Henry
the quality of the kiss was not discussed
I wake on the fiction couch deeply hungover, my head cracking, with Rachel telling me to get up. She’s holding my eyelids open like she used to do in high school when we’d stayed up all night talking and then slept through the morning alarm. ‘Get. Up. Henry.’
‘What time is it? I ask, batting off her hands.
‘It’s eleven. The shop’s been open for an hour. There are customers asking for books I can’t find. George is yelling at a guy called Martin Gamble who’s here to help me create the database. And as a separate issue, Amy’s waiting in the reading garden.’
‘Amy’s here?’ I sit up and mess my hair around. ‘How do I look?’
‘I decline to answer on the grounds that technically you’re my boss and I don’t want to start my new job by insulting you.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I appreciate that.’
I pull the blanket tight around my shoulders and the customer looking in the classics section gives me a sympathetic look. I give him one back because, as much as I love books, if you’re in the classics section first thing on Saturday morning then there’s something not entirely right with your life either.
As I walk towards Amy, who looks fantastic in a pale blue dress, I’m thinking about the strange dreams I had last night. In the first, Amy was invisible. I knew she was there, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t see her. In the second, I was talking to Rachel in the girls’ toilets, and in the last, I was kissing Rachel on the mouth. The dream kiss was very good and the memory of it is highly unsettling. God, I hope I didn’t kiss her. What if I tried to kiss her? The more I think about it, the more I think I did kiss her. I can feel her lips in a way that doesn’t feel like dream lips.
Amy touches my arm as I sit next to her, and we stare at each other for a while. ‘You smell like beer,’ she says eventually, which is true but not encouraging. I move a little away and try to breathe in the opposite direction.
‘I’m sorry about last night,’ she says eventually. ‘I should have told you about Greg, but it happened so quickly. And, I guess, if I’m honest, really honest, I’ve always been a little bit in love with Greg Smith.’
There should be a disconnect button you can push when someone leaves: you’ve fucked me over; therefore I no longer love you. I’m not asking for the button to be connected to an ejector seat that removes them from the universe, just one small button that removes them from your heart.
‘Are you listening?’ Amy asks.
‘It happened so quickly, but if you’re honest, you’ve always been a little bit in love with Greg Smith,’ I say.
I should tell her to leave. I should maintain what dignity I can, which isn’t much considering I’m wearing a blanket and the smell of last night’s drinking. But my family is pretty shit at dignity as well as love, so I think: fuck dignity. Dignity is not in my genes.
‘See, this is why I’m confused. Because when you told me you loved me, in this bookshop, you didn’t say, “I love you but if I’m honest, I’m also a little bit in love with that moron, Greg Smith.” I’d remember that. You just said, “I love you, Henry.” And when we bought the plane tickets, and I used all my money, you didn’t say, “Keep in mind, I’m also a little bit in love with Greg Smith.’’’
‘You used all your money and some of mine,’ she says, and this feels pointed and I know I’m right and she’s choosing Greg over me because I’m broke. ‘It’s because of where I work, isn’t it? It’s because of how much I earn.’ Or, how much I don’t earn. ‘Is it that I live with my family? Is it because I drove you to the formal in the bookshop van?’
‘Henry,’ she says, like I’m being ridiculous.
But I know her. I know her expressions. I know the one she’s wearing now: it’s pity. I’ve seen it on her face when she’s watching documentaries about stray animals that no one wants. I’m a hundred per cent right about why she chose Greg Smith. He’s richer, he’s neater, he’s going to university.
‘You’re a great friend. But we’re not in high school anymore.’
‘So I am right.’
‘No,’ she says, when clearly she doesn’t mean it. She shakes her head, trying to find the answer for me. ‘He’s the one I always saw myself with. You know, at university. Doing things.’
‘What things?’ I ask.
She puts her hand on my arm for a second, lets me feel the warmth of her. She looks past me into the bookshop, and says, ‘There’s always Rachel.’
‘Rachel and I are friends. Just friends. It’s you,’ I tell her. ‘You.’
She smiles and holds my arm a little tighter.
‘What if I changed?’ I ask, and she hesitates before she answers.
‘I don’t think it would matter. It wouldn’t matter,’ she says, but it’s the first part of that answer that’s the truth. She doesn’t think it would matter, meaning it might matter. It could matter. Before she leaves I make her promise that if I change, and it does matter, that she’ll come back.
She kisses me goodbye and I decide to take it for a yes.
There’s not one part of me that doesn’t hurt this morning: my teeth, my head, my heart, my pride, my eyeballs. The backs of my eyeballs hurt. I put my head under the water stream and try to wash out the thought of Amy always being a little bit in love with Greg.
I get out and dry off, then sit on the edge of the bath, and let the leftover steam clear my head. Dad walks in as it’s clearing and asks if he can use the mirror.
‘Rachel told me about Amy,’ he says.
‘She’s only with Greg temporarily.’
‘Sometimes you have to let go, Henry,’ he says, tapping his razor on the side of the sink. He doesn’t believe that, though. If he did, he’d be moving on with his life instead of re-reading Great Expectations and hoping for another chance with Mum.
I watch him making roads through the foam on his face, trying to figure out how to say what I want to say, now that I’m certain I want to say it. ‘How much would we get, Dad?’ I ask.
‘We own the building, Henry. It’s double-storeyed with a big backyard. I’d say well over a million.’
I go quiet while he finishes off his face, wiping it with the towel that I pass him. ‘It’s okay to want to sell,’ he says.
In my perfect world I wouldn’t worry about money. In my perfect world, books would be with us forever, and everyone would love the second-hand ones as much as Dad and George and I do. Amy would love them. But it’s not my perfect world. ‘I think maybe we should sell. Mum thinks we should, and she knows about the business.’
He nods, and waits. Because I can’t answer with a maybe. It’s a yes-or-no question. It reminds me of how he told me once that the thing he loved about fiction was that there were rarely yes-or-no answers when it came to characters. The world is complex, he told me. Humans are too.
He and I have had hundreds of conversations about the characters in books. The last one we had was about Vernon God Little, a book by D.B.C. Pierre. I’d loved it enough to read twice.
‘What did you love?’ Dad had asked.
‘Vernon,’ I’d said, naming the main character. ‘And the way it’s critiquing America. But mainly it’s the language. It’s like he’s left the words out in the sun to buckle a while, and they don’t sound like you’d expect.’
‘You might like to be a writer one day,’ Dad had said. ‘What do you think?’ Anything, in our bookshop, was possible.
But anything isn’t possible. Clearly, it’s not, or Mum wouldn’t want to sell. She loves the shop as much as we all do, and she accepts that the business is dying. Anything will not be possible if, for the rest of my life, I earn the same wage I do now. Anything won’t be possible for George.
‘Yes,’ I say, running my toe along a crack in the tile. ‘I want us to sell.’
‘And what will you do after?’ he asks.
‘There’s still the possibility of travelling with Amy. I’ll probably study next year.’
‘Then it’s decided,’ he says sadly. ‘I’ll get things underway.’