Death of a Bookseller, page 6
They stopped to speak to a homeless man, and then they passed Mirth, and then the Rose and Crown, and it seemed like they really were just walking home. She took a left down Ruby Road but, to my surprise, they took a right when they reached Lloyd Park and walked along its perimeter until they met the main road again. It was a pointless detour—they could have just followed the curve of the main road and ended up in the same place. It would have been quicker. I wondered if she’d forgotten the park was locked at this hour, but that seemed unlikely.
They paused when they reached The Bell, and I took advantage of a green man to cross the street and avoid overtaking them. The pub was still open, all flashing disco lights and blaring pop music, and I thought perhaps Laura was angling for a nightcap, but Eli was shaking his head, cajoling her onwards. If you were so thirsty, Laura, why didn’t you want to have another one with me?
I pretended to wait at the bus stop to let them gain some ground, and then I darted across the empty road so I could continue my pursuit from a safe distance. Eventually, they turned down a quiet residential street, and Laura stopped in front of a Warner flat, right on the edge of the park.
“This is me,” she called over her shoulder, her voice carrying on the still night air. I hid behind a white van on the other side of the street and watched her fumble with her keys, and then she opened the door and turned to Eli and said something that was lost on the velvet of the night, and to my great interest, he followed her inside.
The garden path was made of split concrete, dark clumps of moss packed into the cracks. The bay windows were curtained and dark. Everything looked so ordinary, so disappointingly ordinary, I wondered if I’d ever find it again. I pulled out my phone and made note of her address, just in case I ever needed it.
A gap between the curtains shivered with a flickering light. I left the safety of my hiding place behind the white van and creeped into her front garden for a better look. Beneath the bay window was an empty flower bed, home only to a large, dead-looking plant. I snapped away the twiggy branches to make some space, and my feet sank into the damp soil as I peered inside. She was standing barefoot, holding a box of long cook’s matches. Large votives burned in the fireplace, and she was lighting a half dozen tea lights that lined the mantle. The chimney breast was flanked by bookshelves, but the titles of the books were deep in shadow and indiscernible from my place on the other side of the glass.
Eli appeared in the living room door with a wine bottle and two glasses. He dropped onto a battered brown sofa and twisted off the screw cap, then poured out two glasses of piss-coloured wine. This was like watching television, a little documentary unfolding especially for me. She accepted a glass and lit a cigarette from a cream-coloured pillar candle, and I could have watched them all night through that little gap in the curtain, could have watched whatever seduction she had in mind, but a sharp cough directly behind me made me jump. I turned to see a man in a Nike hoodie and football shorts, his face and legs slick with sweat.
“You all right?” he said with a frown, chest rising and falling as he struggled to catch his breath.
“I think my boyfriend’s cheating on me,” I replied, and then I held his gaze, stared him down, until he turned and resumed his late-night run. He looked back once, twice, and then disappeared around the corner.
LAURA
Wine, music, soft candlelight. The shadows jump, and Eli laughs easily, smoking cigarettes, growing flush, the conversation flowing like the tobacco smoke that rolls off our tongues, and all the while, as we perform this show of friendship, the memory of his lips and the lingering looks continue and the thought that anything could happen prevails.
“I like your place,” he says. “It suits you.”
His left ankle is balanced on his right knee, one arm thrown against the back of the sofa. Dark, tousled hair like Robert Mapplethorpe, like Jim Morrison. Wooden beads around his wrists, a leather cord around his neck.
“What does that mean?”
He exhales and runs a hand through his curls. “It just suits you. Kind of mismatched and creative. It must get lonely, though. Living alone. And I don’t know how you can afford it.”
“I’ve rented this place since I was like . . . twenty-one?” I say. “My landlord lives in Australia and doesn’t really give much of a shit about it. I don’t think it’s occurred to him that he could charge me way more now.”
“Lucky.” He reaches for the bottle and tops up our glasses.
At university, our student house was cacophonous, full of music and laughter and late nights, a revolving door of friends and classmates, boyfriends and girlfriends, lovers and strangers making themselves at home at our kitchen table, on our sofa, in the other girls’ beds. The constant flow of people through the space shredded my nerves, and the unpredictability of it all left me anxious, unable to sleep without medication that knocked me out. It’s better for my mental health to live alone—even in a place like this, with its perpetual damp and mould—but if my landlord ever decides to sell this flat or takes a closer look at the rental market in Walthamstow, I’ll be in trouble. There’s no way I can afford the going rate for a one-bed on bookseller wages. This train of thought leads to dark, vulnerable places, though, so I take a deep breath and swallow some wine that tastes like overripe peaches and an astringent hit of tannin.
“So, are you working on anything new?” he asks.
“Just reading at the moment, trying to decide what I want to write about next. I started working on another found poem, but the story’s a bit . . . much for me. It’s really violent, and . . .” I pause to collect my thoughts. I’m thinking about my mother, and I find myself wondering what Eli remembers from the night we kissed. I’ve always had this shameful feeling that we talked about my mother that night, but the details didn’t stick and I’ve never found the right way to ask.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m done with the found poetry project,” I say. “Maybe I should just trust my instincts and pack it in. Fuck poetry, and all that.”
