The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner (16 page)

Irish pubs and Breton creperies; one chain importing Guinness with bonhomie while the other specialises in cider with Breton dairy products. There are, however, similarities: the franchised
decor of uniformity and the businesses’ lucrativeness.

I have no difficulty in locating ‘Mont St Michel’ in Montparnasse. At 11.15 a.m., as arranged, I walk into the creperie and make for the bar, squeezing myself past tables and chairs. Up from behind the bar pops the smiling face of a man with a viciously receding hairline. His expansive smile conveys the warmest of greeting. But before either of us can speak, an emaciated individual appears with a cigarette poking out of his sullen face.

‘Luc?’ I ask. He nods and makes it obvious I am expected to follow as he descends a spiral staircase. The cavernous cellar turns out to be the kitchen and where the restaurant’s dishes are cleaned.

On trolleys and shelves is piled a mountain range of
food-stained
plates. Stack upon stack of crockery. There are also smaller piles of white bowls on a table amid the cutlery and glasses that bear the remnants of last night’s wine and cider. Luc doesn’t trouble himself to speak – perhaps distrustful of my French. Body language is used to explain what is required. A preliminary clean to remove most of the food and the cigarettes butts; a knife used to scrape the debris into a bin liner. The plates are then to be placed (with loving care if his gesture, made in slow motion, is anything to go by) into an industrial cleaner. A green button is pressed and the machine makes a rumbling sound for the three minutes it functions on a timer. Hey presto. The plates are removed in a puff of steam to be neatly stacked on a trolley.

Luc leaves without a word and I surmise that I am to get on with it. The cable operating the dumb waiter makes a creaking noise under the strain. A stockily built Indian about my age is filling it with crates of Perrier. Having sent it
heavenwards into the eating arena he comes over and is delighted to find that I’m English. ‘It good job. Easy work,’ he says. He wants to talk but has to react to instructions that are being barked down the intercom. More cider needed. Singh complies before efficiently preparing the salads.

After several hours of tedium, I can just about see the end in sight but then Singh carries over more plates from the lunchtime service.

We eventually emerge from the kitchen. The boss isn’t about so Santos, who is Portuguese, can speak freely behind the counter. ‘Engine off,’ he says before treating us each to a fabulous banana and chocolate crepe.

Another man in his forties turns out to be the real boss. Singh explains that that he owns four creperies in the district, two in the same road. Luc is second in command.

After eating, I get ready to leave. Singh will hang around as he also works the night shift. He matter-of-factly tells me that afterwards he’ll visit a brothel. ‘I’ve been going there for three years.’ Five minutes earlier he had been describing to me the beauty of the
Mahabharata
, a celebrated and sacred epic poem of the Hindus, written in Sanskrit.

Days pass. Dishes are washed. In the bowels of the creperie, I try to calculate how many dishes I’ve washed in my lifetime, my current job boosting significantly my daily average. I imagine a dishwashing day of reckoning whereby a mighty column of plates reaches high like Jacob’s ladder into the clouds of God’s kingdom.

My French is improving but the result is a chipping away at illusions I’d naively held onto until recent weeks. People the world over wallow verbally in the mundane routine of everyday
life and that the weather is chief among their preoccupations.

Mornings drag by, after which I play exuberant games of football with ex-pats in the Jardin des Tuileries. Eddy plays too and it’s the only time we now spend together. Eddy has moved in with Sylvia and it’s weeks since I saw Delgado. I spend most evenings with a book for company. I am re-reading Edgar Allan Poe’s only complete novel,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

I keep this book close to my bed as a talismanic object, hoping to use it to draw upon some of mankind’s innate resourcefulness. Pym’s salvation lay, unknown, just yards beneath his feet. Maybe mine is similarly within reach, requiring just a mere helping nudge of fate.

Author, former harpsichord maker, environmental activist, Wolfgang Zuckermann, now in his seventies, has recently opened a bookshop in Avignon. He’s named it Shakespeare in honour of Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare & Co. opened in Paris in 1919.

Having opened our bookshops at roughly the same time, we like to compare experiences and even our respective takings. He kindly listens to my complaints over ‘
les charges sociales
’. Wolfgang has astutely set up his shop as an association to avoid such costs. I call it wisdom.

I went to this game but, being a Chelsea fan, experienced rather different emotions on the day. I wouldn’t have expected Nick Hornby to appreciate the fragile artistry of Pat Nevin or the surging runs of David Speedie. As home supporters, we are first to stream out from the ground. Outside I catch that smell of league football; the mingling odours of cigarettes, hotdogs and horse manure. The crowd is mostly good-natured, buoyed by unexpected victory, but there are still men who proceed down the Kings Road with an air of menace about them.

I check out a nearby second-hand bookstall. The exhilaration of the game is beginning to fade, replaced by a warm glow of satisfaction, but my mind can’t focus in the search for books. Random stupid thoughts assail me; given his
career as gunrunner, would Rimbaud have been an Arsenal fan? The Arsenal hordes will soon be let out. I don’t intend to loiter. There are old match progammes but I’ve never been really tempted by these. Like memories, they are somehow infinite and yet ephemeral.

My loyalty to the club dates to junior school when teachers generally held less liberal and caring attitudes towards children from rough neighbourhoods.

