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In Bloomsbury there sat an unremarkable little bookshop, set back from the pavement with its door on the far side of a shallow gutter, its windows cobwebbed and fly-streaked in apparent contradiction over the slothfulness of spiderkind.
It had grown more remarkable as the years rolled by, as nearby businesses went under, scalped and bled to death by the rent increases and hoists to business rates: replaced by identical coffee shops and the ubiquitous blue hoardings which promised brand new luxury apartments coming soon, soon, someday, any day… each one bragging beside the developers’ logo that they were a “considerate” constructor.
Through the door--on which a red and white sign, slightly adulterated with aggressive marker pen, proudly proclaimed: “Come in! We’re OPEN CLOSED!”--and past stacks of erratically-priced second-hand tomes, alcoves stuffed with necrotic sofas with a permanent miasma of fungus, blackboards half-erased of their arcane and possibly blasphemous gibberish, there was a desk.
Upon the desk there was a veritable Ben Nevis of whimsically-tossed paperbacks and ill-balanced hardbacks, a graveyard of dirty wine glasses, two overflowing ashtrays--one of which had started life as a dirty wineglass--half a bottle of Londis’s boldest and most £6.99 red wine (vin du pays le wasteland), and a defiantly unplugged landline telephone. So defiantly, in fact, that the cord which would have attached it to the telephone socket in the wall was severed.
Behind the desk there sat, sprawled on an office chair quite incompatible with the practice, a pile of dirty laundry with a cigarette in its mouth and a copy of The Lost Artefacts of Truth open in its hand.
The laundry pile’s hair had assumed a malevolence in styling that not even the most devotedly manipulative PR wonk could have described as “boyishly charming” were it placed atop an Old Etonian; his face looked as if the marks of age had occupied it like a lacklustre revolutionary force, creeping in without notice or permission--and they sat uneasily upon inherently youthful features, vying with the dark shadows under the eyes for the title of Most Incongruous.
The door opened with a jaunty jangle of an old-fashioned bell, and Bernard Black’s head shot up like a startled frog from the depths of a literary bog, letting loose a torrent of hoarse and aggrieved coughs as he did.
He’d watched his hairy man-child of an assistant remove the bastard batteries from the bastard bell and throw the whole bastard apparatus in the bin and set it on fire under his express, fork-backed instructions, hadn’t he? Manny still had the dents in his big stupid face. Why was the thing back and jingling like a Morris dancers’ orgy?
“We’re closed,” Bernard said, to allay the nagging sense that he was being haunted. Ghost or not, the sign had made its point.
“The door was open,” said an apologetically English voice. Bernard disapproved of customers on principle, and English ones in particular, but he felt that if they were going to be English then they should at least have the decency and common sense to be sorry about it.
The customer gave him an equally apologetic but infuriatingly eager little smile.
“Mr Black,” he said, extending a limp, soft-looking hand, “I believe we spoke on the telephone?”
“Well you believe wrong,” Bernard snapped, not troubling to either rise, return the handshake, nor take the cigarette out of his mouth. It would be a miracle if anyone had spoken to him on the phone, as he triumphantly informed the customer: “It’s been disconnected for six weeks since those bastards wanted to charge me more money for a service I didn’t want in the first place.”
“Nevertheless,” said the customer, withdrawing his hand so that he could toy awkwardly with his bow tie, “We discussed the copy of Discorſes on thee End Tymes you have in your possession? I believe you agreed to hold it for me.”
The man absolutely radiated pink-faced enthusiasm like a children’s TV presenter--one of the nice damp ones that wore good jumpers and probably carried sick bags with them for other people’s kids, not the ones that kept sex dungeons full of toddlers or whatever it was that the ones from his youth kept being arrested for--and dressed like a washed out painting of someone’s 19th Century gay uncle.
His head was haloed in fluffy blond curls further illuminated by the dim light from the front windows and his age was utterly unknowable. He put Bernard in mind of something but he couldn’t put his finger on what.
“Mm,” said Bernard thoughtfully, raising one finger to indicate the need for patience. “One moment.”
