Words in Deep Blue(7)

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 I found a condom once (wrapped and unused but ten years out of date – a story in itself).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.

There’s Frieda, who’s been playing Scrabble here with Frederick for ten years. She’s about his age and wears severe stylish dresses, and you just know she used to be one of those English teachers who had fifty eyes in the classroom and a supernatural knowledge of Shakespeare. She started the monthly book club, which Howling Books hosts but doesn’t run.

The same people come every time. I set up the chairs, open the door for the teachers and librarians, put out a whole lot of wine and cheese, and then stand back. I hardly ever join in the discussion, but if it interests me, and it pretty much always does, I read the book afterwards. Last month they read Kirsty Eagar’s Summer Skin. George read it after the book club because they talked about the sex scenes, and maybe I read it partly for that reason, too. But mostly I read it because of the way Frieda talked about the main character, Jess Gordon. She reminded me, just a little, of that best friend I had once, Rachel Sweetie. I liked the book – George did too – so we put a copy in the Letter Library.

The Library is the thing that Howling Books is known for, at least locally. We get a write-up every now and then, on sites like Broadsheet, as something special to do in the city.

It’s up the back, near the stairs to our flat, separate from the rest of the shelves. In it we keep copies of books that people particularly love – fiction, non-fiction, romance and sci-fi, poetry and atlases and cookbooks. Customers are allowed to write in the books in the Letter Library. They can circle words that they love, highlight lines. They can leave notes in the margins, leave thoughts about the meaning of things. We’ve had to get multiple copies of works by people like Tom Stoppard and John Green because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Fault in Our Stars are crammed with notes from readers.