Let me tell you a story about my life in books. I spent seven years at a bookstore located in Perth, Western Australia, some of which were fun, some of which were awful, and most of which were a wonderful kind of low-key weird.
This all happened in the late 90s/early 2000s, and at the time I was a uni student studying Archaeology. Now I know most you are thinking of death-defying adventures through ancient ruins (preferably being chased by Nazis or the Illuminati), but Western Australia has always had a disappointing lack of underground dungeons, booby-trapped temples and crypts filled with golden treasure. Most of my studies were spent learning to respect the Aboriginal culture of the country – when your state has cultural sites, artefacts and artworks stretching back as far as 60,000 years, a stone ruin with some blowdarts seems like second place.
I was just started studying full time, and I desperately needed a job. I’d already had a few jobs over the years, but not all of them worked out. I spent a few months pulling soft serve ice creams at a cafe by the sea, but my teenage sullenness and awkward stamping around the cramped space earned me the nickname “Lurch.” X-files was still pretty popular at this point and I probably thought I was being cool and aloof like Fox Mulder. God, we’re all so cringeworthy when we’re teenagers, aren’t we?
After that I was a cleaner and a dishpig in various restaurants, where I learnt that cooks are made of stress and barbed wire, and have precisely zero time for your crap. My last dishpig job was at Rottnest Island, you might have seen the memes for this place on the internet. It’s a small tourist attraction off the Western Australian coast, which boasts swimming, shipwrecks and a colony of Quokkas. The Quokka, Senotix brackyurus, are sweet little mini-kangaroos that unlike their larger cousins won’t kick nine types of shit out of you as soon as you encounter them. Rottnest is also the location of a notorious colonial-era Aboriginal prison and graveyard, but in the 1990s the Island was advertising the cute cuddly Quokkas over deaths in custody.
Anyway, my job on the Island was washing dishes at the Rottnest Tea Rooms, which required me to get up exhaustingly early, put on my kitchen uniform and catch a 45-minute ferry ride. I really needed the work and I neglected to let my new employers know that I get explosively sea-sick, so quite a few tourists got off the boat at their island getaway to be greeted by the sight of a kitchen cleaner chundering off the end of the jetty before staggering over to work.
Eventually I grew sick of the situation (Ha-Ha! No apologies for bad puns in this story series), so I decided to shift to a less gut-clenchingly horrible environment by working as a fishmonger.
Yeah, in hindsight, that doesn’t make any sense to me, either.
Australians love their seafood, you’ve probably all heard the stereotypical “throw another shrimp on the barbie” jokes. We actually call them prawns, and they’re much bigger than shrimp. They also smell like nothing else in this world when one falls behind the damn counter and you find it days later while searching through giant bottles of cleaner. The shop needed to be scrubbed down from top to bottom every night, and I used to go home soaking wet while smelling of fish and industrial-strength chemical sanitiser. I couldn’t afford a car and would catch a lift home with a family member, but the smell was so bad that I was forced to hold my uniform out the window on the drive home (which led to at least one confused passer-by wondering if I was trying to flag down help).
Once I got into uni, I decided enough was enough. Like every other teenager before me, I printed out a stack of CVs and walked up and down the streets of Perth, trying my best to appear bright, professional and eager even after the twentieth “No, we don’t have any jobs going. Don’t you know how tough things are right now?”
I also put in my CV to the local book stores. You could still find the hobby book stores or the family-run second hand book stores, but in the late 90s there were three major book chains operating in Perth’s CBD (which isn’t the case anymore, but that’s a story for another day). Boffins was strictly a technical bookshop, although these days they seem to have relaxed the rules a bit. Next was Dymock’s at the Hay Street Mall in the heart of the shopping area. Finally, a few doors down from this was A&R. Both Dymocks and A&R were general book dealers, living high off a time before eBooks and online media had caught on. Perth was always behind the times and I’m fairly certain there were still stores in 1990s Perth who thought that dial-up internet was cutting edge technology.
A&R was a no-frills, low-tech store, with a raised counter near the shopfront windows and a huge set of double doors at the back leading to a partitioned staff room and the loading bay. Everything in between was sprawling racks of bookshelves, all branded in corporate green and white with subject areas stuck onto the shelf ends with a label maker. If there was a new book out, copies would be stacked up on the floor next to each shelf along the central aisle in the hope that it would catch the customer’s eye, but I later learned that it mostly resulted in people knocking the damn things over as they brushed past.
The shop was run by a woman in her 40s named Katherine, a middle-aged professional who still advertised her quiet rebellion to corporate culture via a single bright purple streak in her hair. Unlike the last couple of dozen shop owners, she actually took a few minutes to speak to me, and it turns out she had a passing interest in Archaeology.
“Alright, I’ll let you know,” she said, pushing up her glasses and placing my CV behind the counter onto a stack of others left by similarly hopeful students. “Don’t get your hopes up though.”
This was the best response I’d heard so far, so I took a few minutes to wander through the store. It was pretty peaceful, with a distinct lack of dirty pans or dishes, and no-one jumping out from behind the shelves to yell at me about fish. I did however notice a short, tomboyish teenage girl who was also wandering through the shelves, looking me over with hard eyes.
