The Bookshop on the Corner (3 page)

“But I can't leave them out in the cold,” she pleaded.

“Nina, it's a load of DEAD WOOD! Some of which smells!”

“But . . .”

Surinder's expression didn't change as she looked severely at Nina. “Nina, I'm calling it. This is getting totally out of hand. You're packing up the library all week. It will just get worse and worse.”

She stepped forward and grabbed a huge romance Nina adored from the top of the pile.

“Look at this! You already have it.”

“Yes, I know, but this is the hardback first edition. Look! It's beautiful! Never been read!”

“And it won't be read either, because your reading pile is taller than I am!”

The two girls were standing out on the street now, Surinder so cross she'd piled out of the front door.

“No!” said Surinder, raising her voice. “No. This time I am absolutely putting my foot down.”

Nina felt herself starting to shake. She realized they were on the verge of having a falling-out, and she couldn't bear confrontation or any form of argument at all. Surinder knew this as well.

“Please,” she said.

Surinder threw up her hands. “God, it's like kicking a puppy. You're not dealing with this job change, are you? You're not dealing with it at all. You just roll over and play dead.”

“Also,” Nina whispered, staring at the pavement as the door swung shut behind them, “I forgot my keys this morning. I think we're locked out.”

Surinder had stared at her furiously, then, thank God, after making the police commissioner face, had finally burst out laughing. They had gone down to the corner of their street, to a nice little gastro pub, which was normally overrun but tonight wasn't too jammed, and found a cozy corner.

Surinder had bought a bottle of wine, which Nina looked at warily. This was normally a bad sign, the start of the “what's
wrong with Nina” conversation that generally began after the second glass.

After all, it was okay, wasn't it? To love books and love your job and live life like that? Nice, cozy. Routine. Or it had been.

“No,” said Surinder, putting down her second glass with a sigh.

Nina composed her face into a long-suffering listening look. Surinder worked in a jewelry-importing office, running the books and the diamond traders. She was great at it. They were all terrified of her. Both her admin and her absenteeism skills were legendary.

“It's not enough, is it, Neens?”

Nina concentrated on her glass, wishing the attention was anywhere else.

“What did the human resources officer say?”

“He said . . . he said there weren't a lot of jobs left in libraries, not after the cuts. They're going to staff them with volunteers.”

Surinder made a snorting noise. “Those lovely old ladies?”

Nina nodded.

“But they can't set people up with the right novels! They don't know what a nine-year-old needs to read after Harry Potter.”

“
The Knife of Never Letting Go
,” said Nina automatically.

“That's exactly what I mean! That expertise! Can they work the ordering system? The filing? The back office?”

Nina shook her head. “Not really.”

“So where are you meant to go?”

Nina shrugged. “There might be facilitation roles in the new media hub, but I'd have to take a team-building course and reapply.”

“A team-building course?”

“Yes.”

“
You?
” Surinder laughed. “Did you sign up?”

Nina shook her head. “Griffin did.”

“Well, you have to.”

Nina heaved a sigh. “I suppose so.”

“You're losing your job, Nina! You're losing it! Mooning around reading Georgette Heyer all afternoon isn't going to change that, is it?”

Nina shook her head.

“Get it together!”

“If I do, can I bring the books into the house?”

“No!”

N
ina turned up at the team-building course nervously. She wasn't sure what to expect at all. Also, she still had a car full of books. Griffin was there, his leg casually placed on his opposite knee, as if he was trying to give the impression of being the most laid-back person of all time. It didn't work terribly well. His ponytail hung lankly down the back of his slightly gray T-shirt, and his glasses were smeared.

“Trainee tossers,” he whispered to Nina, to make her feel better. She didn't; she felt worse, and fussed with her floral shirt. Outside, spring was tossing itself about like a small boat, one moment drenched, the next bathed in sunlight.

Surinder had been right: it absolutely was time to buck herself up.

But sometimes she felt the world wasn't built for people like her. Confident, big-personality people like Surinder simply didn't understand. If you weren't an extrovert, if you weren't shoving yourself out into the open all the time, posting selfies everywhere, demanding attention, talking constantly, people
just gazed right past you. You got overlooked. And normally she didn't mind.

