‘Oh, could I?’ said Jemma, beaming.
He stared at her, nonplussed. ‘If you like,’ he said slowly.
A yowl came from behind him. Jemma peeped and saw Folio, now normal-sized, yawning. ‘Hello, Folio,’ she said, extending a hand.
Folio put his head on one side, considered her hand, then walked off.
‘Right, important business,’ said Raphael, rubbing his hands. ‘Tea!’
‘But aren’t we going to refill the shelves?’ said Jemma. ‘We sold quite a few books yesterday. Shouldn’t we put more stock out? Where is the stock?’
‘In the stockroom,’ said Raphael. ‘Where else would it be?’
‘OK,’ said Jemma. ‘Do we know what’s in there?’
‘Broadly, yes,’ said Raphael. ‘Specifically, not really. I just open a box when I feel the urge, and see what’s inside.’
‘Would you mind if I had a look?’ asked Jemma.
Raphael shrugged. ‘Be my guest. If you go into the back room, it’s the door on the right.’
‘Do I need a key?’
His only response was a laugh.
Jemma went into the back room and faced the door. What would she find behind it? She imagined a broom-cupboard-like space, with boxes stacked one on top of the other and barely room to turn round. She took a deep breath, and opened the door.
‘The light switch is on the left,’ called Raphael. ‘One at a time, remember.’
Jemma snapped on the light. ‘Woah.’
It was like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. OK, maybe not that big, but big.
‘How does this room fit into the shop?’ Jemma muttered to herself. ‘It’s like the Tardis. But stop with the Doctor Who comparisons, it’s getting weird.’ She walked down the middle aisle of the three. Boxes squatted on metal shelves, seven rows high, which reached to the ceiling. She lifted a box out carefully, and saw at least two more behind. As far as she could tell, not one box was labelled. ‘How on earth does he find anything?’ she said, aloud.
The answer came to her immediately. He doesn’t.
Jemma’s sense of order, of how things ought to be, bristled. He needs a spreadsheet, she thought. A big spreadsheet. No, he doesn’t need it. The shop needs it. She resolved to bring her laptop in the next day and start cataloguing this fearful mess. Well, she conceded, not exactly a mess. After all, the books were in boxes. It was a mess made to look as if it wasn’t a mess, which was even worse.
She took the box she had selected through to the shop, then returned to switch off the light and close the door. She found Raphael regarding the box with curiosity. ‘I wonder what’s inside,’ he said.
‘If you labelled the boxes,’ said Jemma, ‘you’d know.’
‘Where’s the fun in that?’ said Raphael. ‘This is like Christmas.’
‘Let’s hope it’s a good Christmas,’ said Jemma, grimly. ‘Do you have any scissors?’
The lid of the box was taped down. Jemma cut into it carefully, opened the flaps, and revealed a stack of Mills and Boon romances and, sitting next to them, what looked like a complete set of CS Forester’s Hornblower novels.
‘Strange bedfellows,’ she murmured. ‘Oh well, I might as well put them out, seeing as the box is open.’
‘Pass me one, would you,’ said Raphael.
Jemma picked up Mr Midshipman Hornblower.
‘No, from the other side.’
Jemma shrugged, and passed him A Debutante in Disguise.
‘I’ve always wanted to read one of these,’ Raphael said, opening it. ‘Never got round to it.’ He sat in the armchair, took out a pair of reading glasses, and settled them on his long nose. Folio hopped onto his lap, and was peacefully asleep within seconds.
‘Guess I’d better restock the shelves, then,’ said Jemma, but there was no response.
Jemma put out the books, turned the sign, raised the blind, switched on the lights, and checked the till, but not a customer appeared. In the end she took out her copy of Anna Karenina and attempted to read the first chapter. But somehow images of a roaring Folio, a bookshop travelling through space, and an empty till kept getting between her and the pages. She glanced across at Raphael, still reading, and the words of the article echoed in her head. How does the bookshop keep running?
Chapter 5
Jemma was no wiser on that subject by Friday. It had been a whirlwind of a week. She had sold, in her estimation, hundreds of books to a range of people, from harried office workers looking for ‘something on emotional intelligence’ to bewildered and often bedraggled tourists in Harry Potter scarves, who arrived in the shop asking if she could direct them to the Leaky Cauldron.
At first she had told them, rather shortly, that while the Leaky Cauldron was on Charing Cross Road in the books, it was filmed elsewhere in London. Then she wised up, gathered Harry Potter books, and displayed them in the window, along with a straw broom she had found at a hardware shop down the road and a witch’s hat from a fancy-dress shop. She had assumed that they would burn through their entire Harry Potter stock in one day. Somehow, though, every time she went to the stockroom, she struck lucky and found yet another box of Harry Potters in her random selection.
‘It’s a bit odd,’ she said to Raphael, one day.
‘What’s odd?’ he asked, looking wary.
‘Well, because of the shop display we have lots of people wanting Harry Potter books, and somehow, those are what I’m finding in the stockroom.’
‘Mmm,’ said Raphael. ‘Probably just coincidence.’ And sure enough, the next box Jemma opened turned out to contain a mixture of books by Zadie Smith, China Miéville, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
But the shop was definitely making more money; of that Jemma was certain. She made sure to always be present at cashing-up time, and on some days they took as much as three hundred pounds. ‘I don’t know what the bank manager will make of this,’ said Raphael.
‘They’ll probably be very pleased,’ said Jemma.
‘They’ll probably think I’m up to something,’ said Raphael.
‘I told you that getting the shop on social media was a good idea,’ said Jemma. So far the shop had a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, and an Instagram account. She liked the idea of TikTok, but suspected that making videos with Raphael in the shop would be difficult.
She had even attempted to catalogue the books, but that hadn’t gone to plan. It ought to have been perfectly straightforward, if laborious. But somehow her laptop kept saving the spreadsheet to weird locations, and when she found and reopened it the data was corrupt, or one of the columns had vanished. In the end she gave it up as a bad job. There’s probably professional software I could get to do this, she thought. Maybe l could persuade Raphael that it’s an investment. And she left it at that.
And now it was Friday, and the end of her trial week. Her clock radio woke her with ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’. She tried to read that as a positive sign that the shop couldn’t cope without her, but didn’t even manage to convince herself. She hunkered under the duvet and stared at the ceiling, where a crack was creeping towards the light fitting. Come on Jemma, best foot forward, she told herself. But she waited until the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Opportunity’ was playing before getting up. You never knew.