I fell in love with Johnson & Ross the second I followed Jenny inside that first day.
The door led into a cramped main room. I was immediately assailed by a cacophony of sensation; the whole store was alive with texture. Books were packed in shelves along every wall, filling cabinets and covering the surface of tables, and there was a comforting, musty aroma to the air, as though all the leather and paper surrounding me had saturated it over the years. I remember exactly what it was like. Not only was I seeing the books, I was feeling them on my skin and breathing them deep inside me as well.
Jenny led me down one of the overcrowded aisles. But in that moment I was distracted—looking around in wonder, almost shocked by my visceral reaction to the shop. Walking in here was like receiving an embrace from someone who had cared for me when I was too young to remember them properly. I had never been here before, and yet it felt like coming home.
The counter turned out to be little more than a cave among the shelves and cabinets. At first glance, I couldn’t work out how anyone got behind it, but a woman was sitting there with a newspaper open on the counter before her. She was in her forties, her long hair dyed so blond that it was practically white, and she was wearing small glasses. She peered curiously at me over the top of the frames as we approached.
Then she looked at Jenny and smiled warmly, clearly delighted to see her.
“Jenny! And what have you brought me today?”
Jenny held up the bag of books. “A few from last month.”
“I was not talking about the books, young lady.”
Jenny glanced back at me, and for the first time that I could remember she looked slightly nervous herself.
“I’m her … trainee,” I said.
“Ah!” The woman seemed even more pleased now. She closed the newspaper and gave Jenny a conspiratorial wink. “The one you told me all about, right?”
“This is Paul,” Jenny said. “Yes.”
From the look on her face, it was like she was no longer sure this was such a good idea. But then she turned to me.
“And this is my friend Marie.”
It turned out that Marie was the Johnson of the bookshop’s name. Ross had been the name of the man who’d owned it before, and whom she’d worked for until he retired several years earlier.
“But I kept his name on there as well,” Marie told me. “Tradition is important, isn’t it? You’ve got to have lineage. Places are like people. They have to know where they came from—and where they are now—or else they’ll never know where they’re going.”
I agreed that was true, but it was honestly difficult to do anything else. Marie was a force of nature. She spent the next twenty minutes bustling around, dragging me off to see different parts of the shop and bombarding me with questions the whole time. The latter were often accompanied by amused glances in Jenny’s direction, as though they were designed to tease her as much as probe me.
“So how did you two meet?”
“We go to the same school,” I said.
“That’s no answer at all. Jenny goes to school with lots of boys, and I don’t recall her ever bringing any of them to meet me before.”
Jenny raised an eyebrow.
“And you wonder why?” she said.
But I could tell that her nerves had settled a little now, and she seemed quietly pleased, as though meeting Marie were a kind of initiation that I was so far managing to pass. It was obvious she and Marie had known each other for a long time and that the woman’s opinion of me mattered. For my own part, it was nice to see Jenny relax a little. I admired how self-contained she always seemed, but it was also good to see her more relaxed, more at ease.
Seeing someone in their sauce, as my mother would say.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but looking back now I can see this whole encounter for what it was. Marie, older and more experienced than Jenny and me, was effectively grabbing our hands and pulling us together, forcing us closer toward the flirtation we were still both tentatively circling.
“We’re in the creative writing club together,” I said.
“Which I already told you,” Jenny added.
“Of course, yes.” Marie feigned forgetfulness. “Well, when you get to my age. The creative writing club—that reminds me. Did you send your story in to that competition?”
Jenny pulled a face. “Yeah. Not that anything will come of it.”
“Hush. You’re a very good writer. Have you read any of her stories, Paul?”
“Only the one in the club. Well—I mean, I listened to that. The one about the dog.”
Marie laughed.
“I liked that one. A bit close to home, maybe, but some of the best stories are.”
“Marie is a font of local knowledge,” Jenny told me.
“There are plenty of stories around these parts, believe me.”
“I know,” Jenny said. “I know.”
The idea of that pulled me up a little. For as long as I could recall, I’d thought of Gritten as a gray and dull place, and I’d dreamed of escaping from it and ending up somewhere better. It had never occurred to me before then that where I lived might be just as interesting in its own way as whatever place I imagined myself going.
“Paul sent a story in too.” Jenny looked at me. “I think?”
“Yeah.”
I had followed my mother’s instructions. I remembered the way my father had sneered at me when I asked him for two envelopes and stamps: one to send the story; the other for a self-addressed envelope if it got rejected and returned.
When it got rejected.
“But nothing’s going to come of mine either.” I turned to Jenny and added quickly: “Not that I mean nothing will come of yours. I’m sure it will. Yours will be way better than mine.”
“You haven’t read mine yet.”
“No. But I’d like to. I mean—if you want me to.”
“Yeah, of course. But only if you want to.”
Marie followed our exchange, her gaze moving back and forth between us, an incredulous expression on her face.
“Teenagers.”
“What was that?” Jenny said.
“Nothing, love. Anyway—let me see what you’ve got for me, bookwise.”
Jenny began unloading the bag, and the two of them went through the contents. The books were all secondhand, and I assumed they had been bought from here. As I watched Marie checking the penciled prices on the inside covers and making a list of figures on a sheet of paper, I guessed that, for at least some of her customers, this place effectively functioned as a library as much as a bookshop.
Marie peered over her glasses at me.
“Would you be kind enough to do me a favor, Paul?”
