I smile until I’ve walked away from Henry and Amy and then I cry like the idiot I am. I push my way through the crowd. I find a space at the back of Laundry where Henry won’t see me. I watch with my breath held while Lola stands on stage alone, waiting for Hiroko. Then I watch as Henry climbs on stage to sing with her. He’s got many talents, but singing really isn’t one of them. Even so, he’s spectacular.
The place goes crazy when Hiroko gets onto the stage. The lights sway with the voices of the crowd. Lola strums a chord, and I recognise the song as the first one she and Hiroko ever wrote. They sang it to Henry and me one day in her garage. I need the music to be louder so I don’t keep hearing myself say I love you, hearing Amy thank me for keeping him warm.
He must have been thinking about her all day. With me in the shop and on the beach and in the car. The urge to kick him comes back. You gave it all away, the bookstore, the Letter Library, the thing you love, for her.
I go to the bathroom and wash my face. Katia’s in there. ‘Did it work out with Shakespeare?’ she asks, and I tell her he’s going overseas with Amy.
‘Well, that’s a shame,’ she says. ‘He missed out on you.’
I walk around the club, and then out into the street. I could go home to the warehouse, but I want to be in the store. I want to catalogue more of the Letter Library. It’s more important now than ever to record those voices on the pages. It’s not that they’ll be lost. They were written, so they’ll always exist. But they’ll be lost for Michael, and I can’t stand that thought.
My plan is to keep cataloguing all night to take my mind off Henry and Amy. I open my computer and take a stack of books off the shelf. I look through the first one and try to concentrate, but I’m too restless.
I take out Sea and look through it, searching again for notes from Cal. There’s a small mark next to some jellyfish, but it’s not his writing. I know his as well as I know my own. He was always scribbling things. On that last day, a minute before he went into the water, he was writing. He was lying down, propped up on one arm, wearing Mum’s floppy hat and her Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. He was writing in one of the notebooks he always used, the ones with the perforated edges so he could tear the pages out neatly.
I feel someone standing behind me, and I turn to see George. She’s staring at Sea and I explain that I was wondering if Cal had left a letter in the book at some stage or other. ‘It’s not important,’ I lie.
‘He did,’ she says, and holds up the copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I see Elizabeth on the cover, face half-eaten away, so her teeth and vocal chords are showing.
George holds up a letter.
It’s written on the kind of paper that Cal used, the kind of paper that he was writing on that day. It feels so frail, which might be my imagining, or it might be that George has read it so many times. I’ll catalogue it later, I know. I’ll catalogue it more carefully than any of the other letters I’ve found in the Library.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Letter left between pages 44 and 45
24 November 2013
Dear George
I understand your concern that I might be a psychopath. I’m not, but I also understand that all psychopaths probably say that. So, here’s my sister to prove it:
My brother is usually not a psychopath.
She doesn’t know why she’s writing that. She’s watching a documentary. She’d sign away her life if you asked her to while she’s watching Brian Cox.
I hope you keep writing to me,
Pytheas
It makes perfect sense, with hindsight – the Sea-Monkeys, the small arrow in Sea that I know now was Cal pointing out what he loved to George.
‘Pytheas was the first explorer to link the moon to the tides,’ I say.
‘It’s Cal, isn’t it?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘I love him,’ she says.
It makes me deliriously happy. It breaks my heart.
‘Do you think he loves me?’ she asks, and I nod again.
She smiles. It’s such a brilliant smile, so full of hope that I can’t look at it.
‘I gave Henry a letter to give to you. I need you to post it.’
I tell her I need a minute, and I walk to the bathroom. There’s someone in there. I stand outside thinking about how unfair the world is – that Cal could have had George. She loved him and he loved her and if he hadn’t gone for a swim that day, then they’d be together now.
It’s Frederick who’s in the bathroom. ‘I might be intruding,’ he says when he walks out and sees me. ‘But are you all right?’
‘No,’ I tell him.
And standing in the doorway of the bathroom, I tell him what has just happened. I let it all out – how I’ve lied to George and now I have to break her heart and tell her that Cal is dead.
My words are a jumble and I’m crying while I speak. But he nods, and listens, and then tells me more about Elena.
‘I loved this shop, when it was a florist. I loved being with Elena here. But after she died, everything in it reminded me of her. It was unbearable. I sold this place for nothing,’ he says. ‘I wanted to burn it. I tried one night, but Elena stopped me.’
‘You saw her?’ I ask. ‘You saw her ghost?’
He nods his eyes completely serious. ‘I’m certain that she kept blowing out the match.’
‘I don’t know how to tell George,’ I say.
‘Perhaps start by telling her again that she was loved.’
Love is important. The small things are important. Whether Henry is in love with me or not, he loves me. Whether Cal and George are together or not, he loved her and she loved him back.
This is where I start.
‘It was Cal,’ I tell her. We’re outside the store so we can have privacy. As gently as I can, I tell her that he died.
She stares up at a sky that actually looks starless tonight. A sky can’t be starless. But the lights of the city are doing their best to drown them out.
‘He died almost a year ago now.’
I expected her to be angry, but she’s completely still, except for the pressure she puts on my hand.
