How we say goodbye

People gather in the shop to talk, and then they leave again. They need to say goodbye to each other.

People gather on the footpath outside and talk about things. Then they need to leave each other again.

People talk on the phone: inside the shop and outside the door; they talk on their mobile phones and need, each time, to end the conversation.

People buy books and talk to me. Then they need to leave and say goodbye to me. It’s such a simple thing. But it isn’t simple – it’s complex, and the ways to bid another person farewell are endless. The ritual of saying goodbye is sculpted with tools as fine as needles in order to fit the situation.

A man outside the shop is pacing with – not an infant – but a phone. The phone is more demanding than any infant – and far less rewarding. The phone is hard and disinterested and alive only through one plastic airway. The man was tense, needing to share information with a listener who was not interested.

‘I’m actually the son of the deceased and – ‘

‘Yes, but that wasn’t done.’

‘It wasn’t done.’

‘Just leave it.’

‘Right.’

‘Bye.’ The word ‘bye’ bruising the end of the conversation.

A child leaving behind her mother and three books under one arm. She turns to wave at me and to wave the way children do: the open hand going back and forth rapidly, level with the flower petal face, byyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeee: a ribbon of sound that ends on a note of hope and the child still looking back at me to see if I heard. I did.

Robert who gets to the door and remembers something and comes back and then leaves again, bobbing forward and backward, clutching the door, thinking about Carlos Castaneda, ‘Yes, ok, bye. Yes bye. Ok. Bye. Ha-ha, bye.’

A tradesman on a mobile at the kerb, ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ok mate. Yeahr. See ya. Fuckin idiot.’

Two ladies:

‘Bye Hilary.’

‘Bye my dearest. See you soon.’ And cardigans and pearls meet in a heartfelt.

Young women talking, intense, buttoning up coats and paying for books, ‘Thank you so much, bye‘, and there’s an emphasis on the ‘ye’, a tiny precise uplift in tone and volume to indicate energy because the day is not yet done.

School children in noisy clots on their way to Woolworths, ‘See ya idiot man.’

‘Stuff you Adam.’

And me, telling my mother, ‘Ok, see you later. I’ll see you tonight, mum.’

‘There’s no need to check on me.’

‘I’m not, mum. It’s fine. I’m coming to visit.’

‘Well, don’t if you’re busy.’

‘I’ll see you tonight.’ This phrase, this time, a code for everything said but not said.

Sculpture by Elizabeth Ostrander

Mum came in and admired my shoes

It’s still raining. Mum came in with a chocolate cake and a bag of lemons, and said, ‘Well those shoes are bright indeed.’

I said I was sick of the rain, and she said a bit of rain doesn’t hurt. Then she went out again and over to Woolworths. It takes her a while to get across the road now. She doesn’t stop at the bakery: she doesn’t agree with their scone recipe.

Outside the door, a couple on pause and examining the window display:

‘I’ve never read that one.’

‘I got sick of it.’

A couple of teenage girls: ‘You never know what you’ll find in here. How good is that?’

There’s a fevered discussion going on about Netflix and Tom Hardy. Everyone is damp from the rain. Outside a horn blast across the road. An old man walking along our side calls out, ‘Ok. Just keep your shirt on, pal.’

An old lady paid for her books with an Apple watch, deft and efficient. Then it’s quiet again.

People pass the window: I hear them: footsteps on wet pavement and black moving shapes against the light. I think about it, what my eyes catch and interpret as a person. How the shapes erupt and then regroup when two people meet and pass each other. Then I see bright pink, a beanie, paper bags, a swinging a dog lead with no dog on the end, cars hissing wetly behind them.

In the afternoon, it becomes so quiet, I can hear the clock ticking on the wall next to me. Every now and again a blast of rain.  

Ian came in for Carol Ruiz Zafon’s The Angel’s Game. Outside the sun came out brief and hot, and across the road a long line of people are standing in the buzzy sunlight. I go outside with my coffee and lean against the fence.

There are nine people and they need to cross the road. Five have walkers and one man has a walking stick. He is too far away. He’s going the wrong way. A lady yells, ‘Get Pops back.’

A young man jogs down to Pops and manoeuvres him across the road, his arm curved protectively around the old man’s back. Rain again, but the sunlight remains, flicking the air with gold and briefly turning the shower into cascading tiny bubbles of light.

The other people are still lined up on the kerb, all talking to each other as they look first one way, then the other and then pausing again to say something to each other.

A man passes me with coffee, and says, ‘That looks like an event trying to happen.’

But they are off, crossing slowly and all in a line. A ute slows and then stops.

