Bellevue Square Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL REDHILL

  FICTION

  Martin Sloane

  Fidelity

  Consolation

  The Calling*

  The Taken*

  Saving Houdini

  A Door in the River*

  The Night Bell*

  POETRY

  Music for Silence

  Impromptu Feats of Balance

  Lake Nora Arms

  Asphodel

  Light-crossing

  PLAYS

  Building Jerusalem

  Goodness

  *as Inger Ash Wolfe

  COPYRIGHT © 2017 CARIBOU RIVER LTD

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Redhill, Michael, 1966-, author

  Bellevue Square / Michael Redhill.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780385684835 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780385684842 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8585.E3425B44 2017  C813’.54  C2017-902461-2

                   C2017-902462-0

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Jennifer Griffiths

  Text design: CS Richardson

  Cover image: Joan Hodgson / EyeEm / Getty Images

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also By Michael Redhill

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part 2

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part 3

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Part 4

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Acknowledgements

  For Elizabeth Marmur and Ruth Marshall

  “I and this mystery here we stand.”

  WALT WHITMAN

  “Song of Myself”

  MY DOPPELGANGER PROBLEMS began one afternoon in early April.

  I was alone in the store, shelving books and humming along to Radio 2. Mr. Ronan, one of my regulars, came in. I watched him from my perspective in Fiction as he chose an aisle and went down it.

  I have a bookshop called Bookshop. I do subtlety in other areas of my life. I’ve been here for two years now, but it’s sped by. I have about twenty regulars, and I’m on a first-name basis with them, but Mr. Ronan insists on calling me Mrs. Mason. His credit card discloses only his first initial, G. I have a running joke: every time I see the initial I take a stab at what it stands for. I run his card and take one guess. We both think it’s funny, but he’s also shy and I think it embarrasses him, which is one of the reasons I do it. I’m trying to bring him out of himself.

  He’s promised to tell me if I get it right one day. So far he hasn’t been Gordon or any of its short forms, soubriquets, or cognomens. Not Gary, Gabriel, Glenn, or Gene and neither Gerald nor Graham, my first two guesses, based on my feeling that he looked pretty Geraldish at times but also very Grahamish, too. He’s a late-middle-aged ex-academic or ex-accountant or someone who spent his life at a desk, who once might have been a real fireplug, like Mickey Rooney, but who, at sixty-plus years, looks like a hound in a sweater. There is no woman in his life, to judge by the fine blond and red hairs that creep up the sides of his ears.

  I know he likes first editions and broadsides, as well as books about architecture and miniatures. I keep my eye out for him. And he’s a gazpacho enthusiast. You get all kinds. I always discover something new when Mr. Ronan comes in. For instance, you can make soup from watermelons. I did not know that.

  He came around a corner and stopped when he saw me. He was out of breath. “There you are,” he said. “When did you get here?”

  “To the Fiction section?”

  “You’re dressed differently now,” he said. “And your hair was shorter.”

  “My hair? What are you talking about?”

  “You were in the market. Fifteen minutes ago. I saw you.”

  “No. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t in any market.”

  “Huh,” he said. He had a disagreeable expression on his face, a look halfway between fear and anger. He smiled with his teeth. “You were wearing grey slacks and a black top with little gold lines on it. I said hello. You said hello. Your hair was up to here!” He chopped at the base of his skull. “So you have a twin, then.”

  “I have a sister, but she’s older than me and we look nothing alike.” I don’t mention that Paula is certain that G. Ronan’s name is Gavin. “And I’ve been here all morning.”

  “Nuh-uh,” he said. “No, I’m sure we…” He left the aisle. My back tingled and I had the instinct to move to a more open area of the store, where I could watch him. I went behind my cash desk and started to pencil prices into a stack of green-covered Penguin crime. I flipped up their covers and wrote 5.99 in each one, keeping my eye on my strangely nervous customer. Finally, he came out of the racks with The Conquest of Gaul and put it down on my desk.

  “Oh…Mr. Ronan? I wanted to tell you I found a pretty first edition of Miniature Rooms by Mrs. Thorne. Original blue boards, flat, clean inside. Do you want to see it?”

  “Yes,” he said, like it hurt to speak. I brought it out from the rare and first editions case. “It’s just uncanny, it really is,” he said. />
  “This woman.”

