Words in Deep Blue

I wake on the fiction couch deeply hungover, my head cracking, with Rachel telling me to get up. She’s holding my eyelids open like she used to do in high school when we’d stayed up all night talking and then slept through the morning alarm. ‘Get. Up. Henry.’

‘It’s eleven. The shop’s been open for an hour. There are customers asking for books I can’t find. George is yelling at a guy called Martin Gamble who’s here to help me create the database. And as a separate issue, Amy’s waiting in the reading garden.’

‘I decline to answer on the grounds that technically you’re my boss and I don’t want to start my new job by insulting you.’

I pull the blanket tight around my shoulders and the customer looking in the classics section gives me a sympathetic look. I give him one back because, as much as I love books, if you’re in the classics section first thing on Saturday morning then there’s something not entirely right with your life either.

As I walk towards Amy, who looks fantastic in a pale blue dress, I’m thinking about the strange dreams I had last night. In the first, Amy was invisible. I knew she was there, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t see her. In the second, I was talking to Rachel in the girls’ toilets, and in the last, I was kissing Rachel on the mouth. The dream kiss was very good and the memory of it is highly unsettling. God, I hope I didn’t kiss her. What if I tried to kiss her? The more I think about it, the more I think I did kiss her. I can feel her lips in a way that doesn’t feel like dream lips.

Amy touches my arm as I sit next to her, and we stare at each other for a while. ‘You smell like beer,’ she says eventually, which is true but not encouraging. I move a little away and try to breathe in the opposite direction.

‘I’m sorry about last night,’ she says eventually. ‘I should have told you about Greg, but it happened so quickly. And, I guess, if I’m honest, really honest, I’ve always been a little bit in love with Greg Smith.’

There should be a disconnect button you can push when someone leaves: you’ve fucked me over; therefore I no longer love you. I’m not asking for the button to be connected to an ejector seat that removes them from the universe, just one small button that removes them from your heart.

‘It happened so quickly, but if you’re honest, you’ve always been a little bit in love with Greg Smith,’ I say.

I should tell her to leave. I should maintain what dignity I can, which isn’t much considering I’m wearing a blanket and the smell of last night’s drinking. But my family is pretty shit at dignity as well as love, so I think: fuck dignity. Dignity is not in my genes.

‘See, this is why I’m confused. Because when you told me you loved me, in this bookshop, you didn’t say, “I love you but if I’m honest, I’m also a little bit in love with that moron, Greg Smith.” I’d remember that. You just said, “I love you, Henry.” And when we bought the plane tickets, and I used all my money, you didn’t say, “Keep in mind, I’m also a little bit in love with Greg Smith.’’’

‘You used all your money and some of mine,’ she says, and this feels pointed and I know I’m right and she’s choosing Greg over me because I’m broke. ‘It’s because of where I work, isn’t it? It’s because of how much I earn.’ Or, how much I don’t earn. ‘Is it that I live with my family? Is it because I drove you to the formal in the bookshop van?’

But I know her. I know her expressions. I know the one she’s wearing now: it’s pity. I’ve seen it on her face when she’s watching documentaries about stray animals that no one wants. I’m a hundred per cent right about why she chose Greg Smith. He’s richer, he’s neater, he’s going to university.

‘No,’ she says, when clearly she doesn’t mean it. She shakes her head, trying to find the answer for me. ‘He’s the one I always saw myself with. You know, at university. Doing things.’

She puts her hand on my arm for a second, lets me feel the warmth of her. She looks past me into the bookshop, and says, ‘There’s always Rachel.’

‘Rachel and I are friends. Just friends. It’s you,’ I tell her. ‘You.’

‘I don’t think it would matter. It wouldn’t matter,’ she says, but it’s the first part of that answer that’s the truth. She doesn’t think it would matter, meaning it might matter. It could matter. Before she leaves I make her promise that if I change, and it does matter, that she’ll come back.

There’s not one part of me that doesn’t hurt this morning: my teeth, my head, my heart, my pride, my eyeballs. The backs of my eyeballs hurt. I put my head under the water stream and try to wash out the thought of Amy always being a little bit in love with Greg.

