Tinderbox Page 3

  ‘This must be a wonderful job,’ an old lady said. ‘I’d love to work in a bookshop.’

  I sat behind the till picking at my split ends.

  A foreigner in a shiny suit stumbled into the store, holding a briefcase. He looked like a refugee. Perhaps a Doctor or a Professor of Linguistics?

  He opened the briefcase and took out a mechanical turtle.

  ‘Ten pounds?’ he enquired.

  I shook my head.

  He flipped the turtle over and showed me the hatch for the double AA batteries.

  ‘Ten pounds?’

  ‘No.’

  He stood for a moment just holding the turtle by his heart.

  ‘Ten pounds?’

  Now that I worked at the bargain bookshop I felt tainted by the remainders. I too was one of life’s remainders. I couldn’t afford a mechanical turtle even if I wanted one. I felt as grim as the pigeons that roosted in the sign above the shop door. In the evening the sky wriggled out of its grey sweatshirt and pulled down its black tattered sleeves. I got up and flicked the lights off. I sometimes caught a silhouette of myself in the glass pane of the door as I locked up. My face a wan shadow like the little match girl. The pigeons cooed. A beggar sat next to his black dog outside the bank. The beggar was also covered in dust. And his dog wasn’t summoned from the power of the Tinderbox to bring him riches. Instead the beggar’s empty hand was outstretched like the mouth of the cash register I left open in the evenings.

  ‘London’s a big place for a little Kiwi,’ Mickey said. ‘Things will get better. Everyone has to pay their dues.’

  At the time I believed him. Mickey and I were in love. He was an artist, but he worked at Borders Charing Cross Road. The staff had nicknamed him Mickey Romance because he worked in the romance section. In 2002 my working holiday visa was running out so we decided to get married. Our wedding was held in the Gold Suite at Hackney Town Hall. I wore an electric blue kimono. Mickey wore a blue tie. My mother cried.

  The timer went off.

  SPARKNOTES SUGGESTED ESS AY TOPIC:

  Discuss Montag’s relationship with Mildred. Is this a typical marital relationship in their culture?

  Yes.

  I woke up at 6.30am and opened my MacBook Air. I’d been writing for nine days. Total word count: 6,762. By this time in 1950 Bradbury was reaching for the last dime in his bag of change. He spent $9.80 and produced a masterpiece. Why couldn’t I be a genius? The failure of my first novel hounded me. It wasn’t even worth $9.80. I couldn’t think of a plot. And I still wrote in disjointed fragments. My own life kept interrupting and changing the script. I wanted to get away from autobiography. I wanted to create with a capital C.

  Whenever Bradbury needed a break from his draft of Fahrenheit 451 he left the basement and ran upstairs to the UCLA library to browse the shelves for inspiration. He chose books at random and opened the pages to find interesting quotations. For Bradbury being in the library was a wonderful experience. He dashed up and down the stairs opening one book after another, plucking sentences straight from the page.

  He was a wise man. He was also prolific.

  I spent the rest of the day cruising BrainyQuotes instead of trying to to put the pieces of my plot together. My book was a total mess. A mish-mash of free floating memories.

  Q. I wonder if writing was this difficult for Bradbury?

  A. It wasn’t.

  I found a website called GlamAmor dedicated to the history of fashion in film. The chick that ran GlamAmor valued the cinematic potential of Julie Christie’s hair in a way that Time Magazine never would. She wrote, ‘Julie’s hair is beyond beautiful and has always been one of my favourite points of inspiration over the years.’

  The webpage was helpfully illustrated with numerous photographs of Christie.

  Her up-do was particularly prominent in Doctor Zhivago. Check.

  Then there was the famous asymmetrical bob from Shampoo. Check.

  I noticed in the string of enthusiastic comments that there seemed to be no end to the influence of Julie Christie’s hair.

  As the author of GlamAmor said, ‘That 1960s bedhead hair of hers – along with Brigitte Bardot’s – never seems to go out of style and has continued to be a popular request in today’s hair salons.’

  I updated my profile picture in Facebook to a photograph of Julie Christie.

  ‘Have you had a haircut?’ asked an old male manager from Borders.

  ‘I’m glad you noticed,’ I said.

