did you really have to bring that up?

Today, a small girl vomited all over the floor of my shop.

I was on duty by myself and I heard a plaintiff voice cry out from the depths of our cavernous shop, "Excuse me, could I have some assistance down here?" In the very back aisle of the store, a small grandma type woman was struggling under the weight of the heaving retching child in her arms.

Ugh.

I hurried to her side and instinctively extended my hands to help her in any way I could. Then I realised that she, the child and a three foot radius of shop floor were covered in red lumpy vomit.

Double ugh.

I instinctively retracted my hands again.

"She's not very well," said the poor Grandma.

Hmmm. You can say that again.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," said the poor Grandma.

"That's fine," I said. "You just get her home. I'll take care of this."

Translation: Get your barfing granddaughter out of my shop.

I called Customer Service and asked if they could send a cleaner around to fix it for me. Well, no, Customer Service explained - the cleaners won't clean inside a shop. It's not their job.

"But," I said, "If you ask Jo, she'll come and help me. She is the GOOD Cleaning Lady."

Customer Service explained that they couldn't call Good Cleaning Lady Jo directly. The request would have to be radioed through to the EVIL Boss Cleaning lady who is none too happy at the moment because her company just lost the cleaning contract on the whole centre.

I wondered how Customer Service could tell the Evil Boss Cleaning Lady was particularly unhappy. She has always been one of the most bizarre and miserable women I have ever had the opportunity to observe in her natural habitat. Evil boss cleaning lady takes her job description seriously and it is NOT in her job description to clean up after any of the staff of any of the shops. In fact, we are not even supposed to put our rubbish in the bins. Those bins are provided for customers, says Evil Boss Cleaning Lady. I once put a small piece of cardboard in one of the centre's rubbish bins. She saw me do it and took the cardboard out of the bin. She very deliberately placed it on the floor all the while looking me in the eye. It was like some kind of crazy challenge.

I dare you to put your rubbish in my bins again.

She straightened slowly, still eyeballing me like John Wayne, in any number of his movies, putting the uppity heathen Injuns back in their place.

I double dare you.

"I'm afraid you're on your own with the vomit situation, dude," said Customer Service. Yes. It's true. The girl at Customer Service calls me 'dude'.

But my question remains - what could this woman do that could possibly make her seem even more unhappy than usual? It's kind of scary really.

I was on duty by myself, as I said, so I couldn't go out to get cleaning gear. I have the basic equipment in the shop of course - a broom, a cloth, a bottle of disinfectant spray - but nothing of the caliber required to combat the kind of damage a projectile vomiter can inflict in a matter of seconds.

And the smell! The smell was permeating the entire space. Customers were streaming out the door. I had to do something!

It's amazing how much you can achieve without inhaling when you must. On my haunches, armed only with tissues and Orange Magic spray clean, I managed to mop up almost all of the mess.

Then as I stood up, I looked out through the front of my shop and saw the cavalry riding down the corridor to my rescue. Well, actually, it was two cleaning people - Good Cleaning Lady Jo and Nice Cleaning Guy Brian pushing their cleaning carts. They were accompanied by Kent, the Centre Manager.

Well, that little spew had certainly caused a kerfuffle, hadn't it? Kent is pretty cool. He strides about the centre with his trusty walkie talkie ever to his ear, just about the only man in our small tropical city who still wears a tie to work. He made a Kent joke as he approached. "What's this I hear? You vomited all over your floor? What'd you do that for"

"I got bored," I replied. "You know how it is."

Everyone thought this was pretty funny. I said to Jo, "I thought you weren't allowed to clean in my shop."

"Kent told me to," she replied innocently. "What was I supposed to do - say no to KENT???"

Kent's chest expanded a little at the mention of his power.

Jo and Brian went forth with mops, both wet and dry, and small spray cans filled with overpoweringly pleasant odours.

As they finished swiping their mops back and forth, ridding me at last of the contents of that small child's over full stomach, I said, "Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you! You are so good to me."

