‘There’s no point writing back unless he tells me the truth,’ I’d say to Cal every time I got a letter and every time Cal would stare at me, his eyes serious behind his glasses, and say something like, ‘It’s Henry. Henry your best friend; Henry who helped us build the tree house that time; Henry, who gave us free books; Henry, who helped us both in English, Henry.’
‘You left out shithead,’ I’d remind him. ‘Henry who is a shithead.’
It wasn’t really a problem that I was Henry’s best friend and in love with him at the same time until the beginning of Year 9. He got small crushes on other girls but he didn’t act on them and they didn’t last and I was still the one he sat with and called late at night.
But then Amy arrived. She had long red hair and this impossible skin with not a single freckle. I’m covered in dust from years of summers at the beach. Amy was smart, too. We competed for the maths prize that year, and she won. I won the science prize. She won Henry.
She told me she would, at the end of Year 9, on the day before summer holidays. We’d been studying the writer, Ray Bradbury, in English. One of his short stories was about a couple on the last night of the world, and the idea had spread around that we should all imagine it was our last night. Really it was just an excuse for hook-ups; a free pass to tell whomever it was that you loved, that you loved them. I wasn’t planning on telling Henry, but since it was also my last night in the city, he said we should spend it together.
‘You like him,’ Amy said, looking at me in the bathroom mirror that morning.
Henry and I had met years ago in the primary school car pool. He was reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a beautiful book with soft pencil moons. I can’t remember that first conversation, but I remember the ones that came after: books, the planets, time travel, kissing, ghosts, dreams. I knew everything there was to know about Henry. Like just didn’t cover it.
‘He’s my best friend,’ I told Amy.
‘Well, I’m asking him,’ she said.
I knew what she meant, and I told her he was spending it with me.
Henry let me know that afternoon that he’d said yes to her. We were at the back of the school, hiding in the long grass, watching insects skate on lines of sun. ‘If it really bothers you, I can go back and say no,’ he said. Then he got on his knees and begged.
I closed my eyes and told him it was fine.
‘What else could I say?’ I asked Lola that night. ‘I’m in love with you and I have been forever and if there are two people who should definitely spend the last night of the world together, it’s us. Henry and Rachel.’
‘Why not?’ she asked, sitting cross-legged on my bed, eating chocolate. ‘I mean really, why not? Why not just say you my friend, are the person I want to kiss and I think we’d be great together and this girl Amy has a worrying habit of getting lost in her own reflection in the change rooms – why not say that?’
I didn’t bother answering. Lola was Lola Hero, the girl who wrote songs and played bass, the girl who people listed when they listed people they wanted to be. If she liked a girl, she asked her out the same day. The kind of love she wrote about wasn’t the kind of love people like me experienced.
Why not? ‘Because I am not a huge fan of failure and humiliation.’
But by eleven, we’d gone through a tub of ice-cream, two blocks of chocolate and a bag of marshmallows, and this kind of madness hit. I decided to break into the bookstore and leave a love letter for Henry in the Letter Library at Howling Books.
My world seemed too small that night. I’d never even hinted to Henry that I liked him, but with the clock ticking down it became the thing I had to do before that last second and the Letter Library was the perfect place to do it.
The Letter Library is a section of books that aren’t for sale. Customers can read the books, but they can’t take them home. The idea is that they can circle loved words or sentences on the pages. They can write notes in the margins. They can leave letters for people who’ve read and been there before them.
Henry loves the Letter Library. So does his whole family. I didn’t quite see the point of writing to a stranger in a book. There’s a much better chance of getting a reply if you write to them online. Henry always said that if I didn’t understand the Letter Library, then he couldn’t explain it. It was something I had to get instinctively.
There wasn’t an alarm on the bookstore, and the lock on the toilet window that faced Charmers Street was broken. After Lola and I climbed through, we listened before we left the bathroom to make sure no one was in the store.
