#4: Chance encounters
Trixie could tell, by the indignant grunts and sharp releases of breath which punched through doorway to the back office, that it was not going to be an easy Monday.
Sabine, the small, sharp-faced manager at the shop, wore her emotions out like a cardigan, filling rooms with them, and Trixie could often intuit from the moment she entered the shop whether it was going to be a good or bad day. On that particular morning, as Trixie jiggled her key in the old lock, kicked the bottom of the door once to unstick it and crossed the threshold into the bookshop, there was a rustiness to the place that she always associated with the very worst of Sabine’s dramatic moods.
It had been Trixie’s morning to open – and she was fifteen minutes early, as she often was for an open shift. She liked to sit behind the counter with a takeaway banana oat muffin (from Ido’s café three doors down) and feel the cool, close bookshop warm up with the mid-morning sun. She also liked how dense and calm the shop felt – all that paper numbing the sound of the traffic outside, and the frenetic energy of Kensington’s shoppers – before she opened up or another staffer arrived. But on days like today, when Sabine was in a mood, she would often arrive hours earlier, stealing these precious fifteen minutes and replacing them with her odd French intensity.
Trixie told herself she didn’t mind, because Sabine had been Trixie’s manager for nearly six years and, in a way, she was like an deeply self-serious older sister. But on many of these mornings, like this particular Monday morning, Trixie felt – just for a second – that she didn’t quite have the energy for Sabine.
The lights were all on, the morning deliveries had been collected from the back door and their ancient computer was still whirring and sighing on the counter, trying to start up for another day of middling sales. Trixie opened the register and checked the float, knowing even as she did that it would already be there. Rolling her eyes at no one in particular, she pulled her muffin out of her handbag, and tramped over to the back office, where Sabine was buried in among a pile of file copies: old books missing back covers, dust jackets or front corners, which the shop had been allowed to keep as part of a distributor’s returns policy. Her angular cheeks were pink, and her mouth was drawn into its characteristic puckering frown.
“Morning,” Trixie mumbled through a mouthful of muffin.
“Is it a good morning?” Sabine moaned. In truth, even when she wasn’t moody, her heavy Provençal accent turned every sentence into a wounded birdsong. “It does not feel good, Trixie!” She would always draw out the end of Trixie’s name – “Trix-eeeeeeee”.
“It’s a very nice day, Sabine,” Trixie said gently. “Why don’t you take a walk while I open up? You’re not even on til 12.”
“No, no. This bloody damn cupboard has been getting at my nerves.” Sabine gestured hopelessly around at the towers of books, which were waiting to be filed away on the overstuffed staff shelves set around the back office. Trixie had been ignoring the mounting copies since October last year, well before the Christmas rush on ordering, because she knew there was no room to store it all. Now she peered at the shelves, thinking.
“I suppose we could swap out some of the older ones. Box them up? We could send them off to a charity drive, or something.”
“Trixie,” Sabine moaned. “There is just too many of the books. I am done with them already for the day.”
“Fine!” Trixie said, picking off another chunk off muffin and popping it in her mouth. “Let’s just leave it for now. We can have a think about what to do with them all later.”
Sabine threw her hands in the air. Silver bangles clinked along her slim wrists. “Ack! All right, Trixie. It’s done. Come, let’s make some coffee.”
Trixie sat at the coffee counter finishing her muffin, while Sabine whipped up two very hot, very toxic black coffees. She dissolved a spoonful of sugar into each (Trixie had learned, despite her preference to take coffee without sugar everywhere else, that Sabine would put one sugar in her jet fuel morning coffees regardless), then passed the cup to Trixie.
“How did your special dinner go so bad, Trixie?” Sabine asked, straightforward as ever.
Trixie winced into her coffee cup. She knew she would have to answer that question a million more times. “Dunno, just did. Time to end things, you know?”
“I thought always that he was embarrassing,” Sabine said. She gave Trixie a sympathetic smile. “He was never reading anything. I am always saying, ‘Lukas, what are you reading?’ And he is always answering, ‘Sabine, I don’t read’. Who is never reading?”
Trixie shrugged. “Yeah, he wasn’t really into that stuff.”
“This is not your man, Trixie. You love books.”
“Yeah.” Trixie glanced at the clock: 9.55am. She scurried to make the final arrangements to open the shop, while Sabine sucked the steam from her coffee cup and watched on thoughtfully. Once Trixie had flipped the sign and propped the door open, she returned to the coffee counter. Sabine welcomed her back with another query. “I hope you will be finding more interesting sex now, Trixie,” she said matter-of-factly.
Trixie laughed. “Is that a question, or are you just warning me to be more outrageous in the bedroom?”
“You are not unattractive,” Sabine observed, scrunching up her eyes to observe Trixie more closely. “And you are clever. I’m thinking you can find more to satisfy you than Lukas.”
