The Whole Story and Other Stories Read Free Page A

Gatsby at once, and to such a smiling young man. She replaced the one which had been in the window with a copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy and as she was doing so she fanned open the pages of the book. Dust flew off. She blew more dust off the top of the pages then wiped it off her counter. She looked at the book dust smudged on her hand. It was time to dust all the books, shake them all open. It would take her well into the spring. Fiction, then non-fiction, then all the sub-categories. Her heart was light. That evening she began, at the letter A.
    The woman who lived by a cemetery, remember, back at the very beginning? She looked out of her window and she saw – ah, but that’s another story.
    And lastly, what about the first, the man we began with, the man dwelt by a churchyard?
    He lived a long and happy and sad and very eventful life, for years and years and years, before he died.

gothic
    This actually happened to me.
    It was an afternoon in spring not long ago, in the mid 1990s. A man came into the bookshop where I was working. He looked like a bank clerk or an accountant or some kind of businessman; he had distinguished looking hair and was wearing a suit and tie. I straightened my shoulders. I was already in trouble at work and didn’t want to get into any more trouble. He looked like he might be important.
    I worked in a more old-fashioned bookshop at that time; what I was in trouble for was not wearing the right kinds of clothes. Shortly before the day I’m talking about I had gone to work wearing a sweatshirt with a designer slogan on it. It said across my back IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FILLED WITH JOY. The sweatshirt had caused a major staff commotion and I had been called to the boss’s office and given a dressing down (as it were), a row about always wearing trousers instead of a skirt and thirty pounds’ unprecedented allowance to go and buy some proper blouses. There was a lot of anger in the staffroom about me getting money for clothes. The old members of staff, who smoked a lot, thought it was outrageous, though they already thought I was outrageous anyway for not wearing the right kinds of clothes, and the young members of staff, sitting resentful in the veil of thick cigarette smoke, thought that it was unfair and that they should get a blouse allowance too.
    I was wearing one of the proper blouses the day I’m talking about. They both itched and I disliked the cowed, dulled person I felt I’d been made to become by wearing them. But I smiled at the man who’d come in. He was nothing like the man standing over there, behind him, at the shelf where The Chronicle of the Twentieth Century was kept.
    The Chronicle of the Twentieth Century, until a couple of weeks before, had always been out with its pages open somewhere in the middle of the century on the lectern specially supplied to the shop by its publisher. Three of us worked on the ground floor and we had decided to remove the lectern because every day this man came in, took out his wet handkerchief and hung it over the back of the lectern while he read the Chronicle. Every day the same; he would come in, he would hang it up, read for hours then finger it to see how dry it was, fold it up, put it in his coat pocket and leave the shop.
    We were always getting people acting weird in that shop. It had been a bookshop for hundreds of years, in the same old building full of hidden corners, sudden staircases, unexpected rooms. People had died in that bookshop. Old members of staff were always talking, huskily through the breathed-out smoke in the staffroom, about the day one of them found the lady lying dead among her shopping bags, her legs sticking straight out, her coat askew and a look of surprise on her face, or the day another of them found the man sitting on one of the windowsills on the third-floor stairwell staring straight ahead, dead.
    We had a man who used to steal books, bring them back again after reading them,