‘We could house it,’ I say. ‘In the shed.’
‘What shed?’ he asks.
‘The shed of wherever we all move together.’
He smiles, and waits for me to catch up.
‘We’re not all moving together?’
‘I thought I might travel. See Shakespeare’s country, and some plays in the West End. Keep going from there to Argentina. Perhaps learn Spanish and read Borges without an interpreter before I die.’
‘You’re not dying.’
‘Well, not immediately, Henry. None of this is your fault. Your mother is right,’ he says, taking her hand. ‘We make very little and none of us can live on dreams.’
‘You need some dreams,’ Mum says.
‘Dreams and a little money,’ he says.
Mum’s crying as much as any of us and I know this is just as hard for her. I catch her looking at me after a while. ‘You’ve grown up,’ she says, when I ask her what she’s thinking. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’
Rachel
soft thoughts pass between us
Henry was in the middle of a rant when I pulled him close and kissed him. He was waving my letter and querying the validity of a love that’s date stamped.
I had a whole speech planned. I was going to make him explain, point by point, with sub points, why he’d decided it was me and not Amy that he loved. How did the turnaround happen exactly? I was going to ask for proof.
But then I decided proof was overrated and possibly not possible. It would likely just spoil the moment – a moment I’ve been waiting for, for a long, long time.
So I decide to take control of the situation and kiss him. It felt as though we were trapped in honey. And the rest of what we did, and how it was, and the words that were said, are secret.
Lying in Henry’s bed, life is not like it was before, and there are things other than death that draw lines and markers. We move in and out of sleep and talking. Henry’s window is open, and the warm night drifts through. I put my feet on the ledge to feel it.
Soft thoughts pass between us. We are the books we read and the things we love. Cal is the ocean and the letters he left. Our ghosts hide in the things we leave behind.
Henry and I go downstairs after a while, to give the Walcott to Frederick. It isn’t the one he’s looking for. It’s out there, though, Henry says to him, and promises to keep looking. Frederick says it’s the looking that keeps her alive, and I understand completely. I must search for Cal always in the things he loved.
Later, when I walk inside, the Walcott is sitting in the Letter Library, facing out.
There’s a letter in it, and it’s for me. I know it before I open the book.
Dear Rachel
I hope you don’t mind that I’m writing to you. But I have been thinking about our conversation and the death of your brother, and the great sadness that you must be feeling.
As you know, I lost my wife twenty years ago. Sometimes I feel as if I have lived without her for a decade, and sometimes I feel as though I lost her just a minute before.
I write lost, but I have grown to hate that expression. She was not a set of keys or a hat. Losing her is the equivalent of saying that I have misplaced my lungs.
I know you understand what I mean; I can see it in your face. There comes a time when the non-grievers go back to life, even some of the grievers go back, and you’re left trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.
What’s the point in living on past the point when those we have loved have left us? And how can we ever forgive ourselves for letting them go? Without Elena in the world, time did not exist. A world without time is a terrible thing. There is no certainty. Days could move quickly or slowly, or not at all. The laws of the universe have been tinkered with, and you are blindly wheeling.
But you know this already, Rachel.
You know that you must hold on to any laws that you can find.
I love my son, and he is the law that cannot be tinkered with. Love of the things that make you happy is steady too – books, words, music, art – these are lights that reappear in a broken universe.
You say that the ocean is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, and the thing that terrifies you the most. This describes how it was for me to fall in love with Elena. So perhaps all things that are worthwhile are terrifying?
Go back to the ocean, Rachel. It’s a part of you, and so is Cal.
Frederick
In the morning, while Henry is sleeping, I take a pen and some paper out into the garden. There are people sitting in it already, even though the bookstore isn’t open. They’ve come through from Frank’s, bringing their croissants and coffee. They ask me what time the bookstore opens, and I tell them the hours – ten till it depends – for book emergencies they open in the middle of the night.
I try not to think about the time when the reading garden will be gone. I try to look on the practical side. People need housing. But right now, I can’t make myself believe that it’s a good thing they have it here.
Frank brings me a coffee. ‘On the house,’ he says. ‘It’s a day of national mourning.’
I hear a soft sound, a small cough, and turn to see Frederick standing next to me.
‘Thank you,’ I say, and instead of writing to him, we have breakfast together in the reading garden.
I tell him that yes; I am going back to the ocean. ‘I want to swim again,’ I say.
After Frederick’s gone, I imagine I’m in the ocean again. I’m floating in it with Mum, our backs to the salt, our faces to the sky.
The line from the Borges story goes through my head – about the narrator ending up where he started. I think about things I’ve read, other readers who have pointed things out to me, strangers’ circles directing the way. I think about Cloud Atlas, all the stories that, in the end, add up to one. I think about the beautiful, impossible thought that Cal might have, at the moment of dying, transmigrated.
