Bookshop Girl Read online

  I don’t know if it was the lack of sleep or the amount of time I’d been staring at my laptop screen in the dark, but I felt so emotional, and before I knew it I was seriously beginning to ask myself, ‘What Would Pippi Do?’

  It was just like that scene in The Lion King when Simba sees Mufasa’s face in the clouds. I could see Pippi Longstocking’s mad, freckly face in an imaginary Disney cloud surrounded by stars and she was telling me to believe in myself. To believe in the campaign! To go for it! To lift Bennett’s Bookshop way above my head! That we have to fight for smaller things too. Smaller battles have to be fought for so that bigger changes can happen.

  I may or may not have been crying at this point. I was definitely crying when I played ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight’ seven times on a loop (through my headphones so Mum couldn’t tell me to calm down and go to sleep).

  One of the things I realised around four thirty was that protests are rarely covered on the news. I guess that’s so bumpkins out in the sticks like us don’t get any ideas about joining in with protests or thinking we could change things. Watching all of these videos made me so excited. Made me think that actually I could make a change. Not alone, but with the others. With everyone from Bennett’s. It made me feel like if we came together and told people about why we should get to stay open in Greysworth, then maybe people would join us. And if a load of us came together and made a point, then surely we couldn’t be ignored, could we?

  This is Something. I mean, how often does anything happen around here? What have I even got to lose? There’s eff all else to do before we go back to school anyway.

  Well, I guess there’s one other thing to do. Mr Parker says that we can get extra marks for our Art coursework if we include life drawing in our portfolios. He reckons drawing the figure from real life is always better than copying from magazines or photos. The only thing is, because we still legally count as minors (eye-roll) the school rules say that there cannot be ANY NUDITY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ON SCHOOL PROPERTY. So while we’ve had a few Art lessons drawing each other fully clothed, Mr Parker suggested we find some real naked life-drawing classes to go to in our own time over the holidays. Immediately I was really up for this. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it means I’m some sort of pervert …

  Anyway, I found a class at the uni here that’s on every Tuesday night. It runs all year round but anyone can join any time they want. It’s called ‘Posers’.

  Luckily Holly was a keen bean too. So here we are, trekking across the park towards the campus, sketch pads and pens and brushes and inks stuffed in our bags. Backache dot com.

  ‘D’you think we’ll get a fit life model?’ Holly asks, her eyebrows triangular with excitement.

  ‘I doubt it.’ My automatic know-it-all response kicks in, although I really have no idea.

  ‘Mr Parker said it’s more interesting to use models who are old, or really overweight, or really skinny, because there’s more bits to draw, like, more details and shadows and wrinkles. He said when he was at art school they had disabled models with wildlife documentaries projected over their bodies. Apparently it’s cool to paint that.’ She shrugs like it’s the first time I’ve heard that, which is nuts because I was sitting right next to her in class when Mr P told us all about his life-drawing days.

  ‘Well, seeing as skinny pensioners with feathery skin are your thing, you could be in for a real treat!’ I do my best dirty-old creep face.

  ‘Hubba-hubba!’ We are already squawking uncontrollably as we trudge through the grass and up to the art school. How the hell will we behave when there are genitals on show?

  We push through the doors, still high from our fit of LOLs and step into the foyer. It’s dark and quiet, and inside glass cases there are bits of work on display. A clay sculpture of a woman’s head. A dress made of recycled plastic bottles.

  ‘Oh, it’s through here.’ Holly points a chipped purple nail to a handwritten sign for LIFE DRAWING THIS WAY.

  We walk through a maze of corridors. It’s the summer holidays so the studios are mostly empty. Rows of abandoned sewing machines and easels in room after room. Then we walk past an open door where a radio is blasting a Taylor Swift song and there’s a group of women in overalls screen-printing.

  Holly’s starts singing along to Taylor as we move down the corridor and I join in. ‘Shake it off! Shake it owwwwwwf!’ We’re shimmying along the hallway obliviously when all of a sudden a man’s voice cuts into ours.

  ‘Oh, look at this, it’s the Spice Girls!’

  The two of us grind to a halt.

