Page 5 of Book People

I don’t want anything to do with women who lack substance.

I don’t want anything to do with women full stop. Or at least not women who live in the village. I go elsewhere if I want female company.

Yet still I watch her as the breeze lifts strands of gold from her shoulders and she pauses to smooth them back. Does she know I’m watching her? Is she trying to prove a point? And, if so, what particular point is she trying to prove?

She was right, I was an arse to her just now. I know that. She had every right to call me a snob. Iwasbeing deliberately provocative. But I wanted to make it clear that I didn’t want her or her books anywhere near my festival.

And it ismyfestival. I’ve spent months organising it for the benefit of Blackwood Books and Blackwood Books alone. Though, it’s more accurate to say I revived it, since it was my great-grandfather who conceived the initial festival, then ran it successfully for years until my grandfather took over. He, unfortunately, didn’t have the same interest in the shop that mygreat-grandfather did, and his lack of passion hurt the festival, and so it became less and less successful over time. Then my father took over and he ran it into the ground.

Which is the story of Blackwood Books in many ways, since it’s also my father’s fault that the bookshop is struggling now. Too many debts. Lack of financial oversight. Too few books being sold. Too much online competition. Too few people reading. The problems are myriad, but I’m determined to overcome them.

Blackwood Books has been a village icon for over half a century and I certainly won’t be the Blackwood responsible for the business going under. Dad might have given up on it after Mum died, but I haven’t.

Pretty Miss Jones pauses before the doors of her ridiculously named shop, and glances over her shoulder.

No doubt she can see me standing here, looking at her.

I should pretend that I’m not looking and turn away, abashed. But I don’t. I’m a deliberate man. I want her to see me staring after her. I want her to know that I was serious when I said I didn’t want her at my festival, that I will brook no argument.

We’ve already had a silent battle of wills once today. Why not another?

I don’t want her at my festival.

I don’t want her in my town.

I don’t want her pretty, flirty skirts, her pale thighs, her tangled blonde hair, her sunny, friendly smiles, and her wide grey eyes anywhere near me.

She’s too far away for me to tell whether she blushes, but she doesn’t turn away. She sees me, I know she does, and she’s looking right back.

I turn calmly and without haste, glancing down at the laptop I have open on the counter, and resume pretending to check through my stock ordering.

If a customer were to come in now, all they’d see would be a bookseller calmly working at his laptop, nothing but professional and pleasant.

Inside, though, I’m feral.

She’s a persistent woman, and this I know because she’s been persistently courting me ever since she arrived in Wychtree. Not courting in a romantic fashion but in a business sense. She wants me to be okay with her bookshop, with her taking some of my business away. She wants us to be ‘friends’.

But I don’t do ‘friends’, and certainly not with her. And while it’s true our shops are aimed at different readers, there’s a proportion of my customers who have abandoned me entirely. They used to put orders through me and now they don’t. It’s a problem, I can’t deny it.

She called me a snob and no doubt thinks that I’m some kind of intellectual puritan. While it’s true that I’ve played up to her expectations because I’m angry with her, I’m neither of those things. I believe all books should exist and every genre has its place. But she’s directly threatening my livelihood, and that’s why I’m angry. That’s why I organised the festival. I need more customers, and if large numbers of people in the village now get their reading material from her, then I need to reach beyond the village.

I want the All the World’s a Page festival to become the new go-to of literary festivals, the way it used to be back when my great-grandfather started it. I want Wychtree to become the new Hay-on-Wye. I’ve already had massive issues with the printers about the posters that were supposed to go up last month, and now Miss Jones is meddling. I can’t have her insinuatingherself and taking all my potential new customers and orders. Blackwood Books will be the sole supplier and that’s final.

Books are a serious business. They deal with deep issues. They are subversive. Political. Religious. They deal with humanity at its worst and its best, and while I believe in fun escapism too, that’s not what my bookshop is about.

I glance out of the shop window again, irresistibly drawn to Portable Magic across the road. Her window dressing is absurd. Piles of romance novels, and mugs of tea and chocolate boxes and cushions, and a huge sign that reads: ‘Indulge in some “me time”!’

The exclamation mark is an affront. The bright colours are an attack. And I’m a fool for indulging in this ridiculous window-dressing battle we have going on, yet I can’t help myself. I filled my window with James Wyatt’s latest Booker Prize winner,The Bay at Midnight, in response to all the fluff in hers. She’s got me stooping to her level and I resent it with every fibre of my being.

I shouldn’t let her get to me, but the debts are already piling up due to the festival and I’m hoping to God that it will be a success, because the bank won’t give me another loan.

No. It will be a success. I’ll make it a bloody success.

James Wyatt himself is the headliner, a coup I managed to pull off through a colleague who manages Wyatt’s wife’s favourite bookshop. My colleague put in a word with the wife, who then convinced Wyatt not only to come to Wychtree, but also to give a reading and a talk right here in Blackwood Books. I’ve got a few other authors, some journalists and some poets too. Ticket sales have been brisk.

Kate Jones and her ‘me time!’ window be damned.

The rest of the village love her, think the sun shines out of her pert rear end, but I refuse to buy into that. She’s the competition, the new kid on the block, and all I have on my side is the historyof Blackwood Books, but it’s enough. The village loves its history and Blackwood is part of that.

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