  “Yes! She said hello back like she knew me. I swear to god she called me by name!”

  “But I don’t know your name. Right? Mr. G. Ronan? I think you dreamt this.”

  “But it just happened,” he said, like that explained something to him. “And you knew my name.”

  “Mr. Ronan,” I said, “I am one hundred per cent—”

  I didn’t like the look in his eye. He began edging around the side of the desk, coming closer, and I backed away, but he lunged at me with a cry and grabbed me by the shoulders. Despite his size, I couldn’t hold him off and he backed me up, hard, against the first editions case. I heard the books behind me thud and tumble. “Take it off!” he shouted in my face. With one hand, he tried to yank my hair from my head. “Take off the wig!”

  “Get back!” I shrieked. I pushed against his forehead with my palm. “Get off me!”

  “Goddamn you, Mrs. Mason!” When a fistful of my hair wouldn’t tear off, he leapt up and stumbled backwards, his eyes locked on mine, but washed of rage. The blood had drained from his face. “Christ, that’s real!”

  “Yes! It’s real! See? Real hair attached to my own, personal head.”

  “Oh god.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  He grovelled to the other side of the desk. “Oh my god. I’m so sorry. I must be having another attack.”

  “Another attack! Of what? Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  “I’ll be okay. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over me, Jean. Forgive me.”

  That was the first time he had ever used my name. “You scared me. And you hurt me, you know?” I began to feel the pain seep through the shock of being battered. “Are you sure I can’t call a friend or someone?”

  “No. I’ll go home and lie down. I’m just so sorry.” He took his wallet out and put his trembling credit card down on the cash desk.

  I tapped it for him. We stood together in a dreadful silence until I said, “Gilbert.”

  “No,” he replied.

  I LIKE SYSTEMS. Order is good. I can pass a whole day in front of bookshelves alphabetizing, categorizing, subcategorizing. I look forward to shelving. I have the image, in my mind, of a beam of used books shining in through the door and through a prism in the middle of the shop. The beam splits and the books leap into their sections alphabetically.

  I am the prism.

  But alphabetical is not the only order. I’m not a library, so I don’t have to go full-Dewey. A bookstore is a collection. It reflects someone’s taste. In the same way that curators decide what order you see the art in, I’m allowed to meddle with the browser’s logic, or even to please myself. Mix it up, see what happens. If you don’t like it, don’t shop here. January to June I alphabetize biographies by author. July to December: by subject.

  There are moral issues involved, too. Should parenting books be displayed chronologically by year of publication? I don’t want to screw someone’s kid up by suggesting outdated parenting advice is on par with the new thinking. Aesthetic issues: should I arrange art books by height to avoid cover bleaching? Ethical: do dieting books belong near books about anorexia? And should I move books about confidence into the business section? And what is Self-Help? Is it anything like Self Storage? (Which is only for things, it turns out.) In Self-Help, I have found it is helpful not to read the books at all.

  And what about the borderline garbage that people like to buy—tales of clairvoyance, conspiracy books, fake science? I’m duty-bound to stock some of this stuff, but I like to put it on a higher shelf and force the customer to find the kick-stool. Take a moment to rethink your life choices.

  I called Mr. Ronan a few days later. I didn’t want to be nosy, but he’d left the store in such distress. I got his voicemail twice and left a message the second time. “Mr. Ronan,” I said, “it’s Jean Mason from Bookshop. I just wanted to ask you if you were feeling any better. I’m sorry for whatever fright you had, but I hope you’ve worked it out. Well. I guess I’ll see you next time. Bye.”

  I put the phone away and at that exact moment a woman I would later be accused of murdering walked into my shop. She wore a green dress embroidered with tiny mirrors and had warm, buttery skin.

  She browsed with her neck bent and looked sideways at me a couple of times through a drape of hair. She wasn’t really looking at the books. She was acting suspicious, like she was going to steal something. You can always tell the shoplifters. They act nervous until you make eye contact with them and then they act über cool, like they’re obviously the last person who would ever steal from a bookstore. “Can I help you?” I asked her.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” She had a Spanishy accent. “Tell me, do you know who I am?”

  Shit, I thought, another author. “Should I?”

  “I work in the Kensington Market. My name is Katerina.”

  “I’m Jean. I own this bookstore.”