She’s handed in a CV too, I realised. Not to be outdone, I continued to wander through the aisles, mentally noting every detail in case it gave me an edge. At this point a silent duel ensured, both hopefuls wandering through the store again and again, looking through every stack of books and trying not to get caught glimpsing each other. The store’s usual customers wandered past us, oblivious to the unspoken competition being played out. Both aspirants stalked each other through the shelves, walking back to the front of the store only to turn at the last minute and dive back into the racks of fiction, leafing through the newest releases and searching for some unknown clue that would deliver victory.
The competition broke off in uncertainty, and both parties retreated to consider what they had learned. The test finally came a week or so later when I got a call back from Katherine, who wanted me to come in “for a chat about a casual position.”
Now I’d never had a real job interview at this point. That don’t do a lot of candidate screening when the job involves mopping floors or cleaning bits of crayfish out of the ice display. Dad had a lot of faith in me though, helped me with the tie and gave me the whole “firm handshake and look them in the eye” speech. When I went in to A&R Katherine took me out into a small office next to the loading bay and we started going through my CV. To her credit she was pretty easy on someone who was obviously a little nervous, and I was hoping she was impressed the fact that I’d memorised some of the details of the store already. In hindsight she’d probably heard everything before, and my teenage self was uncomfortably wondering if I’d been beaten to the punch by the hard-eyed girl from before.
“Ok, tell me why you want to work with books?” Katherine asked with a frown, leafing through the meager pages of my CV again.
So that I don’t come home in the evenings covered in shit, was my initial thought, but the moment she asked the question I knew I had the job.
You see, my family loves books.
My Mum, Dad and sisters, all of us have spent our lives reading books. History, art, crime; everything from social philosophers to pulp-fiction thrillers. However, what we loved most of all was fiction, especially fantasy and sci-fi. A common Sunday afternoon at my family’s place was all of us perched around the lounge room reading the latest offering from one of our favourite authors. We had a well-thumbed communal set of the entire works of Feist, Eddings and Brooks. Asimov was occasionally dusted off but Alastair Reynolds was more popular. C S Lewis and Tolkien took pride of place on the family bookcase and I populated my own shelves after devouring everything ever written by Terry Pratchett. We all barracked for our favourite characters and debated whether Allanon from the Shannara series could beat Macros the Black from Magician or Polgara from the Belgariad. Simon from the To Green Angel Tower series was measured against Fitz from the Farseer trilogy, and we took sides on Team Eowyn over Team Arwen long before any nonsense regarding vampires and werewolves.
“All right,” replied Katherine with a wry smile after I threatened to contrast Jordan’s The Wheel of Time against Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. “I’ll start you off on Saturday mornings.”
I was elated; no more scrubbing pots and pans, no more walking the streets with a pack of CVs, and no more pretending that I had to study whenever my friends and family wanted to do something because I was too broke to afford a social life.
Katherine fished around in one of the boxes hemming in her desk until she found the Angus & Robertson branded green tartan tie and promised me a badge when I started my first shift. I was also introduced to the two other casuals who were already working at the A&R Perth store. The first was Paul, a tall blonde law student. The second was Denise, a town planning student with dark auburn hair and a friendly smile.
“Great to have you on board!” they cheered, stopping to chat with me as they hurried through their lunch in the small staff room.
“Thanks,” I said. “I was worried I wasn’t going to get it.”
“Nah, Katherine likes history,” laughed Paul as he unwrapped a sandwich. “I think she wanted to have an archaeo on board.”
“It’s also good to have someone besides me who knows the sci-fi section,” remarked Denise, breaking apart some disposable wooden chopsticks as she opened her own meal.
I was about to reply when a familiar tomboyish figure walked through the door, clad like myself in casual gear as opposed to Paul and Denise’s A&R uniforms. In the instant our eyes met there was a flash of recognition and the girl’s face twisted up in an unspoken question.
“Hi I’m Chris,” I said brightly, getting up to offer my hand. “I’ve just started as a casual.”
She must got a job too, good for her, I thought (rather magnanimously). Well, the store’s big enough for the two of us.
“Yeah, I remember you,” she nodded with a grin, walking past Paul and Denise to grab something from the small fridge.
“Catch anything today, Tanya?” asked Paul between mouthfuls.
“Not yet but it’s only lunchtime,” Tanya replied, flopping down into chair beside Denise.
“Sorry, do you already work here?” I asked, starting to get a little confused.
“Tanya’s our shoplifting guard,” answered Denise. “She wears plain clothes and keeps an eye on customers who look like they’re going to steal the books.”
“I was wondering how much you were planning to carry off with the way you kept hanging around,” Tanya continued, arching her eyebrow at me as she ate.
“I wasn’t – I mean,” I started, flustered.
“Oh, I know,” replied Tana sweetly. “Considering how obviously you were casing the place, I figured you had to be the worst shoplifter I’ve ever seen.”
The three of them erupted into laughter and after the embarrassment wore off, I joined them. After all, it was still my dream job compared to scrubbing floors and wrapping pieces of fish.
So began my seven-year stint in books. My first lesson was how to deal with the myriad customers who frequented A&R, from the professional to the creepy to the completely unconscious.
But that’s a story for another day.
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