The Bookshop on the Corner (9 page)

Marek nodded his head. “That is what it is like for me sometimes,” he said. “Only the clock is the sniper. Not real sniper. That sounds like just the book for me. I will buy. Very good.”

Nina smiled. “Really?”

“Yes. I think so. You have convinced me. Perhaps we should turn this train to books, huh? Have a book train?”

“I love that idea!” said Nina. “But, uh, maybe best start small.”

“But you will be in Birmingham and your van will be in Scotland.”

“Yes, I know,” said Nina. “I'm going to figure it out soon.”

“That does not seem to me very good way to run a bookshop.”

Nina looked at him to see if he was teasing her, but his face was inscrutable.

“No, not particularly.” She sighed. “But I can't park it in Birmingham. I don't really know where I'm going. My life is just full of problems.”

Marek smiled sadly in the darkness, and she could see his white teeth gleaming.

“Oh, you think you have problems?” he said.

“Well, I don't have a job, all my assets are parked in a turnoff in a place I don't even know, my roommate is going to evict me in case I bring the ceiling down, and I just nearly got run over by a train. So, yes, I think I've got problems.”

He shrugged.

“What, you think I've spent all my savings on a van I can't drive for fun?” She huddled more tightly into her blanket. “How can you not think I have problems?”

Marek shrugged again. “You are young. You are healthy. You have van. Many people from my country would think you were very lucky.”

“I suppose,” said Nina quietly.

They racketed across a bridge, startling a group of herons that had been crowding around a lake. They took off in flight, silhouetted across the moon.

“Wow,” said Nina. “Look at that.”

“You see many things on the night train,” said Marek. “Look.”

He indicated a tiny village, all in darkness except for one light on in a bedroom. “Most nights—not every night—that light is on. Who is there? Can they not sleep? Is there a baby? Every time I wonder. Who are these lives all here one after another; and how kind of them to let us peer in, how generous of them.”

“I don't think people really like living on the railway line,” said Nina, smiling.

“Oh, then they are even kinder,” said Marek, and they fell into silence.

When they pulled in to Newcastle, Marek told her to sit down, out of sight, that she shouldn't really be here. There was a great thundering and clanging in the freight yard, which was lit up like a Christmas tree, so bright it looked like day; men were shouting and attaching cranes and pulleys to the containers on the train: wool, Marek had said, for the Netherlands and Belgium; whiskey, of course; oil; gin. And coming on, freight from China, destined for dollar shops and kitchen shops: toys, salt and pepper shakers, picture frames; bananas and yogurt and mail and anything you could think of, swinging off the great docks at Gateshead and being loaded onto trucks and trains to spread throughout the country overnight, like a network of blood in its veins; a dark midnight world Nina rarely gave a second
thought to as she picked up a coffee stirrer or a jar of honey or a nailbrush. The clanging and shouting went on and on, and she dozed off in the corner of the cab. It had been an exceedingly long day and night.

She woke with a start as they were flying through the Peak District. She was disoriented and thirsty. Marek smiled.

“Ah, I thought you were gone for the whole time,” he said. “Maybe you are not good for night work, huh? A night library is not for you.”

“It's a nice idea, though,” said Nina dreamily. She hadn't been fast asleep, but rather untethered, feeling the train as if it were on rails through the sky. “You could swap children's books for them at night when they were asleep. They could wake up with a new story.” She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and looked around. “Sorry, I'm talking nonsense.”

The tea in the thermos was cold, but Marek offered it and she drank it anyway.

“What is your dream?” said Marek as they flew along, the noisy engine rattling, the radio occasionally stuttering into life.

“Oh, I wasn't really asleep,” she said.

“No, I mean for what you are doing. What do you want to do? Forever. What is your dream?”

Nina sat up. “Well,” she said. “I suppose . . . I want to be with books, have them all around me. And recommend them to other people: books for the brokenhearted and the happy, and people excited to be going on vacation, and people who need to know they aren't alone in the universe, and books for children who really like monkeys, and, well, everything really. And to go places where I'm needed.”

“You're not needed up there? Where we were? In Scotland?”

“Well, yes, maybe, but I've never lived there, and . . .”

“It will be better in Birmingham?”

“No, not really. I mean, not at all. It's really congested there and there's nowhere to stop and they kind of have libraries and bookshops and things . . . not as many as they did, but they do still have some.”

“Mmm,” said Marek. “And you don't like Scotland?”