He ducked below the desk with his cigarette clamped between his lips and opened a drawer for a good, theatrical root around. He thumped the contents onto the desk above him for good measure: chilli sauce bottle, leaky. Engagement ring some rich, handsome moron had been planning to give to Fran. Kalashnikov. Mouldy potato with a nail hole in it. Wordsworth Classics Edition of Wuthering Heights that he’d been using to practise forged signatures in after Manny made him watch that one movie… ah, there it was.
Bernard sat up, slapped out the dog-end that had fallen on his trousers, and extended a slip of paper to the customer with a nauseating smile of his own that flattened his lips over his teeth without ever revealing the teeth themselves.
The customer read the aggressively scrawled capitals: “~NO”, and raised his eyebrows fractionally. He laid the slip of paper carefully on top of a copy of Nude Around-The-World-Sailing With My Grandma and laced his fingers together over his waistcoat at stomach height.
“Mr Black, I’m happy to outbid whatever you may already have been offered,” he said, in tones of gentle expectation.
Bernard pointed imperiously at the door, and selected another cigarette with his free hand.
“I’d be absolutely delighted to negotiate--” the customer began.
Bernard pointed harder, and inserted the cigarette.
“Name your price--” the customer suggested, with gentle desperation.
Bernard converted his point to a shooing motion, and with a few more token protests, the rich old homosexual backed out of the door with a rather less upbeat jingle.
“Mph,” Bernard said, dusting off his hands and lighting what turned out to be the wrong end of his cigarette. He coughed, revolved it, lit the correct end, and picked up his book again.
He reached for the wine glass he’d left by his elbow.
The liquid in it was clear, and it smelled of nothing.
Attired in clothes that could clearly remember being ironed and hair that would be shevelled if it only could, Manny waltzed around the shop, gently wafting a rainbow-striped feather duster but not actually applying it to any of the shelves or books that stubbornly remained wrapped in their protective dusty coats.
The welcoming friendly bastard bell jingled above the door, and Manny was delighted at its sound and immediately resentful at the memory of a stabbing fork, abuse, and the acrid smoke of burning plastic. Who had Bernard got to reinstall the bell? He couldn’t have done it himself: the man had the technical aptitude of a sunfish and far less drive.
A beautiful man appeared in the shop while Manny was wreathed in recollection. The man's twinkling blue eyes were kind and he came with such a manner that before he’d said a word, Manny yearned to recruit him to teach courses on how to be a customer, mandatory to everyone who ever conceived of visiting a shop.
The best customer Manny had ever encountered explained that he wished to buy Discorſes on thee End Tymes , and Manny somehow knew exactly where it was, who had looked at it last, and how much Bernard had paid for it at that estate sale he had made Fran drive him to.
“Of course, right away, let me get it for you,” Manny said, walking towards the shelf, trying to look where he was going while not taking his eyes off his customer.
The customer beamed benevolently at him.
“Would you like anything else while you’re here, can I get you a coffee, are there any other books you waaaa--” Manny tripped over something, possibly his own feet--no, actually the table that had always been there, how could he forget it was always there --
He saved himself from falling by grabbing onto the black jacket that was hanging there--why was a jacket hanging there, who would hang up a jacket that stank so strongly of cigarettes, why was its texture so sticky --
Manny's fingers uncurled in panic.
It was Bernard. He’d grabbed Bernard.
His beloved boss and cohabitee greeted him after his usual fashion: “Gerrof, you mewling little limpet! What are you doing?”
Bernard grabbed Manny’s wrists, removed Manny's lingering hands from the jacket, and tossed him affectionately onto the table.
Manny landed on his back, his feet waving in the air like an upturned beetle, one sandal slipping off his foot and thumping gently to the floor. Fortunately the books under Manny’s back were not damaged, as they were cushioned by the feather-duster that Manny had apparently left on the table.
“I’m -- selling a book Bernard, I’m, I’m, I’m helping this customer --” he explained, with great eloquence, as he slithered about on the table.
Manny turned and looked at his beautiful--his best customer.
