Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

Author:Claire-Louise Bennett [Bennett, Claire-Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473594364
Publisher: Random House

I hadn’t yet read any Dante, but I had read Machiavelli and Marlowe and John Milton. One of my school friends had brought me a Penguin edition of Paradise Lost. She gave it to me before I headed up to London to begin a degree in English Literature with Drama and Theatre Studies and she’d written good wishes and some other things inside the cover. I think she’d managed to fill the whole page. I don’t remember what she wrote, but I can remember her handwriting. It was quite big and the letters were very rounded, yet the words were bunched together, so even though there was a lot of space inside the words there wasn’t very much space between them. It was probably fashionable to write that way. There’s a fashionable way of doing everything at that time of one’s life of course. For a while all the girls put a line through the letter ‘s’ so it looked like a dollar sign, teachers hated that and forbid us from doing it – I did it for about a day and a bit and then couldn’t be bothered anymore. And some people, though again probably only girls, did circles above the letter ‘i’ instead of a dot which looked idiotic, I couldn’t see how you could expect anyone to take anything you wrote seriously if you did that so I never did it. I have no idea where my copy of Paradise Lost is now. When I left England to move to Ireland many years ago I put my books and the belongings I’d accumulated up until then in boxes and I put those boxes in various garages and sheds for safekeeping. During the first few years of living here I travelled back to England with my then boyfriend two or three times and we collected a couple of his boxes, a couple of my boxes, and brought them back in the car to Ireland. I didn’t get the books. I always thought I’d get them the next time, that they weren’t really essential, and anyway if you’re just renting places and you don’t know how long you’re going to be in a particular place it doesn’t feel good to have stacks of books everywhere. Though having said that I’m still renting and I have stacks and stacks of books by now. They don’t bother me anymore. I don’t have any furniture really so I’m still fairly unencumbered, though the idea of having to move again makes me feel sick. Perhaps if the books I have were on shelves or in bookcases they might seem more imposing and would weigh on me more but they are in piles on the floor and on the arms of the sofa and against the walls and beside the bed and so on. Someone who snuck up to see me in my flat, at eleven o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday of all days, and snuck back home at lunchtime, never to

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