They are nearly to the kerb. They are at the kerb and turning toward the bakery, and I have to go back inside. The sunlight is gone. There’s a couple inside waiting for me and one is saying to the other, ‘That history book there, the big one, you can get that for me.’ And he answers, ‘What on earth you want that for?’ And she says to me, ‘My God, great boots.’

The Queen died

We got the news Wednesday, and everyone wanted to talk about it. Or at least mention it. And it was cold and raining again. Christine stopped her gopher at the door and yelled ‘Did you hear?’, and I said I had. She mimicked herself crying and then zoomed on toward the bakery.

Alan had a dilemma with the bakeries: he wanted a pasty and a piece of pavlova and didn’t know which bakery to go to.

‘I don’t want any bakery to see me go into the other bakery.’

‘The Queen has died.’ I said, a bit unnecessarily.

‘Oh God, Sarah will be in a shit now.’

‘She’s bearing up well.’

‘No she won’t. Well I’m going for my pastie. Need a feed.’

But Sarah did bear up well. The Queen had died on her birthday, but she’d already stopped by to tell me that, and to pick up a Sir Alec Guinness biography. She added that the Queen dying on her birthday was an omen of some kind. Robert was here too, disappointed because his order, The Lost Book of Enki, still hadn’t arrived.

He and Sarah stood back to discuss things.

A customer asked me for Mukiwa by Peter Godwin. I didn’t have it. Sarah told Robert that she didn’t hold with that women, Camilla.

Robert said that his family, the Grimshaws, extend directly back to King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and that one day there would be a reckoning for his execution, which never should have happened.

Sarah looked enthralled.

A couple bought a stack of Ben Elton books.

Liz came in for A Fortunate Life and said, ‘Isn’t it awful about the Queen.’

Sarah said that she didn’t think that Charles was in good health.

Robert said he threw the oracle last night and the cards said that Charles would soon succumb to gout, which got all of them in the end.

Anne came in for her cookbook and for tickets to St Andrews on Sunday. A lady came in and bought The Handmaid’s Tale for her sister in hospital. They said that it was sad about the Queen.

Then Robert had to go and reckon with the bank, who were deliberately trying to erase him from their system.

Sarah went to Woolworths.

Still raining.

Painting by Karin Jurick

At a market in Darwin

My first time in Darwin: like a dream. Heat, light, rain: we breathed it in. It was hard to breathe. Then we had to come home again. Everything was different there.

At Mindil Beach, people were soft and relaxed. The market was busy. There was every kind of food. We couldn’t choose.

My grandson climbed into a tree with a trunk like an office block. Twisted roots hung from gigantic heights like tropical thighs: he scrambled and climbed, and soon two more children joined him, clambering in the heat and the extraordinary light. I wondered out loud: is it an avocado tree? A child answered me seriously: no, it’s not avocado. It’s a lemon tree. The other child said, ‘It’s a tree tree’. I walked the tree’s perimeter. There were empty wine bottles in the sand underneath. The little girls were called to family. My grandson was called down. He came, bouncing through green worlds.

Live music: the singer absorbed and passionate, apologising because she was so happy. She sang with closed eyes, leaning into the heat of the evening. We all sat about on the grass eating. Behind the singer, another performer setting up.

Amongst the market tents, so much food, coffee, soap, jewellery, clothing, my grandson got a small metal hovercraft. Music. The stall holders gossiping in tight warm knots between tents.

‘That’s not what they said last week.’

‘I know mate. It’s bullshit.’

We walked without a plan. I, myself, want to live here. But everywhere I go, I want to live there.

An Uber driver started before I was properly in the car. He said, ‘I’m so sorry madam.’

In the foyer hotel we were offered a complimentary drink. There was cold water, fruit juice, soft drinks, beer, red and white wine. I selected a frosty bottle of white wine and cradled it to the lift. A group in the foyer were about to complain. The wife told her husband he could have a complimentary beer. He subsided.

‘Geoff, do you want a beer?’

‘Well. All right. If there is one. All right then. I will. Why not.’

One morning, we went to a market. Food, coffee, fruit, vegetables, crystals, everything in dense warm quantities. A lady shopping in a bikinis and bare feet and a gentle crocheted shawl against the rain.  And it’s raining.  I saw a mountain of bananas. The stallholder with earphones was dancing delicately behind his stall. I should like to live here.

We stood with coffee. A young woman passed us, talking straight into a video call. I saw briefly on the screen, a face. It was a loud conversation. We only heard her side of it.

‘Have you just woken up?’

‘Who’s that with you?’

‘Did they stay?’