  Truffaut’s film was also filled with quotations. According to Annette Insdorf Fahrenheit 451 was made during his ‘Hitchcockian period.’

  In one scene Julie Christie adjusted a self-portrait on the wall and a Penguin Classic fell from behind the frame. She flicked it away with her hand. ‘Eww.’

  Apparently this was a reference to a scene in Hitchcock’s The Birds, when a bird darts out from behind a picture frame and attacks Tippi Hendren.

  The Birds was much scarier than Fahrenheit 451. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but it was rarely frightening. Unless you were holding it, of course.

  The white screen wavered in front of me.

  Also Microsoft Word kept crashing. Word was not a great programme to use on a MacBook. Maybe it just wasn’t a great programme full stop.

  ‘Why have you got so many windows open?’ my boyfriend asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Just force quit,’ my boyfriend said.

  The timer went off.

  Christmas 2002: I dropped off my CV at the main information desk of Borders Islington. I got a call a week later. My interview went more or less according to plan. I sat in the manager’s office in my best pair of jeans trying to look earnest and helpful. I explained that I loved reading and writing. I said I was doing a writing class at City Lit on Tuesdays but I was available to work every other day, including weekends and evenings.

  ‘And if a middle aged lady came in and asked for a great summer read, what would you recommend?’ the interviewer asked.

  ‘I’d probably ask her what kind of books she enjoyed.’

  ‘A good story, escapism, something that keeps you turning the page.’

  ‘I might ask if she had tried The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.’

  The interviewer nodded. ‘And what about a boy looking for a Father’s Day gift?’

  ‘Bill Bryson.’

  My time in the bargain bookstore had served me well.

  ‘Great.’ The interviewer turned the piece of paper over. ‘Can you describe what makes really good customer service?’

  ‘Well, someone who is attentive, but not too attentive. Customers need to be able to browse. It’s important to be able to flick through the books and just relax. That’s why the philosophy of Borders is so great and there’s the Starbucks upstairs.’

  The interviewer smiled. ‘Can you think of any other ways that Borders is different from the competition on the high street?’

  I shifted in my seat.

  ‘How would you describe the décor at Borders?’ the interviewer asked.

  I thought about the high black book shelves at Waterstones. I preferred the traditional library atmosphere that Waterstones was renowned for. Borders stores were messier. Books were left everywhere like bric-a-brac. And Borders played music over the store speakers. The walls were…

  ‘Terracotta?’ I said.

  ‘And do you have any questions you’d like to ask me?’ the interviewer smiled.

  ‘Is there a staff discount?’

  The timer went off.

  In London I started to write because it was cheap. Writing cost me nothing other than time. I inherited an old clunky laptop. The laptop became my tinderbox. I struck words from the keys. Writing kindled early memories.

  On my day off, I rushed into City Lit eager to cultivate a career as a book writer rather than a bookseller. ‘Finding Your Voice’ was run by an Irish author I had never heard of. Our class was held in a garret-like room on the rooftop of Ci
tylit in Holborn. Outside, pigeons strutted and brooded. Inside, students strutted and brooded.

  The Irish author did her best to knock us into shape. We did writing exercises instead of stretches. A sentence pushed out like a lunge. Syntax instead of squats. I balanced two mixed metaphors across my shoulders before they dropped like dumbbells to the floor. The pigeons cooed. The class clapped. The Irish author introduced me to other authors I had never heard of.

  ‘What are you reading?’ Mickey asked one night in bed.

  I held up a book of Raymond Carver’s short stories.

  ‘More mouldy old depressing stuff,’ Mickey said.

  Those early years in London were full of the mouldy old depressing stuff. I was exasperated by everything. Our poverty. Mum’s cancer scare. When Mickey was down he listened to the music of Damien Dempsey. Damien was also Irish but unlike Mickey he was not very funny. When I was down Mickey sometimes joked, ‘Has the little Kiwi been taking its special pills?’ I refused to go on anti-depressants. Instead I sought refuge in books. I related to the anecdote about Raymond Carver standing in a laundromat waiting for his kids’ clothes to dry and realising that his life did not resemble that of any of his literary heroes. I didn’t marry young like Raymond Carver or have any children, but I had once waited in a laundromat in Kentish Town for my clothes to dry. On top of a huge industrial drier was a hamster in a cage. The hamster was a tawny shade of ginger. I loaded my wash into the drier and pushed a coin in the slot. Clunk. The hamster span around the wheel in its cage. My clothes whirled. I sat on the bench of the laundromat, reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

  ‘What if our marriage doesn’t work out?’ I asked Mickey.

