now she’s back, I feel more like me
Martin and I meet outside Shanghai Dumplings. He asks where George is, and I have to break it to him that she’s not coming. ‘It’s just you and me as it turns out.’
‘I thought it was a family tradition.’
‘I did too,’ I say, and try not to sound unhappy about it. I like Martin, but he’s not a substitute for my whole family.
While we wait for Mai Li to seat us, I think about the conversation Dad and I had earlier. Rachel and Martin had left, and George wasn’t around. He told me dinner was off tonight. ‘Your mum and I just don’t feel like it,’ he said. ‘George has gone to her place for dinner. I’m eating with Frederick and Frieda.’
He took some money from the petty cash so I could pay for Martin’s dinner, and gave it to me with a book he’d bought during the week.
The book is a Penguin Classics edition of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories. There are yellow butterflies on the cover, squarish wings fitting together to make a hexagon shape. Some butterflies are breaking off from the whole. ‘Read “Shakespeare’s Memory”,’ Dad suggested, and I promised that I would.
Dad introduced me to Borges’ short stories one night in Year 10 when I was looking for something to read. I’d finished Kelly Link’s The Wrong Grave and I loved the strangeness of the stories. I’d moved on to Karen Russell and loved those stories too, when Dad found me roaming around the bookshop in search of something else.
He’d put a copy of Borges’ stories into my hands and recommended ‘The Library of Babel’. I read it with the dictionary beside me. I only sort of half understood the thing. It was full of mathematical and scientific references that I wanted to talk about with Rachel, but she’d left by then. I decided it was about people needing the answers to the world, to the universe, and going mad trying to find them.
Mai Li comes over and I explain it’s just the two of us, so she seats us on a tiny table near the toilet. People keep hitting the back of my chair with the door. There’s no room for my elbows on the table. There’s barely room for the menu, which I look at for the first time in my whole life because I have to decide what to order for one.
It doesn’t seem right to talk about books without the family here, but it doesn’t seem right not to, so I tell Martin about the Borges that Dad gave me earlier. I hand it over so he can look at it. I try to explain ‘The Library of Babel’ but I can’t quite put it into words. ‘It’s about a universe in the shape of a library, full of all possible works, even ones that don’t make sense. Rachel would have been able to explain it better.’
‘You’ve known her a long time,’ he says.
‘Ten years, if you count the three when she was away.’ I do count them. ‘She’s the closest friend I have.’ I’m not sure if the word ‘friends’ really covers us. I don’t know what word does, exactly. We’re us. Now that she’s back, I feel more like me.
‘Did you? I mean, have you ever?’
‘With Rachel? No. Definitely not. People ask. I mean, people ask all the time. But Rachel would never. I’d never. It’s always been Amy.’
‘How are things with her?’ he asks.
‘I haven’t heard anything since the text,’ I tell him.
I actually haven’t thought much about her this week, I realise. I’ve been thinking too much about Cal. About how he followed me around all the time when he was a kid, asking me questions, and then, when he was about 12, he turned into this super brain and the dynamic shifted. I miss him, and because he’s been away for so long, it feels a bit like a piece of the world has broken away.
‘Do you know anyone who’s died?’ I ask.
‘My grandmother,’ Martin says. ‘We were close. I miss her.’
We stop talking to order, and then I lean in and ask the question that’s been bugging me since Rachel told me the news. ‘Where do they go? I mean, they’re here and then they’re not. I can’t get my head around it.’
‘Did someone you know die?’ he asks, and I want to talk about it with him. I want to get some explanations from someone who’s as logical as Martin. But I promised Rachel, so I can’t.
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ I say, and ask him how things are going with George.
‘Things are better,’ he says, and I’m surprised. They don’t seem better. ‘Around this time last week she was telling you to fuck off.’
‘And I told her that I had decided not to fuck off.’
It’s an interesting tactic. ‘What did she say?’
‘She told me that if I didn’t fuck off, she would.’
‘I’m confused about how things are better.’
‘I was nice to her all week and this afternoon we had a breakthrough. I think we might be friends again.’
Before I can ask what that breakthrough was, exactly, Mai Li gets a break and takes it with us, and the subject shifts to her latest poetry performance and the university course that’s starting and whether or not fried wontons are better than steamed.
It’s easy hanging out with Martin, so when we leave the restaurant and he points to a poster advertising Pavement, a club not far from here, I agree to go with him for a little while. There’s time before I have to be at Laundry, plus Pavement isn’t the kind of place a guy like Martin should go to alone.
It’s walking distance from Shanghai Dumplings. It takes us about ten minutes. When we arrive there’s a line out the front filled with a lot of very angry-looking people. I saw Pavement once listed on the top of ‘The Most Violent Places in Gracetown’ in the local paper.
