Books Read online

  On that particular occasion she had shot nearly a whole roll of film. And it wasn’t until she was back at her guest house, waiting for a plate of evening mezedes, that she began to feel the first distant aches of dissatisfaction with her efforts on the trip to date. She was happy that the pictures she had were distinctive enough in their own way – each day she had ventured slightly farther inland and had been careful to capture the subtle changes in flora that had resulted from her extra effort – but compositionally they had one thing in common: something was missing.

  It was people. She hadn’t expected to see anyone, of course; she hadn’t met a soul on any of her previous walks and if she thought she might this time, she might not have bothered making the trip. But despite her desire for solitude, she found herself craving the sight of people.

  There was an order to photography. A way of doing things, a sequence that required of the photographer a particular engagement with the world. For her, taking a picture meant that the most chaotically inspired, the most emotionally charged moment needed to be – however briefly – viewed dispassionately. There was something about this process that she found deeply satisfying. Necessary even. She had experienced this satisfaction on a few occasions on the trip; photographing an unruly tangle of flowers that needed arranging, an insect that needed framing just so. But if you put people in the picture, well, the stakes were raised, the satisfaction became more than merely a matter of aesthetics. Because people could be contained, preserved, kept in their place through their exposure to this process. At the click of a button.

  On the morning of her second day in Corfu Town, she left her hotel after a light breakfast and wandered around photographing people. She captured them arguing in front of the ochre cafés of the Spinanda, enjoying respite from the sun in the many churches or themselves photographing the Georgian terraces of the Liston. At two in the afternoon, she returned to her room and took a shower. By now she was looking forward to venturing out in the early evening, to record the people of the town at play.

  She walked into the taverna at about four in the afternoon. She was wearing a simple white sunhat, a pale yellow cotton dress and a pair of faded leather sandals. She ordered a slightly sparkling mineral water at the bar and asked about food and then she made her way to a table.

  Richard was already half in the bag. He had looked up from his glass of wine as this poppet, no, maybe not, this num-nums, no, that wasn’t right, get a grip, man, this vision had entered. Now he stared at her, in awe. A stomach-sinking feeling of desperation washed over him, the sort that he’d felt many times when five grand had gone tits-up at the last ditch of the last race. This time it came from somewhere else, from a beauty that Richard couldn’t begin to explain or hope to possess. The woman was slightly off-centre, funny looking, even. She moved like a breeze. Her voice was a sponge on a fevered brow. She had a coolness about her and at that moment Richard wanted nothing more than to bask in her cool.

  Lauren Furrows sat at a table in the middle of the taverna. It was a small place and quite busy but quiet enough for her to relax and consider her options for the afternoon. For a moment she was distracted by the light in the room. It was good – clear and muted – and she wondered whether she should ask if she could take some photographs. But no. First she would have a drink and a bite to eat.

  She watched as the hands of a clock moved unhurriedly on a wall. The clientele was mixed. Near the door, a man and woman in their thirties sat at a table. They were each reading, he a fat, garishly covered book with a title in English, she a loosely bound A4 manuscript. A young local couple – Lauren had them down as friends of the owner – sat close together at the bar and talked in coded love. The bartender was exchanging cigarette smoke with another local, an old man with his face wrapped around his head like bark around a tree. The man on the table next to her was…

  Lauren started. My word. What was he doing? Well, staring, obviously. In what looked like dumb fascination. Now he was… my God, what was that? Was he trying to communicate something? Yes, yes he was. He was trying to smile. It was a little lopsided maybe, but that was what it was. What a strange – and unquestionably drunk – man. And what a hideous shirt!

  Ignoring him, she looked away, sipped from her glass of water and rubbed the back of her neck with her hand. She was still not used to the humidity of the island. Reaching for her camera, she flicked a few switches, set it down on the table and waited. After five minutes, the local couple left the taverna. There was little noise. The clock made no sound. The bartender was writing out a menu on a chalkboard. The old man was sucking a coffee. Lauren flexed her fingers, picked up her camera again. She liked the feel of the bar, the way that the personalities of the people there were indivisible from the environment, held in place by stone, captured by the surfaces of the ceramic tiles behind the bar. She could do something striking if she picked the right time, she was sure of that. As she had with the cyclist in the quad that evening last summer when the light was pink and the sky was strawberry rippled. She’d waited until he’d got off and was chaining his bike up before she’d taken the picture. And the two lovers she’d spied lying on the grass in the park, she’d watched them for a while, until she’d started to feel uncomfortable with their closeness. Portraiture was all a matter of timing. There was no rush. She decided she would order something to eat. She looked to the table next to her to check on the state of her neighbourly drunk.

  At the next table, Richard was slowly emerging from his state of shock. The wine was taking short cuts around his brain and his hapless desire had been replaced with a frenzied need. He had to have her, this woman who could never be his, he simply had to have her. But how best to approach her? Richard was aware that his extreme behaviour was not to everyone’s taste. He would have to approach from downwind for a start…

  After what seemed like a terrible age of anticipation, Richard settled on spillage. It was something of a cliché maybe, but it would give him the opportunity to demonstrate both his contrarian take on good manners – despite himself he liked them – and his practised approach to the removal of potentially embarrassing stains.

