Overdue

  “He’s called Wentworth. They told me he was a Maine Coon … but I’m not so sure. I don’t think they get this big.”

  “He is really big.” The girl’s eyes widened as Wentworth heaved his furry bulk up from the top of the bookshelf, perhaps fearing the cat would decide she was lunch. Instead he flomped back down a few feet from his original position, following the patch of sun that had slid off him during his snooze. “I mean really really!” She had the refined strain of the local accent, Edinburgh brogue lifted straight from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

  “Every bookshop needs a cat. At least that’s what I think.” Marie managed to stop herself adding ‘and customers’. Despite Wentworth being the sole feline in Blackponds, the shop often had more cats than customers, and in fact Marie couldn’t remember a single occasion when the number of customers perusing the shelves had threatened double digits. Recently she’d not even had double digits through the doors for whole days at a time.

  The young woman nodded. “I agree. Bookshops need cats.” She looked as if she wanted to stroke Wentworth but lacked the courage. The cat might even outweigh her, a slight thing in her twenties, the same sort of age Marie had been when she helped open the shop ten years earlier.

  The girl offered Marie a tentative smile and advanced on the shelves, almost swallowed by the raincoat that hid her painful thinness.

  “Don’t get lost,” Marie called after her good humouredly. “It gets a bit complicated back there.”

  The girl waved as she vanished behind the Mysteries, offering a last glimpse of overlarge eyes, high cheekbones, and a fall of flame-red hair.

  ***

  “He’s Wobwellington, Third Duke of Catborough,” Cole said. “I call him ‘his grace’. The man said he was a Cornealian Mountain Cat, but I’ve not been able to find anything about them, not even in the cat aisle.”

  “You have a cat aisle?” The little boy stared at Cole, round-eyed.

  “Well, his grace would say they’re all cat aisles.” Cole smiled. “But yes, we do have some books on cats in the non-fiction section, under Natural History.”

  The boy’s face fell a little. He retreated from the doorway into the sunlight and bustle of the street. He wiped his nose on his wrist and sniffed. “Thanks Mister! I got to go.”

  “Any time.” Cole watched him go, silently berating himself for not saying ‘we have children’s books too – tell your friends – tell your parents – tell anyone’. He wasn’t that desperate. Not yet. Riverocks’ most recent incarnation had only opened its doors the month before. Word of mouth took time to spread. Even in a smaller city like Tirrifon. Though if he’d sold a book for everyone who had come into ask about his grace after seeing the cat stretched out in the display window then he’d be thinking of opening a second branch by this point.

  The door closed gently, muting the clatter of the street to something that slipped beneath the quiet patience of books waiting to be read. His grace came over to the counter and coiled himself to make a fur puddle around Cole’s ankles. A third sound introduced itself, adding to the softened clamour of wheels on cobbles and the expectant hum of five thousand covers, each promising enlightenment or adventure. The call of the blank page was, Cole thought, not unlike the cries of the gulls down by the docks where the tall ships rested at anchor, their sails billowing with potential. A gull’s cry lent itself to all manner of interpretation, a warning, an invitation, despair, longing. One thing to the departing ship, another to the crew returning to safe harbour after weeks on the desert of the ocean. A gull’s cry could break your heart or strip away forty years in a single stroke of white wings.

  With a sigh Cole lifted his manuscript from beneath the counter. One upside from Riverocks’ slow start in the business of selling books was that he’d had time to write a considerable chunk of his own.

  Page 100. The whiteness of the sheet like freshly fallen snow, and his quill, poised above the pristine expanse. He dipped it, rising from the ink pot black-bellied, pregnant with possibility, the glistening drop swelling from its point, fat like the sails of those ships held beneath the gulls’ cries. Cole cleared the nib and began to write. He always felt himself the despoiler, scratching away at the empty page with his crabbed script, trying to anchor more to the paper than mere words, something greater than the whole. Later he would copy it out in his precise copperplate but for now it was a battleground, prone to sudden crossings out, to long lines snaking from here to there, seeking to pull thoughts and emotions together from the alphabet’s wreckage.

