The Bookshop on the Corner (5 page)

“How do you know I'm not from a trucking company?”

There was a pause in the quiet bar. On the other side, underneath the taps, there was a kind of squirming, groaning noise, and Nina realized there must be a dog back there.

Wullie thought it over.

“Are you from a trucking company?” he said finally.

“No,” said Nina. “I'm a librarian.”

The two old men cackled like Statler and Waldorf, until Nina had to give them her special “silence in the library” look.
She was starting to lose patience. Ten minutes ago she'd been all ready to call it off and go home. Now she wanted to show this stupid man she was perfectly capable of whatever he didn't think she was capable of.

“Is this van for sale or not?” she said loudly.

Wullie took his hat off and nodded at Alasdair, who poured him a pint of something called 80 Shilling.

“Aye,” he said in a resigned voice. “I can let you have a test drive in the morning.”

Nina felt suddenly exhausted as Alasdair showed her up to a small, basic, but very clean and tidy whitewashed room with bare floorboards. It looked out over the back of the pub, away from the village and across the great dipping hills beyond, the sun only now making its way below the horizon.

There were loads of birds chattering around the window, but apart from that there was absolutely no noise; a distant car, maybe, but no traffic, no sirens, no garbage trucks or people shouting out on the street or neighbors having a party.

She sniffed the air. It was so fresh and clean it made her head spin. She swallowed a glass of tap water; it was freezing cold and utterly refreshing.

She had thought she would lie awake in the comfortable white-linened bed and draw up a list of pros and cons and things that might help her decide what she should do next. Instead, with the birds still singing outside the window, she was fast asleep by the time her head hit the pillow.

“What kind of sausage do you want?”

Nina shrugged. She didn't know how many kinds of sausages they had.

“Whichever's best.”

The landlord smiled. “Okay then. We'll give you some Lorne sausage from Wullie's pigs. That'll be fitting.”

Nina had slept like the dead until something had woken her like an alarm clock at 7
A.M.
Peering blearily out of the little dormer window, she had realized it appeared to be a rooster. She had dressed and gone downstairs, ready to try out the van for appearance's sake before hitting the bus again and forgetting all about her little Scottish adventure. There must be bookshops and other places that needed staff. Maybe she'd start there. The money wouldn't be as good as she'd been making, but she had never met a bookseller she didn't like, and as long as she could still be around books, still be close by, surely that would be enough.

Breakfast, when it arrived, was a serious affair, a meal to be treated with respect. She sat at the polished table by the window, where she could see all the comings and goings of the village—schoolchildren running along in a free and easy manner in their bright red sweaters; tractors pulling trailers full of mysterious machinery; horses out for their morning exercise; and plenty of Land Rovers off and about their business.

Alasdair set down a huge bowl of porridge with honey and thick fresh cream, still slightly warm. This was followed by a plate of Lorne sausage, which turned out to be square and crispy and utterly delicious; golden-yolked eggs that tasted better than any Nina had ever had—she assumed they came courtesy of the chickens out the back; crispy bacon, black pudding, and triangular things that she thought were toast but turned out to be some
kind of thin potato cake. After just a sandwich for supper, she realized she was ravenous, and polished off the entire thing. It was completely and utterly delicious.

“Get that down you,” said the landlord happily, refilling her coffee cup. “Wullie'll be busy up at the farm till eleven, so there's no rush.”

“This is amazing,” said Nina happily.

“You look like you could do with a meal,” said Alasdair. “A meal and a bit of fresh air.”

Nina had been told regularly since she was a child that she needed more fresh air, at which she would take her book and clamber up the apple tree at the bottom of their tatty garden, away from the car her father was always tinkering with but had never driven in all the years of her childhood—she wondered what had happened to it—and hide there, braced against the trunk, her feet swinging, burying herself in Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl until she was allowed back inside again. It was a good place to be because, she had learned, when people were looking for you, they never looked up, which meant that her two brothers couldn't track her down to either rope her into one of their stupid war games or, when she refused, tease her for liking books so much and sometimes grab whatever she was reading and throw it to each other over her head until she cried. So she simply smiled politely at Alasdair.

Nina really loved wet and cold winter days; she liked to sit with her back to the radiator, listening to the rain hurl itself against the windowpanes as if it could breach them; she liked knowing she had nothing to do that afternoon, that there was bread to toast and cream cheese to spread and gentle music playing, and she could curl up cozy and warm and lose herself in Victorian London, or a zombie-laden future, or wherever else
she felt like. For most of her life, the outdoors had simply been something to shelter from while she got on with her reading.

Now she stood at the threshold of the pub door. The air outside was bracing, the sun bright, the breeze cold and fresh. She took a deep breath. Then she did, for Nina, a very unusual thing.

“Can I just leave this here?” she said to the landlord, and when he nodded, she placed the huge hardback down on top of the table.

“I'll be back soon,” she said as he waved her away, and she stepped outside, book free for the first time in a very long time.

