Grayson Slane is six foot three. Loose limbed, box jawed and ghoul eyed. He is worn in appearance now. A complexion of mountains and deserts. Hair the colour of dust.
The second son of a Midland’s miner. He’s not been back since his youth, when he left for the other side of the world. Forever afraid of returning should it take him back to the open hand of his father’s fury. The black country austerity he fears contagious.
With scholarship and a private inheritance, a quick mind and woman’s hands, Gray worked his way through medicine. Decades ago now.
He took an apartment on the waterfront. Developed a penchant for expensive clothes, top end dining. Dangled his toes in the share market. Ran the never ending race.
He worked every extra hour on offer. Said it wasn’t the money, though there were those who thought otherwise. Every acute shift took his adrenalin to new peaks of preoccupation, taxed his oxygen. He loved it.
Grayson Sloane broke his heart first on the lives of other people, then on letting Candice Neuman go.
‘You’re obsessed with trauma and tragedy,’ said Candice. ‘You spend every waking minute looking for answers. There’s no room left for us.’
A week later Gray collapsed at work. Signed off on stress leave.
It was months down the track before Tony Willmax tracked him down. Grayson was alone. Ghost thin and anaemic. Wallowing in self-pity.
Tony took him to a meeting where they listened to a chap from Kansas talk about work in Africa.
The man from Kansas had technicolour slides, heavy with the allure of underwater swimming. Lifeguards on the shore.
In the voice of a kindly mother he talked of aid agencies and refugee camps, and the small pocket of tents his organisation put up where they thought they could help, and survive. The rewards, said the man from Kansas, were unlimited. Saving the lives of strangers. Grayson Sloane had nothing to lose.
Distance and anonymity where short lived antidotes for squalor and death. Both rampant. Never enough miracles.
It was Bern, Gray’s brother who lowered the last ladder. Brought him home.
Bern had purchased a wee business near the main street. Said it was really his new wife’s project. No great profit to be had – "Don’t tell Annabell" - but the building was a sound investment. He was biding his time.
"Second-hand books," said Bern, "And an Italian coffee machine on the counter to attract the punters. Think of it as a little oasis while you... Just until the baby’s born. Be doing us a big favour."
Gray exchanged operating theatre for playhouse, diagnosis for hero’s journey. Counted on the difference to get him through to curtain call.
* He sits, waiting. The wooden chair straight backed legs like greyhounds tight between shop window and bench. Walls stacked with an excess of stories, stranded. A dog basket but no dog The cash tin. Coffee cup stains eclipsed on the counter. Threadbare carpet (authentic) laid rough on old stone. Silverfish, dead and alive. The tightness of unread pages.
He likes Rankin and Winslow. Rebus, Harry Bosch. Crime, a good police procedural. The predictability of a resolution. The formula always yielding relief. Makes his own happy endings. Keeps his head down.
Tuesday morning in the shop - in truth, it could be any morning - in his chair. One long leg taut over the other. Paperclips. Tedium turning to ordinary. One eye walks the paragraphed page, the other marks a transient customer at the window. A woman.
Gray is at the part in his novel where... Malone’s in lockup, the wind has stopped blowing... everyone knows it’s the eye of the storm...
He unfolds his legs. Balances the book in both hands like a butterfly. New wings.
Marks his page with an old boarding pass. Receipt from another continent, another life. Dog eared. Grubby. One way. Aden Adde International Airport. MGQ, Mogadishu.
She’s unlike the regulars. Not the dull clobber, nor the slow eye of the usual stooped itinerants. Those who come on a Tuesday morning having cashed their pension. To look. To scrounge a hot cuppa. To trade a few words in nebulous banter.
She’s tarted up round the eyes like a painting. Lempicka. Warhol. They are green. Green as a field scorched in summer sunlight.
Her head slant. Skims the spines. She is listening for stories. He knows she’s seen him.
The straight line of her back as she looks up and down the shelves. Heron in shallow water. Elegant. Rapt. A scallop of mud on the side of her shoe. Brown leather, worn at the heel.
Nothing noteworthy in what she’s wearing, nothing to match those eyes. And her hair, straight and buttery, cut neat above the collar. No pinching there.
She bends, and loosens her scarf. The fine hair in the nape of her neck, dark as a cupboard.