The man was haloed in light from the shop window, which seemed somehow less grimy than usual. The customer’s faded waistcoat radiated comfort and and his tartan bow-tie spoke reassurance.
Apparently aware that he was under the spotlight, the delightful customer clasped his hands together and spoke thus:
“Mr Black! Mr Bianco here was just fetching me Discorſes on thee End Tymes! You failed to sell it to me before, but I’m sure we can reach an agreement?”
Manny scrambled to get off the table, his dignity gone, but his sandal still retrievable.
Bernard turned to address the gorgeous, shining paragon of customerhood.
“You. You’re here again, with your filthy attempts to defile my shop," he barked, brandishing what would normally have been a cigarette but for some reason seemed to be a carrot stick. "I saw you smiling at Manny! I know your kind!”
The beautiful customer blinked and tilted his head with another charming little smile.
“My kind?” he said, innocently. “I merely wish to purchase a book. If we could reach an accord that is agreeable to all parties --”
“Parties, right, that’s what your lot are like!” Bernard thundered, brandishing his definitely-a-carrot stick without noticing his own miraculous departure from a lifetime of self-destruction. “And now you want to take this precious thing from me, you, you, mountebank! You spleen-tickler!"
“I wish to purchase a book!" said the customer, confused. "This is a book shop, you sell books."
Something in his tone sounded like he was repeating something he had heard often himself.
Amidst the distraction, Manny tried to unobtrusively take the old prophecy book off the shelf and bring it to the exquisite customer.
“Get out, get out," Bernard flailed about with his carrot stick. "Get out of my shop! The shop is not for you, the books are not for you, Manny -- Manny! Put down that book and step away from that man!”
Manny hurriedly put the book on the nearest available shelf as if he'd never touched it.
The aspiring customer tried to step towards the shelf, but Bernard was ready: he stepped in front of him so fast he almost stumbled, blocking the shelf, and incidentally Manny, in a manner that would have seemed protective in a person who was not Bernard.
"Now, really," the customer murmured, his hands raised in a charming gesture of surrender.
"Away with you!"
Bernard advanced, wielding the carrot stick in front of him like a tiny orange dagger, almost but not quite prodding the customer in the expensive waistcoat.
He continued an unhurried retreat in the face of this onslaught.
“Leave now, before I burn a hole in your tomfoolery!" Bernard snarled, carrot stick at the ready a mere inch from the soft fawn velvet of the would-be customer's well-tailored waistcoat.
The customer was at the door by this point. He reached for the door, raised his eyebrows and asked: “With a carrot?”
And with that parting shot he turned and left.
The bell jingled sadly behind him, as though it missed him.
Manny knew how it felt.
Bernard sat behind his desk, a cigarette in his mouth, searching for a way to light it. He took a match out of a box, realised it was burnt, dumped it, reached for another match, discovered it was headless, dumped that too, then poured the matches on the table, frantically sorting through them to find one that could be lit.
Fran wandered in, springily breezy and trailing a small cloud.
“Fran! You’ll have a light on you, won’t you?” asked Bernard, waving his cigarette at Fran.
“No, I don’t have a lighter on me," Fran rolled her eyes in that discouragingly horsey way she always insisted on. "I vape now. It’s like smoking, but you get to smell of whatever you like. I smell of roses. Or I have another in my bag, look, it’s champagne-and-strawberries-scented.”
"You look like a kettle," Bernard complained, "and you smell like a cleaner. Stop waving that in my face."
He hunted among the piles of paper on his desk: bills, love letters to Fran from the millionaire idiot that he'd intercepted, acceptance letter for university for Manny that he'd been meaning to burn… and finally a lighter.
Click
"I do not," Fran said, deflating a little. "Anyway, you should think about switching over. The NHS might give you money for it."
Click.
"Absolutely not!" Bernard barked, giving the lighter a shake. "No doctors! The judgmental bastards! Always asking how it is I'm not already dead… worse than my woodwork teacher…and she used to come after me with a saw."
