‘Can they plummet from nothing?’
‘I think they’re into minus figures now. We could cause the universe to implode.’
After the entertainment round came 1960s nostalgia.
‘Okay, Dad.’ Dave poked the answer sheet at Jeff. ‘Old people round. Go on, time to earn your seat.’
‘I don’t remember the sixties, you cheeky bugger,’ Jeff said. ‘I’m only fifty.’
‘If you can remember the sixties you weren’t there, eh?’ Dave said, winking at him. ‘Too many acid trips during the Summer of Love, was it?’
‘Yeah. Best first birthday ever.’
‘Right, folks, that’s your lot this half,’ Tim announced at the end of the round. ‘Free supper of chips and curry sauce will now be served, and I’ll be coming round for a quid off everyone.’
‘Awesome, I’m starving.’ Si rose and rested a hand on Clarrie’s shoulder. ‘Want some chips, kiddo?’
‘No, I’m good, thanks.’
‘I’ll come up with you, Si,’ Dave said. ‘Dad?’
‘Go on then,’ Jeff said. ‘You two get the chips, I’ll get the drinks in.’
‘I’m okay for food, I’ll stay with Clarrie,’ Sonny said. He looked up at Jeff. ‘I’ll have another Guinness though, if you’re offering.’
‘Thought you might.’
Si and Dave made a beeline for the food table while Jeff peeled off to the bar.
‘Sure you won’t come to the beer festival?’ Clarrie asked Sonny when they were alone. ‘It won’t be the same without you.’
‘I can’t, I’ve got plans.’
‘Swotting for the current affairs round hardly counts as plans, Sonny.’
‘No, I mean I’ve got proper plans.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Clar, don’t tell the boys, but… I’m going to Gurdwara.’
‘You what? Since when do you go to Gurdwara, you massive heathen?’
‘Mum wants to set me up with her mate’s daughter. Said I’d go and be introduced after evening prayers.’
‘Why? She’s been trying to set you up with some nice Sikh girl since forever, it’s never made you catch religion.’
Sonny fished out his smartphone and pulled up a Facebook photo. Clarrie looked with interest at the stunning Punjabi girl baring her toned midriff in a green and gold sari.
‘Swit-swoo.’
‘Right? Could be a winner.’
Clarrie shuffled her chair round so she could link his arm. ‘You know, you could always ask Gem to the beer festival instead,’ she said, nodding to Gemma sitting with her Pink Lady friends. ‘Bet she’d say yes. I saw her do that finger thing at you.’
‘What finger thing?’
‘You know, the finger thing. Girls do it when they fancy you.’
‘I have literally no idea what you’re going on about, Clarrie.’
‘You know. This thing.’ She parted her lips and ran her little finger slowly along her mouth.
Sonny stared at her in silence.
‘Okay, that was pretty hot,’ he admitted eventually. ‘Did she really do that?’
‘Yeah, didn’t you see?’
‘No.’ Sonny sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not getting back with Gem just because you miss having your mate around.’
‘She was your mate too. Come on, I know you’ve still got feelings for her. Everyone knows.’
‘She cheated on me, Clar, you don’t just get over it.’
‘I know,’ Clarrie said with a sigh. ‘Won’t you even consider talking to her? I know there’s no excuse but she is genuinely eaten up over it.’
‘She looks fine to me,’ Sonny muttered, glancing at Gemma laughing with her friends.
‘Seriously, I know she is. She’s putting a brave face on, that’s all.’
‘Like you’re the bloody love-life expert all of a sudden. When did you last even have sex?’
‘Not that long ago.’
‘Yeah? When?’
‘Well, give or take…’ She did a quick mental calculation. ‘Dunno, nine months ago?’
‘And that’s what you call not that long, do you? That’s the actual gestation period of a human child, Clar.’
She shrugged. ‘Well. Never really seems worth the effort, sex.’
‘If it isn’t then you must be doing it wrong. Who was it? Ed?’
‘No, we’d broken up by then. It was that lad James from the Boar.’ She grimaced at the memory. ‘Dire as well.’
Sonny glanced over to the food table, where Dave and Simon were queuing for chips. ‘You could always take Si up on his offer.’
