The Last Snow Of Summer.
My friend Cookie once asked me how much love I thought there would be in the world if there wasn’t any ink. It’s just the sort of question you don’t answer, because you can’t. That’s why it’s always worth staying friends with Cookie, no matter how infuriating it can be. She says the silliest, wisest things.
“Wow,” I said. I put my coffee down, as if I needed both hands free for contemplation. However, I didn’t, so I simply crossed them in my lap.
Cookie looked at me from over the lip of her own coffee cup, her mouth, I knew, smirking unseen behind it. She had dyed her hair blue a month or so ago, and had then insisted on wearing a patchwork trilby hat over it every day since. It didn’t really go with her World War I trench coat, no matter how much she didn’t care. If they allowed illegally cute women to be bag ladies, Cookie would be their queen. Shortly afterwards, the world of bag ladies would be in chaos, mostly because Cookie would immediately put all of the stray cats in charge of something seemingly small but ultimately terribly important.
“Wow…” I said again, mostly because it literally was a question I couldn’t answer.
Cookie lowered her cup and smiled at me. She raised her eyebrows conspiratorially. “Ink…” she said. “Makes you think, eh?”
I thought of that moment now, many years later in a different coffee shop in a different country, as I sat and contemplated the book in my hands. Not only because I was in a coffee shop, or that I had reason to think of ink and love, or that I had a story to tell Cookie the next time I saw her, but for all of those reasons and more; Cookie seemed to invade all the tiny reaches of my life and set up little camps there, poking her head out of a metaphorical tent every now and again and saying hi. I’d have married her, if she’d have had me and wouldn’t be intolerable company to actually live with permanently.
This, however, isn’t a Cookie story. Not really.
I turned again to the title page of the slim paperback book and read the words there; in tidy and precise script, a handwritten dedication in black ink, probably from a fountain pen. It was unsigned, so I assumed that it wasn’t from the author to a fan.
It read:
Dearest Miranda,
Everything I could ever
want to say to you is said
by Nathaniel in this book.
Take these words
with all my heart.
She was right, my friend Cookie. Ink creates love and allows it to spread. How much of love is contained and transported by words. Only Cookie could tell you something you should already have known by asking you a ridiculous question.
* * *
There’s a particular sense of excitement and comfort that I get from entering a used bookstore, a combination of the two that I don’t find anywhere else or under any other circumstances. Book shops are like embassies: they have a familiar sense and purpose wherever you find them; a common aroma of papers and age, coffee and sandalwood and comfortable dust. Every spine on the shelf is a doorway to another world, created wholly from finite letters in infinite combinations, and every one is unique to whomever reads it. I wonder how so many people can resist the urge to read every available second of the day.
This shop was tucked away down a side alley, hemmed in between bigger and taller buildings on either side like a librarian stuck between two rugby players. It was called Pages. Presumably because it sold books, although it might have been the name of the owner if they didn’t know how to use apostrophes.
The bell above the door sounded as I walked in to the empty-looking shop, but nobody came out to see me. Left to my own devices, I started to browse the fiction section, assuming the natural position of inclining my head to the right in order to read the titles of the books. Every once in a while I’d move my head about on my neck to avoid a cramp and, in doing so, take a look around the shop. I still appeared to be alone.
In these days of mail order shopping, online dealers and eBay, it’s sometimes difficult to explain to people quite how different it is to search for a desired item in person. Many people balk at the time and the effort it takes to physically search through shelves for a particular book when they can simply enter its title into a search engine and have a machine find it for them. That’s how they get a book they want, but it’s not the same as finding it. That little moment of joy at seeing a book that you want right there in front of you. It makes all of the fruitless hours spent looking for it worthwhile. All forgiven, just like that. You pull it from the shelf and look at it, probably for the first time, and savour the cover art, the typeface, the glowing quotes from reviewers far and wide. Turn it over in your hands and feel the weight of it. It’s yours now.
That was how I felt upon seeing The Last Snow Of Summer by Lars Danijelsen on the shelf of Pages, tucked neatly away at the beginning of the D section, exactly where it should be. Strangely, the adjacent books were both larger and dwarfed the Danijelsen in exactly the same way as the adjoining shops did this one. The paperback was only a few years old and the cover had a beautiful painting of a snowy landscape, pinned with stark winter trees, and the falling snow swirled and massed and became the huge wings of an otherwise unseen angel in the sky. On the horizon there was the faintest smudge of crimson as the sun set in the distance.