A couple of clicks revealed the lighter to be empty, and he threw it onto the pile of discarded matches on the floor.
"Besides," Bernard concluded, as Fran went on filling the shop with the sickly smell of synthetic fruit, "I'm in perfect health."
The coughing fit which overtook him ruined his intended speech about the dangers of taking Youth Drugs--had she learned nothing from spending two hours stroking all the books after she ate bath salts or whatever it was?--and covered the stealthy, gruesome pad of the unwashed homuncoloid feet of his assistant.
“Bernard, why didn’t you sell the book to the nice man?” asked Manny, wandering in with a plate of chicken goujons in his hand.
“What book? What man?” asked Fran, attempting to grab a chicken goujon off Manny’s plate.
Manny moved the plate beyond her reach, which unfortunately put the plate entirely within Bernard’s grasp.
“Some fancy haloed would-be customer, attempting to deprive me of some of my best stock,” complained Bernard, shoving a chicken goujon into his mouth without removing his unlit cigarette first, and chewing both at once. It almost made the chicken have a flavour.
“He was offering to pay any amount you wanted, for that heavy old book you got at the estate-sale that no-one else has even looked at,” Manny corrected, getting a word in while Bernard’s mouth was full, the bastard. “Honestly, the book was just taking up space on the shelf.”
“That estate-sale I drove you to, Bernard?” said Fran, the words you were going to pay me back for the petrol hanging between them like a dirty old net curtain, “I thought you just picked up a case full of old doctor-nurse romances and an outdated atlas.”
“There was this big old book in it,” said Manny, and his usual unbearable honk squeezed itself into a strangled and worshipful imitation of the aspiring customer. “Discorſes on thee End Tymes."
He went cross-eyed, laid down the plate on some of Bernard's most fondly-ignored Everyman's Library editions, cleared his throat, and went on in his normal collection of squawks.
“And it’s all leather-bound and full of prophecies, but not by Nostradamus or anyone famous, nobody has heard of it."
Fran looked with considerable interest past Manny and at the plate of chicken. Bernard selflessly relieved her of the temptation.
Fran shot out a hand.
“So no-one was looking at it and nobody was going to pay for it," Manny concluded, as if anyone was listening to him. Which they weren't, because he was talking pointless drivel, as usual, instead of doing his chores.
“Why didn’t you sell him the book, Bernard?” asked Fran around a chicken goujon that she’d somehow laid her greasy claws on.
"Oh, you know," Bernard said, beginning anew his fruitless search for a light for his cigarette, or the parts of it he hadn't eaten, "He just looked like a bastard."
Bernard abruptly got up, sweeping most of the paper on the table into a drawer.
“Fran! Mind the shop. Manny and I are going out to get some matches and a lighter, it’s inhuman having to live like this.”
He grabbed Manny by the back of Manny’s shirt-collar:
“Of course you’re coming, Manny, you have the wallet.”
The shop smelled familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. There was the vanilla-ish smell of old books laced with mildew and the reluctance to sell them, which was familiar as an old friend, but here too was resentment, and the dirt and mould that piles up when someone is uninterested in cleaning but can't miracle the dirt away.
The jaunty ringing of the bell died away, and Crowley frowned at it: it had a welcoming tone that the rest of the shop lacked.
Behind a bottle of wine and a desk sat a woman, with short black hair and a deep yearning to be loved. In this, like in many other things, she would be disappointed today.
She took a sip of the wine, with a disinterested look over the rim of her glass that she probably thought was catlike.
“Hello, I’ve come to buy the book of prophecy that you have here, Discorſes on thee End Tymes,” Crowley said, projecting confidence, assertiveness and sexiness. This kind of bookshop required effort to get them to actually sell the books.
The wine caught in her throat and set off a significantly more catlike round of choking noises.
Crowley sighed. When he’d been asking questions, he should have asked about that esophagus-airway crossover. It was terrible design. He idled closer: it wasn't quite sauntering and it wasn't quite sashaying, for the move didn't involve so much of his amenably flexible and occasionally boneless hips.
