The shop next door is empty, a yellow and black FOR LEASE sign in the window, the outline still legible from where the paint has been stripped from the window: HAIR TODAY. He takes out his phone and snaps a few photos, visual prompts for when he’s writing. The next store is entirely shuttered: a weatherboard fa?ade with two small windows, both boarded up. The door is secured with a rusty chain and brass padlock. It looks as if it’s been like that for a lifetime. Martin takes a photo of the chained door.
Returning to the other side of the road, Martin can again feel the heat through his shoes and he avoids patches of oozing bitumen. Gaining the footpath and the relief of the shade, he’s surprised to find himself looking at a bookstore, right by where he’s parked his car: THE OASIS BOOKSTORE AND CAFE says a sign hanging from the awning, the words carved into a long slab of twisting wood. A bookstore. Fancy that. He hasn’t brought a book with him, hasn’t even thought of it until now. His editor, Max Fuller, rang at dawn, delivering his brainwave, assigning him the story. Martin packed in a rush, got to the airport with moments to spare, downloaded the clippings he’d been emailed, been the last passenger across the tarmac and onto the plane. But a book would be good; if he must endure the next few days in this husk of a town, then a novel might provide some distraction. He tries the door, anticipating it too may be locked. Yet the Oasis is open for business. Or the door is, at least.
Inside, the shop is dark and deserted, the temperature at least ten degrees cooler. Martin removes his sunglasses, eyes adjusting to the gloom after the blowtorch streetscape. There are curtains across the shopfront’s plate-glass windows and Japanese screens in front of them, adding an extra barricade against the day. A ceiling fan is barely revolving; the only other movement is water trickling across slate terraces on a small, self-contained water feature sitting atop the counter. The counter is next to the door, in front of the window, facing an open space. Here, there are a couple of couches, some slouching armchairs placed on a worn rug, together with some book-strewn occasional tables. Running towards the back of the store are three or four ranks of shoulder-high bookshelves with an aisle up the middle and aisles along either side. The side walls support higher shelves. At the back of the shop, at the end of the aisle, there is a wooden swing door of the type that separates kitchens from customers in restaurants. If the bookshelves were pews, and the counter an altar, then this might be a chapel.
Martin walks past the tables to the far wall. A small sign identifies it as LITERATURE. A wry smile begins to stretch across his face but its progress is halted as he regards the top shelf of books. There, neatly aligned with only their spines showing, are the books he read and studied twenty years ago at university. Not just the same titles, but the same battered paperback editions, arranged like his courses themselves. There is Moby Dick, The Last of the Mohicans and The Scarlet Letter, sitting to the left of The Great Gatsby, Catch-22 and Herzog. There’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, For Love Alone and Coonardoo, leading to Free Fall, The Trial and The Quiet American. There’s a smattering of plays: The Caretaker, Rhinoceros and The Chapel Perilous. He pulls out a Penguin edition of A Room with a View, its spine held together by adhesive tape turned yellow with age. He opens it, half expecting to see the name of some forgotten classmate, but instead the name that greets him is Katherine Blonde. He replaces the book, careful not to damage it. Dead woman’s books, he thinks. He takes out his phone and snaps a photograph.
Sitting on the next shelf down are newer books, some looking almost untouched. James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, Tim Winton. He can’t discern any pattern in their arrangement. He pulls one out, then another, but there are no names written inside. He takes a couple of books and is turning to sit in one of the comfortable armchairs when he is startled, flinching involuntarily. A young woman has somehow appeared at the end of the central aisle.
‘Find anything interesting?’ she asks, smiling, her voice husky. She’s leaning nonchalantly against a bookshelf.
‘I hope so,’ says Martin. But he’s nowhere near as relaxed as he sounds. He’s disconcerted: at first by her presence and now by her beauty. Her hair is blonde, cut into a messy bob, fringe brushing black eyebrows. Her cheekbones are marble, her eyes sparkling green. She’s wearing a light summer dress and her feet are bare. She doesn’t belong in the narrative he’s been constructing about Riversend.
‘So who’s Katherine Blonde?’ he asks.
‘My mother.’
‘Tell her I like her books.’
‘Can’t. She’s dead.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. If you like books, she’d like you. This was her shop.’
They stand looking at each other for a moment. There is something unapologetic about the way she regards him, and Martin is the first to break eye contact.
‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘Relax for a bit. You’ve come a long way.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘This is Riversend,’ she says, offering a sad smile. She has dimples, Martin observes. She could be a model. Or a movie star. ‘Go on, sit down,’ she says. ‘Want a coffee? We’re a cafe as much as we’re a bookshop. It’s how we make our money.’
‘Sure. Long black, thanks. And some water, please.’ He finds himself longing for a cigarette, even though he hasn’t smoked since university. A cigarette. Why now?
‘Good. I’ll be right back.’
She turns and walks soundlessly back down the aisle. Martin watches her the whole way, admiring the curve of her neck floating above the bookshelves, his feet still anchored to the same spot as when he first saw her. She passes through the swing door at the back of the store and is gone, but her presence lingers: the cello-like timbre of her voice, the fluid confidence of her posture, her green eyes.
The door stops swinging. Martin looks down at the books in his hands. He sighs, derides himself as pathetic and takes a seat, looking not at the books but at the backs of his forty-year-old hands. His father had possessed tradesman’s hands. When Martin was a child they had always seemed so strong, so assured, so purposeful. He’d always hoped, assumed that one day his hands would be the same. But to Martin they still seem adolescent. White-collar hands, not working-class hands, somehow inauthentic. He takes a seat—a creaking armchair with tattered upholstery, tilting to one side—and starts leafing absent-mindedly through one of the books. This time she doesn’t startle him as she enters his field of vision. He looks up. Time has passed.
‘Here,’ she says, frowning ever so slightly. She places a large white mug on the table beside him. As she bends, he captures some coffee-tinted fragrance. Fool, he thinks.
‘Hope you don’t mind,’ she says, ‘but I made myself one too. We don’t get that many visitors.’
‘Of course,’ he hears himself saying. ‘Sit down.’
Some part of Martin wants to make small talk, make her laugh, charm her. He thinks he remembers how—his own good looks can’t have totally deserted him—but he glances again at his hands, and decides not to. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, surprising himself with the bluntness of his question.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What are you doing in Riversend?’
‘I live here.’
‘I know. But why?’
Her smile fades as she regards him more seriously. ‘Is there some reason I shouldn’t live here?’
‘This.’ Martin lifts his arms, gestures at the store around him. ‘Books, culture, literature. Your uni books over there, on the shelf below your mother’s. And you. This town is dying. You don’t belong here.’
She doesn’t smile, doesn’t frown. Instead, she just looks at him, considering him, letting the silence extend before responding. ‘You’re Martin Scarsden, aren’t you?’ Her eyes are locked on his.
He returns her gaze. ‘Yes. That’s me.’
‘I remember the reports,’ she says. ‘I’m glad you got out alive. It must have been terrible.’
‘Yes, it was,’ he says.