Little talk between them along the shoreline return. The long dusk pulling in. Evening walkers out on the sand. Yelling excited kids scampering the cricket fields. The blue buzz of televisions in windows. It almost felt normal.
In shared agreement they diverted inland just before the Splash, passing the Tomorrow Shines housing development that was filled with the scent of barbecues and cracked-open beers. Steered towards the main intersection in town.
Hedy seemed lost in thought. Glum, not angry as he might have expected.
Just before Miss Connell headed home to wash and change, Hedy said quietly, we found ourselves alone in the school parking lot. No one else around. She looked at me hard, in a way teachers aren’t supposed to look at students, and said very simply: Hedy, there’s something wrong with you. Something really, really wrong. I don’t know what’s made you this way but it’ll never leave you.
Seagulls overhead in the wind. No other sound for a moment.
People, the man said.
People, Hedy said.
• • •
The All Eats Takeaways passing on the right. A greasy beacon in the gathering dark.
You know what, Hedy said suddenly. I’m getting the biggest fucking pile of fish ‘n’ chips and hotdogs you’ve ever seen. Just going to march in and order, no matter how they look at me. You up?
Be there in a minute, he said. He had a thought, and a need. Something Lucia had said after one of her Tempest Bay explorations.
• • •
The Idle Hour second-hand bookstore. He’d only ever walked past it. The outside was plastered with local theatre bills and faded political posters. March for the Night. Take back our foreshore. Tiny handwritten ads seeking flatmates or selling cars or promising spiritual massage at only $25 per session, Ohiro Road, discreet enquiries welcome.
Angela, the fussy woman he’d met the first day in the Doris Cafe, stood near the door. A green bouffant and purple dress that seemed overdone. She was working a cold slice of toast with what looked like marmite spread on it. Marmite was a disgusting black sticky beef extract that existed in a never-ending holy war with vegemite, which was exactly the same thing but came in a yellow tin rather than a red one. One of the many things he did not understand about New Zealand.
So what’s going on? he said.
Angela took another bite of marmite toast. Crunched it.
Don’t know, she said. What is going on?
Staring at each other. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. The marmite like an oil patch.
You have a local history section? he said. Tempest Bay memories, that sort of thing.
I was just about closing, Angela said.
I went to the Hermit Cave, he said. And now I need some answers.
• • •
Inside the Idle Hour was a maze of shelves and book piles, romance novels and thrillers and old car mechanic manuals. Passages wended to distant stacks. Signs pointed to local history, Winston Churchill, EROTICA in firm capitals, nature, globalisation, children’s classics. A miasma of page-dust everywhere, a smell so distinct and universal that it ripped him back in time to New York at age eighteen, his first time in The Strand, five hundred miles of books.
Inside and out, the Idle Hour was the world before the internet. Before the fre he’d helped to stoke.
Vellichor, Angela said.
What?
Vellichor. It’s a word. Means the strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
She led him through the stacks, into branching alleyways of local history and classics. The place was larger than it seemed, much larger.
’S not all antiques and naughty romance, Angela said. More in here than most people realise.
He noticed that under the makeup and bees nest hair, Angela had a shape to her. And then he was surprised he noticed at all.
She led him into a children’s section filled with fossilised memories, Famous Five and Secret Seven and Ginny Gordon and Billy Bunter and Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but as though his mind smelled something he was drawn through to another alcove—
Images overlapping, crowding his mind. Landscapes in oil. Studies in ink and pencil. Old nitrate photos. Diaries and pamphlets. Sculptures. The whole bay, cliffs to rocks, beach and cottages and the Lighthouse and more, charted with hallucinatory intensity by generations of people who had surely experienced—
The cave? he asked.
Angela said. Getting into all the little corners, aren’t you. Some of it. But there’s art everywhere in this town. Most of it hidden or buried. That’s what we do, here. We make strange things and then we hide them.
People come here to unlock parts of themselves, he said.
And then sometimes terrible things happen, she said. Life’s a right shitter.
A book with a distinctive sea-blue cover. He picked it up. The Invisible Storm: Meteorology & Imagination, by H.B.
Not many of these around, he said.
We do read, you know, Angela said. Even if it’s nonsense.
What about her mother? he said. Any of her art, any trace of her?
No, Angela said gently this time.
He turned his gaze and found a pen-and-ink sketch of people down on the Tempest Bay shoreline loading cargo onto a Letting Festival raft. Eleven of them in their best Sunday clothes. Adults with two girls. Haunted, malevolent expressions on their faces. The Lighthouse tower and the far coast somehow both in the picture, curling round at the edges. Something different about the landscape but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Your store is beautiful, he said, and meant it. The memory of what bookstores once were grabbed him hard. He imagined The Idle Hour in livelier times, the smells of coffee and well-turned pages. Curling up in one of the scattered armchairs, clinging to this little oasis of light and civilisation in the midst of a very big, very black ocean.
Thank you, Angela said—
Which is why I’ll burn it to the ground, he said. This store and the entire town. Erase it from existence.
Long dead silence. Angela’s eyes on him, weighing, considering—
A sound somewhere in the stacks—
You should leave, Angela said suddenly, urgently. The bus tomorrow. Catch it. Take that damn woman with you too. There’s nothing here for her any more.
Another sound, maybe a door closing, and she was gone like a startled cat.
He tucked the pen-and-ink sketch into his coat and left the amount in cash on the front counter as he left.