Crowley trailed a finger across the top of some neglected books, leaving more dust than had originally been on the covers. "You do have that book in stock."
The shopkeeper gave him a lascivious look, or a look which would doubtless have been lascivious if the word had been available. It was presently under Crowley's command, for his own use, should he acquire the courage to use it on its correct target.
The correct target was not, however, this woman and her cartoonishly large wine glass. It looked like it had come from a novelty shop. The wine smelled like it might have done too.
"Ye--yes," agreed the shopkeeper, clutching the glass with both hands, her voice dipping halfway through the word into something a lot throatier and more forceful. "We have anything you want."
Behind his sunglasses, Crowley raised auburn eyebrows. "And it's…?"
He turned, hand crammed badly into the too small pocket of his jeans, and waved a questioning finger about the dirty, chaotic bookshop.
"Not for sale," said the shopkeeper, a little sulkily. "I'm under strict instructions. Bernard said if I sold his stupid book to any 'frothy-haired semi-angelic stuff-shirted blond bastards' he'd post my teenage diary to my mum."
She took a swift swig of the wine. Crowley surreptitiously willed it a little better vintage. Someone in this shop should have fun occasionally.
He finally started to process what the woman had said after she declared the book ‘Not for sale’, and stared at the woman, his flabber well and truly ghasted. Who was she, and who was this Bernard person, to talk like that? “Semi-angelic? Entirely angelic, I think you’ll find,” he didn’t say, because neither of them deserved to know.
He waited until the woman had swallowed her most recent sip of wine, then shifted his weight:
“How about selling it to someone devilishly handsome?”
He raised an eyebrow and smiled, with a long slow gesture to the whole length of his black-clad body. It seemed like overselling it, but she seemed like the kind of woman who wanted it oversold. Crowley did not add that he very much did not fit the description because she had eyes, and they were greedily devouring him.
The woman moved her mouth, but no sounds came out. For a fleeting moment Crowley wondered if she was choking again, but she appeared to be trying out several different sentence combinations at once, and he could guess that many of them were obscene.
"I have cash," he added, because if this shop was anything like Aziraphale's, it eschewed modern contrivances like card machines precisely in order to make it harder for customers to buy books. Normally he enjoyed the business of a cash transaction more anyway--it was so much easier to leave the idea in the vendor's head that they could just perhaps take some of the price out before it reached the till. Little things added up.
This broke the deadlock. The woman closed her hand too tightly around the wine glass stem and said in something struggling to be a purr, "Would you like it wrapped? I can truss it up in a bow. I can do lots of things. Whatever you want. Eh-anything you want--"
She cut herself off and readjusted her necklace.
Something she'd said caught up with his brain.
"What--who did your boss say it wasn't to be sold to?"
“Bernard’s not my boss, he’s just a friend. I’m minding the shop as a favour,” she answered, obliviously supplying irrelevant information instead of the information he needed. She fiddled with her necklace.
He looked at her expectantly through his sunglasses. It worked remarkably often, considering his eyes were not actually visible. Perhaps it wouldn't have worked as well if they were.
She gave an eager little start, and after assuring him again that this Bernard was emphatically not the boss of her, she emanated: “Oh, and he said, stuffed-shirt, frothy-blond semi-bastard, I think? No, wait, frothy-haired, semi-angelic--”
Of course. The mild bastard was trying to buy it for himself before Crowley could. Of course.
It was interesting that he'd not been able to succeed. Normally Aziraphale just twinkled at people and they did whatever he wanted. Crowley in particular.
He cast about the shop. It didn't seem particularly occult.
“Was he wearing a waistcoat? And a bow-tie?” he suggested, in case Aziraphale had some doppelganger somewhere, or the notorious Driffeld, a major book dealing competitor, had taken to wearing a disguise.
The woman behind the counter poured herself more wine and said in a voice that had clearly known many irrational foibles, “He was willing to pay any price, but I’m not allowed to sell to him.”
Crowley reached into his bag of tricks in the manner of a man scraping the bottom of a very dry barrel. After all, the ominous Bernard had apparently only said she wasn't allowed to sell it...
