Henry

second-hand books are full of mysteries

I wake Friday morning to see my sister, George, standing next to the fiction couch, where I fell asleep last night, and where I plan to keep sleeping all week.

Not surprisingly, I haven’t taken the break-up well, and I have no intention of taking it well in the future. My plan is to stay on the couch, getting up for toilet breaks and the occasional toasted sandwich, until Amy comes back to me. She always comes back to me. It’s just a matter of time.

Last night I collected all the books I thought I’d need before I took to the couch, so they’re all piled up around me – there’s some Patrick Ness, an Ernest Cline, some Neil Gaiman, Flannery O’Connor, John Green, Nick Hornby, some Kelly Link and, if all else fails, Douglas Adams.

‘Get. Up,’ George says, gently shoving me with her knee, which is her version of a hug. I love my sister, but, along with the rest of the world, I don’t really understand her and it’d be true to say I fear her, just slightly.

She’s seventeen, starting Year 12 this year. She likes learning but she hates her school. She got a scholarship to a private one on the other side of the river in Year 7 and Mum makes her stay there even though she’d rather go to Gracetown High.

She wears a huge amount of black, mostly t-shirts with things like Read, Motherfuckers on the front. Sometimes I think she likes post-apocalyptic fiction so much because she’s genuinely happy at the thought that the world might end.

‘Is the plan to get up sometime soon?’ she asks, and I tell her no, that is not the plan. I explain the plan to her, which is basically to wait, horizontally, for life to improve.

She’s holding a brown paper bag soft with grease and I’m fairly certain it has a sugar-and-cinnamon doughnut inside. ‘At this point I don’t have anything to get up for,’ I say as I reach for it.

‘No one has anything to get up for. Life’s pointless and everyone gets up anyway. That’s how the human race works,’ she says, and hands me a coffee to go with the doughnut.

‘I don’t like how the human race works.’

‘No one likes how the human race works,’ she says.

I finish eating and lie back on the day bed, staring at the ceiling. ‘I have a non-refundable round-the-world ticket.’

‘So go see the world,’ George says as dad walks past.

‘Get up, Henry,’ he says. ‘You’re fermenting. Tell him he’s fermenting, George.’

‘You’re fermenting,’ George says, and pushes me over so she can sit next to me. She lifts my legs and puts them over her legs.

‘I don’t understand,’ Dad says. ‘You were such happy children.’

‘I was never a happy child,’ George says.

‘True, but Henry was.’

‘I’m not anymore. It’s actually hard to imagine how my life could be any more shit at this point,’ I say, and George holds up the copy of the book she’s reading. The Road.

‘Okay. Sure. It could get more shit if there was some kind of world-ending event and people started eating each other. But that’s a whole different shit scale. On your average human-emotion scale, my life is registering as the shittiest of the shit.’

‘There’ll be other girls, Henry,’ Dad says.

‘Why does everyone keep saying that? I don’t want other girls. I want this girl. Not another one. This one.’

‘Amy doesn’t love you.’

George says it gently – like she’s sympathetically sticking a piece of glass straight through my left eye.

Amy does love me. She did love me. She wanted to spend an indefinite amount of time with me and that’s basically the same as forever. ‘If a person wants to spend forever with you, that’s love.’

‘But she didn’t want to spend forever with you,’ George says.

‘Now. Now she doesn’t want to spend forever with me. But then she did and forever doesn’t just disappear overnight.’ If it does, then there should be some sort of scientific law against it.

‘He’s flipping out,’ George says.

‘Take a shower, son,’ Dad says.

‘Give me one good reason.’

‘You’re working today,’ he says, and I take my heartbroken self off to the bathroom.

According to George, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that our family is shit at love. Even our cat, Ray Bradbury, she points out, doesn’t seem to get it on with the other cats in the neighbourhood.

Mum and Dad have tried six times to get back together but finally, last year, they signed the divorce papers and Mum moved out of the bookshop into a small flat in Renwood, a couple of suburbs away. When George isn’t at school, she spends all her time sitting in the window of the shop, writing in her journal. Dad’s been on the down side since Mum left, with no sign of stopping his post-divorce habit of eating whole blocks of peppermint chocolate every night while he re-reads Dickens.

I don’t agree with George. It’s not that I think we’re great at love, but I think the whole world is fairly shit at it, so, statistically speaking, we’re average, and I can live with that.

Amy did love me. Sure, she leaves me every now and then, but she always comes back. You don’t keep coming back to someone you don’t love.

I stand in the shower and try to work out what I did wrong. There must have been a moment when I messed up, and if I could find my way back to it, maybe that moment could be fixed.

Why? I text Amy when I’ve dried off. There must be a reason. Can you at least tell me that?

I press send, and head downstairs to the shop.

‘He looks better,’ Dad says when I rejoin them.

George looks up at me and decides it’s best not to answer.

‘What’s that wonderful Dickens line from Great Expectations?’ Dad asks. ‘The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.’

‘That’s hugely comforting, Dad,’ George says.

‘The terrible days get better,’ he tells us, but he doesn’t sound all that convincing.

