I follow the line of her finger and see Amy, and I realise that Rachel’s not asking me to kiss her how I think she’s asking me to kiss her and I’m disappointed at the same time that I’m relieved.
‘You really want her back?’ Rachel asks, but she doesn’t wait for my answer. Instead, she loops her hands around my neck. ‘Relax. We’re just making her jealous,’ she says.
And then she kisses me. For a very long time.
Rachel
sometimes you need the poets
I’ve been waiting for as long as I can remember to kiss Henry and I’m sick of waiting and I know as soon as I see Amy walk into the club that this could be my one and only chance.
She’s wearing a killer dress – her hair is perfect. Greg is nowhere to be seen. My guess is she’s here to make sure Henry’s not going anywhere. My other guess is that he told her where to find him tonight.
She didn’t turn up here by coincidence and that means they’ll be together again soon. Our letters will stop, or slow. The nights in the bookstore will end along with nights when we dance together.
‘You really want her back?’ I ask Henry, and the answer is in his body. The second he spots her, he turns in her direction. I step in close, and he looks surprised and worried so I tell him to relax. ‘We’re just making her jealous.’
I keep my eyes closed, but the lights seem to have gotten under my lids, and there’s a flickering show happening in the darkness. Thoughts turn in the kaleidoscope, in no particular order – why would Amy keep leaving someone who kissed like this? Cal should have lived to kiss a girl. What is Henry thinking? When should we stop?
I pull away first. I try to read Henry’s expression – confused, worried, thrilled – all three maybe. ‘Is she still watching?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he says, and I can feel his breath as he answers.
‘You’ll have her back within the week,’ I tell him, and try not to sound unhappy.
I tell Henry it’ll be better for the plan if we leave now, and together. I don’t want to stay here with him looking at her, not after that kiss. I can’t see Lola anywhere or George or Martin, so we text to let them know that we’re leaving, and then I pull Henry towards the exit.
We decide to walk home. We’re less than an hour away, and if we get tired we’ll get a taxi. There are loads of people on the street. This is the time that I love the city. The heat is soft. I hate it in the day when the sun bounces off concrete.
We walk through the streets without talking, the kiss making things awkward between us. I decide to put him out of his misery. ‘It didn’t mean anything, Henry. I was helping you out. It’s not worth being embarrassed about small things.’
I try to explain what it’s like to see your brother on the beach, looking empty like Cal did. ‘Nothing seems important after that. Or, the small things don’t seem important,’ I say, trying to convince myself at the same time.
‘I disagree,’ he says.
‘You don’t know what I know.’
‘I disagree that love and sex are the small things. I don’t need to have seen a dead body to know I’m right about that.’
We take the short cut through the park. The sprinklers are on, and we rest near one and hold our legs over the soft specks.
Henry points to the park light and the moths that are flying around it. ‘What is it about the light?’ he asks, and I tell him that moths are phototactic.
‘Phototaxis is when something automatically moves to or away from light. Moths are positively phototactic – they’re attracted to light.’
‘But why?’ he asks.
‘No one knows for certain. Some people think that migrating moths use the night sky to navigate. They follow the lights in the sky.’
‘But they’re flying around a streetlight.’
‘They’ve been using the moon as a guide, flying towards it, but never expecting to reach it, and when they hit the lamp or the fire, they get confused. They think it could be the moon.’
‘It’s nothing like the moon,’ he says.
‘But they don’t know that.’
We sit here for a long time. Henry takes off his shoes and socks to feel the water on his feet. We look at the moths. Henry points out the water’s shadow on the grass, the blackbird singing at night, the lights in the buildings. He’s picking up parts of the world and showing them to me, saying, See? It’s beautiful.
We get back to the bookstore around two. George and Martin and Lola took a taxi, so they’re home ahead of us. George and Martin are talking in the reading garden. Lola is zonked out on the fiction couch. According to George, Hiroko didn’t take it well when Lola ordered her to stay in the country. ‘Lola drank a lot, very quickly,’ she says.
I put a glass of water next to the couch, and leave her sleeping.
I text Rose and tell her I’m sleeping here and she texts back a winking smile. I think about the kiss and how Henry hasn’t spoken about Amy once since we left the club, and I’m hopeful. I think about the amount of times he’s spoken about her in the past, and I’m not.
Henry’s already lying on the floor when I put down my phone. I lie close beside him. ‘Remember how your dad used to tell us the place was haunted?’ I ask, as we listen to the sounds in the store.
‘Second-hand books are haunted according to him. Ghosts in the pages.’
‘You believe in them,’ I say.
‘I don’t disbelieve in them. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
‘Hamlet?’ I ask.
‘Very good,’ he says, and I tell him it’s underlined in the Letter Library.
‘So maybe there’s something to it,’ he says.
‘Maybe,’ I say, thinking about the arrow on Sea.
‘I’ve seen Cal since he died,’ I tell him. ‘He’s a hallucination but he seems so real. I can actually smell apple gum.’
‘Is that possible?’ he asks, and I tell him it is.
‘You can hallucinate sights and smells.’
‘And you’re sure he’s not a ghost? You never thought he might be?’
‘I know he’s not, but I can’t help hoping that he is. Sometimes a television show will come on, one that he loved, and I’ll get so sad because he’ll never know how it ends. I think, if he’s a ghost, then at least he can watch Game of Thrones.’
‘Maybe there’s Game of Thrones on permanent stream wherever he is.’
‘That’s what we think because we can’t imagine what it’s like to not exist.’
He stretches out his arm so I can lie on it, and that makes the thought of not existing slightly less terrifying.
‘You’re warm,’ he says.
‘It’s a warm night,’ I say.
‘Cal believed in them,’ he says, and we’re back to ghosts.
‘Cal believed in all kinds of things,’ I say, and he laughs as if he’s remembering those Sunday-night dinners at our place.
‘He used to love messing with my head, telling me the theories of time,’ he says. ‘Like the growing block universe theory. I still don’t understand it.’
‘The growing block universe theory of time states that the past and present are happening simultaneously,’ I say, thinking about that night when Cal was explaining it to us. He was reading all kinds of books, like Objective Becoming by Bradford Skow. That book told the reader to imagine time as another dimension, a dimension like space. It told them to imagine they could see the universe from above, get outside the universe and look down. If they could do that, then they’d see all the events of their life spread out like they see things in space spread out. I imagined time as like the landscape seen from a plane.
‘Cal believed in the growing block universe. The one that says the past and present are real, but the future hasn’t happened yet,’ I say. ‘He really believed that the past was place.’
‘You don’t think it’s true?’ Henry asks.
‘I’ve never been outside the universe; I couldn’t say for certain.’
Cal was convinced. ‘Think of it like this,’ Cal had said. ‘This house we’re in doesn’t stop existing just because we leave it, and the past doesn’t either.’
‘It’s a nice thought,’ I say. ‘That the things we love still exist somewhere.’