So Waterstones now expected a bloody short story with every book and I was beginning to get the hang of the short form. I thought it might be fun to actually set a story in the branch of Waterstones I used to work in. This also allowed me to insert a Ghostbusters joke which, if nobody else got it, at least gave me a great deal of pleasure.
‘It’s not easy being a bookseller,’ said Warwick Anderson—bookseller. ‘Especially in that branch. It’s a listed building, so Waterstones can’t put in a lift and we have to carry the stock up and down the stairs.’
‘So, you were tired?’ I said.
Warwick took a sip of his coffee. We were in a spare office that the company had made available to us at Waterstones’ gigantic art deco store on Piccadilly. We were there because Warwick Anderson refused to go within five hundred metres of his old store in Covent Garden.
He was a white guy in his late twenties with slightly mad blonde hair flying up into spikes.
‘Well, I already had to do the overnight on my own, so that didn’t help,’ said Warwick, because the perennial problem for all retailers the world over are the customers. Not only do they clutter up the shop, but they also demand to be reminded of the title of a book they read a review about in the Telegraph, given directions to The Lion King, helped to find a book their mum will like and, occasionally, purchase some actual merchandise. All of this customer-facing activity gets in the way of the shelving, merchandising, stickering, destickering, table pyramiding and stock returning that is necessary for the smooth operation of a modern bookshop. The bigger stores can have whole shifts devoted to coming in early and making sure their shelves are ship shape, but small stores have to resort to the occasional overnighter.
‘You can get a tremendous amount of work done if there are no customers in the way,’ said Warwick. ‘It’s crucial if you have to move a section or something.’
‘And you were on your own?’ asked Lesley.
‘Yes,’ said Warwick, who was obviously disturbed by Lesley’s face mask. ‘Peggy had been with me the night before, but last night it was just me.’
Lesley checked her notebook. ‘This would be Peggy Loughliner?’ she said.
‘That’s right,’ said Warwick, looking anywhere but at Lesley’s face. ‘I was in the basement shifting celebrity chefs from one end of the cookery section to the other when a book hit me in the back.’
Warwick had spun around, but found he was still alone. There was a book at his feet. It was Banksy’s Wall and Piece. Fortunately, it was the paperback version.
‘Or else that would have really hurt,’ said Warwick.
Spooked, he’d taken the time to check the rest of the shop, including the staff areas and the three entry points, but didn’t find any evidence that he wasn’t alone. He went back to his shelving and was more annoyed than frightened when he was hit on the back of the head by a soft toy—the kind on offer at the till point. He was just about to whirl around and catch the perpetrator red handed when approximately five shelves of the art section hit him in the back—including two display shelves of Art Monographs.
‘It’s not funny,’ said Warwick. ‘Some of those Taschen books are huge.’
Actually, the CCTV footage was sort of funny, in a cruel YouTube kind of way. Unfortunately, the camera had been positioned to cover a blind spot behind the till, so the books were already in mid-flight before they appeared on screen. Warwick was just visible on the left of frame being knocked down by the sheer weight of literature. Worse than that, a couple had struck him squarely on the back of the head, rendering him semi-conscious.
He’d managed to stagger to the phone at the downstairs till and dial 999 before collapsing. The response team had been forced to break in, adding to the damage. And, having waved Warwick off in the ambulance, they called in the store manager to take care of the door before being called away to deal with a birthday party that was explosively decompressing outside the newly rebuilt Genius Bar in the piazza.
A DS from the CW’s PSU, that’s the Charing Cross Primary Crime Unit to you, evaluated the case and, since Warwick had suffered only a minor concussion, there didn’t seem to have been a break-in prior to the arrival of the police, and nothing appeared to have been stolen, assigned it to his most junior PC with strong hints that it should be cleared, dumped or passed into oblivion by the end of the day. The PC, who shall remain forever nameless, had been at CW with both me and Lesley and had been following our subsequent careers with the same appalled interest engendered by the early round contestants in Britain’s Got Talent, so he decided this was just the sort of weird shit that the Special Assessment Unit, aka the Folly, aka those weirdos, had been formed to deal with.
‘You know what I reckon,’ said Warwick Anderson. ‘I reckon it was a poltergeist.’
I don’t have time to talk about the nature of ghosts here, but let’s just say that like the mentally ill, they almost never pose a danger to the public. And when they do it hardly ever involves throwing physical objects about. However, according to Nightingale, when they do start flinging the furniture it can be very serious. So I arranged for us to spend the night in the, possibly, haunted bookshop.
‘And I have to be here because?’ asked Lesley.
‘So there’s corroboration if anything happens,’ I said.
‘And Toby?’ she asked.
‘To wake us up if anything happens,’ I said.
The shop manager, a short, round and strangely asymmetrical white man in his mid-thirties also wanted to know about the dog.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He’s specially trained.’
‘Oh, he’s special all right,’ said Lesley.
