SECOND HAND BOOK POLLUTION
The bookshop is a city full of people whose faces you will never see; the cracked whisper of the barbed wire lover searching for anything connected with his pet subject.
“I’m sorry sir, we did have a copy of ‘The History of Barbed Wire’ but a gentleman came in and bought it just last week.”
The collector must trudge home and tend to his wounds.
A second hand bookshop is not a fiction but rather a polluted version of a writer’s intentions. You may come across an old friend unseen in twenty years or a lover you wish you had taken but didn’t get round to. There she is, left on the shelf, full of character, a bit rough around the edges, coffee stained, weather beaten, looks like she’s slept out all night in the park but is all the better for it. Now she’s going to tell her story, strangers make their way into other people’s books; each page is a nuisance neighbour that won’t let up. The copyright remains with the author but the story is no longer owned. Take Garrison Keillor for instance. In ‘Lake Wobegon Days’, he was writing about life in small-town Minnesota. A copy was plucked off an Edinburgh bookshelf some twenty years later. The book draws the Edinburgh man, not to Minnesota, the writer’s intended target, but to the Koala enclosure at a wildlife park in Sydney, Australia. A reader’s bookmark has hijacked the work. There’s potential for romance here. It is 9.50 am and crowds are gathering outside the enclosure. Edinburgh man has joined the queue and is gazing at the long flamingo legs of the woman in front of him. Her name is Rachel and she is film-starringly beautiful. She is carrying a young girl.
“Auntie Rachel, when are we going to see the koalas?”
Edinburgh man knows that the gates will open any second as it says so on the entry form Rachel slips into her book as she walks into the wildlife park. A copy of ‘Lake Wobegone Days’.
Edinburgh Man can write his own version of events. If his imagination needs a prompt then the bookmark provides it. That’s why he spends so much time walking between towers of second hand books. He searches for more material about his new favourite destination, Australia. He scans the nature section but finds nothing on koalas and their habitat. He takes down, ‘Flying Visits’ by Clive James. A train ticket is lodged in pages 26-27, in a chapter called ‘Postcard from Sydney 2’. Edinburgh Man is informed about drinking hours in a city, which ‘has transformed itself, so that it is as rare to see a drunk on the streets as it once was common’. He wonders whether opening hours have been extended or shortened. Are all the drunks holed up in bars? This interests Edinburgh Man as he has given up drinking and now lives other people’s lives behind mountains of second hand books.
He pulls up a chair in the drunk-free streets of Sydney and sits in the sun drinking cappuccino. He watches Rachel pass by again and drains the sugar from the bottom of his cup.
The shop will close soon. Boxes of cheap books are being taken in from the street. He hides behind a collection of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and begins reading from ‘Ulysses’. He stares into the grey cold Liffey but finds the day much too long. There’s a postcard of Mexico in a brief chapter entitled ‘In the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis’. Its former owner might have been an Irishwoman distracted by memories of Aztec Temples or a Mexican on the way to Dublin who didn’t want to prejudice his views with too much book pollution. Both are possibilities in the mind of the Edinburgh man. The owner, who he only vaguely knows, asks if he will mind the shop for five minutes before closing time. Edinburgh Man agrees and as she leaves he makes for the antiquarian section and finds his bag is swallowing expensive editions of Seneca, Plato, Walton, Dickens and Stevenson.
Edinburgh Man makes a hurried exit, pausing at the door to drag a scarf across his face so that his Hydean features go unnoticed, passing by the courts before disappearing among the shift work drinkers in the Grassmarket. He’s looking forward to the day when the gasman will come over. Last time they had a good chat about Nietzsche.
NOW THAT WE ARE LOVERS
Don’t get up, honey. Let me tell you a story about my college days. There was this guy who’s playing over here now for one of the top Spanish teams. Our school was well known for basketball. This guy was huge. Six foot ten and shoulders four feet wide. Well, we were at a party one night when I said to him, I saw you in the gym last week. He said, Oh yeah? He was so used to people fawning all over him that he thought I was gonna compliment him. I used to hang around with Benny and Jimmy. Benny was a little guy, only five foot nine but a real good player for his size. One day there was this match between fraternities. You don’t have fraternities in Europe, right? Well, in the US you kinda stick up for each other and Benny and I were in the same fraternity. This big guy dunked on Benny during a game. I dunno how much you know about basketball but it’s not the done thing to dunk on anybody. I said to him, I heard you dunked on Benny. I mean, I saw him do it right, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing I’d been watching. We used to have a few beers at the weekends and when I had a drink I could be a bit, well, I was a young guy, right? I’d had a few when I said, I heard you dunked on Benny. And he said, No. That’s what he said. No. I mean, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a liar. Then he said, Who the fuck is Benny? Can you believe it? I said, You know damn well who Benny is. He’s the guy you dunked on last week. Did Jimmy tell you this, the guy asked. You leave Jimmy outta this, I said. It’s got nothing to do with Jimmy. All the guys in the fraternity team know you dunked on Benny so it ain’t got nothing to do with Jimmy, right? He was fidgeting with his laces and wouldn’t look me in the eye. He was running his thumb round the rim of the bottle top like a cocksucker. And this not facing up to the facts was really getting to me. And then you know what? He got up and started to walk out of the room as if I was some piece of shit on the bottom of his sneaker. You’re gonna apologize to my friend Benny before you go, I said. I ain’t apologizing for nothing, he said. You’re the one who should be apologizing for bringing up this shit at a party. It’s the weekend and I just wanna chill out you son of a bitch... Oh oh. Nobody calls me that. No-body. You might as well know right now that nobody talks to me like that. I got up and hit him hard in the guts and as he doubled forward I let go with a right hook that Tyson in his heyday would’ve been proud of. Blood spurted everywhere. All over the sofa and the carpet. Shit, it was like a Tarantino movie. If you see this guy on TV today have a look at his nose. He’ll think twice before dunking on anybody, I can tell you. And he’s nothing more than a run of the mill player. Gee, I shouldn’t be telling you this but I don’t want any secrets now that we are lovers… Say, how about getting up and making me a nice cup of coffee now, honey?