Eddy makes a resplendent entrance into the classroom, flouting school dress convention. The form teacher, Mrs Bremner, affectedly holds her mouth wide open as Eddy shuffles self-consciously past her, a striking blue figure amidst a room filling with its daily complement of grey jumpers. Eddy drops behind an ink-scrawled desk and into a chair also given the full graffiti treatment. But his swift movements fail to conceal the football kit. Aside from white socks and white stripes running down the sides of his shorts, Eddy is clad in cotton dyed blue in sporting allegiance. Mrs Bremner makes certain that her expression of shock has been universally perceived before she speaks.

What I find distracting is the eerie inertness of Eddy’s head and his thick messy hair. From my angle his head is barely eclipsed by the silver strands on the head of his inquisitor. For a moment I have a ridiculous impression they are kissing. The threat of banishment is stridently issued in tones that belie Mrs Bremner’s short and rather peculiar stature. A huge pair of breasts induces a stoop in her posture, and her pupils, keen to pay testimony to their cruel wit, brand her as the ‘milk float’, a nickname that proves durable.

Eddy looks unruffled. Maybe it’s shock. But from this moment I know that I’m a Chelsea boy too.

In one of the Sillitoe boxes, I might have discovered a story about a man with confused ambitions who must resist a tendency to fixate on limited editions (even his washing machine is a first edition Hotpoint). Amid tales of travel, written in the present tense because that is how he lives them, are chance meetings with verse and prose. He puzzles over the reliability of memory. Is it a present representation of the past? Or the actual past, laid down in neural pathways, resurfacing in the present? It would seem difficult to filter out all the fiction from the fact. Whatever memories are, writing about them is an attempt to impose if not an order then at least some sort of theme to a life lacking in clear direction. Amid a stream of consciousness, he recollects: The births of his children. The polished syntax of a Penguin rep. A knife point mugging in Barcelona. Finding B. S. Johnson’s
Trawl
in a box of Mills and Boon. Diarrhoea on a Corfu beach. Samuel Beckett’s miniature signature. The pallor on the face of a young waitress behind a fish and chips counter. Led Zep taking to the Knebworth stage. Hell’s Angels on a Devon beach. MacGowan mud pelting at Glastonbury. Watching
Match of the Day
in a post-operation painkiller high. Drinking tea with an Israeli soldier beside Bala lake. Finding reminder notes in a hymnbook that belonged to a church organist, recently deceased. A hashish bean soup in Corsica. Impromptu kick abouts.

Life, at times, has an overwhelming intensity. The exhilaration may cause dizziness, and he self-prescribes autonomy to loaf about in imagined worlds, to deal in books and to dream. A buzz of expectation to banish the banal. Groping among the dirt and dust at the bottom of boxes,
fingers eager to uncover rare, limited editions, he can lose himself ‘so that time and place and circumstances are annihilated in this sweet game, as in no other sport’. There is always the chance of a bargain, whether it be found in the shelves at Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road or from Pwllheli public library offloading old stock. He must learn, however, to abstain from snapping up books that were once bargains. The internet plays merry havoc with prices. The perennial fear of dealers, that the rare books will die out, is perhaps a more justified one these days. Charity shops have got savvy. Auctions generally are a better bet. Delving into a box bought at a recent sale, with the beetles and spiders scuttling away, he discovers two books that, being hidden beneath old newspapers, had escaped everybody’s attention. One book, with colour plates that illustrate beautifully the varieties of pheasants, will pay for a flight to Mumbai.

And the other is a book with a passage in it that made a strong impression on him several decades ago,
A Sentimental Education
by Gustave Flaubert. In it somewhere is an acceptance by Frederic Moreau, the novel’s protagonist, of life’s vicissitudes, a useful if rather bland philosophy. He rereads the novel but fails to locate the passage. Is it another figment of his imagination? Maybe it’s to be found in
Madame Bovary
, a more famous work of literature, perhaps, with memorable imagery.

He continues to hunt with delusions of grandeur; to stumble upon an ‘Et Tu Healy’, a broadsheet poem by James Joyce said to have been published when Joyce was nine years old. Or better still; a ‘
Love’s Labors Won
,’ a Shakespeare lost play achieving mythical status since 1953, when Solomon Pottesman discovered it in the 1603 booklist of the stationer Christopher Hunt, listed as printed in quarto: ‘Marchant Of Vennis, Taming Of A Shrew, Loves Labour Lost, Loves Labour Won.’

The story ends before an aborted enquiry into the ethics of selling them, for as Percy Fitzgerald in the
Book Fancier
says: ‘the loyal heart would feel a twinge or scruple, as he carries off from the humble and ignorant dealer, for a shilling or two, a volume that may be worth ten or twelve pounds. No sophistry, he concludes, will veil the sharpness of transaction, in which profit is made of poverty and ignorance.’ This applies to capitalism itself but the realisation of it does not deter the story’s protagonist, now middle aged, from planning more journeys, exploratory missions to the East whereby en route he may even seek some Vedantic wisdom. Beside his bed is a
well-thumbed
copy of the
Let’s Go Guide to India
with the addresses of Delhi’s bookshops underlined. He continues to chase after it, still searching.

Bill Rees lives between Bangor and Montpellier, and makes his self-proclaimed ‘precarious’ living by translating French football matches into English for a Dutch bookmaker, as well as selling the occasional book. As a graduate of Bangor University, Rees worked as a reporter for a local newspaper in London, before the lure of travel and bookselling led him to take a less conventional road.