Nina thought back to standing on top of the hill, looking out over the fields, the ancient stone walls, the sun layering down, flickering in and out of the darker clouds, drawing tremendous stripes across the huge, long, empty land.

“I do,” she said. “I like it a lot. But I don't know anyone there.”

“You'd have your books,” said Marek. “And you'd know me. Well, I am in Scotland for a little bit. Most nights.”

The first hints of dawn—dimming stars, a tiny line of summer gold—were appearing as the train came farther south. Now the towns were bigger and longer and went on and on and on, with only the depot names to differentiate them one from another; there was more traffic as the country very gradually started to wake itself and stretch its legs.

“Where do you live, Marek?” said Nina.

“Oh, the same place as you,” he said. “Birmingham innit.”

The way he said
innit
was so English that she found herself smiling.

“I can tell,” she teased, while marveling at the coincidence that they had both ended up in the same city.

“I do not like it,” he said. “Is expensive to me and too busy and too fast. I like it where is quiet and free and you can think
and breathe proper air, like home. I like Scotland. Scotland reminds me of home. Is beautiful and not too hot.”

“So why don't you move there?”

He smiled. “I not know anyone there either.”

At Birmingham, he helped her down and pointed her toward the exit. It was 5
A.M
., but quite light, and absolutely bitterly cold.

Nina looked at him. “Thank you so much.”

“Thank Jim,” said Marek simply. “That he not run you down and turn you to jam on the tracks. And you must be careful here. If you are jam on the tracks here, well, it will all have been in vain and no good.”

Nina smiled. “I'll be careful, I promise.”

They looked at each other.

“Well,” said Nina. His bristles were more pronounced in the morning, almost a beard, and he ran his hand over them carefully, as if reading her thoughts. His dark eyes were twinkling in his high-cheekboned face.

“Good luck, book girl,” he said.

She was feeling in need of a hot shower and a long nap. The sun glinted off the steel of the train. Nina noticed she had a name:
The Lady of Argyll
. She turned and went to circumnavigate the end of the tracks; it came quite suddenly at the terminus, just a wooden barrier telling you not to go any farther.

“Wait, book girl!” came a voice suddenly behind her. She turned around. It was Marek, waving a piece of paper. Her brow furrowed. He looked rather red, like a big clumsy bear. He glanced down, shy.

“Well,” he said, “if you would like . . . I can maybe take you
back to van. One night. We are not always two people on. Often just one. And I know where is van.”

Nina widened her eyes. “You're allowed to do that?”

“Completely and absolutely not,” he said.

“Oh,” said Nina. “Well, probably . . . I mean, thanks for the offer, amazing, but I'll probably . . . I mean, it'll . . . I don't want to get you into trouble.”

“Not to worry,” said Marek, blushing more furiously than ever, and handed her the piece of paper. It had a completely incomprehensible e-mail address on it. “But, you know.”

Nina smiled and took it. “Thank you,” she said.

There was a loud honking noise from one of the other trains, and quickly, lightly, she ran around the edge of the railway track—the very end of the line, she found herself thinking—and out through a chain-link-fence doorway into a nondescript street in a part of Birmingham she had never visited before. To her joy, there was a little workman's café right there on the corner, condensation steaming up the windows, and she spent her last five pounds on a bacon sandwich and a steaming mug of tea as she watched
The Lady of Argyll
, now less heavily laden, back slowly out of the depot and make its great journey onward to London.

S
urinder was not wearing her friendliest smile when she drowsily answered the door.

“Have a good trip?” she said. “How come you're back so early?”

Nina considered telling her, then decided against it.

“Long story,” she said.

“Come on then,” said Surinder. “I've given up the entire day to move these damn books out. Can we get started?”

“Well,” said Nina, wondering if there was time to go and make a cup of coffee before they got stuck in this. “There's a thing. A kind of . . . Well. Here's the thing. I can't park here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had my parking permit turned down. The van's too big for Edgbaston, it seems.”

“Oh, that's why you're back so quickly. You flew!”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, at least you didn't buy the van. But, Nina!” Surinder put her empty coffee cup down on a quivering pile of Regency
romances, which promptly collapsed on the floor in a fainting fit. “What are you going to do with all of this?”

At the exact same moment, Nina said, with a vision of blinding clarity, “But I did buy it.”

“You didn't . . . You what?!” Confused, Surinder looked around, scattering a mint-condition collection of Orwell in the process.

Nina winced. “Watch George!”