Jo said matter of factly, "Well, you're always good to me too."

It's true. Just that morning I gave her a tiny discount on some books for her kids. It dosn't matter that the amount is small, it's just that everyone likes the acknowledgement that what they do is appreciated. Same with the security guards. All of them repay me by looking after me above and beyond the call of duty.

A lot of people think that Kent and those like him have the most important jobs in these kind of places - but the truth is, Kent went away for a holiday and nobody even noticed he was gone.

Try going a week or even a day without cleaning staff and security. God love 'em.

la belle et la bete

I was looking at one of the gorgeous kid's books we have in the shop at the moment - a beautifully illustrated version of a dark medieval fairy tale.

It reminded me of the time I was reviewing for the local paper and the editor forced me to go see a local production of Beauty and the Beast. Yes. You heard me a local amateur theatre production of Beauty and the Beast.

I was like ... Aw... Do I HAVE to?

And they were like ... No, of course you don't have to. And you don't have to do anything for us ever again either ...

Then I was like … OK! OK! I'll go watch the talentless local show-off hacks bring to life an immortal Disney classic…

You know what I hate most about immortal Disney classics?

They're immortal.

Jeez! Die already, Nambi Bambi and Stuperrella! And somebody disconnect Sleeping Beauty's life support system, for god's sake!

But guess what? While the music for Disney's immortal classic Beauty and the Beast was, is and always will be bloody atrocious, and the sweetness of the tweaked for the twenty first century storyline almost requires an insulin shot to process, it's a phenomenal yarn!

Where do I start? There's a such a lot to this tale of trauma and transcendence. Such a lot that a girl who was always considered nice enough but kind of weird, who always nearly, but never quite, fit anywhere she went, a girl with nameless longings and an awful fascination for the beastliness of life, could identify with. In short, a girl like me.

First of all there is a handsome prince, of course. But the handsome prince happens to a prick who thinks he is better than everyone else. He's cruel to an old woman who, unfortunately for him, is an enchantress. She turns him into a beast to teach him a lesson and her spell has a punchline – he shall remain a beast until he genuinely loves someone who genuinely loves him in return. So you have a beast in a suit, a bitter man-beast with no manners nor consideration for others. A man beast who shakes his fist at cruel fate and blames everybody else for his beastliness.

How Freudian can you get?

Enter Belle, a girl who doesn’t fit in, who is a little bit different, who the lovely mob of plebs in the village take great pleasure in mocking.

And so of course they fall in love and both are transformed. Blah blah blah – how banal and so forth. How boring! And yet, it’s a true thing, the transformational power of love. It may be the truest thing in the whole world. I’ve seen it happen time and time again in others and even had it happen to me. There was not a thing in the world that could have made me willingly leave a warm bed in the middle of a cold night till I was changed forever, for the better, by the overwhelming love of a baby who needed me.

Anyhow, for Belle and the Beast, it’s not the normal course of an affair at all. They despise each other at the start and must work their way through the whole beastliness issue before coming to accept both themselves and each other. Then, of course, he is transformed and voila! - he is actually a gorgeous human being underneath the selfishness – as are we all!

The original story was written in France in the 1700s by a writer named Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. It was a dark tale full of all sorts of Jungian shadows. It was abridged and lightened up about twenty years later by Jeane-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and I’d like to complain about this whitewashing of the story but in fact, it’s unlikely we’d know the story at all if it hadn’t been homogenised for public taste.

“Villeneuve's version of the tale also differs from Leprince de Beaumont's in its eroticism and its insistence on the Beast's monstrosity. Villeneuve makes explicit the transgressive sexual union at the heart of this tale. Not only does the Beast repeatedly ask Belle to sleep with him (in Leprince de Beaumont's version he asks her to marry him), but Belle has pleasurable dreams of being courted by a handsome prince. The transgressiveness of these descriptions is intensified by details of the Beast's frightening appearance …” answers.com

I wish I had enough French to understand the original story. But I don’t so I will have to make do with pale translations. Jean Cocteau apparently made a fabulous film version called La Belle et La Bete in the 40s. If I were just a little more of a film geek, I might buy it. But alas, I too am a pale imitation of a true film geek and will have to make do with the pale imitation of the stage version that I saw at the local theatre.

