Brave Isabella

A short story I wrote a while back. I took inspiration from 'Paperbacks in the Window,' a photograph taken by Jules Aarons in Boston's West End during the 1950s.

Walker’s Books

Throughout all the years Jim Walker was my friend, he accomplished many things. He travelled, he married a woman of exceptional beauty, and he shared with everyone around him the one thing he held most dear to his heart: a deep and profound love of literature in its many forms and guises.

Jim was the one of us who dared venture out of Manchester after the war. He escaped the slums of Hulme, before coming back home to spread his love of literature across every street, ginnel and corner of our neighbourhood. And he did it in his usual quiet, reserved way, without fanfare or the slightest trace of ego. He simply gave people the choice and let them decide which journey appealed to them the most. Oftentimes, the literature they stumbled upon took them on journeys they would never have dreamed of taking before. For that, everyone was grateful to him. But, above all, for me, I will always be indebted to him for being the one who fathered a girl whose voice I still hear whenever I turn the page of a book.

Jim was stationed in France when he befriended Robert Mescalero, an American GI who carried with him a photograph of his beloved sister, Isabella. From the moment Jim saw her picture, he was thunderstruck, and the more Robert told him about Isabella, her generosity of spirit, her sense of humour, the more Jim fell a little bit in love with her. So, when Robert suggested he write to her, Jim made sure to make every word count. This wouldn’t have been a problem for him. You see, out of us all, he was the one who read the most. Every gang has a reader, a fighter, a comedian, and a Lothario. Jim was our reader. He would read anything and everything he could get his hands on. Ghost stories by M.R. James and Edith Wharton, the Charles Dickens novels that resonated with his working-class sensibilities, Dracula, Frankenstein, Hemingway and the Brontës. Even comics like The Beano and Dandy if the mood took him. He took the eloquence and insight from the writers he loved and poured everything he had into that letter. Whatever he wrote must have worked, because when the reply came back, he read it aloud to Robert, who confessed to never having heard his sister use words like that with anybody. “Jim,” he said, “I think she likes you. And lucky for you, buddy, I do too.”

When Jim came home after the war, he was changed in the way men are who have seen things nobody should have to bear witness to in a hundred lifetimes. Like most of us flat-foots who got left behind to work in the munitions factories, we didn’t press him on the details. We let him be, letting it be known in gentle shoulder charges and other unspoken ways that we were glad to have him home. He was always quieter than the rest of us, choosing to speak only when he knew he had something to say that was worth listening to. But now he was quieter than ever, and if he always seemed to have his nose in a book before, now he immersed himself in them completely. There was something in them, he said, that when you find the right line or turn of phrase, you can make sense of almost anything.

If it weren’t for the letters he and Isabella wrote to each other, I don’t think he would have talked at all. He read us every one of them. Isabella matched him word for word, each of them quoting from books and poems, and as Jim read, we could hear a rhythm beginning to take shape. It was beautiful to hear. Of course, when Jim told us he was leaving for America, none of us was surprised and nobody dared try to stop him.

Throughout the ten years Jim lived in America he kept us up to date on everything that was happening in his life. Having lost his parents when he was too young to remember them, I suppose we were his only connection with England. It made us feel exclusive, and we welcomed every letter, photograph and piece of Americana in the shape of a comic or record that he posted to us. But of everything he sent, from Captain America to Louis Jordan, the things we loved most were the photographs. Isabella looked as beautiful as we imagined her, and Jim, though we would never had told him this, looked as handsome as a film star on their wedding day. And their daughter? Now she was something else altogether.

Named after her mother, Isabella Walker was a beautiful child. We saw in pictures how she grew from a baby to a little girl, all the while smiling and with a boundless energy that came through in the leaps and dives the camera captured with every click of the shutter.

When we received a letter from Jim telling us he was moving his family to England, we didn’t think he’d move them to Hulme. But when he showed up on the cusp of Spring in 1957, he told us there must have been something amongst the bricks and rubble that drew him back. I like to think it might have been us.

Along with a wife and child, and a new found optimism that could only have been gained in America, Jim brought with him stacks of American paperbacks and magazines. They were mostly westerns, science fiction stories, and crime novels with the kinds of covers that made some of the women on our street blush. What he couldn’t carry with him he had shipped over. It seemed that Jim’s love of the written word had found something fresh in the pulps, with their stories of revenge on the high plains, murder in the cities, and adventures on other worlds.

