People love the smell of old books, that musty, almost vanilla scent.
I do not.
When I was twelve, I went into Gould’s bookstore on King Street in Newtown with my mother. Newtown was my dreamland and I took solace in its dirty nineties streets, full-regalia drag queens and alterna-vibe that was so different from the suburban misery and bigoty-crush of the Central Coast, where I grew up. Gould’s was a Newtown institution, a massive shop crammed tight with second-hand books. I say massive and I say crammed tight but that doesn’t convey it. The dust was epic. The pages fluttering, old spines falling apart. Behind each row of books was another row of books. There were no prices. It was a place to get lost and stay lost. Gould’s was where old books went to die.
I was a bookish little jerk, so I relished any chance to go to Gould’s and browse the yellowed stacks. I left mum at the front and went deep into the shelves. I was browsing the titles piled high when a man approached me. He was big and smelled of sweat, but not enough that it could overpower the smell of the old paper.
“Hello, little girl,” he said and though I felt an instant discomfort in the deepest meat of my chest and in my toes, I said hello back. I was a polite kid, and when a grown-up spoke to me, I was taught that I should always speak back.
“How old are you?” he asked and moved closer to me. Too close.
“Twelve,” I said, wishing I could tell him I was older, like maybe the extra years might widen the gap between us, the gap that grew smaller every second.
“You’re very pretty,” he said. I was not very pretty, and I knew that, but he still came closer.
There was nowhere to go, I was cornered between two shelves reaching high into the air. I pushed back into the books, cracked spines and dog-eared corners digging into my back and bum and calves and all I wanted was to grow small enough to slip inside the pages. I wanted to escape into them, in a different way from how I’d escaped into them before.
“A very pretty little girl…” His eyes were bloodshot. Too red, too veined with spiderweb lines. There was nowhere to go and I felt like I was falling, like I might topple back and take the shelf down, and the next and the next until the whole bookshop was a mess of titled shelves and books in piles. Like they might bury me, and him, too close together.
The stink of old paper and binding glue was overwhelming. I pressed myself into the stack of books at my back so hard, wishing I could go further, wishing I could disappear into them. Eat me up, books, before he does. They did not.
Then someone browsed around the corner and he took a step back, enough for me to slip between the shelf and him. I wondered if his heart raced like mine did, and what might have happened if we hadn’t been happened upon and if I might have been able to slip inside the pages to get away from him.
I found my mother and told her I was done looking. I didn’t tell her about the man.
I never went back to Gould’s again, not even when I’d moved to my dreamland and become a little Newtown baby, six whole years later and a childhood passed. I loved books and still do, but I never went back, as if the shop itself was to blame and not the man and his red eyes.
People love the smell of old books, that musty, almost vanilla scent. I do not.
