Death of a Bookseller, page 4
“I know what my customers want,” he keeps insisting, even though we have no customers.
ROACH
Laura and I didn’t see much of each other during that first week. To my great irritation, I was sent to the Wood Green branch to cover a sick day, and then it was my day off, and then it was Laura’s. I wondered how she spent her free time. I imagined her studiously tapping away on a Mac-Book in some hip little East London café, her annotated copy of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark spread open in front of her as she worked. I desperately wanted to know what kind of debauched project necessitated such a close reading of that book, but when we were finally reunited on the shop floor, I couldn’t find a way to bring it up without revealing that I’d been rifling through her things.
As I stood at the first floor till and watched her zip between sections, building displays, and rearranging tables, Eli tapped his name badge with a biro, jolting me out of my dark rumination. I’d zoned out again. Sometimes, it was like a switch was flipped and I was somewhere else, deep in the dungeon of my mind, lost in some depraved thought.
“You’re looking a bit thin over there,” Eli said, drumming a little beat on his own name tag while looking pointedly at mine. His gleamed with a full set of eight gold pins. “How long have you been bookselling for?”
“Eight years in December,” I said.
He whistled in surprise. “Wow—so wait, how old were you when you started?”
“Sixteen.”
“You must know a thing or two then.” He winked, and to my supreme embarrassment, I felt my cheeks grow warm. “So how come you’ve only got one pin?”
I just looked at him and sighed like it was obvious. The pins were a meaningless way to acknowledge bookseller expertise. Only normies like Eli and Noor actually cared about them. Each section of the shop was assigned an icon, and each icon had been turned into a little gold-coloured pin that could be pushed into our name tags. There was a paintbrush for Art, Photography, and Design, an aeroplane for Travel, a magnifying glass for Crime, and so on. Of course, all it really meant was that customers familiar with the system learned to scrutinise our name badges with their beady little eyes, not really trusting a recommendation unless it came from a bookseller with the right fucking pin.
That was exactly why I’d declined every opportunity to up my pin count, even though you couldn’t progress to specialist bookseller without at least six. My name tag would have remained at a stubborn zero, but Barbara said it looked unprofessional and forced the Fiction pin on to me, a cold and hard little book, pages fluttered by a ghostly hand.
In an act of secret rebellion, I’d sketched out my own pins based on serial killers. John Wayne Gacy, in his Pogo the Clown makeup, was the natural choice for the Humor section, although I painted him with the sour-faced pout of his mugshot. For Cookery, the blond, chiseled profile of Jeffrey Dahmer: sadist, serial killer, necrophiliac, and, of course, cannibal. The Children’s section was represented by the dark mascaraed eyes and voluminous blonde bouffant of child-killer Myra Hindley. For Local History, it had to be the Stow Strangler.
I completed my sketches during the long hours spent manning the lonely enquiries desk in the History section on Barry’s days off, where I used the internet connection to niff through Wikipedia for inspiration and Google for pictures to replicate a passable likeness. Occasionally, I found myself picking over the bones of long-abandoned message boards where bored teens and lonely divorcées exchanged facts and quips about the seedy underbelly of the Western world. Messages left in 2002, 2003. Sixteen, seventeen years later, and they were still there, like abandoned shopping trolleys at the bottom of a canal.
My obsession with true crime started in my teens. I remember watching a late-night Channel Four documentary about people who believed they were real-life vampires and went around in capes and expensive porcelain fangs committing murder. The documentary had a solemn voice-over and black and white reconstructions of the boring parts of the crimes, like when the high school girl—a normie, of course—pretty, chaste in a sweater and jeans, with good grades and a glittering future, climbed into the killer’s car and you knew she was toast.
The documentary didn’t go into too much detail, so I used my laptop to search for the actual factual details of each killing, to make sure I was fully informed on the subject. I don’t like feeling insufficiently informed about things. I stayed up pretty late that night, googling.
“Anyway, did you know Laura Bunting writes poetry?” Eli said now, tapping a loose rhythm on my shoulder with his biro. I took a step away to break the connection between us.
