First, she opened the shop’s porthole windows in their deep sills to tackle the fresh-paint smell and the increasingly close afternoon heat. Then she’d opened up her laptop to double-check the contract she’d signed and sure enough, after ‘create new stock-record system’ were the words, easy to miss, apparently, ‘and shelve all titles’.
Joy held her hands together and breathed, trying to remember the calming techniques that Hackney Marshes doctor had taught her way back when Radia was a baby and she couldn’t control her anxieties, no matter how many times she checked the front door was bolted and chained or how intently she stared at her sleeping newborn as though it was her job, through sheer willpower alone, to breathe for them both.
‘Baby blues,’ the doctor had called it, telling her she’d soon feel better if she got out for daily walks. But that was the one thing she couldn’t do, terrified Sean was out there, watching them, determined to force himself back into their lives, or worse.
In for five, she inhaled,and out for seven, six, five, four… She spread her hands across the shop counter until the room stopped spinning.
‘How long have they been happening for, these dizzy spells?’ the doctor had asked, and she hadn’t wanted to say ever since Sean took it upon himself to move into her flat a year before. That was when the tight feeling in her chest had started at least, and the dizzy breathlessness soon followed.
She’d sat there crying soundlessly while the doctor printed off a leaflet on postnatal depression, telling her a nurse would visit her at home sometime in the next two weeks. She’d left the surgery knowing full well she wouldn’t answer the door to any nurse that came prying.
The sound of Radia’s cartoons reached her through the memories. The breathing exercises always worked and the dizziness always passed.
Holding her arms in a hug, she picked her way through the boxes and across the shop floor into the café. She poured a long glass of water and downed the whole thing, repeating the inner mantra that accompanied her wherever in the world they happened to be:Sean isn’t here. He doesn’t even know where we are. He doesn’t want us now anyway. It’s over.
By three o’clock she had everything back under control. Anybody peering in through the glass of the shop’s locked front door would see a woman, perfectly composed, standing over the new till point and laptop, scanning books from the crates, adding titles one at a time to the stock-management system, her hands working busily and her waist twisting. Everything efficient and methodical.Lift, scan, enter, stack, repeat.
She’d have this done in a couple of days, she reckoned. Then she’d get the new website up and running, conceal the SSID for the Wi-Fi, install the phone, security cameras and the passcode entry system. Nothing to it. She was used to working on a mix of hardware and software installations, web design and coding solutions in her job. It was what she was known for. She was a good all-rounder, multi-skilled, a safe pair of hands. She could do it all and had the CV and references to prove it. The components of this shop job were nothing she hadn’t done before, except for the small matter of shelving books. That was new.
Dewey Decimal Classification, which would have been her obvious preference, didn’t have a look-in at the bookshop, she soon discovered. For a start, the stock was a mixture of old and new books, some of them positively antiquated and very expensive-looking. She’d have to enter those manually on the new stock-control database. They didn’t have RRPs, ISBNs or barcodes.
Then, a few moments ago, after seeking clarification from Jowan, the owner, Joy had been told that the books were to be shelved alphabetically under the shop’s own – rather random to Joy’s mind – categorisation system. He told her he’d written the prices of the second-hand stock in pencil inside their jackets so at least she didn’t have to worry about that.
When it was finished, her stock system would be fully searchable by title or even just by topic. The changing holidaymakers working here would be able to find particular books if customers asked for them, as well as being able to easily lay their hands on related titles… but it all still had to make sense for shoppers browsing the shelves. She set about tweaking the library coding she’d written on the plane over to England.
Joy liked it when systems were intuitive and user-friendly. This was just another programming puzzle for her to crack, and crack it she would. This was where her talents really shone through.
She reached for another book to scan, liftingThe Handmaid’s Tale. ‘I mean, this one could comfortably sit in non-fiction,’ she sniffed a wry laugh, even though her mouth was set in a line with its usual seriousness.
She didn’t like feeling cynical. It didn’t suit her at all. Was she cautious? Sure. Watchful and restless? Definitely. Since Sean, these traits had shoved their way into her personality, muscling aside her brighter, happier parts. Her abundance of carefree youthfulness had made way for them too. She was fully aware of this fact, but still, she didn’t like the cynicism. She tried to tell herself that Radia Pearl was her proof against it; evidence the world still had unspoiled goodness in it. So, she set the book in the fiction pile where it belonged and carried on.
By four, Radia was asking for a snack and there wasn’t much in the café kitchen other than surprisingly large quantities of fresh milk, strawberry jam, clotted cream, salted butter, a big sack of plain flour and, on the counter by the shiny new coffee machine – rather pointedly positioned, she thought – a book of baking recipes. Was someone honestly expecting her to rustle up a Devonshire cream tea from scratch?
Sure, she knew all about eating the things, but she was no baker. Her stomach chose this moment to remind her of the big, crumbly, oven-fresh scones she used to pick up at that bakery on the Old Brompton Road when she worked at Tech Stars End User Support. That was her first job out of uni, back in the days before Sean, or before she struck out on her own. She’d buy a bagful of the scones every morning and take them to work, while Gaz, Abi or Steve would bring the coffees, and before they’d completed a stroke of work they’d eat breakfast in the office kitchens and talk about their evenings: clubbing, gaming, going on dates.
She smiled now at the memory, and the taste of the fluffy warm scones came back to her too. Delicious days.
Joy now assembled a plate of jammy rice cakes for Radia with a building sense of mum-guilt. She really needed to get to the shops to buy some fruit.
She told Radia to drink her milk, leaving her slumping lazily on one of the patchwork beanbags tucked under the spiral staircase, and turned to survey her progress.
There were now books piled as tall as Radia all over the floor around the till area. Joy felt the prickling heat of the summer afternoon rising up her back. The shop was a mess, sure, but she’d bring it under control if she worked late into the night and all of tomorrow, hopefully by nightfall it would be cooler for doing some of the grunt work.
Air conditioning clearly hadn’t been high on the Borrow-A-Bookshop’s list of renovation priorities. Joy had to prop the shop door open as well as the windows. The sounds of the village spilled in too. Seagull cries, water running down onto stones – Joy hadn’t yet discovered the beach waterfall so had no idea what the rushing noise was – and children playing in the cool shallows down on the shore.
Just as she was throwing off her blazer and plunging her arms into one of the last unopened crates to retrieve a bundle of Jackie Collins hardbacks, someone politely cleared their throat from the doorway behind her and she sentHollywood Wives,The BitchandThe Studtumbling to the floor.
‘Oops, sorry,’ came a voice.
‘It’s Montague! The crabbing man!’ Radia cried, gleefully, already crossing the shop to drag him towards the beanbag nook under the stairs. ‘Why don’t you come in and read with me?’
‘Magnús and Alex left you all the boxes, huh?’ he said, glancing around and looking impressed at the huge mess.
By now, Joy had recovered the spilled books and a little of her composure. ‘It’s my job to shelve them, apparently,’ she told him blankly.
‘I didn’t put two and two together down on the sea wall. That you were the new Borrowers, I mean.’
‘Borrowers? Like my story?’ Radia gasped delightedly, holding up her book. ‘The last people who stayed here left it for me, just forbeinghere.’
