I sat nursing a pint of Guinness in the same pub as the day before and the day before that. I even had my preferred stool at the bar, tucked away in the corner. ‘Tainted Love’ played in the background, and I tapped the beat with the tip of my shoe against the wood of the bar.
Sometimes I feel I’ve got to – TAP TAP – run away, I’ve got to – TAP
TAP.
I was reading over my notes from the day before:
In the course of your life, you’ll spend six months looking for missing objects. An insurance company did a survey once that suggested the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, meaning that by the time we turn sixty, we’ll have lost up to 200,000 things. When it comes to books, how many paperbacks, manuscripts, handwritten drafts have been lost or forgotten throughout history? The number is infinite. How many forgotten libraries remain hidden, like the Dunhuang Library on the edge of the Gobi Desert, sealed up for a thousand years and discovered, quite by accident, by a Taoist monk who knocked down a wall whilst leaning against it and smoking his cigarette. Behind it, he found a mountain of ancient documents, piled almost ten feet high, containing scripts with
seventeen different languages. Who is to say what treasures are yet to be rediscovered, what lost things are waiting to be brought to light?
At least, that is what I reminded myself as I spent yet another night in the bed and breakfast I couldn’t afford, writing up notes in my journal about the bookshop that didn’t exist. Had it ever existed? All I had was a letter from one of the world’s most successful rare book collectors to its owner, a Miss Opaline Gray, discussing a lost manuscript. And where had I come across such an unusual piece of correspondence? In the only room in the world where possibility became reality – an auction room. I had spent years looking for the one, the big discovery that would make my name in the world of rare books, and this was the closest I had ever come.
I should’ve been on a flight back to the UK days ago. I took another mouthful of ‘the black stuff’, as the locals called it. Motivation comes in all shapes and sizes and my motivation for staying in Ireland was to avoid looking like a complete failure. That was what everyone expected – including me. If no one takes you seriously, how can you ever hope to do so yourself? I blamed my father and had no qualms about it. My very first memory of him was one of betrayal. He’d told me to stand up and ‘perform’ with my new toy microphone. It must have been Christmas and he had some of his mates over. I sang some songs, who knows what, but all I remembered was his laughter – the way it almost resembled a wolf snarling when he was really drunk. The others joined in and my cheeks burned so much I hardly noticed the hot liquid running down my legs.
‘He’s pissed himself!’ my father wheezed, falling off the chair with amusement.
I can’t recall what happened after that. My mother must have come and rescued me. But from that point on I was always tagged with the reputation of being a cry-baby; too sensitive. It didn’t help that my sister Lucinda
came out of the womb with her fists ready for a fight. He respected her. In fact, we were all slightly intimidated by her. And so my position as the runt of the litter was firmly established.
Until I found that Rosenbach letter.
Suddenly, I became a man of destiny, as though all of those years missing out on vital stores of vitamin D by ensconcing myself in libraries would finally be vindicated. I ended up spending so much time reading books in the library that everyone thought I worked there and eventually, I thought so too. It reached quite remarkable levels of self-delusion when I began telling the other staff how to perform their duties. When my mother found out she was furious.
‘All that money I spent on your fees! You haven’t even sat one exam, Henry!’
Yes, but I had used the money to attend courses at the London Rare Books School, so it wasn’t all for nothing. I had a trade, even if no one else saw the extreme love of old books as a trade.
Still, I had never actually followed a lead like this … I was hardly Indiana Jones. Lucinda once told me I was about as adventurous as a bucket. Well, who was the bucket now, eh? I laughed, the drink clearly going to my head. I’d spent weeks at Ha’penny Lane looking for any sort of clue, some sign that the bookshop had existed once. A dark shadow like the kind left behind on the carpet when you move the sofa. But I had come up empty-handed.
Until the girl.
Where had she come from? She had stared at me with the most piercing blue eyes I’d ever seen. I stared back. She looked angry. No; she looked afraid, I realised. She had the palest skin, but her round cheeks had a pinkish glow. She failed to conceal a nasty-looking black eye under a long bleached fringe. The whole effect was like that of an angel fallen on hard times. I had wanted to keep on talking to her, but what could I say? Have
you seen a missing bookshop? Is it possible that your house has consumed it? Are you free for dinner? When she slammed the window and turned away, still clutching her jumper over her chest, I could see a vast tattoo all over her back. Not a design as such, but lines and lines of tiny script, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
We had only spoken for a matter of moments, but I was certain that she was the most intriguing woman I’d ever met. Annoyingly however, she stayed true to the pattern of most women who met me and took an instant dislike to me. Still, maybe she knew something about the bookshop, so I would have to dig deep and find any modicum of charm to get her on side.
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Two hours later I found myself back at the B&B, standing in a narrow hallway made narrower still by the claustrophobic wallpaper and the framed portraits of at least five popes. Orange flowers seemed to leer out at me and the swirling brown carpet offered no respite.
‘Are ya back for your tea, love?’
Nora had the look of Hilda Ogden but with the thickest Dublin accent I’d ever heard. She was the kind of person who’d seen it all. Standing with one arm folded and a cigarette held in a limp hand, she looked as though nothing would surprise her. I envied people like that. If there was a nuclear explosion right now with bricks and mortar falling around our ears, Nora would probably still be stood there with her cigarette, rollers in her hair, wondering who’d made that racket and then getting on with frying some eggs for tea.
‘No thanks, Nora. I ate pie and chips at the pub.’
I had never met anyone so concerned with my diet and most of our conversations ended with anxiety over my weight – there generally being not enough of it for her liking.
‘Oh good, that’ll stick to your ribs.’ She nodded approvingly. ‘And you’ll have the full Irish in the morning,’ she told me, in no uncertain terms. I nodded politely and began heading up the stairs to my room with the frilly curtains and shiny bedspread, but despite the decor, the house had felt immediately like home. Not my home, of course. But the concept of being at home. Perhaps it was Nora’s way of making you feel as though she’d known you for years. As though you were part of the family, which, from what I could tell, consisted of three Jack Russells and a husband called
Barry who remained safely out of sight.
‘He lives in that shed,’ she’d said, as she showed me the shared bathroom on my first night, replete with an avocado suite. The sound of a hammer hitting wood had echoed up from the backyard. ‘If I could just get him to sleep out there,’ she had said, with an indulgent sigh.
‘There’s a letter for you by the way,’ she said now, fishing it out of a pocket in the front of her apron. ‘From the council. Looks official. I didn’t read it,’ she added hastily, confirming that she had.