I
t was another splendid day outside, not at all what Nina had been expecting. It looked like the sky had been freshly laundered: a bright TV-studio blue, with fluffy clouds passing across. It was ridiculous, she mused, how little time she spent in the countryside, considering how much Britain had of it. There was always concrete under her feet—she rarely stepped off the pavement—and the sky was hemmed in by streetlamps and the high-rises that were popping up in the Birmingham city center at the rate of about one a week, it felt like.

She looked around. Sunlight rippled through the trees, puddled down the furrows of the fields. Across the road were great lakes of shimmering yellow rape. A tractor happily trundled across a field with birds flying in front of it, like something out of an old children's book about life on a farm. Reflecting the clouds above, a little cohort of lambs was charging around, hopping up and down and nipping at one another's tails in a field so green it looked Technicolor. Nina watched them, unable to stop herself from smiling.

This was so unlike her, she took a selfie of herself with the lambs behind her and sent it to Griffin and Surinder. Her roommate immediately replied, inquiring as to whether she'd been kidnapped by aliens, and did she need help? Two seconds later, Griffin texted back asking if she knew what “interfacing methodologies in library connectivity” was, but she ignored that and tried to tamp down the anxiety it sparked in her.

After exploring the village, she noticed there was no library. She walked on up a hill track, from where she could see the sea, closer than she'd expected, with a little rocky cove you could clamber down to. She shook her head. It was paradise, this place. Where was everyone? Why were they all crammed into the same corner of England, honking at each other in traffic jams, breathing each other's fumes and food smells and squeezing in and out of pubs and clubs? She saw a huge black rain cloud building up in the far distance. It couldn't just be that, could it?

Apart from the distant putt of the tractor, she could hear nothing at all. She felt suddenly as if she hadn't been breathing, not properly, for a long time. It was as if her entire body was exhaling. Standing on top of the hill, she surveyed the landscape. She could see for miles. There were several other villages dotted about, all looking quite similar, in ancient soft gray stone and slate, and in front of her the valley unfolded, green and yellow and brown, rolling onward all the way down to the white-crested sea.

It was a most peculiar feeling. Nina breathed in suddenly, all the way in, and felt her shoulders uncurl, as if they'd been jammed up around her ears.

Maybe they had been, she thought. After all, it had been a year since they'd first heard rumors about the library. Seven months before they knew it was the subject of a consultation
paper. Two months since they knew it was definitely happening, and three weeks since she'd known for certain she was out of a job if she didn't pass the interview. But she'd been living with that uncertainty, that inability to plan the next stage of her life, for much longer than that.

She stared into the distance and tried to think, honestly and properly, about her life: up here where it was clearer, and she could breathe, and she wasn't surrounded by a million people in a great hurry dashing or grabbing or shouting or achieving things in their lives that they plastered all over Facebook and Instagram, making you feel inadequate.

Some people buried their fears in food, she knew, and some in booze, and some in planning elaborate engagements and weddings and other life events that took up every spare moment of their time in case unpleasant thoughts intruded. But for Nina, whenever reality, or the grimmer side of reality, threatened to invade, she always turned to a book. Books had been her solace when she was sad, her friends when she was lonely. They had mended her heart when it was broken, and encouraged her to hope when she was down.

Yet much as she disputed the fact, it was time to admit that books were not real life. She'd managed to hold reality at bay for the best part of thirty years, but now it was approaching at an incredibly speedy rate, and she was absolutely going to have to do something—anything—about it. That was what Surinder had said when Nina had asked her what she honestly thought about the van idea. “Just do something. You might make a mistake, then you can fix it. But if you do nothing, you can't fix anything. And your life might turn out to be full of regrets.”

Suddenly that seemed to make sense. Suddenly everything she'd thought on the way up—I can't do this, I'm not assertive
enough, I couldn't possibly run my own business, I won't be any good at it, I can't drive that van, I can't make this happen, I have to hold on to my safe job—sounded feeble and pathetic.

Here, looking down on the valley, at the tiny villages full of people getting on with their own lives in their own way, unbothered by trends, or fashions, or the pace of the city, or some kind of odd concept of getting ahead, Nina had the oddest sense of things she had ever experienced. She'd been raised in a city, educated in a city, had worked and lived in that world. Yet somehow, deep within herself, she felt that she had come home.

A cloud passed over the sun, and Nina shivered. It turned cold quickly here, and she headed back down the hill toward the pub, lost in thought. The two old men who'd been there yesterday were propped up against the bar again. One of them was holding her book and looked to be deeply into it already.

“Are you enjoying that?” she asked with a smile. It was an Arctic thriller, set at the very ends of the earth, just one man against the elements, the polar bears, and a mysterious presence beyond the ice.

The man glanced up guiltily. “Oh, sorry, lass,” he said. “I just picked it up to have a look at it and . . . I don't know. It kind of sucked me in.”

“It's great,” said Nina, adding, “I'll leave it for you after I'm done with it, if you like.”

“Oh no, no, lass, don't be silly, big expensive book like this . . .” His watery eyes looked sad suddenly. “We used to have a library and a bookshop, you know. Both gone now.”

