Read by Patsy Prince
The first time I had sex in a bookshop was chance. I was downstairs with my boyfriend-at-the-time. He, Marcus, was into music memoirs. Tales of high-jinx and substance-abuse. The sort of thing this place kept in the basement. Anything that had been scrawled out on top of a guitar case by a real rocker. Not Moby, if you get me. Not Fat Boy Slim. This was the early 2000s, and like his heroes, Marcus thought himself a player. He was a fair bit older than my not-so-innocent twenty-five and he wore a leather jacket perpetually. In many ways, I was the product of my all-girl upbringing and that meant I was game. That’s what Marcus saw in me. A young woman with a manageable element of damage blended with a compulsion to rebel.
I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but it was The Waves that was the important one then. I heard somewhere that Virginia Woolf’s books were about glimpses into the fabric of existence. Insights she called ‘moments of being.’ Her idea was that we live our lives in a state of obliviousness, distracted by work and obligation, thrown off course by other people and their needs. Then, something will come along and break this monotony. Her examples were the touch of a petal or noticing a particular fish in a pond. Something, anyway, and the surprise of it allows us to briefly see our interconnectedness with the complex and mesmerising web of all living things, to understand our place within this vast and exotic entanglement that includes our own life itself.
Put another way, these instances of the self are almost the exact opposite of the sex thing people talk about as a little death – the petit mort – and I mention them here, not because I found myself fingering Mrs Dalloway as I climaxed, but because it was something like the thing I felt that early evening with that gorgeous old-rocker Marcus humping away at me on the downstairs table of the grubby bookshop with the oversized music section and tea-stained carpet. The one off the side of the high street, not too far from where I was born. For a moment, nestled amongst all those wondrous books, I saw how my soul was bonded with the universe.
*
The whole thing escalated, of course. Marcus and I were a long way from exclusive, and my second literary rutting was with a young man who looked like he might have been called Harry or Charlie. My guess is he was an employee or, perhaps, the son of the proprietor, as the bookshop he worked in was far from hip. It was one of those with sections themed by country and each shelf would have a few guidebooks – Lonely Planets to Michelins – before it veered into histories or translated literature. Italians cooking pasta. Yellow covers. The outlines of French women complete with poodles and Tricolores. Maybe Indians facing their karmas against beige sleeves, and it was the Nordic stuff I bent myself over, my head nestled between Halldor Laxness’s broodingly magical Independent People and Tove Jansson’s joyously meandering Summer Book. That’s where I was for the brief frisson of Harry, or Charlie, or whatever. Absolutely transported from my little slice of England.
I did it against a Cloud Atlas display. This must have been 2004 and those books of cosmic rebirth rained down on my lunch date and me. I don’t think he, Mikey, could quite believe what was going on as, after, he kept saying ‘What the hell? What the hell?’ as we were chased through the Galleries, my knickers in his hand. Later, he sent me a text saying we weren’t right for each other. I’d come to the same conclusion. I needed someone with better access to the page, and I ended up seeing Kev, a divorcee who owned an infrequently visited secondhand bookshop on the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells. This was okay for a while, but only okay. Perhaps the smell of the used books ended up being too grubby, or their pages too worn, because I found myself, again, out looking for the avant-garde.
And it had to be bookshops. While good for beanbags and those shelves on wheels, libraries just didn’t do it. Lex, a mature student with a summer job in Camden, hurriedly showed me that. I needed pristine covers and unfolded corners. I needed Waterstones or, better still, a smart independent1. I needed highbrow. I wanted my back against Ishiguro and Julian Barnes. Zadie Smith and Ali Smith. Paul Auster. Italo Calvino and Camus. Camus again, and Paul Auster again. God, Paul Auster. There was such richness in those works. Excitement. All of them. The possibilities seemed boundless, every which way, and I drank them in with a loose American in Paris. Shakespeare and Company: summer of 2005. An Italian on the very same bench the following night. I could barely conjure up the energy to stack the few shelves they asked me to the following day, let alone meander along the banks of the Seine, The New York Trilogy in hand.
Then there was the art section at the back of Toppings store in Bath, where the nook behind the circular staircase was wonderfully convenient. There was the upstairs in Daunt Books in Marylebone, a sort of mezzanine with the oldest wood banisters that smelt of varnish and books. Don’t forget Blackwell’s in Oxford. Under the tables. The carpet so coarse. Waterstones in Reading. Waterstones in Bristol. Waterstones in Southampton. Waterstones in Piccadilly. Waterstones in York. I chalked up every one and I loved it2.
