“I was wondering if you had, on pre-order, a book called The Kensington Diet by…” He rummaged in his pockets, and looked at the emergency exit sign. “By, ah, Dr. Frederick Byrne.”
“Oh,” I replied, strangely embarrassed for him. “Right! Okay!”
I started to type. “On pre-order, did you say?”
“Yes,” he rushed. “It’s not coming out until February.”
“February eleventh,” I said, reading the screen. I named the publisher. They were famous, and Irish, and famous because they were Irish. They discovered a lot of authors that would then abandon them for larger contracts in the UK.
“I wanted to know how many the shop had on order,” he asked. “Bit pathetic, but this is my first time publishing outside of an academic press, and I’m hoping more than four people might read it.”
I saw that the order selection was zero.
“Fifteen,” I said. “Fifteen copies.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Quite a lot, then.”
“Yes,” I answered, trying to suppress the blush that always accompanies my lies. “We’re very excited about it.”
He cocked an eyebrow, wary that I might be making fun of him.
“I mean, obviously we’re excited about it, if my manager is ordering in copies. What’s it about?”
“Irish writers during the famine, the artistic response to Victoria starving us out of it,” he answered. “Very cheerful stuff, I assure you.”
I remembered the Eavan Boland poem that I had done for the Leaving Cert. She and Adrienne Rich were the only poets I liked at school.
“What is your body now,” I said, quoting her. “If not a famine road.”
“Very good,” he said, and the atmosphere was tense again, too much like teacher and student. He was growingly conscious of how vulnerable he was, enquiring about his book like that. That particular poem also had a certain relevancy to his personal life, but we’ll get to that later.
James came over and started scanning a stack of books he had just recommended to an old woman. James didn’t read much but he was constantly watching films, and for that reason he was always selling Notes on a Scandal and Perfume: The Story of a Murder. He had the best sales numbers of anyone on our team, which is why Ben kept him long after his Christmas-temp term was up.
“What’s the craic?” he said cheerfully. James would never judge you for talking to a friend at work, and you could always count on him to cover if someone popped in to see you.
“James, this is Dr. Byrne,” I said. “He’s one of my lecturers.”
“Well, how do you do?” James said. He didn’t go to college but loved talking to people connected with it like this. It was somewhere between a piss-take and genuine admiration.
“Very well, thanks.”
Dr. Byrne moved quickly, as if realising that he had been lingering too long. I wanted to dive across the counter and keep him from escaping out of our private world filled with little poses and sexy jokes about literature. But I could not do this, so he paid for his things and left.
The rest of the shift passed quietly. Now that we were living together, James and I loved arranging our shifts so that we were both closing. We pulled down the shutters ten minutes early and blasted our own music through the speakers as we tidied up.
I, however, was taking longer than usual.
“What are you at?” He put his head on my shoulder, gazing at the monitor. “Who’s Dr. Frederick Byrne?”
“My college professor. The one who came in earlier? And this is his book.”
“And who’s Moira Finchley?”
“She’s an ex-customer. She died a few years ago,” I said. “She’s also one of the people who’s ordering his book in.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I stupidly told him we pre-ordered a load of his books. We haven’t ordered any, but if Ben thinks that customers are ordering it in, he’ll order some.”
“Okay.” James began to nod. “I have a question.”
“Why am I doing this?”
“Yes.”
“Because…I don’t want him to be disappointed. He’s so excited about his book.”
James practically leapt into the air.
“You dirty bitch!”
“Shut up.”
“So, what? You’re charging some old dead lady for a book she won’t read because you’re horny?”
“No! It won’t charge her. No one will pick up the book, and then I’ll just put it out on the shelf.”
“Who else are you going to make order it in? Who else is dead?”
“The rest I’m just inventing,” I said bashfully. “I’m making new customer profiles on the system.”
He looked shocked at what he perceived to be the first real insane behaviour from me.
“Jonathan broke up with me today,” I said, hoping that he would interpret my crazy behaviour as a kind of noble grief.
“He broke up with you?” he replied, in disgust. “I thought, the other way around, maybe.”
“Why! I loved him!”
“Rachel. Come on.”
“We went out for two years.”
“Well, I’m glad he’s gone.”
The fact that he could talk to me like this, after a month and a half of knowing each other, still shocks me. There are people in my life I’ve known years who I would hesitate to tell their clothes tags are showing.
“Well, Ben will know something is up if you don’t change the dates on the orders,” he said, pointing to the screen. “They’ll all say January fourteenth.”
So we stayed an hour after closing time to invent back-dated pre-orders for Dr. Fred Byrne’s book on Victorian Ireland during the famine. I realised that I had never been in love with Jonathan, after all. I had known the love from my parents and the strange affection of a college relationship that was somehow both stale and naive. But me and James and the pre-orders: that was love.
* * *
It worked better than we could have possibly expected. Late the following week, Ben was gazing into his A4 printouts and asked, “What the fuck is The Kensington Diet? Is that like Atkins?”
I may have been young, but I had been working in a bookshop for almost three years. Even then, I had serious questions for Dr. Byrne’s publisher, who had the gall to release a book with the word “diet” in the title so close to the New Year.
James picked up the baton straight away.
“Christ, Ben, did you not hear them on about it on Fergal O’Riordan’s show? They had that brilliant doctor on.” James was clicking his fingers, as if trying to recall. “Rachel, you know the guy, don’t you?”
“Dr. Byrne,” I said, trying to sound non-committal.
Ben looked at his form again. “There’s a lot of buzz around him, I gather.”
“He teaches up in UCC,” I said. And then, in a fit of genius, “We could ask him to do a signing here.”
“Or a launch,” James chimed in. “A Cork launch, on his whistle-stop tour of the country.”
“It would be very good for the shop,” I said, nodding at Ben, like he had suggested it.