“Wel-l , if you’re not making any money off it anyway…" he trailed off, and made a persuasive motion with his hips, like a serpent doing the hula.
“Yee-es?”
She forced her eyes open wide and she tilted her head, exposing her long neck. She looked a lot like a startled heron but Crowley suspected that wasn't what she'd been going for.
“I could just take the book off your hands.”
He said it with a casual shrug. Just simple, trivial, not-reallly-important. A mere trifle.
“Steal it, you mean,” she said, and sipped her wine. Then she smiled. “I don’t see why not. Bernard isn’t paying me, he’s not selling the book, and come to think of it, he still owes me for taking him to that estate-sale…”
“Right, I’ll just--get out of here, as soon as you hand over the--” Crowley stretched a hand out towards her and took a step towards the door.
“Oh, there’s no rush, he’s always gone for hours. Come, sit down."
She produced a clean wine-glass out of her bag. It shouldn't have been big enough, and yet it was.
“Have some wine."
A second, larger bottle emerged from what was either a fashionable handbag or a portal to a branch of Oddbins. Crowley stared a little behind his glasses.
Oblivious to her own disregard for the laws of physics, the woman started pouring a ridiculous quantity of merlot.
The thing with humans was, they didn’t take much tempting. Half the time just hanging around them made them start to try tempting Crowley.
Crowley stepped back towards the desk and sat down. Now he was going to have to drink it, he gave the wine an extra little boost. Not more alcohol content, just a better flavour. A little more like the wine Aziraphale habitually insisted upon.
A lot more like it. In fact, possibly just an entirely different and better wine. With any luck, she wouldn't notice.
Just as he was getting settled on the edge of the counter--calculatedly within groping distance--the door gave the ominous beginnings of a jaunty jingle.
"--need a mobile telephone to get a bloody taxi when I have a perfectly good arm for knocking down cyclists," exclaimed a voice in the doorway, "anyway, it'll heal in no time. You're just being a baby."
A whiny voice that wished it could be assertive said, “My arm!” and then yelped, as said arm banged into the door on its way in.
“There you go, over-dramatising again,” said a collection of clothes so innately untidy that it straddled the line between prime ministerial and homeless, as it trailed cheap cigarette smoke into the shop. "It's probably not even broken. You're making it up."
"Bugger," said the woman with the now substantially better wine.
Crowley forced an even more seductive smile onto his face.
The ambulant pile of clothes proceeded into the shop with what would be in a responsible grown-up an almost proprietorial air. It was like being menaced by a teenager’s bedroom.
“Who’re you?!” he barked at Crowley, pointing a smouldering cigarette in eloquent defiance of all those anti-smoking laws Crowley had spent so long planting to increase the annoyance of the UK at large. Without waiting for a reply the apparent proprietor turned his ire on the woman with the wine. “Fran, I told you you were to have no visitors on the job!”
Under the cover of the shouting a less untidy but still dishevelled person hobbled in after him. This one looked like an amiable coconut in a sex offender’s wig, wrapped in a fancy dress party no one else had bothered to attend. If Crowley hadn’t spent long enough on Earth to realise that there was no limit to human absurdity, he’d have assumed this was some form of extra-terrestrial being. Or possibly a strategically shaved and hastily-bleached orangutan.
“Hello, Fran! And hello, Fran’s friend! We haven’t met, I’m Manny,” he said, with the desperate friendliness of the frequently-slapped. The possible-monkey extended what was definitely a hand--it had a death’s head ring on it, to complement in no way the Hawaiian shirt its owner was wearing--and beamed. He then immediately yelped and clutched at his arm with the other hand.
Crowley toned down the smile from seductive to friendly, and kept his hands to himself.
“Hi,” he said in the most I’m too cool for handshakes voice he possessed, in case the little man injured himself even further in a moment, “Anthony J Crowley, nice to meet you.”
But there was no stopping him. Oblivious, the garish coconut whipped out the uninjured arm and closed a very clean and dry hand around Crowley’s unresisting and somewhat cooler one.
