She starts arguing, but I won’t take no for an answer. ‘Leave now, and be back at the bookshop by nine. You need to drive George because I want you to talk to her about Martin on the way. I want to know what she’s thinking.’
‘She’s thinking you should butt out of her life, Henry,’ she says, packing up her computer and her things and leaving without saying she’ll come.
I wave at her through window as she’s getting into her car. She waves her middle finger back.
‘We’re all set,’ I tell Martin before he leaves. ‘Yep. I have a great feeling about tonight.’
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Letters left between pages 74 and 75
15 January 2016
Dear George
I’m looking forward to going to the party tonight. I think it’ll be fun.
Martin
P.S. I like the idea of the Letter Library.
Martin
Never write to me in this book again.
George
Dear George
It’s lovely to get your reply. You’re as charming in print as you are in person. Why can’t I write to you in this book? I see you checking it all the time.
Martin
Martin
I check it because I write to someone else in this book. It’s our book. Not your book.
George
Dear George
Can I write to you in another book? We work together. I’d like to be friends. Please? It’s a LONG day, cataloguing all the books in the store. I’m typing out the names of EVERY SINGLE BOOK here. No matter what you think I’ve done (what have I done to you?) it can’t be so bad as to make me do this with NO relief.
Martin
Martin
You hang out with a girl who calls me a freak.
George
Dear George
I’ve never called you a freak. I don’t think you are a freak. In fact, I’ve been trying to be your friend at school since you started. You’re the one who ignores or insults me on a regular basis. Do you have any evidence that I’m a bad guy?
In the whole time that I’ve known you, I’ve always told Stacy that you’re an interesting person. It seems to me that you’re treating me like Stacy treats you. I think, at the very least, you should give me a trial as your friend, as well as your employee. It’s summer. Can’t we forget how we are at school? Maybe we could call a truce?
Martin
Martin
Okay. Since you seem like you’re about to cry, you can write to me. But NOT in this book. Write to me in Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore. I saw you reading it and there’s a copy in the Letter Library – leave your letters between pages 8 and 9.
George
Dear George
I’m absolutely overwhelmed by your offer of friendship. Thank you. Really, thank you. It’s almost too much. I look forward to all future correspondence.
Martin
Rachel
a constant rain inside
I leave Howling Books, making sure that Henry sees my raised middle finger. I raise it again for impact and sound the horn so Martin knows I’m ready.
I don’t want to drive him home but on my first day Sophia offered to fill my car with petrol if I took him because he has to be home by six so he can look after his sister until his mums finish work. That means we have to leave by five, which is a plus for me.
I’m ready to leave Howling Books when I walk in the door each morning and start the job of cataloguing the random, boring thoughts of every person who’s passed through the pages. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, drums through me every minute of every day, a constant rain inside. I. Don’t. Care.
There are five hundred books in the Letter Library. Maybe more. Five hundred is my estimate. Ten shelves, roughly fifty books on each one, maybe sixty. There are marks on almost every page of every book: some are wordless underlines; some are notes in the margins. Most of the books have a note or a letter left in them, and for some reason, Michael wants a record of every one.
‘First I need you to alphabetise them,’ Michael had said on Monday. ‘And enter their details – title, author, publisher, date of publication. Then I’d like a record of all the letters in the books, the contents of the letters, and a record of the main markings in the margins. If it’s possible, I’d also like a record of the main words and quotes that are underlined.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ I looked around but Henry was busy serving and George was busy ordering Martin around. ‘It’s not a joke on the new person?’
‘Not a joke, no,’ Michael said, running his eyes across all the books. ‘It’s a big job, and it’s not what Sophia hired you for exactly. But this is what I’d like you to catalogue. Martin can do the rest of the shop, but this is important.’
I’ve known Henry’s dad all my life, so I felt like I could be honest with him. ‘It’s insane, Michael. It’s completely insane. Not to mention impossible.’
‘Not impossible,’ he said calmly, taking a sip from his Howling Books coffee mug, the one that has a picture on it of a book baying at the moon. It looks out of place at the lips of a man wearing a blue cardigan and slippers for shoes.
‘No, not impossible, I guess, but it’ll take at least a year and you’re selling soon. You don’t have a year,’ I said, trying to sound reasonable.
‘At most we have six months,’ he agreed. ‘Less, probably, so I’ll pay you overtime.’
‘I don’t want to work overtime,’ I said, but he was already walking away.
He left me standing there, feeling the way I did at school after the funeral, when everything the teachers asked me to do seemed stupid and overwhelming, and all I wanted to do was sleep.
Martin finally gets in the car and puts on his seatbelt without saying a word. I told him on our first trip that I’m a new driver and he shouldn’t take it personally, but I need total silence to drive. ‘The radio doesn’t bother me. Just actual voices in the car.’
I introduced the ban because it’s easier than answering his questions about Cal. I’ve been dodging questions all week about the beach, Year 12, Cal, Mum, university. It turns out even Martin knew my brother because they went to school together.