The bell over the shop’s front door rang, and two older men shuffled through the door. Trixie chugged the last of her coffee and passed the mug back to Sabine. “Perhaps,” she said. Then she hurried over to greet the first customers of the day.
Sabine, though she was overcommitted and overqualified to be manager of the Carr St Bookshop, still had to answer to the shop’s pompous owner, Jon Sutcliffe – just as the rest of the staff did.
Jon was a tall, reedy man with thinning silver hair and a very large nose, dotted with webs of broken capillaries, giving the impression that he was always coming in from the cold. He considered himself a “connoisseur of the written word”, and yet he spent very little time, since Sabine had been made manager, actually running things at Carr St. Rather, he preferred to breeze through once or twice a fortnight, to pick up a few of the most anticipated reading copies from his rarely used desk in the back office, and to complain to Trixie and the other senior staff about the regular appearances he was “practically forced” to make on the afternoon arts programs for a variety of radio stations.
Jon had long been an influential presence in Melbourne’s book scene, since he’d run the Carr St shop by himself through global economic crises, book sales disasters and local publicity scandals for over forty years. Though Sabine did most of the grunt work to keep the shop operational, Trixie knew, and though Jon refused to actually interact with customers (or with any of the junior staff members), Jon regarded Sabine as a more of a necessary evil in the shop than a saving grace. On days when he’d text the shop’s mobile phone, “Coming in, see you soon”, no matter what mood Sabine was in she’d immediately go into panic overdrive, rushing to ensure nothing was out of place in preparation for his arrival.
“Trixie,” Sabine wailed from the back office, where she was shifting boxes from the mid-morning delivery to make a path from the door to Jon’s desk, “please will you come to move these boxes with me!”
Trixie, who was absently Googling a frustrating customer request (a blue Australian cookbook with a blonde man on the front), turned to see Sabine attempting to carry three full boxes at once down the narrow set of stairs from the back mezzanine to the main shop. “Sabine! Careful.”
“I am fine, Trixie. Please get the other boxes.” Sabine waved Trixie away with a sharp elbow, staggering to the enormous old trestle table where they unpacked and sorted the orders. Trixie grabbed two boxes from the office, and returned to the orders table, just as the bell above the shop door rang again.
Since the mid-morning rush, the shop had been silent as a chilly church hall. But through the door burst a tall, red-ponytailed woman with a tired face and a toddler’s hand pressed in her own. The toddler, a chubby boy with curly blonde hair and lots of freckles, looked intensely worried.
“Good morning!” Trixie called over her shoulder, as she dropped the boxes she was carrying down by the orders table. Sabine was already working away, unpacking and sorting the books against her printed list at lightning speed.
“Afternoon,” the woman replied, gesturing to the big clock which hung above the counter and read thirteen minutes past twelve.
“Right!” Trixie smiled, and wiped her sweaty hands on the front of her jeans. “Then, good afternoon.”
The woman was frowning at her. She had a slim, oval-shaped face, which was very symmetrical. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were so pale they were nearly invisible, and the skin under her eyes was bruised blue with exhaustion. Beside her, the toddler was bouncing from one foot to the other and peering uncomfortably around the shop. “Look, I know this is an annoying thing to ask,” the woman said, “but my son, he’s—”
At that moment, the little boy let out a wail and squeezed his legs together, scrunching his face up at the same time.
“Oh!” Trixie said, looking down at him in alarm.
“Yes,” the woman replied bluntly. “He has to use the toilet. Now I wouldn’t ask. I know. I know it’s annoying, it’s just—”
“I am sorry,” Sabine called from over at the orders table, “our facilities are for customers, madame. You may buy a book or walk down to the public park.”
The woman gave Trixie a pained look. “If I try and get him to the park, he’ll . . . well, you know.”
Trixie looked at the little boy, wriggling on the spot. Then she peered at the woman in her Lululemon exercise clothes, with her Karen Walker sunglasses pushed back on her brow. She had very clear grey eyes and fine lines around her mouth, that signalled how often she was usually smiling (thougn, of course, not at that moment). “It’s all right, Sabine,” Trixie said at last. “I’ll take them”
Sabine looked at Trixie and raised an overplucked eyebrow. “Remember, Jon is coming here,” she warned.
Trixie nodded curtly and led the woman and her son through the back to the mezzanine, past the office and out to the shop’s courtyard. It was always too dark and cool out there for customers to really enjoy the space, because of the enormous mulberry tree that hung over the fence from the optometrist’s office next door. Very occasionally, Trixie would sit out there with a file copy and a cup of tea, wrapped in a cardigan, and attempt to take a Vitamin D break. But she rarely caught any more than a glint of sun before Sabine was calling her back inside again. “Toilet’s just through there,” Trixie said, pointing at the rustic door they’d hung across the outhouse building. “Sorry, it’s not much.”
