Second-hand books are full of mysteries, which is why I like them.
Frederick walks in while I’m thinking that. He’s a bit of a mystery himself. He’s been a regular here since the day we opened. According to Mum and Dad, Frederick was our first official customer. He was fifty then, but he’s seventy now, or thereabouts. He’s an elegant man who loves grey suits, deep blue ties, and Derek Walcott.
For as long as I’ve been book hunting, as long as the shop’s been open, Frederick has been looking for a particular edition of Walcott poems. He could order a new copy, but he’s looking for a second-hand one. He’s not looking for a first edition. He’s looking for a particular book that he owned once. And something like that, he’s likely never to find.
I don’t think he should stop looking, though. Who am I to say he won’t find it? The odds are stacked against him, but impossible things happen. Maybe I’ll find it myself. Maybe it won’t be too far from home. Second-hand books have a way of travelling, sure. But what travels forward can come back.
Frederick won’t tell me what’s in that Walcott he’s looking for. He’s a private man, a polite man, with a flower permanently fresh in his lapel and the saddest eyeballs I’ve ever seen.
I hand him the three copies I’ve found over the last month. He dismisses the first two but hesitates over the third. The way he holds it makes me wonder if maybe I’ve found the one. He opens the cover, turns the pages, and then tries not to look disappointed.
He takes out his wallet, and I tell him he doesn’t have to keep buying the books if I haven’t found the right one. ‘They sell, and I’ll go on looking for it anyway.’
He insists, though, and I imagine someone walking into Frederick’s house after he’s died and finding hundreds of versions of the same Walcott book, and wondering why they’re there.
Frederick isn’t the only regular. There’s Al, who reads a lot of science fiction and looks like someone who does. He’s been working for years on a novel about a guy who’s jacked into a virtual utopia. We’re all looking for a way to tell him that it’s already been written. There’s James, who comes in to buy books on the Romans. There’s Aaron, who arrives drunk at least once every couple of months, banging on the door late at night, because he needs to use the bathroom, Inez who just seems to like the smell of old books, and Jett, who comes in to steal the hardcovers so he can sell them to any other second-hand place that’ll take them.
There’s Frieda, who’s been playing Scrabble here with Frederick for ten years. She’s about his age and wears severe stylish dresses, and you just know she used to be one of those English teachers who had fifty eyes in the classroom and a supernatural knowledge of Shakespeare. She started the monthly book club, which Howling Books hosts but doesn’t run.
The same people come every time. I set up the chairs, open the door for the teachers and librarians, put out a whole lot of wine and cheese, and then stand back. I hardly ever join in the discussion, but if it interests me, and it pretty much always does, I read the book afterwards. Last month they read Kirsty Eagar’s Summer Skin. George read it after the book club because they talked about the sex scenes, and maybe I read it partly for that reason, too. But mostly I read it because of the way Frieda talked about the main character, Jess Gordon. She reminded me, just a little, of that best friend I had once, Rachel Sweetie. I liked the book – George did too – so we put a copy in the Letter Library.
The Library is the thing that Howling Books is known for, at least locally. We get a write-up every now and then, on sites like Broadsheet, as something special to do in the city.
It’s up the back, near the stairs to our flat, separate from the rest of the shelves. In it we keep copies of books that people particularly love – fiction, non-fiction, romance and sci-fi, poetry and atlases and cookbooks. Customers are allowed to write in the books in the Letter Library. They can circle words that they love, highlight lines. They can leave notes in the margins, leave thoughts about the meaning of things. We’ve had to get multiple copies of works by people like Tom Stoppard and John Green because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Fault in Our Stars are crammed with notes from readers.
It’s called the Letter Library because a lot of people write more than a note in the margin – they write whole letters and put them between the pages of the books. Letters to the poets, to their thief ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend who stole their copy of High Fidelity. Mostly people write to strangers who love the same books as them – and some stranger, somewhere, writes back.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Written on title page: This book belongs to George Jones. So don’t sell it in the bookshop, Henry.
Letters left between pages 44 and 45
23 November – 7 December 2012
Dear George
You’re probably surprised to find this letter in your book. Maybe you’re wondering who put it here. I plan to leave that a mystery, at least for now.
I haven’t actually left it, yet – I’m still in my room writing it – and I’m sure getting it into the pages won’t be easy. I’m thinking I’ll put it in when you’ve excused yourself from class to go to the bathroom and left the book on your desk. But I know you like to find things in second-hand books, so I’ll give it my best shot.
And here it is, you’re reading it, so I must have been successful.
I know you’re curious, so I’ll tell you this much -I’m a guy, your age, in at least one of your classes.
If you’d like to write back, you can put this book into the Letter Library at your bookstore and leave a letter between pages 44 and 45.
I’m not a stalker. I like books. (I like you.)
Pytheas (obviously not my real name)
To Pytheas – or Stacy, or whichever friend of hers wrote this. Stay away from me. If I catch you in my shop, I’ll call the police.
George
Dear George
Thank you for writing back, even if it’s only to say that you plan to call the police on me.
