Every Bookshop Needs a Cat (Fleckney Fields Series, Book 2)

It's Never Been Good

Varya was making her third circle around a large hall on the ground floor of the Town Hall. Anya knew it about her daughter - Varya could switch her extraversion on and off. Right now, she was smiling and chatting with booksellers and volunteers, moving from stand to stand. She'd already negotiated a discount for herself at one stand; the seller at the table of used books had checked their boxes at the back for her and found the Le Guin Varya had wanted, which supposedly they had been sold out of before Varya showed up; and the coffee and sweets lady had given Varya a free cupcake. Varya was, after all, the 'perfect mixture of her parents,' as everyone in Fleckney seemed to comment. She had Anya's stubbornness, her frequent doom and gloom attitude, and her ability to work for hours on something that either caught her interest or had to be done. She could spend hours sitting on one spot if she had her books or her art supplies, from a very early age. On the other hand, when needed, she could project Dom's charisma.

"Brilliant!" Yolanda exclaimed. "Your sprog has just gotten a freebie out of Miss Rosa! No one has ever been able to do it, according to the local gossip."

"Mum, would you like a cupcake?" Varya asked, popping up near Anya.

"It's OK, you should have it. I'm good," Anya gave the girl the habitual lie.

Anya was an incorrigible sweet-tooth - but that was in her past life. She was also horrible at making any sort of confectionary, somehow unable to produce anything dainty and elegant; breads, meat pies, and other savoury carb-bombs being her forte. As if she needed another metaphor of her unsophisticated present self.

"My hands are busy anyroad," she said and nodded towards the box with Persimmon inside.

They'd closed the flaps on top, to hide the feline. Varya nodded and bounced away, in search of more treasures.

"So, Anya! ¿Qué onda? What's your–" Yolanda waved her hand in the air, and that snapped her fingers a couple of times. "Your deal. Your situation. What happened to Mr. Ferguson? What brought you to Fleckney?"

Anya pretended to study the nearest arrangement of colourful children's books.

"You see, cuata, no one actually moves to Fleckney," Yolanda continued. "Vi, my friend - and she knows Fleckney like no other - told me long ago that to be able to stay here, one needs to either bring something really ace to the community– In my case that would be a book shop. Plus I have Vivi to vouch for me. Alternatively, you marry into the county. Not 'shag your way in,' they don't like it here. No, it has to be the legitimate 'loving, honouring, and obeying' your man sort of slavery." She made a loud gagging noise. "But while Varya told us you're staying with your in-laws, you've just introduced yourself as Anya Rosenfeld."

Anya sighed. She never fancied talking about herself. It never ended well. She'd always been an odd one, after all: as a child, she'd been the only Asian among her Jewish peers - and the only Jewish in her school in Almaty. Even among the Tatar relatives on her Mother's side, she was a black sheep: she looked too much like the Khazakh girls around her. She often wondered if her father had been aware of the rumours the envious neighbours had been spreading about her Mother and every Khazakh man near them. After moving to the UK, she was a strange maybe-Japanese-maybe-some-other-Asian with a Slavic accent - which for the first two years had granted her such epithets as 'exotic' and 'unique' and had made the sons of other professors in Oxford chase after her. After her Father's death, it had taken her Mother only eight months to run out of whatever had been left after their immigration. When they'd joined the incomer workforce - our name is legion, for we are many - and her Mother started coming home at the end of the day smelling of fried onion and bleach, just as Anya had been for some many years after that, no one cared about her accent anymore. Neither had they cared about her story; except for women asking whether her husband knocked her about, like theirs did; or men trying it on with her.