When I arrived, they had already started pulling apart Checkerboard Tobacco and Book Exchange of Windsor. Two guys in orange hi-vis were moving above the now-empty pale blue shelves, CD racks and vinyl. They pinged back and forth through the swinging saloon half-doors that had once separated the adults’ section from the rest.

Boxes of DVDs, CDs and records were on the floor, along with ankle-high slush of junk and refuse: old phone card ads, sleeves of rollie papers, old Christmas décor, empty sleeves of Friends DVDs, dust jackets of Ian Botham books, and that was just the top layer. The hi-vis men were, improbably, French, chattering away, as they took to the place with swing hammers, and piled up a pyre of panels in the centre of the store. “Bof enfin,” whack, “ah m’en fou ta guele,” whack.

Behind what remained of the counter, the Chinese woman who was to be the Checkerboard’s last owner was alternately yelling and texting, tapping out characters with her long pink nails, clack, clack, clack. She wore a knock-off Chanel suit, and enough gold for Lasseter’s reef. When I’d come in the week before, she said she was closing down. I asked if I could grab some of “the stuff”. Now the shop was half-gone.

“You said I could get some of this!” I near-screamed in pain.

“It’s all there!” she said, pointing to the boxes upon boxes of DVDs, eight copies of K-9, 10 copies of Gilmore Girls, over and over. “You got a truck?”

“I don’t want the DVDs! I want-“

Ah, there we hit a loss of translation. How do you explain that what you really wanted was the 10-year-old copy of InPress magazine in the front window? The Kool ad stuck to the closed cigarette cabinet? One of the swing doors from the adults-only section, and the classification sticker not fully scraped off it (NRC: Not Recommended For Children). How could you explain that what you really wanted was for the damn Checkerboard Tobacco and Book Exchange not to close?

That it was still open was a miracle in itself. Prahran/Windsor is still a land of lost souls and laundromats, secondhand furniture and discount people, methadone men and mad women muttering into shopping jeeps. Even so, it was amazing that Checkerboard — an actual book exchange — was still there.

Book exchanges — there was one near every railway station, I haunted them through my childhood — were not secondhand book stores per se, with their shelves of old penguins, Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch stretching to eternity. They were one-stops, which sold smokes and secondhand cassettes and tame porn and fuse wire and shoelaces and piles upon piles upon piles of pulp Westerns and thrillers and Mills and Boons.

The Cheqckerboard, gone. A long buried “Paperback Exchange” sign emerges — the hot pink and circus lettering suggests that it is c.1975. Photo: Bill King

 

Book exchanges were run by thin men with lined faces, in brown cardigans and aviator shades, who sucked on Peter Stuyvesants so hard you couldn’t tell who was smoking who. Tobacco was about half of their turnover, lame porn a third, bookselling gave them extended opening hours. Even as we were pulling the shop apart that morning three blokes wandered in to buy Winnies; directed to the “Free Choice” shop down the road, they didn’t look happy. I didn’t blame them. Smoking’s a habit, forestalling the thought of death with the very element that brings it closer. Nothing itself, the world comes in with the drawback.

The last ever owner of the Checkerboard departed on day two. “I going, I not coming back,” she said, and left, clacking her phone. When she was gone, the French guys — backpackers, all youth and muscle, and no clue as to why any of this could mean anything to anyone — and I simply looked at each other for a second or two. Then we dug back in. I went out to the two dollar shop next door, and bought 10 XL Happy Shopper bags, and started to dig in.

It took me a day and a half over three days but I got it all. I got racks of empty cassette cases: Gilbert O’Sullivan; The Move; James Last Orchestra. I got a Bic lighter dispenser shaped like a Bic lighter; five different notes saying “back in five minutes”; three German textbooks used to prop up the counter till; receipts from 1989 Philip Morris order forms; a press metal sign painted over, the words “Phone Cards” emerging from the black like a Colin McCahon; I got VHS cases of old interracial blowjob porn; Newsweek from 1978; ads for Alpine; I got the Motels CD you bought in 1985 and the Bert Kaempfert LP your parents bought 20 years earlier.

I got it all. I bagged it up. I took it away.

I had come back from Tasmania that morning after a visit that ended with an unexpected dalliance with the sort of hearty woman who appeared on the cover of the innumerable Jilly Coopers still lying around the Checkerboard floor — “Jodphurs”, “Saddle Up”. I was missing my blood pressure pills, and one sock was in another state of the commonwealth, my flat was devoid of furniture two months after I had moved in. But I got Checkerboard.

The Frenchies and I developed a modus vivendi, two species sharing a habitat. They spent half a day demolishing a brick outcrop at the back of the store that had been the original counter, abandoned, I presume, when a previous owner realised that it allowed shoplifters to just run in and take stuff — and together we hauled out old shipping boxes for Corona cigars. Could they contain …? No they did not. They were filled with reams and reams of paper, store logs, tax invoices, cash register reels, all meticulously retained.

The previous owner but one had been Chinese too. He’d kept everything. He’d leant into this place, kept it going. Had he died? Just gone? No one would ever know. By now, even the Frenchies had developed some sense that there was something basically askew in what we were doing. I knew the place to be at least 40 years old; it might have gone back another 20 or more before that.

The piles of white business papers, the thick foam of a life, knocked us all sideways. They chattered about what to do. They called the lit-out owner, not knowing why they were doing it. “Why you calling me!” she yelled out of the phone. “I gone!” I took a few ledgers, a sheaf of records, a register reel or two and they tipped the other 10 boxes into the skip outside. I went out and bought them coffees and pastries, and they got up on ladders and took down the six-metre sheet metal sign “Checkerboard”, with a black and white chessboard pattern at each end. Someone had said once, put that on, that’ll be a nice touch, and there it was. And now it was gone.

Going …

 

Going …

 

Gone!

Getting it gone, that was another matter. Delivery guys at an op shop further up had said they would take it wherever I needed. I thought I could carry the pair of signs half a k. Realised I couldn’t. Bit the bullet, bought a trolley and octopus straps from a discount store, and made a sort of lethal chariot by putting the signs on either side. What was one more shopping jeep maddie at the Windsor end of Chapel Street? Even so. “What is a man without madness?/But a beast feeding, a body breathing,” said Pessoa, but even he, had he seen me clanking my way to Commercial Road, through the gym junkies and DayGlo club kids staggering home might have said “FFS Rundle”.

I darted, I weaved, I got the hang of it. And at the last coffee shop extant, where no one says “too easy” when you ask for a short black, the old lags were all there at the tables outside, in their trackie daks and secondhand Scotch blazers, their $9 sneakers and their untouched coffees. “Hey, Checkerboard! Hey!” they yelled. “It’s gone guys its gone,” I said, and they looked sad, but unsurprised. A couple of them stood to look, creating a sort of military salute as I passed by. They all had fags going, menthols. The blue-grey smoke twisted upwards past the old Victorian facades, steadily thinned and, at some unseeable point, dissolved into the late autumn air.