I lie on the floor with my head on my books and my feet up on more of my books and stare up at the ceiling with its flystuck old electric fitting and at this point in the story even the ceiling is glorious.
the book club
The girl who went missing was the same age as I was. Her school photograph was in the papers and on the Scottish news on television, which I found very exciting at the time since nothing about where we lived was ever on television, not even Scottish television. I was ten. I spent the long light nights that summer playing by myself in and out of the greenhouse my father was putting up in our back garden. It had no plants or glass in it yet, just the concrete floor, the frame of its sides and roof and the new door stiff in its runners. I could put my arm through glass that wasn’t there and imagine it passing through solid wall, like in The Bionic Woman. I could lean out of the top half of the door like it was a stable door, or crouch down under the metal bar across its middle and walk through the bottom half of it without opening it.
I heard my father over the fence talking to someone by the garages. He called me out of our garden. She loves books, he was saying to the man. Here, he said to me, this man says he’ll let you choose any book you like out of his van, then when you’ve read it you can give it back to him and get another one.
The man’s name was Stephen; he sold books round the Highlands and Islands. The inside of his van was all books. It had folding steps at the back doors; it was all right to go in because my father had said it was. It wasn’t a library, they weren’t for borrowing, they were for selling. They had titles like Papillon and Shogun. I chose one about someone looking for someone, with the actress I now know to be Diane Keaton on the cover smiling and smoking a cigarette; I chose it because she was pretty.
If you’re careful with it, the man from the van said, I’ll be able to sell it on.
He showed me how to hold it and bend it gently so the spine wouldn’t crease and so I wouldn’t smear the page-edge with dirty hands. I read it in bed. It was about sex, then somebody killed her. Each night I held the book like he’d shown me because of the person who would be reading it after me, maybe someone who lived out on one of the islands. Someone up there would buy it from the van and would have it in their house and I had to make sure they would never know I had read it before them. There was a girl from the Outer Hebrides at my school. She spoke like her words had extra sounds to them, fussy-edged like the lace things my mother stuck with long pins on to the backs and arms of the new three-piece suite in the front room.
My mother, eyeing me blank and steady over the breakfast plates.
Iona, you’re looking a bit pale, she said. Come here.
She felt my head. I had been awake long after everybody else, reading and re-reading the bits about sex and the part at the end where the man did it, holding the book as hardly open as possible with my head at an angle to try to make out the words at the hidden inside ends of the lines.
I was up late reading, I said.
She pushed the butter into her toast, hard and spare with the knife. Neither of my parents read books. If you worked you had no time for it. My mother especially had no time for it, she saw no point in it, which is why it’s still surprising to me that one of the very few things I have of hers now, ten years after her death, is a book. Rip Van Winkle and other stories by Washington Irving. She gave it to me one afternoon when I was in my twenties, home from college for the summer; you can have this, she said. God knows where she’d kept it, I’d never seen it before and I knew every book in the house. It was a school book. It has her maiden name and the name of her school written in neat handwriting inside a printed shield saying This Book Belongs To, and her name scrawled in blotted blue capitals all along the page edge in messy different-sized letters. Its date of publication is 1938, the year her father died and she had to leave school. She was fourteen. Now I have the book, her grey leather driving gloves and her wedding ring.
I am thinking about all this between the airport and home, in a black cab crossing the South-East of England. The driver is keen to talk to me, I can sense it. I take a book out of my bag and hold it ready, though I know if I do actually try to read it I will get motion sickness. It’s a book that was on a lot of shortlists last year. It’s written by a man and the trick of it is that it’s written as if a woman were writing it. Everybody says it’s good. I turn it over in my hand. It smells of my father’s tomatoes. I hold it to my nose and fan its pages. My bag is full of tomatoes, some near-ripe, some still green. I am supposed to put them on my windowsill when I get home.
The driver half turns towards me. I open the book in the middle. I glance at it, then out of the window. The grass on the road verges is high again, the fields the gold colour they go at this time of year. I press a button by my armrest and the glass to my right slides down. Summer air comes in. The summers go round and round, they seem not to get any older at all, they seem smooth, repetitive, summer back again, but really they date as hopelessly as if you put an old 45 on a turntable, or maybe took an old 45 off a turntable and skimmed it into a canal on a still day like today then stood staring at the surface where there’s nothing to say anything ever skimmed across it or sank below it or happened at all.
Now the driver is asking me something. Excuse me, he is saying from behind his divide. Where do you want?
His voice sounds amplified but far away. I’ve already told him where we’re meant to be going. What if we’re going the wrong way? I don’t have that much cash on me and already the animated circle on his meter which lights a new piece of itself every three or four seconds and means ten pence each time the circle completes itself has completed itself an alarming number of times and we’re only just on the outskirts of Luton.