“Of course.”
“Excellent! I like him very much already, Jenny. Right, you look like a big, strong lad, and I have a box of books out back that I could do with someone bringing in. Would you be kind enough to do that for me?”
“Sure.”
Marie retrieved a set of keys from below the counter and held them out for me.
“You can head through there.” She nodded toward the back of the shop. “Just follow the corridor. My car’s out back. Old orange Ford. You can’t miss it, it’s the only one there.”
I took the keys.
“The box is in the trunk. Be careful, though. The metal really catches the sun and I don’t want you burning your hands.” She raised an eyebrow at Jenny. “I’m sure Jenny doesn’t want that either.”
I had time to see Jenny go horribly red before I quickly shut the comment away inside my head and hurried to the back of the shop.
The last half term of school seemed to crawl by. I found myself counting the days until the summer holiday, desperate to see the back of Gritten Park for at least a little while.
I did my best to avoid Charlie, Billy, and James, and for the most part I succeeded. Not always, of course. There would be those times when I’d see them—times that never felt entirely like accidents. James would be staring at the ground, and Charlie would be smiling beside him, as though showing off a trophy he’d won.
I always looked away quickly.
Fuck them.
But even when I didn’t run into them directly, there were times when I could feel them somehow. Whenever I was near the stairs that led down to Room C5b, it was like I could sense a heartbeat pulsing steadily below me, and I found myself wondering what was going on down there. What the three of them might be dreaming up together.
But I spent as much time with Jenny as possible. We’d share her bench at break and lunchtimes, until it began to seem more like ours than hers. We’d compare notes on books we’d read and stories we’d thought of; sit and talk; sometimes stroll around the grounds together. On weekends, I’d visit her house. Her mother was always home, so our opportunities were limited, but I remember we spent a lot of time in her room, kissing and fooling around. The connection between us was blossoming. I had never felt so comfortable and relaxed with anyone—so able to be myself without worrying that being me was a problem—and the knowledge that she felt the same was enough to take my breath away.
And, of course, we’d go to the bookshop.
Marie provided us with coffee and cake, and the occasional filthy comment, but the latter became increasingly less embarrassing. Partly because Jenny and I were more relaxed with each other, but also because Marie was a little way behind us by then. But mostly, the three of us just talked. I liked Marie and took to helping her out during our visits: moving and unpacking boxes, organizing shelves.
One time, she was chatting to Jenny when a customer approached the counter. She called me over.
“Paul? Will you serve this gentleman for me, please?”
“Sure.”
I had absolutely no idea how to work the register. I pressed a few of the more obvious buttons, fumbled with the drawer, and did the math in my head.
Marie came over to me afterward.
“The summer holidays are coming up soon, right?”
“Ten days.” I feigned checking a watch I didn’t have. “Sixteen hours, ten minutes, and fifteen seconds.”
She laughed.
“Well, I was thinking. You’re going to have a lot of time free.” She glanced at Jenny. “And I figure you’re going to be in the area. So I was wondering if you’d like a job?”
I blinked, then looked around the shop.
“You mean here?”
“Let me show you how to work the register,” she said quickly.
My mother was pleased that I’d found a part-time job to occupy my time.
“In a bookshop too!” she said.
I might have expected my father to be happy as well, but I’d long since given up hope of impressing him, and if anything the bookshop part of the equation—and a secondhand one, at that—seemed to be worthy of even greater disdain than usual. But rather than being discouraged, I found myself quietly emboldened. It felt like working in Johnson & Ross somehow brought me closer to my dream.
When the holidays began, I helped Marie three days a week, and once I’d mastered the register I found the work rewarding. There were shelves to be organized, boxes to be packed and unloaded, and regular customers to begin to get to know. Marie was far less provocative without Jenny around to tease. She showed me some of the more expensive books in the shop, and even began to teach me how to recognize what might be a valuable edition myself. I liked her more and more. And Jenny had been right: Marie was full of stories. She was like a walking repository of the area’s history, and not a day went by when she didn’t regale me with some wild local tale.
Late at night, after my parents had gone to bed, I continued to attempt writing tales of my own. It was hard. While I wasn’t short of ideas, the problem came when I sat down at my desk and attempted to put them into words. Marie was a natural storyteller, and I suspected that Jenny was too. But not me. Ideas that felt good in my head came out flat and lifeless on paper. I started a lot, and finished nothing.
The rest of the time, I spent with Jenny.
The strength of my feelings for her frightened me. It was strange to think that at the beginning of the school year I’d barely noticed her at all. Now I could hardly stop thinking about her. My heart beat oddly, as though my pulse had been taking secret classes and learning fresh and unfamiliar tricks. When we weren’t at her house, we walked slowly around the streets of her part of Gritten. She showed me the park she’d played in as a little girl, the shops she remembered that weren’t there anymore. On one level it was all inconsequential, but the intimacy rendered each detail vivid and special. The weather was hot and bright, and I suddenly found myself noticing color everywhere. Summer was coming. A world that had previously been drab and gray was growing more vibrant by the day.
And I didn’t see Charlie or Billy or James at all.
All these years later, when I first saw Jenny upon returning to Gritten, she reminded me there were good memories for me here as well as bad ones. That was true. All of them were here, as I fell in love for the first time. The three weeks at the beginning of that holiday are the happiest of my whole life.
It was in the fourth that everything went wrong.