Gothic

A bookstore clerk confronts corpses, urinators, men with damp handkerchiefs, and a restrictive dress code. And, worst of all, authors. A short story from the author of the Booker-nominated "Hotel World."

By Ali Smith

May 24, 2004 | This actually happened to me.

It was an afternoon in spring not long ago, in the mid 1990s. A man came into the bookshop where I was working. He looked like a bank clerk or an accountant or some kind of businessman; he had distinguished looking hair and was wearing a suit and tie. I straightened my shoulders. I was already in trouble at work and didn't want to get into any more trouble. He looked like he might be important.

I worked in a more old-fashioned bookshop at that time; what I was in trouble for was not wearing the right kinds of clothes. Shortly before the day I'm talking about I had gone to work wearing a sweatshirt with a designer slogan on it. It said across my back IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FILLED WITH JOY. The sweatshirt had caused a major staff commotion and I had been called to the boss's office and given a dressing down (as it were), a row about always wearing trousers instead of a skirt and thirty pounds' unprecedented allowance to go and buy some proper blouses. There was a lot of anger in the staffroom about me getting money for clothes. The old members of staff, who smoked a lot, thought it was outrageous, though they already thought I was outrageous anyway for not wearing the right kinds of clothes, and the young members of staff, sitting resentful in the veil of thick cigarette smoke, thought that it was unfair and that they should get a blouse allowance too.

I was wearing one of the proper blouses the day I'm talking about. They both itched and I disliked the cowed, dulled person I felt I'd been made to become by wearing them. But I smiled at the man who'd come in. He was nothing like the man standing over there, behind him, at the shelf where The Chronicle of the Twentieth Century was kept.

The Chronicle of the Twentieth Century, until a couple of weeks before, had always been out with its pages open somewhere in the middle of the century on the lectern specially supplied to the shop by its publisher. Three of us worked on the ground floor and we had decided to remove the lectern because every day this man came in, took out his wet handkerchief and hung it over the back of the lectern while he read the Chronicle. Every day the same; he would come in, he would hang it up, read for hours then finger it to see how dry it was, fold it up, put it in his coat pocket and leave the shop.

We were always getting people acting weird in that shop. It had been a bookshop for hundreds of years, in the same old building full of hidden corners, sudden staircases, unexpected rooms. People had died in that bookshop. Old members of staff were always talking, huskily through the breathed-out smoke in the staffroom, about the day one of them found the lady lying dead among her shopping bags, her legs sticking straight out, her coat askew and a look of surprise on her face, or the day another of them found the man sitting on one of the windowsills on the third-floor stairwell staring straight ahead, dead.

We had a man who used to steal books, bring them back again after reading them, slide them on to the shelves and choose new ones to take away with him. We called him the Maniokleptic. We had a man who would fall asleep as he stood leaning against the shelves. We called him the Narcoleptic. We had a woman who would come in and pick up whatever was on the New Books table, turning the pages very fast like she was taking photographs with her eyes. We called her the Critic. We called the two old ladies who always came to any readings at the shop so they could drink the free wine Raincoat and Mrs. Stick (Mrs. Stick used a stick to walk with). I much preferred working down on the ground floor; where I'd worked first, up in a room off a staircase at the back of the second floor, we were always having to clear up after the people who urinated in True Crime, the spines of Dead by Sunset, The Yorkshire Ripper, Massacre, Crimes Against Humanity, Perfect Victim, The Faber Book of Murder dripping again under the fluorescent light. We called the urinators the Gothics.

Our name for the man with the handkerchief was Toxic. The day we took the lectern away all three of us gathered at the front desk nudging and shushing each other to see what would happen. He came in as usual. He stood where the lectern usually was. Then he came over to the counter. Barbara stared at the floor. I stared at my hands on the counter. He asked Andrea if she could point him in the direction of The Chronicle of the Twentieth Century.

Andrea blushed. She was the ground-floor sub-manager. She raised her arm and pointed it out to him in Non-Fiction. Then she said, wait. I'll show you. She took him over and found it for him. We all watched him spread the book open on the shelf at reading level, shake his wet handkerchief open and hang it off the edge of the bookshelf; it draped over the books on the shelf below. When it was dry he closed the book, put it back where it came from and left.

He was there again the day I'm talking about. He was always there. I could almost see its contents evaporating into the air, circulating throughout the shop in the ancient rattling heating system (although it was supposed to be spring, that morning there had been a white frost up the sides of all the church spires when I was on my way to work, frost across the endless tenement roofs). Earlier while I'd been watching him I'd been wondering again about leaving bookselling. I had turned away so as not to have to see him standing in his coat with the grey belt hanging; I looked out of the window instead at the busy Old Town streets and the blackened church and shops, the taxis passing and the wind whipping the people about as they stood by the pelican crossing or hunched themselves against the weather up and down the street where the museum was. My blouse was too tight under my arms. I stretched my shoulders and wondered if the material would rip. I wondered what it would be like to be working at the museum with its glassy-eyed stoats and stuffed hawks and foxes cordoned off behind the Do Not Touch signs, the dinosaur bones wired together the height of the grand hallway, the sound of genteel heels tapping on marble, the scholarly, weighty, methodical air. But they probably had a dress code at the museum too. Probably people like this man would stand about there all afternoon as well, hanging their handkerchieves to dry off the toe-bones of extinct creatures, urinating on the predators. I stood and wondered if there was anywhere in this city I could work where I wouldn't feel that while I was doing it life, real life, was happening more crucially, less sordidly, somewhere else.

Then the smartly dressed man came in and stood at the counter. I smiled at him.

Can I help you? I said.

Next Page: This book, he said, is in its own way a kind of rebellion against exactly what we've been talking about

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