  She stood in front of the cash desk with her hands clasped in front of her. Her dress winked at me. The mirrors stitched onto it were the wings of butterflies. She folded her hands in front of her pelvis and took a deep, stagey breath. “If I call you out,” she said gravely, “you must to come out.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “If I call you out, you must to come out!”

  In downtown Toronto, you have to be prepared at all times to intersect with people living in other realities because they pop out at you when you least expect it. In the liquor store, in the lineup at Harvey’s, shouting about today’s god or just asking you whassup. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I followed a rumour that there was a Llorona about. The Llorona of Ingrid. And if you are Ingrid’s Llorona, and I call you to come out, you must to come out!”

  “What the hell is a yorona?”

  “The Llorona cries for a lost child, and tries to steal one from its mother.”

  Now she was beginning to scare me. “Are you serious? Are you accusing me of something? What do you think you know about me? We haven’t met before.”

  “I know.”

  “So?”

  She kept her dark eyes locked to mine for a three-count. Then she relented. “Okay, Jean. So maybe you’re not Ingrid’s Llorona. You could be Sayona, but I don’t think so. You live near Kensington Market, Jean?”

  The way Mr. Ronan had acted seemed to be of a piece with this woman’s behaviour. I felt a need to see where she was leading. It was none of her business, so I lied. “I live around the corner from here, up a side street. Concord Avenue.” I changed the name of the street, but I was honest about the neighbourhood. I also left out the words ramshackle and hut. It’s not like we couldn’t do better, but Ian says he’s not moving again for ten years. “If ‘near’ is five kilometres, then I guess I’m near. But I never go to Kensington Market.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I have my local shops. I don’t have to go.”

  “You mean you don’t like to go, right? You think it smells bad?” She leered at me. “Maybe you have a Llorona following you around.”

  “I want you to go now.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “I don’t,” I lied.

  “Do you have a twin?”

  Goddammit, what the hell was this? “No. I have a sister, but she’s older than me, and we look nothing alike. This Ingrid you’re talking about…?”

  “Yes,” she said. “She is absolute your twin. Only her hair is shorter.”

  “Who told you you could find me here? You know Mr. Ronan, don’t you?”

  She gave me another galactic stare, her mouth clenched. She was very pretty, well dressed, smelling of some floral balm. “Who is Ronan?”

  “You might meet him in a waiting room one day. Anyway, if this is a joke, it isn’t funny. I know people will do anything to go viral these days, but I’m not falling for it.”

  “Is not a joke! You might have bee
n an evil spirit. I called both Sayona and Llorona out of Ingrid and they did not come out. So now I know: I am witness a miracle.” Her eyes welled up. “God bless the baby Jesus.”

  “Stop it. I’m sure she looks more like herself than she looks like me.”

  “No, no. You must come see now. She buys my pupusas!”

  “Your what?”

  “My pupusas!”

  “Katerina—”

  “Jean?”

  “The human face has millions of combinations. I mean, there’s Catherine Deneuve but there’s also André the Giant, right? But still we see people who look like each other all the time. It’s common.”

  “Who is Catherine Deneuve?”

  “A professional wrestler.”

  She laughed. “You will see. You have Spanish books, by the way?”

  “I have some foreign-language back there,” I told her. If she wanted to browse instead of leave, that was fine. As long as the conversation was over. “I have the Don Quixote Penguin in English.”

  “Don Quixote does not exist in English,” she huffed, wagging her finger at me. She crouched in front of the poetry section. “And Catherine Deneuve was a old movie star.”

  “Humphrey Bogart was an old movie star. Deneuve is still alive.”

  “He was very ugly.” She returned with a Celan. “She has exactly your eyes.”

  “Deneuve?”

  “Ingrid.”

  “Do you know her last name? Maybe I should look her up.”

  “Fox. F-O-…” She had to draw the X in the air.

  “Really. Ingrid Fox.”

  “Maybe she will look you up.”

  “I hope she does!” I said, with forced good nature. I spun her book around to face me and flicked the upper right-hand corner of the cover to see the price. “You’ll read French poetry in English, but not Don Quixote.”

  “Don Quixote thinks in Spanish. Is impossible to be any other way.”

  “Just take it,” I told her. “A gift. It’s been nice meeting you.”

  “Really?”

  “No, but I want to give Torontonians a good name.”

  “This is a wonderful city, but it is cold. Weather and people.”