‘I tried to pass Year 12,’ I say, in an effort to defend myself.
‘If you were trying, you’d have passed. You could pass Year 12 with your eyes closed.’
I think of myself lying out the back of school when I should have been in class – the sun on my face and the warm grass on my back. ‘My eyes were closed most of the time.’
‘Life starts again,’ Rose says, as if that’s something she can order.
When we get back to the car I notice a flyer tucked under the windshield wipers advertising a band called The Hollows. I know immediately that it’s Lola’s band. It’s the name she and Hiroko chose back in Year 9, when it existed only in their imaginations. It was written all over the covers of their exercise books, their folders, their school bags. Lola designed t-shirts and had them printed before the band officially existed.
I study the flyer while Rose packs the last of the shopping bags into the car. There’s a picture on it of the two of them at a bus stop, waiting with Lola’s bass and all of Hiroko’s percussion instruments. ‘Old friends,’ I explain to Rose.
‘Old friends write,’ a voice says, and I look up to see Lola standing there.
It’s not all that surprising since she lives close by, and she’s obviously here putting band flyers under windshield wipers. It feels like a small miracle, though, as if she’s slipped through the air from the past: short and curvy, long brown hair and olive skin. I want to hug her, but if I do that I might spill everything and cry right here in the parking lot.
‘It’s been too long,’ I say to fill the silence.
‘Way too long,’ she says, twisting an earring that looks, in the dimness of the car park, like a small nail. ‘I thought you might be dead.’
‘I’d have told you,’ I say. ‘If I were dead.’
She doesn’t smile, but she stops twisting the nail. If I told her about Cal, she’d forgive me immediately, but she’d feel guilty when there’s nothing to feel guilty about. Plus, it doesn’t feel right to blurt it across a grubby car park while Rose is packing toilet paper into the car.
‘Year 12 sort of took over everything,’ I tell her and she steps forward a little and touches my hair as if she’s just noticed that it’s short and bleached now.
Her eyes roam all over me, over my black t-shirt and jeans, over my skinny frame. She’s in a short silver dress and I try not to look as faded as I feel. ‘You don’t like it?’ I ask, running my hand over my hair.
‘I like it,’ she says.
‘Are you forgiving me?’
She stares for a while and then takes the flyer from my hands. ‘The Hollows are playing at a place called Laundry tonight,’ she says, scribbling her phone number on the paper. ‘Henry’ll be there, and if you’re really sorry, you’ll come anyway.’
She gives me back the flyer, kisses me on the cheek, swings her leg back over her bike and cycles off before I’ve got time to think of an excuse and say no. I can hear her shouting, ‘Thank God you’re back,’ as she pedals away.
I tell Rose about Lola and Hiroko as we leave the car park. Lola’s on vocals and guitar. Hiroko plays the glockenspiel and some other percussion instruments I can’t name. They do some covers but mostly they write their own songs. As I talk I can see the two of them in class, passing notes with lyrics written on them while the teacher isn’t looking.
I put the flyer in my pocket. I miss Lola, and I want her to forgive me, but there’s no way I’m going to Laundry tonight. Life’s depressing enough without seeing Henry and Amy kissing.
‘Speaking of old school friends,’ Rose says. ‘I bumped into Sophia the other day – your friend Henry’s mum? It was good timing too. I’d just found out that the job I got you at the hospital fell through, and when I mentioned it to her she offered you a job at Howling Books instead.’
Rose is speaking quickly, so it takes me a while to absorb what she’s saying, and then think about what it means. Working next to Henry for eight awkward hours every day. Even if we work different shifts, there’ll be no avoiding him. He’s always in the bookstore. He sleeps in the bookstore. He’ll be lying on the fiction couch talking constantly about Amy.
‘No,’ I say.
‘No?’
‘No,’ I say again, more forcefully. ‘Thanks but no thanks. Tell Sophia I found another job.’