‘Are you sleeping together?’

‘Fuck you Damien.’

It’s so hot here. We’ve been cold for some time in South Australia. From our hotel one morning, it rained and rained. I filmed it on my phone as if the sound of rain was new to me. It isn’t. But intensely hot rain: that is new to me. I want to live here.

Up on the top floor, the hotel sunset bar: open from 3pm and with free canapes for all the guests. We rush up in the lift at 3.30 to try the canapes: square bowls of twisties, cheezels, pretzels, a beetroot dip with no spoon, corn chips, a tray of sweating cheese slices, a bowl of fuzzy lollies. A hot metal bath of saveloys.

People approached the buffet with delight. Some still have their bathers on, fresh and relaxed from the hotel pool.

‘Oh, you’ll like this. These little sausages.’

‘Too right.’

A man piled cheezels into a bowl and added tomato sauce. He carried it over to the pool table and his mates rushed over for the same. A man at a little outside table stacked cheese slices and ate them folded into small squares. A bottle of beer sat cold and ready, happy to wait for the good folded cheese. His companion, in a smart suit, drank red wine, and in front of him, a plate of humble saveloys.

The staff rushed, for they were understaffed. They apologised. They rushed to make it nice for us. Diners kept arriving, gazing rapt at the buffet, piling plates and sitting outside to enjoy the view: this is most of Darwin city and the horizon, a jewel at any time. And then the sun goes down in a blaze of arrogant light, stripping and taking with it any values you’ve held right up to that point.

I sampled the joy of the diners as they passed me with saveloys and corn chips and decided that I too was joyful. A waiter settled margaritas in front of a group of women who clutched each other’s hands, thanking him, and him smiling and rushing for the next order.

My grandson passed me with a bowl of furry lollies, his face a lit lamp. He left the tongs on the floor. Happiness: obviously what we allow.

hands clasped in an attitude of prayer

This is how some readers stand in front of bookshelves in the shop. Sometimes, they’ve spoken to me but forget. But that’s ok. I’ve spied spines on shelves, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and forgotten what to do.

It’s when we are most able to let ourselves happen.

Other readers pass through as though they are angry, but they’re not. One old lady bent over a wheeled walker seemed angry. But she wasn’t. She bought Paul Gallico’s Mrs Harris Goes to New York. I said, ‘My mum has this book.’ She said, ‘Oh yes.’ And her daughter, who was there to carry the books, shifted onto another foot and looked at her phone. She was angry. But that’s ok. So am I. So are my daughters.

Outside my shop, on Saturday morning, a couple of motorbikes coughed low and steady. Throaty suggestions of leaving. I hoped so. But they didn’t. They were waiting for mates.

A customer said, ‘Noisy buggers.’

‘What do you think I’m gunna do? This was shouted right at the door. A man urged companions straggling along the footpath, who ignored him. He shouted:

‘Come in, come in, come in. Just want to show this book to yous.’

‘We know you Marley.’

‘Na. Na. No way. Ok I’m going in. Watch this.’

He didn’t come in. He was moving through a pastie as fast as he could. And shouting:

‘I don’t know why you won’t come in. I’m not taking the piss. Real.’

‘What book you getting Marley?

‘Facebook. No. Joking. Just come in and look at this. I just want to show you something.’

‘Not going in, Marley. Just fuck off.’

Marley leaned against the post outside my door and finished his pastie, soothed. The group moved on, Marley trailing them, dancing with both arms going from side to side and his head following, strong and rhythmic.

At the door a new voice saying, ‘Oh, oh, oh, a bookshop.’

‘No, let’s go. You won’t cope.’ This couple in the doorway, unable to agree. ‘I’m going in. I need something.’ He want into the front room. His partner leant against my desk and consulted his phone. He said, ‘If Miles was here, this wouldn’t happen.’ He looked at me, and I agreed. Good old Miles.

The partner returned. ‘Come on you.’

‘What’d you get?’

‘Sword in the Stone. Coffee now?’

‘Yeah.’ They left.

Outside, more shrieking at the window. ‘I want to go to bed and sleep. I lay there with me eyes open all last night.’ Laughter

‘You going in then?’

‘Na.’

A group of people looked through the window, bending to peer through the glass. A man said, ‘Is it books? Not much happening in there.’ They moved on.

But books, being alive, have veins and pores and moisture. Mould spores multiply in the lush haven of a book, the paper growing life and disintegrating lusciously, like us. Liquid and angry, rhythmic, and still having the shopping to do and a good series on Netflix waiting.

