The Art of Hunting

From the outside, it isn’t much to look at. Wedged between an empty bookie’s and a row of three identical cabins selling mobile phone fascias; the wooden frontage is so scratched and pealed that it resembles not a shop but some itching, scabrous visage. It makes Purlock think of meat. Beneath a curl of faded paintwork, a wooden sign survives: ‘D.H. James & son’.

The font is simply beautiful (Purlock notices these things). The perfect balance of the ampersand; the descender on the capital J skimming a dark green trim; the elegance of the full stops; the strangely deferential, uncapitalised ‘son’.

Purlock points his pitch-black winkle-pickers south and enters, half-shoving the half-stuck door, leaving the street behind as he has left most things in his life (cold, some chance of showers). A motorbike backfires as the door scuffs shut.

Inside it is dark and golden brown, like a cereal womb. It takes Purlock a moment to adjust. I mean, it takes us all (he’s not alone in this, not by a long stretch). Inside the shop there is more stuff than shop. Let us start here, by the window: a row of oddities and ghastly mannequins, Venetian marionettes holding tragic poses, strung up to the ceiling by their necks. Next, eyes up, a bull’s head. A whole head, protruding like a knob from the wall, black as a bear, startled, a rusting iron ring slung through its nostrils. It makes Purlock think of meat and shipbuilding, the ring a miniature of the kind used to fasten ships to the harbour. Barnacled and bloody. A doll’s house. The city laid out in miniature. A faded Persian carpet. And then the books. Hundreds of them, toppling from prehistoric chipboard shelving, wall to wall, wall to floor, floor to ceiling. Purlock can feel the air move around him, or rather he senses the dust in the air. It’s like everything’s still and flowing at the same time.

Purlock is meant to be here, the same way Jim was meant to open this shop in the first place. I don’t believe in Fate and neither do they. But something has drawn them together more than coincidence or the sheer bloody closeness of the city.

In the backroom, Jim, one foot aloft a wooden step-ladder, hears the front door judder open. He sniffs, and ignores it. He doesn’t like to pry too early with his customers. He’s not like the boors who populate the chain stores with their vacant questions. Can I help you madam? and Were you looking for something in particular? Jim guesses, rightly on most occasions, that his customers either know exactly what they’re looking for and would regard any intrusion on their search as entirely ill-mannered, or have absolutely no idea, are browsing mindlessly, and are therefore not worth his attention anyway. Customers are, after all, seven types of sheep.

When Jim finally emerges, the rakish boy leafing through his Penguin Classics flinches and is identified immediately as Type 6 – unusual for D.H. James & son, but not unheard of. The dark, artfully dishevelled hair, the hint of blush in the lower chaps, the antiqued dress sense – all distinctive characteristics of the art student. Jim remembers an old witticism, that art students make ‘neither art nor study,’ and chuckles to himself in what comes out as a low splutter. There is no need to formally acknowledge his customer’s presence, so Jim shuffles into the craggy dock of the counter or till or sales desk or whatever one might call it. There is a strong tang of cut tobacco here, which he finds comforting. This is his rolling desk. He sits, opens January’s issue of The Bookseller and scans the glossy pages for the names and thumbnail photographs of old enemies.

Purlock snatches the nearest dog-eared volume as the ample shape of the manager appears from the shadows at the back of the shop. You must play the customer; that’s how the game works in here. A 1956 edition of Brighton Rock. Washed out orange cover, substantial spoiling and pencil marks. Purlock thinks he should like Graham Greene. He flicks to a random page; the paper is cold to the touch.

It was the Pompadour Boudoir, he reads silently. ‘It’s Mr Colleoni I want to talk to,’ Cubitt said. He breathed whisky over the marquetry. Purlock senses the manager’s instant disapproval. ‘Take a seat,’ Crab said, waving a possessive hand at the gilt chairs.

You mustn’t spend too long on any one book. That’s also in the rules. It may give the wrong impression, like you’re not really looking for something. Purlock attempts to squeeze Brighton Rock back into the row of tightly packed Classics; failing, leaves it propped out of place next to Moby-Dick (2003; nearly new). He’s in luck – the crime is masked by the sound of a bus.

Jim clears his throat, as he always does. It lends his speech an air of aggressive intent. Without looking up:

“I’m afraid I’m closing for lunch in ten minutes so you’ll have to be quick.” (Jim has no intention of taking lunch.)

Purlock performs a demi-turn, his sallow face creasing into a kind of surprised grin.

“Oh, I see. Err – thank you.”

Dust fills the shop bottom-up, like poison gas in a sealed room.

“After something specific?”