  There were only a couple of flaws in the plan. First, he wasn’t in spilling distance. Secondly, the woman was not sitting on any route that he could realistically take to the bar. Spillage seemed a less plausible scenario than splashage and given the distance between the two of them even that would mean the wine would have to travel a distance of well over six feet. Richard was not sure that he could pass this off as an accident. And the line between a little bit of badness and violently hoying a bottle of wine across a quiet taverna was a thin one.

  Just as Richard was contemplating feigning a seizure of some kind, the woman who sat reading at the table next to the door dropped her reading matter, pirouetted off her seat and pitched face first on to the stone floor. The woman’s companion caught his breath sharply and was calling her name even as Lauren was crossing the bar towards the prostrate figure with a controlled purpose that tugged at Richard’s loins.

  When Richard saw the writer’s name on the cover of the manuscript the woman had been reading, slick as a lech, he saw his chance to make an impression.

  ‘I’m not surprised she’s nodded off,’ he said, ‘reading that rubbish.’

  SNAPS

  Lauren Furrows sat in a pale green room and sipped a cup of peppermint tea. She worked on the campus of the University of Birmingham, in a handsome brick-red Edwardian building of the Byzanto-Italian school. Her office overlooked a quadrangle of grass that was enclosed by small-windowed and immaculately weathered Victorian blocks. A sycamore stood serenely in the centre of the square. Chittering martins and skittish swifts holidayed in the eaves above her window while down below learners and lovers gathered and sprawled and read or were read to by others.

  On the worst of days, the view was diverting. Today, however, the early September sky was blue, the sun shone, the birds sang and yet still Lauren was not to be diverted. All mor
ning she had been conscious of a question darting swift-like around her brain and she had spent at least half of this time on the phone, attempting to relieve herself of the burden of her concern. It hadn’t helped.

  The cause of her fixation was a newsfeed in the online journal Neurology Today. It was only a few lines long but its significance outweighed its brevity:

  Two deaths this summer have been attributed to a previously unknown condition dubbed Spontaneous Neural Atrophy Syndrome, or SNAPS. The first victim was a British holidaymaker who died suddenly on the island of Corfu. The condition came to light following a joint investigation between the British consul, the Greek police and medical authorities in the area, and the syndrome went on to claim the life of the British consul himself.

  Examinations undertaken by a local coroner and Sofia Georgiou, a neuro-specialist from the mainland, suggest that the condition is characterised by a spontaneous weakening and failure of the electrical signals that pass through the cells of the brain. Its cause is not known but its pathology – a precipitous cortical degradation – is thought to be similar to that identified as Sudden Onset Cerebrovascular Trauma in a journal article by Lauren Furrows in 2009 (Furrows, L (2009) Qualitative Neurological Research).

  Now Lauren was gratified to be referenced in a journal as auspicious as Neurology Today. But this particular peer acknowledgement came with caveats.

  The article was sloppy, with insufficient attention to detail. It contained assertions that lacked even the most rudimentary of empirical underpinning. Lauren’s career had been dedicated to the investigation of conditions such as ‘SNAPS’, and if there was one thing that she could reasonably assert, it was that axons didn’t spontaneously weaken and fail without reason. What external factors had triggered the cortical failure? And why didn’t this aspect of the syndrome’s pathology merit a mention?

  Lauren had worked too hard to allow her reputation to be compromised by association with a piece as amateurish as this. So. She would get to the bottom of this SNAPS business. And in a quietly satisfying rebuke to the careless tone of the newsfeed, she would do so methodically, incrementally and without recourse to unsubstantiated conjecture.

  She began her investigations after lunch. The first phone call she made was to the editor of Neurology Today. She discovered that the piece had been put together by an intern, from a news agency report. The reference to her work had come from the editor himself who was familiar with Lauren’s research in the field. Her next call was to the news agency and then, after five minutes, to the British consul in Patras; later in the afternoon there followed a brief exchange of emails with all parties, some of which she cross-referenced.

  Over the course of these communications, Lauren gleaned much. The Greek coroner was conversant with the common causes of brain death and had demonstrated the necessary methodology in ruling them out. But still the questions remained. What had caused the deaths? Were they even connected? And – if it existed – just what was SNAPS?

  There were elements of this story that Lauren was struggling with. It was clear that if she was to understand the issues that the identification of this new syndrome had raised, she would have to broaden her observations.

  Lauren made another cup of tea, thought of her alternatives. She thought back to the death she had witnessed. There had been other people in the taverna, other tourists. They might have noticed something that she had missed. Someone in particular came to mind, someone she’d spoken to at some length in the aftermath of the incident, someone who had been pleased to discover that they lived in the same city. What had he said he did? ‘I run the last bookshop in town.’ It wouldn’t be too difficult to track him down, then.