‘Have you found another job?’
‘Obviously not.’
‘Then you’re taking this one. You start at ten, tomorrow morning. Sophia said she was looking for someone with people and computer skills, and that describes you perfectly.’
‘I no longer have people skills.’
‘This is true, but I chose not to share that with her. I didn’t share anything else, either. They don’t know about Cal. They don’t know you failed Year 12. They think you’re taking a year off before university. All they need is someone to catalogue the stock and create a database. You can do that, right?’
I can do it, I admit. I just don’t want to do it.
I don’t want to explain the humiliating situation with Henry, but since I don’t have a choice I tell her about liking him, about the last night of the world, Amy, the letter, my declaration of love, his ignoring my declaration of love. Any other human would understand why I couldn’t take that job.
‘You’ll just have to get over it.’
But Rose is not like any other human.
‘You want to hide. You want to be miserable, but that’s not happening. You’re taking the job at Howling Books. You’re not spending even one day lying on your bed staring at the ceiling.’ She parks the car opposite the warehouse. I get out and slam the door.
I’m more determined with every bag that I take inside that I’m not working with Henry. ‘It will be deeply, deeply annoying. It will be humiliating.’
‘It’ll be life,’ Rose says. ‘And you have to jump back in sometime.’
‘I’d rather clean toilets. Let me clean toilets. I beg you. Let me look for a job cleaning toilets.’ I start shoving cans onto shelves.
‘You still like him,’ Rose says, passing them to me.
‘I don’t still like him. I don’t like anyone.’
Maybe some people have loads of sex to help them get over their grief, but I went the opposite way. I broke up with Joel. I haven’t kissed anyone since the funeral. I don’t want to kiss anyone. I don’t want to see anyone kiss anyone. I definitely don’t want to see Henry kiss Amy.
‘This is my condition for you living here,’ Rose says, her voice running under my thoughts. ‘You get up every morning; you go to work. You either do that, or I enrol you in Year 12 again. You’re eighteen, so you can decide what to do. You can stay here and do what I say or you can move out.’
I put the last can on the shelf.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rose says into the quiet. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound that brutal. We’re all just so fucking worried about you.’
I go into the bathroom and shut the door because it’s the only door to shut. I stand looking at myself in the mirror. I’m someone I recognise but don’t. I cut off my long hair about a week after the funeral. It was a strange night. The thing I remember most about it is the sky. I hadn’t seen one like it before. Flat and starless, as though the world had become a box with a lid on it. I couldn’t sleep. I sat on the balcony, staring up for a long time, knowing there were planets and stars and galaxies, but not believing in them anymore.
I like there being a line between the Rachel I was before Cal died – the girl with long blonde hair, the scientist, the girl who wore dresses because it was easier to strip down to bathers underneath – and the Rachel with cropped hair, the one who doesn’t wear bathers anymore and doesn’t care what she looks like.
‘I just want you to be you again.’ Rose taps her nails on the door and calls my name. ‘Do you remember that day,’ she says, and I know what day she means without her naming a date or a place or a time. She starts to describe it, and I want her to stop, but I don’t want to make a big de
al about it. Nothing much and everything happened.
Rose had come to visit in the summer before I started Year 12. She’d arrived home from Chile, turning up in the early morning the way she usually did, appearing in the kitchen with coffee and croissants and the papers. It was summer. Hot by first light. We ate on the balcony, and Rose told us she’d visited Cape Horn, the headland at the southern end of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Chile. Beyond that are the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, separated by the Drake Passage. ‘The connecting point between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans,’ Cal said, reading from the screen of his phone, pushing up his glasses with his knuckles, scrolling through more information. While he read from the screen, Rose put her feet up on the balcony and said, ‘First trip. Wherever you go, separately or together, wherever it is, I’ll fund it.’
Rose didn’t make promises she didn’t intend to keep. Cal and I started planning. We’d go together, that much was certain. I’d wait till he finished Year 12. The hard part was deciding where.