‘I’m going book hunting,’ he says, which is unusual for a Friday. I ask if he wants some company, but he waves me off and tells me to look after the shop. ‘I’ll see you tonight for dinner – eight o’clock at Shanghai Dumplings.’

Since I finished Year 12 last November, I’ve worked in the bookshop every day. We sell second-hand books, which is the right kind of book to sell for this side of town. Dad and I do the book hunting. It’s getting harder. Not harder to find books – books are everywhere, and I’ve got my particular spots to look, spots Dad showed me – but harder to find the bargains. Everyone knows the worth of things these days, so you don’t just find a first edition of Casino Royale sitting on someone’s shelf that they don’t know they’ve got. If you want to buy it, then you buy it for what it’s worth.

I keep reading articles about the end of second-hand bookshops. Independent bookshops selling new books are hanging in there, doing well again in fact. But second-hand shops will be relics soon, apparently.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because, since the divorce, Mum’s been talking about selling the shop. Every time she talks about it her arguments convince me a little more. I love this place but I don’t know that I love it as much as dad does – he doesn’t care if it makes money. He’s willing to work some place else to keep it.

He and Mum bought the place twenty years ago, when it was a florist. It was priced cheaply for a quick sale. The owner had walked out for some reason. When Mum and Dad came to inspect it, there were still buckets on the floor and the place smelt of old flowers and mouldy water. The notes had gone from the till, but there were still coins in the drawers.

Mum and Dad kept the wooden counter running along the right as you walk in, as well as the old green cash register and red lamp that the florist had left behind, but they changed almost everything else in the long, narrow space. They put in windows along the front of the shop, and Dad and his brother, Jim, polished the floorboards. They built shelves that run floor to ceiling the whole length of the shop, and huge wooden ladders that lean against the shelves so people can reach the books at the top. They built the glassed-in shelves where we keep the first editions, and the waist-high shelves in the centre of the shop at the back. They built the shelves where we keep the Letter Library.

In the middle of the shop, in front of the counter, there’s the specials table, and next to that is the fiction couch. At the back on the left are the stairs to our flat, on the right is the self-help cupboard, and then through the back glass doors is a reading garden. Jim covered it, so people can sit out there no matter what the weather, but he left the ivy and jasmine growing up the bluestone walls. In the garden there are tables with Scrabble boards and couches and chairs.

There’s a stone wall on the right, and in that stone wall there’s a locked door that leads through to Frank’s Bakery. We’ve suggested to Frank that he open it so people could buy coffee from him and then bring it into our garden, but Frank isn’t interested. In the whole time I’ve known him, which is since I was born, he’s never changed a thing in his shop. It’s still got the same black and white tiles, the same diner-style counter with black leather stools along it. He makes the same pastries, he won’t make soy lattes and he plays Frank Sinatra every minute that he’s open.

He gives me my coffee this morning, and tells me I look terrible. ‘So I hear,’ I say, putting in some sugar and stirring. ‘Amy dumped me. I’m broken-hearted.’

‘You don’t know what broken-hearted is,’ Frank says, and gives me a free blueberry Danish, burnt on the underside, just the way I like it.

I take my coffee and Danish back to the shop and start sorting through the books that need to be priced.

I check through all of them because what I like about second-hand books are the marks you find inside – coffee rings, circled words, notes in the margin. George and I have found all kinds of things in books over the years – letters, shopping lists, bus tickets, dreams. I’ve found tiny spiders, flattened cigarettes and stale tobacco in the creases. I found a condom once (wrapped and unused but ten years out of date – a story in itself). I once found a copy of The Encyclopaedia of World Flora 1958, with leaves marking the pages of someone’s favourite plants. The leaves had dried to bones by the time I opened the book. All that was left were the skeletons.

Second-hand books are full of mysteries, which is why I like them.

Frederick walks in while I’m thinking that. He’s a bit of a mystery himself. He’s been a regular here since the day we opened. According to Mum and Dad, Frederick was our first official customer. He was fifty then, but he’s seventy now, or thereabouts. He’s an elegant man who loves grey suits, deep blue ties, and Derek Walcott.

For as long as I’ve been book hunting, as long as the shop’s been open, Frederick has been looking for a particular edition of Walcott poems. He could order a new copy, but he’s looking for a second-hand one. He’s not looking for a first edition. He’s looking for a particular book that he owned once. And something like that, he’s likely never to find.

I don’t think he should stop looking, though. Who am I to say he won’t find it? The odds are stacked against him, but impossible things happen. Maybe I’ll find it myself. Maybe it won’t be too far from home. Second-hand books have a way of travelling, sure. But what travels forward can come back.

Frederick won’t tell me what’s in that Walcott he’s looking for. He’s a private man, a polite man, with a flower permanently fresh in his lapel and the saddest eyeballs I’ve ever seen.

I hand him the three copies I’ve found over the last month. He dismisses the first two but hesitates over the third. The way he holds it makes me wonder if maybe I’ve found the one. He opens the cover, turns the pages, and then tries not to look disappointed.