‘What happened?’ she asks, and I start anywhere. I don’t know where the beginning is really.
I describe him on the beach, in Mum’s floppy hat and huge sunglasses, writing in his journal. ‘I think he was writing his last letter to you.’ I’m going to find that letter for her. I’ll start with the box, and if it’s not there I’ll go home and search every inch of the house for it.
‘Mum and I were talking about the future. My future. We were planning what university I’d go to, talking about the best ones for marine biology.
‘He put down his pen, took off his hat and glasses, and ran towards the water, calling for me to follow him, but I stayed on the beach talking with Mum.’
I can see Cal running into the water under this thin and yellow light, while Mum and I sat on the beach and talked about tomorrow.
The thing that most people don’t realise about drowning is that it’s quiet. Cal was such a good swimmer, the possibility of him dying that way didn’t occur to us. He and I had been much further out on other days. We’d swum at night, in dangerous places, and we were fine. It makes no sense that he died that day, at that time, when the water looked so still.
He drowned while I asked Mum if I could have a bellybutton ring, and she said yes, and asked me how they did it. He drowned while I waved away a fly. While I looked at the buckled trees, while I imagined sex with Joel, while I excavated sand with my toes.
‘We tried to save him,’ I say. ‘We got him to the beach.’
I don’t tell her about Mum standing quickly and looking into the water. How I started laughing, and said, ‘What?’ because I thought Cal was doing something funny.
‘I can’t see him,’ she said, taking off her dress before she ran to the water. These are the lost seconds that bother Mum. ‘Why did I bother
taking off my fucking dress?’ I’ve heard her say to Gran. ‘Why?’
‘Because you did,’ Gran said. ‘And it wouldn’t have mattered. He was gone.’
I tell George instead that Cal died in the place he loved the most. I tell her it was quick – which I know, outside of nightmares, it would have been. I tell her that the last thing he did was write her the letter.
I tell her how far he’d thought himself far into the future, to when he would dive off the Gulf of Mexico, in the Green Canyon. I tell her about that canyon; about the animals he imagined seeing, deep below the surface, where the sunlight can’t reach. I tell her about the light down there, light from billions of micro-organisms that glow in the dark. Spots of light – like drifting snow.
She and I walk to my car. I take out the box and we sit on the curb to look through it. There are journals and comics and a small world globe that I gave Cal once for Christmas. There are keys to his bike lock, some coins, his swimming goggles and a penknife. We find his library card, a CD. Maybe it seems strange to George that this is the box of things that Gran gave to me. But everything in here is important to me. It’s his life. I’ll never throw these small things away. There will never be a time when I don’t want them, all the tiny parts of Cal that made a life.
In the journal, just as I expected, there’s a letter for George. I hand it over without looking at it, and she reads it aloud. Cal loved George and she loved him back, and that’s no small thing. I look up at the light-drowned sky. I locate a star.
The letter is beautiful and brave and hearing it I know for certain that Henry was right. I’ve had the world the wrong way around. It’s life that’s important.
‘Can I get Martin for you?’ I ask George, after she’s finished reading.
‘Actually, I’d like that,’ she says. ‘He’s in the reading garden.’
I go inside, and bring him back to her.
Dear George
It’s the start of March; the end of summer, but it’s still warm. Not a lot of time left to swim.
I’m on the beach with my mum and my sister. My sister is Rachel Sweetie. I’m Cal Sweetie. Yep. The tall, skinny, goofy guy you’ve known pretty much all your life. Are you disappointed? I understand if you’re disappointed. I really hope you’re not disappointed.
I think we should go out on a date. One date. That way, you can see if you like me in person.
I’m about to go for a swim. And then I’m going to mail this letter to Howling Books. My friend Tim was putting the letters in the books for me, but he’s moved interstate.
So if you want to write back, send the letter to 11 Marine Parade, Sea Ridge 9873.
Love
Cal
Henry
life doesn’t always happen in the order that we want
I keep calling Rachel on the way to her place. I call again and again but she doesn’t pick up. I leave message after message. ‘I messed up. I just didn’t know what I know now. It’s you and the bookshop that I want. I don’t need loads of money. I can live without a definite future as long as you’re in that indefinite future with me.’
I’m in what I’d describe as a love fever. I ask the taxi driver if he can go any faster. He points out that we’re not going at all, since we’re stuck in a traffic jam. ‘Someone’s broken down up ahead,’ he says.
‘Of course they have,’ I say, and put my head out of the window to see what’s going on. There’s something close to a four-car pile-up, so we’re not going anywhere fast. I pay the fare, get out, and start running. The rain that Rachel predicted earlier starts to fall.
It’s one of those summer thunderstorms that really hammer the ground. The thunder rolls but I keep running, splashing water as I go.
By the time I reach Rachel’s place, I’m soaked. I bang on the door and yell Rachel’s name. Her aunt opens it and frowns. ‘I know I fucked up,’ I tell her, trying to speak through heaving breaths. ‘But I can fix it if I can just talk to her.’
‘She’s not here,’ she says. ‘How did you fuck up?’
‘She didn’t say?’
