Harpo has accidentally set up a karmic sex cult. He didn’t set out to establish the villages first karmic sex cult. It just sort of happened.
“Why did you put a ad in the paper looking for people to join a sex cult Harpo?” I ask him.
He slaps the palm of his hand into his shaking head. “Bookman! I didn’t put an ad in to set up a sex cult,” he screams.
I read the advert in the crumbled freepaper again. “WANTED: People who want to get hard. Enjoy yourself with likeminded adults. Plenty of sweat and tears. Keep it up longer.”
“Exactly,” Harpo cries.
“Jaysus, it sounds like an advertisement for a karmic sex cult Harpo.”
He slaps his head again and shrieks so highly that I can’t understand him.
“What?”
“I… was… trying to… set up… a gym club,” he shouts. “Not a sex cult. For heaven’s sake, I am not a pervert Bookman. I just wanted to get fit and then Declan did that thing.”
Seven people turned up at Harpo’s gym club. Two were there for exercise, including himself. The other five were regulars on the South Wexford dogging scene. Harpo tried to start everyone off easy with a bit of light stretching. Then Declan took his trouser off.
“It was terrible Bookman,” Harpo lamented. “He stood there waving it at me man!”
Jane Smiley once said; “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” We have a few customers who come to our store to be temporarily encased in books rather than find new reading material. I think it’s like a body treatment for these people. Where others might go to a spa or take a hike, some people like to spend an hour in the closest thing you’ll get to a cave made entirely of books.
Veruca Dempsey is one of those customers. Sometimes I think we should charge her for the time she spends in the shop, criticising myself and the other customers and carefully avoiding buying anything. I used to think she was a charming lady, until she told me the only thing that could possibly make the bookshop better was if I wasn’t in it.
“I love the smell of old books,” she says theatrically, breathing in the place as if she had just returned to the surface for air. “It’s like you can smell the very culture.”
I nod quietly and try to avoid eye contact, silently thankful that at least Stout Trout isn’t around. Stout has mistakenly come to believe that Veruca Dempsey is in love with him. I think the correct emotion she feels for him lays between disgust and hatred.
“Oh, Roddy Doyle,” she says suddenly, and with the same air you might use to say you had just stepped in cow shit. “I didn’t expect to find him here among the Irish classics but I suppose that’s the fault of the proprietor and not Irish fiction.”
“Roddy Doyle won the Booker prize,” I say.
“Hmmm, so did DBC Pierre, an Australian drug addict descended from pirates and prostitutes,” she sneers. “The Booker Prize always was the poor man’s literary award.”
“I like Roddy Doyle.”
“That’s not saying much Bookman. You told me you liked science fiction, a degenerate genre.”
“Roddy Doyle introduced a lot of Irish adults to the novel,” I protest.
“Yes of course, it’s amazing what fuck and shit can do for a literary career in Ireland.”
Arguing with Veruca Dempsey is pointless. It’s best to sit out her visit in silence. Luckily this trip is cut short when the Trout arrives outside. Veruca hears him shouting at a passing car and quickly makes her exit.
“Oh hello my dear,” Trout begins as Veruca Dempsey rushes past him. “What’s up with her?”
I shrug, pleased to have gotten rid of Veruca in such a pleasant fashion.
“You know, I think that lady has a thing for me,” Trout smiles. “I’m very good at recognising the subtle hints. I used to work in the psychology field and, if it taught me anything, it taught me how to recognise a woman who was clearly in love with me.”
“Congratulations Trout.”
Trout smiles and rocks back to forth on his heels, a fair feat for a man of his girth. “I’ll invite you to the wedding. By the way, do you have hot water bottles for sale? Mine burst you see.”
“No Trout, as I keep telling you, this is a bookshop.”
“Some bookshops sell hot water bottles I’m sure,” he says. “You’d be a lot better off financially if you did sell hot water bottles. I would have been one sale there today. I think your missing out on a very important business opportunity to be honest.”
The Most Negative Man in the Village arrives five minutes before I’m due to close. Stout Trout has dozed off in an old wicker chair half full of mills&boons. The Most Negative Man in the Village watches him intently for a few seconds and then mutters something I can’t catch under his breath.
“How’s things?” I ask, hoping he’ll be less negative than usual.
“Terrible,” he moans. “The country is shagged. I had to replace the two front tyres this morning. €120. The little one has measles. Maybe she’ll die knowing the HSE. I haven’t been paid in two weeks because the boss thinks I stole the petty cash box.”
“Did ya?”
“I did but I had no choice with the cost of living in this poxy country. I say you’re selling nothing are you?”
“I’m getting by,” I say, trying to remain cheerful.
“I say you’re suffering. You’ll be bankrupt by the end of the year. I hear books will be extinct in a few years. If I was you, I’d jump in the canal.”
“Ah now…”
“I know, I know. There’s not a bloody enough water in it to kill yourself because of those fecking farmers dumping shite into the river and blocking it up.”
Harpo has turned up in the middle of this rant and, unable to control his inquisitiveness, has to enter the conversation. “Are you in trouble with money Bookman?”
“Of course he bloody is,” the Most Negative Man in the Village cries. “The man is barely hanging on. Anyway, I hear you’re a pervert now setting up tantric sex cults.”
“I am not a pervert,” Harpo screams, striking his forehead so hard with the palm of his hand that he falls back over onto the sleeping Trout.
“Oh Veruca,” he mutters, still sleeping and drooling all over my mills&boons.
The Most Negative Man in the Village looks at me sadly. “The whole place is shagged Bookman!”
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