Scribbles in the Margins Read online

  6

  When the lovers get together

  Books make us appear to be better human beings than perhaps we are. If spotted in transit reading Ulysses, a stranger may think us intelligent and worldly; in reality, it is now the fifth time our eyes have waded through the same sentence on page 17. For readers there exists a generosity of emotion often lacking in real-world responses. We are capable of authentic vicarious pleasure: genuine in our happiness for the characters on a page, or heartfelt in our sorrow when catastrophe reigns. Nothing exemplifies this more than how a reader feels when two hearts collide.

  This blessed moment can scatter itself across the pages in a number of ways. It can be conversational, two companions finally giving way to the hints and undercurrents that have pursued them for half a book – ‘I think I’m a little bit in love with you’ and ‘I thought you’d never say it’. At the other extreme are wildly romantic unions, those faintly impossible eruptions and declarations of the heart involving speeches, moonlight and lavish kissing. Most of us will never experience such theatre in that moment of blending with another human, but we rarely feel jealousy as we read.

  Finest of all, though, and most likely to make our hearts thump, is the coming together of our two after a long and longing pursuit – the boy sighing his way through 300 train journeys until the girl finally angles her head and smiles faintly at him. Or, the two who we know belong together, but seem destined to ignore our feelings, squabbling and busting-up when finally love loiters over their shoulders. Either falls into the arms of an imposter, a careless suitor. Then, something changes, truths spark and clouds break. Inside we cheer, and some of that is self-congratulatory: we knew they were meant to be together. We willed it to happen. A book’s characters are not in charge of their own destiny. An author writes for us. Guiltily, we reflect that the unifications of people we actually know do not shroud us in such euphoria.

  Most of all, the lovers getting together, even when they do so in a manner only possible in print or on screen, bring to us electrifying feelings last encountered years ago. They float us backwards to shaky first kisses and stomachs seasick with nerves, to buying flowers and standing outside cinemas, to late-night calls that last for hours, to being unable to think of nothing or no one other than the person who has turned up and ransacked our hearts and rationality. They remind us what it feels like to fix your hand into someone else’s for the first time and find that it fits, to get goosebumps at the scent of their neck and to know nothing about someone we are falling towards, their stories still to be taken from the shelf. The reader is a benevolent voyeur, thrilled and wistful.

  7

  Reading in a tent

  It is possible that you haven’t done this for a while, that all of your reading is undertaken beneath solid ceilings. Reading in a tent, however, is worth rediscovering, even if it means camping out in an urban garden – the curtain-twitching of neighbours adds to the sense that you are indulging in gentle disobedience.

  As if to build pleasingly humdrum expectation levels, there is awkward ceremony in preparing to read in a tent. The ragtag orchestra of rustles and zips offers an avant-garde score apt for this clumsy manoeuvring. You must first contort into the tent’s entrance, and steer yourself around to yank at the outside zip until it chokes shut. Then there is a crawl over discarded shoes and a cereal bowl or two into the sleeping area, followed by another graceless u-turn and a similar struggle to make metal teeth force a smile. Haul yourself into a sleeping bag without bashing your face with a knee, or crushing a family member to death, and finally, there it is – your book rests beneath your pillow, a nugget of reward.

  As the sleeping bag buzzes shut around you, and that book is in your hands, a new atmosphere crackles. It falls like an interval curtain between you and the world, as if time and the moon are handing you a private space. The night belongs to you and your book. Just the two of you. And, you are reading outdoors. Not only does your book have a setting; so too do you.

  Some sounds float onto your stage, welcome ballast to this seclusion: a cat fight in its devilish throes; a lone car bringing home the jaded and the drunk; a distant door slamming like the Iron Man clapping. Everything is enhanced. The type of book you are reading may help: a novel about a shipwreck or the countryside, or the autobiography of a tortured musician (but perhaps not the story of a maniac who enjoyed strangling his victims with tent rope). If the sky decides to scatter raindrops upon your tent, then you have perfection. Their pitter-patter is heavenly. Nothing could be safer or more content. You, a book and rain on the canvas. Each drop flicks the roof and slaloms as your eyes zigzag the pages. What jubilant solitude.