Jim had made some pretty good money in the States. He’d been working with Isabella’s brother as a copy editor at the family’s printing firm. When he got back to Manchester, he took the money he’d saved and rented a flat over an empty shop at the corner of Stanton Street. Within a month, he’d turned the downstairs into a second-hand bookshop. The sign above the door read:

Walker’s Books

Est. 1957

Along with the books he already owned, Jim had amassed a collection big enough to fill a room. What he couldn’t fit inside, he displayed on a rack outside the shop’s entrance. This he filled with pulp paperbacks, and magazines like Weird Tales, Future Fiction, and Planet Stories. The books had these wonderful titles like Outlaw Justice at Hangman’s Coulee and The Night and the Naked. He placed these outside for good reason, figuring that if the titles didn’t draw people in, the covers certainly would. Half dressed women and men stripped to the waist were hard to resist when the only other thing you had to look at were derelict houses and waste ground.

Inside, books were stacked one on top of the other. There wasn’t a specific order to the titles. Horror, crime, romance; they were all lumped in together. For every old Victorian yellowback, there was a ‘Yellow Peril’ book sitting next to it on the shelf. Slotted in between books by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Christie and Greene, you could find cowboys, Martians and gangsters. Jim told us his thinking behind it was that customers might find something outside of their usual reading habits. Sure enough it worked. I remember catching my neighbour Mrs Barlow reading a Jack Williamson novel once. She tried to tell me she thought it was a romance. I could see how the rocket on the cover might have confused her.

Everywhere you looked since Jim came home, people seemed to be reading. After every visit to Walker’s Books, which had become a new and frequent habit for the residents, there followed a silence that fell over the neighbourhood, broken only when someone passed their book onto somebody else, excitedly recommending what they had read and, in turn, having a book forced into their hands by another, equally enthusiastic neighbour. For those who were unable to escape the confines of Hulme, Jim, for his part, did the next best thing by inviting the rest of the world and beyond into their homes. It didn’t take long before the sight of somebody writing feverishly into a notepad became commonplace, as they tried to emulate the best they could the authors who had inspired them to pick up a pencil themselves. The ones who didn’t write well still had the spoken word, and it was they who replaced idle conversation with philosophical thought and wild imaginings. But of them all, there wasn’t a one who could articulate their imagination better than Jim’s eight-year-old daughter, Isabella Walker, or, as she became known to us all, Brave Isabella.

The Tale of the Jade Venus

Isabella was the light of Stanton Street. All the grown-ups loved her. She never stopped talking, and, what’s more, she would rather talk to us than play with the other kids in the bombed-out houses. Though she was forbidden from reading some of the books in her dad’s shop, Isabella still found a way for them to feed her already fertile imagination. For her, the covers and titles were enough, and it was this small glimpse into an adult world that led to her regaling us with the kinds of stories Black Mask and Startling Stories would have paid good money for.

On summer evenings, once the working day was done, me and the gang (that’s Joe, Bill and Albert), would sit outside the bookshop, smoking and talking and trying to make sense of the war and the rise of rock and roll. It was during these times when Isabella would come running over, and when Isabella ran towards you, you’d brace yourself against the force. She was like a hurricane, and once she got your attention, that was it. Her hazel eyes, so full of expression, fixed on you and wouldn’t let you go until she was finished. She was clever too for a kid her age. She painted images for us, like all good story tellers do.

One evening, we were sitting playing cards outside the bookshop, when Isabella came bounding over. She grabbed me by the arm and said, “Mr Turner, you’ve got to help me!”

“What is it, Isabella?” I said. “What’s happened?”

She said, “I think I’m in trouble.” She was panting and looking around as though something might jump out on her at any minute.

I told her to slow down and tell me all about it, so she sat on a crate while Bill tied her laces. She said, “Well, me and Ruben,” Ruben was her invisible friend, the only one who’d dare go on her adventures with her, “we’re playing in the houses behind Mrs Naylor’s place. You know the ones where the grown-ups are always telling us not to go?”

I had to smile at that. Telling Isabella not to do anything was like an invitation to go ahead and do it anyway.

“I know the ones,” I said. “What about them?”

“Well, in one of them there was this chanting coming from inside and a kind of orange light like fire, you know? So I says to Ruben, I says, ‘C’mon Ruben, somebody might be in trouble, let’s go see’. But Ruben’s a little scared, you know Ruben, right? So, I go in first and there’s this lady sitting at a table with all candles and skulls and snakes crawling all over it. And she’s got this mask on looks like a bear or something, but I can tell she’s got green skin underneath ‘cos I can see her arms, right?”

