The Reading List

Aleisha had opened the copy of Little Women, feeling Leilah’s eyes trained on the pages, as if a spell had been cast once more.
‘Wait,’ Leilah said. ‘What’s Little Women about then? I’ve heard of it.’
Aleisha turned to the back cover – she scanned the text. ‘Right, it’s about four sisters in New England … set in the 1860s,’ she continued to scan. ‘It’s about their attempts to help their family make more money, their friendship with a family living close by … and their later “love affairs”, apparently. There’s Meg, who dreams of being a lady; Jo … it says she’s based on the author herself – she wants to be a writer. Beth is quiet and delicate … she likes music, and then there’s Amy, she’s a “blonde beauty”. The pretty one.’ Aleisha kept running her eyes over the cover. Leilah was nodding, focused on the middle distance. ‘Ready?’ Aleisha asked.
‘Yes, go on.’

She turned over and stared straight up at the ceiling, willing sleep to overcome her. Suddenly her phone on Aidan’s bedside table started to buzz: Kyle. Of course. She’d see him later for her shift at the library, anyway, so she turned it face down. But her eye was drawn to Aidan’s stack of books again.
There it was. How had she missed it? Nestled between the crime books, the Martina Coles, there it was.
The Time Traveler’s Wife.
She thought of her copy, Mr P’s copy, resting beside her bed – forgotten and ignored.
Her heart caught in her throat. She pictured Mr P, telling her about this book, about how it had helped him. ‘The books show us the world; they don’t hide it.’ She imagined Aidan, sitting in his same spot, reading it. Had she even seen him read it? How recently had he read it?

She wanted to be away from this world, a world that felt completely alien and yet unforgivably unchanged too.
She picked up the copy of The Time Traveler’s Wife she’d carried up the stairs, wanting to escape, wanting to soothe Leilah. But what good were books now? The characters she’d loved in them were fake, they’d never be able to fix anything. They’d never live beyond the page. But the person she’d loved who had existed in the real world, who’d fought for her, who’d encouraged her, who had given up so much for her – he was now gone.

Little Women was undoubtedly the book. It was the book he should have asked for at the library when he didn’t know what book to read.
As soon as he met the March sisters and Marmee, he knew why Naina and Priya had loved it so much. The girls – Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy – they were fun, imaginative, they lived in books and outside books. They cared for one another, looked after each other. And everything about Little Women spoke of Naina. Every page burned with her legacy, her spirit sprinkled through the sentences. Sadly the sisters’ dad was away at war, and their mother Marmee was looking after them all on her own, in America, Massachusetts – and beyond that, she was looking after and caring for so many other people too, helping out with the war effort, treating her neighbours with kindness and warmth, as well as bringing food for families who needed it at Christmas, helping her neighbours and friends. If Naina had still been here, she would have been just like Marmee; so happy to put her own needs and comfort second to that of others. With each page, he just imagined Naina, everywhere, around him.

At that moment, Aidan arrived back home, making a racket as he shoved open the door and dropped his bags on the floor. He shut the door behind him.
‘Shh,’ Aleisha said, tiptoeing into the hall. ‘Hey, what’s all this noise about?’
Aidan just gave her a quick pat on the arm and stomped into the kitchen.
‘Mum’s resting.’ Aleisha followed him. ‘I’ve been reading to her.’
Aidan poured himself a glass of water from the bottle in the fridge. He downed it all before he looked at his sister for the first time.
‘Aidan … I’m just amazed, you know, it’s really working. She’s like getting into them.’

That evening, as Izzy was tucking the list away with the others (the one underneath said simply Baked beans (lo salt), ice cream, sausages, sausages veggie, cat food), she glimpsed a title that stirred something: Rebecca. Her dad had had a Reader’s Digest copy bound in red leather with gold lettering that he’d inherited from his own mother – he read it every year because it was his mother’s favourite book.
‘This book reminds me of her, Izzy,’ he’d said to her, when she asked him why he was reading the same story again and again. ‘You like to re-read your books, and I do too.’

Izzy saw it there, lying on the pavement in front of her. She had a look around, wondering if someone had dropped it, where it had come from. It had a piece of sticky tape at the top, now lacking any adhesive. It was just dry and dirty from the London smog.
She hadn’t found a list in a long time. It was a bit of a weird habit of hers, collecting lists. She’d started when she first moved to London, when she’d found one abandoned in a trolley in Sainsbury’s. The city had been so large, so vast and lonely sometimes, finding lists was like finding tiny moments of human connection, where she could prove that the silent strangers who walked past her, avoiding eye contact, were people too.

Rebecca skulked about Manderley like a ghost and, a chill running down her spine, Aleisha dropped the book down onto her desk suddenly. Bloody creepy. After a breath, to calm herself, she tucked the novel under her arm and grabbed her bag, overloaded with books. When she stood up, a big, dark shadow was looming over her, slicing through the waning light of the summer evening.
‘Shit!’ Aleisha yelped, clutching the book to her chest for protection. As her eyes readjusted, she realized it was just the vacuum cleaner, left out by Kyle as a reminder to ‘keep this place looking sharp’. This bloody book – it was still basically daylight and it was already scaring her half to death.