A girl who reads

She was always there when I arrived. Table by the door to the kitchen, resting her head on one hand, holding the book in the other, legs crossed under the table, one foot constantly jiggling. Her shoes lay discarded on the floor.

The first time she was reading Jane Eyre. A dog-eared, charity shop copy, one-pound-fifty sticker half peeling off the cover.  Her green eyes flickered side to side behind her black-rimmed glasses, moving down, turning to the next page even as she read the last words of the previous one so as not to break the flow of words for even a second. A small, constant frown crinkled her forehead into three lines, her eyes widening occasionally at some shock, a moment of tension causing her to bite her lip.

She sipped at her tea, bit into her cake; never taking her eyes off the page. Coffee shop life went on around her. The clatter of spoons and crockery, the idle banter of the staff, the rise and fall of conversation; none of it touched her.

I would hang on till the last possible moment before abandoning my table and drifting reluctantly back to work, thinking about her. What did she do? Did she just take long lunch breaks? Did she work at all? Outside was an old-fashioned upright bicycle chained to a lamppost, a wicker shopping basket on the handlebars, flowers entwined round the frame.

I imagined her sailing through the park on it, the wind pushing the curls of her hair back in waves from her face, her back ruler straight, her long bare legs rising and falling steadily on the pedals. Riding back to her small flat, above a shop perhaps, with a fluffy tortoiseshell cat that curled up beside her as she lay on the worn sofa, lit by an old table-lamp. All the furniture in the comfortably cluttered room was second hand, thrown together at random but it somehow just worked.

And in her hand, of course, a book. I couldn’t imagine her not reading. The second day Jane Eyre was gone, replaced by The Great Gatsby. A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Time-Traveller’s Wife, Pride and Prejudice, Catch 22, the list went on, none lasting more than a day.

Once I could see she was going to finish one: Catcher in the Rye. I waited, hoping that, freed of the book’s spell, she would look up and notice me, terrified at the thought she actually would. I watched as her eyes stopped moving across the page; she closed the book and held it before her for a moment, staring at the cover. The she smiled, laid the book aside, reached into her bag, pulled out Fahrenheit 451 and started reading.

Did she ever sense me looking at her? Surely she must have done, the intensity of my gaze taking on physical form to brush against her, enticing her to raise her eyes to mine. I would smile. She would smile. I would say ... what?  

One day as I got up to leave I found myself standing by her table, staring down at her, the soft curls of her hair, her long fingers holding the book. Say something, say something, say something.

I fled, cursing my pathetic cowardice. Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow, you will speak to her. I laughed at the idea: sitting down at her table, bold as anything, and casually introducing myself. It was funny but somehow I knew it would happen, I would do it. I had to. Tomorrow was the day I would meet the girl who reads.

The next day there were strangers at her table. One glanced briefly up at me as I stood staring at them.

Outside, there was no bicycle leaning against the lamppost. It wasn’t there the next day, or the one after, or any of the days after that. After a while I just stopped going that way.