“Sounds like the wife,” Albert said, and we all laughed. Isabella too.

Then she said, “Yeah, no, but her eyes are all rolled back and white, so she doesn’t see me come in. And then she says,” and here Isabella tried to make her voice go all deep and ghostly-like, “‘I am the Jade Venus and very powerful! My greatest enemy, the Red Bone Woman has stolen my book of spells! Is there anyone brave enough to return it to me?’ Well, Ruben’s shaking like crazy now and begging me to leave, but I can see that the Jade Venus is real sore about her book, so I say, ‘Excuse me, Miss Venus, maybe I can help. I’m an adven-, adventurer, and I know no fear!’ ‘Ah-ha! I know of you already, Isabella,’ she says. ‘You are indeed a brave warrior. Cross the river to Dragon’s Island. There, you will climb to the head of the mountain and find the Red Bone Woman in a cave. Go now and bring me back my book! But be sure to return before the sun sets!’ Then she laughed, like, ‘Gra-ha-ha-haaa!’ and all this green fire shot out of her mouth and she disappeared in a puff of smoke!”

“No,” Bill said, and Isabella nodded slowly and said, “Yes. Vanished. Just like that.”

“Definitely sounds like the wife,” Albert said, and Isabella hit him in the arm.

“So, what did you do?” I asked her.

“Well,” she said, “I ran all the way to the river with Ruben on my back. When we get to the other side, we climb the mountain and Ruben keeps look-out while I go into . . .” And then she paused. For dramatic effect. “. . . the cave!”

And me and the chaps, we all go, “Oh!”

I said, “What did you see, Isabella?”

She looked around to make sure nobody else was listening. “The Red Bone Woman,” she said. “And she’s real ugly and about a hundred feet tall with this hair all crazy and red and she looks at me with these big yellow eyes. So, I take my book out of my satchel and I walk right up to her and I say, ‘Red Bone Woman! I am here to make you a deal. In my hands I hold a book that will tell you where you can find an island full of little people who you can make your slaves! But in return you must give me the book of spells before the Jade Venus kills us all!’ So, the Red Bone Woman gives me the book of spells, but she can see my book is just my notepad with silly drawings inside, right, so I run away, and I hear her shouting, ‘Isabella, I put a spell on you, you fool! You are not the only one who knows tricks! You will die if you don’t find the troubled spring and wash your face before sundown!’ So, I take the book of spells to the Jade Venus and she’s real happy, but when I tell her about the spell she says she can’t help me find the troubled spring ‘cos she can’t go near water. She melts if she gets water on her! What can I do, Mr Turner?”

“That is a problem, Isabella,” I said.

Me and the other chaps, we all rubbed our chins and thought about it for a minute. Then Albert clicked his fingers and said, “I know where the troubled spring is. I’ll be back in a minute.” He walked off and came back a while later, took Isabella by the hand, and said, “Follow me.”

Later, we found out that Albert had dug a hole in the ground and put a tin bowl inside it. He’d filled it with water and placed candles around the hole and told Isabella to wash her face. So, she did, and the spell was broken.

That night, once Isabella was asleep, her mother came over with a plate of sliced bread and a pot of jam for us all. We ate them with Jim leaning against the shop’s doorframe, reading a book of Conan stories and smiling.

The Tale of the Two Bad Men

Every town in every city has a certain somebody who blames the world for their lot in life. In our neighbourhood, that somebody was Roger Parker. He stole, lied, and cheated, and did everything he could to make sure people knew that he fought in the war and for that he should be excused for any wrongdoing. We didn’t judge him, nor did we excuse his behaviour. But there was one man who did. His uncle, Tom Barraclough, was our local beat policeman and all too ready to turn a blind to what his nephew was doing. At a price. It was well known that Roger split his ill-gotten gains with his uncle, and that there was nothing we could do about it. If he ever found out Roger was holding out on him, which he often did, Tom would beat him in front the whole neighbourhood. This, we knew, he did under the pretence that he was upholding the law, but the real reason was that he couldn’t stand the thought of anyone, related or otherwise, getting the better of him. What made it worse, was that Tom would flaunt his power, telling the kids that it was all very well staying on the straight and narrow, but if they wanted to get out of Hulme, they needed to smarten up. Which to Tom meant taking what they could whenever the opportunity arose.

One morning, Isabella caught up with me on the road as I walked to buy a paper. She fell in step and said hello. Other than that, she was unusually quiet. At the shop I bought her a bag of sherbet and a stick of liquorice. On the way back, I watched as she dipped the liquorice in the sherbet and furrowed her brow. I could tell that whatever was bothering her was being rolled around inside her head as she shaped what she had to tell me into something more palatable. Finally, it came out.