“She’s doing a reading tonight and I think you should come. Even if you hate poetry, it’ll be fun.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to clean out my snail tank tonight.”
A look of delighted surprise transformed his face. “You keep snails?”
“I have a giant African land snail called Bleep.”
“Bleep! That’s so cute.” He looked amused. “Sucks, though. I know poetry probably isn’t your thing, but if your snail can wait one more night, I’ll buy you a beer? The whole team’s coming.” He paused, perhaps taking in the Murder Girls badge pinned to my shirt, or thinking of my speech earlier in the week about Ted Bundy. “Laura’s work—well, it can be quite dark. I think you’ll like it, actually.”
My ears pricked at “quite dark,” and I thought of the copy of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark in her bag, all battered and underlined, read to death. Dennis Nilsen wrote poetry in prison. Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three, wrote it on death row. I loved the idea of poetry—loved the easy messiness of it, the darkness of it, the way anyone could slap words together and call it a poem—but I’d never been to a poetry reading before.
Just then, Eli spotted a customer who looked lost, a scrap of paper clutched in her hands as she frowned at the bay headers as though they were written in hieroglyphics. As he moseyed off to help her with whatever inane shit she wanted, he called over his shoulder.
“You’re up for it, yeah?” he said, eyebrows raised.
I tried to hide my enthusiasm with a casual thumbs up, but my skin was crawling with excitement.
Of course I was up for it.
LAURA
An elderly woman with white hair and a gently curved back buys Letters to a Young Poet. A rosy-cheeked man with dimples and blond curls, like an overgrown cherub, buys American Psycho. A teenager with pastel pink hair and a healthy layer of blusher over the bridge of her nose buys The Fountainhead.
“Don’t be mad,” Eli says, stopping to rest a giant stack of mind, body, and spirit titles on the till point. Angels and crystals, tarot cards and auras. Smoke and mirrors to pad the pain of reality with a comfort blanket of mysticism.
“Don’t give me a reason to be mad,” I counter, sliding a pretty hardback called Astro Poets from his stack and turning it over to read the blurb.
“I’ve invited the rest of the team tonight,” he says with an impish grin.
I lower the book and scowl at him. “Oh, you suck.”
“Don’t give me that face,” he says, neatening his pile of books. “I invited Sharona, and then she invited Martin, and then Martin asked if he should text Barry and it just snowballed. Are you actually mad?”
“I thought it was just gonna be us, that’s all.”
He opens his mouth with a frown, and then pauses as he searches for the right words. I realise with a hot rush of embarrassment that it might have sounded like I thought we were going on a date. “I mean, I was going to invite Sharona anyway,” I say quickly, placing Astro Poets back on to his pile of shelving. “But did you have to invite the entire team?”
“Isn’t it for charity though? I thought the vibe was, like, the more the merrier?”
“Yeah, but . . .” A tug of uneasiness, and then the image of Roach, eyes shining as she talked about Ted Bundy, calcifies in my mind. “I dunno, it’s fine. I just wish you’d asked me first.”
I lean on the counter and inspect my fingernails. The polish has chipped away around the edges, leaving a craggy island of peach paint on each nail.
“Ah, you’ll smash it,” he says, earnest and sweet. “You don’t hate me, do you?”
He smells like fresh sweat and nag champa, and when he smiles, his cheeks dimple.
“I don’t respect you enough to hate you,” I reply, and he laughs as he disappears towards the lift.
A little girl in a yellow raincoat picks a board book with a rubber duck on the cover. An elderly gent in a stained three-piece tweed suit buys The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. A woman with fuchsia acrylics and matching pink lips buys The Valley of the Dolls.
Sometimes people surprise me, and sometimes they do not.
ROACH
The poetry reading was in a bar called the Nib. A girl with curly green hair and a bull-like septum ring was sitting on a high stool by the door with a clipboard and a purple plastic charity bucket.
“Hi guys, it’s entry by donation tonight,” she said, shaking her bucket at us. “We’re raising money for Women’s Aid.”