‘The offer still stands,’ Rose says tonight. ‘Pick a place.’
I pick the past.
The bathroom is too small. Rose keeps tapping. The strange girl stares from the mirror. I think about how good it would feel to get in the car and drive again, to concentrate and not think.
I unlock the bathroom door and come out.
‘Can we at least talk about it?’ she asks, and I tell her sure, we can talk.
‘But tomorrow. Tonight I think I’ll go to see Lola’s band.’
I take the flyer, and Rose gives me a spare key to the warehouse. She looks worried, so I kiss her on the cheek. ‘Relax. You got through to me. I’m living again.’
‘I’m not an idiot. You’ll drive around all night to avoid talking.’
I think she’s about to yell some more, but instead she thinks for a minute and then relaxes against the counter. ‘Okay.’ She picks up an apple. ‘Go out. Good idea.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, and I’m on the way to the front door when she calls to me.
‘But take a picture of Lola on stage. Text it to me,’ she says and bites the apple. ‘Show me proof of this life.’
Too smart for her own good is how Gran describes Rose: too adventurous, too honest, too unconventional, too loud. These are the qualities I love about Rose. Until now, when they’re working against me. I’ll have to go to the club, but first I drive around to old places, putting off the inevitable for a while longer.
Everything seems the same: the streets, the shops, the houses. I pass Gracetown High, where Mum taught Science and I went to school. Cal went to a private school across town that had a good music program because he played the piano.
I park outside our old place on Matthews Street, a three-bedroom Californian bungalow, painted cream. Whoever lives there now has kept our chairs out the front and the plants, but there are different bikes leaning on the side, and different cars in the driveway.
The back of the house was glass when we lived there. I remember Cal and me sitting in the lounge room one night when a summer storm started. Cal and I both loved storms. We loved the accumulation of charge in the air, electricity building in the clouds above and on the earth’s surface, moving towards each other.
Cal was interested in science, and he was good at it, but he didn’t love it, not the way that I did. He liked science because of all the possibilities, but he believed in other things like time travel and the supernatural. I remember once we had this argument about whether ghosts existed. Cal thought they did. I thought they didn’t. Mum explained to us why, according to the second law of thermodynamics, they couldn’t exist. ‘Humans are a highly ordered system and once we’re disordered beyond repair, we don’t reorder.’
Cal chose to believe in them anyway. I sided with science.
But after the funeral, after everyone had left the church, I stayed, waiting for Cal’s ghost. I still didn’t believe in them but I had this crazy idea that because he did, they might be possible. ‘See, Rach. I’m here,’ I imagined him saying, as he held up his arm to show the sunlight shining through. Ghosts are nothing but dust and imagination, though, and eventually the funeral director told me I had to leave. There was another funeral starting soon.
I think about Rose’s ultimatum. Stay here or go home. Cal’s everywhere, but at least in the city I won’t think about those waves that took him.
The dreams of the silver fish make me sad, but they’re not the worst ones I have. The worst are where I’m tangled in the water, screaming his name, hauling him onto sand, desperate to give him my breath.
I check the address of Laundry, and start the car.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Letters left between pages 44 and 45
8 December – 16 December 2012
Okay, Pytheas, I’ll write back, but only because I feel sorry for you. What kind of guy likes freaks?
I’ll tell you about me, but first I have some questions. Who is Pytheas? Have we spoken before? Why do I never see you putting letters into the book? I’ve been watching very closely.
George
Dear George
Are you always this suspicious? I don’t mind, but I wonder if you trust anyone. You’re always on your own at school. I asked to sit at your table in the cafeteria once. You looked at me, said sure, and then got up and walked away. Not exactly welcoming.
So, Pytheas – I’m glad you asked. He lived in 300 BC, and he was the first person (at least on record) to write about the Midnight Sun. He’s the first known scientific visitor to the Arctic, and he was the first person to record that the moon causes the tides.