He takes out his wallet, and I tell him he doesn’t have to keep buying the books if I haven’t found the right one. ‘They sell, and I’ll go on looking for it anyway.’

He insists, though, and I imagine someone walking into Frederick’s house after he’s died and finding hundreds of versions of the same Walcott book, and wondering why they’re there.

Frederick isn’t the only regular. There’s Al, who reads a lot of science fiction and looks like someone who does. He’s been working for years on a novel about a guy who’s jacked into a virtual utopia. We’re all looking for a way to tell him that it’s already been written. There’s James, who comes in to buy books on the Romans. There’s Aaron, who arrives drunk at least once every couple of months, banging on the door late at night, because he needs to use the bathroom, Inez who just seems to like the smell of old books, and Jett, who comes in to steal the hardcovers so he can sell them to any other second-hand place that’ll take them.

There’s Frieda, who’s been playing Scrabble here with Frederick for ten years. She’s about his age and wears severe stylish dresses, and you just know she used to be one of those English teachers who had fifty eyes in the classroom and a supernatural knowledge of Shakespeare. She started the monthly book club, which Howling Books hosts but doesn’t run.

The same people come every time. I set up the chairs, open the door for the teachers and librarians, put out a whole lot of wine and cheese, and then stand back. I hardly ever join in the discussion, but if it interests me, and it pretty much always does, I read the book afterwards. Last month they read Kirsty Eagar’s Summer Skin. George read it after the book club because they talked about the sex scenes, and maybe I read it partly for that reason, too. But mostly I read it because of the way Frieda talked about the main character, Jess Gordon. She reminded me, just a little, of that best friend I had once, Rachel Sweetie. I liked the book – George did too – so we put a copy in the Letter Library.

The Library is the thing that Howling Books is known for, at least locally. We get a write-up every now and then, on sites like Broadsheet, as something special to do in the city.

It’s up the back, near the stairs to our flat, separate from the rest of the shelves. In it we keep copies of books that people particularly love – fiction, non-fiction, romance and sci-fi, poetry and atlases and cookbooks. Customers are allowed to write in the books in the Letter Library. They can circle words that they love, highlight lines. They can leave notes in the margins, leave thoughts about the meaning of things. We’ve had to get multiple copies of works by people like Tom Stoppard and John Green because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Fault in Our Stars are crammed with notes from readers.

It’s called the Letter Library because a lot of people write more than a note in the margin – they write whole letters and put them between the pages of the books. Letters to the poets, to their thief ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend who stole their copy of High Fidelity. Mostly people write to strangers who love the same books as them – and some stranger, somewhere, writes back.

 

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Written on title page: This book belongs to George Jones. So don’t sell it in the bookshop, Henry.

Letters left between pages 44 and 45

23 November – 7 December 2012

Dear George

You’re probably surprised to find this letter in your book. Maybe you’re wondering who put it here. I plan to leave that a mystery, at least for now.

I haven’t actually left it, yet – I’m still in my room writing it – and I’m sure getting it into the pages won’t be easy. I’m thinking I’ll put it in when you’ve excused yourself from class to go to the bathroom and left the book on your desk. But I know you like to find things in second-hand books, so I’ll give it my best shot.

And here it is, you’re reading it, so I must have been successful.

I know you’re curious, so I’ll tell you this much -I’m a guy, your age, in at least one of your classes.

If you’d like to write back, you can put this book into the Letter Library at your bookstore and leave a letter between pages 44 and 45.

I’m not a stalker. I like books. (I like you.)

Pytheas (obviously not my real name)

To Pytheas – or Stacy, or whichever friend of hers wrote this. Stay away from me. If I catch you in my shop, I’ll call the police.

George

Dear George

Thank you for writing back, even if it’s only to say that you plan to call the police on me.

I don’t want to make you angry, but I’m not one of Stacy’s friends. I don’t really like Stacy and she definitely doesn’t like me. This isn’t a joke. You’re funny, and smart and I’d really like to write to you.

Pytheas (Would any of Stacy’s friends call themselves Pytheas?)

Pytheas

So you’re not a friend of Stacy’s? Prove it.

George

Dear George

That’s a hard one. How can I prove to you that I’m not playing a joke? If we were a mathematical equation, then it would be easy. But since we’re not, you might just have to take a chance.

I’ll tell you some things about me. Maybe that would help? I like science. I like maths. I like solving problems. I believe in ghosts. I’m particularly interested in time travel and space and the ocean.

I haven’t decided what I want to do when I leave school, but I think I’ll either study the ocean or space. Before that, I’ll travel. The first place I want to go is the Atacama Desert. It’s 1000 kilometres long, running from Peru’s southern border into Chile. It faces onto the South Pacific Ocean and it’s known as the driest place on earth. There are parts where it has never rained and since things don’t rot without moisture, if something died there, it would be preserved forever. Imagine that. You can see the desert on page 50 of the atlas in the Letter Library. (I’ve also marked some other places I want to see in South America.)

Will you tell me some things about you?

Pytheas

Pytheas

Why are you writing to me? According to everyone at school, I’m a freak.

Dear George

I quite like freaks.

Pytheas