Tinderbox Page 10

  Warm like a live body. She stroked the mechanical hound. A robotic pet she could rely on. A husband, not so much.

  The librarian finished shelving and wheeled the empty trolley away. The wheels squeaked and I remembered other trollies, other books shelved.

  A chorus of drones blazed across the night sky. The pair turned and watched.

  The proboscis extended from inside the hound’s mouth.

  On the tip: a reading light switched on, then off.

  Word count: 27,418. I closed my laptop. The apple blanked. Just another reading platform.

  ‘There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches,’ Ray Bradbury said, in the afterword to the 1979 edition of Fahrenheit 451.

  I know what temperature books burn at. Half price.

  On 26 November 2009, I attended a conference call in the office. The senior managers and general managers of the remaining forty-five Borders UK stores were on the other end of the line. The CEO spoke. He told us that despite all our best efforts the chain had been placed into voluntary administration. MCR had been appointed as the company to handle the administration period and were now legally in control of all the chain’s assets, including the stores.

  The worst was happening.

  I put the phone down. I laughed.

  Each store was bequeathed a retail consultant, a representative of MCR. Our retail consultant, Gordon, arrived later that day carrying a plastic bag filled with sale signage. The drama. On the evening of the 27th of November 2009, it was announced that a closing down sale would commence in all stores on the following day. In the windows Borders staff erected the sale signs in glaring states of emergency.

  Gordon had a potbelly and a robust sense of humour. He was used to resentment; his attitude could best be described as resigned. He told me that I would be surprised by the value this experience would add to my CV.

  He was married and emitted a vague aroma of stifled sexual energy. Or perhaps that was me? He told me what to do, and I made the staff do it.

  The sale began. More signage arrived.

  The queue turned into a conga line of shoppers driven insane by bargains, bays, tables, gondolas strip searched, tills banging open and closed, Lady Gaga caught in a Bad Romance. A customer mentioned that the volume was inappropriate. I agreed.

  Shoppers offered their condolences. ‘So you’re all out of jobs? I’m sorry.’ Then bought stacks of books for under half price and watched their receipts like Scrooge McDuck. I had a loud argument with a young couple convinced they had been cheated out of 2p. I told them I didn’t give a fuck.

  The next customer waiting in the queue was children’s author Jacqueline Wilson. She was sorry.

  The timer went off.

  On Day 28 Sooty O’Donahue, the NaNoWriMo character bearing my porn-name, woke up inside a terrible farce. Eyes blinked open. The whiteness of space. Above her head a bank of florescent lights were on the fritz.

  She sat up. Concrete walls. Rows of industrial clad blue shelving.

  A poster of Touch Not the Cat.

  A voice over the tannoy said, ‘Dear customers, this store will close in ten minutes. If you do have any final purchases you’d like to to make please take them to the staff at the ground floor tills who will be happy to serve you.’

  A giant soft toy appeared at her side. He had a blue head shaped like a kidney bean and held a red blanket in his hand.

  ‘Where am I?’ Sooty asked.

  ‘The sort room,’ Iggle Piggle giggled.

  ‘I think I’ve lost the plot,’ Sooty said.

  ‘It’s time to sort it out,’ Iggle said.

  A door opened and Iggle walked through it, trailing his bed time blanket. Sooty followed. She noticed a few empty trolleys abandoned at one end of the coridor and a fire extinguisher attached to the wall. Above it was a map outlining the staff collection point incase of fire. Cartoon flames gushed from the square that represented Borders.

  They passed multiple swing doors. Sooty stopped and looked through a window at a cavernous packing centre, huge blue cranes patrolled the endless aisles and conveyerbelts carried a miscellaney of products past a row of automated assembly workers.

  Iggle motioned her forward. He zipped along pretty quickly for a creature who was essentially as big as a dwarf.

  They turned another corner. At the end was a large door marked Management Only. Sooty pressed her lanyard over the grey button. The door swung open and they both went through. Sooty peered down another corridor that stretched into the distance. ‘This place is bigger than I thought.’