  The torchlight fades in unison with your eyes. Your curtain is raised and to earth you must fall. Sleep visits. In the morning, a morning earlier and brighter than any other, you awake to find your book squashed in some nylon crevice, the edges of its pages curdling. It is dishevelled, as if it sneaked out to a nightclub when shut-eye reigned. Now, you must shake free from your cocoon, and embrace the daylight with one eye on the sun, and one on the clock. With the shifting of time and dropping of light can this treasured distraction happen anew.

  8

  Blotches, stains and other reminders of where and when you read a book

  Perhaps subconsciously, you are marking your territory. The blots you leave will often be accidental, and yet they stamp authority over the book and assert that it belongs to its reader. When that book falls into your hands years later, these chance etchings are a reminder of the surroundings and era in which its words were gulped.

  On page 27 of a novel, a sun-cream blotch shelters a speech mark: oh, that shabby bar in a Catalonian square, where the waitress was more beautiful than planet earth from space, where the wine was cheap and tasted cheaper, where the afternoons were born for reading with drowsy, contented eyes. On page 83 of a biography, a droplet of tea: oh, that train journey that seemed to last seven Sundays in a graveyard, the one with the damaged overhead lines near Peterborough, the one with the oversized man hemming you into your seat with elbows like pistons and shoulders broader than grey clouds over the Irish Sea, the one where only this book stood between you and criminality. Such triggers are not always so haphazard. The pages of a book are hiding places for receipts, bank advice slips, train tickets and restaurant calling cards. Perhaps they are lost bookmarks, perhaps intended keepsakes. Regardless, a book transports us elsewhere when we read it, and such items float us out of ourselves anew, perhaps into reminiscence, or a faint handshake with a time gone by. On its own, an old bus ticket is litter. Inside a book, it is a connection.

  Such smears, smudges and ephemera bring a book back to you, and become a dateless, unintended diary entry. Page becomes time and place. Beside curling and scuffed leafs and bowing spines, they show how a scarred book is a loved one, a house that became a home.

  9

  Old bookshops

  What joy to spot one while dawdling in an unknown place. From the opposite kerb you clock a name like Scrivener’s Books and Bookbinding, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights or The Elliot Bay Book Company, and a busy window framed by varnished shopfronts in Scrabble-box green or wine-gum red. An imagined breeze wafts you across the road, freewill suspended, traffic and other distractions buried. You push the door, a bell rings, and you are delivered into an outpost of paradise.

  There may not be a friendly greeting. Some of these shops are owned by men who were born to a higher calling than mere humanity: books. Many haven’t made eye-contact with a customer for 27 years. Their postures have grown to prevent such a thing – all buckled knees and curved necks so that viewed side-on they resemble a sickle. Hunched and crouched, they scuttle around in a netherworld beneath regular sightlines, busy with grave tasks; or crumpled upon a stool, ticking and marking a list with the concentration and gravity of Noah choosing animals for the ark. That you hardly exist to him matters not. In this realm you have entered, he is one character among thousands present, and
those others are begging for freedom from congested shelves.

  To other proprietors that bell above the door is a sweet sound, like ice-cream van chimes or a piano outdoors. It means a new apostle has floated in, someone whose eyes will soon be saucer-wide at the view. Never are these owners pushy, and certainly they are not sales people. Such custodians of pages are there if you need them, their recommendations more astute, colourful and wilfully eccentric than any website algorithm could ever manage. They are the owners of a country mansion leaving you to enjoy the blooming gardens in your own time.

  All old bookshops are united by their sacred aromas. Just as whisky develops its essence in the cask, so books mature on shelves. It is alchemy. What assails you once that doorbell chime has dimmed are instantly recognisable fragrances. There is damp, certainly, but damp with authority rather than being a cause for concern, as in a home. It is the mustiness of words fermenting. Leather, here teetering on the brink of aniseed, there of tar, hangs strong. Tobacco comes and goes as if a smoking ghost is browsing in the same sections of the shop as you. Hotchpotch carpets and rugs add spent matches. All at once you are smelling yesterday, inhaling the odours of history and feeling enormously comforted by familiarity. Open and consider a book or two and the bouquet lingers on your fingertips through an afternoon.