Jim mentally curses himself as his corroded vocal chords release this mantra. Of course this little rogue is after something. They all are.

“I – well, I’m trying to, yes, locate a – yes, locate a book.”

Purlock pauses, sucks in a lungful of air.

“I was told to come here. To find it.”

Jim swivels, prods at the mouse. His dormant computer (save a conked out mobile hidden in a drawer, the only technology in the shop) stirs into life.

“Title? ISBN?”

It is long since Jim bothered to take careful note of the contents of his shop. You may ask how such an enterprise could even exist here, on the margins of the city, the sick belly of bloody-nowhere. D.H. James & son, established 1974; back-street utopia of bearded students. Fortress of the rearguard revolution. Haven for Whitechapel weirdos and spectacled pensioners with pockets jangling with coppers.

It is not such a mystery. In 1984 Jim came into possession of a stash of rare and valuable books, a fortuitous event occasioned by the death of his great-uncle, a grotesque ogre of a man with pretensions of nobility. For the past twenty-five years Jim has been steadily selling this legacy for scrap; a book for every year. A complete thirteenth century English Bible, illuminated in masterly Gothic by William de Brailes, flogged off page by page to naïve tourists. The ultimate cut and paste job. The vast bulk of D.H. James & son’s sales are now made back-channel to vellum aesthetes or online, the shop itself mere window-dressing for Jim’s digital avatar jamesbooksUK.

There is no answer from the pale apparition currently poised next to a plastic silo of obscure French Literature. Jim looks up, takes in this strange figure before him. On closer inspection not a student, Jim decides. Beneath the puppy fat, the hip attire, another face, scored, coarse; cheekbones threatening to pop right out. An aspiring scribbler? Layabout? Hackney benefit fraud? Outlandish get-up, certainly; a cut above the usual retro clobber. Pointed black boots; tight, grey eelskin trousers; crisp, white linen shirt cosseted by a black, wasp-waisted jacket; double-knotted neck-tie drawing the eye up towards the face. In short, he appeared to Jim a pure spectacle of decoration.

“I will need to know the author’s name, at least.”
Purlock leans one elbow against the nearest shelf. A whorl of dust breaks away, falls slowly to the floor.

“Purlock, E.H.”

Jim stares for a moment, then swivels to the screen.

“Let’s see now. Pur-lock.” He types it in. “Yes, here we go. Purlock, Ebeneezer Henry. The Art of Hunting. 1861. In, I believe, a later binding. Good condition. Some very minor soiling and a missing frontispiece, that’s all.”

His eyes scan the webpage.

“Wait there.”

Purlock watches as Jim scuttles off into the backroom. There is the scraping sound of a ladder. Outside, the city groans under its own weight. Ten million souls searching for a horizon. The cafés and sandwich bars fill with workers seeking lunchtime solace. Fag-breaks become extended metaphors. It starts to rain; tentative at first, and then with heavy intent. The windows of the shop cloud up.

Purlock has been away. He has trudged from Cripplegate to Bethnal Green, but London is changed. So many people. They look right through you. Paving erupts at every corner; great diggers pile and turn the earth, stack sheet metal like it was light as parchment. Walking the city is like working through a sludge of text, white noise, static. Purlock longs for the stillness of Bunhill, four hectares of birdsong (wrens up in the plane trees); clover, chickweed suckling the bones of Bunyan, Blake, Defoe.

A hacking cough. Jim returns, cradling a book-sized package.

“The Art of Hunting. E.H. Purlock. I had to dig that out of my special collection. Rather unusual in fact.”

Jim places the package on the counter and carefully removes the brown paper covering. Purlock approaches, thinking of meat; slabs of bloody viand on a Smithfield butcher’s table, the sulphurous pong of ripped-out innards.

“Well, there you go. A first edition too.”

The only edition, as Purlock well knows. The dark cloth cover. The title on the spine picked out in gilt. The water stain on the contents page. After all these years, there was no mistaking the smell of it, rising up from the hardwood counter.

There is a shift in the place.

A telephone rings from the backroom.

A distant whining.

When Jim returns, having declined the offer of car insurance with customary discourtesy, the shop is empty. There is no customer – and no book.
Jim tears through the shop, thrusts open the front door with more force than he’s shown in a decade.

Across the street two Asian kids in tracksuits are scuffing a ball against a wall. They look up. A podgy old white bloke, the one who runs the dirty bookshop, is poised in the flickering gloom of the street light. The air is cold. There is no sign of The Art of Hunting. Jim does not understand; his watch reads one, but it is almost night. He bends down slowly. On the tarmac by his feet, engorged and sodden, a pulsing fist of heart.