I walk downstairs and start to detach myself from the bookshop. I don’t look at the Letter Library on the way past. I don’t check the Prufrock for strangers’ thoughts. I don’t look behind me into the reading garden.
I walk straight to the front counter where George is yelling at the new guy: ‘If you don’t get your computer out of the way, I’ll shove it up your arse.’ It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen so I take the stapler away from George because we’re a second-hand bookshop and we can’t afford to replace an eye.
The new guy – Martin – is about George’s age. He seems like a neat, good-looking, computer geek.
‘Hi,’ he says to me, and smiles.
He seems like a nice, neat, good-looking, computer geek. Or maybe he just looks like a geek next to George in her black clothes and her black hair with a blue stripe running down it. Away from my goth sister, he’s probably more popular guy in high school than geek, which might account for why she doesn’t like him.
‘I’m Henry,’ I say, holding out my hand for him to shake.
‘Martin Gamble,’ he says, and George says, ‘Martin Charles Gamble,’ in the same way she might say the words complete and utter dick.
Martin doesn’t look angry; he looks kind of amused. ‘Your mum hired me to help in the store and to catalogue the books. Which is why,’ he says to George, ‘I need to charge my computer.’
‘Mum doesn’t live here anymore,’ George says. ‘Henry is the manager today and he’s about to fire your arse.’
‘Excuse me,’ I say to Martin. ‘I just need to talk to my sister for a minute.’
I motion for George to follow me onto the street, but it’s clear she’s not in the mood to listen. She starts yelling before the door’s closed, and I really wish she’d stop because I have a cracker of a headache.
‘He goes to my school. He’s in my class. He used to date Stacy,’ she says. ‘They’re still friends.’
George doesn’t tell me a lot about what school is like for her, but I know about Stacy. She’s in the popular crowd and she’s not a big fan of anyone who’s not in the popular crowd, so she’s not a big fan of my sister. George told me once that Stacy liked to write George Jones is a freak over things like toilet doors, lockers and desks. Once, on a school camp, she wrote it on George’s face.
I peer through the shop window at Martin. ‘He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d call you a freak. Let’s give him a trial. Seven days.’
It’s clear she’s not changing her mind, so I try a different approach. ‘Think about how miserable you could make him in a week if you’re his boss.’
I can see the idea hadn’t occurred to her before, and now that it’s been pointed out, it really appeals. She looks through the window at Martin and considers it for a while. ‘Okay,’ she says eventually. ‘But he can’t bring his friends here. This is my home.’
‘Fair enough,’ I say, and then I tell her there’s something else she needs to know before she goes back inside. I say it quickly. There’s no point in dragging it out. ‘I voted with Mum. We’re definitely selling.’
It’s not a huge surprise. George says she figured I would after what happened at dinner last night. I can’t tell if she thinks I’ve made the right decision. ‘If it’s not what you want, you should vote against it.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s fine. I vote with you.’
I try to imagine George living away from the bookshop, but I can’t. It’s her safety net. She’s basically in one of three places – here, at Shanghai Dumplings or at school. And she hates school, so there are only two places that she loves.
There are three people she loves, though: me, Mum and Dad. She already feels terrible because she chose to stay in the bookshop and not move in with Mum. If she votes with Dad over this then she’s dividing the family down the middle. As it is now, I’m the one who’s divided the family and she’s just going along with me.
We walk back inside and I hear her telling Martin that she’s his boss, and he can’t bring his friends in, and he has to do what she says.
‘Okay,’ he says, smiling at her in a way that makes her blush, something I’ve hardly ever seen her do before.
After the morning’s emergencies have been dealt with, I turn my attention to Rachel. We’ve got a whole lot of catching up to do.
Dad’s given her the job of cataloguing the Letter Library and left Martin the job of cataloguing the rest of the books. She’s set up a small desk near the Library, with her computer on it, a notebook, and a jar of pens.
It’s typical Rachel. She loves being organised. She loves stationery. She was the kind of girl who always had a never-ending supply of those little fluorescent sticky notes and she wrote on them, word for word, what the teacher said. In English, she’d peel off the note and press it to the appropriate page of her novel like it solved the mystery of that word or sentence and why the author had put it on the page.
I found one of those notes about a month after she’d moved. It had slipped from one of her novels while she was at the shop, and it read: This line sums up the meaning of everything. Loose from the book, it was tantalising and completely useless.
‘So how was Year 12?’ I ask as a way of starting the conversation.
‘Okay,’ she says without stopping what she’s doing, which is alphabetising the books in the Letter Library.
‘So you got into science?’ I ask, and she nods and keeps ordering the books. ‘At Melbourne University?’
She nods again.
‘And Cal, how’s Cal?’
‘Henry, I have work to do,’ she says. ‘Cataloguing the Library is a huge job and your dad wants it done within the month, which, honestly, isn’t possible even if I work day and night.’
‘I’ll help. We’ll do it together.’
‘I don’t want your help, Henry,’ she says in a sharp voice.
‘Are we fighting?’ I ask. ‘It feels like we’re fighting.’
‘We’re not fighting. I need to concentrate, that’s all. I’m better off alone.’
I’m worried I did kiss her and that’s why she’s angry, so I decide to come right out and ask her. ‘Did we kiss last night?’
‘Sure we kissed, Henry,’ she says, taking a copy of Anna and the French Kiss and placing it into its correct position. ‘And then I went into the toilet and drank water from the bowl.’
‘A simple no would be fine, Rachel,’ I tell her and walk back to the counter feeling certain that something must have happened that I can’t remember and it’s put us, for some reason, right back where we were before last night.
‘She found you next to a sanitary disposal unit,’ George says helpfully when we talk about it before lunch.
‘Sure, that’s embarrassing for me, but that wouldn’t make her angry.’ I lean on the counter and watch her. ‘After Rachel left in Year 9, you didn’t find a letter from her for me?’
‘If I’d found it, you’d know,’ she says, ‘and now I must go to make Martin’s life a complete and utter misery.’
While she’s doing that, I serve customers and watch Rachel. Serve and watch, serve and watch, trying to remember the missing pieces of the night. I remember her saying we were friends. I remember her apologising for not writing. I don’t remember us arguing at all. I remember us making up.
Lola walks in around one o’clock, and I ask her what she remembers. ‘I saw you drinking,’ she says. ‘I saw you walking over to Amy, Rachel helping you up. I saw you crawling away from her across the floor and into the girls’ toilets.’ She takes a mint from the bowl and rolls it around her mouth for a while. ‘You really shouldn’t drink,’ she says through her mouthful.
‘That fact has been more than established.’
‘So,’ she says, changing the subject, ‘I have news. Bad, bad news.’
‘Amy’s asked Greg to go overseas with her?’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes, when it comes to Amy, you sound like a self-centred dick.’