Rachel

I’ve lost those octaves

What have I lost? What have I lost? Only everything, you complete moron. I’ve lost more than you, that’s for sure. I’ve lost Cal; I’ve lost my old mum, the old me. I’ve lost an entire ocean. That’s seventy-one per cent of the earth, that’s ninety-nine per cent of the biosphere. I’ve lost ninety-nine per cent of the biosphere, and you’ve lost Amy.

You’ve lost a girl who, the last time I checked, dotted her i’s with tiny little self-portraits. A girl who checks her reflection in the mirror every second minute of the day. A girl who watches you fall on the floor in front of her and doesn’t help you up.

I’m throwing myself through the crowd, my mind on the car, on my getaway, on maybe driving off and leaving this city behind, leaving the job and Henry and Rose, when George tugs the edge of my t-shirt and asks for a lift home.

I pretend not to notice that she’s crying. I tell her Henry’s in the backyard, and that she should look for him. I’m not going home. I don’t know where I’m going, exactly, but it’s not back to the bookstore or back to the warehouse.

She looks hurt and walks away past a group of shining girls. ‘What are you wearing?’ the tallest girl asks George as she passes, and then laughs. George looks different, sure. But a thousand times better than them, with her black dress and gold tights and that streak of blue shocking the darkness of her hair. She says something to them, but she’s outnumbered, so when they call her a freak, she starts crying. They laugh even more.

I recognise the tall girl. Cal and Tim pointed her out to me in their school yearbook once. ‘Stacy basically runs the place,’ Cal said. ‘If she doesn’t like you, no one likes you.’

‘Does she like you?’ I asked them, and Tim answered that she was, fortunately enough, unaware that they were alive.

George clearly isn’t in that fortunate position. Cal would hate me for not helping her. I have this impossible feeling that he’s actually here, watching. Who are you Rachel? How did you get here?

I walk the short distance and pull George from the girls. Her hand is small and warm. It holds me back like it needs to be held, so I don’t let it go. I don’t let go all the way across the lawn, past Amy and Greg, past people sitting on the fence. I hold it till we reach the car.

After she gets in, she texts Henry to let him know that she’s with me, and then she silently puts away the phone.

‘Tell me,’ I say. ‘If you want, tell me.’

‘I was talking to Martin,’ she says. ‘We were hiding in the top floor bathroom to get away from the crowd. God, Henry’s an idiot. He didn’t even check if it was formal. So, Martin’s there with me, his knees leaning against my knees, and he’s talking about funny things to make me laugh. We’re talking for ages, and it’s great. I don’t talk like that with anyone – at least not face-to-face. And then he leans in and kisses me.’ She puts her boots back on the dash, and pulls her knees in close, folding up.

‘It took me by surprise, so I pushed him back, and he hit his head and then it got weird. He said he thought that’s what I wanted and I was embarrassed so I told him he needs to get over himself because he thinks he’s hot, which he doesn’t think, and then he left before I could fix things and now he feels like an idiot when I’m the idiot.’

‘Why are you the idiot?’ I ask.

‘Because I did sort of want to kiss him, but at the same time I like someone else.’ She looks at me with mascara-smudged eyes. ‘But the “someone else” isn’t really an option. I mean, I want him to be an option, but I don’t know if he is.’

George is a lot like Henry when she starts talking about something. It’s not all that easy to follow her line of thought.

‘The guy that I like writes to me in the Letter Library,’ she explains. ‘He leaves – at least he was leaving – letters between pages 44 and 45 of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.’ She pulls her shirt open a little so I can see the sky-blue 44.

‘Do you know who he is?’ I ask, thinking that the guy she has on her skin could be anyone.

‘I think I do. I’m pretty sure. He hasn’t come to get the letters that I’ve left in the book for a while so I’ve stopped leaving them. I haven’t stop waiting for his, though.’

‘You’re certain that Martin didn’t write them?’ I ask, and she says she’s certain he didn’t.

It’s a shame. I like Martin and he seems to like George plus he’s here, which this letter writer isn’t.

‘I lie in bed thinking about him, you know?’ she asks, and I do know. I haven’t felt that way for a long time, but I know.

‘What would you do?’ she asks, and it occurs to me that George can’t have that many good friends if she’s asking me that question. ‘If it were you . . .’ she says.

I think back to that night when I was desperate for Henry. When Lola and I were laughing and breaking into the bookstore. In hindsight, it wasn’t my best idea.

‘I’d play it safe. I’d wait and see.’

Since she doesn’t know about the letter that I wrote to Henry, I just tell her that I loved someone once, who didn’t love me back. Then I met a boy called Joel, who did. I tell her how good it is when someone you like wants to spend time with you. Real time.

‘Did you sleep with Joel?’ she asks, and it feels as though George and I are alike. We’ve both had great brothers but no sisters to ask about things like this. George seems young tonight. She is young. She hovers on the edge of her seat, waiting to hear my answer.

‘I did,’ I say. ‘After a while and when I was sure.’

She asks me about it, so I tell her. And as I do, I almost feel how I did that first night that Joel and I were together in his room. His parents were away. We’d already decided. His hands moved over my skin in velvet jolts. The actual act was okay the first time, but it got better as we knew each other more. The parts that I really miss came after sex, when we’d lay together in our warmth, talking about the future. ‘It’s a big deal,’ I tell her. ‘People might tell you it’s not, but it is.’