But now Nina could see she was in danger of overlooking herself. However many books she tried to save, whatever she tried to do, the branch library was closing. Her job was going, and it wasn't just a case of finding another one. Librarians were unemployed everywhere. Thirty would apply for every job going. It was like being a typewriter repair man, or someone who made fax machines. She felt, at twenty-nine, oddly surplus to life's requirements.

A young man bounded up onto the little dais at the front of the back room of the library where they'd all gathered along with the groups from the other two libraries also closing in the region. There was a lot of muttering and complaining when they met, about the bloody government and how crap everything was, and didn't they know—didn't they
know
—what libraries did for their communities?

Nina thought they did know: they simply didn't care.

“Hey!” said the young man, who was dressed in jeans and a pink open-necked shirt.

“I wonder what he's paid for doing this,” whispered Griffin. “More than us, I bet.”

Nina blinked. She'd never been in it for the money.

“Hey, everyone!” said the young man, who had one of those voices that went up at the end and made everything sound like a question. “Now, I know this isn't an ideal situation?”

“You reckon?” snorted Griffin.

“But I'm sure we're going to all get on great by the end of the day . . . do a bit of bonding, a bit of confidence building, yeah?”

Griffin snorted again. But Nina leaned forward a little. Confidence building? Couldn't hurt.

It came an hour into the morning. They were playing “trust games” to restore faith in something or other, despite the fact that they were all going to have to compete against one another for the few remaining jobs. Nina had walked blindfolded across the room, guided only by the others' voices. And now here she was standing on a table, again with her eyes shut, waiting to fall backward. She felt nervous and irritated all at once. This wasn't for her, the shouting, the showing off.

Mungo, the young man, had been encouraging, however. “Don't think there isn't anything you can't do!” he'd shouted. “Yeah?”

Griffin had sighed. Nina, though, had looked at him. Could there be something in it after all?

“There's nothing you can't do if you try.”

“Oh good, I think I'll join the Olympic diving squad,” Griffin had commented.

Mungo's smile hadn't dropped for a moment. Then he'd lifted his pant leg and the room had gasped. Underneath, his leg was smooth plastic.

“I'd still give it a try,” he said. “Come on. What do you really want to do?”

“Run a Mediatech department,” said Griffin quickly. He was convinced, Nina knew, that Mungo was a corporate spy.

Mungo merely nodded. “Let's go around the room,” he said. “Be honest. There are no spies here.”

Nina shrank back in her seat. She couldn't bear speaking in public.

A gruff man she didn't know spoke up from the back of the room.

“I always wanted to work with animals,” he said. “Out in the wild. Spotting them, tracking their numbers, you know what I mean?”

“That sounds amazing,” said Mungo, and he sounded like he meant it. “Great! Come up to the front!”

Nina shriveled inside as they all had to gather around the table, and the man stood up on it and fell back, letting the crowd catch him.

“I always wanted to do makeup for movies,” said a young receptionist from central services. “Make up the big stars and that.”

Mungo nodded, and she came forward and fell, too. Nina couldn't believe how casually everyone got into it.

“I just want to work with books,” said Rita. “That's all I ever wanted to do.”

More ideas came in from around the room, with lots of nodding from everyone and the occasional round of applause. They didn't make Rita do the fall backward, though, not with her hips. Even Griffin modified his original answer, muttering that actually he'd really wanted to be a comic-book artist. Nina didn't speak. She was thinking furiously. Finally she saw that Mungo was staring at her.

“Yes?”

“Come on. You're last. You have to say what you want to do. And be honest.”

Very reluctantly, Nina edged toward the table.

“I haven't really thought about it.”

“Course you have,” said Mungo. “Everybody has.”

“Well, it'll sound silly. Especially these days.”

“Nothing sounds silly in here,” he said. “We've all been falling backward off tables.”

Nina climbed up onto the table. The rest of the group looked at her expectantly. Her throat went dry and her mind went blank.

“Well,” she said, feeling herself color in that awful way. She swallowed painfully. “Well . . . I mean. Well. I always . . . I always dreamed that one day I might have my own bookshop. Just a very little one.”

