Carmen was using the bottom door to get in and out of the house. The most contact she had with her sister’s family was on the nights Skylar was out, when she would sit on the sofa and let the kids fight while looking at social media on her phone and sending rude messages to Idra she really couldn’t let the children see.
She thought this was probably quite a nice break for the kids from being prodded to practise their instruments/do their homework/read an improving book every second of the day. Sofia didn’t agree. They communicated in stiff texts.
Carmen was reflecting on this sad state of affairs when the man in the shop snorted.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Has Mr McCredie mentioned me?’
‘Who are you?’ said Carmen.
‘Ha! Aha. Very good. Well. Just as well. I’m Justin Feeney.’ He looked at her face. ‘Well. Um. Okay, right. Mr McCredie told me to come in because I have the perfect book for your shop!’
He held up a packet of poorly stapled together pieces of foolscap. On the front of it was a rather badly sketched picture of a fish. Added in pen was a Santa hat. The title of the work was clearly The Fish, but the word ‘Christmas’ had been inserted in between ‘The’ and ‘Fish’。
‘The Christmas Fish?’ said Carmen slowly.
‘Yes! It’s supporting independent publishing,’ said Justin proudly. ‘I do them myself.’
‘Okay,’ said Carmen. ‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about a man’s struggle against a fish,’ said Justin. ‘He has to fight and overcome the slippery fish in a titanic struggle between man and fish. The fish is a metaphor.’
‘For Christmas?’
‘No. For women.’
‘Oh,’ said Carmen. ‘Where does Christmas come into it?’
Justin frowned.
‘Actually I’m not sure you’d really understand it out of context. But I think Mr McCredie definitely wants to take some to sell. They’re only ten pounds each, wholesale.’
‘I think I’d have to ask him,’ said Carmen.
‘But you work here, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Carmen, then lied. ‘I’d definitely have to run it past him.’
Justin frowned, and Carmen was sure she saw him mouth ‘fish’ to himself.
‘You can leave one if you like,’ she said, looking up happily as another customer entered, ‘so we could take a look at it … ’
‘To steal my idea? Not likely,’ said Justin, grabbing his plastic bag and heading out again. ‘You’ll be sorry.’
Still, thought Carmen. It proved her ‘Christmas only’ push was working if people were desperate to get their books into the shop. And he was irritatingly right about the decorations issue.
Carmen watched him go, stalking off down towards the Grassmarket, clutching his plastic bag close, and felt sorry for him.
Or, she would have felt sorry for him if, over the course of the next four days, every time the old-fashioned black phone rang startlingly loudly, making her leap in the air, it would be somebody with a badly disguised Edinburgh accent asking if they had any books in about fish as that was the kind of thing they liked to read at Christmas. And as Mr McCredie had told her on strictest terms that next time he came in she had to buy one and give Justin ten pounds from the petty cash, because that was the correct thing to do at Christmas, she found herself feeling rather told off.
As was familiar to most people in Edinburgh, you weren’t just front-facing staff; you were tour guides and historians too, and Carmen was having trouble, not being a native, although she had figured out the answers to ‘Where’s the castle?’ （‘Up the steps on the left’）， ‘OMG, WHAT’S THAT NOISE?’ （the daily one o’clock cannon designed, Carmen was reasonably sure, simply to startle people into having heart attacks and thus cut down on tourist numbers） and ‘Where’s the café J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter?’ （Carmen rotated her favourite coffee shops on this list, reasoning everybody deserved a shot）。