The Reading List(36)

She let herself out of the library, locking the doors behind her. She looked back through the windows. It had been confronting seeing Mia here today – an intruder in the space that was starting to feel different to her. More like a refuge than a prison sentence. More like somewhere she could, one day, actually belong. She watched as the last beam of evening sun shone on her desk, her spot. Even if she’d never admit it to Mia, maybe she was starting to like working here.

It was the little things.





THE READING LIST


IZZY


2017


IZZY SAW IT THERE, lying on the pavement in front of her. She had a look around, wondering if someone had dropped it, where it had come from. It had a piece of sticky tape at the top, now lacking any adhesive. It was just dry and dirty from the London smog.

She hadn’t found a list in a long time. It was a bit of a weird habit of hers, collecting lists. She’d started when she first moved to London, when she’d found one abandoned in a trolley in Sainsbury’s. The city had been so large, so vast and lonely sometimes, finding lists was like finding tiny moments of human connection, where she could prove that the silent strangers who walked past her, avoiding eye contact, were people too. They wrote shopping lists, they planned their dinners, they added some treats in every so often – the lists grounded her.

Every list she’d ever found was now stuffed into a little box in her hallway dresser drawer. She knew that one day she’d upgrade them, put them in a folder or a photo album or something, but for now, that’s where they lived. Most of the lists were from supermarkets, found in baskets, on the floor, by the cash register, left at the self-service checkout. Sometimes she discovered them floating down the street outside a shop. Almost all the lists were shopping lists, once useful then suddenly discarded. Apart from one, which was an invite list – a small dinner party, maybe. There were names scribbled out – and some responses too: ‘doesn’t eat eggs’ or ‘allergic to chicken but fine with other birds’. For days she’d wondered how the dinner party had turned out – whether the people who were crossed off had RSVP’d ‘no’, or were dumped by the host.

Every list gave her some kind of insight into the person – she loved trying to work out what meal someone might be cooking, whether they were meal planning for the whole week or just for one special dinner, maybe a date, a meet-the-parents lunch, or just a cosy night in.

Sometimes she wished she was all right at art, because the images of these people were so vivid in her mind, she wanted to draw them, immortalize them in some way. She could work out if someone had kids, was vegetarian, was cooking for one or two, even what their skincare regime was or how smelly they were (deciphered by their choice of deodorant).

But this list, floating down Wembley High Road, was a bit different.

Just in case you need it:

To Kill a Mockingbird

Rebecca

The Kite Runner

Life of Pi

Pride and Prejudice

Little Women

Beloved

A Suitable Boy

She knew what it was. She’d written loads herself when she was at uni and had to get a pile of books out of the library. It was a reading list. It might even have been someone’s university reading list, if it weren’t for the line at the top: Just in case you need it.

She recognized some of the books, had read them years ago, but, as she stood in the middle of the busy pavement, scrutinizing the handwriting, she struggled to find the connections between each title. What, and importantly, who had brought all these books together?

Looking down at this smudgy list, her fingers brushed over the words. Silently, it began to rain. She didn’t notice until the drops fell on the words, and the ink, once dry, was suddenly fresh and running into a puddle. She tucked it up her sleeve in a hurry and sprinted to the nearest bus stop. Here she stood looking down at the words, the handwriting, the gentle curl of the ‘J’, the ‘d’. The titles were written less floridly, as though whoever wrote the list wanted the books themselves to be as legible as possible. Yet they couldn’t resist adding a flourish to the ‘g’ and the ‘R’, and eliding the ‘B’ and ‘e’ of Beloved.

That evening, as Izzy was tucking the list away with the others (the one underneath said simply Baked beans (lo salt), ice cream, sausages, sausages veggie, cat food), she glimpsed a title that stirred something: Rebecca. Her dad had had a Reader’s Digest copy bound in red leather with gold lettering that he’d inherited from his own mother – he read it every year because it was his mother’s favourite book.

‘This book reminds me of her, Izzy,’ he’d said to her, when she asked him why he was reading the same story again and again. ‘You like to re-read your books, and I do too.’

It was beautiful, the book – and she’d loved seeing her dad pick it up so often. He turned each page so carefully. He never opened it wide enough to bend the spine. It was precious to him. The day he’d finally given it to her, she knew that she was old enough and trusted enough to read it; she’d felt like a grown-up that day. But, for fear of damaging it, of getting her sticky fingerprints on it, of ruining her father’s precious copy, she’d never passed the first page.

She wandered to her kitchen, where her only bookshelf was kept (she’d never asked her landlord why the shelf was screwed to the wall, here of all places), and began to rummage through the books. This time, she couldn’t quite picture the list writer, and it niggled at her, this unknowing … But perhaps reading the books themselves – some again, some for the first time – would help her to get a clearer picture of who they might be?