I held the book close to my chest as I browsed the rest of the shop, although I knew that I wouldn’t find any other purchases today. That wasn’t how it worked. But still I browsed. Halfway through the S section, a birdlike man walked past me and wished me a good morning, before roosting behind the till where he wrote in a notebook until I came to pay for my book. He placed it carefully in a paper bag and counted my change precisely and carefully into my hand.“Have a very good day,” he said as I left the shop, the bell once again sounding as I passed over the threshold.
Outside, the wind had picked up and, although it didn’t look as if it was threatening rain, it did feel colder than before. I resolved to find a coffee shop so that I could warm myself and spend a little time with my new book. I didn’t have to walk far, as there was a café around the very next corner, following the universal law that any book shop without its own coffee bar should be within easy walking distance of a coffee shop.
I decided to sit outside the shop and risk the weather, ordering a large cappuccino and settling down into a comfortable wooden chair. I pulled the copy of The Last Snow Of Summer from its bag and opened it to the first pages, reading the author’s biography and acknowledgements.
My cappuccino arrived and I settled into the book, periodically sipping the hot coffee and snuggling into the protection of my coat as the weather continued its slow slide into chill. It was a short novel, some would say little more than a novella, and I found myself contentedly absorbed into the plot and the characters. I finished my coffee and continued reading for a while longer. The book was all I wanted it to be, all that I had imagined in those years of searching for it in book shops around the country. But it was getting colder and near time that I should head home. I could wrap up in a blanket and finish the book in the comfort and warmth of my own home.
I have a habit of tucking the receipt for book purchases somewhere in the first few pages, so that I have an instant bookmark should I need one. I flicked through The Last Snow Of Summer looking for its receipt and that was how I came across the dedication to Miranda inscribed upon the title page. I read it through twice, struck by how personal it was; how her unnamed lover had tried to say so much while saying so little. Even the few dozen pages of the book that I had read imparted some of his feelings to me.
I wondered how the book had come to be sitting on the shelves of a second-hand book store. Had Miranda, some time after the relationship ended, simply given the book away? Perhaps it was accidentally discarded; maybe they had married and moved away to a new life together, absentmindedly abandoning an artefact of their young love. I considered that the man who had written the dedication had never given the book to his sweetheart; he may have died, or she might have, or their relationship finished before the book was given.
That was when I thought of Cookie, and how this would be just the sort of anecdote she would love. How she would imagine multiple scenarios that would lead to the book being found by someone on a shelf, when it quite plainly belonged to another, like a lost dog with an owner’s address on its collar. If she were here, I know just what she’d say and I couldn’t tell her this story later without doing what I know she’d want me to do. She’d never forgive me. She’d enact a cruel revenge like enthusing over some foreign chocolate she’d discovered on her travels, but hadn’t brought any home for me to try; or raving about an obscure film that was no longer playing in local theatres. Once, she’d gone to Istanbul for a week on a volunteer dig or something, entrusting me to water her plants while she was away; I’d then somehow managed to kill a rare cactus by over watering it. She let herself into my flat every day for the next week while I was at work and watered my bed sheets; after three days I ended up sleeping on my sofa. I told her that was what I was doing, but it didn’t stop her watering my bed until the seven days were up. She’s relentless.
But, like I said, this isn’t a Cookie story, no matter how much she’d like it to be.
I closed the Danijelsen book, shutting away that inscription forever. The angel wings swirled into snow, and the dark scratches of trees and the bloodlike smear of sunset formed the only colour on the book’s bleak cover. I stood, dropping enough money on to the table to cover my bill, and walked back the way I had come. The slight book felt heavy in my hand as the cold air bit into the skin.
Around the corner, the book shop with its hulking neighbours was still open. There was a light on in the depths, although, once again, I saw no one when I entered the shop. I walked to the shelves marked D before the sound of the doorbell had faded away. I felt strangely nervous as I took one last look at my newly bought copy of The Last Snow Of Summer. There must be hundreds, maybe even thousands, of copies of it in used book stores around the country; perhaps a dozen of them in this very city. I would find another.
Carefully, I replaced the book where I had found it, back into the gap that was still there between the two other larger books. It was not my book, and no amount of money could make it mine; someone had already outbid me in a higher currency. It belonged now and always to Miranda, whoever she is, or whoever she was. Every word it contained had ceased to belong to Lars Danijelsen and could never belong to me.
I gently ran my fingertip down its spine as I moved away and left it there.
Take these words with all my heart.
I hoped that I could find my own copy, and that the words of Miranda’s unknown lover would somehow leave me before then. But already that phrase haunted my mind; it had soaked in somewhere and would never leave me, not entirely.
I closed the door of the book shop softly behind me, the last tinkling rings of the bell echoing and waning as I walked away into the growing cold of the evening.