The line moves. It’s free to get in because no one would pay and we stick to the carpet as we walk through the club, all the way over to the far side of the room. There’s a live band that threaten to eat kittens on stage and everyone claps at the suggestion. ‘Put your back against the wall,’ I tell Martin, who’s looking around like he’s expecting to see a friend. He watches two guys walk past us; one of them is leading the other one by a chain. ‘It’s really best not to stare, Martin,’ I say.
He leans over and yells, ‘When will George be here?’
‘What?’ I yell back.
‘George. When will George be here?’
‘George wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this,’ I yell. ‘She was at Mum’s tonight but she’s probably back at the bookshop by now playing Scrabble and drinking warm cocoa.’
Martin nods and says, ‘Riggght,’ like something’s just become clear to him.
Something’s just become clear to me, too. ‘George told you she’d be here? That was the breakthrough this afternoon?’
‘I bought her coffees all week, and those doughnuts she likes. Is it unreasonable to think that if a person drinks the coffee and eats the food you buy them that you’re on the way to being friends?’
‘This is not unreasonable,’ I tell him.
‘So this afternoon I asked her if she wanted to maybe meet up somewhere and she said she might be at Pavement.’
It’d be one thing for George to have said she might be at Laundry and then not turn up. But to tell Martin to come here to wait for her is a shitty move.
I check my watch and see it’s only a little after seven. ‘Come to Laundry. I’ll buy you a beer while we wait for Rachel.’
He looks deflated after the news of George, so says he’ll just get a taxi and go home. I’m not leaving him alone around here, though, so I sling my arm around him and walk him to the door.
We leave Pavement and head towards Laundry. ‘How long do I have to pay?’ Martin asks. ‘I mean how hard does a guy have to work to be friends with your sister?’
I’m starting to wonder this myself. I know George has had some trouble at school that’s not her fault, but she’s throwing away the chance of having a friend by her side for her final year. I’d love to explain George to Martin but I can’t because I don’t understand her myself.
As I think this, I see Amy ahead. She’s leaning against a building, not far from the bookshop. My heart still goes crazy when I see her. All she has to do is turn up and I’m right back where I started.
‘I’m waiting for Greg,’ she tells me.
I think back to her text, and the first thing I want to ask her is, ‘What does at the moment mean?’ Because ‘at the moment’ sounds hopeful. But before I have time to ask, Greg arrives. He pulls up in a car, gets out, and stands between us.
‘Stop hassling Amy,’ he says.
I step to the side so I can see Amy, and ask my question. ‘What does “at the moment” mean exactly?’
‘Did you hear me?’ Greg asks, but I ignore him.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask Amy. ‘Are things okay?’
‘I think you should go,’ she says. ‘We can talk later.’
‘We’re talking now,’ I say.
‘Did you hear me?’ Greg says again, this time loudly in my ear.
‘Not very well. Because my ears are not tuned to the language of dickhead,’ I say, turning around to see four guys, all of whom I know from school, each one of them, a dickhead.
‘Maybe your ears should be tuned to the language of dickhead,’ Greg says, and Amy and I laugh, which makes him even angrier than he was a second ago.
He tells his friends to get us, and there isn’t much time to get away. There’s just enough to lunge at the guy who’s taken hold of Martin. ‘Run!’ I yell after the guy let’s go, but Martin stays where he is. It’s a brave move. Stupid, sure. But brave.
They haul him towards the car first, throwing him in the back and slamming the door. They grab me second, and shove me in the boot. Before they close it over, the last thing I see is Amy standing on the footpath, staring in my direction.
The car starts and I feel the rhythm of the road. It’s an understatement to say that the night is not turning out how I’d imagined. I wish I were the kind of guy who didn’t panic but I am not that guy. As it turns out, I’m the guy who panics quite a bit. They won’t kill us but they’ll do something bad, and at this point I think it’s best not to imagine what that bad might be.
All the while I’m lying here, I’m trying to work out what Amy sees in this guy. I’m trying to interpret her expression before they closed me in the boot. Anger at Greg? Fear? Pity for me?
Surely she can’t be even a little bit in love with Greg now. What is there to be a little bit in love with? Part of me is happy he’s done this because there’s no way she’ll be able to stay with him after tonight. Love’s insane but it’s not fucking insane.
I try to work out which way we might be going based on the speed of the car. First they move slowly, I’m guessing because High Street’s full of traffic on Friday night. The car picks up to about sixty for a while, so I think they might be going down Melton Street, which means they’re taking us through the city. Slow, fast, slow. I map it out but I’ve got no real idea. My instinct is they’re taking us across the other side to the harbour.
