I press send, and head downstairs to the shop.
‘He looks better,’ Dad says when I rejoin them.
George looks up at me and decides it’s best not to answer.
‘What’s that wonderful Dickens line from Great Expectations?’ Dad asks. ‘The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.’
‘That’s hugely comforting, Dad,’ George says.
‘The terrible days get better,’ he tells us, but he doesn’t sound all that convincing.
‘I’m going book hunting,’ he says, which is unusual for a Friday. I ask if he wants some company, but he waves me off and tells me to look after the shop. ‘I’ll see you tonight for dinner – eight o’clock at Shanghai Dumplings.’
Since I finished Year 12 last November, I’ve worked in the bookshop every day. We sell second-hand books, which is the right kind of book to sell for this side of town. Dad and I do the book hunting. It’s getting harder. Not harder to find books – books are everywhere, and I’ve got my particular spots to look, spots Dad showed me – but harder to find the bargains. Everyone knows the worth of things these days, so you don’t just find a first edition of Casino Royale sitting on someone’s shelf that they don’t know they’ve got. If you want to buy it, then you buy it for what it’s worth.
I keep reading articles about the end of second-hand bookshops. Independent bookshops selling new books are hanging in there, doing well again in fact. But second-hand shops will be relics soon, apparently.
I’ve been thinking about this lately because, since the divorce, Mum’s been talking about selling the shop. Every time she talks about it her arguments convince me a little more. I love this place but I don’t know that I love it as much as dad does – he doesn’t care if it makes money. He’s willing to work some place else to keep it.
He and Mum bought the place twenty years ago, when it was a florist. It was priced cheaply for a quick sale. The owner had walked out for some reason. When Mum and Dad came to inspect it, there were still buckets on the floor and the place smelt of old flowers and mouldy water. The notes had gone from the till, but there were still coins in the drawers.
Mum and Dad kept the wooden counter running along the right as you walk in, as well as the old green cash register and red lamp that the florist had left behind, but they changed almost everything else in the long, narrow space. They put in windows along the front of the shop, and Dad and his brother, Jim, polished the floorboards. They built shelves that run floor to ceiling the whole length of the shop, and huge wooden ladders that lean against the shelves so people can reach the books at the top. They built the glassed-in shelves where we keep the first editions, and the waist-high shelves in the centre of the shop at the back. They built the shelves where we keep the Letter Library.
In the middle of the shop, in front of the counter, there’s the specials table, and next to that is the fiction couch. At the back on the left are the stairs to our flat, on the right is the self-help cupboard, and then through the back glass doors is a reading garden. Jim covered it, so people can sit out there no matter what the weather, but he left the ivy and jasmine growing up the bluestone walls. In the garden there are tables with Scrabble boards and couches and chairs.
There’s a stone wall on the right, and in that stone wall there’s a locked door that leads through to Frank’s Bakery. We’ve suggested to Frank that he open it so people could buy coffee from him and then bring it into our garden, but Frank isn’t interested. In the whole time I’ve known him, which is since I was born, he’s never changed a thing in his shop. It’s still got the same black and white tiles, the same diner-style counter with black leather stools along it. He makes the same pastries, he won’t make soy lattes and he plays Frank Sinatra every minute that he’s open.
He gives me my coffee this morning, and tells me I look terrible. ‘So I hear,’ I say, putting in some sugar and stirring. ‘Amy dumped me. I’m broken-hearted.’
‘You don’t know what broken-hearted is,’ Frank says, and gives me a free blueberry Danish, burnt on the underside, just the way I like it.
I take my coffee and Danish back to the shop and start sorting through the books that need to be priced.
I check through all of them because what I like about second-hand books are the marks you find inside – coffee rings, circled words, notes in the margin. George and I have found all kinds of things in books over the years – letters, shopping lists, bus tickets, dreams. I’ve found tiny spiders, flattened cigarettes and stale tobacco in the creases. I found a condom once (wrapped and unused but ten years out of date – a story in itself). I once found a copy of The Encyclopaedia of World Flora 1958, with leaves marking the pages of someone’s favourite plants. The leaves had dried to bones by the time I opened the book. All that was left were the skeletons.
Second-hand books are full of mysteries, which is why I like them.
Frederick walks in while I’m thinking that. He’s a bit of a mystery himself. He’s been a regular here since the day we opened. According to Mum and Dad, Frederick was our first official customer. He was fifty then, but he’s seventy now, or thereabouts. He’s an elegant man who loves grey suits, deep blue ties, and Derek Walcott.
For as long as I’ve been book hunting, as long as the shop’s been open, Frederick has been looking for a particular edition of Walcott poems. He could order a new copy, but he’s looking for a second-hand one. He’s not looking for a first edition. He’s looking for a particular book that he owned once. And something like that, he’s likely never to find.
I don’t think he should stop looking, though. Who am I to say he won’t find it? The odds are stacked against him, but impossible things happen. Maybe I’ll find it myself. Maybe it won’t be too far from home. Second-hand books have a way of travelling, sure. But what travels forward can come back.
Frederick won’t tell me what’s in that Walcott he’s looking for. He’s a private man, a polite man, with a flower permanently fresh in his lapel and the saddest eyeballs I’ve ever seen.
I hand him the three copies I’ve found over the last month. He dismisses the first two but hesitates over the third. The way he holds it makes me wonder if maybe I’ve found the one. He opens the cover, turns the pages, and then tries not to look disappointed.
He takes out his wallet, and I tell him he doesn’t have to keep buying the books if I haven’t found the right one. ‘They sell, and I’ll go on looking for it anyway.’
He insists, though, and I imagine someone walking into Frederick’s house after he’s died and finding hundreds of versions of the same Walcott book, and wondering why they’re there.
Frederick isn’t the only regular. There’s Al, who reads a lot of science fiction and looks like someone who does. He’s been working for years on a novel about a guy who’s jacked into a virtual utopia. We’re all looking for a way to tell him that it’s already been written. There’s James, who comes in to buy books on the Romans. There’s Aaron, who arrives drunk at least once every couple of months, banging on the door late at night, because he needs to use the bathroom, Inez who just seems to like the smell of old books, and Jett, who comes in to steal the hardcovers so he can sell them to any other second-hand place that’ll take them.