Our opening hours at Howling Books are flexible. We’re open by ten in the morning, and we stay open till at least five, but sometimes we’ll stay open later. We’ll almost always open up for a late-night book emergency.
We close on Friday evening, though, because that’s when we have our family dinner at Shanghai Dumplings. Tonight, I’m bringing in the rolling shelves we keep on the street, getting ready for dinner, when Lola walks in and says she’s just seen Rachel.
I don’t need to ask her which Rachel she’s talking about. There’s only one Rachel. The Rachel. Rachel Sweetie. My best friend who moved away three years ago and forgot all about me.
After she left I wrote her letters – long letters – telling her all the news about the bookshop. I wrote about George and Mum and Dad and Lola and Amy. She sent me one-paragraph letters back, and then the letters turned into one-paragraph emails, and then she added me to group emails, and then she stopped writing altogether.
‘She’s ignoring me,’ I’d say to Lola every time Rachel sent her a long email. ‘Has she said anything to you?’ I’d ask, and she’d shake her head. Lola is a shit liar. Rachel had said something to her but since Lola was too loyal to tell me I was left to wonder.
‘She’s cut her hair short, and bleached it,’ Lola says, and now I’m trying to picture Rachel and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to wonder what she looks like or what she’s doing. ‘I still don’t know why we stopped being friends, but we did, so I don’t really want to hear about her.’
Lola turns her back to the counter and hauls herself up on it so she’s near the mint bowl. She takes one and says, ‘She’s back and I want to hang out so you need to get over it.’
‘I’m over it. I’m completely over it. I’m over that she wrote to you and not to me. Completely over that she wouldn’t take my phone calls. More than completely over that she left town without saying goodbye.’
‘The way I heard it, you texted her and said you’d slept in.’
‘Is that why she hasn’t written? Because I always sleep in. I’ve slept in almost every day of my life and Rachel knows that. She could have driven past the bookshop on her way out of town, woke me up, and said goodbye.’
‘You do seem to be over it,’ Lola says.
‘But you know what she did instead? She sent me a text saying that my copy of American Gods was on the front steps of her house. It rained before I got to her place. It was totally ruined.’
‘Lucky you work in a bookstore and you have five other copies on the shelf and two in your personal collection.’
‘Not the point,’ I say.
She passes me a flyer. ‘The Hollows are playing tonight at Laundry. Which is, for your convenience, just across the road.’
Lola and Hiroko have been playing together officially as The Hollows since the Year 11 formal. Unofficially, they’ve been dreaming of the band since Year 8. They’re a little like Arcade Fire meets The Go-Betweens meets Caribou and they’re good.
They play at Laundry on the Friday nights when the club has live music. The owner is a friend of Lola’s dad, so Lola made a deal with him – The Hollows play as support act to the main band and get a percentage of the door that’s taken before ten.
She slides off the counter. ‘Full disclosure: I asked Rachel. You should come and patch things up with her.’
I tell her I’ll try but I’m pretty sure patching will not be a possibility. You can’t patch up someone forgetting about you. For the rest of your life you’ll always be worrying that they’ll forget about you the same way they did before. You’ll always know that they’d be a hundred percent fine without you but you wouldn’t be a hundred percent fine without them.
I lock up after Lola’s gone and head to Shanghai Dumplings. On the way, I distract myself from thinking about Rachel by thinking about Amy. I’ve had my phone on silent all day and deliberately not checked, because it’s a truth universally acknowledged that a watched phone never rings, especially when you’re waiting on a text from your ex-girlfriend.
There’s a missed call from her, but no message.
I’m thinking about whether or not I should call back when I walk into Greg Smith. I’m looking down, and he’s standing in my way, so my shoulder knocks into his. I ignore him and keep walking. Greg was in my class at school and every time I see him he makes me question the universe. He’s a complete idiot but he’s got supernaturally white teeth and perfect hair. Why reward the idiots? Surely if you don’t want the idiots to win, don’t make them good-looking.
‘Heard Amy dumped your arse,’ he calls after I’ve passed him. I find it’s best not to engage with Greg. But every time I see him, I engage anyway. I engage when he calls my sister weird. I engage when he calls me weird. I engage when he calls Lola a lesbian like there’s something wrong with that. I engage when he says that all poetry is shit. I’m willing to admit that some poetry is shit. If Greg wrote poetry, his poetry would be shit. But Pablo Neruda, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson – just to name a few – are as far from shit as you can find.
‘She didn’t dump me, actually. We’re still together. Flying out on 12th of March,’ I tell him, and keep walking before he can say anything else. He’ll find out sooner or later that I’m lying, but it’ll be sometime when I’m not standing right in front of him. One of the great things about finishing high school is that you can finally get away from the dickheads.
I’m only in a bad mood till I get to the restaurant. We always get the pork dumplings, the pan-fried dumplings, the wantons with hot chilli sauce, the salt-and-pepper squid, the prawns and greens, and spring rolls.
Since Mum left, we’ve kept up the tradition. She’s moved out of the bookshop but she still comes to dumplings, and for an hour at least we’re a family again.
Mai Li’s working the door, the same as always. Her family owns the place. I know her from school. She’s studying journalism this year, but her main love is performance poetry that she writes on her phone while she’s walking around. I can’t work out if she speaks like a performance poet or if that’s just the way I hear her.
‘How be life, Henry?’ she asks, and I tell her, ‘Life be shit, Mai Li.’
‘Shit why?’
‘Shit because Amy dumped me.’
She stops handing out menus to customers and gives the news the pause it deserves. ‘Life be fucked then, Henry,’ she says, and gives me a menu. ‘I think they’re fighting.’
‘Really?’
‘No one’s eating. They’ve been yelling,’ she says, and I start climbing the stairs.
Mum and Dad don’t yell. They’re the kind of people who quote literature and try to talk about their problems. Even when Mum was leaving, they didn’t yell. The silence in the bookshop was so loud George and I went next door to Frank’s to get away from it, but even when they were alone, I’m pretty certain they fought in silence.
I arrive at the table and see that Mai Li’s right – they are fighting.
Usually at Friday-night dinners we talk non-stop and about books and the world. Last week we started with George. She’d read 1984 by George Orwell and The One Safe Place by Tania Unsworth. She’d started The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
The first rule of our family book discussions is you can’t spend forever explaining the plot. You get twenty-five words or less for that but endless time for what you thought about it. ‘Orwell – a world controlled by the state. Unsworth – set in a world after global warming. McCarthy – father and son surviving post-apocalypse.’