  For day after day Cole had tried to pour himself into the story, as if the ink were his blood and he might by force of will press the ineffable – the complexity that even in the shadows of his thoughts would not allow words to frame it – into the book. And every night, pushing the growing stack of papers into its drawer, part of him would cringe to think what any reader might make of his efforts. A toddler may paint with passion and heart … and still what lies on the board in thick, primary colours remains a stick person of uncertain gender and purpose.

  “Ouch!” Cole looked down from blotting his last line. “Did you just bite my leg?”

  Unapologetic eyes looked up from a furry face. His grace licked one long canine, studied the calf in question as if considering a second bite … then lay back down to sleep.

  ***

  “What’s he called, Mr Worth?”

  “Wobble. Or at least that’s what I call him. I think I’m not the only one who feeds him.” Nicholas considered the sleeping beast stretched out among the dusty books that still needed sorting onto shelves. Miss Pency seemed content to join him in his contemplation of the cat. The bell on the door had announced her arrival, and she introduced herself as an old newcomer. She promised to call into the Bee & Den at least once a week, which was probably as often as her old legs could manage the hill from the cottage she’d rented down by Hilbert’s farm on the outskirts of the little town.

  “He looks like he’s being fed by several people. Or perhaps has eaten several people…” Miss Pency tutted. “Such a beautiful boy though. Is he part lynx?”

  “A mountain cat. I’ve been adopted by several over the years. All the same sort of tabby beast. I seem to attract them…” Nicholas didn’t discount the old woman’s opinion. The cat might seek his meals elsewhere too, but Wobble very rarely left the shop. Most of the time he just vanished into the back, deep among the shelves, sometimes evading detection for days at a time. “And what brought you out to Lounton, Miss Pency? Not to town today, I mean. To this part of the world?”

  The old lady shrugged. It made her look younger than her years and Worth scolded himself for thinking of her as old. She was probably only 15 years his senior, if that. Or perhaps he should call them both old. He felt old these days, brittle driftwood abandoned on Lounton’s distant shores, washed clean of dreams, hopes, and ambition.

  “I guess I…” She paused as if considering how honest she wanted to be. “Blown here by the wind, Mr Worth. I was the baby of the family and they’ve all gone and died on me. I needed a change of scene. What’s your story? There can’t be enough people in this town to buy more than three books a week.” She smiled, a mischievous gleam amid the wrinkles, but not unkind.

  “Call me Nicholas. I always felt too young to be ‘Mr Worth’, and then suddenly I felt too old to bother with formality. There wasn’t even a day in between when I was happy with it.” Nicholas realised he was stalling, trying to decide whether to be polite or to be truthful. He opted for the middle ground. “I came here to lick my wounds and ended up falling in love with the place. And selling three books would be a good week. I’m afraid if I’m honest this is just something to occupy my time – a sort of retirement. I’ve always loved books. I’ve been a librarian, run several failed bookshops…”

  “Did you ever try writing one?” Miss Pency took an old tome from a nearby shelf, its cover blank with age, the leather binding rough with hard use. One of a set from the Ravensbridge Estate.

  “I …” Nicholas shook his head. He came to lick his wounds, not to open old ones. “I never did.”

  ***

  “Make sure you talk to her when she comes back.”

  “She probably won’t come back,” Marie looked out through the shop window. By craning her neck she could glimpse Bridge Road where Edinburgh shoppers flowed both ways in a never-ending tide of colour. The girl with her crystal cut accent and sheath of flame-red hair had vanished out of the shop into their number. Although all it took to reach Blackponds Emporium of Fine Books was a left or right turn, very few ever took that corner and entered Marie’s little backwater. It was like that extra click on the internet that proves just too much effort for so many. The girl was gone. History. Not even that.

  “She’ll be back,” Sarah said. “She was looking for something and she found it.”

