The Totem Pole

Eleanor took a tight-lipped sip from one of the gilt-rimmed cups I reserved for company. She closed her eyes and inhaled heavily through her nose. The tea was specially bought loose-leaf, brewed in a pot that had been at the back of my cupboard since her last visit. She opened her eyes and smiled approvingly over an untouched plate of biscuits. Having exhausted all of the ecstasy she seemed to be able to extract from a sip of overpriced tea, she opened her eyes and spoiled my day.

“I nearly forgot. I brought that book you liked the sound of,” she said. Liked the sound of referred to my reaction, no more than polite, to a long and detailed description of a book I had absolutely no interest in reading. Sadly, my politeness had been plausibly misinterpreted as genuine interest. Now I watched as Eleanor’s handbag dislocated its golden jaws to heave a two-inch-thick, undigested paperback onto the table.

My precious and private bedside book pile was a carefully curated library of good intentions, intellectual aspirations and deferred fun. It was a strange, stratified club where talented Americans lay with intimidating Russians, describing things that I needed their help to even begin to imagine, and junkies and drinkers got up to things that I needed their expertise to experience. It did not need to be jacked up another two inches, especially not by some pastel-covered, book club-stickered, uninvited, chick-lit shite.

“Thanks!”

It served me right. I had started it. During a previous visit from Eleanor, brought low under the weight all the emotion I wasn’t feeling for one of my oldest friends, I had allowed my tolerance for the gossip-archaeology of our shared lives to wear impolitely thin. I had been listening to an exhaustive critical analysis of the life choices of a girl we had both known at school. Desperate to change the subject to something more edifying, my frustration had begun to build. Eventually it had boiled over and rushed out of my mouth as unguarded enthusiasm for a book I had read four-fifths of. The interruption was jarring. I had begun speaking about the book apropos of nothing, clearly desperate to twist away from the conversation we had been having. I had instantly regretted being so dismissive and rude, but not as much as I regretted starting a conversation which opened a path to my bedside book pile.

“That sounds fascinating,” Eleanor had said.

I had given a ham-fisted synopsis of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, complete with some philosophy 101 references and some no-shit-Sherlock observations. My rush to change the subject and, if I’m being honest, to sound clever, had made me butcher the book and expose my fledgling understanding of it. Interesting ideas, that I was just beginning to explore, were forced out into the thin, sunlit vacuum of one of mine and Eleanor’s sporadic chats. The book had been shoved out over the untouched biscuits to do a dance in the steam of the teapot. A dance to declare how bored I was with our repetitive chat of eternally returning mutual mortifications past.

Eleanor had retaliated with a description of a recent favourite of her own. It could not have sounded less interesting.

“Interesting,” I said, nodding into my tea.

“You can borrow it if you like!”

“Thanks, although, I’ve got so much to read at the moment.” I did not want to borrow this book.

“I’ll bring it for you next time.”

You can’t make me read it. “I don’t know when I’ll get round to it. It might just end up on the pile, you know how it is.”

“No hurry! You’ll really enjoy it. It’s nice and light, just easy fun.”

Shit.

This was Francis all over again. I had never expressed any interest in reading a cosy-crime bestseller about the members of a book club who solved mysteries. And yet, it had found its way onto my pile. It was very sweet, really. He knew I liked reading so he had bought me a book. It was possibly the first one he saw in the book shop, an environment he was not overly familiar with, a choice based on no knowledge of my tastes and interests whatsoever, but very sweet all the same. He wanted to give me nice gift, I should be grateful, but my poor pile! It had grown taller but dumber. I’d have to read it. I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings. I could text him to let him know what I thought of it and arrange to see him again at the same time.

Under the cosy-crime bestseller lurked James Clavell’s Shogun. I’d read and enjoyed it years ago having found it on the small, solitary pine bookshelf at the top of my parents’ stairs. Now my brother had passed it on to me, reminding me that I had passed it on to him after reading it twenty (twenty-five?) years ago. He’d found it there, back in its place on the small, shallow shelf as he cleared out the house after my father died. I hadn’t gone to the house. No need for both of us to go. There wasn’t too much to clear out. I had more books on my bedside pile than there had been in the whole, small house. My parents were never really into books; one of many things we didn’t see eye-to-eye on. But my brother and I were on the same page when it came to Shogun, and I would probably reread it. Even though I generally avoided rereading books, it slowed progress through the unread pile. Even though it put me a staggering one-thousand two-hundred and forty-three age-yellowed pages of epic further away from the next book that I had actually intended to read. The true top of my pile.

I say book. It was a was a thick wad of printer paper held together with straining treasury tags; my friend Beth’s manuscript that I had agreed to read in a rare unselfish moment. We’d talked about it so much I felt like I’d already read it. But I hadn’t. But I was going to, because I’d promised and because Beth valued my opinion, which had flattered me enough to convince me to read it, even though I had my doubts about how enjoyable that process would be. I didn’t even have the heart not to read books that I had been loaned against my will; how could I give my sensitive, creative friend honest feedback on her novel? Please let it be good. Please say it was only printed on one side of the paper.     

Sweet, eager Francis, my subtly sentimental brother, diligent, creative Beth and now kind (if slightly pushy) Eleanor. They’d conspired to bury my own choices under an avalanche of their gifts, memories, tokens and favours and built up my pile to be tall as a toddler. Hilary Mantel would not be Bringing up the Bodies any time soon, George Saunders’ Liberation Day was a long way off and Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book now lived in limbo at the foot of a strange little bedside totem pole that told a story about who I thought I might like to be and who my friends would have me be.   

I dropped Eleanor’s book onto the top of the pile with a thump, and went back to reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being.