  A voice over the tannoy announced, ‘All aboard the Ninky Nonk.’

  A train with a banana for an engine pulled up, Iggle and Sooty stepped into the carriage, the bells and klaxons sounded and off they went.

  At the first door along the corridor the Ninky Nonk pulled to a halt. A mechanical hound with eyes as big as teacups guarded the door. But Sooty didn’t drink tea. She prefered a Flat White, even if it was from Starbucks.

  The hound stood up. ‘I am the keeper of the key to the Medieval Library. Inside are many treasures: The Decamaeron, The Canterbury Tales, The Consolation of Philsophy. Including all the sales figures for the era.’

  Iggle said, ‘Doggie.’

  ‘Would you and your companion care for a reading? Perhaps Beowulf?’

  Sooty held out her hand. ‘Sorry, but I’m on the timer.’

  ‘What about a recital from The Diseases of Women?’

  As the Ninky Nonk sped off she heard him howling: ‘What were we war-danes in our yore days…’

  ‘He needs to get another job,’ Mildred said.

  Iggle laughed. ‘The Book of Job.’

  The mechanical hound at the second door had eyes as large as dinner plates. Not that people neccessairly ate off dinner plates. Sooty often ate off microwave trays because it saved on time, especially when she was on the night shift. Still, she recognised the dinner plate as a cultural artifact.

  The mechanical hound wore a white neck ruff and a quill behind one ear.

  ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ The hound stood on his hind legs, barked and ran around in a circle. His tail wagged.

  Shakespeare and Iggle seemed to hit it off. One was a genius who had stood the test of time. The other had a bit further to go.

  Shakespeare and Iggle compared their worldwide net worth, but Sooty was too discreet to possibly outline the frontrunner.

  They alighted the Ninky Nonk more and sped off along the corridor.

  They came to the third door and stepped off.

  The mechanical hound from Fahrenheit 451 stood up on his eight legs. His green eyes glowed. But he didn’t have a probiscus because it was too difficult to imagine what a hound with a probiscus would look like.

  ‘Everything’s got a bit messy,’ Sooty said. ‘There are so many different characters and stories colliding in this corridor I don’t know how to keep everything straight. I’m just glad that we finally managed to crowbar something from Hans Christian Andersen into the mix again, because frankly the reference to ‘The Tinderbox’ has really been bothering me.’

  ‘What’s behind this door,’ Sooty asked. ‘Extra margin?’

  The mechanical hound stepped aside.

  She opened it and discovered the staff toliet.

  The hound and Iggle waited outside.

  Sooty sat on the toilet and listened to the sound of her own pee.

  She sighed, there were so many books in the world. Too many. She reached for the loo paper and discovered the roll was empty. The company account was on stop again.

  At her feet sat a pile of old Jodi Picoult novels.

  Sooty tore the title page from My Sister’s Keeper.

  The voice over the tannoy said, ‘Borders on the verge of collapse.’

  ‘Borders had a whiff of the Friends generation about it,’ said Bookseller UK’s editor-in-chief Neill Denny. ‘It was very of its time and all
set up to sell cultural stuff like books, CDs and DVDs to hip young things. But the market changed around it – in the end the Friends left New York and moved to suburbs and were in fact the generation that was first to start shopping online.’

  I was galled to be implicated as a statistic of the Friends generation. Why? I knew Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross. I even knew the name of Ross’s pet monkey, Marcel. I’d watched Friends, but I was not one of them. The show didn’t reflect my education, economic situation or lifestyle. I didn’t take Friends literally.

  I worked at Borders because I thought it would help me become a better writer. Just by shelving Dan Brown I’d get better at keeping my reader glued to the page. I read the first pages of novels. I read the last pages. I looked at literary masterpieces as though they were runes that might cast my own fortune. By touching their spines I’d release my inner genius and write a classic in a fever, trancelike – it would be as easy as watching Friends. The characters would move through me like ghosts.

