Six weeks or six days, I don’t care. I’m away from London, from my mother and her piles of stuff, from the memories of Patrick and Claire, from my beautiful flat that’s being bulldozed to make way for an ASDA, from all of it …
I may be a hot mess, but at least I’m afunhot mess, like a runaway train filled with glitterand Jammie Dodgers.
I wander down a narrow lane beside the butchery and come across a strange and beautiful building. A three-story architectural sampler tin with Medieval, Tudor, Victorian and art nouveau details, little dormer windows in the attic, and a hexagonal turret on one corner. Fairy lights flicker from the depths. A window display beside the narrow front door shows an arrangement of spell books and witchy fiction arranged around a bubbling cauldron.
The sign above the door reads “Nevermore Bookshop”.
I stop in my tracks. As a kid, I used to love bookshops – I adored the neat rows of books organised by subject and genre and author names, each one a window into a new, different world. I loved the smell of all that paper – heavy with history and possibility.
But my mother loves bookshops, too, especially the charity ones where you can buy a box of old paperbacks for three quid. She loves books about murder and books about romance and books that are broken and need love and books that are new and smell like a specific memory from her childhood and books that remind her of me and things I liked, and especially books that my father would have loved if he was still here. She loves these books so much that they all have to come and live with us.
After she stacked our downstairs hallway and bathroom so high with books that the small amount of floor space, piled with damp paper, squelched between my toes like wet sand, we had to abandon the rooms altogether. And after the angry letters from neighbours in our mailbox, I simply cannot love books anymore. I haven’t purchased or read a paper book since I left my Mum’s house at eighteen. If people give them to me as gifts, I buy them on my Kindle and donate the hard copy. If Claire or Patrick ever wanted to visit a bookshop, I’d fake a stomach ache and wait outside.
But something about Nevermore Bookshop calls to me.What’s the harm in one little look?
I push open the door and step inside.
I find myself in a long, narrow hallway, made even narrower by the towering shelves of books on each side and the piles strewn across the floor. I breathe throughthe rising panic.
For a moment, just amoment. I am back in my mother’s house, drowning in stuff.
But then, I see the traces of organisation – shelves divided into genres and sections, signs explaining to customers where to go. The relief of order in the chaos. This mess is not my shame, and it is part of the bookshop’s beauty.
As bookshops go, Nevermore is particularly striking. Strings of fairy lights outline each shelf, and more lamps and lanterns are shoved into every space not occupied by books. Every inch of wall space is filled with strange and wonderful artwork. On the end of one bookshelf, someone has placed a smashed Kindle on a wooden shield, as if it were a hunting trophy.
I think about the gleaming Kindle in my bag, the virtual bookshelf arranged in folders by genre and author surname. I’m not sure I’m welcome in this place.
I hear female voices laughing, and I pass under an archway into a large room stuffed with even more books on shelves and tables. A large desk occupies one corner, practically buried under evenmorebooks and an ancient till, upon which sits a large black raven who watches me with intelligent, fire-rimmed eyes.
Behind the desk, a brown-haired woman around my age shuffles through a stack of blank card sheets without looking at them, her fingers tracing over little raised dots on the surface.She’s blind.She chats with two other women on my side of the counter. One is dressed in workout clothes, her waist-length black, wavy hair pulled back into a tight ponytail that accentuates her soft brown skin and huge dark eyes. She beams at her friends with the softest smile I’ve ever seen. The other – a shorter white woman with a penchant for purple velvet and the kind of curves that sinks ships – bunches up a wild tangle of dark red curls and shoves them through a scrunchie before clasping her hand on the blind girl’s shoulder and shaking her friend with excitement.
“Mina, you have a customer. Hey there!” The redhead waves to me, her voice bubbling with enthusiasm in a way that reminds meuncomfortably of Claire.
“Oh, hello!” the brown-haired woman named Mina calls out to the room. “New customer, announce yourself! Get me away from these two witches and their meddlesome ways.” The other two giggle. “Can I help you?”
“I’m just browsing, thanks.”
Their faces fall a little, but they go back to their conversation. I study the rows of books on the poetry shelves, now feeling like I’m intruding on their private gossip session.
“—all I’m asking is that we dig up some dirt on him,” the black-haired woman is saying. “Just oneteeny tiny littlesex scandal to topple him from his throne. Maybe you could give him a little hex, Isis? Nothing too major, just make him grow a wart on his nose or only speak in a Basil Brush voice. That man is ruining my life!”
“Augustin Durant is hardly ruining your life, Komal, just because he opposes your parking solution for the Midsummer Festival?—”
“The fair is our main tourism event for the year. If we don’t have parking, how does he expect people to attend? Are they going to beam down from their starships? And this is thefifteenthproposal of mine he’s opposed?—”
“That’s probably because you sit on every committee in town. Heathcliff has forbidden me from sticking my nose into any more village mysteries,” says Mina. “But Idoenjoy a good hex …”
Okay, scratch that. I’mdefinitelyeavesdropping. But it’s because their conversation is so damn fascinating.
“I have just the spell to sort him out.” The red-haired one rubs her hands together with glee. “I’ve been working on this curse that will give him an itch between the shoulder blades that he can never quite reach.”
Spells? Hexes?
“Or perhaps he can always step on a wet spot after he puts on fresh socks?” Mina shudders. “Ihatewhen that happens.”
I shudder too. Ideteststepping in a wet patch in fresh socks. It reminds me too much of my mother’s house.
“If Dora would get involved, I bet we could digup a sex scandal in ten seconds flat. I know she’s my sister and I should respect her decision, but I’ve wanted that kind of power ever since I knew what it was, and she doesn’t even care,” the redhead sulks, playing with the lace on her purple velvet dress. “She thinks it’s acurse.”
