Words in Deep Blue

  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.

  Henry

  it should be raining when she tells me

  While I drive Martin home, I think about the argument I had with Rachel, which leads to thoughts about her in general, which leads me to the greater mystery of what happened to her and why she’s come back so angry with me and the whole world.

  ‘She used to be really something,’ I say to Martin. ‘She killed everyone in races at the swimming carnival. She won the science prize every year and the maths prize, till Amy arrived. Ask her anything about science and she knows the answer. She wants to study fish in the deep sea, the ones that live in complete darkness.’

  ‘I’m always worried about shark attacks,’ Martin says.

  ‘I know, right? But she’s not afraid.’

  I can see her, three years ago, crouching, ready to jump at the starter’s gun. She hit the water and turned into one smooth line. ‘She doesn’t swim anymore,’ I say to Martin, who’s only half listening because he’s staring out of the window, dreaming about George, no doubt.

  ‘What?’ he asks.

  ‘She usually swims in the mornings,’ I say. ‘But her hair, it’s never wet.’

  He nods, but he doesn’t understand. Rachel out of the water isn’t Rachel.

  When we’re close, Martin directs me to his house, which is over the river on an avenue lined with trees. It’s a weatherboard with a huge fig tree in the front yard. Beyond the tree, I see two women sitting on the veranda. ‘My mums,’ he says, and I give them a wave as he gets out of the car. I miss my parents being together like that.

  This side of town reminds me of Amy, because of the way she talked about it. She’s never really gotten used to living on my side of town and I can see why. I love it, but the streets aren’t graceful like they are over here.

  I think about her all the way back over the bridge. I think about the possibility of her realising that Greg is an idiot, and the way she touched my arm before she left the bookshop. I think about how, so far, she’s always come back to me in the end. And so, on the way home, I make a detour down her street.

  I don’t sit on the steps of her apartment building and wait. I leave a note in her letterbox: I just don’t think he’s good enough for you, that’s all. Henry.

  Rachel’s there when I arrive. She’s reading Cloud Atlas, squinting at the pages in the dimness.

  ‘I thought you didn’t read fiction,’ I say, turning on the light so she can see.

  ‘Maybe I’m changing my ways.’

  Cloud Atlas is a set of stories from different times, and Rachel asks me if they’re interconnected. ‘How does it all fit together?’ This is what Rachel does with fiction – she reads the last page first, she asks me for spoilers. She googles to find out the meaning. ‘Is it a novel, or a set of short stories? Just tell me that much.’

  ‘No,’ I tell her, and instead of arguing, she marks her page with a slip of paper.

  ‘Walk with me?’ she asks, and I head out with her, into the night.

  We take the route we took when we were in Year 9 and it was hot and we couldn’t sleep. Down High Street, walking a huge block back up to the bookshop. Around again if we felt like it, which was almost every time.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘About the party. I started cataloguing tonight. I’ll try to finish it all.’ She smiles. ‘Sorry about the drink.’

  I tell her about Greg and the hose and she laughs. ‘I should have stuck around. You know he used to dislocate body parts to impress girls. He told me in Year 9 that he could dislocate his penis.’

  ‘There’s no bone in there. Is there a bone in there?’

  ‘The adult body has two hundred and six bones, and not one of them is there, Henry.’

  ‘So what’s he dislocating?’

  ‘This is a mystery I do not need solved,’ she says, and hits the button as we stop at the lights.

  ‘I haven’t been myself lately,’ she says, balancing back on her heels. ‘Cal died ten months ago. He drowned.’

  Then the lights change, and we cross the road.

  I have this stupid thought that it should be raining when she tells me. It should be a different kind of night. It should be starless. It should be bleak. It’s the most terrible news I’ve ever heard, and I can’t quite make myself believe it.

  I think about the last time I saw him. He came in looking for books on the ocean. I remember he bought a book that I’d found in a charity shop – The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck. I hadn’t read it. I’d bought it because I’d liked Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.

  Cal told me the book was about an expedition to the Gulf of California that Steinbeck had made with his closest friend, Ed Ricketts. They went to collect and observe marine life on the coast, and although I never got around to reading the book, and I’ve forgotten most of what he told me, I haven’t forgotten the part about the friendship between a writer and a scientist. It felt right, the balance between those two things. I don’t know much about
Steinbeck or Ricketts, but I could imagine a scientist and a poet collecting specimens, drawing them, observing them from two different poles of life. I imagined one sparking the thoughts of the other.