Drunk boys in tuxedos cartwheel across the road in front of us. Girls, sheeny and strapless, applaud.

‘I like your dress better,’ I say to George, and start the car to go home.

My plan is to deliver George to the bookstore and keep driving. But when we arrive I look through the window and see Michael talking to Frederick and Frieda.

It reminds me of nights in Year 9 when they all helped Henry and me with English. The bookstore was always a hub of people who loved words and ideas and wanted to talk about them. Michael charged other students for tutoring, but he said I was like a daughter and refused to take my money.

Henry’s right. I don’t have a sense of humour anymore. I lost my friends in Sea Ridge because of it. They tried to hang in there with me but I pushed them away, the same way I pushed Joel.

‘Are you okay?’ George asks.

‘Not really,’ I say, and follow her inside to talk to Michael.

I ask if I can speak to him alone for a minute.

‘Certainly, Rachel,’ he says, and we walk towards the Letter Library. He puts his hand on the books, the way a person might do to feel the heat from something. ‘There’s twenty years of history here,’ he says. ‘More, if you count the history of each author.’

I already knew all the things that Henry reminded me of earlier. I knew that Sophia and Michael had divorced. I knew they were selling the bookstore. But my skin is thick since Cal died. All the sadness of losing him is sealed in and no one else’s sadness seems to get through.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been rude this week,’ I say, and he accepts my apology without question.

‘I know it’s a difficult job. That’s why I chose you.’

His words weigh me down but I want them anyway. ‘I’ve finished the alphabetising,’ I tell him. ‘It took me all week.’

I try to strike the right tone – gentle, kind – but I’ve lost those octaves and my voice sounds harsh. ‘I still think it’ll take longer than six months, even with overtime.’

‘The job’s too big,’ he says, with all the octaves I’ve lost.

It is, but that’s not what I’m trying to tell him. ‘If you give me a key to the bookstore, I could work double time. I could catalogue when it’s quiet, that way I won’t be interrupted by customers.’

‘Thank you,’ he says, and runs his eyes over the spines of the books. ‘It’s a library of people, really,’ he explains, and gives me a spare key.

George and Michael go upstairs, and Frederick and Frieda go home. I stay and continue work on the Letter Library, trying to see it as a library of people. If it is, it’s people who Michael doesn’t know. It’s like Cal’s box in the car. It’s the leftover things that don’t add up to anything that matters.

I’ve promised, though. The Letter Library is the heart of the bookstore, and the bookstore is Michael’s life, so I’ll try. It’s Henry’s life too. I don’t know how he’s planning on living without it. I keep imagining the whole family returning to the shop the same way Mum and I drifted in and out of Cal’s room.

I’ve been going for an hour, entering people’s thoughts and notes into my database, when I pull out the copy of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations. I turn to page 4, but of course my love letter’s not there. I pull out some books and search behind them for it. I flick through the books on either side of the Eliot, but I don’t find anything. A lot of people visit the Library. It’s most likely some stranger took the letter without knowing the worth of it.

Henry read me ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ once, on a night in Year 8. We were lying on the floor of the bookstore, and I’d told him that I didn’t like poetry. ‘I can’t understand it, so it never makes me feel anything.’

‘Hang on,’ he’d said, going over to the shelves.

He came back with the Prufrock. The poem did sound like a love song. As I listened I stared at a mark on the ceiling that looked like a tear-shaped sun. The mark somehow got mixed with the words.

I didn’t know exactly what ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was about, but lying there next to Henry, with his voice so close, I wanted to disturb something. I wanted to disturb us, shake us out of him seeing me as just Rachel, his best friend. I loved the poem for making me feel like disturbance was possible. And because it said something to me about life that I wanted to know, but didn’t understand.

‘Explain it to me,’ I’d said.

‘Do you need to understand it to love it? You think it’s beautiful. That’s enough,’ he said, and closed the book. ‘Proof that you don’t hate all poetry.’

He closed his eyes and I took the book from his sleeping fingers and read the poem again.

Tonight, I see the words and phrases that Henry has underlined over the years. I see also that other people have done the same, marking their loved ideas. Back in Year 8 I didn’t notice those markings. I didn’t notice the title page, either, but tonight, I read the inscription:

Dear E, I have left this book in the library, because I cannot bear to keep it, and I cannot throw it away. F

I know without any real proof that E is dead. I know that some of the lines on the love song are hers. She has been on the same page as me, the same page as Henry, and she has loved the same words that we have loved.

I stop being angry with Henry. I sit on the floor and read over the poem. I hear it in Henry’s voice. I think strange things as I read. How this copy of the book holds the memory of that night with Henry, and the memory of E and F, and the memory of countless other people, I suppose.

I decide to wait for Henry to come home. I take the copy of Cloud Atlas out of the window display, put the five dollars for it on the counter, take it over to the fiction couch, and start to read.

 

Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

Note found on title page, undated

 

 

 

Dear Grace, on your first day of university.

All men (and women) have the desire to know – Aristotle (and Dad) xxx

Enjoy the journey. It’s wild and a little confusing, but good, I hope.