On The Shelf
by Kim Kelly
One day you’re being splashed with champagne at your literary launch, and the next you find yourself wedged between a Lionel Shriver and a Dan Brown on the bottom shelf of a small-town street library, wondering how you got there, and why.
She didn’t take to me, didn’t me give much of a go, Jane, with the sad brown eyes and her phone going off every five minutes and that boyfriend always making her cry. No wonder she was too distracted to read me – or couldn’t find me ‘relatable’ from the ‘get go’, as the mysterious marketing people say. I suspect she didn’t like my author too much, anyway. Not sure of the full story with them but it seems Lisa, who wrote me, and Jane had worked together some time ago – maybe there were some jealousy issues. Who would know? Not me. I only know what I hear and see and feel, and all that Lisa put into me. She could drink Pinot Grigio for Australia, let me tell you – drink anything after the first bottle.
Jane bought me just after Lisa’s teary launch speech, right off the stack of fresh unboxed copies – Love you always, Janey, thanks for coming! Lis xxx sprawled across my title page – and I sat on Jane’s bedside table for a couple of days after that, but she couldn’t get past chapter one. Then, all in a rush, I got shoved into a cavernous black bag and we went somewhere on a train, the ragged edges of wedding-cake fibro and blond-brick burbsville falling away into trees and trees and trees. She held me for a long time, held me like a shield against the whole world – I had a great window-seat view but still she didn’t make it past chapter one. I wished I could do something about her sadness, touch her, hold her – not up to me, though. You can put a book in someone’s hand, but you can’t make them read.
I think it was Jane’s mother’s place we were going to, out in the countryside – certainly somewhere Lisa had never taken me. But just before we got there, Jane slipped me out of that big black bag saying, ‘No, I do not want to spend the whole weekend talking about Lisa,’ and she pushed me onto this shelf, sitting outside a corner store-come-cafe that was selling milk and papers and hot chips and fried everything in who the hell knows where.
Both Lionel and Dan are all right, in their own ways, but they’re not Lisa. She was full-bodied and lavish-hearted; she was messy and generous and my every day for so long. I miss her. She had a hard time – spent half of her every day telling herself she was useless. Telling herself the most terrible lies. But then some days, together we’d fly. She took me to Madrid, to Dresden and Prague. We escaped some heavy situations, almost found love on a couple of occasions, but we always survived. She took me to a lot of interesting bars.
Now, I’m staring spine-out at an old pub across the road, rusted roof, verandah sagging. The sun’s sinking, it’s getting cold and damp, and I’m thinking about how Lisa’s editor Isabella had kept wanting to knock the ‘h’ off verandah in the copyedit, when this bloke comes swaggering across the road, heading this way.
He knocks the toe of his boot stepping up the high, wild-west bluestone gutter and staggers, and I reckon he’s had a few afternoon bevvies. He’s not drunk, though. He’s only had the one schooner and a bit of a hard time lately, with some health issues and a story I want to know as soon as he picks me up.
His name is Jonno and he orders his ‘usual’ from Karen behind the counter at the corner store, and we make it past chapter one before our dinner hits the table.
© Kim Kelly, 2020
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