I don’t want to make you angry, but I’m not one of Stacy’s friends. I don’t really like Stacy and she definitely doesn’t like me. This isn’t a joke. You’re funny, and smart and I’d really like to write to you.
Pytheas (Would any of Stacy’s friends call themselves Pytheas?)
Pytheas
So you’re not a friend of Stacy’s? Prove it.
George
Dear George
That’s a hard one. How can I prove to you that I’m not playing a joke? If we were a mathematical equation, then it would be easy. But since we’re not, you might just have to take a chance.
I’ll tell you some things about me. Maybe that would help? I like science. I like maths. I like solving problems. I believe in ghosts. I’m particularly interested in time travel and space and the ocean.
I haven’t decided what I want to do when I leave school, but I think I’ll either study the ocean or space. Before that, I’ll travel. The first place I want to go is the Atacama Desert. It’s 1000 kilometres long, running from Peru’s southern border into Chile. It faces onto the South Pacific Ocean and it’s known as the driest place on earth. There are parts where it has never rained and since things don’t rot without moisture, if something died there, it would be preserved forever. Imagine that. You can see the desert on page 50 of the atlas in the Letter Library. (I’ve also marked some other places I want to see in South America.)
Will you tell me some things about you?
Pytheas
Pytheas
Why are you writing to me? According to everyone at school, I’m a freak.
Dear George
I quite like freaks.
Pytheas
Rachel
a dream of my past
I drive out of Sea Ridge early on Friday afternoon in Gran’s car. It’s old – a 1990s dark blue Volvo – but it’s mine. It was Gran’s idea for me to move in with Rose and as
a way of encouraging me to go, she gave me transport.
In one of our sessions, Gus, my counsellor, asked me to imagine how I’d feel leaving the ocean. ‘Light,’ I’d told him, thinking about the road winding away from the sea. Gran’s house is built so every window catches a glimpse of water. I wake every morning in the blue briny air and have to remember that I hate it.
In the city I won’t have to run into my ex-boyfriend, Joel, or the teachers I’d disappointed, or the friends I’d drifted from. I wouldn’t have to see people from the beach lifeguard club where I’d worked before Cal died, or see the kids I’d taught to swim at the local pool.
But everything’s working against relief today – the colour of sky, the light. It’s the exact time that Mum, Cal and I arrived here three years ago. We looked for the ocean as we approached, the way we always did, spotting it first in small triangles and then in deep scoops.
Cal had one of his atlases open on his lap, an old one, drawn in the nineteenth century. He’d found it at a second-hand store that day. I turned to the back seat and saw him smoothing his hands across the pages of the Southern Ocean, paler at the edges, dark blue in the deep.
We pooled facts about it as we drove. Fourth largest ocean. Has seventeen thousand nine hundred and sixty-eight kilometres of coastline and an area of twenty million three hundred and twenty-seven thousand kilometres squared. An average depth of between four thousand and five thousand metres. I remember the three of us went quiet for a moment, excited by the scale.
In the boot there’s a box of Cal’s things that Gran put in there before I left. I wonder if the atlas is amongst his things, but push the thought away. I didn’t want the box with me but Gran didn’t give me a choice. It’s full of items that Gran can’t categorise so she wants me to sort through it. There’s a question mark on the side of the box and the word miscellaneous written under that. I hate that Cal’s life ended as a set of boxes with words written on the side like sporting goods, hobbies, computer equipment and entertainment. I think about pulling to the roadside and hurling it over the cliffs.
Instead I drive faster. I take the turn inland and push the car as fast as it will go. The shrubs and the water move backwards in a blur, and I imagine that time is rewinding, back to when the world was some other place. I keep my eyes on the road ahead and wait for the relief of concrete, and the absence of sea.
It’s getting dark by the time I arrive and I miss the first turn-off to Gracetown on the freeway, so I have to get off at the next exit. This means I have to drive back through Charlotte Hill along High Street, past Howling Books.
I haven’t been back to the city since we moved. I crawl with the traffic and have the strangest feeling – like I’m driving through a dream of my past. Small things have changed: Beat Clothing is now Gracetown Organics. The DVD store is now a café. Other than that it’s the same.
When I pull level with Howling Books, Henry’s sitting behind the counter on a stool: heels hooked on the rung at the bottom of it, elbows on knees, book in hands, completely focused. The only sign that three years have passed is that I don’t want to kiss him. There’s a mild urge to kick him, but that’s about it.
Amy’s not there, but she’ll be around, somewhere close by. I might not have replied to Henry’s letters, but I read every one. I held them together with a fat rubber band, shoved far at the back of my sock drawer. I know he and Amy kissed on that last night of the world. I know they started then.
Before the traffic moves, Henry comes outside to take in the books that are on shelves in the street. The breeze shifts his hair around. It’s got that same blue-black shine. I watch him and test myself, but no matter how I stare, there’s no haze in my chest, no flicker in the skies.
I think back to those first few months in Sea Ridge, when every time I thought about him I burned with anger and embarrassment. When the only thing that took the blush off my skin was the sea.