Sculpture by Ans Vink

George

After closing up the shop last night I went over to Woolworths and ran into George at the end of the international cooking aisle. I was going for soya sauce.

He was standing with a modest basket of goods and a walking stick. I looked at the walking stick.

Behind him, three people clustered over a shopping trolley: two women and a man. They were fervent. The man, who a sweater hood over his eyes, was saying that he contacted Woolworths yesterday and they told him there was a three day wait. They exchanged significant looks.

George moved closer to me and raised his walking stick. ‘My God, I’ve had health things.’

I asked him, ‘But what have you been reading?’

He said, ‘Barbara Kingsolver. A giant. And you?’

I said, Evelyn Waugh.’

‘My God. A giant. What else?’

I said, ‘The Baron in the Trees.’

He said, ‘Calvino? My God. A giant.’

I said, ‘Albert Camus. The Plague.’

George leaned back and put his basket on the ground. The trio behind him were discussing salad. The man said, ‘Why the fuck is there no lettuce? And try and get oats.’ He balanced on the edge of the trolley with his feet on the rungs. The women agreed, nodding and nodding.

A lady next to me dropped a pack of instant noodles and apologised. A man walked gently behind us, leading a lady by the hand. He stopped at Pappadams. He said, ‘You love these Ettie.’ But she didn’t answer.

George said, ‘Camus. A giant.’

‘I hated him in high school.’

‘High school. My God.’ We agreed about high school and moved together to be out of the way of school children with wet shoes carrying twisties and coke to the registers. A man with a ponytail and wearing thongs said, ‘sorry mate’, to me because he needed sesame oil and I was in the way.

George said, ‘What else? What else are you reading? What about the shop? Are you still there?’

‘I am. It’s ok. But you know how slow I read.’ Then I remembered something: ‘I read Fleur Jaeggy.’

‘My God, who? Who is it? I’ve never heard of her.’

To find a find unknown to George was impossible. But I’d done it. I threw the bottle of soya sauce into my basket triumphant.  The trolley trio looked at me. A lady up the aisle said into her phone, ‘It’s the best air conditioner in the country.’

I looked at George and said, ‘My God George. Fleur Jaeggy’s a giant.’

He breathed, ‘Really.’

‘She’s Swiss, but she writes in Italian.’

George thumped him walking stick on the floor. The trolley trio looked at us again. A lady looked over from Indian cooking sauces. I saw she had Tandoori and Madras, one in each hand. I needed them too.

‘She wrote These Possible Lives.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s three squashed biographies of three of the biggies: Thomas de Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob.’

“I don’t know Schwob. Who’s he? And what do you mean by compressed?’

‘Thinned out. Spare. Carved with a potato peeler. But it works.’

‘My God. How?’

‘Don’t know. But she writes about each of them. Who were they? I don’t know, but maybe I do now. They wrote things. Each biog is a slice. Cut with a razor blade. That’s what they say about Jaeggy: that she writes with a razor blade.’

‘My God.’ George banged his walking stick again. A family with three giant packs of cornflakes in a trolley full of mostly toddlers in beanies all looked at us.

‘George, you never saw such a book. You can read my copy. You’ll die.’

‘My God.’

A couple passed us the end of our aisle, and the women said, ‘Get me some fetta, babe’, and the man turned back toward the refrigerated products aisle without looking up from his phone.

‘George, I have to go.’

‘I, too.’

‘See you soon.’

‘My God, yes.’

We parted, and I moved to the 12-item only checkout and waited behind a lady telling the cashier that the eggs in her carton had gone off.

Walking past the window and clear as crystal

It was two tradesmen striding past my window, young and rugged up in t-shirts and shorts against the cold and talking to each other.

‘She said, ‘What do you want then?’, and I said, ‘a Moderna or two will do’. But she didn’t ring me back.’

The other tradesmen said, ‘Yeah.’

Then they passed the window and were gone.

A lady bent to read a title in the window out loud to her friend. The friend said, ‘Looks expensive. I’m not getting it.’

And then two motorcyclists, parked just outside the door, returned to their bikes. They were in no hurry. Holding helmets and thinking it over and pleased with the bakery they’d just been to.

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘No, no, you pick.’

‘Oh dear. Well. I think we’ll give Macclesfield a go. What do you think?’

‘Well. Right oh then. After you.’

It took a while to get set, get steady, get the gloves on and then go. But they did; two friends riding off slowly in the cold wind together.

A lady bought two books for a granddaughter, and then she too, rode away on a motorbike. She’d been dressed in all red leather with magnificent boots and a copy of Where The Crawdads Sing just purchased.