  In childhood my first stories were about demonic possession. As a teenager I tried science fiction, inspired by the cover art. I wrote about a dragon preparing to fly out of a cave. I didn’t know what the dragon would do next. In high school I finished a romance in the style of Sweet Valley High and kept it in a mauve ring binder. And in late 2002 The Borders of Love evaporated like the froth of a Starbucks cappuccino, before my job was swept away by the flood of online retail and – of course – the future.

  At the time Borders UK was unravelling Dad emailed me, ‘I’d love to get my hands on the BBC Don Cupitt program broadcast in the 1980s called Sea of Faith.’

  I ordered him a copy on Amazon.

  The sea of faith ebbs in and out.

  The title is a reference to a line in Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’. The SparkNotes website prompted students to read ‘Dover Beach’, asking why it was significant that Montag reads this poem to Mildred and her friends in Fahrenheit 451? Good question. I imagined the poem might just be something Brabury pulled from the shelves at the UCLA library. He probably shut his eyes, opened the page and put his finger down. Hey presto!

  Personally, I loved Arnold’s poem, especially the line about the sea of faith withdrawing. The poem described the withdrawal of religious faith but I had believed in the power of literature and the tide had gone out on that too.

  Perhaps, in hindsight, some Virgina Woolf might have struck more of a chord with Mildred and her friends? If Montag had been serious about converting the women to literature he could have tried harder to appeal to their sensibilities. What self-respecting modern woman doesn’t require A Room of One’s Own? I didn’t think it was so wrong to add a wall screen – or three – to Woolf’s original shopping list. Let’s face it, a woman needs something to put in a room of her own – and sometimes after writing it’s nice to flick through Netflix. Netflix doesn’t have The Hours of course, which is a shame because Nicole Kidman looks so intellectual playing Virgina Woolf in that prosthetic nose.

  According to IMBD Kidman loved wearing the prosthetic nose and wore it off screen and on. Woolf’s nose became an item of camoflauge for Nicole, a pyschic shield that protected her from the paparazzi’s damaging rays during her split from Tom Cruise. I knew just what Nicole was thinking as she pushed her feet into a pair of stilettos and exited the set of The Hours each day: let’s escape.

  I opened up my laptop. The first job I saw online was for the general manager of Borders Wellington. It was time to go home.

  I arrived only to discover that Borders down under was going under fast.

  ‘Do you have any maps of Wellington?’ a customer asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you realise we’re in Wellington?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The New Zealand Borders stores were owned by Redgroup Retail, a private company that also owned Angus and Robertson in Australia and Whitcoulls in New Zealand. Whitcoulls is the equivalent of WHSmith, a bookstore drained of all romance by florouscent lighting, children’s gifts and games. The word literature doesn’t belong shrink wrapped in the aisles amongst the greeting cards. If Ray Bradbury had walked into Whitcoulls he would turned around and walked out, with a Lotto ticket in his back pocket.

  In New Zealand the Borders instore café was called Gloria Jeans, another terrible Australian franchise. At least Starbucks was a Moby Dick reference. Gloria Jeans sounded like a character from Kath and Kim – one who enjoys a large glass of Khardonnay. The buying for the New Zealand Borders stores had also been centrally managed from the Australian head office. That explained why Borders Wellington had a stack of twenty-five hardbacks on keeping Australian houseplants: the joys of automated allocation.

  Still, there were benefits. I read Monkey Grip by Helen Garner and Candy by Luke Davies. The Aussies do junkie stories so well. The fiction bays were as gap-toothed as an addict’s rotting smile. I spent the next few months removing shelving. I checked the dates on the binc stickers of untranslated French and Italian novels. Dead wood. The poetry section in Wellington was skimpier than a g-string. Crime had shrunk to the usual suspects: Dan Brown’s latest.

  The 2010 Redroup Retail conference was held in a hotel outside Brisbane. The climate was humid. The ideas overripe; the company running a high temperature. A motivational speaker was brought in to do a workshop on positive thinking. The staff were asked to suspend their disbelief. Perhaps branching into gifts and homeware was the answer? A customer could pick up a copy of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Minute Meals and compliment it with Jamie Oliver’s cheeky coasters or a ‘Big Boy’ Barbeque.