Imagine - a story with a truth so strong that not even an amateur theatre company and an overdose of Disney tunes could kill it!

come the revolution, all bookshops will be run by writers...

I am a bookseller.

But I'm not primarily a bookseller. My highest calling is that of Creative Genius but unfortunately the world hasn't yet realised this and so, I am forced to supplement my meager living by selling books. It's not so bad. Quite sexy in fact at times, when the new stock comes in and there are all those luscious taped up boxes full of unsullied books wanting nothing more than to give up their retail virginity to me. To me! Ooh, it feels so GOOD! Suck it and see for yourselves, all you green eyed book monsters out there. A writer who is also a bookseller. Maybe there is a god after all.

Still, satiating as it can often be, being a bookseller is not an afternoon at the beauty spa. Selling books is hard work. It is at least as hard as writing them - this I know because I have done both - and it is most certainly much harder than reading them. Well, most of them anyhow. I'm sure we all have a difficult book in our past, the reading of which was the frustrational equivalent of having your eyes sandpapered out of their sockets by an angry soccer hooligan. But that is food for another blog...

Now, to the specific aspects of the general difficulty of selling books.

1) Physically, the most difficult thing is that BOOKS ARE HEAVY. Carrying one lonely book from the kitchen to the front veranda to sit in the morning sun and sip a fresh made coffee is no great imposition, it's true. But now I want you to close your eyes and imagine carrying ten or fifteen of the suckers from the back of the shop to the front and then carrying the ten or fifteen that were at the front down to the back for no apparent reason except to participate in the mysterious ritual of 'rotating the stock'. When I first heard of 'rotating the stock', I tried cheating by just picking up a few books at a time and turning a quick circle. But it didn't seem to help sales at all so I stopped doing that - I felt it may have made me look a little bit silly.

2) Emotionally, the most difficult thing of all for a Creative Genius like myself is DEALING WITH THE PUBLIC. The Public, in case you didn't know, is a seething mass of crazy idiosyncrasy*. They want the impossible yesterday. When you offer to order it for them by tomorrow, they huff and they puff and they finally grudgingly agree to wait the extra day for whatever impossible thing it is that they can't live without. So you run around like a cat with a dead rat strapped to its tail and procure the preferred impossibility for them. You dutifully, smugly even, have the impossible sitting there waiting for them to pick up and while they're about it, give your ego a quick but hearty touch up. You know, say something like, "Holy shit! How the HELL did you ever manage to get this impossible thing for me so swiftly? Who are you really? SuperBookGirl? You're astonishing! You're fantastic! God, let me slip you an extra tenner just for being so damn clever" and other suchlike things.

Now keep in mind, this is only what I think should happen, what I am expecting to happen, what God has decreed should happen to all diligent book sellers who go beyond the call of duty for a customer who desires the impossible.

What actually happens is that they don't even bother to pick it up at all.

After a week, you put it back on the shelf sadly. Another week later and you feel glad when someone else buys the impossibility - it hurts too much to see it there, a reminder of your magic making gone unappreciated. Another week later again and the original customer comes back and wants to know where their impossible to find book is. When you tell them that you sent it home with someone who actually wanted it enough to give you money for it, they call you names and walk out, vowing never to return. It's cruel and unusual and I don't know how I go on sometimes.

3) Finally, spiritually, the most difficult aspect of selling books, the roughest, the most soul destroying, is that you somehow have to stop yourself from standing around all day reading the stock. Or not.

Seriously, it's a burden.


* Why don't we just cut out the middle man and spell idiosyncrasy with a z? Idiosyncrazy. That says it all.