  Subject sections in such an emporium are pleasingly chaotic, meaning it is easy to become gladly lost. ‘Sport’ is next to something called ‘Rivers, etc’; ‘Classic Novels A to M’, as denoted on a yellowing sign in finest calligraphic letters, rest beside ‘War and Military’ (though ‘Military History’, as another note on slightly newer cardboard informs, ‘is above Modern History in Lower Basement’). Everything is governed by pragmatism and an antipathy to uniform furniture. ‘Medicine’ must joust for attention alongside ‘Trains and Transportation’ because both fit perfectly onto what once was the top half of a Welsh dresser. On the shelves themselves, there is order. Alphabet triumphs, though not among knee-high floor piles or batches of books stacked horizontally in front of vertical spines. These are for sorting later – tasks for the silent owner, or a satisfying Sunday distraction for the custodian in her garden.

  Lost to the shelves, marooned from society with its din and streets and final clearance sales, it is possible to imagine yourself completely alone in some abandoned palace. As such, stumbling upon a fellow customer is a shock. There may be a brief smile of recognition, but silence endures. It is a reverent quiet, as if you both fear the books might take umbrage. You are left to continue your meanderings among the spines, occasionally pulling out volumes, volumes whose pencilled price marks remain in the top right-hand corner of page one, only slightly faded from the day they were left there twelve years ago.

  Economic trends or other ways of buying and reading should, by rights, have slain these wonders by now. Yet the indefatigable of Durham, the unstinting of Rochester and the devoted of London are set in stone. Behind a very unchanging façade, where the kettle is always clicking or the coffee machine percolating, they are, quite by accident, tiny anarchist republics. In Durham, Rochester, London and beyond are militant cells, upholders of a variegated world from a time before so much around us resembled airport departure lounges with their terminal boredom. Most of all, though, old bookshops are as close as we bibliophiles get to walking through a wardrobe into another, living kind of nirvana.

  10

  Hiding yet more purchases from partners

  I need books. I feel as though I have no choice in the matter. I need shelves and stacks of them in every room in the house. Some, inevitably, will become what are termed in Japanese tsundoku – books bought and never read, sentenced to live forever on shelf or pile – but addiction is seldom logical.

  I need to take books on holiday with me. I need to take a book on any journey I am making, whether the bus into town or a train across the country. I need to have a book or two on the go, and I need to know what I will be reading next. I need unread books on the bedside cabinet, and cherished books gone by within easy reach for checking a detail or holding fondly like an old pet brought back to life. Narcotics have nothing on this addiction. It started in a mobile library and becomes more extreme each year.

  Books are my crutch. They sustain me, make me giddily happy and profoundly sad. I am never far from my next purchase, whether late at night when booze has persuaded me I must Proceed to Checkout, or in a charity shop buying a title I didn’t need upon publication ten years ago, but suddenly now do. ‘Is that another book?’ I am asked, as I sneak upstairs, like a teenager home considerably beyond midnight or a tip-toeing cartoon burglar. As with all addicts, I have my excuses: ‘It was only a fiver’; ‘I haven’t got this one of his’; ‘I loved this when I was a kid’; and ‘I had this but lent it to John and he never gave me it back’.

  It is not my fault. All I am doing is giving a few hundred friends a place to stay.

  11

  Just giving up

  Reading isn’t always joyous. Sometimes, though, joy can be salvaged from the gloom.

  There are occasions when a book fails to put you under its spell, when the ignition splutters and fades or the candle turns its back on the match. Your eyes move across the lines but they are shuffling rather than cantering. Words turn into bollards, sentences to blockades and paragraphs are entwined in barbed wire. To finish a chapter is to arrive flustered and late having become hopelessly lost. You revisit lines over and again, nothing much vaulting from paper to mind, and feel as if you are wading through treacle. Pages seem to be a negotiation process. The whole thing is a slog.