It was dark but the streetlight helped us see. I’d written the letter before I left home – my hands shaking as I put the words onto paper. It was mostly I love you – a little go fuck yourself. The perfect love letter, according to Lola.
I didn’t hide it in a book he never read and leave it to chance. I put it in T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations. Even more dangerous than leaving it in his favourite book, I’d left it on the page of his favourite poem: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.
I decided that if I was doing this, I was really doing it, so I climbed silently upstairs to Henry’s room. He was still out with Amy but his book was on this bed, his page marked by a folded corner. I left a note in it –
Look in the Prufrock tonight – Rachel.
Lola and I went back out the bathroom window; laughing as we hit the air. It had been a hot day but now rain covered the street. ‘It’s the end,’ I thought, but I wasn’t thinking the end of the world. I was imagining the end of Henry and me, the moment when he read the letter, and everything changed. We’d be a different Rachel and Henry. I saw a couple kissing on the other side of the street, John and Clara from school, and felt rain hiss on my skin.
We hailed a taxi and dropped Lola off first. I was checking my phone obsessively by the time I reached my place. I imagined Henry’s voice and how it would sound with the knowledge of me in it. I fell asleep waiting.
Lola woke me around three, asking if he’d called, which he hadn’t. He hadn’t called or come around by the time we left at nine, later that morning. At ten, when we were on the road to Sea Ridge, he sent me a text: Sorry I overslept!! Will call soon.
Henry doesn’t use exclamation points, I thought, staring at them. He doesn’t like the look of them unless they fill a whole page, in which case they look like rain. He especially hated when people used two, and at that moment I understood why. Two is trying too hard. Two is false.
Amy loves exclamation points. I read a short story of hers once and she used them every time someone spoke. She wrote the text. I imagined her reading my letter over Henry’s shoulder and telling him how he should reply: ‘Ignore it. She’s leaving anyway.’
Henry never mentioned my letter and what I’d told him that night, not once, in all the letters he wrote. They were full of Amy. I ignored every one.
Henry doesn’t know about Cal. If he’d heard, nothing would have kept him from the funeral. But I haven’t told him and neither has Mum. Rose can’t say the words without crying and she never cries in public. Cal wasn’t on Facebook. He had an account, but he wasn’t interested.
Tim Hooper, his best friend from Gracetown, moved to Western Australia a couple of months before Cal died, so I wrote him a letter with the news. I didn’t need to tell him not to post it on social media. I didn’t have to say that I couldn’t stand the idea that Cal’s death would be gossip for people to comment on. Tim just knew.
‘Henry used to tell me we were so close we could talk by mental telepathy,’ I say to Woof and the night around me. I only read the start of the letter before I fold it up, dig a huge hole, and bury it in the sand.
Dear Rachel
Since you never write, I can only assume you’ve forgotten me. Again, I refer you to the blood oath we took in Year 3.
Henry
second-hand books are full of mysteries
I wake Friday morning to see my sister, George, standing next to
the fiction couch, where I fell asleep last night, and where I plan to keep sleeping all week.
Not surprisingly, I haven’t taken the break-up well, and I have no intention of taking it well in the future. My plan is to stay on the couch, getting up for toilet breaks and the occasional toasted sandwich, until Amy comes back to me. She always comes back to me. It’s just a matter of time.
Last night I collected all the books I thought I’d need before I took to the couch, so they’re all piled up around me – there’s some Patrick Ness, an Ernest Cline, some Neil Gaiman, Flannery O’Connor, John Green, Nick Hornby, some Kelly Link and, if all else fails, Douglas Adams.
‘Get. Up,’ George says, gently shoving me with her knee, which is her version of a hug. I love my sister, but, along with the rest of the world, I don’t really understand her and it’d be true to say I fear her, just slightly.
She’s seventeen, starting Year 12 this year. She likes learning but she hates her school. She got a scholarship to a private one on the other side of the river in Year 7 and Mum makes her stay there even though she’d rather go to Gracetown High.