She snorted. ‘Si Dewhirst, are you kidding me? You know he only asks me out because he’s reigning king of the wind-up merchants. I bet he’d run screaming if I ever shocked him by saying yes.’
‘You never think maybe he means it?’
‘Don’t be daft. Simon’s had knickers dropping for him since he was sixteen. Why the hell should he be interested in me?’ She tugged at her bikini strap again, wincing as the plastic bit dug into her flesh. ‘He’s like a proper grown-up, with his house and his car and his… washing machine. I can’t even manage to dress myself.’
Sonny smiled. ‘I reckon he likes you that way.’
‘Come on, he’s been asking me out since school. It’s a game to him. Just like sex is a game.’ She looked at Si, loading a couple of baskets with chips. ‘Twenty-six and he’s never had a steady girlfriend. That can’t be healthy, can it?’
‘You two’ve been best mates since you were tiny though.’
‘Exactly. And the last thing we need is to start messing about with that.’ She glanced in Gemma’s direction. ‘Shagging your friends only causes problems, Sonny. You know that.’
When the other three came back to join them, Si dumped one basket of greasy-looking chips in front of her and another by his own chair.
She looked up. ‘I said I wasn’t hungry.’
‘Yeah, you always say that, then you eat all my chips. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… well, still shame on you. But you’re not getting my chips.’
He grinned, and the fizzy feeling in Clarrie’s stomach settled down again. He was just Si. Of course he didn’t mean it. He never meant anything, did he? She grinned back.
‘You can read me like a book, can’t you?’ she said.
‘Yep. A greedy chip-thieving book. Still, I’m sort of fond of you.’ He gave her shoulder an affectionate rub as he took his seat next to her.
‘Right,’ Sonny said, pulling the answer sheet towards him. ‘Where’ve we got gaps?’
‘That entertainment round,’ Dave said. ‘Bloody reality TV questions.’
‘The sixties round isn’t looking too healthy either,’ Si said. ‘Jeff’s a dead loss – no offence, mate.’
Jeff shrugged. ‘None taken.’
‘Anyone know this one, city Martin Luther King was killed in?’ Clarrie asked, looking round at her teammates. ‘I’m sure we did it in RE.’
‘Oh, wait! Think I might.’ Sonny tapped his temples. ‘Where does Elvis live? It’s in a song.’
‘Graceland?’ Si said.
‘No, the city.’
‘Memphis?’ Clarrie suggested.
‘Yeah, that’s it. I’m positive that’s it. Put it down.’
‘Okay.’ She scribbled it into the empty space. ‘Try this one on then. Which US president was born 29 May 1917?’
Sonny was still tapping his head, as if he could shake trivia out of the grey cells. ‘Must be sixties, mustn’t it? Let’s put JFK, he’s the most famous.’
‘Bloody hell, you’re on form today,’ Dave said, reluctantly impressed. ‘How d’you know this olden day’s stuff?’
‘I’ve seen things, man. I was in ’Nam.’
‘No you weren’t,’ Si said. ‘Bet Jeff was though.’
‘For Christ’s sake.’ Jeff drained about half his Landlord in one sup and wiped a fleck of foam from his grizzled ginger beard. ‘Look, I wasn’t in Vietnam, I wasn’t in the trenches an
d I wasn’t chief fucking wiper of Queen Victoria’s arse. Now give the old man a rest, eh? If I wanted the piss ripped I’d stay in with the wife.’
After musical intros and pot luck, the team decided to play their Joker on Clarrie’s literature round as their best chance of doubling their points. But an eighteen out of twenty wasn’t enough to push them to the top. They finished fourth in the table, putting them behind The Murgatroyds, Gemma’s Pink Ladies and their main competition – last year’s winners, Les Quizerables.
‘Well, we’ve had worse starts to the League,’ Si said to Clarrie as they walked home arm in arm at the end of the night. ‘Top five. That’s not bad, is it?’
‘Mmm. We’re still screwed though.’
‘Oh yeah, royally.’
4
The Bookshelf was just that: a shelf in a broom cupboard, where Clarrie’s infrequent customers could come to browse the handful of volumes currently taking up mahogany space.
