And yet there I was sitting a few hundred feet beneath 250 tons of decelerating metal and flesh and I wasn’t bothered. Far from it.
‘Did you know,’ I said to Susan Ashton, ‘the engines on a 747 are designed to fall off in the event of excessive vibration? Designed to fall off. What kind of idea was that? Can you imagine coming out with that one on a Monday morning? You know, the design team sits down around the table to bash out a schedule for the week and you say, Hey, why don’t we design the engines so they fall off if it gets a bit rough? Save the whole wing coming off. Why do they put engines on a 747 in the first place? Because it’s a bit heavier than a fucking glider. That’s why.’
Susan Ashton was smiling. She hadn’t heard it all before. Unlike Veronica.
As a break from working in the garden, I walk into the village. On School Lane I pass Dog Man. Dog Man has a leaning-forwards gait so pronounced he would fall over if he stood still. He has a red face and five o’clock shadow even first thing in the morning. His dog, a chocolate-brown Labrador cross with stumpy legs, struggles to keep up at his side. I must have seen him fifty times and never once without his dog.
I end up in Oxfam, but the selection of books has not altered much since my last visit a week ago. There’s an extensive fiction section, but the only white-spined Picadors are the ubiquitous Kathy Lettes and a couple of Julian Barnes novels that I already have (and almost certainly will never read), and Carlos Fuentes’ The Old Gringo, which I picked up recently elsewhere. In terms of A-format orange Penguins there’s a volume of Dirk Bogarde’s autobiography, but it’s a later edition than the ones I like to collect. It’s also Dirk Bogarde’s autobiography, and while I collect almost indiscriminately within my chosen parameters, there are limits. There are three John Wyndham novels, but I have them all. Under classics there’s Middlemarch and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, both of which I already have.
They have started playing middle-of-the-road pop music in Oxfam. A Whitney Houston track finishes and is followed by Sting, the equivalent of adding insult to injury. The manageress smiles at me as I walk past the till on my way out. I draw my lips across my teeth in response.
I cut around the back of Marks & Spencer to Barlow Moor Road and the Art of Tea. I pass through the café to reach the second-hand bookseller — the Didsbury Bookshop — where I can easily lose an hour in the narrow aisles between the tightly packed stacks.
‘Hello, m’laddie,’ calls Bob, the proprietor. ‘Just having a look? Let me know if there’s anything I can help you find.’
I make a non-committal reply, knowing from experience that a conversation with Bob will inevitably come around to the subject of Europe, and Britain’s place in it. Bob holds strong views on this, but he keeps a good stock, which is all that is important to me.
There are no other customers. I can hear faint music coming from the picture framer’s workshop at the far end of the premises. On the right as you enter Bob’s domain is a section devoted to Penguins. My eyes move across the spines, looking for any new additions, checking first by author, then title. I slide out a copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Slave. The front cover is coming away and there is a stain in the bottom left corner, but I have a number of these white-spined editions and I am fairly certain that this is one I don’t have. I hold on to it while I check out the remaining shelves. I am never sure which Edna O’Briens I have and which I don’t, and I can’t remember whether I have started collecting the slim translated novels of Françoise Sagan or if I’m still saving her for another day. Bob has three, in uniform covers. I leave them for now and walk to the other end of the shop where he keeps the rest of the paperback fiction.
I am looking for the classic white spines of Picador, but for some weeks now I have been thinking that soon I will start collecting other white-spined books. Sceptre, Abacus, King Penguin. I spot a white-spined First Love, Last Rites, Ian McEwan’s first collection of short stories. My copy has a photographic cover that bleeds on to the spine. I have been keeping an eye out for a white-spined edition for years. I reach up for it and as I’m taking it down from the shelf I am aware out of the corner of my eye of someone entering the bookshop. Indistinct, dressed in black, the newcomer walks past Bob’s little table and is obscured by the stacks in the middle of the room. I hear Bob call out a greeting and make his usual offers of help, which are met with nothing more than a grunt.
I move to the left-hand wall, where there’s a small selection of crime and mystery fiction. Numerous grass-green Penguins, including several Simenons, but I can never remember which Simenons I have, so many of the titles being so similar. Maigret this, Maigret that. I crouch down to look at them, as I have looked at them on previous visits, to read the titles and try to remember whether I have seen them here, or in another shop, or on my shelf at home. I can’t be certain and so I decide that the two books I have found will do for today and when I stand up and turn I bump into the black-clad newcomer. I mutter an automatic apology and when she looks up I see that it is Grace, from the Year 1 workshop and First Novels course. There’s recognition in her eyes, but no obvious surprise.
‘I was just about to pay for these,’ I say.
She asks me what I have chosen and I show her. Her hair needs a wash, I see, as she flicks through First Love, Last Rites. It’s greasy and lank and there are some tiny flecks of dandruff on her scalp.
‘I’ve never read McEwan,’ she says. ‘Is he good?’
‘Very. The early stuff especially.’
‘You like early stuff, don’t you?’ she says. ‘First novels.’
‘The Cement Garden is very good. Nice and short, too.’
‘I was going to get a cup of tea,’ she says suddenly. ‘Do you want to get a cup of tea?’
I don’t answer.
‘I could do with a bit of help on the whole First Novels thing,’ she says. ‘If you don’t want to, that’s fine.’
‘No, no. Sure.’
It can be like a tutorial, only over a cup of tea. In a café. It’s not a problem.
I pay Bob for my books and we move back into the Art of Tea. Grace picks a little table on the lower level and we order herbal teas. She asks what cake they have and orders a piece of lemon drizzle cake.
‘For you?’ the boy asks.
‘I’ll have the same,’ I say.
There’s a moment’s silence. Grace picks up the Isaac Bashevis Singer and pretends to read the blurb on the back.
‘So, what were you looking for?’ I ask her. ‘In the bookshop.’
‘I’m still looking for most of those first novels,’ she says. ‘From your list.’
‘I don’t think you’ll find many of them here. Maybe the Jane Solomon, although I’d have noticed it if they’d had it. The Bell Jar, but you’ve already got that, I think.’
She casually pushes up the sleeves of her hooded top and my eyes are instantly drawn to the angry red marks on the insides of her forearms. I look away at the framed artworks on the wall.