I step from that thought to another – that he had been transmigrating all his life; leaving himself in the people he loved, in the things he loved. I think of the cover of Cloud Atlas, the pages turning into clouds and turning into sky, raining into ocean; Cal, brimming at the edges, escaping.
As I’m leaving, I see Michael sitting in the corner of the garden. He must have been there all along. When I get closer I see why he was silent. He’s been crying.
I let him have his privacy, and walk back inside. I look at the Letter Library for a long time, thinking about the catalogue, and how it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Because a record on a computer doesn’t record the way people have underlined. You can’t tell from a database the deep mark that Michael left under the words where Pip tells Estella that she’s part of his existence. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here.
That speech is underlined all the way through, and the notes in the margins are scribbled frantically. There’s no way I can record the reasons why people have underlined that speech, or how they felt when they saw that someone else had underlined it too. I can imagine by looking at it, but I can’t record that on a spreadsheet.
I can’t record the things I felt by holding the book. I can’t record the worn pages or the coffee cup rings or the circles around Auden and Eliot’s poetry. I know the poems meant something to people just by holding the book, and that’s what Michael wants to keep. A catalogue won’t keep it for him.
It can be saved, though. Just not in this form.
I tell Michael first, and he keeps crying as I explain.
Then I go upstairs to Henry. ‘Wake up.’ I say it close to his ear, so my lips kiss skin. ‘Wake up. I know what we have to do.’
Henry
the world has not ended
I wake and the world has not ended and Rachel is whispering transmigration into my ear. At least I think she is. I can’t quite tell because I’m distracted by her mouth and the memory of what happened last night and the hope that it might happen again, very soon.
/> I sit up, and she says the word again. ‘Transmigrate. The Letter Library has to transmigrate. We have to break it up and leave it in other bookstores.’
It’s a nice idea, I tell her, but other stores won’t want them. ‘It’s Howling Books’ thing. The books are written all over, so it’s not like they can sell them. And if they kept them all they’d do is take up shelf space for stock that earns them money.’
‘So we won’t tell anyone,’ she says, and I listen as she describes the operation. We will disperse the Letter Library secretly, in all the bookstores around the city, and further.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Letter left between pages 44 and 45
14 February 2016
Dear Cal
This isn’t a goodbye letter; let’s get that straight. I’ll be writing more letters to you over the years. You’ve become the person I tell everything to, and that won’t change.
I got your last letter – and the answer is yes. Yes, let’s meet. Let’s start at Frank’s café for breakfast, and then we can go to the Palace, where I see they’re having a Doctor Who marathon. Then we’ll head across town to the museum, I think.
I’m not disappointed. I thought it was you – at least, I was fairly sure, but then the letters kept coming after you’d moved, so for a while I wondered whether it was Tim. I didn’t want it to be Tim. I wanted it to be you.
Do you remember that day at school when we sat out in the sun, watching everyone play sport? It was our first and only, not on paper, conversation.
I was crying because of what happened at a party, and because Mum wasn’t at home anymore.
You: Hello
Me: What do you want?
You: To make you feel better
Me: Impossible.
You gave me the Sea-Monkeys.
You: They’re fast-growing sea creatures. You put them in water and they grow really quickly. They get to be adults in about a week. They’re not actual monkeys. They’re a kind of brine shrimp. They start off as these cysts. If the conditions aren’t good in the lake, the females release dormant cysts; the embryos just wait in those for as long as it takes for things to get better. And then, when things are good again, the life cycle keeps going. They’re like time travellers, holding on until conditions improve.
Me: You’re so weird.
You: I know.
I really loved those Sea-Monkeys, but I didn’t say it then.
Love,
George
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Letter left between pages 78 and 79
Undated
Dear Stranger
If you have found this letter, then you have found this book. It’s an incredibly important book – all books are incredibly important – but this book, this particular copy of this book – started a shop. Howling Books. Don’t bother looking for it. By the time you read this letter, it will be gone.
This book was the first book on the shelf, the first book I gave my wife, and although we’re no longer together, it is proof of how we loved each other once. Proof that we walked into a florist one day, and dreamt into it another life.
So why haven’t I kept it? A girl called Rachel convinced me I shouldn’t. One morning, she found me crying in the reading garden. Weeping at the thought of my bookshop, my life, being knocked to the ground. It had been in our family for more than twenty years.
The bookshop is the building but not only the building, she told us. It is the books inside. People are not only their bodies. And if there is no hope of saving the things we love in their original form, we must save them how we can.
Every single book from our Letter Library, all of them marked with lives, has transmigrated to other shops. One by one, we snuck them into shops, and placed them on the shelves. Sometimes, the end begins.
Michael
Rachel
the specks of him travelling
We spend all of February working on the transmigration.
We are moving the books to preserve the memories in them, the thoughts on the pages. We secretly place the books in other stores, around the city.