Eli raises his glass. “Yeah, fuck poetry,” he says, and I raise mine and we clink them together.
“What would you write instead?” he asks.
Outside, the wild cry of an urban fox.
My mother, I think. I would write about my mother.
“A love story,” I reply.
ROACH
On the way home, I stopped at an all-night corner shop and picked up a cucumber for Bleep and a pair of Dark Fruits to drink when I got home. At the cash register, with a devil-may-care shrug, I asked for a pack of Pall Malls, the type that came with a flavour capsule like a Rice Krispie in the filter that you could squeeze to change the flavour of the cigarette from plain to menthol. Laura, Eli, and Sharona all smoked rolling tobacco, but I didn’t feel much confidence in my ability to roll. I had to walk before I could run.
The lights were low inside the Mother Black Cap, and it hummed with the late-night jokes, petty rows, and maudlin heart-to-hearts of the drunks, losers, and students who favoured cheap beer and late nights. The bar smelled like disinfectant, and Laura’s words rolled around my head like a loose marble. It stinks. Ridiculous. She must have been thinking of another pub. She didn’t seem that fussy once she had a drink in her hand.
Jackie was sitting at the bar with a vodka soda, all dolled up in a sparkly top and a full mask of makeup. She was flapping her gums at one of the regulars, a middle-aged saddo who was inching towards the door. When she saw me, she interrupted herself midsentence.
“You’re back late,” she said, grabbing me by the arm and kissing my cheek with greasy lipsticked lips. She was wearing too much perfume—a strong punch of Calvin Klein Obsession smacked me in the face. “I was just telling Dave here—”
“It’s Frank, actually, and I—”
The man looked sheepish, like a shamefaced dog who’d shit all over the carpet and knew he was in trouble, but Jackie ploughed on regardless, with some long-winded story about her hairdresser’s daughter. She kept her arm clamped around my waist the entire time, pinning me in place.
“Anyway, she got the deposit back in the end,” she concluded, rattling the ice cubes in her glass with her free hand.
“Well, night,” I said, trying to extricate myself from her grasp, and she blinked at me as though she’d forgotten I was standing there. The punter, Frank, saw his chance and bolted for the door with a hasty goodnight.
“Where’ve you been, then?” she asked, turning the full beam of her attention on to me. She had a suspicious gleam in her eye, like she was anticipating a lie.
“Just out,” I said, twisting free from her grip.
“On a date?”
“A work thing.”
“A work thing? What work thing?”
“It was just drinks,” I said, slipping behind the bar towards the staircase before she could lock me into a proper conversation.
“Drinks? Where? Not the Rose and Crown?”
I dashed up the stairs, leaving her hanging. You had to be quick on your feet around Jackie. Keep yourself at arm’s length and keep the conversation short and sharp, with as little information as possible.
Living above a pub had its perks, but it led to a lonely childhood. There was never anyone around to bathe me or put me to bed, as Jackie worked round the clock to keep the bar running. Even when she wasn’t working a shift, she could usually be found in the bar choosing the music, interrupting conversations, telling stories, badgering the staff. The pub was her stage and she was the main character, the playwright, and the director all rolled into one.
I would appear in the pub at odd times, ramshackle with dried jam around my mouth, a grimy neck, hair in disarray, a smell of unwashed clothes about me, a little animal stuffed into leggings and T-shirts that never quite fit me right because I wasn’t built the way little girls were meant to be built. I was big for my age, tall with broad shoulders and little oysters of breast tissue that left me feeling self-conscious. Jackie would always make a fuss of me when I appeared, give me packets of salt and vinegar crisps and glasses of post-mix Coke, and I’d tuck myself in a corner and read Goosebumps and Horrible Histories until day faded to night and I was shooed back upstairs. Sometimes, she’d take a flannel to my face and neck like an afterthought, flatten my hair with her hands, stick a padded Alice band on my crown in an attempt to make me look complete. I thought perhaps I was the problem. She wanted a little girl, but she ended up with me. There was always something missing, a hole in my heart that I filled with murder, death, and putrefaction.
Safe in my bedroom, I cracked a Dark Fruits and practised smoking out of my bedroom window, a splintered sash edged with thin metal spikes to keep the pigeons that roosted in the roof from shitting all over the front of the pub. At night the pigeons cooed to one another, a gentle, infernal symphony. I’d once heard someone call Pall Malls “virgin fags,” but the menthol took the edge off, softened the burning taste to a cool chemical mint, like brushing your teeth in hell.
I grabbed my phone and pulled up Laura’s social media accounts to find out more about her—how she dressed outside work, whether she liked to post pictures of her meals or the weather or if she was into vapid selfies. But no: her entire feed was just a catalogue of paperbacks held up against different backdrops: a brick wall painted eggshell blue, a field of grass, the coarse grit of a beach. Boring.