The Covent Garden branch of Waterstones had been created by purchasing three shops — one medium sized one on New Row and two small ones on Garrick Street — and then knocking them together and fitting out the basement. This gave it three entrances, four till points and a very odd shape. Lots of dead space, I noticed, ideal for shoplifting.
I asked the manager about it, and he said I’d be surprised by what got stolen.
‘Poetry mainly,’ he said.
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘Really,’ he said.
I supposed that being right next to the Garrick Club they got a better class of shop lifter.
I’d noticed an interesting windowed dome over the main till on my first visit, but when I did a cursory historical and architectural search online that afternoon, I couldn’t find any reference to it at all. I got the impression that the central section had once been a hall or a ballroom—somewhere built for display.
The manager would have preferred to have spent the night in the shop with us, but we suggested that if he were that worried he could always wait in his car outside—he declined.
Once he’d shown us how to lock up and set the alarm, in case we left early, and had a strained telephone conversation with his cluster manager, he departed with many a worried backward glance.
The ground floor was an L-shaped space made up of obviously quite a large hall, the main entrance, and a similar sized section at an angle which contained the main till with the glazed dome above it. The stock room and loading bay were behind the till and at the other end two smaller wings, children’s books and travel, ended with doors out onto Garrick Street. A set of central stairs led down to the basement where Art, Self-Help, History, Politics and the ever-expanding Cookery section lay.
We did what we’ve come to call an Initial Vestigium Assessment or IVA—which consisted of me and Lesley wandering around the shop trying to sense if anything occult had happened inside. It wasn’t easy, because books have the same effect on vestigia as those egg-box shaped bits of foam have on sound. It was a phenomena much commented on in the literature, or at least in the literature I’d managed to skim through that afternoon. Most practitioners cite the effect as the reason why it was much easier to have a nap in one of the Folly’s libraries than in the smoking room where they were supposed to.
There was definitely something at the main till under the dome on the ground floor. A whiff of the slaughterhouse mingled with shouting, excitement, desire, disappointment and rotting straw. Downstairs, where the ‘attack’ had taken place, it was just your normal central London background of pain, joy, sweat, tears and the occasional inexplicable horse or sheep.
According to the literature there are basically two types of ghosts, those that only show themselves when people are present and those that only come out when nobody is there. There’s Latin tags for both types but I can never remember what they are. So, the big question was whether to set up camp where the unfortunate Warwick Anderson was buried in books or to wait in the manager’s office and monitor via CCTV. In the end we decided to wait in Art where the attack took place and if nothing happened after three hours move to the office—which was closer to the staff room and the coffee in any case.
‘Hold on,’ said Lesley as we settled into our chairs. ‘Didn’t the children’s section used to be downstairs?’
‘I don’t remember getting called to a job here,’ I said.
‘I used to buy presents for my nieces and nephews,’ she said. ‘And the children’s section was there.’ She pointed to a square alcove whose shelves were currently labelled Street Art, Interiors and Photography. Street Art being graffiti with a dollar value on the international market.
‘At least that bit was where Harry Potter and Roald Dahl were,’ she said. ‘Although Tracy preferred Darren Shan to Harry Potter. I used to check the table for new stuff.’
The display table in the alcove was currently sporting a sign which read: Never Without Art, a category which appeared to consist of big glossy books with tastefully photographed white women on the front cover.
I rummaged around in the go-bag for the first of the snacks and Toby lay down on his back at our feet and stuck his legs in the air.
At least we had plenty to read.
In three hours I ate two packets of crisps, a ham sandwich and read sixty pages of Policing With Contempt by Victor Baker, the alleged pen name of a serving police officer in some force up north. Whoever he was, he really hated paperwork, political correctness and yearned for the simpler days of yore. I reckoned that if his skipper ever worked out who he was, he was going to get a close look at the good old days via the application of a telephone directory to the tender parts of his body.
We decided it was time for coffee and a possible shift to the manager’s office.
I’d just put the kettle on when Toby started barking.
Me and Lesley looked at each other and then ran for the door. We would have made it back to the Art section faster if we hadn’t tripped over each other’s feet in the narrow corridor that ran past the manager’s office. By the time we got there it was all over.
There four neat stacks of books lined up in front of our chairs.
‘Symmetrical book stacking,’ I said. ‘Just like the British Library in 1896.’
‘You’re right, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘No human being would stack books like this.’
Having established that some sort of weird shit was going on, step two, in the as yet completely theoretical Modern Procedure Guide for Supernatural Police Officers, was to try and categorise what it is you’re dealing with. With ghosts, the easiest way was to pump a bit of magic into them and see what form they take.
I conjured up a werelight which caused Toby to take refuge behind the till counter—he’s a veteran of many of my practise sessions.
Shadows flickered amongst the shelves as the werelight dimmed and took on a crimson hue.
‘Definitely something,’ said Lesley.
‘I can’t see a figure,’ I said.
Usually a ghost would have manifested by that stage.
‘Give it some welly,’ said Lesley.
