“Completely and absolutely not,” he said.
“Oh,” said Nina. “Well, probably . . . I mean, thanks for the offer, amazing, but I’ll probably . . . I mean, it’ll . . . I don’t want to get you into trouble.”
“Not to worry,” said Marek, blushing more furiously than ever, and handed her the piece of paper. It had a completely incomprehensible e-mail address on it. “But, you know.”
Nina smiled and took it. “Thank you,” she said.
There was a loud honking noise from one of the other trains, and quickly, lightly, she ran around the edge of the railway track—the very end of the line, she found herself thinking—and out through a chain-link-fence doorway into a nondescript street in a part of Birmingham she had never visited before. To her joy, there was a little workman’s café right there on the corner, condensation steaming up the windows, and she spent her last five pounds on a bacon sandwich and a steaming mug of tea as she watched The Lady of Argyll, now less heavily laden, back slowly out of the depot and make its great journey onward to London.
Chapter Nine
Surinder was not wearing her friendliest smile when she drowsily answered the door.
“Have a good trip?” she said. “How come you’re back so early?”
Nina considered telling her, then decided against it.
“Long story,” she said.
“Come on then,” said Surinder. “I’ve given up the entire day to move these damn books out. Can we get started?”
“Well,” said Nina, wondering if there was time to go and make a cup of coffee before they got stuck in this. “There’s a thing. A kind of . . . Well. Here’s the thing. I can’t park here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had my parking permit turned down. The van’s too big for Edgbaston, it seems.”
“Oh, that’s why you’re back so quickly. You flew!”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, at least you didn’t buy the van. But, Nina!” Surinder put her empty coffee cup down on a quivering pile of Regency romances, which promptly collapsed on the floor in a fainting fit. “What are you going to do with all of this?”
At the exact same moment, Nina said, with a vision of blinding clarity, “But I did buy it.”
“You didn’t . . . You what?!” Confused, Surinder looked around, scattering a mint-condition collection of Orwell in the process.
Nina winced. “Watch George!”
“Watch George?! Nina, what the HELL is wrong with you? What were you thinking? Why didn’t you wait to find out about parking before you bought the damn thing?”
“I don’t know. I just assumed it was going to be okay.”
“Why did you hand over money for it not knowing what you were doing?”
“I don’t know that either. I just . . . I thought I wouldn’t go through with it if I waited too long.”
“Nina . . .”
Nina had never seen Surinder so furious. She wished she wasn’t exhausted, as she could feel the tears already building behind her eyes.
“Nina, I have tried to be patient. I have tried to help when things go wrong and you buy a book and things go well and you buy a book and it rains so you bring home some books and it’s sunny so you get some books. But . . .”
It might, Nina thought later (more in hope than expectation), have been Surinder’s high-pitched voice that set the whole thing off. It might not have been purely Nina’s fault.
That, however, was not how she felt just then, as Surinder gestured again in frustration and knocked the rather wobbly banister, which immediately started to wobble even more and dislodged a pile of books at the top of the stairs. And inevitably, as though in a terrible slow-motion film, they then knocked into the next pile, and the next, and sent the whole bunch tumbling over and down the stairs, where they hit a large ornamental vase, which banged onto the hall floor so hard that a small crack appeared in the hall ceiling and a puff of dust came down.
Everything seemed to happen so slowly. Nina watched the spiral of dust tremble its way from the ceiling, wavering in the light, a tiny cloud of white, nothing more. But it was, she knew, enough. She looked at Surinder.
It was the last straw. The very final one. They’d both known it was coming.
“Okay,” said Nina. “Okay. I’m out of here.”
Once it was decided—or rather, once Nina had announced it and they had both calmed down—Surinder was genuinely sad. They had been roommates for four years, and good ones on the whole. She took the rest of the month’s rent in lieu of Nina paying for fixing the crack in the ceiling and immediately plunked some of it on a couple of bottles of prosecco and a gigantic bag of Haribo gummy bears, and they sat in the sitting room the following evening talking it all through.
“Where will you live?” said Surinder.
“I don’t know,” said Nina. “I don’t think it’s that expensive up there. Cheaper than here, anyway. Which is useful, seeing as I won’t actually have any money.”
“What are you going to charge for the books?” said Surinder.
“It depends,” said Nina. “I think I might just make up prices when I see people.”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to do that,” said Surinder. “Are you sure you won’t forget you’re a librarian and start just handing books out to people?”
“Only until I miss my first two meals,” said Nina, taking another handful of Haribo.
“Have you told your mum?”
Nina made a face. Her mum worried a lot about everything. Usually her younger brother Ant, which was useful.
“I’ll e-mail her as soon as I’ve got a change of address.”
“You’re not going to tell her you’re leaving the country?”
“It sounds bad when you put it like that.”
“Uh-huh,” said Surinder, who went around to see her mother pretty much every day and rarely came home without a Tupperware box filled with something delicious, and who thought Nina’s relationship with her mother was suspicious in the extreme.
“Okay, okay, I’ll tell her,” said Nina. “Just give me five minutes to get settled. This is all happening awfully fast.”
Surinder leaned forward on the sofa and topped up their glasses.