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.’