I get out and dry off, then sit on the edge of the bath, and let the leftover steam clear my head. Dad walks in as it’s clearing and asks if he can use the mirror.

‘Sometimes you have to let go, Henry,’ he says, tapping his razor on the side of the sink. He doesn’t believe that, though. If he did, he’d be moving on with his life instead of re-reading Great Expectations and hoping for another chance with Mum.

I watch him making roads through the foam on his face, trying to figure out how to say what I want to say, now that I’m certain I want to say it. ‘How much would we get, Dad?’ I ask.

‘We own the building, Henry. It’s double-storeyed with a big backyard. I’d say well over a million.’

I go quiet while he finishes off his face, wiping it with the towel that I pass him. ‘It’s okay to want to sell,’ he says.

In my perfect world I wouldn’t worry about money. In my perfect world, books would be with us forever, and everyone would love the second-hand ones as much as Dad and George and I do. Amy would love them. But it’s not my perfect world. ‘I think maybe we should sell. Mum thinks we should, and she knows about the business.’

He nods, and waits. Because I can’t answer with a maybe. It’s a yes-or-no question. It reminds me of how he told me once that the thing he loved about fiction was that there were rarely yes-or-no answers when it came to characters. The world is complex, he told me. Humans are too.

He and I have had hundreds of conversations about the characters in books. The last one we had was about Vernon God Little, a book by D.B.C. Pierre. I’d loved it enough to read twice.

‘Vernon,’ I’d said, naming the main character. ‘And the way it’s critiquing America. But mainly it’s the language. It’s like he’s left the words out in the sun to buckle a while, and they don’t sound like you’d expect.’

‘You might like to be a writer one day,’ Dad had said. ‘What do you think?’ Anything, in our bookshop, was possible.

But anything isn’t possible. Clearly, it’s not, or Mum wouldn’t want to sell. She loves the shop as much as we all do, and she accepts that the business is dying. Anything will not be possible if, for the rest of my life, I earn the same wage I do now. Anything won’t be possible for George.

‘Yes,’ I say, running my toe along a crack in the tile. ‘I want us to sell.’

‘There’s still the possibility of travelling with Amy. I’ll probably study next year.’

I walk downstairs and start to detach myself from the bookshop. I don’t look at the Letter Library on the way past. I don’t check the Prufrock for strangers’ thoughts. I don’t look behind me into the reading garden.

I walk straight to the front counter where George is yelling at the new guy: ‘If you don’t get your computer out of the way, I’ll shove it up your arse.’ It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen so I take the stapler away from George because we’re a second-hand bookshop and we can’t afford to replace an eye.

The new guy – Martin – is about George’s age. He seems like a neat, good-looking, computer geek.

He seems like a nice, neat, good-looking, computer geek. Or maybe he just looks like a geek next to George in her black clothes and her black hair with a blue stripe running down it. Away from my goth sister, he’s probably more popular guy in high school than geek, which might account for why she doesn’t like him.

‘Martin Gamble,’ he says, and George says, ‘Martin Charles Gamble,’ in the same way she might say the words complete and utter dick.

Martin doesn’t look angry; he looks kind of amused. ‘Your mum hired me to help in the store and to catalogue the books. Which is why,’ he says to George, ‘I need to charge my computer.’

‘Mum doesn’t live here anymore,’ George says. ‘Henry is the manager today and he’s about to fire your arse.’

‘Excuse me,’ I say to Martin. ‘I just need to talk to my sister for a minute.’

I motion for George to follow me onto the street, but it’s clear she’s not in the mood to listen. She starts yelling before the door’s closed, and I really wish she’d stop because I have a cracker of a headache.

‘He goes to my school. He’s in my class. He used to date Stacy,’ she says. ‘They’re still friends.’

George doesn’t tell me a lot about what school is like for her, but I know about Stacy. She’s in the popular crowd and she’s not a big fan of anyone who’s not in the popular crowd, so she’s not a big fan of my sister. George told me once that Stacy liked to write George Jones is a freak over things like toilet doors, lockers and desks. Once, on a school camp, she wrote it on George’s face.