  There are many things that can make it so: characters you don’t care for, ludicrously obscure language, Latin phrases, unpunctuated sentences longer than the Golden Gate Bridge, bemusing plots and misfiring attempts at local dialects. More likely, it is a general, intangible feeling; it is bad chemistry, you and the book just don’t get on. There is no anticipation, no excitement when you think about opening the book’s pages while commuting or in bed. This feeling can even trigger an existential crisis – has the love gone, are reading and I over? To banish such thoughts, you may battle on with the book, stoic as Sisyphus.

  Embedded within the reader is a feeling that to give up on a book is sacrilege, that such an act contravenes some oath or purity law, or represents a failure on your part. Worse, you are abandoning this living object, leaving a child to drown at sea. What of the poor author? You are dismissing their toil, shooing away the servant with the back of your hand. All of this is underpinned by niggling fears, reasons for persisting and blind faith in books – that this one will ‘get going soon’, that the plot will click, that thistly lines will begin to sing as you get used to this writer’s way, that, in short, all will be well. You are governed by stubbornness and a completist’s fear that a book can never be known or justifiably criticised until it has been read to the end.

  Then one day, you just do it. You give up. You snap. It is a liberation. All is clear. You see that life is too short for bad books and struggling on. It is an epiphany. There is a funeral ceremony for the book: you shake your head, sigh or swear, pull away the bookmark, fan through the pages one last time, clap it shut, and take one final glance before tossing it down on the floor like an Edwardian schoolmaster dismissing an essay. Do not mourn nor feel guilty. This was a destructive relationship. You have found sweet release. There are plenty more books on the shelf.

  12

  Reading to a child

  Once upon a time and happy ever after. Dragons and beasts, fire and growls. Flawed witches and white Christmases. Girls that fly and animals that speak. Sad frogs and homespun spaceships aimed towards a moon made of cheese. What worlds to take a child to, what colour to heap upon their imagination. As you read, their heads become vivid cinemas, their hearts pounding pistons stoked by radiant fires. ‘Do the voices,’ they implore. ‘Do the voices!’ Your ‘angry mother’ is a triumph, your ‘brazen burglar’ shames seasoned actors.

  Sneak a
look at their eyes as you begin a new story or once more navigate a recognised one. It is as if the boulder has been rolled to reveal Aladdin’s Cave, lighting the child’s face with amber rays. They inhale the pictures, colours and rhythms, and jump into the pages before them, walking among giants and ogres, giggling with chatty crows and talking to mournful oak trees.

  Field all of the child’s questions, give way to their interjections – stop-and-start telling does no harm. It buries a young mind even deeper in the story, it lets them drag it where they like, to become authors by the age of eight. Agree to the second story, the third and the fourth. Sleep can wait when the princess must be saved.

  You, the child and a book snuggled in bed or perched on a cot-side chair, tucked away in a bedroom, everything shelter and safety. You are hidden statues rigidly in thrall to the adventures before you. The book could be newly bought or borrowed, or – a delight within a delight – one from your own youth. In such a moment, two children are united across thirty years by paper and ink.

  Slowly sleep overcomes tiny eyes, the next fixture already in place: same time same place tomorrow and tomorrow’s morrow. Perhaps the story runs onwards in their dreams, perhaps they blow down the house or fool the troll.

  We have a few sacred years before words are unlocked and they learn to walk fairytale woods alone, that hand of yours no longer needed. You are embedding a ritual and igniting a love more intimate than any other. Tonight, you help them fly.

  13

  Reading a travel book about somewhere you’ll never visit

  The page is a magic carpet we can ride to distant lands. Lines of text are wings, darting us from our homes and parachuting us among igloos, forests and deserts. Travel books drop us off at Moscow Yaroslavsky in good time to catch the Trans-Siberian Express; they are paper aeroplanes braving Antarctic turbulence on our behalf. They pay no heed to borders and transplant scenes from elsewhere onto the everyday.