She wears a huge amount of black, mostly t-shirts with things like Read, Motherfuckers on the front. Sometimes I think she likes post-apocalyptic fiction so much because she’s genuinely happy at the thought that the world might end.
‘Is the plan to get up sometime soon?’ she asks, and I tell her no, that is not the plan. I explain the plan to her, which is basically to wait, horizontally, for life to improve.
She’s holding a brown paper bag soft with grease and I’m fairly certain it has a sugar-and-cinnamon doughnut inside. ‘At this point I don’t have anything to get up for,’ I say as I reach for it.
‘No one has anything to get up for. Life’s pointless and everyone gets up anyway. That’s how the human race works,’ she says, and hands me a coffee to go with the doughnut.
‘I don’t like how the human race works.’
‘No one likes how the human race works,’ she says.
I finish eating and lie back on the day bed, staring at the ceiling. ‘I have a non-refundable round-the-world ticket.’
‘So go see the world,’ George says as dad walks past.
‘Get up, Henry,’ he says. ‘You’re fermenting. Tell him he’s fermenting, George.’
‘You’re fermenting,’ George says, and pushes me over so she can sit next to me. She lifts my legs and puts them over her legs.
‘I don’t understand,’ Dad says. ‘You were such happy children.’
‘I was never a happy child,’ George says.
‘True, but Henry was.’
‘I’m not anymore. It’s actually hard to imagine how my life could be any more shit at this point,’ I say, and George holds up the copy of the book she’s reading. The Road.
‘Okay. Sure. It could get more shit if there was some kind of world-ending event and people started eating each other. But that’s a whole different shit scale. On your average human-emotion scale, my life is registering as the shittiest of the shit.’
‘There’ll be other girls, Henry,’ Dad says.
‘Why does everyone keep saying that? I don’t want other girls. I want this girl. Not another one. This one.’
‘Amy doesn’t love you.’
George says it gently – like she’s sympathetically sticking a piece of glass straight through my left eye.
Amy does love me. She did love me. She wanted to spend an indefinite amount of time with me and that’s basically the same as forever. ‘If a person wants to spend forever with you, that’s love.’
‘But she didn’t want to spend forever with you,’ George says.
‘Now. Now she doesn’t want to spend forever with me. But then she did and forever doesn’t just disappear overnight.’ If it does, then there should be some sort of scientific law against it.
‘He’s flipping out,’ George says.
‘Take a shower, son,’ Dad says.
‘Give me one good reason.’
‘You’re working today,’ he says, and I take my heartbroken self off to the bathroom.
According to George, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that our family is shit at love. Even our cat, Ray Bradbury, she points out, doesn’t seem to get it on with the other cats in the neighbourhood.
Mum and Dad have tried six times to get back together but finally, last year, they signed the divorce papers and Mum moved out of the bookshop into a small flat in Renwood, a couple of suburbs away. When George isn’t at school, she spends all her time sitting in the window of the shop, writing in her journal. Dad’s been on the down side since Mum left, with no sign of stopping his post-divorce habit of eating whole blocks of peppermint chocolate every night while he re-reads Dickens.
I don’t agree with George. It’s not that I think we’re great at love, but I think the whole world is fairly shit at it, so, statistically speaking, we’re average, and I can live with that.
Amy did love me. Sure, she leaves me every now and then, but she always comes back. You don’t keep coming back to someone you don’t love.
I stand in the shower and try to work out what I did wrong. There must have been a moment when I messed up, and if I could find my way back to it, maybe that moment could be fixed.
Why? I text Amy when I’ve dried off. There must be a reason. Can you at least tell me that?
I press send, and head downstairs to the shop.
‘He looks better,’ Dad says when I rejoin them.
George looks up at me and decides it’s best not to answer.
‘What’s that wonderful Dickens line from Great Expectations?’ Dad asks. ‘The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.’