“Watch George?! Nina, what the HELL is wrong with you? What were you thinking? Why didn't you wait to find out about parking before you bought the damn thing?”

“I don't know. I just assumed it was going to be okay.”

“Why did you hand over money for it not knowing what you were doing?”

“I don't know that either. I just . . . I thought I wouldn't go through with it if I waited too long.”

“Nina . . .”

Nina had never seen Surinder so furious. She wished she wasn't exhausted, as she could feel the tears already building behind her eyes.

“Nina, I have tried to be patient. I have tried to help when things go wrong and you buy a book and things go well and you buy a book and it rains so you bring home some books and it's sunny so you get some books. But . . .”

It might, Nina thought later (more in hope than expectation), have been Surinder's high-pitched voice that set the whole thing off. It might not have been purely Nina's fault.

That, however, was not how she felt just then, as Surinder gestured again in frustration and knocked the rather wobbly banister, which immediately started to wobble even more and dislodged a pile of books at the top of the stairs. And inevitably,
as though in a terrible slow-motion film, they then knocked into the next pile, and the next, and sent the whole bunch tumbling over and down the stairs, where they hit a large ornamental vase, which banged onto the hall floor so hard that a small crack appeared in the hall ceiling and a puff of dust came down.

Everything seemed to happen so slowly. Nina watched the spiral of dust tremble its way from the ceiling, wavering in the light, a tiny cloud of white, nothing more. But it was, she knew, enough. She looked at Surinder.

It was the last straw. The very final one. They'd both known it was coming.

“Okay,” said Nina. “Okay. I'm out of here.”

Once it was decided—or rather, once Nina had announced it and they had both calmed down—Surinder was genuinely sad. They had been roommates for four years, and good ones on the whole. She took the rest of the month's rent in lieu of Nina paying for fixing the crack in the ceiling and immediately plunked some of it on a couple of bottles of prosecco and a gigantic bag of Haribo gummy bears, and they sat in the sitting room the following evening talking it all through.

“Where will you live?” said Surinder.

“I don't know,” said Nina. “I don't think it's that expensive up there. Cheaper than here, anyway. Which is useful, seeing as I won't actually have any money.”

“What are you going to charge for the books?” said Surinder.

“It depends,” said Nina. “I think I might just make up prices when I see people.”

“I don't think you're allowed to do that,” said Surinder. “Are
you sure you won't forget you're a librarian and start just handing books out to people?”

“Only until I miss my first two meals,” said Nina, taking another handful of Haribo.

“Have you told your mum?”

Nina made a face. Her mum worried a lot about everything. Usually her younger brother Ant, which was useful.

“I'll e-mail her as soon as I've got a change of address.”

“You're not going to tell her you're leaving the country?”

“It sounds bad when you put it like that.”

“Uh-huh,” said Surinder, who went around to see her mother pretty much every day and rarely came home without a Tupperware box filled with something delicious, and who thought Nina's relationship with her mother was suspicious in the extreme.

“Okay, okay, I'll tell her,” said Nina. “Just give me five minutes to get settled. This is all happening awfully fast.”

Surinder leaned forward on the sofa and topped up their glasses.

“You know,” she said conspiratorially, “the kind of people who are going to be up there?”

“Old geezers,” said Nina promptly. “I know, I've met them.”

“No!” said Surinder. “No, no no no. I don't mean that at all. Up there, it's all guys, you know.”

“Really?”

“Of course! Middle of nowhere. Who's there? Farmers. Vets. Probably a military base nearby. Hikers. Mountain bikers.”

“I'm not sure I'd get along very well with a mountain biker. Bit too much raincoat action. Also, I don't like being outside.”

“It's just a concept. Geologists. Agricultural students. Tree
surgeons. Men men men men men! You'll be hopelessly outnumbered.”

“Do you think so?”

There had been only two men—Griffin and old Mo Singh—at the library, and eight women. And in the media center there were about forty women, mostly young, Nina had learned in the course of a very excitable e-mail from Griffin.

“Course! And there's none here.”

“You do all right.”

Surinder rolled her eyes. She got asked out constantly, and was interested in almost none of them, complaining that they were all too metropolitan and she didn't like beards.

“Whatever,” she said, waving her hand. “You'll see. Boys everywhere.”

“I'm not going for the boys,” said Nina. “I'm going for the books.”

“But surely if a boy or two turns up you're not going to be too disappointed?”

“I told you,” said Nina. “They're all a hundred and two and live in a bar. And stop whistling ‘Over the Sea to Skye.'”