At night, when I can’t sleep, I think about those books, and I like the thought that Michael’s copy of Great Expectations now belongs to someone else. They are reading Michael’s thoughts – his passion for Sophia, in the passion Pip had for Estella. His passion is there in his underlining, in his notes, in the inscription on the title page.
In April, Henry drives us all to Sea Ridge. We are returning to scatter Cal’s ashes. Lola, George and Martin are in the back of the van. Rose is following in her car. Frederick and Michael and Sophia are coming too.
We will take them to the water and let the current have them. I will love the idea that a speck of Cal might make it to Mexico, given the right weather and conditions. I’ll think about this over the years, the specks of him travelling.
Hiroko is in New York, but we’re playing the CD of her and Lola’s musical history as we drive. I’m not thinking about endings, though. I’m thinking about beginnings. Rose has agreed that Mum and Gran and me can all live with her next year, while I do Year 12 again. She’s started building walls in the warehouse, in preparation. Each room, because of the way it’s designed, leads into another room, though. Rose doesn’t love the idea, but she’s coming around to the fact that she and Gran will be connected.
Henry puts his hand on my knee as I wait for the water to appear – first in small triangles and then in deep scoops. Henry is worried, because I’m going back to the water, to where I lost Cal. It will be fine and it won’t be. It will be terrible and good.
The past is with me; the present is here. The future is unmapped and changeable. Ours for the imagining: spreading out before us. Sunlight-filled, deep blue, and the darkness.
Acknowledgements
There are many, many people to thank for helping me with Words in Deep Blue. Thank you Catherine Drayton, my brilliant agent – without you, the book would not be finished. Thank you Claire Craig, my wonderful publisher – you read so many drafts, gave so much detailed feedback. Thank you Ali Lavau, Jodie De Vantier, and Georgia Douglas – my brilliant Australian editors. Thank you also to my brilliant US editors – Allison Wortche and Karen Greenberg, and the many, many other editors that read my manuscript. (More thanks to you to come in the US edition.)
Thank you Mel for my gorgeous cover. Thank you to the people at Midland for the typesetting and the design. Thanks to Alison Arnold, Emma Schwartz, Elizabeth Abbott, Diana Francavilla and Kirsten Matthews for your constant support and editing ears. Thank you to Gabriella for letting me use your desk that one time and Lewis and Harriet for inspiration. Thank you Fiona Wood, Simmone Howell and Gabrielle Wang for everything writing and friendship. Over the last five years, I have spoken to many young adults who have generously given advice and suggestions – thank you, all. Thanks to my family for advice and love, especially Esther, Charlie, Ella, Declan, Callum, Tom and Dan. Thanks to Michael Kitson – for advice about writing and bookshops, and for marrying me while I was in the midst of a writing muddle. Last, but not least, thanks to the booksellers – old and new – and thanks to writers, without whom the world would be a terrible place, bleak beyond imagining.
About Cath Crowley
Cath Crowley studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT and works as both a freelance writer in Melbourne and a creative writing teacher. Words In Deep Blue is her sixth novel, following the three Gracie Faltrain novels and the award-winning Chasing Charlie Duskin and Graffiti Moon. To find out more about Cath, please visit cathcrowley.com.au.
Also by Cath Crowley
The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain
Gracie Faltrain Takes Control
Gracie Faltrain Gets it Right (Finally)
Chasing Charlie Duskin
Graffiti Moon
Cath Crowley
Graffiti Moon
&nbs
p; Lucy is in love with Shadow, a mysterious graffiti artist.
Ed thought he was in love with Lucy, until she broke his nose.
Dylan loves Daisy, but throwing eggs at her probably wasn’t the best way to show it.
Jazz and Leo are slowly encircling each other.
An intense and exhilarating 24 hours in the lives of four teenagers on the verge: of adulthood, of HSC, of finding out just who they are, and who they want to be.
A lyrical new YA novel from the award-winning author of Chasing Charlie Duskin and the Gracie Faltrain series.
Shortlisted
Children’s Book Council Awards
Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards
Winner
NSW’s Premier’s Literary Awards: Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature
Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, YA fiction
Cath Crowley
Chasing Charlie Duskin
Charlie Duskin is running.
Fleeing from failures and memories and friends who have given up on her. And she’s not only running, she’s chasing things – like a father who will talk to her, friends who don’t think she’s as invisible as a piece of cling wrap, and an experience with a boy in which she doesn’t look like an idiot.
But Charlie Duskin is about to have the best summer of her life. She’s about to meet a friend who’ll change her forever. She’s about to fall in love. She just doesn’t know it yet.
THE GRACIE FALTRAIN SERIES
Cath Crowley
The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain
STAR (noun): any large body like the sun, intensely hot and producing its own energy by nuclear reactions