They shook. This Manny’s expression went from an anxious wince through to a grimacing attempt at a smile to a beatific mix of relief and awe. Manny held on to Crowley’s hand longer than most people who were not trying to keep him there until the police showed up.
“Can I have my hand back?” said Crowley, patting him on the injured shoulder with intent.
Manny’s eyes widened--not in response to the torrent of impressively inventive invective spilling out of the Irishman behind them--and he stood back with the kind of excited politeness of a dog that has just been told to wait for a biscuit.
“Hey!” He exclaimed, immediately. “My arm’s stopped hurting!”
Crowley grimaced to himself.
“Bernard, my arm’s not hurting anymore!”
The person who had shown so little concern for the previously broken limb continued to show absolutely no concern for its no longer being broken, nor for the ears of the neighbours, the feelings of the woman with the wine glass, nor even the fact that he’d just singed his own hair with an indignantly flailed cigarette while scoffing the words “--fancy man.”
“This is not my visitor, this is a customer, Bernard,” said Fran, patiently. Crowley received the impression she was very used to the sound and fury, and knew it signified nothing. “He was just getting this book--”
She got up, forsaking her wine-glass, took the Discorſes on thee End Tymes off a nearby shelf, and showed it to Crowley from a distance too great for him to just seize it and saunter.
“Once he has the book he’ll be out of your hair,” she assured the smouldering, sulking cigarette-smoker. Crowley couldn’t imagine anything would survive in the man’s hair. Lice would asphyxiate. “There’s no need to be so rude, Bernard.”
This instigated another avalanche of shouting.
“What do you mean, ‘once he has the book’? What book is that? Is that the book I expressly told you not to sell!? What are you doing with it in your hands? Why is he smiling? Why are you smiling? Why is Manny grinning like an oaf? Stop making cow-eyes at the customers! It just encourages them! What is going on here in my shop?” said the pile of clothes who walked like a man and stank like an ashtray.
Crowley hooked his thumbs into his pockets. Did they still make ashtrays? They seemed to have gone out of fashion. He’d made damn sure they went out of fashion. Being forced to carry butts around for fear of being scolded by council workers kept everyone grumpy, and grumpy people were a couple more irritations away from being wrathful ones.
The energetically coughing proprietor didn’t, he admitted, seem to need much help in that.
His employee and his… possibly pet... reacted surprisingly little, considering the vehemence and the volume of the outburst. He supposed they were used to it.
“Well he’s obviously not the one you said was absolutely not allowed to buy the book, so I decided to g--” Fran caught herself and ate the rest of the sentence. “--to sell it to him. You have to admit he’s nothing like your description. I mean, assuming the description you gave was a description and not just you practicing adjectives.”
“Yeah, the other man was lovely,” said Manny.
Crowley narrowed his eyes behind his sunglasses.
“--er, not that you’re not lovely, but he was--”
“The way you described him, Manny, the other guy had an entirely different sort of sex-appeal,” interrupted Fran, and batted her eyelashes at Crowley slowly.
Crowley almost choked. Admittedly a lot of very specifically-inclined gentlemen over the course of the last six thousand years had noticed that Aziraphale was, in fact, angelically pleasant to look at, but even they would have been hard-pressed to refer to his particular kind of ineffable magnetism as strictly “sex appeal” so much as the sudden, desperate desire to please.
“Sex-appeal? I didn’t say anything about sex-appeal!” Manny’s voice rose with every word, so that the last ‘appeal’ was almost a yelp. He took a breath. “I just said he was handsome, and had the kindest eyes, and this gentle manner, and his hair glowed like a halo, and I wanted to make him happy, and give him anything he wanted--”
Crowley fixed a polite, uncomprehending smile onto his face. Yes, that was exactly it.
The black-suited, ash-covered Irishman scoffed loudly and walked away through a curtain-covered doorway behind the desk. “He looked like a bastard, actually.”
Behind his sunglasses, Crowley raised his eyebrows, just a little. Most people didn’t notice that part. But with Bernard gone, the focus of the conversation was now squarely and entirely… him.