I peer through the shop window at Martin. ‘He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d call you a freak. Let’s give him a trial. Seven days.’

It’s clear she’s not changing her mind, so I try a different approach. ‘Think about how miserable you could make him in a week if you’re his boss.’

I can see the idea hadn’t occurred to her before, and now that it’s been pointed out, it really appeals. She looks through the window at Martin and considers it for a while. ‘Okay,’ she says eventually. ‘But he can’t bring his friends here. This is my home.’

‘Fair enough,’ I say, and then I tell her there’s something else she needs to know before she goes back inside. I say it quickly. There’s no point in dragging it out. ‘I voted with Mum. We’re definitely selling.’

It’s not a huge surprise. George says she figured I would after what happened at dinner last night. I can’t tell if she thinks I’ve made the right decision. ‘If it’s not what you want, you should vote against it.’

I try to imagine George living away from the bookshop, but I can’t. It’s her safety net. She’s basically in one of three places – here, at Shanghai Dumplings or at school. And she hates school, so there are only two places that she loves.

There are three people she loves, though: me, Mum and Dad. She already feels terrible because she chose to stay in the bookshop and not move in with Mum. If she votes with Dad over this then she’s dividing the family down the middle. As it is now, I’m the one who’s divided the family and she’s just going along with me.

We walk back inside and I hear her telling Martin that she’s his boss, and he can’t bring his friends in, and he has to do what she says.

‘Okay,’ he says, smiling at her in a way that makes her blush, something I’ve hardly ever seen her do before.

After the morning’s emergencies have been dealt with, I turn my attention to Rachel. We’ve got a whole lot of catching up to do.

Dad’s given her the job of cataloguing the Letter Library and left Martin the job of cataloguing the rest of the books. She’s set up a small desk near the Library, with her computer on it, a notebook, and a jar of pens.

It’s typical Rachel. She loves being organised. She loves stationery. She was the kind of girl who always had a never-ending supply of those little fluorescent sticky notes and she wrote on them, word for word, what the teacher said. In English, she’d peel off the note and press it to the appropriate page of her novel like it solved the mystery of that word or sentence and why the author had put it on the page.

I found one of those notes about a month after she’d moved. It had slipped from one of her novels while she was at the shop, and it read: This line sums up the meaning of everything. Loose from the book, it was tantalising and completely useless.

‘Okay,’ she says without stopping what she’s doing, which is alphabetising the books in the Letter Library.

‘So you got into science?’ I ask, and she nods and keeps ordering the books. ‘At Melbourne University?’

‘Henry, I have work to do,’ she says. ‘Cataloguing the Library is a huge job and your dad wants it done within the month, which, honestly, isn’t possible even if I work day and night.’

‘We’re not fighting. I need to concentrate, that’s all. I’m better off alone.’

I’m worried I did kiss her and that’s why she’s angry, so I decide to come right out and ask her. ‘Did we kiss last night?’

‘Sure we kissed, Henry,’ she says, taking a copy of Anna and the French Kiss and placing it into its correct position. ‘And then I went into the toilet and drank water from the bowl.’

‘A simple no would be fine, Rachel,’ I tell her and walk back to the counter feeling certain that something must have happened that I can’t remember and it’s put us, for some reason, right back where we were before last night.

‘She found you next to a sanitary disposal unit,’ George says helpfully when we talk about it before lunch.

‘Sure, that’s embarrassing for me, but that wouldn’t make her angry.’ I lean on the counter and watch her. ‘After Rachel left in Year 9, you didn’t find a letter from her for me?’

‘If I’d found it, you’d know,’ she says, ‘and now I must go to make Martin’s life a complete and utter misery.’

While she’s doing that, I serve customers and watch Rachel. Serve and watch, serve and watch, trying to remember the missing pieces of the night. I remember her saying we were friends. I remember her apologising for not writing. I don’t remember us arguing at all. I remember us making up.