The bar was the kind of try-hard place that normies liked, desperate to recreate the careless cool of an American dive bar with carefully curated neglect. The walls were painted a scuffed black, and the bar was lined with ripped pleather stools. A guy with dreads poured drinks and nodded along to some wanky guitar noise thrumming from the speakers. I pictured him sliding whiskeys down the bar to exhausted, grey-faced detectives, drinking to forget, drinking to shrug off the last brutal crime scene, drinking so they didn’t take echoes of homicide home to their wives.
High tables faced a makeshift stage that was covered in ripped stickers and pasted flyers, flanked by an old piano and a yucca plant in a terracotta pot. At Laura’s insistence, the booksellers bagsied a table near the back. “Otherwise, I’m too aware of my audience,” she said, shrugging out of her camel-coloured raincoat and reserving herself a seat next to Eli. “I perform best when I feel anonymous.”
I grabbed the seat next to Laura’s. I’d spent the whole day trying to start a conversation with her, and although she always smiled politely whenever I spoke to her, distraction clouded her eyes and her answers were short and vague. I hoped the atmosphere of the poetry reading would loosen her up, and I’d finally manage to squeeze out enough conversation for her to realise we had something in common.
Laura peeled off to say hi to a tall, thin man with sharp cheekbones and a scraggly beard while Sharona went to the bar and came back with a metal bucket stuffed with open bottles of Budweiser on ice, which leaked cold water all over the table and dripped onto the floor.
Eli, Noor, and Kofi accepted beers from Sharona’s bucket, but after a quick exchange of words with Barry, Martin excused himself and returned from the bar with two pints of bitter. I wanted a Dark Fruits, but the others were still shuffling around and getting settled, and I didn’t want to risk losing my seat next to Laura, so I accepted the last bucket beer instead.
“I’m just trying to save up some money,” Noor was saying. “I want to go backpacking in 2020, but I don’t know how much I’ll need.”
“Depends where you want to go, really,” said Sharona, lifting her beer bottle and wiping water from the base of it to stop it from dripping on her top. “If you fancy the hippy trail, the biggest cost is the airfare. Once you’re there, everything’s pretty cheap. Europe gets cheaper the farther east you go, and the US is basically expensive all over. Backpacking somewhere like South America, on the other hand . . .”
She rambled on. Noor was small and thin, with delicate shoulders and skinny wrists. The only scenario in which I could picture her backpacking was as a missing persons story on the evening news.
“Sounds awesome, though,” said Eli. “You have to do that shit while you’re still young. Right, Sharona?”
“Oi, fuck off,” Sharona said with a broad grin that revealed a missing canine. “I’m only just forty, thanks.”
“Ah, I’m just messing. And anyway, you’re never too old to travel,” Eli said, raising his beer bottle to his lips. “I hope I’m still out there discovering new places when I’m a hundred.”
“Yeah, all right, thanks for that,” Sharona said, but she was still laughing and her laugh was infectious, and the rest of the team laughed at her expense too. When people laughed at me, I felt it in my bones, painful and acute as a dentist’s drill, but it was something Sharona simply shrugged off, even seemed to enjoy.
The bar was filling up around us, but Laura’s seat remained conspicuously empty. As the booksellers continued their mindless chatter, I watched her flit around the room, a hummingbird collecting the nectar of attention from people she knew. She carried a something-and-Coke and a slim pink volume of stapled pages, and when the tall man with the scraggly beard switched on the microphone, she turned to face the stage and clapped without spilling a drop of her drink.
Laura was first to read. When the compère announced her name, there was a smattering of polite applause. She stepped into the limelight and took her place in front of the microphone without a second glance towards her colleagues. Eli raised his beer bottle in silent salute, but she was flicking through her little pink book and paid him no attention.
“Hiya! My name’s Laura, and I’m a local writer and poet.” She was using her customer voice—perky, bright, and warm. “I’m gonna read a couple of found poems for you guys this evening. Just to explain what that means . . . I take snippets of prose from true crime narratives to create commemorative poetry about the lives of the women who are so often overlooked when we talk about violent crime. Some of them are a little darker than others, though, so please consider this a content warning.”