  ‘Then it will make a good chapter for the autobiography,’ he said.

  In London we moved in and out of rented flats. Dalston. Stoke Newington. Stamford Hill. Our bills arrived addressed to new postcodes. Mickey left Borders Charing Cross Road. I stayed on at Borders Islington. Mickey worked nights in hospitality. Our shifts were often out of sync. I wanted to be a writer; Mickey wanted to be an actor. We pursued our separate goals with ardour.

  At Borders Islington I started co-writing a satirical romance called The Borders of Love with a fellow employee. Saul was erudite and witty. He prevailed over the main information desk like an intellectual Yul Brunner. He was also the only Borders staff member who could get away with referring to Starbucks as a coffee emporium over the in-store tannoy. Saul and I wrote a few pages of The Borders of Love together under my porn name (Sooty O’Donahue)* before the story evaporated like the froth of a Starbucks cappuccino.

  Meanwhile I had graduated from ‘Finding your voice’ and moved on to ‘Narrative Drive’. The new class met at the Dalston Library on the Number 30 bus route to Hackney Wick. I walked to lessons each week past the overland station and the Dalston market. Pale chickens hung from the awning of stalls, feet still attached, necks broken. I glanced through windows at greasy spoon cafés, Turkish restaurants and the wooden veneers of local pubs. ‘Ricky! Ricky!’ EastEnders elbowed and dodged one another on the street. The red double-decker buses docked at the lights, their engines generating exhaust.

  ‘Narrative Drive’ was run by a Grenadan author called Jacob Ross. The group was composed of middle-aged women all ready to strike flint from the tinderbox. Jacob began our weekly sessions with a new workout. He set the timer on his watch. ‘When I say go, start writing. Then I am going to call out a sequence of words, as I call out each word I want you to incorporate it seamlessly into the sentence you are writing.’

  The middle-aged women and I looked at one another.

  ‘Go,’ Jacob said.

  Sooty arrived at work and went STRAIGHT down to THE basement.

  In THE sort room the inventory processing team were FIERCE at work on three LUMBERING pallets, like A herd of cardboard RHINOS waiting to be tamed.

  In the sort room Sooty PERCIEVED a dummies guide on salamanders that had been binced WRONG for the SEX section.

  ‘Guys!’ she scolded. ‘Retail IS detail.’

  THE IPT team grunted AND kept shelving AND grunting. At least they weren’t SEVERELY flouting the staff handbook again by CONNECTING in dangerous horseplay. ‘ONIONS!’ Sooty cursed, she didn’t understand how the IPT team couldn’t be more FERVENT about their work. Forget the LOW pay, LOW status and REPETITION. Selling STUFF. And REPETITION. That was what she lived for. She even loved the NAUTICAL theme that had been used to CHIRPILY label the instore fixtures SO that the tall bookshelves were KNOWN as bays and the LOW bookshelves as gondalas, but the FLANKS of each bookshelf were simply CHRISTENED endcaps. Sooty loved sailing the EARTH, stocking the bays with the SPANKING new bestsellers. She was the kind of GIRL who could merchandise the HELL out of an end cap and still have VIM to redesign a till queue at the end of the day.

  ‘HORSERADISH!’ She was going TO get that supervisor promotion if it FLAGGELATED her.

  Filling her trolley was KAPUT so she scanned the sort room, her GAPE gliding over the rows of blue clad industrial shelving

  ‘Hey, what’s this?’ she walked over to a HANDSOME box in the corner.

  The IPT guys GESTICULATED non-commitally. ‘Must be a NEWFANGLED sideline for the till queue.’

  Sooty REVIEWED the invoice. ‘Can YOU guys get a binc sticker on this right away. I need to sell it CURRENTLY. Truck to the floor in 24!’