I loved every one.
*
My bookshop highs lasted for a full nine years, and if I had to pin the moment it started to go wrong to a single novel, it would be Wolf Hall. This isn’t to take anything away from Mantel’s reimagining of Cromwell. They say she communed with the spirits and there is something of this in the pages. She seems to be present in Tudor London. There is real shit on the street and her character feels the loss of a child that is so present tense. But, it was the way the book was embraced by the reading public that snatched the enjoyment of this thing that had been keeping me going for so long. From that moment on, bookshops seemed to tilt. The displays going first and the shelves following not far behind. They lost direction. They became unadventurous, homogenised.
I sought help and I failed. At one point, I tried to do it on a table of Sebald knock-offs, and it has to be said, my industrious partner in the act, Jonathan, was giving it his best shot too, but the pair of us ended up slumping into the sea of covers unfulfilled. Some of them had found photos on the front. Others were wrapped in minimalist pen and ink drawings. It hadn’t worked. Perhaps I was just older, or jaded, but I couldn’t help thinking that the bookshelves had become distractions of their own, that the formulas of a guided discovery for the reader and the crafted precision of prose had squandered the essential truth that the rawness in the words used to hold.
I found myself thinking about my father and this illness that took him when I was a girl turning into a woman. How his eyes dimmed as he looked up at me from that hospital bed. The frailty of his fingers. The thinning of his paper skin. The patina of inky veins and the way my mother folded into the pages of herself after he was gone. How university had seemed vacant. The studying so pointless. His death in the air around me.
I found myself wondering about my own place in the world. How we are all fleeting, how we are inconsequential in amongst this vast multitude of being. My sleep was patchy, and there was too much news. I was watching television. Scrolling. Growing hopeless. The days drifting away from me as unfathomably as the whale-free meanderings of Captain Ahab in the nonsense of Moby Dick. Each month as long as a sentence in Proust. Years like Russian novels, and in them I grew more and more numb.
I was worrying my friends, worrying myself, when I saw an advert for a group of ramblers.
They were walkers, really, and I wasn’t sure. Nature didn’t feel like something I could identify with, but I was greeted by the stile near the canal by Steve, our guide for the afternoon. He was rugged enough for the task. All gracious with the gates and enthusiastic with the chaffinches, yellowtails and sparrows. Muscles and sensitivity, if you know what I mean. Careful to make sure everyone had just the right amount of milk in their tepid coffees.
‘Go on, have a second biscuit.’
After the break, we happened to fall into step with one another. The pair of us were way at the back, lagging someway behind the eager pensioners with their matching walking trousers and coats, and the sun was low, throwing a rich evening glow into the valley, and Steve said, ‘There’s nothing better for getting a bit of colour back into your cheeks,’ and I said, ‘Really? I can think of something.’
The rest of the group were really quite a way ahead of us now, and there was a look in his eye that I remembered, a glint that I knew so well, a Woolfian look of connection and existence, and he said, ‘Perhaps you’re right?’ and I said, ‘I am Steve. You know I am,’
And I couldn’t help but smile, glinting back at him, flicking my eyes towards the half-cover of a hedgerow in a way that meant:
Now. Right now, Steve. Let me show you what I mean, right this second. I can read your dirty little mind like a grubby paperback.
(c) Al Crow, 2025
FOOTNOTES:
1 Don’t get me started on WH Smiths, and I never did it on a Harry Potter, that would have been wrong. Poetry sections were off the cards too. I’m yet to meet a man who could sustain it in the poetry section. Of the three times it started there, we were forced to relocate on every one.
2 Almost every one, anyway. The Milton Keynes Waterstones was only a hand job, and interrupted at that – but perhaps, this is made up by my managing four of the different floors of the Waterstones’ headquarters in Piccadilly.
BIOS:
Al Crow works across fiction, creative non-fiction & poetry. Recent work is featured in The Last Song, words for Frightened Rabbit; Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices, & Last Light, an anthology of Apocalypse Poetry; as well as Lighthouse & The London Magazine.
Patsy Prince trained at RADA & KCL. Film includes: God is Dead, The Bad Nun, Mummy Reborn & Culture Shock. Theatre includes The Moat (Network Theatre), Misfits at the Space Theatre (nominated at The Asian Media Awards) & Voices from September 11th (Old Vic). She also co-hosted 'Open', a podcast on The Women's Radio Station. An ex-lawyer, ex-parliamentary candidate & ex-hotelier, Patsy is now excelling at being a bad wife, drinking too much gin & expanding her collection of millinery.
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