She certainly had my attention now.
“This one’s called ‘It Was Now 5 A.M.,’” she said, and then she began to read. It sounded like she was recovering from a cold, and she spoke into the microphone with a syrupy huskiness that commanded the attention of the room. The audience fell silent as she spoke: just the occasional rattle of ice cubes as someone sneaked a mouthful of their drink, and the periodic slamming of the till drawer. The booksellers were all captivated, apart from Eli. Although he seemed to be listening, his head was bowed as he scratched at the wet paper label of his beer bottle with a thumbnail, face bearing a grave expression. He was the only bookseller not looking at her.
At first, I found her poetry kind of boring—it was all pink skies and pale dawns—but the more she read, the more I found myself getting drawn into her dark world. If her goal was to remove the violence from true crime narratives, the result was the opposite. Between descriptions of the weather and women doing ordinary things—hanging laundry, returning video tapes, dropping children off at school—I could feel the spilled blood simmering underneath it all, the constant threat of murder, the occasional flashes of coldness, of menace. By removing the violence, it was all I could think about. What happened to these women? When did the ordinary humdrum of their lives become extraordinary with a final—fatal—chance encounter? I listened closely for clues that might indicate time period or location, any crumbs that could lead me to the killers between the lines.
When she finished, the room broke into rambunctious applause. I put down my drink and smacked my palms together as hard as I could. She nodded—a brief bob of her head that was close to a bow—collected her drink from the piano, and walked swiftly offstage towards our table. I braced myself to greet her, already reaching for the right words to express how much her poetry had maggotted under my skin. I wanted to ask which books had inspired each poem, find out which murderers made them tick. This was our moment to connect.
Laura didn’t seem to think so, though. She breezed straight past me, straight through me, to Eli. He was brandishing a rollie and a something-and-Coke—no communal lager for Laura—like a spectator greeting a marathon runner at the finishing line.
“Gimme,” she grinned, taking the cigarette in one hand and the drink in the other. As the compère began to introduce the next poet, Sharona leaned forward and patted Laura on the forearm.
“Well done,” she murmured in a low voice. “That was epic, mate. You smashed it.”
“Thanks,” Laura whispered back, a smug smile playing on her lips, and then she gave Eli a look and he nodded. As they walked outside together, I was amazed that the crowd simply parted and let them through. I imagined she’d be swamped by admirers: other poets keen to congratulate her, perhaps even a poetry agent (if such a thing existed—it must do, I reasoned) waiting to give her a card, or a publisher ready to offer her a book deal then and there. I could only assume that everyone else, like me, was stunned into silence, her words still ricocheting around their heads. I found myself wishing that I was a smoker so that I could follow them into the smoking area and no one would think anything of it.
On stage, an elfin poet in chinos and an unzipped hoodie was adjusting the microphone as though nothing extraordinary had happened at all.
“This one’s about my fear of churches,” he said.
I squeezed my way to the bar and ordered a pint of Dark Fruits. Once the pint was in my hand, I felt bold. On a whim, I walked straight past my colleagues and took my fizzing glass outside to find Laura. Who needs a pack of cigarettes to grab some fresh air? It felt imperative that I speak to her then, while my head was still swimming, my heart hammering. If I tried to articulate that feeling later, at the shop, it wouldn’t be the same. It would feel forced, and she might think I was just being nice, polite. She’d brush me off, look through me. I needed her to know that I knew my stuff too, that I’d grown up in the shadow of a serial killer, that I understood the power of violence.
The garden was buzzing, the air clouded with plumes of vape smoke that smelled like bubble gum and gummy bears. I spotted the gleam of Laura’s bottle-blonde hair through the crowd, somewhere near the far corner of the courtyard. She was perched on the table of one of the round picnic benches, her feet on the seat, and she didn’t seem to mind that the wood was stained dark with early evening rain, even though it must have been seeping through the thin fabric of her skirt. She was laughing at something Eli had said, really laughing, an unlit rollie pinched between her fingers.
