ones in this town who don’t want to see the back of the bookshop … Think about all of the regular customers –’

  ‘Why not?’ Bruce’s smile is wide and I catch a glimpse of the tooth he’s missing towards the back of his gums.

  I’m scribbling all of the ideas that are flooding my brain into the pink Moleskine notebook I keep in my bag. Adam and the others are feeding me with suggestions, and eventually I work up an appetite and order a plate of chips.

  I might just be the bookshop girl with a bad fringe, who’s using books to jump into other peoples’ lives. Maybe nobody cares about what I think, but if there’s a whole group of us, who all stand up against what we think is unfair, then we’ll be impossible to ignore. We should be loud about our plans. We should tell everybody what we think. We should save our bookshop and our jobs. We should do something.

  My phone pings. I had no idea it was that time already. A text from Mum flashes up on my screen asking if I want a lift home. She’s finished her CV-writing workshop. It’s this class she has to do to qualify for her Jobseeker’s Allowance. I jump out of my oilcloth-covered seat for a chance to bypass a blistery walk.

  ‘See you tomorrow then, Holly-wood!’ I blow her a kiss while she squeezes a sachet of ketchup onto yet another bowl of chips.

  Texting Mum to say I’ll be there in a sec, I navigate my way past the hair extensions and heels and eyelashes and bad tattoos and aftershave and sorry darlin’s along the pavement, feeling like I’ve successfully managed to indoctrinate the others with my vision of a Bookseller Uprising.

  I hear the car before I see it. Mum’s sitting in the Fiat Punto with windows rolled down and ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials blasting full volume.

  When I get in the passenger seat she turns it down. ‘Hey, baby! How was your day?’

  ‘Hmmmm … Well, some random bloke in a suit came to tell us that they want to demolish Bennett’s.’

  She twists the volume all the way down in disbelief. ‘You are joking?!’

  ‘No, really. But it’s all going to be fine, because we’re going to make sure they can’t close us down …’

  ‘Oh, Paige, that’s such a shame. It would be terrible if it closes. There’s nowhere else to get books around here. And y’know what I heard today? Right, listen to this: the council are making cuts so the library will be closed on weekends! Can you believe that? It’s disgusting. People rely on that service.’

  I stare out of the window, at TO LET signs plastered on every other empty shop unit along the Welly Road. Some joker has been at every one with a spray can and added an ‘I’ in the middle, so now they all read ‘TOILET.’ I snigger while she’s mid-rant.

  ‘It’s hardly Banksy, is it?’ Mum LOLs at her own joke. ‘At least we could keep each other company, y’know, glamorous mother-and-daughter trips to the jobcentre!’

  I picture the two of us in fluffy white robes, kicking back on sunloungers and sipping champagne while we have our nails filed and make a long list of our transferable skills.

  No way.

  I have to do something about Bennett’s.

  At home, Elliot rushes to the front door to let us in. He’s a few years younger than me and still finds running around outdoors fun. He’s been playing football in the park all day, and hasn’t changed out of his muddy shorts. His game of FIFA is paused on the TV screen and he’s halfway through a tube of salt and vinegar Pringles. Hashtag living the dream.

  ‘That was here for you when I got in, Paige.’ He points to a padded brown envelope. I clutch it to my chest, already knowing what’s inside. Another chunky prospectus from another university. I’m collecting them. Arty courses up and down the country. I don’t know where I want to go yet, but I still have an excruciatingly long amount of time to decide. At the moment I’m coveting these brochures like they’re sacred texts, keeping them all together in an old plastic toy box in my room.

  ‘Thanks, Elliot!’ I dash upstairs and shove the envelope under my bed. Saving it for later.

  Through dinner and through University Challenge and even when we hear the ice-cream van chime some dodgy version of ‘Greensleeves’ as it does a U-turn in our road (and Elliot asks if we can get something and Mum says, ‘We’ve got choc ices in the freezer if you really want an ice cream,’ and neither me nor my brother is surprised because it’s a tale as old as time) That Boy, who was locked in the shop, is in the back of my mind. Moving around my head on a loop like an overused GIF. I keep going over the moment we both looked at each other and remembering how it felt. Like a scene on 24 Hours in A&E.

  They’d slide me out of a stretcher and onto a table where people in plastic disposable aprons would rush around me and cut off my jeans and apologise for ruining my clothes and I’d be, like, ‘It’s okay,’ as I’d stare up towards the ceiling with my head in one of those neck-brace things and a paramedic would be, like, ‘This is Paige Turner; she’s sixteen years old. After a collision with a Serious Fittie she’s suffered a cardiac arrest. She’s a casualty of the high street.’

  BOOKSHOP GIRLS GET BUSY

  I snap a twig off a bush and scrape it along the wooden fences as Holly and I walk side by side and she tells me about this morning’s panic-fuelled job hunt.

  She raises her hand to her forehead, all damsel in distress. It’s not the first time I’ve considered what a good Shakespearean actress she’d make. I’ve seen her do a mean Lady Macbeth monologue on a particularly dead Sunday-afternoon shop floor. ‘Job hunting is bleak. Seriously, I was so determined to hand out all the CVs I printed last night; I tried everywhere! I –’ pause for dramatic effect – ‘I even went to the Games Workshop! That’s how desperate I am for cash.’

  ‘That’s a new low,’ I remark, thinking about the reek of sweaty pubescent lads that pumps out of that place.

  ‘Nowhere woul
d take my CV, though; they just looked at me like I was a sandwich bag of fresh dog poo.’ She pinches the bridge of her nose and impersonates a snotty shop assistant. ‘All applications are online … Eugh, I was so desperate to get rid of the CVs I stood above the bowl of the Grosvenor Centre loo and was seriously considering flushing the lot.’

  ‘Don’t worry, you won’t need to hunt much longer, Hols, because our petition will do something to stop us losing our jobs!’

  I should really be tired. I’m what snarky Physics teachers who catch you yawning at the back of the lab would class as ‘sleep-deprived’. I was up all night watching YouTube clips and reading books from work about people (mostly women) who have campaigned and protested for things they believe in and actually been successful.

  Women who have set up online petitions to ban topless women from so-called ‘newspapers’, to scrap the tampon tax or the closure of women’s refuges. I clicked link after link after link.

  At one point, around three o’clock, I felt a bit stupid. Like, this is just Bennett’s Bookshop in Greysworth, right? Will anybody actually care if we lose our jobs?

  I looked at myself, sitting there, sweating in a heap of blankets, mascara smeared all over my tired face, and I felt kind of silly for thinking Bennett’s closing was in any way linked to the protests these amazing women were organising.

  Then something caught my eye. My bookcase. My wonky, wobbly bookcase. It’s not a trendy, neatly stacked IKEA unit like Holly’s; it’s pine and it’s unfashionable and it’s rammed with books I’ve collected since I was tiny. Beatrix Potter books I scribbled in with felt-tips, the Rumpelstiltskin picture book that scared Elliot so much he threw it down the toilet. My copy of Pippi Longstocking. My fave. I remembered Mum buying me this from Bennett’s. I thought about how I’d spent hours copying the illustrations of Pippi lifting that great big horse above her head. Pippi was a little girl, but she was fearless.