‘That’s hugely comforting, Dad,’ George says.
‘The terrible days get better,’ he tells us, but he doesn’t sound all that convincing.
‘I’m going book hunting,’ he says, which is unusual for a Friday. I ask if he wants some company, but he waves me off and tells me to look after the shop. ‘I’ll see you tonight for dinner – eight o’clock at Shanghai Dumplings.’
Since I finished Year 12 last November, I’ve worked in the bookshop every day. We sell second-hand books, which is the right kind of book to sell for this side of town. Dad and I do the book hunting. It’s getting harder. Not harder to find books – books are everywhere, and I’ve got my particular spots to look, spots Dad showed me – but harder to find the bargains. Everyone knows the worth of things these days, so you don’t just find a first edition of Casino Royale sitting on someone’s shelf that they don’t know they’ve got. If you want to buy it, then you buy it for what it’s worth.
I keep reading articles about the end of second-hand bookshops. Independent bookshops selling new books are hanging in there, doing well again in fact. But second-hand shops will be relics soon, apparently.
I’ve been thinking about this lately because, since the divorce, Mum’s been talking about selling the shop. Every time she talks about it her arguments convince me a little more. I love this place but I don’t know that I love it as much as dad does – he doesn’t care if it makes money. He’s willing to work some place else to keep it.
He and Mum bought the place twenty years ago, when it was a florist. It was priced cheaply for a quick sale. The owner had walked out for some reason. When Mum and Dad came to inspect it, there were still buckets on the floor and the place smelt of old flowers and mouldy water. The notes had gone from the till, but there were still coins in the drawers.
Mum and Dad kept the wooden counter running along the right as you walk in, as well as the old green cash register and red lamp that the florist had left behind, but they changed almost everything else in the long, narrow space. They put in windows along the front of the shop, and Dad and his brother, Jim, polished the floorboards. They built shelves that run floor to ceiling the whole length of the shop, and huge wooden ladders that lean against the shelves so people can
reach the books at the top. They built the glassed-in shelves where we keep the first editions, and the waist-high shelves in the centre of the shop at the back. They built the shelves where we keep the Letter Library.
In the middle of the shop, in front of the counter, there’s the specials table, and next to that is the fiction couch. At the back on the left are the stairs to our flat, on the right is the self-help cupboard, and then through the back glass doors is a reading garden. Jim covered it, so people can sit out there no matter what the weather, but he left the ivy and jasmine growing up the bluestone walls. In the garden there are tables with Scrabble boards and couches and chairs.
There’s a stone wall on the right, and in that stone wall there’s a locked door that leads through to Frank’s Bakery. We’ve suggested to Frank that he open it so people could buy coffee from him and then bring it into our garden, but Frank isn’t interested. In the whole time I’ve known him, which is since I was born, he’s never changed a thing in his shop. It’s still got the same black and white tiles, the same diner-style counter with black leather stools along it. He makes the same pastries, he won’t make soy lattes and he plays Frank Sinatra every minute that he’s open.
He gives me my coffee this morning, and tells me I look terrible. ‘So I hear,’ I say, putting in some sugar and stirring. ‘Amy dumped me. I’m broken-hearted.’
‘You don’t know what broken-hearted is,’ Frank says, and gives me a free blueberry Danish, burnt on the underside, just the way I like it.
I take my coffee and Danish back to the shop and start sorting through the books that need to be priced.
I check through all of them because what I like about second-hand books are the marks you find inside – coffee rings, circled words, notes in the margin. George and I have found all kinds of things in books over the years – letters, shopping lists, bus tickets, dreams. I’ve found tiny spiders, flattened cigarettes and stale tobacco in the creases. I found a condom once (wrapped and unused but ten years out of date – a story in itself). I once found a copy of The Encyclopaedia of World Flora 1958, with leaves marking the pages of someone’s favourite plants. The leaves had dried to bones by the time I opened the book. All that was left were the skeletons.