Ben squinted. “Like actually being there?”
“Like actually being there. You plug straight into the writer’s brain. It’s just you and them. You experience what they experience.”
Ben looked at her for a while, then scuffed his sneaker on the pavement. There was a long pause.
“That sounds no’ bad.”
Nina figured she needed more coffee, and poured some from her thermos. Then she brought out We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and looked at Ben.
“Want to have a look?”
Ben glanced all around the square to make sure nobody was looking at him and there weren’t any other boys around. Then he shrugged.
“All right.”
“Well, come and sit down here.”
And the two of them sat on the steps in the morning sunshine and painfully, slowly, and with much grunting from Ben, made their way through it.
Finally they got up. Ben looked like he might almost say thank you.
“Where are you going now?” Nina asked carefully. “Are you going back home?”
Ben shrugged. “Maybe.”
Oh Lord. Nina thought again that she really needed to call social services. Or someone. But Ainslee had begged her so hard.
“You could go to school,” she said, as gently as she was able, feeling as if Ben were a timid animal that might bolt at her touch. “You know. If you liked.”
“The other kids are mean,” said Ben. “They call me dirty.”
He was, undeniably, dirty. Nina sighed. She would slip a little more money to Ainslee, suggest she bought him a new shirt.
“You could wash in the coffee shop,” she said. “They wouldn’t mind. And just go to school. Ignore those other kids. Who cares about them?”
“I hate it,” said Ben. “It’s just stupid people saying stupid things and telling you to eat vegetables and stuff.”
“I know,” said Nina.
She watched the little figure pad across the square—he did go into the coffee shop, she noticed—and then the next of her customers arrived. Farmer McNab came in once a week and bought four space westerns—fortunately there’d been a lot of them in the boxes, because it was a narrow interest that wasn’t getting any new input anytime soon. She’d tried to move him over to either real westerns or space opera, but he was having absolutely none of it, so now she’d e-mailed Griffin and was desperately trying to source anything online that had a picture on the cover of a cowboy wearing a space helmet. By the time she’d dealt with Mr. McNab’s queries about how one tamed a Martian horse (neutron reins), she’d lost sight of Ben.
She worried all morning, serving a long line of people, many, she was pleased to see, absolute regulars.
“This is your fault,” said Mrs. Gardiner, brandishing a huge saga about a Native American woman who’d been magically sent back in time to the court of Henry VIII, who had promptly set about attempting to make her his seventh wife, with pulse-racing results. “You’ve got me hooked on these book things.”
“Good,” said Nina, but she was still thinking about Ben when Surinder turned up to whisk her off to lunch.
“The lucky thing about you . . . ,” began Surinder, watching Nina’s eyelids droop as they sat in the little pub garden and ate cullen skink, a fishy, creamy soup with which they’d both become horribly obsessed, accompanied by rough brown bread and locally smoked salmon, which tasted so different from the oily, rubbery stuff that Nina was used to on the rare occasions she could afford it from the supermarket that it might as well have been a different food altogether.
In the sunlight, with half a lager shandy in front of her, Nina felt her horrible mood start to lift a little.
“What’s lucky about me?” she said. “Because I don’t feel very lucky.”
“Well, you can just finish for the day now, can’t you?” said Surinder. “You’ve sold a bunch of stuff. You can go home and take a nap.”
This hadn’t occurred to Nina, who tended to work a full day from force of habit, not to mention being unable to shut the shop if there was even the slightest chance of another sale. After years of working in public service, it had come as a bit of a surprise to her how genuinely interested she was in running a business; seeing what worked, looking at stock, and, of course, matching the right book to the right person. It was the same joy she had always felt at the library, but somehow, watching people leaving with books they could keep forever was even more profound.
“Oh yeah,” she said.
“Well, can’t you? You’re making enough, aren’t you?”
Frowning, Nina explained about Ainslee and Ben.
“Oh God,” said Surinder. “You should just report it.”
“But Ainslee begged me not to.”
“Yes, but you don’t know what’s going on,” said Surinder. “It could be really, really awful at home. There could be some evil stepdad doing horrible things. She might have Stockholm syndrome or something. Kids are weird like that: they’ll defend their family even if it’s completely messed up.”
“Yeah,” said Nina. “Yeah.”
“So, last night . . . ,” said Surinder, leaving it hanging.
“Argh,” said Nina, dropping her head. “Oh GOD.” And she told Surinder everything.
“Oh,” said Surinder. “Well, Lennox might be right. I mean, why hasn’t Marek invited you anywhere normal?”
“Lennox is a judgmental arsehole.”
“Or Marek’s sending all his money back to his family.”
Nina didn’t reply.
“Oh come on,” said Surinder. “What did you think would happen? Marek was going to take you boldly in his strong and manly arms?”
Nina didn’t want to answer that either.
“What, he was going to lay you down and give you a doing on the floor of the cab?”
“You don’t need to be so explicit.”
“It’s what you were thinking, though.”
“It’s been AGES! AGES!”
Surinder laughed and shook her head. “Your fantasy life is out of control, man.”
Nina felt herself going pink. “I know.”
“I mean, it’s not real, is it?”
Nina thought back to his soft lips on hers, the surprise on his face.