His friend nodded. “Used to be a nice wee trip out, that, if you wanted to go to the big library. Get the bus. Go choose a book. Have a cup of tea.”

The men looked at each other.

“Ah well, you know, things change, Hugh.”

“They do, Edwin. They do.”

The double doors of the old pub creaked open and Wullie stood there, squinting in the darkness of the bar. He glanced over to where Nina was standing, then looked around, just in case there was anyone else there he hadn't noticed the first time, putting off the moment when he was actually going to have to interact with her. Eventually his eyes came back to settle on her, and his face took on a look of disappointment.

“Hi, Wullie,” said Alasdair, already setting a foaming pint of brown ale on top of the counter. “How's it going this morning?”

Wullie looked downcast as he headed toward the bar to sit down.

“Aye so . . . ,” he began.

“The young lady's ready for her test drive!” announced the landlord cheerily. “She's only a little thing, but . . .”

“Aye so,” Wullie said again. The room fell silent. “Aw,” said Wullie finally, taking off a very battered-looking hat. “Only this time I really thought I'd sold her, I swear to God.”

“Um, hello?” said Nina, stepping forward. “I'm Nina, remember? Here to look at your van?”

“Aye so,” said Wullie. “But it's a big van, ye ken?”

He took a long sip of his pint.

“I really thought we'd gotten it sold this time,” he repeated. He shook his head. “I don't understand why nobody wants it.”

“I might want it,” said Nina impatiently.

“It's not really a wee lassie's van,” said Wullie.

“Well, I'm not really a wee lassie, whatever that is,” said Nina. “I'm perfectly capable of driving that van, and I've come all this way to try it out.”

Edwin and Hugh were snickering now. Nina didn't think they'd had such a spectacle around the village in years.

“It's a big van,” said Wullie again.

Nina sighed in exasperation. “Can I have the keys, please? I did e-mail you about this.”

“Yes, but I had no idea you were a lassie.”

“My name is Nina.”

“Yeah, but that's a foreign name, isn't it? I mean, it could be—”

“Wullie,” said Alasdair, his normally twinkly face suddenly turning stern, “this lassie's come a long way to see your van. You've put it up for sale. I don't see what the problem is.”

“I don't want her crashing it is the problem,” said Wullie. “She dies and I have even more problems than I have now, which is a lot.”

“I'm not going to crash it!” said Nina.

“How many vans have you driven?”

“Well, not many, but—”

“What do you drive now?”

“A Mini Metro—”

Wullie harrumphed.

“Wullie, if you don't stop being rude to the lady, you're no' getting a pint.”

“Oh come on, man, I've been up for seven hours.”

The landlord held the beer up threateningly. Wullie scowled and rifled in his pockets, which were deep and many. Finally he took out a large set of keys and threw them on a nearby table.

“I'll need security,” he scowled.

Nina took out her passport. “Can I leave this with you?”

He frowned. “You don't actually need one of those to get into Scotland. Yet.”

The men at the bar cackled appreciatively.

Nina was desperate to throw her hands up in surrender—she hated conflict in any form—but she couldn't, wouldn't forget how she'd felt this morning. She would be as kick-ass as Katniss Everdeen, as uncompromising as Elizabeth Bennet, as brave as Hero. She told herself she only needed to drive it across the square, then she could leave. Turn around. Go home. Hope for the best at the library. Her bravado had been shaken by this man, but she wasn't entirely deterred.

She picked up the keys. “I'll be back shortly,” she said.

She stepped out of the pub and into the square. She felt wobbly inside. She was used to dealing with the occasional rowdy child, or people unhappy that she was charging them for late returns, but those weren't personal attacks. This was different; it was someone making a very clear point that she was annoying them.

The men had followed her outside the pub and she could feel their eyes on her—where were all the women around these parts? she wondered as she crossed the cobbles and moved over to the side street where the big white behemoth was parked. She paused for a moment and looked at its old-fashioned headlights.

“Listen, Van,” she said, “I don't really know what I'm doing here. But neither do you, right? You've been abandoned on this
street for years. You're lonely. So you help me and I'll help you, okay?”

She unlocked the door, which was a start, at least.

The next thing was getting into the cab. There were a couple of steps, but even they were high. She pulled her skirt above her knees and hoisted herself up. It wasn't graceful, but it was effective. She wobbled a little opening the door and thought for a second she was going to fall off the step, but she didn't, and in a moment she was sitting in a big cracked leather seat patched with duct tape.

The inside of the cab smelled—not unpleasantly—of faded straw and distant grass. Nina turned around. It seemed huge to her, but she reminded herself yet again that it wasn't a truck. She didn't need a heavy-vehicle license; anyone could drive this thing. People did it all the time.

It felt a lot like a bus, though. And it was parked in such a very narrow street, the little stone cottages on either side of her almost touching the vehicle.

She swallowed, then turned back again and inspected the controls. It looked like a normal car, except everything was much farther away. She fumbled under the seat for the release, and moved a little closer to the huge steering wheel. The gearshift too was massive and unwieldy. There wasn't a rearview mirror, and the side mirrors just scared her sick.