Junk - Melvin Burgess [50]
Lily got off the wall and put her arm through mine.
‘She’s been missing you,’ she said. ‘We all have. And me.’ And she stood on tiptoe and kissed me on the lips. A real long kiss. Then we went off down the road, with her arm in mine and her warm body right against me and I thought, Crikey.
We got to the house and she made me wait in the hall.
‘We’re home!’ she yelled.
‘Hang on a mo…’ That was Rob.
Then the door opened. Gemma came running out at a hundred miles an hour and wrapped her arms round me and kissed me all over my face, just like she did that time I met her off the coach.
‘I missed you, I really missed you, I was so AMAZED at how much I missed you,’ she said. And then before I had time to think about it they pushed me into the room and there was Rob with a can of lager in his hand nodding and grinning and next to him…
It was the book! I couldn’t believe it. That book, that sixty quid’s worth that you had to be God to own. They had it up on this old wooden easel and there were ribbons and flowers they’d picked – loads and loads of dandelions, a great big yellow heap of dandelions. And a big card with, ‘For Tar, love from’… and their names written on it for me.
‘For who? For who?’ I said, because it didn’t make sense.
And they said, all together, ‘For you! For you!’
I couldn’t believe it! They’d opened it up at one of the pictures I thought was really amazing, and it was covered in flowers and paper leaves Lily had made. And the whole thing was draped in red silk; it was a kind of monument to me.
‘But… how did you get it?’ I mean, that book was kept right next to the pay desk all on its own, right where all the assistants always were.
‘You’re the only person who could afford it,’ said Rob.
‘Yeah, and now you’ve got three people to love instead of just one,’ said Lily, and she gave me a big kiss – a proper one, about two minutes’ long, it felt like. I could hear Gemma clapping her hands and whooping and Rob yelling, ‘Yeah… yeah!’ They started counting, to see how long we could go on.
I started crying then, right in the middle of kissing her. Sort of leaking tears, not sobbing, but they were on my cheeks. They thought I was pleased and I was but it wasn’t just that. I was still so sad then about losing Gemma, and Lily saying that and kissing me reminded me. Then Lily stood up on tiptoe – I’m quite a lot taller than her – and she licked all the tears off my face.
‘I’m gonna live forever now,’ she said.
They’d spent the whole week liberating that book. They’d gone to the bookshop every day to stake the place out, looking for a time when no one was there. They even dressed up in different clothes so no one would recognise them. That made me laugh, actually, because Gemma and Lily might get away with it, but Rob with his big tatty Mohican and two front teeth out – there’s no way you could disguise that.
Anyway, so after about six days they still hadn’t worked out how to do it, when Rob heard an assistant talking about how someone should have come in and they hadn’t and he was late for his tea break. So the under manager or something like that comes in and lets this guy go for his break. Then the phone rings and the under manager has to go to the phone.
Rob had been planning on going in as a student with one of those art portfolio cases to hide the book in. He didn’t have it with him because he was still staking the place out. But then suddenly there he was standing next to the book and there’s not an assistant to be seen and he’s totally unprepared…
He just put it under his arm and walked out, right past everyone, past the assistants in the fiction department between him and the door, past the girl at the sales desk and the other shoppers walking to and fro, past the staff stacking books and pricing them. He just walked past them all with this amazing showpiece book tucked under his arm, right under all their noses. He got to the pavement and Gemma saw him and they both just walked fast round