  ‘Wow. The Spice Girls. Pur-lease. Last time I heard that I fell off my dinosaur,’ Holly whispers pretty loudly in the direction of my ear.

  ‘We’re just on our way to life drawing,’ I try to explain.

  ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place, ladies. I’m Clive – I lead the class.’

  Clive is in his late fifties, maybe early sixties. I’m so rubbish at guessing age. My mum takes it as a huge insult when I describe someone as ‘really old’ and she discovers they’re younger than her. Clive IS old, though.

  He’s head to toe in beige. Beige hair, beige skin, beige shirt hanging over beige combat trousers, then beige lace-up shoes. Beige. Is that not the most offensive colour? Is he doing it for the irony? I don’t know. I do know that I take an immediate dislike to anyone who is fully clad in beige and addresses me and my friends as ‘ladies’.

  ‘We’re about to get started in a few minutes so find yourselves some room and get settled; I’m just popping out for a snout.’ He holds a cigarette up to us in his beige fingers.

  It’s not a big room but it’s got high ceilings and about six other people in there. Mostly smiley middle-aged women who all seem to know each other. One is in a purple dressing gown, eating a pear and chatting to a lady in corduroy.

  There’s a mattress on the floor with a few battered old scatter cushions and one of those portable heaters pointed to it. This could all easily seem a bit seedy.

  Holly and I aim for spaces at the back, behind a lad our age, who’s dressed in sportswear. He’s good looking, in a boy-band kind of way. Like, the bad boy from the boy band. If it was the nineties and he was the bad boy of the boy band, he’d have his eyebrow pierced. But it isn’t so he doesn’t. He looks up and says a steady ‘Hey’ when we squeeze past him.

  I start unpacking. Miffy pencil case and brand-new sketchbook. First-day-of-term vibes. I really hope we don’t have to show our work to the group. Everyone here seems so at ease and like they know what they’re doing. I’m already cringing and I haven’t even started drawing yet.

  Clive returns, grin on his face. ‘Okay then, gang.’ He’s rubbing his hands together with glee. ‘We’ve got a few new faces here tonight, so I’ll go through how we usually do things here at Posers.’ This is a guy who likes the sound of his own voice. ‘Sue is our model tonight. She’ll do a few poses for us; some will be ten minutes, some will be a bit longer than that. Is that all right with you, Sue? Back not giving you too much trouble tonight?’

  Sue nods in agreement, already stepping out of her purple robe like it’s completely normal.

  ‘We don’t show our work after every pose but if you’re happy to at the end of the session, we can share. Oh, and we do have a fag break, and teas and coffees halfway through. Right then, ten-minute pose, please, Sue.’

  The room falls silent. Clive stands at his own easel and starts waving his right arm around straight away. I look over at Holly and we do our best to suppress our immature smirks.

  I pick up a pencil and try. Sue’s body is interesting to draw. There are bits where she sags, and her skin stretches, and bits where the knobbly bits of her spine jut out. And the hair. Like, the pubic hair. I’m not used to seeing that on TV or in magazines. Those bodies are always so smooth and even and not really like my or Sue’s bodies. Would she be offended if she saw our drawings of her? Would she be upset of we drew her nose really big or her boobs really small? I gu
ess not. I guess you’ve got to be brave to sit naked in a room full of strangers when you know for a fact that everyone is paying close attention to how you look. The funny thing is that after a while, it really doesn’t seem so strange that she’s naked. It’s pretty much like the six weeks of Art GCSE we spent drawing wax fruit.

  I’m just adding some shade to Sue’s nipple when the door creaks open. Someone’s coming in late and she doesn’t even flinch. What a pro.

  Holly grabs my arm and I look up.

  Jesus Christ. It’s Him.

  OMG. It’s HIM. It’s the cute guy from work. The one who got locked in the shop yesterday. The lurker. He’s here. He’s where I am. Here. We are both here.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Clive.’ He doesn’t whisper and his low, even voice breaks the silence of the room.

  ‘S’all right, son, come in!’ Clive whispers back and waves him into the room with his thick beige hands.

  Son?! Son? Is he Clive’s son?! No way!

  They don’t look alike.

  I mean, okay, not everyone looks like their dad.