  I remembered the David Brent lookalike from Borders UK and finally saw him for what he was: The Lost Symbol.

  In Brisbane the powers that be came up with the same answers to the same problems. RedgroupRetail thought the solutions to the problems of trying to run a large chain bookstore were stationary (high margin) an extended range of gifts and Kobo ereaders. (Elonex: RIP.) Kobo was an important investment in the company’s future, we were told. The mechanical hound strained on its leash. The CEO sprang on stage and introduced the concept of the company as a content provider. Not a bookstore.

  But the final straw was when the a bubbly blonde from the marketing department got up on her soap box and addressed the conference. She detailed the findings of a recent survey which revealed that Borders staff didn’t even like customers. They liked books.

  ‘Is the direction of the company clearer to you now?’ my boss asked.

  At Borders Wellington I found a small paperback called The Yellow Lighted Bookshop mishelved in fiction. The book was the true story of an American bookseller named Lewis Buzbee. Buzbee outlined the cycle of a bookstore so well. By the time the shelves begin to thin out, the store is already in a terminal state of decline. He wrote about how the employees of Silcon Valley, the winners of the dot-com boom, bought their computer books from the book shelves, but were also the first early adopters who migrated to shopping online.

  I thought of my own meagre beginnings tending Computers, Maths and Science at Borders Islington. The computers section had a small window that looked out over Sainsburys and a small sidestreet. On the night shift I sometimes stared out into the blackness. I admired the residue of faded stars above Sainsburys. On those long quiet nights I felt as though I was inside a black hole, shelving the cosmos. Light years away, I had slipped into another dimension, neither a writer, a bookseller or a content provider – just a person trying to find order in the strange deep abundance of the galaxy.

  I cried as I read The Yellow Lighted Bookshop. In the end it’s the truth we take to heart.

  On 17 February 2011, RedGroup Retail (including the Borders, Angus & Robertson as well as Whitcoulls chains) were placed into voluntary administration. All the Borders Australia stores were closed and the New Zealand stores were rebranded Whitcoulls.

  The timer went off.

  Day 29 and I was finally closing in on that cool 50,000.

  I set the
timer: The war was over in 45 minutes. The drones flew in formation like a v of birds migrating south for winter. People ran through the streets as bombs fell. On multiple floors of gleaming high-rise buildings office workers paused at photocopiers, water coolers gulped, people in apartment blocks looked up from their screens as the grey-beaked drones advanced carrying their cargo of first-world problems.

  The inner shriek of a stomach, a muscle flexed, wincing, running, little time, the sky cracked open, buildings blazing like heads on fire. A second sequence of drones streaked across the sky on a timer. A child hid inside beneath a table, hands clamped over his ears as the wallscreen forecast the end of the world.

  Howling. All data lost, only blank screens.

  Tangled electricity lines sparked on the streets.

  Fires swept through the city unbidden, looking for reasons to burn, latching on to anything, orange tongues lashing.

  At the station, the hound blinked. Tried to stand on its haunches. Blackness. The swirl of ash. A mechanical whimper. The hound’s hard drive sifted, heat coursing out of its air vent at the back. A shaft of light. The hound blinked again. A chain gang worked from above, passing rubble from the collapsed fire station down into the street. A blonde, her face covered in soot, lifted a brick from the station and yelped. A guttural sound of excitement, of pain.

  ‘It’s a dog,’ she cried. Across the broken shards of the city, flames danced, turned. Who would put them out?

  A fireman walked towards her dressed in his frayed uniform, his face no longer distinguised. It took a minute to recognise him. He must have been caught in the explosion, standing near the heat.

  ‘I am Fahrienhiet 451,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’ They touched hands. A light drizzle fell on their shoulders. Or perhaps it was just more atomic ash? Either way, she shivered. He wasn’t wearing his wedding ring anymore. Nor was she.