Bleep looked on, incurious about my new smoking habit. He oozed against the glass of his vivarium, a silent witness, his glistening body the colour of a ripe Conference pear. I reached a finger into his tank and stroked his smooth shell, chocolate brown marbled with white. Most people don’t think of snails when they think of loving pets, but I’d always drawn a sense of calm from their timid, docile presence. The warm glow of a heat lamp in a snail vivarium was my night light as a child and snails were my most reliable source of comfort. My first giant African land snail was called Slimer. One of the regulars wanted to get rid of him, and as soon as I heard he was free to a good home, I set my heart on becoming a snail mother.
“A bloody snail,” Jackie said, rolling her eyes. “Why can’t she want a hamster or a kitten or something normal?”
I didn’t care for hamsters or kittens. What I really wanted was a snake, but beggars can’t be choosers and a giant African land snail turned out to be just as good. Slimer lived to the ripe old age of nine before he ended up on the wrong side of the grass, so to speak. After Slimer came Bleep. Bleep was still going strong. He lived a modest life on a diet of grapes, cucumber, and lettuce leaves, with the occasional scoop of calcium powder to keep his shell strong. He needed his tank cleaned weekly, and I took great pleasure in crushing the clutches of his pearly eggs under the weight of a pint glass. Aside from that, it was just regular mistings all day every day, and we lived in harmony side by side.
As I sipped cider between drags, I grew to like the contrast between smoky and sweet, hot and cold, dry and wet, dead and alive. I felt light-headed. I put on a murder podcast to ground me, and watched night buses from the city glide past, occasionally belching out a clot of staggering drunks, normies on their way home from a night out in Shoreditch or Dalston. Careless, carefree, with kebabs, clutch bags, and even their high heels in their hands, bare feet on the spit-spattered pavement, like the dark city streets were just an extension of their kitchens, and nothing awful could happen to them there.
Laura’s poetry rolled around my head, the way the ordinary could so easily become extraordinary, the way you never knew what was waiting for you around the next corner. I smoked and watched the world pass by underneath me, and nothing extraordinary happened to anyone outside my window. I wondered what I would do if something did. Would my weapon of choice be my phone, to call for help, our biggest kitchen knife, in an act of vigilante justice, or my silence? Would I do anything at all, or would I just sit back and watch it all happen beneath me, a spectator with a front-row seat?
LAURA
The poetry reading hangs over me, the anxiety of another drunken night casting a shadow over my day off. I wake up to the bacchanalian detritus of the night before: the stinking ashtray, the empty wine bottle, a trail of crisp packets, a hummus pot scraped clean with a drunken finger. I cringe for being too much, too full on, too obvious, shamefaced at the memory of Eli cutting our hug goodbye short as he made his way out the door.
With a thick headache, I drag myself to the bathroom to clean my teeth and wash my face. Something on the carpet catches the light by the back door—a sparkling loop-de-loop. It looks like a dropped necklace, or a coil of silver thread, but on closer inspection I realise it’s a twisted rope of slug or snail mucus. Horrified, I search in vain for the culprit but I can’t find any invertebrates in the bathroom or kitchen. I clean up the mess with a square of dry kitchen roll, but as I potter around, watering my plants and tidying up, I keep expecting to feel the squelch of slug under my bare foot and I’m on edge all morning.
Once I’ve finished cleaning, I make myself a cup of tea and curl up on the sofa with my books, but the case is horrendous, and I can’t focus on it. An uneasiness settles over me, and I realise it’s because my thoughts keep returning to my conversation with Roach at the bar. I love serial killers. I shudder at the memory of her hot rotten breath, her uncomfortably close proximity, her fixed attention. She was practically salivating. I’ve met people like her before. The kind of people who have a favorite serial killer, who buy true crime merch and watch documentaries about death over dinner, who visit places where terrible things have happened like they’re going to Disneyland: Chernobyl. Alcatraz. Fukushima.
Combing through stories of murder, violence, grief, and loss can be harrowing, but creating new narratives felt empowering, like I’m doing something with my grief, saying something with my anger, making a point. Now, it feels flat. Perhaps it hits differently with someone like Roach in the audience, enjoying it for all the wrong reasons.
Poetry used to come to me like summer rain—long droughts, and then a storm of inspiration that lasted a week, two weeks, a shower of words filling notebook after notebook until I had nothing left and it was back to dry skies for another month. Notebooks, so many notebooks, full of poetry and prose, notes and diary entries. When I have money, I buy hardback Moleskines for the Hemingway clout, and when I don’t, I go for cheap exercise books, studious with their echoes of secondary school. I love the lure of a clean page, fresh and untouched, like a hotel bed, a blanket of virgin snow, an empty plate waiting to be filled.
I worry about what to do with them all, all the notebooks that I’ve already filled up. They feel important and they feel stupid. Significant, and embarrassing. There’s a striking red and white mural near my house that quotes William Morris: Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. I can’t work out where my old notebooks and diaries sit on that particular spectrum, and I’m worried about leaving a legacy of trash for my future children to deal with after my death.
When someone dies, everything becomes sacred. Greetings cards marked with their handwriting, their winter scarf, their half-used cosmetics. Everything. I’m not sure who sorted through my mother’s things when she died, or what happened to them. It’s all a bit of a blur—I was only sixteen, a child really—but I guess my grandmother must have dealt with it all. My father certainly didn’t lift a finger.
