The Bookshop on the Corner (4 page)

“I mean,” said Griffin, “you can't say it's in your nature to take daredevil risks. You've never been late back from a lunch break in the four years I've known you; you've never made a staff suggestion or complained about anything or stayed out to have an extra cup of coffee during a fire drill—nothing. Little Miss Perfect Corporate Person. Little Miss Ultimate Librarian . . . and now you're going to buy a van and sell books out in the wild? For a job?”

“Does that sound crazy?” said Nina.

“Yes,” said Griffin.

“Mmmm,” said Nina. “What are
you
going to do? Are you going to apply to comic shops and illustrators and stuff?”

Griffin looked embarrassed for a moment. “Oh,” he said.
“God, no, not really. No. I'll probably just apply for one of the new jobs. You know? For safety? As a knowledge facilitator.”

Nina nodded sadly. “Yes, me too.”

“I'll never get it against you,” said Griffin.

“Don't be daft, of course you will,” said Nina, glancing down at the paper again, feeling an awkward flush pass through her. She focused on the ad. “This van is miles away, probably.”

Griffin leaned over her to look at the ad, then shook with laughter.

“Nina, you can't have that van!”

“Why not? That's the one I want!”

She modified what she was saying.

“That's the one I would have wanted.”

The van was white, boxy, old-fashioned, with big headlights. It had a door toward the back of one of the sides, with a little set of metal steps that folded out. It looked retro and rather lovely, and best of all, there was plenty of space for shelving inside, a leftover from the bread van it had once been. It was gorgeous.

“Well, good luck,” said Griffin, pointing at the small print. “Look! It's in Scotland.”

C
athy Neeson had everyone in individually to look at “core skills development.” It wasn't an interview. Of course it wasn't. What it was, truly, was cold-blooded torture, but of course nobody could say that. Nina was quivering with nerves by the time she got into the room.

Cathy looked up as if she didn't recognize her (which she didn't, as she had a child with whooping cough whom she'd settled at 3
A.M.
), which didn't fill Nina with confidence. She glanced quickly at her notes.

“Ah, Nina,” she said. “Nice to see you.”

She looked again at her paperwork and frowned slightly.

“So, you've enjoyed working at the library, yes?”

Nina nodded. “Yes, very much.”

“But you must be excited by our new direction, no?”

“I found the team-building course really helpful,” Nina said. To be honest, she had thought of little else since. Of how the van might look, parked, inviting and sparkling, and what she might put inside, and how big a collection she would need to have a
good chance of stocking the kinds of things people might like, and where she could source other secondhand books when the library had been totally cleared, and . . .

She realized she'd drifted off and that Cathy Neeson was staring at her intently.

(Cathy Neeson hated this part of her job so much she wanted to stab it. The idea was to gently dissuade unsuitable candidates from applying and save the interview process some time. But the truth was, Cathy wasn't sure the noisy
Apprentice
-style kids who seemed to get all the jobs these days were what they really needed. A nice manner and a level head would surely get you much farther. But that didn't cut much ice with the big cheeses, who liked flashy mission statements and loud, confident remarks.)

“So are you still thinking of applying?”

“Why?” said Nina, a look of panic crossing her face. “Shouldn't I?”

Cathy Neeson sighed. “Just think about how your core skill set would fit in,” she said blandly. “And . . . good luck.”

What the hell does that mean? thought Nina, stumbling up to go.

Nina was still obsessing over the small ads for vans when she ought to have been preparing for the interview, but couldn't find anything even vaguely as nice as this one elsewhere. It just felt right, with its funny little nose and its curved roof. There was nothing for it. She was going to have to go to Scotland.

Griffin came up behind her, squinting.

“You cannot be serious,” he said.

“I just want to have a look,” she protested. “It's just a thought.”

“Time's running a bit short for thoughts,” said Griffin. “Uh, could I ask you something?”

“What?” said Nina, instantly wary.

“Could you look over this application for me?” He looked shamefaced.

“Griffin, you know I'm going for the same job!”

“Uh-huh. But you're so much better at this stuff than me.”

“Well, why wouldn't I totally just tell you all the wrong things to write and make you put in a really terrible application?”

“Because you're too nice to do that.”

“Maybe I've just been lulling you into a false sense of security.”

“For four years?”

“Maybe!”

“Nah,” said Griffin, with a complacent look that made Nina want to spill her coffee on him. “You're too sweet. Too sweet not to help me, and too sweet to drive a truck.”

“You reckon?” said Nina.

“Yup.”

He pushed over the forms. “Could you just take a look at it? Let me know? Come on, they're interviewing us both anyway. Might as well help out your illiterate chum.”