  The mechanical hound waited in the dark. Its eight HAUNCHES packed into a STYROFOAM base. The hound’s proboscis was INSERTED inside its muzzle. The HATCH opened. A RAY of florescent light. The mechanical hound OGLED the girl FLOATING above its face like a SYMBOL. Its eyes glowed MINT green.

  The timer went off.

  Day 12: Every word was torture, let alone every word count. I knew nothing about hounds, not even mechanical hounds. I didn’t have a dog. What did a proboscis look like? Why couldn’t I be a normal person?

  The timer went off.

  In 2004 in a small flat above Stoke Newington High Street I picked up the phone. A mirror of a pock-marked moon, straddled by black branches hung on the wall. Bring-Bring. The dull sound of ringing on the flip side of the world. Outside, the real moon was only a sliver away from full.

  ‘Hello?’ His voice was gruff, no nonsense.

  ‘Dad, it’s me.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  A small voice from London, bogged down with poverty and shame. ‘No.’

  ‘What is it? What’s going on there?’

  Our apartment on Stoke Newington High Street was awash with yellow streetlight, shadows stretched across the laminated floor. The fridge hummed a mechanical tune and the digital clock in the kitchen blinked back the seconds and minutes. Mint-green. Our bedroom was empty, the duvet flung back on my side. The vats behind the downstairs bar whirred.

  ‘Mickey hasn’t come home,’ I said.

  Static crackled down the line. Dad sighed.

  It was not the first time.

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘What’s the time in London?’ Dad asked.

  ‘It’s quarter past four. I know he’s probably just out drinking, but I can’t stop worrying.’

  ‘It’s a shame he’s like this,’ Dad said.

  ‘He fell asleep on a bus once,’ I said. ‘He called me disorientated because he didn’t know where he was. But what if he isn’t drunk and something’s happened to him and he’s been beaten up or killed or in an accident and I don’t even know?’

  I started to cry and then I felt bad for crying and for calling too.

  ‘I wish you were closer,’ Dad said.

  ‘Me too.’ My tears tasted of salt. I imagined the tide coming in along Lyall Bay beach, the sand building up in the brick drive and the sound of the planes landing and taking off. The seagulls’ white neck ruffs ruffled by southerlies.

  ‘I miss you, Dad.’

  ‘I miss you, too.’

  Dad talked about how hard it is to make a rel
ationship work with no money, no time together, both of us working different shifts, dissatisfied in ourselves and in our lives.

  ‘You better try and get some sleep,’ Dad said.

  After I hung up the phone, my legs were stiff from sitting on the floor. Pins and needles rushed up and down my calves. I wandered to the bread bin and carved off a sliver of soft white Turkish bread. Then tried Mickey’s mobile one last time. ‘Hi, I can’t get to the phone right now. So please leave a message.’ His voice sounded bouncing and buoyant.

  Their marriage was an elastic band that had lost its pull. They lay in bed. Spine to spine. The cameras rolled. Oskar Werner turned his head in his sleep and Julie Christie pulled the duvet closer around her shoulders. Day 13 and I was watching the film again. Oskar was trapped in a bad dream. So was I. Memories rewound: nights in bed beside Mickey like two books side by side on a shelf. ‘Mind the gap,’ the voice on the London tube always said.

  On screen the arched tracks of a railway rushed past. Again and again. The cinemotographer Nicholas Roeg shot the footage of the empty tracks for the nightmare sequence. Oskar tossed and turned, slack mouthed in his sleep, he groaned. In his nightmare Julie wore a dowdy nana cardigan and a string of pearls. She struck a match. All around her the books were burning. Julie smiled, like a Borders employee, one that was happy to help. How had she wound up married to Mickey Romance?

  Their honeymoon took place a year overdue. They went to Nerja, a small seaside town in the Costa-Del-Sol. Out of season. The sun sparkled on the Mediterranean sea. The light was crisp. Nerja rocked back and forth; the town rebuilt on the surface of the sea. They did the touristy things that honeymooners do. Gelato, tapas, beer. Locals hung their laundry from out of white windows. Towels and sheets kicked in the breeze. A Frank Sinatra lookalike lip-synced in the square. Oscar took photographs of the stray cats that populated the beach. At night they ate paella and watched the sun set. He ordered Long Island Ice Teas and paid for them by credit card.