THE DEATH OF BOOK EXCHANGES (14th July 2000)

[Unpublished essay found on an old floppy disk]

These holidays I am a ghost.

The fact is evident just from the book exchanges. 

Returning from the south, I stopped at Busselton and the memory of the old holidays there thrust itself up inside me. Past the newsagency where my brother and I used to buy chocolates and comics, I hurried on toward the book exchange above the bakery, a pokey treasure cave of memories, comics and SF. The familiar dingy staircase was there but the book exchange sign was not. I climbed the stairs anyway.  At the top, dust collected in empty rooms. It was gone. Gone. 

And then it was back to Bunbury, staying in my parents’ house and during the day I felt I was sixteen again, so bored and frustrated.  Except it was worse because it was without the promise of the future, the uni years, the redemption. The redemption had come and passed and now there was nothing to look forward to.

Bunbury’s best book exchange: I walked excited to it along the length of the mainstreet, past the cafes, the restaurants, some of them changed, some of them the same. I saw the sign in the distance and I thought of how soon I was to browse the familiar shelves, culling treasures from them. But in the window was another sign – ‘For Lease’ – and I could see through the barren shop to the little staff room at the back, a single chair left by the sink.

Later, co-incidentally, I sat in a cafe opposite the dead book exchange with old school friends and we laughed for an hour and remembered what had happened and then we dispersed to our different lives. 

The third book exchange was this morning.  I had never been to it.   But from the uni library I borrowed a paperback from the seventies and on the first page was stamped, ‘The Novel Shop, Book Exchange – Sleat Road Mall, Applecross’.  A book exchange in my suburb – once at least – and I had never seen it. 

I woke late and rode there on an impulse.  It is such a quiet morning. Even the gears on my bike clicked subduedly, hollowly.   The streets were wet, my pedalling gentle and there was no-one in sight. I rode through the backstreets of rich houses and I heard a dry brown leaf scutter across the bitumen. 

I found the Sleat Road Mall.  In it was a florist and a bootmaker.  There were no traces of the book exchange. I wondered how many years I had missed it by.  If I had come ten years ago as an eager nine year old hunting for Phantoms… would I have found a beautiful dusty book exchange with an old man sitting behind the counter, reading, as if he had done it for years and would for years to come?  Perhaps the Neverending Story playing on a black and white television and perhaps I would be with friends, and we would be laughing and optimistic. 

But today there was no-one.  I was by myself on my bike outside a bootmaker. 

I rode back, softly again. I came to an ugly orange brick church I had not seen before.  The foundation stone, it said, had been laid in 1955 by a reverend who, undoubtedly, was now long dead.  1955. The year my mother was born. My parents, I thought, they were born in the 1950s!  They are so old.

And then, as I rode on, I realised I was born in the 1980s, and that too sounded ancient.

Near the church was a primary school. A mother had brought her children to play there and I slowed and watched them, so busy on the bars, cages and swings that mean so much when you are six.  The mother saw me watching and glared, and I realised that I was forever to be an exile, watching childhood from the outside, as one banished. I saw water fountains, six of them in a row, the site for happy summer afternoon water fights and I saw a target painted on the wall and I imagined the children of decades throwing balls against it, all of them now gone, dead, dead at least as children. Some in their twenties, some in their thirties, perhaps some even in their sixties – this was an old school – and that thought was both unbearably beautiful and unbearably sad. 

I wished at that moment for friends and I saw myself swinging from the climbing cage, five years old, telling Mrs Hann that I was really the Phantom and when I grew up that’s what I was going to do and I wondered where Mrs Hann was and I thought how dare she laugh and play with us back then like it was all going to last forever. All we can hope for is to meet in a cafe again and remember what was.  

It began raining softly just before I got back. The keys on my computer, they are soft this morning, just like the clicks of the gear. It is a quiet morning. And these holidays, of which today is the last day, I am a ghost.