I tell him the name of the town again.
No, but where? he says.
Near the centre, I’ll tell you when we get there, I shout at the divide.
But where exactly? he says. The street you live in. How is it spelled?
You won’t know it, I shout. It’s very small.
You don’t need to speak so loud, he says. I can hear you.
Without taking his eyes off the road he points to a sign above the back of his head. When the light is on, the sign says, you may speak to your driver.
Oh, right, I shout. Then I speak more normally. The street I live in is very small, I say, but when we get there I’ll tell you which way to go.
No, he says. Because look.
He has a screen stuck to his dashboard about the size of a paperback. He flips its insides down and open. He punches some buttons.
I just told it the city we’re going to, he says.
A voice comes out of the screen, the voice of a middle-class English lady. She says: at the next roundabout, continue straight ahead . Words appear on the screen at the same time saying the same thing.
We come to a roundabout. We continue straight ahead.
So where do you live exactly? the driver says.
He enters the name of my street into his machine. Several maps flash up. That’s where you live, isn’t it? is that where you live? he is saying. There? He swivels his head from me to the road ahead then back to me then to the road again. The cab swerves as he turns. I slide about on the seat.
Yes, I say.
See? he says. It’s good, isn’t it? It can tell you about anywhere. Anywhere you ask it. Anywhere at all. It sends a signal to the satellite and the satellite sends a signal back.
He points at a small dark box fitted on to the other side of his cab.
And you can have the voice on to tell you, or just the words on here if you don’t want to listen to the voice, or both, if you want both, or neither, if you don’t want a voice or the information, he says.
He switches the voice on and off to show me. He turns its volume up and down. He is a lot younger than me. It’s a new cab. Everything metal about it is reflecting light and its grey insides are new. It says on a sticker by my hand on the door the words Made
In Coventry With Pride.
It cost eighteen hundred, he says, and that’s not all it does. It tells you, look, it tells you all these things.
At the next roundabout, the lady’s voice says, continue straight ahead.
He presses a series of buttons one after another.
It tells me the fastest route, he says. And the route that is quietest. It tells me exactly how many miles till I have to turn left or right. It tells me about roadworks. It tells me how many miles it is to your house, not just to the city but right to your house. And look, it can tell me the route that saves me petrol, and when we get to town it will tell me exactly which way to go to get to your house and exactly how many yards before I have to turn left or right to get there. See that roadsign? What does it say?
Bedford 15 miles, I say.
Look on here, look, what does it say?
Bedford 15 miles, I say.
Exactly, he says. Exactly. So if we wanted to go to Bedford, we would know for certain without needing a roadsign that it’s only fifteen miles away. Did you ever travel in a cab like this before?
No, I say, this is my first.
I wonder to myself if it is an elaborate chat-up technique. Do you want to go to Bedford. He tells me that soon all cabs and probably all cars will have navigation systems like his.
My name is Wasim, he says. I’ll give you my mobile number and whenever you need a cab from Luton you can call me and I’ll always fetch you from the airport.
What? he says when I tell him my name. How is it spelled?
He tries to make sense of it.
It sounds like three words, not one, he says.
It’s the name of an island, I say. It’s a place. You could type it into your machine and find me on it.
Ha ha, he says. But where are you from, if it is okay to ask?
I point to the screen. You know exactly, I say.
Ah, he says. No, before that. You’re from somewhere else. I can tell by the way you speak.
At the next junction, the middle-class lady’s voice says, turn left.
He tells me he has a cousin who works in Glasgow. I tell him Glasgow’s not really near where I’m from.
I visited, he says. It rained.
He lifts both hands off the wheel in a shrug which takes in the whole country round us, deep in its afternoon sun.
I nod and smile. I sit back.
Are you too hot? Do you need air-conditioning? Tell me if you need anything, he says.
I’m fine, I say. Thank you.
If you want to go to sleep, go ahead, he says. I’ll wake you when you’re near home.
He flicks a switch on the dashboard. The little red light above his head goes out.
Her name was Carolyn Fergusson, she lived down the Ferry, it was before the new bridge and I can remember the posters stuck on the shop windows with her school photograph on them, she looked sad. They found her in her uncle’s house up in Kinmylies hidden all over the place in supermarket bags in the cupboards, I remember a friend of my parents coming round to the house and telling them; he knew because he worked at the police labs, and that the smell when they went in was really terrible even though the summer hadn’t been nearly as hot as the one the year before; they were in the kitchen talking about it and I was listening through the door and when they heard me there my mother shouted at me to go out to the back garden and bring the washing in. That summer I Feel Love by Donna Summer was number one for weeks and after it the Brotherhood of Man. Running away together, running away for ever, Angelo. Whenever I hear those songs now I think of then. We weren’t supposed to leave our gardens; we were supposed to stay where our parents could see us at all times. The following summer we could go where we liked again and I can’t remember what was number one.