  “She didn’t buy anything.” Marie shook her head. Her sister was an idiot sometimes … though what did that make Marie? She shook her head again. She was the sensible twin. Sarah the idiot.

  “She was very pretty,” Sarah said innocently.

  “She’s a child.” Marie snorted.

  Sarah folded her arms. “Twenty-three if she’s a day.”

  “All the boys will be after her then.” Marie went to start straightening books as she always did when flustered.

  “I’m sure she’s had
all she wants of them. This isn’t a Jane Austen novel. We’re not in the 1810s.” Sarah came to watch the book straightening. “And I know she’ll be back. So next time ask her name at least. And then–”

  “As if I would take your advice on dating.” Marie sniffed. “You’re not even here.”

  “Am so.”

  “You’re dead.” Marie wanted to add, ‘You idiot.’ She wanted to get angry. She wanted to shout. But she’d done all that and Sarah was still dead.

  “If I’m dead then how come Wentworth can see me?” Sarah pointed at the cat who had left his spot and come to sit nearby, watching them.

  “He’s not very clever. He’s staring at dust motes.”

  Sarah sighed and looked at Marie as if waiting for more.

  “You’re not to mention that girl again,” Marie said. “I don’t need a friend. I certainly don’t need a girlfriend–”

  “How would you even know? It’s not like you ever–”

  “Don’t speak about her again.” Marie was aware that this was not how twins were supposed to end each other’s sentences. Another straw for the haystack of her guilt. “Not another word.”

  With an excess of theatricality Sarah mimed zipping her lips shut, locking them then tossing away the imaginary key. Wentworth chased the figment of the dead girl’s imagination into the aisles.

  The street door opened, not the girl returning, but customers even so. Two Americans still wrapped in a conversation about the castle. And behind them, hunched against the cold swirl of wind that followed them in, a thin man in a black raincoat. Marie found herself staring then shook herself, leaving the books to return to the till. The man was an albino … could you call them that anymore? Marie wasn’t sure. The man suffered from albinism. That sounded safer… Suffered, or just had? The man was a person with albinism. She looked up and startled, knocking her pens onto the floor. He’d come right up to the till without her noticing his advance and was now looking her in the face as if the whole of her embarrassing internalised conversation about his condition was written there in red ink.

  Marie, remembering herself, opened her mouth to ask how she could help but without warning, and causing a cry of alarm from one of the American ladies, Wentworth sprang from the nearest bookshelf to land on the counter with a distinct thud. Marie’s surprise sent her coffee mug tumbling to join the pens. It was the most athletic thing she’d seen the cat do since she’d inherited him with the premises, on behalf of Blackponds Ltd, a decade earlier. Mostly he moved as if he were underwater, exploring the deep places of the world in a heavy pressure suit.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t–” She tried to stop the man as he reached absently to fondle the cat’s head. “He … bites…”

  But, as the white hand vanished into the thickness of his fluff, Wentworth only pushed himself against it. At first Marie thought that the vibration, so deep it made the air throb, was caused by some sort of engine that had started up in the street, machinery for roadworks perhaps. “Oh. He purrs?”

  “You didn’t know?” Sarah leaned in beside her grinning. “He purrs for me all the time. You just have to know where to scratch him.”

  Marie bit her tongue and avoided rebuking her sister in front of a stranger for the obvious lie.

  “Hello, Wentworth.” The man fussed the cat. He nodded, seemingly in Sarah’s direction – which was of course ridiculous. “Behind the ear. That’s where he likes it most.”

  “Exactly,” Sarah said. “This one knows his cats.”

  “I know this cat,” the man said. He had no accent whatsoever, which seemed an impossible thing but also true.

  “I scratch him behind the ear all the time!” Marie protested, stepping in front of Sarah to try to reclaim the conversation. “He’s never purred once, not in all these years.”

  The man turned his pink eyes on Marie. “Stroking a cat is a two-way process. He’s not going to purr unless you’re both happy. That would be rude.”