I upped the intensity of the werelight until it practically gave off lens flare. Then suddenly it shrank down to a small sapphire blue star and winked out.
‘Uh oh,’ said Lesley and we both dived for the safety of the till counter just in time for the shop to explode.
Well, not explode exactly. As far we could reconstruct it later fully half the books in the basement shot off their shelves and would have sailed across the shop if they hadn’t met the books from the opposite shelves coming the other way, with a rattling sound of collision.
Strangely, some areas were untouched, not one Nigella Lawson book left its shelf but every single copy of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist was found jammed into an air conditioning vent.
‘What the fuck was that?’ asked Lesley once the noise had died down.
‘That didn’t feel like a ghost,’ I said.
Toby licked my face, which was disgusting, but there was no way I was sticking my head above the level of the till just yet.
Lesley cautiously took her hands off her head and risked a peep over the countertop. When nothing bad happened, I joined her.
‘What did it feel like?’ she asked.
It had felt a bit like the first time I’d met Mama Thames or when Beverley Brook kissed me, or the Old Man of the River had turned his gaze upon me. Like the smell of blood and the taste of Plasticine, liked crossed legs and chicken feathers.
‘Definitely not a ghost,’ I said. ‘I want to check something.’
We tiptoed over the books on the floor and up the stairs, which were fortunately clear of books, although a display case full of Dan Brown’s had been flung into the travel section.
A drift of brightly coloured volumes for toddlers and early readers stretched out from the Children’s section towards the stairwell. I motioned Lesley towards the area under the dome.
‘Tell me what you sense,’ I said.
Even without her mask on it can be hard to tell what Lesley’s thinking. The damage to her face had stripped it of the markers that we rely on to read the expressions of others. Still, I was getting better at interpreting what I did see and what she showed under the dome was puzzlement, then disgust and then recognition.
‘Cock fighting ring,’ she said.
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘All that excitement, activity and on top of that the power that gets released at the point of death.’
‘Chicken ghost?’ said Lesley. ‘No, wait, you said it wasn’t a ghost.’
‘Do you know how gladiator fights got started?’ I asked.
Lesley indicated that not only did she not know this interesting historical fact, but that she would like me to impart it sometime before old age and death.
‘They started as part of a religious ceremony at grand Roman funerals,’ I said.
‘And you know this because?’
‘Horrible Histories,’ I said.
‘So you’re thinking what?’
I told her.
‘You’re kidding me,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Say something bad about books.’
‘What?’
‘Say something disparaging about books and reading,’ I said.
‘Why me?’ asked Lesley.
‘Because it will be more convincing coming from you,’ I said.
Lesley looked around self-consciously and then said: ‘Nobody ever learnt anything from a book.’
I thought I heard a rustle downstairs—so did Lesley.
‘Books are for losers,’ she said.
Definitely movement, and it wasn’t us. I checked and it wasn’t Toby either.
‘Oh my god,’ said Lesley as we went downstairs.
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well don’t sound so smug,’ she said. ‘Look at this place. It’s a mess.’
‘I have a plan for that,’ I said and told her.
‘Not me again,’ she said.
‘You’ve got a better voice,’ I said.
Lesley agreed and, after a moment’s thought, went upstairs to fetch a book from the Children’s section. She waved it at me when she came back down.
‘Harry Potter,’ I said. ‘Really?’
‘Since I’m reading,’ she said. ‘It’s my choice’
I created another werelight, a nice gentle one, and addressed the bookshop at large.
‘Hello,’ I said in my brightest voice. ‘My name’s Peter Grant and tonight we’re going to play a game called ‘put all the books back in order.’ And if you’re especially good and well behaved, my friend Lesley’s going to read you a story.’
* * *
Lesley, the coward, claimed she had a medical appointment and left me to explain it to the manager the next morning.
‘There’s a god living in my branch,’ said the manager when I was finished.
‘A Genius Loci,’ I said. ‘A spirit of place. And it’s more accurate to say that it is the shop—in a metaphysical sense. A god or goddess of books and reading.’
‘But why here?’ he asked plaintively.
‘Well, it’s a book shop,’ I said.
‘So what?’ asked the manager. ‘My last branch didn’t have a local god in it. None of the other managers have ever mentioned anything like this—I’m sure I would have remembered. Why here?’
Because, I thought, the cockfighting ring on your top floor provided a reservoir of vestigia which interacted with all those young minds reading books downstairs, and a spirit of place formed like a pearl around a bit of grit. Only I wasn’t going to tell him that. Because not only couldn’t I prove any of it, it was also a bloody dreadful simile.
Then the children’s section had been moved upstairs and the poor little deity started to feel unloved.
‘Just one of those things,’ I said.
‘But what am I supposed to do about it,’ he asked. ‘Sacrifice a goat?’
‘About once a week somebody has to sit down and read it a book,’ I said.
‘What kind of book?’
‘It’s not the book that’s important,’ I said. ‘It’s the reading.’