In the privacy of the empty shop, and the length of a single sentence she places the full weight of Gray’s past at his feet.
"Anything about Africa?" she says. Her back still to him.
Her accent’s northern. That canny lilt, running on empty after a score of antipodean years. Geordie, perhaps.
"Travel books. Back room."
He reaches up, flicks the light.
...the dead quiet lull that comes before the worst of it...
"No," she says, louder this time. "Stories. Made up ones. Set in Africa."
He pulls the boarding pass, marks his page again.
She is looking at him now. Her face round, a symmetry he has not expected. That flush of pink.
"Like, you know, that film. The one with Meryl Streep."
"Born Free?"
"No." She smiles. "But yes, like that."
"Karen Blixen. In Kenya?"
"Was Meryl in it?"
"Yes, and Robert Redford."
"Yes, that’s the one."
"It’s a true story."
"Really?"
"Yes. Memoir. Try those shelves." He puts his head down, points behind her.
"Blimey. Needle in a haystack, love. Give’s a clue."
"They’re alphabetical."
"A for Africa then?"
"By author."
"Cor, must be hundreds here."
"I’d have to read for years if I was to catalogue them by subject."
Air spins between them, vibrates.
She turns quick and catches him looking. Her scarf now unravelling. A parade of elephants over a green silk jungle. He regrets his sharpness.
"Try B, for Blixen. Or H for Hartley. Aidan. He writes about Africa too."
...one night in a cell, freedom already seems strange to Malone...
She sees the boarding pass.
"Where you been, then?"
How easily he comes to the frayed end of himself.
He could tell the truth.
He could say Africa.
Somalia. Hargeisa, Bosaso.
He’ll get back to Malone faster if it’s London.
"London," he says.
"Well, aint you the lucky one then." Those eyes again, circling him like a firefly. "Fancy. Now me, I ain’t been back in years, love. Don’t miss it neither, not really. Not to say I don’t get out, mind."
She’s talking to the window now. Watching new rain darken the road. Dismantling the afternoon. "Who’d have thought it’d rain like that today, eh? And here’s me out without a coat."
...Malone didn’t start out to end up here... without his gun or his shield...
She hands him a paperback.
"You read this?"
"No." He tries to smile.
"Must be good to own a bookshop. Sit on your chuff all day. Read anything takes your fancy."
"Just helping out," says Gray. "It’s really my brother’s..."
He turns her book over in his hand, reads the blurb.
"This is fantasy," he says. "Changed your mind about Africa then?"
"It’s about this princess who fights to end a war and saves a whole village of starving kids," she says.
"Nice." He makes a clicking noise with his tongue.
"She has magical powers."
"Of course she does," says Gray. He hands her back the book.
"Toughest problems get solved with a bit of imagination," she says. "Didn’t Einstein say that?" She picks at the folds of her canvas bag. "Three dollars is it, love?"
A fist of sirens howl as she drops coins in the cash tin.
"Look, the rain’s stopped," she says. "See if I can make it to me bus before the next down pour."
He watches her slide the book into her bag. The slow curve of her fingers. Tender, newborn pink. She looks up, without the smile this time.
"I don’t miss home, you know," she says. "Absence is one thing. Abandonment is quite another."
The bell above the door rings and the hinges sigh.
He sees her on the footpath through beads of old rain on the shop window. The way the ends of her green scarf work free, fly behind her like a pair of swallows teasing an updraft. The way a fringe of white cotton swirls below her skirts, and the way her yellow hair flashes across her face. She looks both ways, crosses the road, and disappears through an alleyway.
Judge Lee Murray's comments:
A beautiful whimsical story.
After several readings, I’m still not quite sure what message I’m meant to grasp from this piece—possibly something about constantly moving on as a means of escaping trauma and eventually realising you can stay in one place and find the same solace in books—however, it doesn’t seem to matter, as the prose is so delicious, and since repeated readings offer new perspectives into the character’s brokenness, I feel sure one more reading will clinch it.
The author’s startling imagery, masterful use of fragments, and brave inclusion of poetry to progress the plot, captivated me. And there is the charming rom-com allure of the English second-hand bookstore setting, and long hours spent reading a book balanced ‘in both hands like a butterfly. New wings’, which, of course, is every writer’s secret dream.