  Independent bookselling

  Richard Anger opened up late that morning. This was not the existential ball-ache he imagined it must be for his fellow shopkeepers. It was of little consequence to his daily routine – he was often late – and it did not adversely affect his mood: Richard had no desire to live in a society where the buses ran on time, still less to pander to the whims of shoppers who wanted to buy anything at one minute past nine in the morning.

  On this particular occasion he’d spent the previous night on an extended mooch around the Irish quarter of Birmingham. The session had kicked off with a few port and Guinnesses and then – inspired by a sudden burst of bleary Europhilia – he’d switched to Trappist-brewed fruit beer. The combination had been effective in settling the nerves but, despite this, it hadn’t been the most successful of his forays into the Digbeth netherworld.

  Richard was drunk by the time he’d clocked his night hadn’t had the necessary karmic imprimatur of truly bad behaviour. If he hadn’t been, he might not have approached a man whose face he recognised from that year’s surprise summer bestseller, a photographic celebration of ‘The Hard Men of Brum’. At first the fella in question had been civil enough. But when Richard’s attempts to ingratiate himself led him to assume the persona of a self-confessed ‘tasty geezer’, the sociopath’s tolerance had begun to pall. At around two in the morning he’d beckoned Richard close and muttered something in his ear. Richard thought he must have misheard. When he realised he hadn’t, he decided to leave the pub, the better to preserve his dignity and what he guessed were his kneecaps.

  Since then he’d managed to piece together only six fractured hours of sleep. And he was suffering. Not that he had a hangover, mind. Richard didn’t do hangovers. For him headaches, the fear of loud noises and the like were the stuff of caricature. Instead, he felt ill. Seriously, anxiously unwell. He was jittery and tense and felt faint. His fingers and toes were numb. His vision was blurred. A toxic foreboding trickled down the channels in his brain.

  The state of his shop didn’t help. The last thing before he’d left the previous evening, he’d had to contend with a sudden rush of schoolchildren. They’d missed the bus, noticed one of Richard’s more eyecatching window displays – the transcript of an imagined conversation between D.H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin, Michel Houellebecq and Erica Jong – and decided to familiarise themselves with the oeuvres in question. In itself, this was manageable, but a tricky situation arose when, their appetite for the printed word whetted, they’d reached the coffee-table Mapplethorpes. Were they sixteen? They certainly weren’t eighteen. Should Richard score one for the libertines and let them have a look? It was not an abstract dilemma and, reluctant to go to prison for a cause as morally nebulous as this, he threw them out. (As much as Richard liked the idea of an urban underclass of disaffected and rebellious youth, he didn’t want them in his shop.) This led to another trashed display and the loss of a sale to the nervous-looking youth with the pink drainpipe jeans who had been waiting to talk to Richard about – he guessed – Banana Yoshimoto.

  Richard made himself a coffee, reshaped the paperbacks in the window into a display which, despite his best efforts, remained stubbornly un-penis-like. He switched on the till and perused the morning’s post. As usual, it was full of books. There was something dulling about this ritual. Many publishers had stopped using sales reps and pitched to retailers by sending through new titles in the post instead. And every day, Richard despaired at the mediocrity of the new arrivals. The difficulty was that mediocrity took many forms. There was mediocre/good, mediocre/bad, mediocre/indifferent – the stuff was everywhere. He did what he could to satisfy his conscience, to ignore the sort of writing that he felt was merely words on paper, a smooth progression from point A to point B that detracted from the sum total of the human experience. But deep down, Richard suspected he was pissing into the wind.

  Today, he’d been sent three memoirs and three attempts at fiction. A Long Way from Under the Mango Tree, a tale of inter-generational conflict from inside the Anglo-Pakistani community, lumped its exotic bulk ahead of Learning to Walk – from seventeen-year-old diva Lil’ Missy Muffet – and Boom! (Bang-a-Bang), an inside story of the financial crisis written by a deeply penitent millionaire; Sophie’s Party Time by Trixi Hart, Commander Down! by J
ohnny ‘Two Splints’ Morrison and My Mates, a ‘grittily realistic’ collection of short stories from the backstreets of Burton upon Trent, completed the line-up.

  Richard shook his head. It was more of the same old same old, a steady accretion of grim. Where were the dazzlers, the men and women on the edge of their art, those who would present the world not as it sometimes seemed – muddy, impressionistic, torporific – but as it should be – brilliant and intriguing, perverse and beautiful and vile? Those who would rent and tear at the fabric of mediocrity? Those who would move us on?

  He yawned loudly, scratched his armpit and juggled his balls in an attempt to take his mind off his alarmingly tocking ticker. His phone rang and he picked it up. Then he heard the voice on the other end and found himself in the middle of his third hot flush of the morning.

  Blimey!

  ‘Hello,’ said the voice. ‘This is Lauren, Lauren Furrows. Is this Richard Anger?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ said Richard. His heart thumped an offbeat. Sweating mightily, he sat back on his stool and swung his feet on to the counter in a gesture designed to affirm – to himself at least – his ability to nonchalantly absorb the shocking reappearance of his holiday infatuation. ‘Bollocks!’ he spat, as his grittily realistic coffee went flying.