Lola walks in around one o’clock, and I ask her what she remembers. ‘I saw you drinking,’ she says. ‘I saw you walking over to Amy, Rachel helping you up. I saw you crawling away from her across the floor and into the girls’ toilets.’ She takes a mint from the bowl and rolls it around her mouth for a while. ‘You really shouldn’t drink,’ she says through her mouthful.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes, when it comes to Amy, you sound like a self-centred dick.’

That’s actually not an unfair call. Lola’s been hearing about Amy for a long time now. ‘I’m all ears. Tell me your problems.’

‘The Hollows are breaking up,’ she says, and this news is in a category at least as shit as Amy and I breaking up. ‘Hiroko told me last night after we’d played. She’s moving to New York to study percussion. She didn’t even tell me she was thinking of applying. Four years of work and it’s all been for nothing.’ She throws her mint at my head and it bounces off towards the specials table. ‘Sorry. That made me feel better.’

‘I just got us a regular gig at Hush. A paid, regular gig that I’ll have to cancel.’

‘There’s no replacement for Hiroko,’ she says. ‘She’s going so The Hollows are done. We’re playing our last gig this Valentine’s Day. End of story.’

She throws another mint, and I manoeuvre myself so it hits me, because I don’t know how else to cheer her up. The Hollows has been Lola’s love, her obsession, since she and Hiroko met in the line for Warpaint tickets in Year 8. They dreamed it up that night and in the cold, dodging calls from their parents, they wrote their first song.

‘What school did Hiroko get into?’ I ask, and Lola eats another mint and signals she doesn’t want to talk about it.

Some customers come in and I help them find the crime fiction and when I come back, Lola’s looking over at the Letter Library. ‘You’re right. Rachel looks mad,’ she says, and goes over to do some investigating on my behalf.

They talk. I hear laughter. Rachel shakes her head, and keeps shifting the books into order. Lola watches her and they talk for a while longer before she finally comes back.

‘You’re not fighting,’ she says. ‘You fixed everything last night. You did kiss her, but she’s okay about it. You made her miss her ex, Joel, that’s all.’

I try to look happy about this because I am happy about it. If I’m not happy then I’m the kind of guy who cares more about his ego than he does about his best friend. And I’m not that guy.

‘Or, incredibly bad,’ Lola says. ‘But I can’t answer either way because the quality of the kiss was not discussed.’ She writes an address on a piece of paper. ‘Justin Kent’s having a party this coming Friday. Hiroko and I are playing what will be our third-to-last gig. Invite Rachel. She needs cheering up.’

Every day of this week I’ve been friendly to Rachel and every day I’ve expected Rachel to turn back into her old self. But every day she’s arrived at work and walked past me, straight over to the Letter Library. She doesn’t take a break till lunch, when she disappears for half an hour. She doesn’t go to Frank’s. I know, because I’ve gone in to look for her.

Everyone in the bookshop has been going out of their way to be friendly to her this week – asking questions about her mum, about Cal, about the ocean, about Year 12 – but she cuts us all off, saying she has work to do.

I buy her coffee. I read interesting science articles to her while she’s working. I don’t once tell her how tired I am of listening to her complain about the Letter Library. This weird thing happens where I’m missing Rachel while she’s standing right next to me.

‘She’s upset about her ex-boyfriend, apparently,’ I say to Martin and George on Friday afternoon. ‘But that changes tonight. We’re going to Justin Kent’s party. All of us,’ I say, pointing at George and Martin. ‘It’s a work outing.’

Martin’s been having his own girl trouble this week. If he’s lucky, he gets the silent treatment from George. If he’s not, she’s ordering him around and timing his breaks.

‘We don’t pay enough to time breaks,’ I reminded her on Wednesday, and she reminded me back that Martin is on trial and she’s his boss, so I should stay out of it.

Strangely, Martin seems to be enjoying his interactions with George. There’s nothing she can do that he doesn’t find funny or weird but, on the whole, likable. No matter how many knockbacks she gives him, he keeps trying.