Nina looked at him. She knew her session with Cathy had not gone well. It was almost like she was sabotaging herself by helping Griffin. On the other hand, he needed help . . .

With a sigh, she took the application and plunged deep into impenetrable paragraphs about multimedia, moving forward, and crowd-sourcing content. The more she read, the more depressed she felt. Was this what the world wanted now? Because
if it was, she didn't know if she had it. She tried to help Griffin with some of his more incomprehensible sentence structures, but she couldn't help comparing all this stuff about paradigms and envelope-pushing and sustainability targets with her own application, which had short, neatly typed paragraphs about libraries being the center of their communities and how reading helped children fulfill their potential. This had, she could see, much grander ambitions.

She sighed and looked at the ad again.

The van was long, not unlike an ice-cream truck, with an old-fashioned frontage. The pictures of the interior revealed it to be completely empty, with enough space—she'd actually drawn a model of it on some paper—for plenty of high shelving down each side, plus a little corner seating area where she could have a sofa, and maybe the children's books . . . a couple of bean bags . . . She found herself staring dreamily out of the open window into the noisy Birmingham evening.

Outside, two men were having a loud discussion about how someone had cheated them about a car; a clutch of adolescents was screaming with laughter on their way down the road; there were four buses honking at the crossroads for some reason; and there was the endless roar of traffic from the nearby overpass. But Nina didn't hear any of it.

She could see it perfectly. She could. She could imagine the entire thing. Some gas, her stock—so many of the books she'd picked up were absolutely brand new, in perfect condition. And with all the libraries closing . . . was it possible she could bring something good out of something so awful?

She glanced at the address again. Kirrinfief. She looked up ways of getting there. The fast ones weren't cheap, and the cheap ones . . .

She had weeks of vacation days that she'd never taken. If she didn't get a new job, she was going to lose it all anyway, right? She might as well take advantage of some of the last free days she'd ever get paid for.

Before she knew it, she'd finished Griffin's grandiose application form—and booked herself a bus ticket.

N
ina let her book fall into her lap, conscious that she was getting drowsy.

It was late in the evening and she'd been on the bus all day, with only the shortest of stops to stretch her legs and wander about at superhighway service stations—not normally great places to relax. The day was nearly over but the sun was still high in the sky—it stayed light here far later than it did down in Birmingham—and it was glowing strongly through the left-hand window she was leaning against as they crossed the Forth Road Bridge. The glow off the quiet Firth was shining pink, making it feel for an instant as though the bus was flying through the white wires of the great structure.

Nina had never been to Scotland before. In fact, as she'd booked her ticket, for less than the price of an evening in the pub, she'd realized that at the age of twenty-nine, there were lots of places she'd never been. Of course she had been to Narnia and the Little House on the Prairie, and Wonderland, but to actually smell the deep, rich, yeasty smell of the old gray
streets as they'd approached Edinburgh, the ancient cobbles almost making her dismount then and there as the iron sky was reflected in the windows of the tall houses, the oldest skyscrapers on earth—that had made her sit up, entranced by the higgledy-piggledy little streets that wandered here and there, tangling over the great wide ones, and the austere castle on a cliff that appeared to have been parachuted into the middle of the bustling city.

And still they went on: north, ever north, the sky growing even larger as they crossed the great bridge, the iron railway bridge to the right of her, the traffic thinning out as they drove through rolling farmland and harsh, craggy landscapes and long moors under the wide, clouded sky.

There were fewer people on the bus, too. There had been plenty of comings and goings at Newcastle and Berwick and Edinburgh, but now it was only her and a few elderly people and what looked like oil workers, sitting patiently, tough-looking men on their own, grunting at one another, their faces set to whatever lay ahead of them.

One moment she would look up from her book to see a great brown plain, the golden light playing through the heather; the next, she was in time to see an osprey dive across the road toward a loch, which made her start; then, as they crested the next mountain, a ray of sunshine came out and she put her book down altogether.

Perhaps if it had been rainy that spring weekend, everything would have been very different.

Nina would have sat reading, huddled up in her duffle coat; she would have exchanged a few words with the sellers of the van, thanked them politely, gone home to think about it again.

Had the wind been coming off the sea, had the bridge been
closed to high-sided traffic because of strong winds. Had a million different tiny things happened.

Because life is like that, isn't it? If you thought of all the tiny things that divert your path one way or another, some good, some bad, you'd never do anything ever again.

And some people don't. Some people go through life not really deciding to do much, not wanting to, always too fearful of the consequences to try something new. Of course, that in itself is also a decision. You'll get somewhere whether you put any effort into it or not. But doing something new is so hard. And a few things can help.