“While you,” Fran said, directing a square hip at him as if she’d read about it in a magazine--Crowley had an unpleasant feeling it was one of the articles he’d penned as J. A. Crow, “look like you could do absolutely anything you wanted--” she made a sound in her throat which was trying very hard to be a purr, “--and you’d do it well.”
Which was true, more or less. On the other hand, if he didn’t want to do something he usually did it very badly, and he suspected that whatever this woman had in mind--he wasn’t about to look and find out--it was going to rank a lot less highly on his list of priorities than getting Aziraphale a present without him finding out about it.
Manny, like a lust-struck sheepdog or an amorously-inclined toilet mop, began to close in on his other flank.
Crowley contemplated perhaps just slightly setting them on fire. Or maybe running across the top of the book-covered table behind him. It would be undignified, but who would know?
He lightly took a step back, keeping a wary eye on the two amorous humans.
The dirty blanket across the doorway behind the desk billowed dramatically up into the air then, rather spoiling the effect, wrapped around a head and shoulders before being violently yanked aside with a splutter and a roar of 'aha'.
"TAKE THAT YOU FOUL BLOODSUCKING FIEND," snapped Bernard Black, bookshop proprietor and evident alcoholic, brandishing before him at arm's length a pair of forks elastic-banded into the form of a cross.
Crowley raised his eyebrows. "Oh no," he said, flatly. "How terrible. I can't look on it. Argh."
He raised his hands in a full Nosferatu early-cinema camp horror, and backed inelegantly into the corner of the table.
"Oh my eyes are burning probably," he continued, surreptitiously rubbing the back of his thigh. "Oh no, I had better leave."
Bernard triumphantly waved the cross again. Crowley sighed. Aziraphale would just have to wait until he could terrify the book out of whichever bona fide collector ended up with it next. They'd probably have it up on eBay in no time anyway.
He backed out of the shop, limping a little, as the owner lit a cigarette with an expression of heroic victory and his two possible employees looked as if they'd just been deprived of an entire birthday cake.
Neither of them, Crowley was relieved to discover, followed him.
It was a fine, sunny day of the sort God shouldn’t have wasted time making in Bernard Black’s opinion, and Manny had left the bloody door open again, to “air out the shop” because it “smelled like something had died in there”; this despite Bernard’s dire warning that something was going to if he kept leaving the door open.
Bernard was smoking his breakfast with turbulent and contemplative thoughts circulating in his head after a surprise nap on the desk had left an earwig in his hair; he regarded the noon light with bitter dislike and wondered if it would really be too much trouble to have the sun switched off until he was ready to face it. In, say, about next February.
From behind him came the unlovely squawk of mild disappointment that Manny occasionally issued from the hole in his beard that was alleged to be his mouth, and Bernard prepared himself for the unnecessary scene that was bound to transpire once his demanding child of an assistant realised that Bernard had been keeping his shoes in the fridge again.
Instead, Manny came out carrying what remained of a cardboard box, and plonked it on the table in front of Bernard.
It smelled a great deal like something had died.
“You were supposed to move this!” Manny exclaimed, gesturing at the fungal coffin. There was quite an attractive toadstool growing out of the side.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been busy,” muttered Bernard, turning away.
“Doing what?”
“Sleeping, mainly,” said Bernard, who had the uncomfortable feeling he might have peed in the box on more than one occasion. It was at least six feet closer than the toilet. “I’m a very busy man! You have no idea how exhausting running a business is!”
Manny pulled out a furry, green object from the bottom of the box, and Bernard recoiled.
“This,” Manny said, shaking it at him, “was a very valuable 16th-century prophetic manuscript!”
“Are you sure,” Bernard said, putting his feet on the desk next to it, “because it looks a lot like that time you forgot your lunch down the back of the sofa.”
Manny tapped the title plate on the cover. Bernard could just about make out the words: Discorſes on thee End Tymes under the mould.
He shrugged, and lit the second course of his breakfast. “Oh, no sane mortal would have wanted that anyway.”