‘How have you been able to read so many books?’ he asks, and she looks up from Kafka, her thumb marking the page. ‘I’m a weird girl in high school. I’ve had some time to kill.’

She stands and Ray Bradbury jumps from her lap to Martin’s. He scratches him behind the ears and Ray starts purring. ‘Traitor,’ George says, and leaves to sit in Frank’s for a while.

‘You think she’ll come to the party tonight?’ Martin asks, and I tell him I know she will. I don’t tell him I know because Mum stopped by during the week and saw how George was treating him and threatened to dock her pay if she didn’t start making him feel welcome.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with Martin this week and most of them have had something to do with George. The more we talk, the more I warm to him. He’s seen George at her worst, and he likes her. ‘She’s funny,’ he said the other day while I was helping him with the cataloguing. ‘Funny. Smart. Original.’

What he and George need is some time outside of the shop to get to know each other. Rachel and I need that too. Three years have passed, and I think the problem is we need to connect again.

‘We need to get to know our new selves,’ I tell her this afternoon, when I walk over to remind her about the party. The old Rachel loved parties but this new one reacts more like George.

‘I have to work tonight. I have to do the hugely insane job your dad has given me. I think he’s having a midlife crisis. Not only does he want me to alphabetise all of the books, and not only does he want a record of all of the books in the library, he also wants a record of anything loose inside the books, like letters, and a record of any notations in the margins.’

This isn’t the first time this week Rachel’s said something like this to me and until now I’ve avoided having an argument with her. But this afternoon my patience with this new Rachel is running out and I want the old Rachel to make an appearance.

‘The periodic table lists all the elements existing on the earth. There’s a point to the periodic table. There’s no point to this library. This library is the definition of pointless, Henry.’

‘Okay, enough,’ I say. ‘More than enough. You’ve been in a bad mood all week and I feel the need to point out that I am heartbroken too and I need some cheering up. I need my best friend back and I need her to come with me to a party tonight.’

She starts arguing, but I won’t take no for an answer. ‘Leave now, and be back at the bookshop by nine. You need to drive George because I want you to talk to her about Martin on the way. I want to know what she’s thinking.’

‘She’s thinking you should butt out of her life, Henry,’ she says, packing up her computer and her things and leaving without saying she’ll come.

I wave at her through window as she’s getting into her car. She waves her middle finger back.

‘We’re all set,’ I tell Martin before he leaves. ‘Yep. I have a great feeling about tonight.’

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Letters left between pages 74 and 75

15 January 2016

Dear George

I’m looking forward to going to the party tonight. I think it’ll be fun.

Martin

P.S. I like the idea of the Letter Library.

Martin

Never write to me in this book again.

George

Dear George

It’s lovely to get your reply. You’re as charming in print as you are in person. Why can’t I write to you in this book? I see you checking it all the time.

Martin

I check it because I write to someone else in this book. It’s our book. Not your book.

George

Dear George

Can I write to you in another book? We work together. I’d like to be friends. Please? It’s a LONG day, cataloguing all the books in the store. I’m typing out the names of EVERY SINGLE BOOK here. No matter what you think I’ve done (what have I done to you?) it can’t be so bad as to make me do this with NO relief.

Martin

You hang out with a girl who calls me a freak.

George

Dear George

I’ve never called you a freak. I don’t think you are a freak. In fact, I’ve been trying to be your friend at school since you started. You’re the one who ignores or insults me on a regular basis. Do you have any evidence that I’m a bad guy?

In the whole time that I’ve known you, I’ve always told Stacy that you’re an interesting person. It seems to me that you’re treating me like Stacy treats you. I think, at the very least, you should give me a trial as your friend, as well as your employee. It’s summer. Can’t we forget how we are at school? Maybe we could call a truce?

Martin

Okay. Since you seem like you’re about to cry, you can write to me. But NOT in this book. Write to me in Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore. I saw you reading it and there’s a copy in the Letter Library – leave your letters between pages 8 and 9.

George

Dear George

I’m absolutely overwhelmed by your offer of friendship. Thank you. Really, thank you. It’s almost too much. I look forward to all future correspondence.

Martin