Henry doesn’t know about Cal. If he’d heard, nothing would have kept him from the funeral. But I haven’t told him and neither has Mum. Rose can’t say the words without crying and she never cries in public. Cal wasn’t on Facebook. He had an account, but he wasn’t interested.
Tim Hooper, his best friend from Gracetown, moved to Western Australia a couple of months before Cal died, so I wrote him a letter with the news. I didn’t need to tell him not to post it on social media. I didn’t have to say that I couldn’t stand the idea that Cal’s death would be gossip for people to comment on. Tim just knew.
‘Henry used to tell me we were so close we could talk by mental telepathy,’ I say to Woof and the night around me. I only read the start of the letter before I fold it up, dig a huge hole, and bury it in the sand.
Dear Rachel
Since you never write, I can only assume you’ve forgotten me. Again, I refer you to the blood oath we took in Year 3.
Henry
second-hand books are full of mysteries
I wake Friday morning to see my sister, George, standing next to the fiction couch, where I fell asleep last night, and where I plan to keep sleeping all week.
Not surprisingly, I haven’t taken the break-up well, and I have no intention of taking it well in the future. My plan is to stay on the couch, getting up for toilet breaks and the occasional toasted sandwich, until Amy comes back to me. She always comes back to me. It’s just a matter of time.
Last night I collected all the books I thought I’d need before I took to the couch, so they’re all piled up around me – there’s some Patrick Ness, an Ernest Cline, some Neil Gaiman, Flannery O’Connor, John Green, Nick Hornby, some Kelly Link and, if all else fails, Douglas Adams.
‘Get. Up,’ George says, gently shoving me with her knee, which is her version of a hug. I love my sister, but, along with the rest of the world, I don’t really understand her and it’d be true to say I fear her, just slightly.
She’s seventeen, starting Year 12 this year. She likes learning but she hates her school. She got a scholarship to a private one on the other side of the river in Year 7 and Mum makes her stay there even though she’d rather go to Gracetown High.
She wears a huge amount of black, mostly t-shirts with things like Read, Motherfuckers on the front. Sometimes I think she likes post-apocalyptic fiction so much because she’s genuinely happy at the thought that the world might end.
‘Is the plan to get up sometime soon?’ she asks, and I tell her no, that is not the plan. I explain the plan to her, which is basically to wait, horizontally, for life to improve.
She’s holding a brown paper bag soft with grease and I’m fairly certain it has a sugar-and-cinnamon doughnut inside. ‘At this point I don’t have anything to get up for,’ I say as I reach for it.
‘No one has anything to get up for. Life’s pointless and everyone gets up anyway. That’s how the human race works,’ she says, and hands me a coffee to go with the doughnut.
‘I don’t like how the human race works.’
‘No one likes how the human race works,’ she says.
I finish eating and lie back on the day bed, staring at the ceiling. ‘I have a non-refundable round-the-world ticket.’
‘So go see the world,’ George says as dad walks past.
‘Get up, Henry,’ he says. ‘You’re fermenting. Tell him he’s fermenting, George.’
‘You’re fermenting,’ George says, and pushes me over so she can sit next to me. She lifts my legs and puts them over her legs.
‘I don’t understand,’ Dad says. ‘You were such happy children.’
‘I was never a happy child,’ George says.
‘True, but Henry was.’
‘I’m not anymore. It’s actually hard to imagine how my life could be any more shit at this point,’ I say, and George holds up the copy of the book she’s reading. The Road.
‘Okay. Sure. It could get more shit if there was some kind of world-ending event and people started eating each other. But that’s a whole different shit scale. On your average human-emotion scale, my life is registering as the shittiest of the shit.’
‘There’ll be other girls, Henry,’ Dad says.
‘Why does everyone keep saying that? I don’t want other girls. I want this girl. Not another one. This one.’
‘Amy doesn’t love you.’
George says it gently – like she’s sympathetically sticking a piece of glass straight through my left eye.
Amy does love me. She did love me. She wanted to spend an indefinite amount of time with me and that’s basically the same as forever. ‘If a person wants to spend forever with you, that’s love.’
‘But she didn’t want to spend forever with you,’ George says.
‘Now. Now she doesn’t want to spend forever with me. But then she did and forever doesn’t just disappear overnight.’ If it does, then there should be some sort of scientific law against it.
‘He’s flipping out,’ George says.
‘Take a shower, son,’ Dad says.
‘Give me one good reason.’
‘You’re working today,’ he says, and I take my heartbroken self off to the bathroom.
According to George, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that our family is shit at love. Even our cat, Ray Bradbury, she points out, doesn’t seem to get it on with the other cats in the neighbourhood.
Mum and Dad have tried six times to get back together but finally, last year, they signed the divorce papers and Mum moved out of the bookshop into a small flat in Renwood, a couple of suburbs away. When George isn’t at school, she spends all her time sitting in the window of the shop, writing in her journal. Dad’s been on the down side since Mum left, with no sign of stopping his post-divorce habit of eating whole blocks of peppermint chocolate every night while he re-reads Dickens.
I don’t agree with George. It’s not that I think we’re great at love, but I think the whole world is fairly shit at it, so, statistically speaking, we’re average, and I can live with that.
Amy did love me. Sure, she leaves me every now and then, but she always comes back. You don’t keep coming back to someone you don’t love.
I stand in the shower and try to work out what I did wrong. There must have been a moment when I messed up, and if I could find my way back to it, maybe that moment could be fixed.
Why? I text Amy when I’ve dried off. There must be a reason. Can you at least tell me that?
I press send, and head downstairs to the shop.
‘He looks better,’ Dad says when I rejoin them.
George looks up at me and decides it’s best not to answer.
‘What’s that wonderful Dickens line from Great Expectations?’ Dad asks. ‘The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.’
‘That’s hugely comforting, Dad,’ George says.
‘The terrible days get better,’ he tells us, but he doesn’t sound all that convincing.
‘I’m going book hunting,’ he says, which is unusual for a Friday. I ask if he wants some company, but he waves me off and tells me to look after the shop. ‘I’ll see you tonight for dinner – eight o’clock at Shanghai Dumplings.’
Since I finished Year 12 last November, I’ve worked in the bookshop every day. We sell second-hand books, which is the right kind of book to sell for this side of town. Dad and I do the book hunting. It’s getting harder. Not harder to find books – books are everywhere, and I’ve got my particular spots to look, spots Dad showed me – but harder to find the bargains. Everyone knows the worth of things these days, so you don’t just find a first edition of Casino Royale sitting on someone’s shelf that they don’t know they’ve got. If you want to buy it, then you buy it for what it’s worth.
I keep reading articles about the end of second-hand bookshops. Independent bookshops selling new books are hanging in there, doing well again in fact. But second-hand shops will be relics soon, apparently.