The Christmas Bookshop(6)

Further on, leading into the darkening evening, was a winter funfair as far as the eye could see, as well as stalls selling sausages, mulled wine, hot chocolate and schnapps. Obviously they started early around here.

People were everywhere: little children, eyes wide, in their light-up trainers; teenagers laughing and shoving each other; young girls in sleeveless tops and short skirts, oblivious to the weather. Carmen noticed none of it, blindly following the map on her phone and trying not to get run over by what, to her shock when she glanced up, turned out to be a tram, dinging angrily at her.

They have trams? she thought, jumping back. Who knew?

She remembered once again her parents’ strained looks of disappointment as her mother had let slip, as kindly as she was able, that her sister’s law firm handled the affairs of someone who had a shop and was looking for some seasonal help.

‘You let Sofia find me a job?’ said Carmen, distraught.

She had been quite capable of looking for a job herself. Okay, she had also been doing quite a lot of doomscrolling and watching Netflix and reading all the Anne of Green Gables books again, because that was just self-care and she was grieving for the loss of the job and the life she’d had and why wasn’t that okay?

‘So Sofia knows best again?’

Her mother and father looked at one another.

‘She’s just trying to help,’ said her mother.

‘She’s just showing off. What if I hate it?’

Carmen was aware she was being a brat, sitting at home, getting her laundry done and her meals cooked and her father – her gentle father, who almost never reproached his girls – nonetheless looked up from over his crossword and raised his eyebrows.

Her voice cracked.

‘I mean … you know this is a very hard time for me.’

She had applied for so many jobs, but without a degree or any qualifications, she wasn’t having any luck at all, unless she either wanted to be an exotic dancer or a delivery driver. Carmen was not a hundred per cent sure which of these she’d be worse at.

She waited for her parents to spring to her defence as they always did, say she was going through a bad patch, that the shop closing obviously wasn’t her fault, that she deserved a bit of down time to recover from the blow.

Neither of them said anything. Her father stared at the floor. Her mother looked miserable, but didn’t open her mouth.

‘You all think I’m being a brat,’ said Carmen, devastated.

‘No, chica,’ said her mother. ‘It’s just … we just want to see you on your feet and … ’

‘You think I’m wasting my life.’

‘No life is wasted,’ said her father, but it had sounded an empty platitude in the tidy, tiny kitchen.



I will be nice. I will be grateful, Carmen said to herself as she finally pulled herself onto the correct street.

She’d been sent pictures of the house but Carmen had never really paid attention, just assuming it would be big and posh and stupid. She didn’t expect it to be all of those things, but also heartbreakingly adorable.





Sofia felt nervous and trepidatious answering the door. This was ridiculous, she told herself. It was her sister. They could be close. Other people were close to their sisters! She wished Federico was here and not in Hong Kong. He was good with Carmen – at teasing her and bringing out her fun side, and not prodding her sensitive spots, namely how she compared to Sofia and how skint she was. Still, at least Carmen would be slimmer than her for once. Sofia took a lot of care over her food and working out, while Carmen ate a lot of pizza and moaned that Sofia was ‘lucky’.

And their mother, while being quietly thrilled, had pledged that she wasn’t going to interfere or contact them. It was really for her own sanity: she couldn’t handle them on the phone every five minutes complaining about the other one. She would miss her grandchildren – she doted on them – but maybe this would be the spur Carmen needed to get to know her own family.

She very much hoped so.

Like many mothers, Irene couldn’t quite believe her children were adults. In her eyes, they were just little girls in grown-up dresses (or ripped jeans in Carmen’s case). She remembered Sofia trying to get Carmen to behave for five minutes so they could get an ice cream, one holiday down in Ayr. The queue stretched out of the Italian ice cream shop as more and more people came away with their 99s and oysters while the little girl was getting more and more frantic despite Sofia trying to calm her down, until Carmen got so upset she had lashed out and knocked another child’s ice cream over. It had been an entire catastrophe. Irene had bought the other child a new ice cream whereupon their sibling had started to kick off, then Irene said Carmen couldn’t have one for yelling whereupon Sofia had stared at her own ice cream, and offered Carmen ‘a lick … No, Mum, she’s taking all of it! She’s taking all of it!’ and that had more or less been the end of their day out.

But they were sisters. Sisters always came through in the end, didn’t they? It had been so hard, watching Sofia fly through school. Carmen had been such a little reader, but by the time she got to school she couldn’t bear to be compared with her brilliant sibling, and fell further and further behind, almost, it felt, on purpose.

‘Don’t call them,’ Rod, her husband, had said, reading her thoughts as usual. ‘Let them get on with it. They’ll sort it out.’