The Telling

couldn’t mention the noise in the night, the electric hum, the way it made my skin prickle. Or how little I had managed to do, so far, by way of sorting out the house. Cate was an ache in my throat, a flash of panic at the empty space at my feet. The bag-handles cut into my palms, but I had nothing to push, no one to carry, to hold. It made me uneasy.
    The conversation didn’t go well. The wind blew my words away; Mark was distracted by his email. After a few minutes, we gave up and said goodbye. I was slipping the phone into a pocket as I passed a shop window: deep in the pale interior, a woman bent her head to paperwork and the phone, a sheet of silk-blonde hair screening her face, a perfect nail skimming a line of text as she read. A shift in focus, and I caught my own reflection on the window: pale, eyes shadowed, that line between the brows that didn’t used to be there.
    I pushed into the first charity shop I came to, the bell jangling. It smelt of old clothes, instant coffee and other people’s perfume. I put the bags down on the counter. A woman in her sixties, her face deep-lined with smoke, came out from the back room. She thanked me and went to gather the bags to her. ‘Just these two,’ I found myself saying, keeping hold of the bag with the jumpers in and retreating. They’d absorb the old-clothes and other-people smell. I couldn’t leave them.
    There was a bookshop just across the street; an independent one. I crossed in a gap in the traffic, clutching my bag. The window was dusty, the display sparse. Dead flies desiccated on the window-shelf and local history books bleached and buckled in the spring sun. I was here to shed possessions, not acquire them. But there was no harm in looking.
    The place had that breathy, fusty kind of quality that libraries used to have, before they were full of computers. A sandy-haired man sat behind the counter, his head down, reading. I poked around in the local history section for a while, flicking through contents pages, dipping in and out of articles. There were books on local industries, local farming practices, maritime history, educational institutions. I skimmed chapters in the final one and read the index, thinking that I might find something there about the Reading Room, but there was nothing.
    At the back of the shop there was a flight of stairs. Sunlight poured down them and the carpet was worn to hessian fibres. A sign had been balanced on the lintel: Second-hand Books. I went up.
    The smell of old books: musty, skin-like, of the attic. The room was lined with tight-packed shelves and in the centre a table was heaped with books. A real jumble: Teach Yourself to Knit, Socialism New and Old, The Odyssey. A door stood open into another room. I went through. There were shelves on all four walls, bookcases dividing the space into bays and booths and alleyways.
    I wandered through the narrow spaces in an acquisitive daze. I picked up books, examined bindings, checked prices, weighed volumes in my hand. The rooms were dim and soothing and felt private and quiet as a pine wood. The carpets swirled green and gold and red. I had picked up a craft book and was looking at a very seventies illustration of a woman making a wicker basket, when someone sniffed close by, making me start. In the space between the top of some French paperbacks and the bottom of the shelf above, I saw a fold of denim and a blunt-fingered hand. I’d thought myself alone.
    I ducked through the next doorway, into a corridor lined with shelves. It ended on a small room where the floor was almost entirely covered with boxes of sheet music, slitheringly overfull. There was a second, narrower, flight of stairs with books stacked on every tread. I made my way up, was soon half-hypnotized by the repeating labyrinth of corridors and rooms, the same layout as the floor below, but with sloping ceilings and different patterns on the patchwork carpets. I found myself standing in an attic, white sunlight through a low window, a wedge of shelved wall packed solid with books, with a sense that this was something I’d once dreamed. The heavy red book seemed to nudge itself into my grip like a dog pushing its muzzle into a hand; blunt, mute, accepted instinctively. I took it downstairs with me.
    The sun was shafting down the stairwell, so that I came down it in a stream of golden dust-motes. At the cash desk, the bookseller grunted and took my stack off me. A shiver of guilty self-consciousness ran