“Mr. Turner,” she said, “I think I saw a bad thing, but I don’t know how to tell it.”

“Well,” I said, “why don’t you tell it like you always do. You’re good at telling stories.”

She took a minute, then said, “Okay. I was helping put out the chairs in the hall for the play tonight.” (A local theatre group had formed, and they were trying their hand at Chekhov after a copy of Three Sisters had begun to circulate amongst them).

“That’s nice of you, Isabella,” I said.

She carried on like she didn’t hear me.

“And when I finished, I cut through the alley to get home quicker. And then I saw that policeman who’s always talking to us. But he wasn’t nice like he is with us. He was shouting and punching that man the grown-ups tell us to stay away from. He was saying he owed him money.”

“That’s a terrible thing for you to have to see. Did you tell your dad?”

“Not yet. I was on my way when I saw you.”

“Then we should get you home, don’t you think?”

“Yes. But wait. I’m not done telling yet. The policeman went away, and I wanted to see if the man was okay. Now, I know I’m not supposed to talk to him, but he was crying and there was blood coming out of his nose. And when I got to him, he handed me this bag full of money and told me it’s come from the great mail robbery and that I should bury it someplace for him or he’s gonna’ kill me. So, I ran, but before I turned the corner I looked back and I saw the policeman come back, and he’s standing over the man and saying, ‘You wanna’ be an outlaw, Roger? Well this is outlaw justice!’ And he plugged him, BLAM! BLAM! And then he said, When I find out who’s got my money, I’m gonna’ plug them too! So, I ran and ran but the policeman grabbed me and told me he’s gonna’ bury me instead of the money. And I’m real scared but then there’s this light and a voice says, ‘Unhand her, copper!’ And guess who it was, Mr. Turner.”

“I give up,” I said. “Superman?”

“No! It was the Jade Venus! The policeman let me go, but too late, ‘cos he kind of set on fire and disappeared!”

I told her we should tell her dad. I remember us standing in the bookshop with Jim hunched down to meet his daughter at eye-level. He was holding her gently with his hands on the sides of her face, so her eyes met his and didn’t roam around as she scanned the titles on the shelves. The truth came out, and though there were no guns or bags of loot, it was still enough for Jim to decide that it was time the neighbourhood needed a new policeman on the beat. Isabella told him how Tom had threatened her not to speak a word. He’d also told her that she talked so much that nobody would believe her anyway. That’s what you get, he’d said, for telling stupid stories.

After Jim reported him, Tom was put on leave pending an investigation. It didn’t take much pressure for Roger to break down crying and confess all. The two of them were never seen in Hulme again. And Isabella, heralded as a hero by the other kids when she told them what had happened (coloured with her own imagination, of course), became known under her new name: Brave Isabella.

The Tale of Mr. and Mrs. Mallory

The Mallorys were always arguing. Sometimes, when they were really going at it, you could hear them all the way up the street. Unfortunately for the Walkers, they lived next door to them. We always said that one of these days, it would end with one of them killing the other. That’s how bad they were.

Of course Isabella, never one to let a good story go to waste, would fill in the details for us whenever she overheard us discussing what their latest argument was over.

During one such conversation, Albert said, “I heard they argue over everything, from what they’re having for tea to what they want to listen to on the radio.”

Isabella shook her head and rolled her eyes. “That’s not what they argue about at all,” she said, sitting herself down next to us.

“Is that right?” Albert said.

“Yes,” Isabella said, her eyes closed, looking for all the world like someone who was privy to a secret that gave them wisdom we could only hope for. “Last night, something awful happened.” She let that hang in the air between us, then, satisfied that she had our full attention, said, “I was putting out the trash for my mom, and I heard them fighting again, and Mr. Mallory was calling Mrs. Mallory names like . . .” she lowered her voice, “Can I say whore?”

“This time,” I said, “but I wouldn’t make a habit of it.”

“I won’t, I promise,” she said. “So, he’s calling her names like whore, and other things too, but my mom said Mr. Mallory has a mouth like a toilet and I shouldn’t copy what he says. Anyway, there’s a lot of shouting going on, but then it goes real quiet. So, I stand on a trashcan to see through the window and Mrs. Mallory’s lying on the kitchen floor, and Mr. Mallory’s stood there with a knife in his hand and he’s saying, ‘Remember, sweetheart, bedrooms have windows too. This is trial by marriage!’” But the way Isabella said it, she put on this voice that sounded like Humphrey Bogart. Then she said, “And Mrs. Mallory’s crying, but he just throws her out into the alley. Right. Next to. The trashcan!”

