A Fucked Up Life in Books (19 page)

BOOK: A Fucked Up Life in Books
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I turned to my favourite books:
Until I Find You
– I loved it so much I’d made him read it; Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory
– he’d read it to me as a bedtime story;
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
– I’d spent hours telling him about my love for the cowardly Corelli and why he was wonderful;
The Periodic Table
– he’d introduced me to Primo Levi;
Selected Poems of John Clare
– he’d bought me for my birthday. They all meant something different now, they weren’t a comfort or an escape anymore. They were memories of him.

The third week I tried harder.
Frankenstein
,
Fragile Things
,
Wizard’s First Rule
,
The Princess Bride
,
The Lady and the Unicorn
,
Cat’s Eye
,
Hangover Square
. Books that were just mine. They didn’t work either. Every time I couldn’t make it past the first page I put the book on the table and made a neat little stack of things that didn’t work anymore. I tried to just find the passages that made me happy but the words looked bland and ordinary. They’d lost their magic.

Every day, wherever I went,
The Quincunx
came with me in my bag. Sometimes I’d take it out and hold it. Sometimes I’d look for crease marks on the pages to see where someone had stopped, or breaks in the spine where someone couldn’t reach the words on the very edges anymore.

I haven’t heard from him since he went. It’s as if he’d disappeared. And if I shut the bedroom door then it feels like he was never here at all. As is the fucking law of the world, everything makes me miss him, so I’ve stopped putting the telly on and I’ve stopped fucking about on the internet and I’ve stopped looking up and around when I’m walking to and from the tube for work.

At home, I’d sit with a book on my lap and wait for him to call. He has to, after all, because all of his stuff is still here. And while I waited I looked at my books and thought about how now none of them had anything for me. None of them made me feel happy.

Today that all changed. I needed to get out and I needed to look around and find something to make me happy. I didn’t want to feel so fucking miserable on my birthday. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in real life, face to face, all week and was frightened, but often it is only fear that can make you do things.

I got the tube to Wood Green and headed to a bookshop ran by someone that I talk to on Twitter – The Big Green Bookshop.

I’d never been there before and so I didn’t know what to expect. When I went in and looked at the table display I smiled for the first time in fuck knows how long. A lovely arrangement of books that I had read and loved, published by independent and obscure publishers and so obviously thought about as important. You wouldn’t find that in a fucking Waterstones.

I wandered around the whole shop looking at everything. It just felt so nice and I felt normal, where everything else in my life felt so fucking completely out of my control I knew what to do here, and for the first time in six weeks I felt safe.

I went back to the table and looked at the books there again. There was one,
All My Friends are Superheroes
by Andrew Kaufman, that I hadn’t read before. I’d read
The Tiny Wife
, however, (it was the first book I ever reviewed on my blog) and decided that was the book I was looking for, the book that would help me read again.

I left it there and went over to a shelf where I rummaged in my bag for a piece of paper. On the back of the receipt I wrote a note, scrunched it up in my hand and went to the counter, picking up
All My Friends Are Superheroes
on the way.

‘Good choice,’ said the man at the desk ‘It’s a wonderful book, it will make you feel happy inside,’ he said, pointing at his chest.

I was so nervous.

‘Like
The Tiny Wife
?’ I asked.

‘I haven’t read
The Tiny Wife
,’ he said.

‘You should,’ I said. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Then I will,’ he said.

I handed over my money and he tucked the receipt into the book.

‘Are you Simon?’ I asked.

‘… Yes …’ he said, obviously unsure where this was going.

‘Here,’ I put my hand down on the counter with the note sticking out underneath. ‘Don’t look at this until after I’ve gone, okay?’

‘… Okay …’ he said.

I picked up my book and left the shop.

On the tube home, for the first time since I’d been alone I opened a book and began to read. And he was right, it made me feel happy inside.

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Copyright

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith

London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by The Friday Project 2013

Copyright © Anonymous

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook Edition © May 2013 ISBN: 9780007514991

Version 1

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

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Australia

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Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

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Canada

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New Zealand

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United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

London, W6 8JB, UK

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

United States

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New York, NY 10022

http://www.harpercollins.com

BOOK: A Fucked Up Life in Books
3.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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