‘I haven’t seen her.’
‘Fuck,’ I say, looking up at the rain and knowing I just spent my last bit of money on the taxi. ‘Fuck.’ I look at her. ‘I don’t have any money.’
‘Wait a minute,’ she says. ‘I’ll drive you.’
I’m out of the car as soon as it stops, running straight to the bookshop, dripping water all over the floor. I can’t see Rachel; I’m calling out her name as I search for Never Let Me Go. Nothing gets removed from the Library, so it must be here. ‘Rachel!’ I yell again, as I pull out the book, and flick through it to find the thin sheet of paper with Rachel’s handwriting on it.
12 December 2012
Dear Henry
I’m leaving this letter on the same page as ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ because you love the poem and I love you. I know you’re out with Amy, but fuck it – she doesn’t love you, Henry. She loves herself, quite a bit in fact. I love that you read. I love that you love second-hand books. I love pretty much everything about you, and I’ve known you for ten years, so that’s saying something. I leave tomorrow. Please call me when you get this, no matter how late.
Rachel
I have this feeling as I hold it that even though the bookshop is sold, all is not lost. We lose things, but sometimes we get them back. Life doesn’t always happen in the order that we want. ‘Rachel!’ I yell again.
‘You called?’ she says, and I turn around and she’s there. ‘You’re here.’
‘I was here all along,’ she says. ‘I spoke to George, and then I was sitting in the reading garden. Everyone’s out there – having a drink to say goodbye to the shop.’
‘I love you,’ I say.
‘You kissed Amy,’ she says.
‘But I love you, and before you say it words do matter. They’re not pointless. If they were pointless then they couldn’t start revolutions and they wouldn’t change history and they wouldn’t be the things that you think about every night before you go to sleep. If they were just words we wouldn’t listen to songs, we wouldn’t beg to be read to when we’re kids. If they were just words, then they’d have no meaning and stories wouldn’t have been around since before humans could write. We wouldn’t have learnt to write. If they were just words then people wouldn’t fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, stop aching because of them, have sex, quite a lot of the time, because of them. If they were just words, Frederick would not search desperately for Derek Walcott.’ I take a breath, and when she doesn’t say anything, I keep going.
‘I might have kissed Amy, but I’m telling you now, I love you. And you do love me,’ I say, waving the letter. ‘This has your signature on it. A person might call it a contract.’
‘There’s a date on it, though. I don’t think you can hold me to a contract I signed three years ago in a state of sugar madness,’ she says.
‘I don’t think you can date a letter like this. A love letter, by definition, should be timeless or what’s the point? I love you, but only for that moment and then my love expires? What’s the universe’s problem with forever? It lets the geese get away with it.’
‘The geese?’ Rachel asks.
‘They mate forever.’
‘Well, that’s actually not strictly true,’ she says, and then she interrupts herself, takes hold of my t-shirt by the collar, and pulls me close.
‘That was a very nice speech,’ she says.
‘I got a bit carried away.’
‘I liked it.’
‘You are my best friend. You are the best person I know. You are spectacular, Rachel Sweetie. I love you,’ I say again, and then I kiss her.
Later, much later, at a time that is unknown to me at this point, I will unbutton Rachel slowly. I will kiss her collarbone, and think of watermelon in summer, explored down to the rind. I will hope, and imagine, that I can see our lives from above the universe, and we
are spread out together, all along the fixed points of our life.
But at this moment, it is a kiss. It’s a kiss that continues while we put the Prufrock and her letter back in the Library. It is a kiss that continues while I lead her up the stairs for some privacy. It is a kiss that continues through the years.
But at this moment, it is just the start.
Later, in bed, she leans over to check her voicemail.
‘I left some messages,’ I say.
‘So it seems,’ she says.
‘I felt it important you understood the situation.’
‘I think I do.’
‘So we can be together? You’ll be with me?’ I ask.
‘Okay,’ she says.
‘Okay?’
‘Okay,’ she says, and it’s that easy. I don’t have to beg, I don’t have to convince her I’m worth it. It’s just okay, and our future starts.
She asks me if I gave Frederick the Walcott we found today. I haven’t yet, so we go downstairs where everyone is still in the garden, drinking champagne and saying goodbye. Frank is there too, holding a crow bar, and the door between our garden and his shop has been prised open. Better late than never, I guess.
I don’t know how Mum came to be here now. Later, I will find that she came to the shop to get the Dickens. As guilty as me, as sad as me, despite still thinking that selling was the right thing to do.
Now I’m just glad that she’s here.
Rachel and I take seats and I hand the Walcott to Frederick. From the way he holds it this time, I’m almost certain it’s his, but he tells us, sadly, that it’s not. Even when the shop’s gone, I’ll keep looking, I tell him. He thanks me, and accepts the offer. ‘I think perhaps,’ he says, ‘it’s the looking that keeps her alive.’
We sit here missing the bookshop before it’s gone, working out the logistics of what to do with stock. ‘Can’t we keep the Letter Library?’ I ask.
‘It’s huge, Henry,’ Dad says. ‘I already have copies of all of those books. That’s why I want the catalogue.’