Across the road and on the bus

Every morning there’s a small waiting crowd over there, the people still and thoughtful. I see them when I’m putting my signs out. Eventually the bus pulls up, everyone hearing it first and making small movements of preparation before it arrives.

The passengers inside the bus look out at the cold queue, look at them without really seeing them, passengers thinking through all the things in their lives, thoughts that are now blended with the inside of the bus and the angled light and the feel of the engine through their feet.

There’s only a small queue this morning, but two people are farewelling a third man and shouting directions to him as they move toward the bus.

‘Go straight down.’

The listener was also walking backwards, his arm raised and thumb up, the thumb jerking up every time he shouted back.

‘Yep.’

‘Turn at the roundabout.’

‘Yep.’

‘Keep going down, you’ll see it.’

‘Yep.’

‘Ok?’

‘Yeah mate. See you’, and turned to jog toward a motorbike.

The bus driver, masked, was turning to each passenger then back to the front, then to the next, nodding his head, nodding his head. There was a bottle of hand sanitizer next to him and a jacket folded over the back of the seat.

The queue shuffled forward. A young man was trying to fold a pram on the footpath. A young woman at the front of the bus kept looking back at him. She had a toddler on her hip; the bus driver was looking at the young man through the windscreen. The motorbike exited the carpark entrance without looking to give way.

The young man must have got the pram onto the bus because the door was hissing shut, and the bus was pulling away and everyone’s heads relaxed and jerking back a little with the movement of the bus in exactly the same way.

The coffee people

Come into the shop with extra muscles and more blood than other people. Come in grinning. Eyes sparking humorous energy. Can get down to the bottom shelves even when balancing hot coffee; the bottom shelves are fun. They get the music I’m playing, sometimes executing a few imperceptible dance steps next to Biographies.

When the sound of motorbikes shaves the air away from the inside of the shop, the coffee people don’t notice. Coffee is a hot fragrant cushion. The young couple nursing steaming hot coffee look at me and nod happily. There’s another family in here too this morning, flushed and fresh from cold grass and junior soccer. They are on their way to get coffee.

One of their children bought a book about chocolate to the counter. His two golden coins were hot clutched. He handed them to me, hot, clutched, melting.

A smaller girl appeared at the counter, just her face. Then a five-dollar note flapped onto the counter in front of me.

Then her book poked up slowly and was laid next to the five dollar note: Lego Star Wars. I gave her back a coin and her eyes widened, then softened.

The coffee people cross and re cross the floor, going from room to room beaming light, carrying Ernest Hemingway and Chaucer. Reaching for Johnathon Swift, The coffee illuminating and warming sudden new interests.

I can hear children quarrelling smally in the back room.

Now the green grass soccer family are leaving, everyone with a carefully chosen book, and mum with a paper bag, a newspaper, her book, and a son burying his head into her stomach as they bundle through the door and into the cold which isn’t cold for them.

The coffee people continue, ‘What about the collected works of Charles Dickens..?’

‘We’ve got most of them.’

She nods and dives at the lower shelves. Something else.

Why are people so quiet when they look at books?

Sometimes customers are so quiet, I forget they are there. They’re in danger of being locked in, something that’s happened in bookstores before. But never here (yet). People can be silent when it’s necessary.

Browsers of books are always moving; it’s just that you can’t see the movements; imperceptible downloads of information and ideas so astonishing, that on the outside the reader appears as though paralysed. They move from shelf to shelf, giving back only delicate breath, and sometimes not even that.

An arm reaches. A finger touches a spine, asking something. The book is grasped and held, examined. Rejected. Or, held while the reader’s head tilts back, giving ceiling to the eyes, which need it because the memory they are interrogating is too large for this small shop.

Sometimes the paperback is placed under one arm and carried softly along.

Readers gaze into long barely lit thoughts which are ignited and hiss briefly before going out again, sparked by pictures on covers, images on spines, the dry smell of paper, the thick loving waist of a paperback no longer new, the cough of an opening sentence that you remember icily from high school.

Small children are the stillest. All the action happens in the small roaring rooms of their minds. Sometimes their eyes go wide and their lips compress. Then back to normal, all in a second. Once a child shook his head sharply as though trying to dislodge something back into the book.

Some readers press hands to hearts while they read. Others go up on toes and down again. Men jangle keys and coins and say, ‘HA!’ to the page. Readers come and tell me what they just found, and others place their books before me apologetically, as though admitting inferiority of choice. There’s no such thing.

 Sometimes readers just gaze at a book, neither touching nor opening the covers. Why? What are they thinking? They might turn their heads just slightly, and that’s all.