  I imagined them sitting on the boat at dusk, sunburnt, going over their thoughts from the day. Talking late into the night, and really understanding something about the world with the help of science and literature. Like maybe they were half of each other and they were always destined to be friends.

  It seems stupid to tell Rachel about one small conversation between Cal and me, when she had millions of them that really meant something, but I tell her anyway, because what else is there?

  Rachel swallows, and wipes her eyes, and says, ‘Thank you,’ like somehow it helped, which I can’t imagine it did.

  I’ve read about death, obviously, but I’ve never known anyone who’s died. I feel like an idiot now for complaining about Amy breaking my heart. If I lost George, nothing would matter; I can’t imagine not having her. I don’t know how to imagine it.

  Rachel’s crying more now, and looking embarrassed. ‘I’m not depressed,’ she says, like it’s the worst thing in the world. And then she says, ‘No, I take it back. I am. I’m so depressed, Henry. I’m so depressed. I’m so depressed my friends at the beach started avoiding me. I broke up with Joel; I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I see a therapist. I saw him today. God, Henry, I failed Year 12. Everything’s a mess.’

  I offer her my sleeve so she can wipe her eyes and her nose, but she’s already using her own. She laughs, and sniffs and blinks and tries to mop up the mascara. ‘Did I get it all?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I say. ‘You look fine. You look good. Anyway,’ I continue, ‘for the record I think you should be depressed. I think depression is completely fair enough. Depression is the absolute appropriate response here.’

  ‘It’s been nearly a year,’ she says, but that doesn’t seem like a very long time. If George died, I’d miss her forever.

  ‘Why didn’t you call me? I would have come. I would have come to the funeral.’

  She shakes her head, as though she doesn’t quite understand it herself.

  We get to the end of the block and decide without speaking, to walk around again. Rachel tells me a whole lot of things as we walk. How her mum sort of collapsed on the inside after the funeral and hasn’t been herself since. She tells me that she collapsed too. How Christmas was this awful meal where they cooked Cal’s favourite foods but no one ate anything. How there’s a box of Cal’s things locked in the boot of her car.

  A summer storm starts. Rachel looks up and then over at me. ‘I haven’t told anyone in Gracetown. Please don’t tell anyone either. I came back here to forget about it for a while.’

  I wonder how she could forget about it, a thing like that. And I wonder how she can go on living if she doesn’t.

  Rachel

  this I love

  It’s a relief to tell Henry, to let everything out – losing Cal, how I failed, how it’s all ruined now. It’s a relief to cry and have Henry tell me this is the correct response and to hold out his sleeve.

  I feel exhausted afterwards. I feel almost as tired as I did in those days after I dragged Cal out of the ocean and tried to force him back to life on the beach. I sit on a bench and I tell Henry I’m not sure I can get up. Sometimes I feel like running and sometimes I want to swim, and sometimes I just want to sit in the same place forever because I don’t have the energy for another day without Cal in it.

  The story he told me about The Log from the Sea of Cortez is perfect. I can see Cal near the register, taking mints from the free bowl and rolling them up and down the counter while he and Henry spoke. Cal loved Henry. He loved telling him strange scientific facts when he came to our place for Sunday-night pizzas.

  It starts to rain softly. There are sparks in the humid sky. ‘We need to go,’ Henry says. He’s not a fan of thunderstorms.

  ‘Maybe I’ll just sit here,’ I say. ‘It’ll stop raining soon.’

  ‘No,’ he says, and kneels down with his back to me so I can climb on.

  He stands and I wrap my legs around his waist and tuck my chin into his neck, like I did as a kid when we were running races in primary school.

  ‘This is much better,’ I say as we start walking.

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ he says. ‘If you’re the one on the back.’

  ‘I did save you the other night,’ I say. ‘So it’s payback.’

  ‘I’m very happy to carry you as long as you need it. Payback or not.’

  The rain starts to soak us.

  ‘I forget. Do you stand under a pole in a lightning storm?’ Henry asks, moving faster up High Street.

  ‘Sure, and it helps if you can find a puddle too,’ I tell him.

  ‘We don’t stand under a pole,’ he says.

  ‘We don’t stand under a pole,’ I confirm.