  Marie felt herself go still, her cheekbones prickling with pins and needles, and her concentration suddenly consumed by an unexpected battle not to release the sob that wanted to move her ribs and escape.

  Sarah’s hand came to rest on her shoulder, allowing the pressure to leak away. Marie sucked in a breath. “How… How can I help you, sir?” She tried to guess his age and found she had no idea. He hadn’t any wrinkles and his white hair lay as thick as a young man’s, but on the other hand he reminded her strongly of her late grandfather … both of them in fact. Not in appearance so much as in his deliberate and cautious movement and just a general … grandfatherliness…

  A kind smile took possession of the man’s colourless lips. “My apologies. My name is Yute. I’m on a quest.”

  “A quest, Mr Yute?” Why did the nice ones always have to be strange with it. She hoped this one wasn’t going to be like the young man last month who refused to leave and kept talking about sabbers waiting for him in the street. Marie fixed her own smile in place and looked past the man, hoping to catch the eye of one of the Americans and to somehow convince them not to leave her alone with him. “W-what’s the quest for?”

  “Well, if I knew that it wouldn’t be much of a quest, now would it?” He turned away, scanning the shelves. “A friend asked me to meet him here.” He gave Wentworth’s ear one final scratch. “But I’m not sure why. May I look around?”

  Marie opened her mouth, not knowing how to answer. Sarah nudged her. “Of course…” She almost added her ‘don’t get lost, it gets complicated back there’ joke, but somehow this Yute didn’t look like a man who would ever lose his way in such a place.

  “Thank you.” He paused. Hesitant. And when he spoke he was cautious, kind, certain in himself and yet a thousand miles from preaching. “What you do here matters. Never think it doesn’t.” And with that he was off, a swirl of raincoat, the black of his collar shocking against the whiteness of his neck. He walked briskly into the aisles with Wentworth trailing after him as if there were a cat treat in each of his footprints.

  “Well…” Even Sarah sounded taken aback. “He was…”

  “Unusual,” Marie finished for her.

  ***

  Cole’s father had ignored his wife and his many children in order to make a great deal of money by floating on financial seas and following the winds of opportunity. When a heart attack had sunk his father along with his career, Cole had spent his portion of those funds buying the bookshop he had for so long imagined and populated it according to his own tastes. The architecture had been inspired by a childhood dream of a library so vast that you could walk for days between towering shelves and never see the same book twice in all those miles.

  Of course, even a banker’s wealth has limitations and dreams pass into the waking world through the keyhole of compromise. Even so, customers did occasionally report getting lost within the labyrinthian aisles at the rear of Riverocks.

  Cole’s father had, Cole thought, seen money as a way of keeping score, and life as a competition that needed to be won in some demonstrable manner. Cole had no interest in competition, and if he were to keep score it would not be with the number of zeros after a digit in some bank ledger’s bottom line.

  Unfortunately, a degree of interest in competition and in the business of bookkeeping proved to be a necessity when it came to not just keeping books but selling them in quantity too. The dream shop had to be sold, and the remaining funds were used to purchase an existing store on one of the lesser highstreets of Tirrifon. The dream, however, was not sold. Rather, as dreams so often do, it became something else.

  Cole still loved to sell books, although in simply numerical terms he wasn’t much better at it than he had been at the start. Now though, his dream was to write books as well. One in particular. The first of what would likely be a flood.

  “Good afternoon!” Cole nodded to the man who’d come in from the blaze of sunshine outside and now stood, perhaps letting his eyes adjust or simply soaking up the comparative coolness. Cole laid down his quill, feeling it was rude to write whilst a customer might have need of him.

  “Indeed.” The man lowered his hood, an oddity that Cole had not noticed until he came forward and resolved from mere silhouette to full formed human. The quite marvellous whiteness of the man caused Cole to blink but he pressed his lips together against any personal remark and instead waited with what he hoped was polite attention for the customer to state his business.