That evening, as Nina arrived in Scotland for the very first time, it was not stormy and wet and overcast, with clouds so low they seemed to clip the trees. Instead it was as if the entire country was showing off for her. The evening was golden, the northern light strange and beautiful. Everywhere she looked, it seemed, were gray stone castles and long bright vistas, lambs gamboling in the fields and deer scattering away in distant woods as the bus rolled past. Two old men who'd gotten on in Edinburgh started speaking gently to each other in Gaelic, and she tuned her ear in, feeling as she did so that it was not so much talking as singing, and thrilled and astonished that while she was technically still in the UK, where she'd spent her entire life, it could still be so strange, so foreign.

The road coasted higher, but never seemed to end in the untouched landscape, instead floating above the heathery fields, and Nina found herself urging the bus on and on, to where there were no cars, and even fewer towns and people.

She had a guilty moment when she felt as if she was betraying her beloved Birmingham, with its highways and tower blocks and police sirens and jostling pubs and noisy parties and
dense traffic. Normally she loved that. Well, she liked it. Well, she tolerated it.

But up here, it wasn't hard at all to understand why the Scots thought of themselves as different and apart. She'd traveled in the UK—to London, of course, to Manchester, on vacation in tended, manicured Dorset and Devon. But this: this was a completely different proposition, a far wilder land unfolding in front of her, so much larger than she'd ever thought of it, had she thought of it at all. Towns and villages appeared at a leisurely rate, with the strangest of names—Auchterdub, Balwearie, Donibristle—all of it unfolding in a strange tongue. It was startling.

Just after 9
P.M.
, but with the sky still light, even though it was only April, the bus finally arrived in Kirrinfief.

Nina was the only one getting off here, feeling odd and crushed and so very far from home. She looked around. There were two narrow streets winding down from the side of the hills that surrounded the town: a little pub, a gray-painted restaurant with scrubbed wooden tables, a small grocer's shop, a bakery, a tiny post office, and a shop selling fishing rods. There wasn't a single soul to be seen anywhere, nobody on the road.

Nina felt nervous. In novels, this usually meant that the next person you met was going to try and kill you and the rest of the community was going to cover it up, or everyone would turn into a werewolf. She told herself not to be ridiculous. Griffin and Surinder knew where she was. She was going to look at a van, an insurance policy if everything kept going so horribly at work. That was all. This was just business. Normal people did it all the time. She took out her phone regardless and checked it. No signal. She bit her lip, then told herself to get on with it.

The pub was called the Rob Roy and was covered in pretty hanging baskets. There was no one sitting outside; the evening had taken on a chill, even though a weak sun was still making its slow way down over the horizon. Nina took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

Inside, the old wooden tables were highly polished, and there was a great stone fireplace surrounded by horse brasses and filled with dried flowers. The room was almost empty, but at the bar, two old men turned around and regarded her carefully above the pints they were clearly nursing. Nina had to grab her courage with both hands to smile nicely and walk forward. After all, the bus had gone, and there wasn't another until tomorrow, so it wasn't like she had a lot of choice in the matter.

“Uh, hello,” she said, conscious suddenly of how English she sounded. “Is, er . . . Is the landlord in?”

“Hesjustawainnit.”

Nina couldn't remember feeling more embarrassed in her entire life. A hot flush rose up around her neck; she genuinely hadn't understood a word the man had said. She put her hand to her throat.

“Uh, sorry?” she said. It felt like the more she tried to make herself comprehensible, the more she sounded like the Queen. Suddenly she wished herself very, very far away from here, almost anywhere, in fact.

Both men sniggered, then, thank heavens, the door burst open and a ruddy-faced man came in carrying a barrel of beer as if it weighed nothing.

“The lass!” he said cheerfully. “Hello there! I was wondering if the bus had been through.”

“It has.” She nodded, relieved beyond words. If she concentrated, she could follow him.

“I'm Alasdair. So what brings you here this time of year? The snow's barely melted off the peak land.”

Nina smiled. “I know. It's beautiful.”

His face softened at that. “Aye, it is. Can I get you a drink?”

Nina didn't recognize any of the beers on tap. She asked for a mineral water, then saw the men shake their heads sadly and changed her order to half a pint of the local beer, which tasted like fizzy molasses.

“Get some of that down you, lass,” Alasdair said.

“Are you still serving food?” asked Nina. They all laughed.

“Naw, not at this time of night,” said Alasdair. He looked up, his eyes very blue under his sandy hair. “I can probably make you a sandwich if you like.”