  It feels good to be weightless and moving. I count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder and tell Henry the charge is at least six kilometres away from us. ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you,’ he says. ‘But I’m making a run for it.’ He sprints the last stretch to the bookstore, and leans so I can open the door with my keys.

  He puts me on the floor, and goes upstairs to find some towels. While he’s gone I text Rose to let her know I’ll stay the night at Henry’s. I don’t want to go home. I want to lie on the floor on the same quilt bed like Henry made when we were kids, and talk until I fall asleep.

  I say this to Henry when he comes downstairs, and he looks relieved that there’s something practical he can do. He makes a three-quilt bed on the floor – three on the floor and one to pull over us. But because it’s a warm night we don’t really need a top quilt, so we lie on the four, and it’s as comfortable as a mattress.

  We lie listening to the creak of the shop – someone’s footsteps across the ceiling, walking to the bathroom and back in the flat above. I look at the water that’s falling outside the window, lit up by the streetlights so every separate line of water is visible.

  ‘I had a dream where Cal told me he could see the world from above,’ I tell Henry. ‘He said the seconds were pouring off people, tiny glowing dots pouring from their skins, only no one could see them.’

  ‘Beautiful dream,’ Henry says.

  ‘Is it? Wouldn’t it be better if the seconds were adding up? Do we have a set amount of seconds to live when we’re born or an unknowable number?’

  ‘An unknowable number,’ Henry says.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I don’t. I believe.’ He rolls over and looks at me. ‘I believe I am adding up to something.’

  ‘I don’t want to cry anymore,’ I tell him. ‘I think I’m at the end but then I realise there’s more to go. Tonight there was more to go.’

  ‘Have you gone to the top of that cliff in Sea Ridge and just screamed your lungs out?’ he asks.

  ‘Done it.’

  ‘Did you swim till you’re exhausted?’ he asks.

  I look right at him because I don’t care if he sees how sad I am. ‘I hate the water now.’ I tell him I can look at it, but I can’t stand the thought of diving under. ‘It took him,’ I say. ‘I went in once and all I could feel was that day – the water in my mouth and the weight of him. I pulled him back to shore and all the time I knew he was dead.’

  ‘What can I do to help?’ he asks.

  ‘Distract me,’ I say, because he can’t do anything.

  ‘I can do that. I’m very distracting.’

  ‘What’s your plan?’ I ask. ‘The life plan for after you sell the bookstore?’

  ‘There are several. I could go to university. Become a lawyer. Maybe a literature professor.’

  ‘You’ve never wanted to be a literature professor. You’ve always wanted to work in the bookstore.’

  ‘I’ll be poor, like Dad.’

  ‘Your dad’s got two great kids and a bookstore. He might not be rich, but he’s not poor.’

>   ‘Mum left him. He’s working all day every day, trying to hunt down first editions so we can stay afloat. It just seems like a hard life.’ He shifts around. ‘Books can’t buy your girlfriend a good night out.’

  They can’t buy Amy a good night out. ‘You know the best night out I’ve ever had? Hands down the best night? The time you read me “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.’

  ‘I seem to remember you saying you hated poetry,’ he says. ‘I distinctly remember you saying something along the lines of “poetry is pointless”. That we could lose all the poets from the world and no one would care. In fact, thousands of people would be very happy.’

  ‘You’re twisting what I said.’

  ‘What did you say then? I can’t remember.’

  ‘I said poems don’t make a difference to the real things.’

  ‘The real things?’

  ‘They can’t save people from cancer or bring people back from the dead. Novels can’t either. They don’t have a practical use, that’s what I meant. I loved that you read the poem to me that night, but the world remained unchanged.’

  ‘And yet you don’t think I should sell the bookshop.’

  ‘My theory isn’t perfect,’ I say, already in the blue before sleep.

  I wake in the early morning, with Henry’s arm slung around me, and Lola tapping on the shop window. I open the door and see she’s still in the clothes she was wearing last night. She’s here for Henry, but when she sees me she looks excited. ‘I sense there’s gossip to be had.’

  ‘No gossip,’ I tell her after we’re sitting at Frank’s. It’s seven. I haven’t been up this early for the longest time. It’s cool, but the light promises heat. We order coffee and toast and a large orange juice to share.

  ‘Big night?’ I ask, and point at her clothes.

  She tips a heap of sugar in her coffee and stirs. ‘We played till three. Then Hiroko and I went out to eat. Two gigs to go till we’re gone.’