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“HANNAAAAAH!”
The shriek set Hannah’s ears ringing as she opened the door to the set, and someone barreled across the living room to fling her arms around her, almost knocking her off-balance with her heavy rucksack.
“April!” Hannah set down her case, laughing, and hugged April back. “How are you? Sorry your Christmas was a bit pants.”
“Pants is not the word. It was a big steaming pile of crap,” April said, throwing herself back on the sofa. “If it wasn’t for my sister, I’m not sure I’d bother to go back next vac.”
“You have a sister?” Hannah was surprised. She wasn’t sure why—April had never explicitly said she was an only child, but somehow Hannah had just assumed that was the case.
“Yeah, she’s eleven and a little brat, but I wouldn’t leave a dog alone with my parents at Christmas. Oh, by the way”—she threw out a hand at a small gift bag sitting on the table in front of the sofa—“I got you something.”
“For me? April, you shouldn’t have.”
“Well, I did, so suck it up.”
Surprised, Hannah wriggled her rucksack off each shoulder and made her way over to the armchair in front of the fireplace. The bag was small, white, and made of stiff card with handles of thick black grosgrain ribbon, and inside was a miniature parcel done up in holly-green paper. Carefully she took it out, unpicked the tape, and drew out the little jewel-bright box inside.
“Chantecaille,” Hannah read out. It wasn’t a brand she knew, but she could tell from the packaging and the feel of it in her hand that that was probably because it was far too expensive for the makeup counter at Superdrug. “Is it nail varnish?”
“Lipstick,” April said. “I’m so fed up of seeing you use that horrible axle grease you call makeup.” She took the box from Hannah, pried open the top, and said, “Mouth open, please.”
Hannah did so, parting her lips in that strange frozen smile that little girls learned from watching their mothers in the mirror and closing her eyes as April stroked her mouth in a gesture so intimate a shiver ran down her spine. When she opened her eyes again, April was looking smug.
“I knew it. Go and look in the mirror.”
Hannah did.
The girl that stared back at her was herself, but not herself. It was Hannah, but her lips were soft, full, and a deep rose pink that begged to be kissed. The color was dramatic without looking clownlike, the way her dark red lipstick had. It was, somehow, perfect.
“Thank you,” she said to April, and then, without really meaning to, Hannah found she was hugging her friend, feeling her fine, bird-thin bones, her face in April’s cloud of platinum-blond hair, smelling that strange dark scent that April always wore. “I love you, April. I really missed you over Christmas.”
Hannah felt, rather than heard, April swallow against her shoulder. An intake of breath, a catch in her throat. She felt April’s fingers tighten on her spine as though she almost didn’t want to let go.
Then she was pushed away, and it was the same insouciant April rolling her eyes and laughing at her.
“Yeah right, you sentimental cow. Now come on. Let’s go down to the bar. I’ve got some drinking to do.”
AFTER
Rainy days have always been Hannah’s favorite in the shop. It’s not good for business—the regulars stay home, and the tourists get taxis to the museums instead of browsing up and down Victoria Street and the lanes surrounding the castle. But the truth is that although Hannah likes the customers, they are not why she came to work at Tall Tales.
She has always felt safest surrounded by books. The library back in Dodsworth, happily browsing the early readers while her mum graded papers in the reference section. Blackwell’s in Oxford, a cornucopia of culture, everything from Aeschylus to X-Men comics. The Bodleian—an actual living temple to literature and learning. The quiet of the library at Pelham, with the low shaded lamps glowing off the dark wooden desks. Hannah has never understood people who get married at their college chapel—she has no religion, she feels no connection to that remote, austere place with its psalms and hymns and Latin lessons. She and Will got married at Edinburgh’s town hall, in a civil ceremony that lasted only a few minutes. But the library… yes. If she could have married Will in the Pelham library, that she could imagine—in the deep, reverential quiet, surrounded by all that humankind has ever known about love—every novel, every poem, every word.
So when she came to Edinburgh, all those years ago, running away from the unanswered letters from Pelham, filled with questions about her future that she couldn’t answer, perhaps it was natural that she looked for bookshop posts. A professional librarian position was out of the question, without a degree. So was work at a publisher. Once, Hannah had dreamed of being an editor, stacks of manuscripts on her desk and a wall of books she had edited in her living room. But the adverts all specified a BA at minimum, some of them asked for a master’s, or specialist qualifications. Bookshops, though… bookshops were not so prescriptive. Cathy didn’t even mind about her lack of retail experience. “As long as you love books,” she’d said, “it’ll all work out.”
And it had. At first she and Cathy had worked side by side, Cathy teaching her how to work the till, how to keep track of stock, who to help and who to leave alone.
Now, nine years on, Cathy is semi-retired and it’s Hannah, as much as anyone, who runs the shop—she and Robyn between them. It’s Hannah who speaks to the reps, checks the stock, decides how many of the new Paula Hawkins they will want, whether to put Haruki Murakami in the window, and when to ask Ian Rankin for an event. Robyn is their children’s specialist, and takes care of the shop’s Facebook page and Twitter feed.
Today, it’s been raining hard since twelve, and they’ve had only one customer in that time—a young man who has been browsing in the back room of the shop for a while. Cathy doesn’t like them to harass the customers with offers of assistance unless they look actually lost; Nothing worse than feeling jumped on, she always says. But customers who lurk out of sight in the back room are a bit of a red flag for shoplifting, particularly students with a rucksack, and it’s the nonfiction section, housing some of the most expensive books in the shop—academic reference volumes, and the fifty-pound Taschen art books. If you were going to steal stuff, that’s where you’d start.
“He needs to shit or get off the pot,” Robyn whispers to Hannah when she comes back from the staff room to find him still there, and Hannah laughs.
“I’ll go and see what he wants.”
She coughs as she enters the nonfiction section, not wanting to be seen to sneak up on customers. The man straightens and turns around and Hannah sees that he’s not as young as she thought. From the other side of the shop there was something about his sandy hair and flushed cheeks that made him look like a teenager with a schoolbag, but up close she can see he’s quite a long way past that, and as he stands, she catches a pink flash of scalp through the thinning hair at the back of his head. He’s probably in his mid-twenties, a little younger than her. Not a student, then. And probably not a shoplifter either.
“Can I help with anything?” she asks.
