We’re close up, eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose, holding hands. She doesn’t seem sad, at least not the kind of sad she’s been looking since she arrived. ‘I want to hear Josie,’ she says, and turns to the front, without dropping my hand.
When Rachel’s interested in something she leans forward, and I can almost hear her humming. She is the smartest, sharpest girl I know. I hold her hand tighter, because Josie is talking about her son. I’ve heard the story of how he died, and it’s terrible – the bike, the car, how he was here in one second and then gone in the next.
Rachel is mesmerised. So is the group. Josie starts off a round of people talking about their lives, sometimes connected to the books they’ve brought with them and sometimes not. Every one of them is talking about death.
‘I’m okay,’ Rachel says, because I’m staring at her, waiting for signs that she’s not. She points at the group, signalling that I should pay attention. When I look back, Frederick is standing in that formal way he has.
‘My wife Elena died twenty years ago,’ he says, and the room is so quiet. ‘We ran a shop together.’
He tells the group about the night she died, when he sat next to her, and read from her favourite book. I can see him, reading in that soft, careful way he has, saying every word completely, before starting on the next.
Rachel looks over at me. ‘The Walcott,’ we say together.
Rachel
the words could rain on us
I am a strange mix of things tonight. I am spark from Henry’s hands and the memory of his kiss. I am warmth, blush from his stare, and calm, because I’m almost certain that he’s mine and I’m his. He walked inside, and took my hand and held it in a way that let me know. It seems impossible at the same time that it seems like the thing that I knew was always going to happen. I’m all these good things, and aching, too, and sad, because Josie is talking about her son. ‘He was seven,’ she says. ‘Riding his bike. I was, cheering him on. Then a car came round the corner and went up onto the footpath. Just collected him right up,’ she says, and looks shocked, as if all the years haven’t dulled that moment. She’s staring at a spot of air in front of it, and I know, in that spot of air, is her son. At this moment, he might be lying on the footpath, as she saw him that day. But I’m certain that at other times, he’s in that spot, grinning at her.
I’m crying, I realise, but I don’t care.
Frieda talks about her brother next, who died in a plane crash. Another woman talks about her cousin who has cancer and will, most likely, be dead soon. Henry’s agitated beside me but I squeeze his hand to let him know I’m okay. He squeezes back and I ache more and smile again and think about death in my head and love in my skin.
Frederick talks last. He stands to share his story, and as he speaks, he solves some mysteries for Henry and me. ‘My wife Elena died twenty years ago. We ran a shop together.’ He tells us that he’s searching for a book because it was his wife’s favourite. ‘Elena read from it on our wedding night, and I read to her from it years later, as she died.’
‘The Walcott,’ Henry and I say together.
There’s a soft haze in my chest, a quiet I haven’t felt in a year now. I won’t ever put it together properly in words, but I understand it. Frederick’s story is different in the details, so it can only ever be his. But all the same, I hear myself in it.
I’m certain that E and F, on the pages of the Prufrock, are Frederick and Elena. As he speaks, I feel as though Elena is here in the bookshop with us. I think about Cal’s arrow on Sea, and all the other lines in the books, the pages where words are the same, thoughts are the same, where words are written so closely to each other that the curves of letters intersect. I wish Mum were here to listen in to the book club, to read the markings in the Library, to feel what I feel and know what I’m starting to know.
I help Henry clean up and put the chairs away, all the while waiting to see Frederick standing alone. When there’s a chance, I walk over and tell him that my brother, Cal, died.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ he says.
‘I can’t swim anymore. I don’t go near the ocean.’ As I say it, I wonder if it’s true. I wonder if I’m speaking in present tense, when really I should be speaking in the past. I wonder what I’d feel now, if I were there, looking at the water. I think I might walk in, not all the way, but enough to feel the water at my calves, and to imagine it rising, slowly.
After everyone’s gone, Henry and I sit together at my computer, and search for the Walcott. Both of us are desperate to find it, our hands knocking against each other in excitement every time we find a copy close by.
I make a list of locations, because I like making lists.
‘You’re very neat,’ Henry says, looking at my handwriting, and it feels like he’s said something sexy.
‘You’re very messy,’ I say.
‘And yet, I’m the one who passed Year 12,’ he says.
‘You’re very annoying,’ I say, smiling at him.
‘You’re very sexy,’ he says, like it just came out and he had no control over it.
‘So are you,’ I say.
‘It’s not the way I’m usually described,’ he says.
‘Tonight feels sort of unusual,’ I say.
We finish the list of Walcott sellers, and decide that since tonight is an unusual night, it might be the night when we locate the book. Henry scans the list and says we should choose a place now, and then visit it to look on the last night of the world. ‘That,’ he says, ‘is the time we’ll find it.’
‘I’ll choose which bookstore,’ I say, and immediately pick Beach Side Books.
‘It’s Beach Side,’ Henry says.
‘I can read, Henry.’
‘It’ll be by the beach,’ he says.
‘I had a vague idea.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘I don’t mind,’ I say. Or maybe I do, I’m not sure. But I want to find out. The store is on the coast, but the opposite way from Sea Ridge, and I can’t think of a safer way to test whether I’m ready to see the water again, than to go with Henry.
We get ready to sleep, my arm touching Henry’s.
‘Why would Frederick give the book away?’ he asks. ‘If it was so important?’
‘Things get lost,’ I tell him. ‘Or maybe you can’t stand to look at them.’
We lie quietly for a while, and then Henry remembers that there’s a story his dad wants him to read. He gets the book from his bag, and lies next to me, holding the book over our heads. The words could rain on us, I think. I have an image of us drinking them. Henry has changed me. He’s changed the way I cry about Cal. The way I see the world.
The story is called ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’ and it’s about a German Shakespearean scholar who has been offered the memory of Shakespeare from his boyhood to 1616. The scholar accepts the memory, but he doesn’t understand that memory is strange and chaotic. He feels as if he’s been offered the ocean, and in taking it, he doesn’t understand what it is that he’s accepting. Memory surfaces in sounds and images and feeling, and in taking someone else’s memory, he’ll have to lose parts of himself.
Henry finishes reading and closes the book. He doesn’t say what’s bothering him, but there’s something that is. He says he needs to sleep, but he watches the ceiling. Every now and then he turns his head to the side, and looks around the bookshop. ‘You’re thinking about what happens after you give this place away.’
He nods, but he doesn’t want to talk. He thinks I’m sleeping when he stands and walks around the store, running his hands along the spines as he moves.
After a while, he comes back with a book, starts to read, and falls asleep. He’s woken me, now, and I’m restless. I move quietly out of the store, towards the car.