Page 15 of An Enchanted Moment on Ever After Street
‘I’ll be there with bells on. The only thing that could make it any better is if you got U.N.Known to come. Can you imagine the excitement?’ She lets out a squeak. ‘I’ll pop in again later in the week when you’ve got the tickets ready.’
Icanimagine the excitement. Getting U.N.Known as a guest author would be the scoop of the book world. Talk about creating a buzz around Ever After Street…
I always have a copy ofOnce Upon Another Timebehind the counter so I can flick through it and re-read paragraphs when I’m staring at an empty shop and need to remind myself that owning a bookshop is my lifelong dream. I turn to the inside cover of the hardback book, but where there would usually be a photo of the author and a short biography, the image is a stock photo of a silhouette, and the biography reads ‘U.N.Known wishes to remain unknown.’
The book came out seven years ago and no one has ever found out who he is. But if I could… if I could somehow persuade him to be one of the authors at the Bookishly Ever After event…
‘Everything that is real was imagined first.’ I repeat the quote to myself as my fingers rub across the blank photo.
I close up at five and run upstairs to set about making two cups of tea and getting the Custard Creams out again.
This time, I grab a tray to transport it and put it down long enough to shrug my coat on over my brown and cream striped autumn jumper and then hurry out the door.
‘Tea up, neighbour!’
‘Are you serious?’ Darcy says from the other side of the hedge.
‘Who doesn’t need a cup of tea at the end of a long day?’ I take the mugs down to the gatepost, take a few biscuits for myself and then come back, and I hear his footsteps on a concrete path as he goes to collect his mug and then returns.
‘Thanks for this, Marnie.’ There’s so much satisfaction in hearing him take a sip and then let out a sigh of pleasure.
He must be able to tell I’ve sat down because there’s the sound of his under-breath grunts as he sits too. There’s something odd in the subconscious noises he makes with almost every movement.
‘Your flyer is fantastic. Thanks for showing me.’ He takes in a breath, like he’s questioning his next sentence before he’s even said it. ‘It’s… surprisingly nice to be involved in something like this.’
The warmth that fills my chest is enough to shut out the chill filtering through my jeans from the cold ground. I want to jump on the sentence and say he could be a part of everything on Ever After Street if he came along to a shopkeepers’ meeting or engaged with anyone else at all. ‘Three authors confirmed today,’ I say instead.
‘That’s incredible.’
‘Everyone has been so supportive. Independent bookshops are dropping like gravely ill flies that have been on the wrong end of a squirt of fly spray and the general response has been that no one wants to lose another one. I’ve never really posted about A Tale As Old As Time in my Facebook booklover groups before, but I did last night, and so many readers said they’d visit if they lived nearer, which is promising, even if they live miles away.’
It’s a reminder of how things used to be, how excited I used to feel about A Tale As Old As Time and all the possibilities here. This week has felt like the before times, when I wanted to put all my energy into making our shop the best it could be, whereasrecently, I’ve channelled every bit of energy I could scrounge up into ignoring the world.
‘People are drawn to a genuine passion for something.’ His words are gentle, calm, and deep, and I close my eyes, let my head drop back, and wayward hedge branches spear me in the neck as I look up at the sky.
I never complain when the winter starts coming on – I love the darker evenings and the prospect of going home to have homemade soup for tea and snuggle on the sofa under blankets with a good book, but it’s getting dark, and I wish we had longer, because I need to make a decent start on cutting back the garden and I alsoreallywant to talk to Darcy.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d come, is there?’
‘Hell, no!’ he barks, followed by a scoff of derisive laughter.
Oh, well, that’s telling me. So much for it being ‘surprisingly nice’ to be involved. I stomp down the disappointment. The man hasneverbefore attended an event on Ever After Street – what did I think his answer was going to be? I want so badly to push and prod, to get him to explain why he’s so reclusive, but it would do nothing but push him away. ‘Do you like to read?’ I ask instead.
He does that disbelieving scoff again. ‘No.’
‘No?’ I say in surprise. ‘You don’t read?’
‘No.’
‘What kind of person doesn’t read?’
‘The kind who doesn’t enjoy reading, perhaps?’
‘But what kind of persondoesn’tenjoy reading? Books are the best way to escape from the misery of the world. You can immerse yourself in these brilliant worlds for hours on end using nothing but your imagination. It’s not like staring mindlessly at a TV or endlessly doomscrolling on social media.’
‘We’re in luck then because I don’t like TV or social media either.’
Well, that answers the question I hadn’t got around to asking about why his shop doesn’t have its own Instagram account. ‘You say you’re a beast, but nothing has ever made you more of a beast than not reading.’