Nina was starving; the food in the service stations hadn't looked particularly nice and cost a fortune, and she was conscious that she might well be out of work very soon. She'd hoped for a casserole or a potpie or something warm and filling—in fact if she was totally honest, she'd fantasized about a friendly farmer's wife and home-baked apple pie and cream, then realized that she was thinking about an Enid Blyton novel, not a real place she was actually visiting.

“Um, yes please,” she said, and the man disappeared through the back into what looked like a tiny kitchen space while Nina stared hard at her phone as if that might make it work, and wondered if she could just take her book out again.

One of the men asked her a question, which she didn't quite understand but guessed to be, “What are you doing up here?” and she mentioned that she'd come to look at a van.

At this they both burst out laughing and ushered her outside. In the little town square, the fading light picking out the names on the war memorial—MacAindra, MacGhie, MacIngliss—they
led her across the cobbles to a side street completely blocked by the van from the ad.

Nina stared at it. It was pretty grubby, but she could see that underneath the dirt, and some rust on the front grille, was the lovely curved roof and friendly nose that had so attracted her in the ad. The main thing that struck her, though, was that it was far, far larger than she'd expected, worryingly large, in fact. Could she really handle it?

Seeing the van in the flesh, as it were, rather than in a fantasy or just as an idea, made her suddenly anxious. Her idea of a future doing something where she wasn't protected by a salary and sick days and vacation days and someone else doing all the planning and organization . . . if it was to start anywhere, it would start in this little gray stone square, with the last weak rays of evening sunshine coming over the hills, the smell of sharp pine and sweet gorse in her nostrils, a chill wind blowing down the valley and the air so clear she could see for miles.

“Finally getting rid of that eyesore!” said one of the men, laughing, as the other one sized her up. Nina's ear was beginning to getting attuned to their way of speaking.

“You're no' really going to buy Findhorn's van?” said the other in disbelief. “That thing's been rusting out there since the year zero.”

“Are you sure you can handle it, a wee thing like you?” said the first man, unfortunately echoing exactly what Nina had been thinking herself. The van had looked pretty normal in the photograph, but here it seemed absolutely gigantic, old-fashioned and terrifying.

“What are you going to do with it?” said the older man wonderingly.

“Um . . . not sure,” said Nina, unwilling to give herself away
in case she got committed. Now that she'd actually made her way here, everything felt so terribly real. The men exchanged glances.

“Well, Wullie'll be in soon enough.”

They headed back to the pub, Nina shooting anxious glances behind her. It was truly, terribly big. Doubt gripped her. After all, this was completely out of character. She'd seen it now. It wasn't appropriate. She'd go back and write a resumé like Griffin's and promise Cathy Neeson that she'd do anything, sacrifice anything, perform motivational handstands if she could just hold on to her job. Yes, that was what she'd do. And she could go back to working all day and reading all evening and occasionally going for drinks with Surinder, because her life wasn't bad, was it? It was absolutely fine. It was okay. Whereas doing something like this—nobody would believe it. It would be a crazy huge mistake and she'd just quietly go home and never mention it again and nobody would even notice.

The landlord looked up with a broad grin when she reentered.

“Ah, there you are,” he said, pushing across a loaded plate. There was a huge sandwich on fresh white bread with a thick crackling crust; in between were slathers of butter and some ripe, crumbly local cheese Nina had never tasted before, smothered in homemade chutney, with a crisp pickled onion on the side. She smiled to see it; she really was starving, and Alasdair's face was friendly and kind.

Suddenly, together with the smooth beer, the meal made perfect sense, and she consumed it all sitting at the bar, her book propped in front of her.

Alasdair beamed approvingly. “I like a girl who enjoys her
food,” he said. “That's our cheese, you know. Got some goats up on the moor.”

“Well, it's lovely,” said Nina appreciatively.

The door creaked open behind her and she turned around. Another old man, heavyset, with deep wrinkles around his blue eyes and an old hat entered the bar. He sounded gruff.

“Has that bus been through?” he said.

“Aye, Wullie!” said one of the other men. “Here's your latest van buyer!”

Wullie looked at Nina and his cheery face turned suddenly grave.

“Youse are having me on?” he said to his jubilant companions.

“Uh, hello?” said Nina nervously. “Are you Mr. Findhorn?”

“Mmm,” said Wullie. “Aye.”

“I answered your ad.”

“I know . . . I didn't realize you were a young lass, though.”

Nina bit her lip crossly. “Well, I'm a young lass with a driver's license,” she said.

“Aye, I'm sure, but . . .” His brow furrowed. “I'm not . . . I mean, I was expecting someone a bit older, like. Maybe from a trucking company.”