  I don’t look at all like my mum. She has naturally black hair, and mine is fair, slightly gingery, but she is actually my mother. Like, there is proof somewhere that she pushed me out and into this world. (She loves to go into detail about the birth. ‘It was like squeezing a melon-sized object out of a lemon-sized hole.’ Ew.)

  Not everyone looks like their parents. But Clive, really?

  Could this boy really be the fruit of Clive’s loins? Did that melon-sized head squeeze through a lemon-sized hole that Clive has come into contact with?!

  He clocks me. Eye contact. I’m going to be sick. Right here. Right now. Sorry, Sue, it’s not you, it’s me. I can feel Holly watching as he walks past everyone in the class and makes his way to the back of the room.

  To the back of the room next to me.

  There are no more chairs left so he picks up a weird tall wooden stool thing and sticks it beside me.

  ‘Hey, you’re the Bookshop Girl.’ He smiles as he says it, like he knows he’s melting me from the waist down.

  I want to say many things. Like ‘Hey’ and ‘So you got locked in my bookshop last night. That’s pretty funny, right?’

  My bookshop? What am I saying ‘my bookshop’ for?! Like I’m a kid who refers to the slide in the park as ‘my slide’. For God’s sake, Paige, shut up.

  ‘Yes.’ It’s all that actually comes out of my mouth and I leave it at that.

  Just take another glance at him.

  Maybe Clive isn’t his dad. Like, maybe Clive’s the kind of man who calls younger boys ‘son’ even if they aren’t biologically linked.

  I’d hate that aspect of being a boy. People calling me ‘son’ left, right and centre. It would really creep me out. No one really calls girls who aren’t their daughters ‘daughter’. But I suppose people do refer to girls in all sorts of other mind-numbingly idiotic ways to make up for it.

  He catches me staring at him. Crap.

  I never knew my cheeks were this flammable. I’m a fire hazard. I’m burning up. My face is ablaze.

  He pulls out a tin of inks and nibs and starts scribbling in his sketchbook. I suddenly become very aware of the nipple I’ve been circling with lead.

  I turn to Holly.

  ‘OMG! OMG!’ she silently mouths over and over like she’s about to pop with excitement. We can’t get carried away, not now.

  Maybe Clive isn’t his biological father but he has raised him. Maybe he took him in when no one else would. Maybe he’s an orphan. Like Oliver Twist. Like a fit, arty Oliver Twist. And Clive raised him. And he comes here to draw naked Sue because Clive is his legal guardian.

  Of course. The book he was reading. The Egon Schiele nudes. It all makes sense. He’s an artist. He’s an artist. Oh God. He’s a beautiful, struggling, orphan artist.

  How long are you an orphan for, though? You can only be an orphan when you’re a kid, right? Because he is defo not a child. He’s a man.

  Okay, well, not a Man-Man. But he is not like the sixth-formers I see walking home from the boys’ school. There’s not a hint of bum-fluff baby beard growth on his face. He’s older than me. By a couple years I reckon.

  ‘Lovely, Sue, could we have another ten-minute pose now?’ Clive clears his throat then nods in her direction.

  Sue’s bones crack when she takes a standing position. I try so hard to focus but as I tear the last sketch from the top of my pad The Boy leans in and takes it. WTF!

  ‘You have good line.’

  Eff off! Did I say you could look at that?! How rude.

  But.

  Those eyes. So big and blue and open and I don’t think he’s taking the mick. He’s not smirking, or laughing – and I do have good line.

  ‘Thank you.’ It’s all I can muster. I am so embarrassed and annoyed at the same time. I don’t want him to look at everything I draw. I’m suddenly so conscious of my ‘good line’, of the heat in this room, of all the nudity. My head is spinning. Do not pass out in here, Paige. I repeat, do not pass out.

  I take a sip from my water bottle to try to compose myself and when I go back to drawing I turn towards Holly, away from him, and cover my work with my arm like I’m doing a Maths test in Year Four.

  I just cannot concentrate. I feel like someone has taken a putty rubber and erased the contents of my brain. I’ve lost my artistic ability and the physical function of swallowing. Did I actually just dribble? Oh God.

  He smells good. Like soap and fags and boy. I know that might not seem like a good combo on paper but I am intoxicated.

