Special Tastes

The gradual onset of summer meant that the days started earlier and the evenings held out till a bit later, and on the South Coast the heat of summer was moderated by the Southern Ocean which helped Quarabup secure 100mm more rain than Perth with that rain mostly falling at night and spread a little more evenly throughout the year.  Mornings could still be a bit brisk, but not deathly cold, and as the air warms revealing a vault of azure blue sky days become exquisite.   The afternoons were so balmy you wanted them to last forever.

Ellie Johnson loved the beach.  Living in Quarabup she was in her element.  West Beach was a long gentle curve of white sand interrupted from time to time by grey granite boulders and buttresses but backing up to dunes covered by silver-grey grasses.and peppermint willow.  Many a summer holiday had been spent catching the rays as well as watching the local grommets and dudes fight for space on the waves.  She had tried her hand on a surf board, but preferred to watch others.  The general opinion around the place was the she was quite decorative around the beach and she was happy with that.  The best thing about Quarabup was that as well as the West Beach which generally caught the prevailing south-westerly weather, on those occasions when the weather was coming from the opposite direction Back Beach was the place to be.  Back Beach formed a relatively narrow curve of beach facing East and buttressed on either end by high granite headlands.  So from whichever direction the weather was coming there was always a place to find good surf.
Her beach-time was confined to weekends this summer because of her new job at Horden House Antiquarian Books.  She didn't mind really.  Books were her second love after all.  It did not take long in her work at the Bookshop to realise how much she enjoyed handling books, especially old and special editions.

She even began dreaming of having a house of her own with a reading room that had floor to ceiling bookshelves comfortably and decoratively filled with books from all over the place.

The best time was when boxes of books came in.  Generally GG would get her to do the initial sort through of books that came this way, but about once every three or four weeks the post would bring an unusually packaged box that Ellie was under instruction to take straight to GG or leave in his office untouched if he was out of the shop when it arrived.  Whenever such boxes arrived, a day or two later, the same customer would come in to meet briefly with GG and then leave with the box under his arm.  By now she recognised him, but he was not someone she knew, even by sight before her work in the shop.  The customer would never say hello to her or smile or look her in the eyes.  There was something shifty about him - a kind of guilty look, but she wasn't sure how to interpret it.

Curiosity is a powerful thing and Ellie sat with this for some time.  The shiftiness of the customer meant that in her imaginations of what was involved, she was inclined to suspect the worst.  Her earliest imaginings were that perhaps doing a line of drug-supplying might be a way for GG to earn enough to make ends meet - God knows he didn't seem to sell enough books to make it a viable business.

That afternoon, Ellie determined she would confront GG about this - or at least ask him to satisfy her curiosity so that she could just get back to normal again.  But how could she raise such a thing?  If it was really drugs, he was not likely to fess up about it; illicit drugs are, after all, against the law.  She would have to think up a rather innocent or naïve way of raising it and see how he reacts.

She would do it when she took a coffee in for him at about 3pm, as she did each day.

As casually as she could, she put the coffee on his desk and then said "GG?  I have been wondering.  Every time we get one of those special boxes I am supposed to put straight onto your desk, the same customer comes and takes away the whole box.  What is so special that he takes the whole lot?"

GG shot a sideways glance at her, looked thoughtful for a moment and then got up from his desk and wandered to the window of his office that looked into the bookshop.  Without looking directly at her and with as much of a matter-of-fact air to his voice as he could produce he simply said "Mr Caruthers has special tastes and I have found a supplier who can help me meet them.The supplier sends me other books, but he packages these differently so that I know what he is sending me."

"Books?" asked Ellie, with a bit too much surprise in her voice.

"Yes, books!  Its what we sell here!  My goodness dear.  What else did you think they might be?"
"Of well.  I don't know." she said rather sheepishly now.  And then with a sort of rush, as if to get it off her chest she blurted it out.  "I really thought it might have been drugs and I was afraid you might be in trouble or something and I didn't know what to do and so I thought I had better just ask you and ...  Oh, I feel so silly!"
GG thought for a minute, considering who it was he was talking to.  Yes, she was a young lady, just out of school, but she was now an employee and she needed to know enough about the business he did to make sure she didn't get caught up in silly gossip that might ultimately embarrass him.

"My dear Ellie, come over here and let's talk about this so that you know just what the score is."  He sat her down at the table, went into his office turning the kettle on as he went and started rummaging around in the back.  When he came back he had coffee for each of them and a rather thin, oriental-looking book that he gently put down on the table and slid it towards her.  "Mr Caruthers has special tastes in books.  You don't need to look at it, if you don't want to, but perhaps you might best listen to me before you choose whether or not to."

He proceeded very carefully to engage with the idea that there were many different kinds of books on the market these days, and that because of the internet, people had a much wider knowledge of what was out there than used to be the case years ago.  Mr Caruthers was a good man who had discovered a particular kind of book on a business trip to Tokyo years ago.  They are called Manga.  At first glance they look like comic books, but a little attention to the images and the story lines reveals that these are not children's stories.  There were various genre of Manga that were intended for young people and adults, and there was a genre that appealed to the erotic.  Mr Caruthers was inclined to read these and he preferred to buy them for cash at Horden House than buy them over the internet.  GG found a supplier and they made an agreement to secure a certain amount each quarter.  Mr Caruthers sometimes asked for particular titles, but generally he was happy to read whatever was supplied.  By using one supplier, they were able to keep track of previous purchases.

This regular business for Horden House was the only consideration GG had given to the arrangement.  He was not interested in, nor did he make any judgement about, Mr Caruther's taste in literature.

"So you just buy them for him." said Ellie, thumbing disinterestedly through the book on the table.

"Yes, my dear.  As you have seen many times, I don't even open the packages.  I take the invoice from the address label and let Mr Caruthers know that the books have arrived and how much they are."

Ellie was clearly relieved by this information.  GG looked her in the eye and said to her "I'm a simple man who has tried to make the best of my life.  I have found that the best way to get along with people is to accept them as they are.  I don't make any judgements about people.  If they are square with me I will be square with them.  When I give my word, I keep my word and that rule has served me well over the years.  When you first walked into my shop I knew there was something about you that would mean that we would get along fine, and I should have trusted you earlier about this, rather than allow you to dream up all sorts of silly notions about me and the business.  I hope you will accept my apology."

"Your apology!  GG, it is me that should apologize.  I feel so silly for even thinking you could have been doing something like drugs.  I am so sorry!"

"Well, let's not hear anything more about it then, shall we?"

As Ellie closed up the shop that evening, she felt just a  few inches taller at having been trusted by GG the way he did that afternoon.