Shelf-space

This is a tragedy, but I’ll try to keep it light. I got a job. Not a tragedy in itself, but we will get to that. The job was in the north. The far north. Beyond the far north. The isles beyond the northern most tip of the mainland. I really just wanted out of the city so had been applying for jobs in the western islands, the highlands and, yes, the northern isles, and this was the only success. I was sure it said in the advert that relocation expenses would be met, so it was a real pain when they told me that there was no cash for someone to move to a job as lowly as the one I was taking. They didn’t put it like that, obviously. So, if you were rolling in money and taking a job up there where you might be rolling in even more money; they would pay your expenses. If you didn’t have two pennies to rub together, well, tough, pay your own way. The theory was that they should hire locally for the kind of job I’d be doing, but, then, if they could’ve, they would’ve. I mean that since they had been unable to get someone local, then they should have been willing to help me out with the move. That’s fair isn’t it? Not that I had much. Living in a rented, furnished flat, I wasn’t moving beds, Welsh dressers or ottomans or dining tables with six matching chairs. No absurdly large sofas, no big bits of technology. Sounds a little Spartan. I even had the landlady remove a two-seater sofa because it was more than I needed, she replaced with an armchair. A pink armchair.
The only real possessions I had were books. The hall was full, the living room and bedroom pretty much full too. I did have some other stuff: small television, CD player, bits and bobs. But books were the main thing. So I called up a movers and asked them how much to shift my stuff and nearly dropped the phone. What, are they using Rolls-Royces to shift people’s possessions? Porsche pantechnicons?
No way could I afford that. I don’t drive and didn’t know anyone who could hire a van and would put that much effort into driving all that way as a favour, even a paid favour, to me. Maybe should have socialized more instead of having my head stuck in a book all the time. But then I wouldn’t need someone to help me move all these books.
There were a few second-hand bookshops not far from the flat. I’d occasionally had to sell the odd book now and then when flat broke, though other times I made myself flat broke spending my last few pounds on a book. But this was going to be wholesale slaughter. Retail slaughter.
I thought that I could save the poetry, those slim volumes , you can get a lot of them in a suitcase. But the fiction would suffer a fate worse than verse.
I decided that I would sell all the books at one shop. It was bad enough having to sell them without hawking them around several places. It is a cruel and harsh world where a simple working man can’t even keep his books. I could just imagine a passer-by deriding the guy with the bag of books…’what good did they ever do you? Your head is full of tales and your pockets full of nothing‘. Ah, the old ‘do not read poems; read timetables’ line. Well they trashed the public transport systems anyway, a timetable now might as well have been written by Lear for all its realism, Edmund I mean, not King…I’d get an arm about his neck in a half-kidding, half-serious half-nelson and tell him that these books had changed who I was, had played their part in making me who I am, what I am…’yeah’, he’d say, ‘ someone who can’t afford to keep his books.’ I’d gracefully pick up the bag of books and go on my way, maybe quoting something appropriate under my breath. Remember to look something up that I can memorise easily.
I chose the likeliest shop, the one that sold the kind of thing I was selling. I filled a bag and made the first trip. It didn’t help that this shop was run by the glummest bunch you could meet. It always seemed strange to me, twenty years or so I’d been coming here and it was the same three or so people running it. How could a small second-hand bookshop provide a living for these three? And miserable like a wet afternoon on early-closing day in Dunoon. Do they still have early-closing days? Is there still a Dunoon?
On the way to the shop, I thought it was like the film the ‘March of the Penguins‘…the British with the Scotts, as usual, making up a large contingent, English and Irish, no Welsh, sorry, the French, including one very large miserable figure and half a dozen Parisian types who seemed to be marching in tight patent-leather shoes, a Knight of Spain, confused, the Russians, a mix of prince, pauper, radical and criminal, the Americans, some in trench-coats, some in jeans, even one with a wooden leg , and a couple of others with hats pulled low very camera-shy, you couldn’t see their faces at all, I think they liked it that way. There was non-fiction too. What an unpoetic term, I suppose that’s the idea. Most were reprints, histories of the second world war. I didn’t feel too bad about moving those along, after all, they were just about mass slaughter rather than the depths of souls. The war books went unbought, they weren’t interested in reprints. So they ended up in Oxfam, which was a bit ironic what with them being about aid for those countries we fight our wars in now so as to avoid destroying all our lovely European real estate, art galleries and all that. But the fiction they gobbled down. The staff usually hung around in a little sitting room area at the back of the shop, leather armchairs, standard lamp, there for staff only, none of this friendly nonsense of chain stores. I’d dump the bag and affect interest in the nearest shelves. Then, obviously, start seeing things I’d have to resist buying. Turn round and the rejects are at one side. I’d have taken this, he said, but the pages are loose. Damn, should’ve noticed that, glued it up. So The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution’, ends up Oxfambound. After a few selling trips over a week or two, the shop began to resemble my own flat before the clear-out began. I thought that maybe I could wander downstairs one day and hide somewhere, come out after closing and sit in one of those armchairs, read a few pages each of those books that were once mine. But with my luck, I would stumble into a sub-basement that would be part of a salt-mine. I’d be forced to work there with only the thought of the great novel I would write about my experience if I ever got free. I think salt-mines came to mind because the staff always seemed a bunch of old Stalinist types, the last leaves on a withered tree, who had set up the shop with the last monies in the kitty, before throwing in the towel against steroid suffused capitalism. The fat cats won out; they’d bought the judges.
At this point a sister or two…actual sisters, not like dames out of Hammett or Chandler, started saying that they would have stored books in their attics, but them broads! they waited until the books were gone before making the offer. Now the flat seemed twice as large and far smaller at the same time.
So now I’m far away in a practically bookshop-free town. I have one bookcase. One! there is a suitcase of books at dad’s which is divesting its contents on each visit, and purchases are slowly beginning to repopulate the shelves. Next time I might just rob a bank to keep the books with me.
This happened a year or so ago. They’ll all be gone now, the books I sold, they will have flown off the shelves like racing pigeons from coops at the start of the race. I should be glad, I suppose, that people are discovering some of those writers now, those novels, individual pages, single lines that change your life forever.