You never see me putting letters in the book because I’m incredibly stealthy.
Pytheas
P.S. I saw that you marked the United States on the map – I’d like to go there too. My sister and I would like to dive off the coast of California some day.
Okay, Pytheas: things about me.
I like the bookshop. I read a lot. Some favourites are Hugh Howey, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, John Green, Tolstoy (just read Anna Karenina), J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, Melina Marchetta, Charlotte Brontë and Donna Tartt. Lately (you know this) I’m getting into the mash-ups of the classics (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, that kind of thing).
I like dumplings. My birthday is the first day of winter; I actually like being cold (everywhere except my feet). Music-wise I like The Finches, Jane’s Addiction, Amber Coffman and Wish.
I’m sorry about that day in the cafeteria. I don’t remember it. But if I’d known you were you, then I would have hung around.
George
Dear George
Thank you. I accept your apology. If I ever get the courage to walk up to you again, I’ll be expecting a warmer reception.
I actually do understand. I changed schools too – but I’ve made a good friend now, so it’s bearable. I think you’d like him, I know he’d like you. You’re in his English class, and he thinks you’re interesting. He liked the book report you gave on Liar. He told me you said fuck and didn’t realise it.
I haven’t heard of those bands, but I downloaded some of their music. I like Wish. They sound kind of dream-like. Have you heard of The Dandy Warhols? I think you might like them.
I read a lot of fiction and I like comics, but I love non-fiction. Like I said, I’m into time theories. I’ve been reading a lot about the growing block universe. I don’t entirely understand the theory but I like trying to get my head around it.
Pytheas
P.S. I do like freaks, but I don’t think you’re one. Or, if you are, it’s in the best possible way. You’re gorgeous. (I’ll never tell you who I am now.) I like the blue stripe in your hair and I like how you give answers in class and don’t care what people say. I like how you’re always reading interesting stuff and I like that you work in a bookstore.
P.P.S. I’ve left a book in the Letter
Library for you. It’s one of mine, so you can keep it – Mark Laita’s Sea. It’s one of my all-time favourites. I’ve marked the North Pacific Giant octopus. It can change its appearance and texture to look like even the most intricately patterned coral. Its life span is only about four years, which is actually longer than other species.
Dear Pytheas
So I read up on the theory of time you mentioned. If I believe the growing block universe theory, then I have to believe that the past actually exists. So while I’m here in the present, I’m also there in the past? That makes NO sense, Pytheas. And if the past exists like a place does, why can’t I travel to it?
Thank you for the book. It’s very beautiful. Are the photographs enhanced? The fish seem unbelievably bright. I’ve been looking at the pictures in almost complete darkness, with a small torch to shine on the fish. I feel like I’m underwater. Have you done that?
The giant octopus is amazing, sure. But my favourite photograph is of the jellyfish. I go to the aquarium sometimes to watch them. They look like ghosts in the water.
Thanks for all the compliments you’re giving me – I’d give some back but I can’t (obviously). Lately I’m distracted in class, because I can’t stop wondering who you are. You don’t seem like you’re one of the popular kids (I mean that in the best possible way).
Are you ever planning on telling me who you are? Or will we keep writing like this forever?
George
Dear George
I thought it might be getting weird that I’m at school and you don’t know who I am. But I just can’t tell you. I’m worried that if you knew, it might change things, and I don’t want to stop writing.
I like the jellyfish too. Did you know that they’ve been in the oceans for more than five hundred million years? There’s a lake in The Republic of Palau, Jellyfish Lake, that’s flooded with them. My sister wants to dive in Palau – but not in that lake.
The growing block universe does mess with your idea of time, doesn’t it? Think about it like this – the universe is growing, and as it grows, slices of space-time are added to it. As slices are added, you move forward. Travel to the past is impossible, though. Space-time moves in one direction – forward.