Page 1 of An Enchanted Moment on Ever After Street
1
‘“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”’ I quoteAnne of Green Gablesto Mrs Potts as I throw open the bookshop curtains, ready for another day on Ever After Street.
She looks up at me uninterestedly from the floor, waits for me to straighten out her bed in the window, and then jumps into the display and settles down with her back to me. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never win over my grumpy old lady of a cat.
It’s not personal, I tell myself. Mrs Potts doesn’t like anything except Dreamies and leaving mouse intestines by the front door.
As I open up the shop, Mickey, who runs The Mermaid’s Treasure Trove, is walking past and she pokes her head round the door. ‘You okay, Marnie?’
‘Fine, thanks.’ I pretend to be rearranging the other window display and concentrate intently on it so I don’t have to make eye contact. I know she means well, the other shopkeepers who work on this street always do when they pop in to check on me, but every time they do, it’s a sharp reminder of how alone I am now.
‘Well, you know where we all are if you need anything. Have a good day.’
I give her a wave as she disappears down the street towards her own shop, but it’s too late for her to see it. It’s not that I don’t appreciate them checking on me, but I just keep hoping they’ll stop coming, and maybe things will start to feel normal again.
Things haven’t been normal in A Tale As Old As Time for a while now, not since Mum died, taking with her my enthusiasm for running the bookshop we owned together.
In the window, there’s a vase holding bare tree branches hung with laminated miniature book covers, a liberal scattering of fabric autumn leaves around my book picks for this week, and brown and yellow leaf bunting that’s draped from one side of the display to the other. I adjust that and rearrange my favourite book that has a permanent spot in one of the two bookshop windows –Once Upon Another Timeby U.N.Known – an anonymous author who happens to have written the best book ever. It’s my go-to recommendation foranyonelooking for a book. It appeals to all ages, from disinterested teenagers to cynical adults who need to see the good in the world again. It’s the ultimate comfort book. Escapism that reminds you of what’s important in life and inspires you to follow your dreams. I stroke my fingers over the embossed cover and tilt it on the stand so the shiny lettering catches the morning sunlight and draws in passersby. Hopefully, anyway.
A Tale As Old As Time is a little bookshop on Ever After Street, a fairy-tale-themed shopping street in the foothills of a castle in the Wye Valley. I stock mainly fairy tales and their retellings and other books that have a hint of magic, myth, legend, or enchantment about them. And romance, because falling in love is like experiencing a fairy tale in real life. So I’m told, anyway. My experience of love so far is the exact opposite of a happy ending.
It’s not nine o’clock yet so I run upstairs to make a cup of tea. The elderly gent who used to rent this shop before we tookit on lived here, but my mum left her bungalow to me when she died, so I live in a little row of cottages on the other side of the forest, and the upstairs here is just storage with a dingy kitchen and a kitty litter tray for Mrs Potts, who only deigns herself to go outside when the bloodthirsty need to murder a mouse arises. Most of the time – perfectly normal contented cat. Couple of nights a month – bloodthirsty harbinger of death to every rodent within the Herefordshire land borders.
I pop a lemon shortbread biscuit into my mouth for good measure and go back downstairs and head to the counter with my cuppa. The counter is probably the best thing in the shop. It’s hexagonal and made from dark wood, with shelves for displaying books on each of its sides. The sixth side at the back is a door that lets me into the middle of it, where the till and computer is, and there’s loads of under-counter shelving to stash my current read and any errant cups of tea.
I tidy the displays of bookmarks, postcards and notebooks, a few of the other bookish gifts on sale here, and wait for the first customers to come in.
And wait…
And wait…
All right, customers are few and far between at the moment, but it’ll pick up. It’s autumn now – the perfect time of year for snuggling under blankets with a good book and a hot chocolate, preferably in front of a crackling fire.
And it’s Monday. It’s always quieter early in the week. It’ll be better at the weekend. And there’s the after-school club this afternoon. Maybe one of them will buy a book for a change, and not just find a book they like and watch as one of their parents gets their phone out and orders it from Amazon.
It’s times like this that I miss Mum more than anything. She was my co-owner and running this shop was our dream, together. Once upon a time, the place was filled with customersand full of the constant chatter of book recommendations and the ding of the till as people couldn’t queue up fast enough. We had a shop assistant back then, we were so busy that it was more than two people could handle, and it was nice that there was always someone to talk to, although given what happened with Shannon, myex-shop assistant and Rick, myex-boyfriend, maybe there’s something to be said for working alone.
Thankfully, it’s picked up a bit by the afternoon. There are a few people browsing, and a mum reading a Heidi Swain book while her toddler runs riot in the kids’ section play area, scribbling with crayons on the table itself as opposed to on the blank paper set nicely in front of him. I want to say something because that’ll take me a lot of scrubbing later to clean up, but I’m not very good at saying things to people, and I’m hoping the mum will actually buy that Heidi Swain, given how much she’s creasing the spine.
‘Anything new by U.N.Known yet?’ one of my regular customers asks as she comes up to the counter with a pile of fantasy books.
‘Nothing, disappointingly.’
She comes in every week and we have the same conversation. I talked her into buyingOnce Upon Another Timemonths ago. She loved it, and now she’s as desperate to read something else by its unknown author as I am, but unfortunately he hasn’t written anything else, and in the seven years since it was published, he seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. No website, no social media, no other mentions anywhere online. It was initially advertised as the first book in a trilogy, but over the years, all mention of that has been removed from existence, so much so that I’m half-convinced I imagined it. Even a movie that was being made of the book has now been canned with no explanation.
‘One day,’ she says hopefully as I put her books into a brown paper bag with a print of the Beast’s enchanted rose on it. ‘What I wouldn’t give to meet that man. The things he can do with words. I’d ask him to marry me on the spot.’
No one knows for sure that U.N.Known is a man, but that’s the general consensus. It’s hard to believe that someone who can write a story like that can suddenly stop and never write anything again, and I – along with alotof other fans – live in continual hope that he will. There’s a forum on the internet dedicated toOnce Upon Another Timeand its mysterious author, with people determined to find out something about the unknown man.
I wave goodbye to my regular customer and turn back to serve the next one.
‘Think we’d better take this.’ The mum has put the Heidi Swain back on the shelf, put her toddler in reins, and reluctantly come to buy the book he’s scribbled all over while I wasn’t looking. ‘A sneaky idea to put crayons in the children’s section, bet you get a lot of sales this way.’
I’m not sure if she’s joking or not, but I do an awkward laugh like it’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day, which to be fair, as she’s only the second person who’s spoken to me today, it actuallyisthe funniest thing I’ve heard all day. Most people scurry out without purchasing anything and don’t want to make conversation with the person they haven’t purchased anythingfrom. I want to tell her that the only reason she has to buy it has nothing to do with my placement of crayons and everything to do with her not bothering to watch what her precious moppet was up to, but I’m not brave enough to say it. I don’t have enough customers to risk offending the ones I do have.
At least she had the decency to buy it because most people who damage books just slip them back on the shelves and hope I won’t notice.
I put it in the bag and the toddler scrunches his hands for it, so I hand it over, and his mum gives me a glare when he immediately tries to eat it.
