The Christmas Bookshop(21)

Flushed by her own success, Carmen was feeling unstoppable.

‘Maybe I should do a story time next,’ she said. Mr McCredie raised his eyebrows.

‘Do I have to be there?’ he said. ‘It’s just … there would be rather a lot of children.’

She noticed how anxious he got when sticky fingers approached his beloved first editions.

‘Quite the opposite,’ she said. ‘You’ll need a rest from manning the till so much. I order you to stay in the back sitting room while I do it.’

He smiled at her, and Carmen had the oddest sensation that this might just work.



One morning, the bell tinged just as Carmen was wondering why young Mr McCredie didn’t turn some more of his books out with their covers facing customers – it seemed a reasonably obvious retail thing to do, but then things seemed to work differently here.

She got down from the stepladder and smiled brightly, waiting for the inevitable, ‘Is young Mr McCredie not about?’

This could be said in a variety of different ways, Carmen had learned, and in this man’s case – he was thin, with a knobbly red face, wearing a long greasy-looking overcoat and clutching a much-used plastic bag stuffed with papers – it was said furtively, and for the first time, she saw a sigh of relief when she said, ‘No, it’s just me.’

‘Well then,’ he said, arriving at the glass-topped desk, pushing aside several copies of Christmas with the Savages Carmen was cheerfully planning to recommend to today’s customers.

‘Doesn’t look very Christmassy, your shop,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Carmen, who was thinking the same thing, but she couldn’t spend the shop’s money as they didn’t have any and it wouldn’t help to get them further on the red side. Maybe she should ask Sofia, although she baulked at the idea.

Although things were going better at the shop, relations between the sisters were still frosty, and their mother was refusing to be drawn in and had declared herself Switzerland. Sofia complained to Federico every night, which was first thing in the morning in Hong Kong so he was rarely at his best. Plus, he just liked to hear her voice, loved the rattle of the children in and out: Jack barking short answers to questions about how things were going; Pippa on the other hand elaborating on exactly who had misbehaved at school that day and why and how the boys hadn’t listened to Mrs Bakran, and had got into trouble; and Phoebe, more often than not, simply breathing snottily down the phone. He liked it all, just let it wash over, soothed by familiar noises. Which actually rather fired Sofia up, thinking he was agreeing with her, when he was just generally soothed by thoughts of home. He was a good man, Federico, but like many others he was guilty of letting his wife handle the domestics, despite the fact that she’d been to law school and graduated higher than he had.

Carmen was using the bottom door to get in and out of the house. The most contact she had with her sister’s family was on the nights Skylar was out, when she would sit on the sofa and let the kids fight while looking at social media on her phone and sending rude messages to Idra she really couldn’t let the children see.

She thought this was probably quite a nice break for the kids from being prodded to practise their instruments/do their homework/read an improving book every second of the day. Sofia didn’t agree. They communicated in stiff texts.



Carmen was reflecting on this sad state of affairs when the man in the shop snorted.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Has Mr McCredie mentioned me?’

‘Who are you?’ said Carmen.

‘Ha! Aha. Very good. Well. Just as well. I’m Justin Feeney.’ He looked at her face. ‘Well. Um. Okay, right. Mr McCredie told me to come in because I have the perfect book for your shop!’

He held up a packet of poorly stapled together pieces of foolscap. On the front of it was a rather badly sketched picture of a fish. Added in pen was a Santa hat. The title of the work was clearly The Fish, but the word ‘Christmas’ had been inserted in between ‘The’ and ‘Fish’.

‘The Christmas Fish?’ said Carmen slowly.

‘Yes! It’s supporting independent publishing,’ said Justin proudly. ‘I do them myself.’

‘Okay,’ said Carmen. ‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s about a man’s struggle against a fish,’ said Justin. ‘He has to fight and overcome the slippery fish in a titanic struggle between man and fish. The fish is a metaphor.’

‘For Christmas?’

‘No. For women.’

‘Oh,’ said Carmen. ‘Where does Christmas come into it?’

Justin frowned.

‘Actually I’m not sure you’d really understand it out of context. But I think Mr McCredie definitely wants to take some to sell. They’re only ten pounds each, wholesale.’

‘I think I’d have to ask him,’ said Carmen.

‘But you work here, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Carmen, then lied. ‘I’d definitely have to run it past him.’

Justin frowned, and Carmen was sure she saw him mouth ‘fish’ to himself.

‘You can leave one if you like,’ she said, looking up happily as another customer entered, ‘so we could take a look at it … ’