I wasn’t planning on keeping the lie I started at Laundry last Friday night going. But when Amy was in the store that Saturday morning she asked what course I’d been accepted into and there was no way I was telling her I’d failed. George was listening when I told her I was taking a year off. I haven’t been able to walk it back since.
Even if I wanted to tell Henry, there’s been no room in our conversations – he talks constantly about Amy. What’s worse than having to catalogue pointless love letters that won’t ever arrive because they’ve been mailed into the pages of a book? Having to listen to Henry talk about his love for Amy while I’m doing it.
It was clear from the moment I woke Henry on my first day that his kiss was a mistake, a drunken lunge that he barely remembered and hoped was a dream. ‘He’s panicking,’ Lola said, when she came over to quiz me about it. I sent her back with a message that I hoped would sting. ‘It made me miss Joel, that’s all.’
‘So you’re not still into Henry?’
‘I am no longer insane,’ I told her, and she left it at that.
I turn into Martin’s street, and the thought of his sister waiting inside for him hurts, like it has every day. I leave him walking up the path towards her, and head back across the river in the direction of Gus.
He phoned the warehouse on Monday to let me know he’d be in the city on Friday afternoon and if I felt like talking I could meet him at St Albert’s. ‘Call into emergency and get Rose to page me.’ Rose insisted that I see him today. She was the one who suggested Gus as a therapist. They’re old friends from medical school and she knew he lived near Sea Ridge.
The ER is only a short walk away from the car park and I’m inside before I’ve thought
through how much it’ll remind me of the day when Mum, Gran and I waited for news about Cal. We spent two hours praying that he was alive, the whole time knowing that he wasn’t.
Three people wait on the chairs in the corner. They’re holding hands, a pile of knuckles resting in the lap of the person in the middle, who looks like Gran. The woman on the right looks like a mother. I make the mistake of looking directly into the girl’s eyes.
I walk out of the waiting room and into the air. I’m planning on getting into my car and driving away when I see Gus walking towards me. He’s got two coffees stacked in one hand, and he’s waving at me with the other.
He looks behind me at the EMERGENCY sign and frowns. We walk across the road to the park and sit on a bench under a huge old maple to drink our coffees.
‘Sorry about the meeting place,’ he says, and I tell him it’s fine.
‘It doesn’t seem fine,’ he says.
‘There were people in there who looked like us. Like me and Mum and Gran.’
‘And how do you look?’ he asks.
‘Sad,’ I tell him, and he takes a drink from his coffee and says I don’t seem sad today. ‘You seem kind of angry.’
‘Intuitive,’ I say, and he tells me to stop being a smart alec and tell him what’s wrong.
‘Where does that phrase “smart alec’’ come from?’ I ask, buying myself some time. ‘Henry would probably know. His dad would definitely know.’
‘Do you like working with them?’ Gus asks.
‘Michael, Henry’s dad, has me cataloguing the Letter Library.’ I explain what it is, and how frustrating I’m finding the job.
‘Does it pay you well?’ Gus asks, and I nod. ‘And it’s a nice place to work?’
‘I can set my own hours. I get free coffee and breaks whenever I need them, I don’t have to serve customers unless Henry or George are on lunch. Martin’s nice, the guy who’s been hired to catalogue the rest of the store.’
‘If it’s just the monotony that’s getting to you, wear headphones. Listen to music.’
‘That’d stop the questions, I guess. People are asking about Cal.’ I watch the blue wren moving near our feet. I let myself get mesmerised by the detail of it. ‘I haven’t told them he’s dead.’
‘Maybe that’s what’s bothering you?’ Gus asks.
‘It’s that I don’t have patience for pointless stuff anymore. What’s Michael planning on doing with my catalogue anyway? It’ll sit in a file on his computer and one day he’ll delete it and I’ll have done all that work for nothing. Seems stupid when there are more important things to do.’
‘What more important things have you got to do?’ Gus asks. ‘I’m just curious.’
When I don’t answer, he tells me to try writing about what’s making me angry.
I really like Gus. More than that, I respect him. But today I want to tell him to fuck off so badly I have to cover my mouth so the words don’t escape.
‘Any time you need me, call, and we can arrange another session,’ he says, and we spend the rest of our time staring at the wren, pecking at food we can’t see, somewhere under the grass.
I pull up at the bookstore at nine. George is waiting out the front and as soon as she sees my car she calls to Henry that she’s leaving, and gets in the front seat. ‘Let’s go,’ she says. ‘If we get to the party before them we can lose ourselves in the crowd.’
It’s not a bad idea, so I start the engine and let George direct me to Justin’s house. I remember him from high school. He was a little wild, but a nice guy. His parents always seemed to be away, so his house was available for parties. He grew a beard in Year 9 and refused to shave it off. I’m wondering who I might see – Amy for certain – when George nudges me out of my thoughts and tells me to take a left at the lights.
She turns on the radio, and skips around until she finds a station playing David Bowie, and then leans back and says, ‘So, how’s Cal?’