Okay, slight exaggeration. There were at least twenty actual shelves, including the dividing bookcase slicing the little room into two aisles. The second-hand books they were stacked with defined eclectic – expensive old hardbacks, iconic orange and black Penguins, tatty eighties bonkbusters, Wainwrights and Herriots galore…
The shop was slap in the middle of Wickden, a Yorkshire Dales village popular with tourists and walkers, so there was usually a steady trade in the summer. Enough to keep The Bookshelf’s proprietor in Oxfam tops and Sugar Puff sandwiches anyway. Not quite enough to keep her in beer, but the rest of the quiz team were used to accidentally ‘overlooking’ Clarrie’s round.
No one quite knew what had possessed her to set up a bookshop. Most of her uni friends had headed to the cities after graduation for jobs in publishing, journalism, PR. But not Clarrie. No: she had a degree in books, more or less, she’d always wanted to run a bookshop, and like the stubborn cow she was, that was bloody well what she was going to do.
Okay, so she hadn’t always wanted to run a bookshop. At five, after seeing Star Wars for the first time, she’d wanted to be an astronaut. She was going to build a rocket and explore planets, her and Simon. He’d wanted to fly it, which she was fine with, as long as she got to press all the shiny buttons to see what they did.
A year later she was bored of that dream and she was going to write books, like Roald Dahl or someone, and be famous, and live in a big house and eat ice cream all day and have twelve puppies that would never get big.
But why write books when you can read them, right? Get lost in other worlds, ones where Mum and Dad didn’t shout at each other so loud that even a pillow wouldn’t block it out. So she’d made a library in the attic, transporting all the books she thought were worth reading up there. Everyone who wanted to read one got a ticket, and a tuppence a day fine if they were late back.
And last of all, because there didn’t seem to be much money in the library business on tuppence a day, she’d wanted to be a lady in a bookshop. And that, for some reason, had stuck. So after graduating from uni, she’d tapped the money her dad had left for her – the final gesture of a guilty conscience after her parents’ marriage had broken down – and here she was in The Bookshelf: a tiny shop with a tiny kitchen-diner at the back and a tiny flat above.
Yep, she was living the dream all right. She sighed while she ingested her coffee behind the counter, looked around at the silent books – judging her as usual, the little bastards – and wondered if the bell that meant ‘customer’ was going to ring today.
That reminded her. Gemma. She tapped out a quick text.
Glass of something later? Come round after closing if you’re free.
It buzzed almost immediately with a reply.
You had me at ‘glass’, Midwinter. See you at six.
The day yielded three whole customers. The first two were walkers looking for the OS maps, the third a tall man in a sharp grey suit who spent twenty minutes rummaging through the quality hardbacks. Probably a tourist.
He finally approached the counter and Clarrie took the box he handed her. Hitchhiker’s Guide, the five-book set. Good choice.
‘Six pounds ninety-five please,’ she said without looking up.
‘You’re undercharging, you know.’
She was surprised to hear a Yorkshire accent. Not a tourist then.
‘Probably,’ she said, ringing the purchase through on the cash register.
‘How much more for a date?’
Clarrie finally glanced up at the man. ‘Not that kind of bookshop, love. This is the Dales, not Soho.’
He laughed, his grey eyes crinkling.
Clarrie ran her eyes over him. Not bad-looking. Tall, sandy hair. Smartly dressed, and good taste in books too.
‘Okay, how about six pounds ninety-five now and I’ll buy you dinner later?’ he asked.
He was the wrong kind of good-looking though. Not her type at all. And the way he was drumming his fingers on his thigh was already starting to annoy her.
‘Sorry, I’m seeing someone.’
‘Really seeing someone or fobbing me off seeing someone?’
‘Fobbing you off seeing someone.’
He flashed her an amused grin. ‘Okay, I’ll take the hint. Here.’ He opened his wallet and passed her a business card. ‘Call me if you change your mind.’
She looked at the card as the door swung closed behind him.
Ugh. Worked in insurance. She’d dodged a bullet there. Crumpling it, she chucked it in the bin.
Gemma turned up at six on the nose, bouncing through the door brandishing a bottle of wine. She flipped the shop’s sign to Closed behind her.
‘Here,’ she said, plonking the wine on the counter. ‘I naturally assumed you’d be broke and boozeless as usual.’
‘Always happy to welcome guests bearing bottles.’ Clarrie came out from behind the counter and gave her a hug. ‘Come on in the kitchenette, I’ll get us glasses.’
