Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

A crow flew overhead. Needs a trench coat, that crow. Do they mind the rain, birds? Paul would’ve known. But only thoughts of this place and this time were allowed: her legs marching beneath her. She inhaled. The joy of empty thoughts, occupied by senses alone. If she were ever to write a book (and she’d never consider it), it would be on the satisfaction of thinking nothing. What a dullard I’ve become! And what a book that would make! It would cure insomniacs, at least.

The trail descended through woods, across farmers’ fields, over a stile, past the ruins. Back in the Fiat, she flung her wet cable knit into the backseat and adjusted the rearview mirror, amused at the sidelong image of her bedraggled self. The drive home was twenty minutes down a one-lane road, her toes curling as onrushing lorries appeared around each corner, she swerving into hedges to let them pass. Her car was a spine-jarring contraption lacking shocks, seatbelts, or a passenger-side window, the missing pane covered with plastic sheeting that flapped furiously as she drove. Through holes in the rusted floor, she glimpsed asphalt rushing beneath.

Tooly pulled in at the church parking lot, and sparrows — battling over scattered rice from a weekend marriage — took flight. For nearly two years she had lived in the village, yet she had no friends here. Reserve was the norm in these parts, which suited her. The place let her be, and she’d grown fond of it. The newsagent, the village doctor, the solicitor, the police constable, the butcher’s apprentice in red-striped apron smoking on his delivery bike. The pie-and-chip shop on Unicorn Street, the village clock, the monument to “those sons of Caergenog who fell in the Great War 1914–1918,” with a wreath of plastic poppies.

To the locals, she was known as the bookshop lady, seen hiking on public paths, a little foreign — she was “from away,” as they put it. In her defense, she wasn’t English. The Welsh were much concerned with “the English,” a term uttered curtly, as of neighbors who barge into one’s living room on a Sunday, monopolizing the cakes and conversation. Worse still, the English language had supplanted their own, whose wondrous native words were still extant on traffic signs — CERDDWYR EDRYCHWCH I’R CHWITH — but unpronounceable to many of the Welsh themselves. At least their lilting accent held fast in English, words articulated as if there were spaces between every syllable.

She entered the shop and took the staircase up past the inn rooms, each furnished with a four-poster bed and a hay-stuffed mattress, every chest of drawers smelling of lavender. In the kitchen, the floorboards bore the impression of a now departed range, its border outlined in caramel stains. The bathroom contained a clawfoot tub, while the water closet had a wooden-seat toilet, which flushed with a cold chain, the tank trickling.

Rather than lodging in one of the inn rooms, Tooly had settled in the attic. She’d evicted the spiders, disposed of the broken furniture and the gramophone, then scrubbed the splintery floor and wiped the porthole windows to transparency. Up the attic ladder, she had shoved a double mattress, leaving it on the floor. She slept under the rafters, her nose cold by morning.

Clothes still damp from her walk, she undressed and stood nude at the window, only her head visible from the street. She preferred not to hang curtains, and it was too high for anyone to spy. On the floor were piles of her clothing, plus a canvas bag large enough to contain everything. This was all she owned. Over the past decade, she had discarded anything of value.

Once dressed, she went down to the shop, counted out the float, entered yesterday’s sales into the computer (this never took long), reversed the OPEN/CLOSED sign, and unlocked the front door. Opening time was 10 A.M., but she was always early. By contrast, Fogg was always late.

“Caught in traffic,” he explained, dropping a folded newspaper from under his chin, placing his cappuccino on the bar counter. His house was a four-minute walk from World’s End, so “traffic” was understood to mean a queue at the Monna Lisa Café. It was his habit to arrive every morning with a hot beverage and a cold periodical. He bought a different publication each day, and they took turns reading it, holding a discussion in the afternoon. Till then, or at least noon, he tried to limit his jabbering, disappearing behind shelves, his location perceptible by coffee slurps emanating from Geography or Political Thought.

When the morning was quiet like this, she read up on her latest hobbies, tried books that customers had recommended, and dusted. Formerly, she’d played music from a cassette player on the servery, the same few tapes she’d been addicted to for years. But those cassettes were gone. Weeks earlier, a crotchety old couple had entered, both in identical anoraks and looking so alike that it was nearly impossible to say which had once been groom and which bride. They walked around single file, then returned to the servery, where one of them gathered a handful of Tooly’s mixtapes. “We need something to play in the camper van.”

“Those aren’t for sale,” Fogg said.

“They can be,” Tooly interposed. Any income was worth accepting at this point. “Don’t you want to see what they are first?”

“Prefer music. Doesn’t matter what kind.”

“You prefer music? To audiobooks, you mean?”

“Prefer music to conversation.”

They agreed on fifty pence per tape, and the couple counted out the coins while Tooly stared at the stack of cassettes, with titles like “Year 2000 Mix by D-Mac.” They’d been produced years before by her then boyfriend, Duncan McGrory, and included extensive liner notes about the musicians (Fiona Apple, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tori Amos, Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Tom Waits), written in lettering that shrank as space ran short, asterisks added to asterisks. Tooly regretted the sale before it had concluded, but refused to reverse herself. That had been weeks earlier. No point dwelling on it. “Shall we put on the radio?” she asked Fogg, handing back a novel he’d lent her.

He went behind the computer and live-streamed Radio 4. “Did you enjoy that book?” he asked. “Utter rubbish, I thought.”

“Terrible. Why did you recommend it?”

“It was so awful, I thought: Tooly has to read this.”

“You’re the only person, Fogg, who recommends a book because you hate it.”

“Hang on.” He scurried away, voice drifting back through the stacks, overlaid by radio chatter. “If you didn’t like that book,” he called back, “you have to try this one.”

“Does it involve an alien playing the saxophone?” she asked. “If there are aliens playing the saxophone, or any other instruments, or even just being their alien selves without any musical inclination — if there are aliens, Fogg, I’m banning you.”

“That’s a bit rough,” he said, returning with a paperback.

“Okay, I won’t ban you. But I ask one final time — aliens?”

“No aliens,” he promised, adding, “There may be an orc.”

“Is there or is there not an orc?”

“There’s an orc.”

Fogg’s most salient quality as an employee was his ability to be present while she fetched a sandwich. Beyond this, he contributed little that could be quantified. But she would not have wanted to continue without him. World’s End earned nothing, meaning she paid him from her personal savings, a small and diminishing sum. Within a couple of years, she’d be insolvent. Yet she observed her bank balance nearly with impatience for bankruptcy. This was the most fixed abode she’d known, and she couldn’t shake an urge to lose it.

A person like Fogg was so different from her, formed in considerable part by his location. He was inextricably from here, this village, a place findable on Google Earth (how he loved spinning the digital globe from Paris to Caergenog, zooming down to the roof of the shop). His continued residence in the village, he said, was because staying here was “ la pièce de least résistance .” That was ungenerous. He remained partly out of decency, because his family had a devastating summer when he was fifteen, his elder brother paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident, his father’s affair uncovered through credit-card charges at a hotel, his mother suffering a breakdown. The father left, and the family had not recovered, Fogg holding them together since. Four years ago, he’d nearly married. But his girlfriend went to do theater in London and met a new man there. They’d stayed friends, till she sent photos of her newborn. “When you open the baby-photo email,” Fogg said, “it’s like your friends waving goodbye.” He and his ex exchanged messages once in a while, she inviting him to visit, he responding, “Would love to — when?” and she taking months to reply. He didn’t even know what she looked like anymore: on her Facebook profile was a picture of the baby.