Wonderboy by Fiona Gibson

Author:Fiona Gibson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Dress Ink
Published: 2012-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

chapter 13

Put Your Shoes On

At Coffee & Books, most customers take care to put books back in their proper places. Rarely would anyone be so badly behaved as to stuff a gardening manual back into the local history section, or slide an author beginning with B on to the S–Z shelf. Their cups leave no rings on the three circular tables. If a book has taken longer than expected to arrive, the customer doesn’t complain or cancel the order. They actually say thank-you, even though they leave empty-handed.

Julia’s daughter Sian, and occasionally Julia herself, serves coffees, teas and brittle biscuits for dunking into hot drinks. I man the till, a task which, as our customers are thoughtful enough not to stampede in all at once, is low on stress, and high on caffeinated beverages.

Sian is a dreamy girl of around eighteen who smells of cloves and hums unidentifiable melodies. As she wafts her smells around, I align the spines of paperbacks or draw on the backs of old posters that have been displayed in the shop window. There are notices for church coffee mornings and aqua-natal classes at Lexley Leisure Center. On their plain sides I draw that boy, the one who crept into my head years ago, before Tod, or even Marcus, and sometimes I look up to see a customer, holding a cookbook or a guide to cycling in Southern England, waiting patiently to be served.

Marcus says that since I’ve started working again, I’m more like my old self. I’m not sure what this means. I don’t feel like I’ve ever been any different. For years now, I’ve waited for something to happen, to feel suddenly sorted and be seized by an urge to start using the National Trust place mats donated by Marcus’s parents. But that hasn’t happened. The place mats are still stashed in the box with the casserole dishes.

Some nights I lie with Marcus curled around me, thinking he’ll soon complain that his shoulder hurts, or his arm’s gone numb, and assume his usual edge-of-bed position. But he doesn’t move, and I wake up still wrapped in his arms.

I buy him books from the shop—books about war, with grainy black-and-white covers—and not just because I get a thirty percent discount. I have stopped grumbling if he misses the six–thirty-five, or the seven-twenty, and no longer call him at work because he’s either too harassed to talk properly or out with a client.

If you want to know something, just ask. I don’t want to know. I have my job now, and Tod after school, and a new kitchen to choose, which I pick from a catalogue without even going to see it in the shop.

“That looks fine,” Marcus says when I force him to admire pictures of plain white units.

“Well, I like it. It’s very…”

“…white,” Marcus says, wandering away from me and the flapping catalogue so I’m left talking to the back of his head. His hair is freshly cut, shorn close to his ears and neck.

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