Next to the tomatoes in the bag is the lump of defrosting soup in its Tupperware container; he wrapped it in newspaper to keep it cool. He is refusing to take any of the pills his doctor told him to take. He was proud about it. You’re being stupid, I said. Rubbish, he said, they do you more harm than good. He took me out into his garden and pointed at some huge concrete slabs by the greenhouse and said, as soon as you’ve gone I’m going to take those seven slabs up and put them back down on the other side of the garden and then I can swing the caravan round on to them, and then there’s a fridge-freezer in the garage I’m going to move into the house later today if I can get it through the door. You are joking, aren’t you, I said. But he’s a bit deaf in one ear and he was looking away from me with the wrong ear turned towards me, he didn’t answer.
I feel the cab turn left. The soup is wrapped in newspaper covered with the story of the missing schoolgirls, which is why, I suppose, I’m even thinking of Carolyn Fergusson. It’s pushed the build-up of war on to the second and third and international pages. It’s always in the summer they go missing, as if it’s the right season for it, as if the people who take them have been waiting, like farmers or fruit pickers or tabloid editors, for the right weather to kick in for it. When I was about twelve and got home late one summer night, when they’d been calling me and calling me all round the neighbourhood to come in and I hadn’t heard, they were so angry that they threw me round the kitchen, my father grabbing one arm as my mother let go of the other. I bounced off the units. I was bruised all over. She was particularly good at being furious, slamming the prongs of her fork into a piece of potato at the dinner table, warningly looking away from me and saying nothing, and because the saying nothing was so much worse than the saying something I remember her saying:
I swear Iona, in a minute it’ll be the back of my hand.
You’ll be the death of me, girl.
You’ll be sorry when I’m gone.
Then I remember something I haven’t thought about for years. She was standing at the table flicking through a magazine and she held the magazine up and looked at me across the room. It was summer. I was sitting on the couch watching anything on TV. I was seventeen and sullen. She flapped the magazine in the air.
I think we should join this, she said.
It would be something about sewing or Catholicism or being more like a girl was supposed to be. I watched the TV as if something very important was on.
For only a penny each, she said, if you send to these people, you can get four books. A penny each. There are all these books you can choose from on this page. All you have to do is buy their Book of the Month. And then what they do, after that, they send you their Book of the Month every month for a year and you don’t have to buy it if you don’t want it. They have all these things you can choose from for a penny. The Collected Works of William Shakespeare. That would be a useful book for you to have.
What? I said, because I had been fighting for nearly a year to be allowed to do English at university, not Law or Languages but something that meant I would never have a proper job. I can see myself now coming across the room, my eyes wide, my face like a child’s, or like someone whose hopelessly foreign language has suddenly been understood, and my mother pleased with herself, holding out the open page to me.
We ordered the Shakespeare collection and a dictionary and a thesaurus and a book of quotations. Four weeks later they came all together in a box through the post and with them was the hardback Book Club Book of the Month which was called Princess Anne and her Horses and was full of colour photographs of Princess Anne and horses. My mother laughed and laughed. Then she saw the price of the book.
The following month the Book of the Month was a book about royal palaces. The month after that it was about the life of an English Edwardian lady. The month after that it was about the history of fox-hunting. They came every month, about gardens and the stately homes of members of royalty, always glossy with colour plates, expensive unwieldy hardbacks and my mother, who kept forgetting to send them back before the crucial eight days’ return time, kept having to pay for them. They were stacked in the back room on the floor under the coffee table and there were more each time I came home at the end of a
term.
I am wondering where all those useless books ended up, where they are now, whether they are still piled up unread somewhere in my father’s house, when I hear the taxi driver speak. I open my eyes. The red light above his head is lit.
See how close we are, he says.
At the back of his voice the middle-class lady’s voice is telling him to turn left in twenty yards.
Nearly home, he says.
Nearly home, I say.
He edges his cab between the cars parked on either side of the narrow roads before my own narrow road. He drives well.
You laughed in your sleep, he says. It must have been a good sleep.
He pulls up outside my house. It isn’t as much on the meter as I thought it’d be. It is exactly the amount he told me it would be. I get the money out and count it and try to scrape together a good enough tip and I want to ask him, who called you Wasim? was it your mother or your father? is it after someone? does it mean something? what does it mean? I want to say, are you married? have you any children? are your parents still living? are they old enough to be supposed to be taking medication for anything and are they refusing to? did you grow up in Luton? what was it like to? what’s it like there since Vauxhall closed and so many people lost their jobs? can we not just drive somewhere else, choose a place at random? could we go somewhere and not know where we’re going till we got there? could we leave the navigation system off and just see where we ended up?