It’s about fifteen minutes before they stop. One of them opens the boot but Martin’s putting up a good fight in the back seat, so he pushes it back down to help his friends contain him. I stop the boot clicking shut at the last minute. I’m free but I can’t run. I’m not leaving Martin and anyway, there’s nowhere to run. I was right. We’re at the stretch of road that runs along the docks.
Packing crates are behind us, a double lane freeway in front. There are a few warehouses spread out along the road on the other side, but that’s about it. Apart from that it’s deserted.
There’s enough time to send a dropped pin to Rachel and a help! text while I’m waiting for them to come back. Out of respect, I close my eyes when they start to strip Martin of his clothes. I can hear him put up a good fight, though. It takes a while for them to get everything off him. I open my eyes when they’re winding the tape around and around his body, securing him to the pole. They’ve got a couple of rolls of the stuff so they’re not stingy with the amount. He’s wrapped up tight when they stop.
And then it’s my turn.
All of them haul me out of the boot and throw me on the ground. They tell me to strip and they kick me when I don’t. I’ll admit I give up pretty quickly. ‘If you want to see me naked so badly, Greg, who am I to ruin your night?’
The comment earns me another few kicks and then a siren sounds in the distance and they let me get on with the stripping. I’ve always been fairly sure I don’t look good naked but I solve the problem by not looking in the mirror when I don’t have my clothes on. I don’t have to look in a mirror today, but I do have to put up with my ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend filming me for YouTube.
‘You fucker,’ I say, as he takes the gaffer tape and winds it around and around me and the telegraph pole again and again and it crosses my mind that there are some parts of my body that will never be the same after I rip that tape off.
Once Greg’s satisfied that I’m taped sufficiently, he films me some more, and says I can find myself on YouTube under ‘dickhead’. I suggest to him that surely the ‘dickhead’ is the guy who strips another guy naked and tapes him to the pole. I am clearly the dickhead-ee.
‘Fuck, I hate you,’ Greg says.
‘Believe me, the feeling is mutual.’
He’s about to make off with our wallets, our mobile phones, the bookshop keys, when I call out that taking those makes this a robbery, not just a joke. ‘Can you practise law with a criminal record?’
He comes up very close and does some more filming before he throws our valuables on the ground and gets in the car. I’m fairly certain Greg is the kind of guy with a great internet plan, so we’ll be up for all to see before they’re pulled out from the curb.
‘What kind of guy does this to another guy?’ I ask Martin when we’re alone.
‘The kind of guy who’s taking revenge for a ruined suit?’
‘Is it really the same thing? This seems so much worse.’ I look down at myself. ‘So much worse.’
Martin takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.
‘You’re mad,’ I say.
‘I’m naked and gaffer-taped to a pole. That’s what I am. It’s not your fault. I’m not angry with you. I helped you squirt him with the hose. I want to concentrate on how we get free, that’s all.’
‘I sent a dropped pin to Rachel,’ I tell him. ‘We just have to wait.’
People drive past us but don’t stop. I don’t hear car horns so I don’t think they even notice us. ‘At least it’s warm,’ I say.
‘You’re an optimist,’ Martin says after a while.
‘It seems important to be, considering the reasonably regular shitness of life.’
‘But I mean, why isn’t George an optimist? There’s this guy who’s been writing to her in the Letter Library for three years now and she’s pretty sure she knows who he is, and she’s sure she likes him, so why hasn’t she done anything about it?’
‘What guy?’ I ask, and he reminds me it’s the guy he told me about at the party, someone who’s been writing to her in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. ‘He’s been writing to her for three years and she’s almost certain she knows who it is, so why hasn’t she done anything about it?’
Three years is a long time to write to someone. That’s commitment. That’s romantic. I think about George sitting in the window of the shop, acting cynical about love, when all the while she’s falling for a secret admirer.
‘He might not even be the guy she thinks he is,’ Martin says. ‘He might be a psychopath.’
‘All the psychopaths are on the internet now,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘More potential for victims, I guess.’
‘No, why wouldn’t George want to meet him? If she really is so sure about who he is?’
‘Scared,’ I say. ‘She’s shy.’
‘She doesn’t seem shy. She seems hostile and aggressive.’
‘It’s a cover,’ I say, working something out about my sister as I say it.
‘Good cover,’ Martin says, but I think he’s worked it out too because some of the anger’s gone out of his voice.
I look around for Rachel’s Volvo, wondering if my text got through.
‘With a bit of luck, Amy might call the police,’ Martin says.
I love Amy, flaws and all, but I know, without a doubt, that she won’t be calling the police. I know that she didn’t call them after I disappeared in the boot. She didn’t take down the numberplate like Rachel would have done. She didn’t get into a taxi and say, ‘Follow that car.’
It’s Rachel we’re waiting for. Rachel I texted. Rachel who’s coming to save us.