“It’s – you’re a lifesaver,” the woman said, giving Trixie a warm smile. She pushed the toddler into the toilet, and in another moment, she was back out the door again, calling, “You just tell me if you need a hand, Olly.”
“OK?” Trixie asked.
“We’re trying to do toilets by ourselves at the moment,” the woman explained. “Which is how we got into this whole mess in the first place. Thank you.” She held out a hand to Trixie.
“No problem,” Trixie replied, taking the woman’s small hand and giving it a squeeze. “Sabine is just . . . well, she likes to follow the rules.”
“And you don’t?” The woman grinned at Trixie.
“No, I do,” Trixie said, laughing. “But I also don’t like cleaning up toddler urine from the floor.”
“I’m Natalie,” said the woman. She jerked her head at the toilet door, “He’s Olly.”
“Trixie.”
“Thanks, Trixie.”
Trixie shrugged. “Toilet stuff is hard.”
They stood together for a moment, shoulder-to-shoulder, listening as Olly sang to himself in the toilet. Trixie smiled, recognising an old Peter Coombe tune.
“How long have you worked here, Trixie?” Natalie asked.
“Oh, ages. Nearly six years.”
Natalie nodded, looking around the breezy courtyard. “And you like it?”
“Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.” Trixie tapped her fingers against her leg. “You local?”
“Only recently,” Natalie explained. “Just moved from Elsternwick.”
“South to north – that’s a big shift.”
“Mmmm.”
They were silent again, and Trixie could feel something heavy settle on Natalie. She looked over at her, looking properly. Natalie was tall, as Trixie had first noticed inside the shop, but she also appeared tall because she held herself beautifully. With her chin lifted up slightly to face the sun, her neck was stretched up like a figure in an old painting. And, despite looking somewhat worn out, her skin was rich and dewy like thickened cream. Trixie noticed Natalie’s hands fidgeting at her sides, picking the skin around her nails with her thumb and index finger.
“I like your top,” Natalie said, pointing to Trixie’s E.MOT.ION shirt. “That’s a great album.”
“It is a great album,” Trixie agreed, grinning. “I bought it off the internet, to be honest. Never seen her live, or anything.”
Natalie shrugged. “I never see anyone live anymore. Can’t exactly run out to gigs when you’ve got a three-year-old.”
“Right.” Trixie paused, then said, “I like your hair. I’ve always wished I had red hair.”
“Careful what you wish for,” Natalie said, rolling her eyes. “It doesn’t bloody go with anything. Looks dirty one day after washing. And if I don’t wear mascara I look, well, see:” she gestured up to her face, “ghost girl.”
“I like it!” Trixie smiled “It’s nice; it’s pretty.”
Natalie gave her a curious look. “Well. Thanks. That’s sweet.”
From inside the toilet, Olly’s singing turned to cries for “Mummy! Mummy!” and Natalie pulled open the makeshift door to help him. As she did, Trixie ducked her head back into the shop to check on Sabine. The shop was empty, and Sabine was shelving the orders, a look of furious concentration pasted over her sharp features.
“Thanks for helping us out, Trixie.”
The voice startled Trixie, and she jumped a little, turning to see Natalie and Olly, both looking far more comfortable and much happier. “Pleasure,” Trixie said. “All good?” she asked Olly.
Olly began to nod, then slipped behind Natalie’s legs, suddenly shy. Natalie rolled her eyes again. “Oh, Olly. Stop it. Say thank you to Trixie, please.”
From behind Natalie’s legs, Trixie heard the smallest mumble of “thank you”.
“You’re very welcome,” she replied. “I’ll let you out here, if you like.”
She pulled out her keys and unlocked the ill-used side gate, set into the tall brick wall which separated the courtyard from the laneway beside it. Natalie and Olly slipped through, and as they brushed past, Trixie felt a tingle of electricity where her elbow met Natalie’s forearm. The two women gave each other slightly overlong, odd smiles, then Trixie waved. “See you around,” she called, as she began to close the door.
“Goodbye, Trixie,” said Natalie.
As Trixie locked the gate back up and dropped her keys back into her pocket, she felt a twinge in her gut. She returned to the shop, and to Sabine’s harried afternoon instructions. As she started cataloguing the customer orders ready for pick-up, she thought of Natalie’s upturned chin and her long neck. Her stomach twitched merrily again.
The Broken-Heart Brigade is released via weekly e-newsletter instalments through Substack. It is supported by Matilda’s generous subscribers, Melbourne City of Literature and the City of Melbourne.
The Broken-Heart Brigade is made in Naarm (Melbourne), on stolen Wurundjeri land that was never ceded. Matilda pays respect to the rightful Aboriginal owners of the land on which she lives and works, and hopes the readers of her writing do too.