“What did you do?” I ask her.

“Well, she didn’t see me ‘cos she started crawling up the alley until she got to the back door of Mr. Shaw’s house. And Mr. Shaw’s standing there smoking a cigarette, and she goes, ‘Help me, Bob. Mr. Mallory’s trying to kill me!’ But Mr. Shaw just says, ‘Lady, don’t die on my doorstep. I’ve got enough heat.’ And he goes back inside. Then, all these . . . Mr. Turner, what’s a juvenile delinquent?”

“A teenager who gets into trouble. Why?”

“Okay, that makes sense. All these juvenile delinquents come running up the alley and they’re trying to grab Mrs. Mallory’s purse, when Mr. Mallory comes running out with his gun and, BLAM! BA-DAM! BLAM! He shoots them all dead!”

“No!” I said.

“Yeah. All of them. Then he picks up Mrs. Mallory and says, ‘I’m sorry, honey. Let’s take you to the Jade Venus, she’ll fix you up with one of her magic spells.’ And Mrs. Mallory says, ‘No. We can’t. The Red Bone Woman stole her spell book. Didn’t you hear?’ And Mr. Mallory says, ‘Yeah, but Brave Isabella brought it back.’ Then they see me standing on the trashcan and they say, ‘How can we ever repay you, Brave Isabella?’ And I say, ‘Well, my mom says you fight too much and sometimes it keeps me awake, so can you please stop fighting, please?’ And they say, ‘Of course, Brave Isabella. Anything for you.’”

“And what about the juvenile delinquents?” Albert said. “What happened to them?”

“Oh, them,” Isabella said. “They’re fine now. The Jade Venus fixed them up too. Just don’t tell anyone I told you, okay? I promised the Jade Venus I wouldn’t keep telling stories about her.”

We crossed our hearts and made our promises. Isabella went inside the bookshop, picking up a magazine from the rack on the way in. Through the window, we watched Jim take the magazine off her, and hand her a pop-up book of The Wizard of Oz. With his daughter on his lap, they read it together while the radio played rock and roll.

From that night on, we never heard another argument coming from the Mallory’s house. Which is good, it’s important that Isabella gets her sleep. I often wonder, when her parents tuck her in at night, just who’s telling the bedtime story to whom.

Stanton Street

Walker’s Books survived for as long as it could. During the decade that followed, the council bought up the houses they deemed uninhabitable. People were moved away, families separated, and homes torn down. Stanton Street, however much we wished otherwise, was demolished with the rest of them.

Isabella was seventeen when Jim decided to move his family back to America. Brave Isabella, in spirit, remained, but no longer did we hear the clomp of her shoes as she came racing towards us with stories of heroism, magic and dastardly deeds. Instead, her footsteps approached lightly, and she would sit with book in hand, and join us as we discussed the finer points of the books we were reading. We carried on in this way until the very morning the Walkers waved us all goodbye for a life a million miles away.

This time, Jim travelled with less baggage than before. He carried two suitcases with his wife’s and daughter’s clothes inside. Across his shoulder was slung the canvas duffle bag he’d carried when he returned home from the war. Inside were a few clothes of his own and a copy of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, his favourite book out of the hundreds he must have read.

He shook us all by the hand and gave me the keys to the shop. In the window was a sign. It read:

Free Books courtesy of Walker’s.

Only take what you can read.

Pass them on . . .

Then on again.

THE END

#

The books that informed Isabella’s stories:

The Jade Venus, George Harmon Coxe (Dell, 1951)

Red Bone Woman, Carlyle Tillery (Avon, 1951)

Dragon’s Island, Jack Williamson (Popular Library, 1952)

Head of the Mountain, Ernest Haycox (Popular Library, 1952)

Troubled Spring, John Brick (Farrar, Strough and Company, 1950)

The Great Mail Robbery, Clarence Budington Kelland (Popular Library, 1952)

Outlaw Justice at Hangman’s Coulee, Al Cody (Avon, 1952)

Bedrooms Have Windows, A.A. Fair (Dell, 1952)

Trial by Marriage, Vereen Bell (Dell, 1943)

Lady, Don’t Die on my Doorstep, Joseph Shallit (Avon, 1952)

Juvenile Delinquents, Lenard Kaufman (Avon, 1955)