I can’t dodge questions for much longer so I tell her he’s good. I just leave out the part where he’s ash in an urn on Mum’s mantelpiece. I’m surprised George even remembers Cal. They went to the same school, but I can’t imagine their paths crossed that often.
Cal was a tall, skinny guy with a cloud of brown hair that made him look kind of like a dandelion. A dandelion with glasses, giant headphones around his neck and a book in his hand. George has long straight black hair with a blue stripe down the left side. These days she has a tattoo running along her collarbone; it’s the number 44 written in a soft blue-sky script.
I heard Martin asking about the tattoo during the week. ‘Forty-four. Is that the meaning of life?’ he asked. ‘That would be forty-two,’ she’d said, which is something I know only because Cal read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
‘But what’s he doing?’ George asks, and it feels like I’m un-writing Cal by not filling her in, so I tell her what he would be doing, if he were alive. ‘He’s on exchange, sort of. It’s not an official program. He’s living with our dad at the moment.’
It’s a sort of truth. The plan had been for Dad to spend three months in Paris, so Cal could stay with him. If Cal hadn’t drowned, that’s where he’d be right now.
‘That makes sense,’ George says in a way that makes me think she knew Cal better than I thought.
‘I didn’t know him that well,’ she says when I ask. ‘He was nice to me at school once. He gave me some Sea-Monkeys. I was having a bad week.’ She stops herself from telling me about it, and skips part of the story. ‘Anyway he said they’re like time travellers. They can hibernate until conditions are better. I haven’t put them in water yet. I’m saving them.’
I didn’t know that Cal had a crush on George, but he must have. He wouldn’t give Sea-Monkeys to just any girl. I look over at her – boots on the dash, humming to Bowie. I imagine Cal at school, holding the Sea-Monkeys, trying to get up the courage to give them to George. He probably wrote out a speech beforehand.
‘Did you two talk much?’ I ask. ‘After that?’
‘Not much,’ she says.
They would have been good together, I think, and I turn up the radio to let it drown out sad thoughts.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Letters left between pages 44 and 45
15 March – 15 April 2014
Dear George
So how’s Year 9 going? I’ve found this old typewriter that belonged to my grandpa in the shed, so I’m using it for our letters.
The y jumps a little yyyyyyy – see?
I like Year 9. I’m reading a heap – swimming, too, but obviously not the two together. I got a new haircut – my sister says I look good. I think I look weird. My ears are quite big. I’ve never noticed that before. You have nice ears – they’re so small I wonder how you fit all the piercings on them. I’d like to count them one day. Too much information?
Pytheas
Dear Pytheas
You’d be welcome to count them, if you ever told me who you are?!? You have a new haircut and you have big ears, so I guess there are two clues. No one at school fits that description.
This leads me to a question that I hope isn’t insulting. You’re not Martin Gamble are you? I don’t think you are but lately he’s everywhere I go at school, flipping up the cover of my book to see what I’m reading and even though I’m certain that you’re not, the thought keeps crossing my mind. Are you? Please say you’re not.
He’s going out with Stacy, so it’s highly unlikely that you are. Unless these letters are a joke, which I know they’re not. So I’ve just convinced myself that you’re not Martin.
On another, sadder note, my parents are fighting a lot. Dad says they won’t ever divorce, not as long as their copy of Great Expectations is in the Letter Library. It’s their book. Dad says it reminds them of how much they love each other, but I don’t know. They don’t seem to love each other at the moment and I don’t want to point it out but
Pip and Estella don’t even end up together.
Bye for now,
George
Dear George
I’m sorry to hear about your mum and dad. My parents are divorced and I still miss Dad. I’m planning on spending some time with him overseas soon. It gets easier. Or, maybe you get used to it being hard.
No, I’m not Martin Gamble. He’s actually pretty nice, though. Maybe he’s trying to talk to you?
Pytheas
Henry
she just doesn’t let me talk
George leaves the bookshop as soon as Rachel arrives, telling me she’s very keen to get away from Martin. I’m not fooled. While she was doing my hair for me tonight, I told her I was certain Martin likes her. She didn’t tell me to shut up.
I relay this to Martin on the way to the party and quiz him about how he feels.
‘Are you always like this?’ he asks.
‘Like what?’
‘Like a matchmaker.’
‘I would like my sister to be happy,’ I tell him. ‘I think it’s possible you could restore her faith in life and love.’
‘No pressure there,’ he says.
‘Do you like her?’
‘She’s the reason I took the job at the bookstore,’ he admits. ‘One of my mums had some clerical work going at her office, but then I saw this cataloguing job advertised at Howling Books, so I took it.’
‘Try kissing her tonight.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘Try flirting with her tonight.’
‘I’ve been flirting with her for the last year. I wrote to her this week,’ he says. ‘I left a note in the Letter Library. She doesn’t seem to entirely like it but she doesn’t seem to entirely dislike it either. I think I’ve made some headway.’
We pull up at the party, and I see Amy walking inside. ‘Do I look responsible?’