I’m relieved when the traffic moves.
Rose lives a block back from High Street, which is crammed with shops selling coffee and clothes and records. The north of the city always felt like the second-hand side of town to Cal and me, and we liked it. Over the river, in the south, there are wide streets and new clothes, but if I have to live in the city, I prefer it here. The cinema shows old and new films, walls are covered in graffiti, crooked powerlines cross the sky.
Rose’s last flat, over the road from the hospital, only had one bedroom. When Cal and I stayed there she put a mattress on the lounge room floor for us. Her new place is an orange-brick warehouse with CAR REPAIRS written in faded letters across the outside. There’s a wooden door on the left, and double wooden doors on the right, which must be where they drove the cars in.
Rose is my favourite aunt – she was Cal’s, too – but she has always been the most elusive. She appears and disappears. When she appeared in Sea Ridge she was always mowing the lawn or cleaning out the garage or smoking in the dunes. When she disappeared, it was always to somewhere exotic – travelling through Africa, working in London, volunteering in Chile.
Once I asked her why she didn’t have kids.
‘I never wanted them,’ she said. ‘I’m too busy. Plus, I swear too fucking much.’
But I know she didn’t mind Cal and me being around. I’m told that after I was born, I cried all the time; Rose would stop by after her shift at the hospital and hold me, so Mum and Dad could get some sleep. Mum would wake in the night and hear Rose reciting the periodic table. ‘It’s the only story I know,’ she’d said.
Before I get out of the car I send Mum and Gran a quick text to say I’ve arrived, then I put my phone on silent and take my suitcases out of the boot. I leave Cal’s box where it is, locked inside.
‘I heard she gave you the car,’ Rose says when she opens the door. ‘How’d it feel to drive here?’
‘Pretty good.’
‘You were scared the whole way, right?’
‘Half the way,’ I tell her, looking around. It’s messy because she’s renovating, but that’s not the problem. ‘There are no walls,’ I say, and she taps on the outside one.
‘There are no indoor walls.’
It’s one huge room with polished concrete floors, the front all windows. There’s a kitchen in the back right corner and two spaces at the front set up as bedrooms.
I can see straight into Rose’s life now. Her bed is unmade, a blue mess with a chest of drawers next to it and a shelf full of her medical books. Her clothes, mostly jeans and t-shirts, are lying on the floor or half out of drawers. There’s a clothes rack with some little black dresses, some long boots underneath.
My corner of the warehouse is near the front windows. There’s a bed with a pile of sheets on it, a chest of drawers and an empty clothes rack.
‘Obviously the long-term plan is to have walls, but until then we’ll just have to respect each other’s space. The bathroom has walls.’ Rose points to a metal door near the kitchen.
I look at where she’s pointing and try to be comforted by that fact.
‘You don’t like it?’ she asks.
‘I do. It’s just not what I expected.’
But what I’m really thinking is, there’s nowhere to hide.
I don’t have much to unpack, and there’s no food in the house, so Rose and I leave for the supermarket. I’m thinking about the warehouse on the way and wondering what I’ve let myself into. I’ve gotten used to being alone and doing my own thing – walking to the beach, skipping school to sleep, crying if I want to, in my room where no one sees.
‘I’m talking to you,’ Rose says.
‘And?’
She points through the windshield. ‘We’re here. You get the trolley. I’ll meet you inside.’
Rose isn’t much of a cook so we buy things that I can make or things we can heat. It feels good to shop in the city, and not in Sea Ridge, where everyone knows everyone, and everyone still gives us looks. This supermarket is new. Cal and I never stood in the chocolate aisl
e deliberating between peanut or plain M&M’s. Rose doesn’t deliberate at all as it turns out. She puts both bags in the trolley.
‘Your gran says you’re not eating enough,’ she says, and we keep moving. ‘She also says you’ve turned into a zombie who hides in her room, sleeps all day and spends her nights at the beach with her mother, who has always turned into a zombie.’
Rose throws cans of tuna in the trolley while I’m trying to get a look at myself in the cake tins to see if I do actually look like the undead. The news isn’t entirely good.
‘She has no idea what a zombie actually is,’ Rose says. ‘So I wouldn’t worry.’
‘Cal introduced her to zombies. Shaun of the Dead is her top movie of all time.’
‘Jesus,’ Rose says. ‘We didn’t even get to watch TV when we were growing up. Now she’s watching Simon Pegg films and telling me my niece needs to have sex. But don’t worry,’ she says, looking at my horrified face. ‘I set her straight about that. I told her to leave you alone.’
‘Good.’
‘I told her zombies don’t have sex.’
I put down the cake tin and we keep walking. Rose moves along the aisle complaining about the volume of Gran calls she’s had lately and how every one of them has been about me. ‘Late at night, early in the morning,’ she says, throwing crackers into the trolley.
Gran and Rose have fought for the sake of fighting all the way back to when Rose was three, or so the family history goes. According to Gran, Rose swears too much, works too much, and doesn’t come home nearly enough.
‘If she’s sent you to me, you’re in trouble.’