It’s what I thought she said, but I was hoping for Martin’s sake I’d misheard. ‘Is Pavement the same kind of place it was three years ago?’
‘It’s pretty much the worst club in the city,’ she says, and then starts defending herself. ‘He told me I had a problem. He wouldn’t leave me alone.’
I can’t exactly judge her. I held a grudge against Henry for three years. But Pavement? She couldn’t have just told him she’d been at Laundry and then not showed?
‘Henry was with Martin tonight,’ I say. ‘They went for dumplings.’
‘Okay,’ she says, but clearly she’s edgy as she directs me through the centre of town, past the main City Train Station, and towards the docks.
We’re on a long stretch of dark blue road when George finally tells me to slow down. ‘He’s somewhere around here.’
We really start to worry when we get to the blinking dot on the map and he’s not here. I pull over and George looks at the map, pinches it between her fingers and makes it bigger. I take it from her, and turn it around. ‘It’s a double highway,’ I say. ‘He’s on the other side.’
I make a U-turn and see Henry before she does. He’s shining in the darkness; arms pulled back like a suburban Caravaggio.
‘Shit,’ George says, spotting Martin.
I pull up near them, and we get out. Henry Jones naked is quite a sight and I try not to look like I’m enjoying it as much as I am.
‘Hello,’ he says.
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘You seem to have gotten yourself in some trouble.’
‘You’re naked,’ George says.
‘Really?’ Henry says. ‘We hadn’t noticed.’
‘Why are you naked?’ George asks.
‘Why are you in pyjamas?’ Martin asks, as she walks around to his side of the pole.
‘I had to leave in a hurry, to save you.’
‘Maybe I wouldn’t need saving if someone hadn’t told me she’d be at Pavement tonight.’
‘I said I might be there.’
I decide it’s the best thing for everyone if we get Henry and Martin down as soon as possible. There’s nothing to cut with in the back seat, so I open the boot, and there, next to Cal’s box, are scissors and, for some reason, a steak knife.
I pick them up, and stare at the box. My hands touch the cardboard instinctively. I trace my finger around the question mark, but don’t open it.
George walks over and I close the boot. ‘You take the scissors and Martin,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll take Henry and the steak knife.’
‘Do you have a steady hand?’ Henry asks me while I’m cutting.
‘Fairly steady,’ I say. ‘I’ll go carefully around the sensitive parts.’
‘It’s skin. It’s all sensitive, really.’
I nod, cutting slowly.
‘How do I look naked?’ he asks after a while.
‘Not half bad,’ I say.
‘Can I take that to mean I look half good?’
‘Close your eyes,’ Martin says to George. ‘Stop looking at me.’
‘I’m cutting some fairly sensitive areas. Do you really want me to close my eyes?’
‘I’m glad you find this so funny. If you and Rachel were naked and Henry and I were making jokes, it’d be a whole different story.’
‘Relax,’ George says.
‘Relax?’ he says. ‘If you didn’t want to be friends you could have just said no. Do I need to beg every single day? You haven’t even bothered to say sorry.’
He yells the last bit, and George doesn’t answer for what seems like a long time. Eventually she says, very quietly, ‘Sorry.’
‘What?’ Martin asks. ‘You’ll have to speak up.’
‘I’m sorry,’ George says loudly.
‘I accept,’ Martin says.
‘Careful of my penis please,’ Henry says, and I suddenly find the whole situation hilarious. I haven’t found anything funny in ten months. Usually I pretend to laugh. I try to make jokes.
‘Don’t laugh while you’re cutting,’ he says, making me laugh even more.
‘You’re shaking,’ he says, and George is laughing now and Martin too and Henry’s saying, ‘I’m glad my naked nuts are so hilarious to you all,’ but he’s laughing as well and he’s happy that everyone else is happy, because that’s the kind of guy Henry is.
We pile in the car, and Henry and I listen to Martin retelling the story of tonight to George, who interrupts every five seconds or so to say she’s sorry. He gets to the part about Henry talking to Amy, and then Greg arriving, and I look quickly across to the passenger seat.
Henry’s staring out the window, with an old jumper I keep in the car over his lap. ‘You can say it.’
I’m dying to say it. What kind of a girl doesn’t call the police when her idiot boyfriend throws two guys into a car and drives away? What kind of person stands on the side of the road and stares into the boot and doesn’t do anything? ‘It’s not my business, Henry,’ I say instead, because he doesn’t need to feel any worse.
I’m not in the mood to drive all the way across town, so Henry and George convince Martin to stay at the bookstore. ‘You can sleep in my bed,’ Henry says. ‘I’ll sleep in the shop with Rachel.’
After Martin and Henry get dressed we all sit behind the counter and watch the clip of them on YouTube. ‘You can’t really see much,’ Martin says.
‘Of you,’ Henry says. ‘There’s a fairly shocking close up of me.’ He puts down his phone after a while. ‘So people see us naked? So what?’
‘So I go back to school and face a storm of ridicule,’ Martin says.
‘I’ll be there,’ George offers, and he gives her a look that suggests that this is a very good consolation prize.
The two of them go upstairs and Henry and I lie on quilts in front of the Letter Library. He turns off the lights so we’re just voices in the dimness. ‘She left me,’ he says after a while. ‘She didn’t call my parents or the police.’ He holds up his phone. ‘Hasn’t even sent a text.’
‘In her defence, that’s a hard text to write.’
‘I used to worry sometimes,’ he says, ‘before we really started dating, that other guys were better kissers than me, and that’s why Amy and I weren’t going out officially.’
‘Speaking as a girl who’s kissed you, I can say you’ve got nothing to worry about in that department.’
‘I’m sorry I don’t remember more of it. Was I better than Joel?’
‘You were different.’
‘Did you have sex with him?’
‘That’s a personal question. Did you have sex with Amy?’
‘You’re right. It is a personal question,’ he says.
‘Maybe we should talk about something else.’
‘Things have changed between us,’ he says, but he doesn’t say how, and I’m not sure if he means things have changed between him and Amy, or him and me.
‘What good things have happened to you in the last three years?’ he asks. ‘You’ve only told me the bad things.’
I haven’t thought about the good things in a while but a lot of good happened before Cal died. ‘I won the science awards, before Year 12. And the maths awards. I swam two kilometres almost every day with Mum. Dad visited and took Cal and me windsurfing. I was Sports Captain in Year 11. What about you?’
‘I won the Year 11 English prize. I did pretty well in Year 12. I went to the Year 12 formal with Amy. Lola and Hiroko wrote a song about me. I won a short story competition.’
‘That’s a good list,’ I say.
‘Can we try again to go dancing?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I tell him, for the second time.
He falls asleep, and I lie awake, enjoying being next to him.
The Broken Shore
by Peter Temple
Letters left between pages 8 and 9
1 February – 5 February 2016
Dear George
I appreciate all the apologising, but seriously, you can stop. So everyone in class saw me naked on YouTube? The shots were mostly of Henry.
If you really want to make it up to me, maybe you could tell me about the letter guy. Who do you think he is?
Martin
Dear Martin
I know you’ve told me to stop, but I need to say one more time – I’m sorry. To make it up to you, yes, I’ll tell you about the guy, who I think is Cal Sweetie.