At the little dining table, Clarrie handed Gemma a glass of wine and sank into a seat opposite.
‘Er, thanks,’ Gemma said, eyeing the glass. It was an oversized picnic goblet in neon pink plastic.
‘Sorry,’ Clarrie said with a grin. ‘Broke the guest glass last week. Still, you’re posher than me, Gem.’ She took a sip of wine from a pewter Guinness tankard with A Souvenir from the Emerald Isle engraved on it.
‘Yeah, but you get a bigger drink. Swings and roundabouts,’ Gemma said. ‘So how’s business? Earn enough today to buy yourself a new guest glass?’
‘Nope. Only three customers. Two walkers and a bloke who asked me out.’
‘And you said no, right?’
‘How’d you know that?’
Gemma laughed. ‘Please, born-again virgin. When was the last time you went out with anyone?’
‘Don’t you start.’
‘Go on, what was wrong with this one?’
‘Nothing,’ Clarrie said, shrugging. ‘Didn’t fancy him, that’s all.’
‘Come clean, Midwinter. You Edded him, didn’t you?’
Clarrie frowned. ‘Is Ed a verb now?’
‘Yep. So, what was it?’
‘Okay, okay. Drumming his fingers on his leg. And he worked in insurance.’ Clarrie swallowed a mouthful of wine. ‘So how was quiz night for you then?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Painful. Wonderful.’ She gave a sad little laugh. ‘Didn’t look very pleased to see me, did he?’
‘He’s hurting, Gem.’
‘I know he is. And I know it’s my fault.’ She sighed. ‘I just can’t stop missing him, Clar. Does he ever talk about me?’
‘Not often. But he misses you too, I know he does. He’s even moodier than usual these days.’
Gemma summoned a smile. ‘When we were in sixth form I used to think he was all intense and brooding.’
‘Nah. Just a sulky bugger.’ She squeezed Gemma’s hand. ‘You ever going to tell him why it happened?’
‘It’d only make things worse,’ Gemma said, her voice chok
ed. ‘Sounds like an excuse, doesn’t it?’
‘Go on, tell him. It’s been a year and neither of you has been able to move on. Might make it easier for him to forgive.’
Gemma dropped a tear into her ridiculous pink wine glass. ‘Yeah, that’ll work. “Hi honey. Forgot to mention earlier, I had a pregnancy scare a year ago and went into meltdown because at twenty-five I still felt like a fucking kid. Oh, and during the ensuing booze bender I shagged some wanker I picked up in a club. Want to grab dinner and forget about it?”’
‘Er, yeah. Don’t think you should say it quite like that, Gem.’
‘Well, come on. How would you feel?’
‘Okay, not great,’ Clarrie admitted. ‘But it did get to him, seeing you at the quiz. And I told him you did that thing with your finger.’
‘What thing with my finger?’
‘You know, this thing.’ She did the thing.
Gemma looked puzzled. ‘Did I do that?’
‘No. But I told him you did, and he seemed pretty keen on it. Lads like that.’
‘Er, thanks. What is this, seduction by proxy?’
‘Don’t knock it if it works,’ Clarrie said, shrugging. ‘So. You’ve got all your new Pink Lady mates now then.’
Gemma laughed. ‘Jealous?’
‘Yep.’
‘You’re sweet, Midwinter. Drink on it.’
‘Okay. On three.’ Clarrie tapped out three beats and the two women drained their glasses then slammed them back down, Gemma’s pink monstrosity hitting the table a split second sooner than Clarrie’s tankard.
‘I win,’ Gem said, laughing. ‘You were never a native wine drinker, were you? Go on, top us up.’
‘Yeah, I’ll always be a lager girl at heart. Still, this stuff’s not bad.’ Clarrie took the wine from the half-sized fridge and poured them each a fresh glass.
‘So?’ she said, sitting back down. ‘Do you like your new mates best?’
‘They’re nice girls, I know them from work,’ Gemma said, shrugging. ‘But it’s not the same as with you lot. I’ve known you and Si fifteen years now, the other two even longer. You can’t replace that.’
‘Is it really that long since we started secondary? Bloody hell.’ Clarrie raised her tankard. ‘Well, cheers to old age.’
A Question of Us Page 3