There was a silence. And then, around the room, “Me too!” “Oh, yes!” “That sounds LOVELY.”

“Close your eyes,” said Mungo gently.

And with that, she leaned backward, eyes tightly shut, and fell into the waiting arms, which held her, then gently returned her to the floor.

And by the time she opened her eyes again, she wondered . . .

“A SHOP?” Griffin, of course, pooh-poohed it. “A BOOKSHOP? Are you NUTS?”

Nina shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. “I could sell your comics in it.”

She was still feeling oddly inspired. Mungo had taken her aside at the break and they'd discussed it. She'd expressed her inability to deal with overheads or stock or staff or all the huge and paralyzing commitments that running a shop would entail that she didn't feel she could deal with. He'd nodded gently. Finally she'd confessed that she had a whole shop's worth of stock in her car, and he'd laughed and then held up his hand.

“You know,” he'd said, “there are mobile versions of this kind of thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, instead of a shop with running costs and so on, you could do something different.”

He showed her a picture on a Web site of a woman who ran a bookshop from a barge. Nina had seen her before and sighed with envy.

“It doesn't have to be a barge,” he said. Mungo pulled up a few more sites on his computer. “I knew a woman in Cornwall who ran a bakery from a van.”

“A whole bakery?”

“A whole bakery. People used to come for miles.”

Nina blinked. “A van?”

“Why not? Can you drive?”

“Yes.”

“You could fit it out quite nicely, couldn't you?”

Nina didn't tell him it had taken her forever to learn how to reverse around corners. Mungo's bouncy enthusiasm was so all-encompassing, it somehow felt easier just to agree with him.

She showed Griffin an ad in the paper she'd found during the break, helped by an admiring Mungo. “Look at this.”

“What is that?”

“It's a van.”

“A smelly old food van?”

“A smelly old food van,” agreed Nina reluctantly. “Okay, that one probably won't work. But look at this one.”

“You think vans are the answer to everything,” grumbled Griffin. “They'll have bugs.”

“I just said, no food vans!” Nina's faintly irritated voice
caused Griffin to look up from his pint in surprise, as if a mouse had roared. “Be sensible. Look at this.”

“It's a van,” said Griffin with exaggerated sarcasm. “I don't know what you expect me to say about it.”

“I expect you to say, wow, Nina, that's amazing, imagine you taking charge of your life and thinking of something like that.”

“Have you gone soft on that Mungo?”

“No, Griffin, he's a child. But I like his attitude.”

“I don't get it,” said Griffin. “A van. I thought you said you wanted to run a bookshop?”

“I do!” said Nina. “But I can't afford premises, can I?”

“No,” said Griffin. “You're a terrible risk for a bank to lend money to. You don't know anything about running a shop.”

“I know,” said Nina. “But I do know about books, don't I?”

Griffin looked at her. “Yes,” he admitted grudgingly. “You're pretty good at books.”

“And I'd get unemployment money,” said Nina. “And I could sell the Mini Metro. I mean, I could . . . I could afford a van . . . just about. And I've got all the stock from the library. And my life. And everywhere, really. I mean, I could start with that, pretty much fill it and see where I go from there.”

“You do have too many books,” said Griffin. “And I never thought I'd say that about anybody.”

“Well,” said Nina, “if I have the stock . . . and I have a van . . .”

“What?”

“I mean, I don't see what's stopping me from just traveling around selling books.”

She was feeling genuinely excited now, something buzzing in her chest. Why not her? Why should everyone else get to have dreams and not her?

“What, in Edgbaston?”

“No,” said Nina. “It will have to be somewhere without parking restrictions.”

“I think that's, like, nowhere.”

“Somewhere they don't mind. Somewhere I'm allowed to just sell books.”

“I don't think it works like that.”

“Well, like a farmers' market, where they turn up once a week to sell stuff.”

“So you'll work one day a week and spend the rest of the time tending your book crops?”

“Stop pouring cold water on everything.”

“I'm not, I'm just being realistic. What kind of a friend would I be if I sat here saying, yes, Nina, drop everything in your life before you even know if you have a job or not, toss it all away for a pipe dream when you're nearly thirty?”

“Mm,” said Nina, feeling flattened.