  ‘Thanks, Sue, that’s great.’

  Has it been ten minutes already? How? I look at my paper and flip my book shut before he gets his hands on it.

  ‘Shall we take that break now, guys?’ Clive stretches his arms up and yawns. Beige sweat patches. ‘Let’s give it fifteen minutes then meet back in here.’

  Before I know it That Beautiful Boy is up and out of the door, cigarette balanced between his beautiful lips.

  ‘OH EM EFFING GEE.’ Holly’s jaw drops and she tosses the fine liner into the air for dramatic effect.

  ‘He said I had good line.’ I look over to the mattress, where Sue is lying on her stomach eating a custard cream and chatting to corduroy woman again.

  ‘You do have good line. He must come here. He knows Clive.’

  Of course. He goes to uni here, that’s how he knows Clive. Obvs Clive isn’t his dad.

  ‘He clearly fancies you!’ Holly is the emoji with heart eyes. ‘You are in there like swimwear.’

  I take another swig from my bottle. Cool down, Paige. Be cool.

  ‘Let me see what you’ve done anyway. It’s a good class, right?’ I change the subject and Holly passes over her sketches.

  ‘I like it here,’ Holly agrees, ‘although I wish we had a bit longer on each pose. As soon as I get into it, it’s time to change.’

  Sue takes a gulp of her tea and asks, ‘So what are you girls studying here?’

  Wow. Sue must think we’re students. I’m so desperate to pose around at art school that being mistaken for an actual student makes me feel like I’m one step closer to that dream becoming a reality.

  ‘Um, we don’t go here. We’re at the girls’ school,’ Holly answers. And then clarifies, ‘Not the posh one.’ It’s true. We attend the school that saw the famous Flaming Sanitary Towel Bomb incident of ’99. Before our time, but scorched into Greysworth Secondary School folklore.

  ‘So you’re on your summer holidays now? All that free time to get up to all sorts of mischief I bet.’ She winks.

  ‘Well, we work in Bennett’s Bookshop in town, so …’

  ‘Oooh, bet that’s a nice place to work.’

  ‘It is! But it’s actually closing down …’

  I start to explain but Sue spits her tea back into the home-made ceramic mug she’s drinking out of. ‘No! When? How?!’

  ‘They want to demolish us and build fancy ne
w shops in our place.’ I pause. ‘But they won’t.’

  ‘Hey, that’s the stuff, girl!’

  ‘We’re setting up a campaign to keep it open.’ Talking about it to someone I don’t know makes it feel so real. ‘A petition.’

  ‘Good for you, girls …’ She starts talking to her corduroy friend, who’s ferreting around in her trolley of art materials, but as she speaks she doesn’t take her eyes off us. It makes me laugh nervously. ‘Did you hear that, Elspeth? They’re closing Bennett’s, knocking it down?’ She shoves the remaining half of the biscuit in her mouth, talking as she chews.

  ‘No, what are they doing that for?’ Elspeth squints through her glasses and looks to me for an answer.

  ‘They want to bulldoze us out and build brand-new shop units, which Bennett’s won’t be able to afford to rent.’

  ‘These girls are starting a petition.’

  ‘Ahhhh, great! That’s what we like to hear, new Posers and activists!’ She beams. ‘Well, you can count me in.’

  ‘Me too! I love Bennett’s. It’s the only place in town they’d let me breastfeed my Dominic when he was a baby …’ She’s reminiscing and then adds, ‘I’m sick to death of shops closing in this town.’

  I remember all the TOILET signs by the empty shop windows and laugh on the inside.

  ‘So is it an online petition then?’

  ‘We haven’t actually set it up yet …’ Holly starts and I jump in.

  ‘I was thinking we should wait until we’re all together at work to do it properly.’ I’m well aware that the four-week deadline to turn this round is already creeping nearer and nearer, like a dreaded Maths exam or TB jab.

  ‘I’m always getting emails from one of those online petition sites … Which one was it?’ She stares hard at her unpainted toes, straining to remember, while the two of us wait politely. ‘I signed something to stop the disability allowance cuts … Oh, what was it called? It’ll come to me and I’ll let you know. There’s a few of those sites around now, you know for all the clicktivists out there …’