There’s a soft pink glow in the sky by the time Henry drops me at the warehouse so that I can get ready for tonight. I remember something that Gus said to me once. ‘It’ll just arrive. A feeling of being okay. If you do all the things we’ve talked about, it’ll arrive.’ He spoke as though it was a physical thing, something as real as a package that would come to me in the mail.
As I step out of the van, I catch a glimpse of myself in the window. I’m not the old me or the me I’ve been for the last eleven months. I’m another me. I still don’t quite recognise her. She looks, if I had to describe her, expectant.
By the time I get back to the bookstore the sky has clouded over. ‘It’ll rain by the end of the night,’ I tell Henry.
‘Let’s hope not,’ he says, and smiles nervously.
We walk to Shanghai Dumplings where his parents, George, Martin and Lola are meeting us. ‘Since it’s the last night of the world, they agreed to have dinner,’ Henry says, and then we go quiet. I keep waiting for him to say something, to flirt with me again, to make things clear between us. I wonder if I should tell him that the letter I wrote three years ago wasn’t a goodbye.
Mai Li gives us some menus after we’ve walked into the restaurant, and tells Henry that his parents are fighting again. ‘I don’t know what it’s about, but it seems bad. Your mum’s crying.’
We walk up the stairs, and see that Mai Li’s right. Sophia’s eyes are red, and there’s a small smudge of mascara under her right eye. Henry looks worried. He puts his hand on his mum’s shoulder, and she smiles up at him.
We take our seats, and Lola arrives soon after us, and then George and Martin arrive too, and when we’re finally all seated, an awkward silence settles over the table.
‘What’s going on?’ Henry asks.
‘Nothing,’ Sophia says. ‘We can talk about it later.’
‘Your mother’s sold the business,’ Michael says.
‘We all decided to sell the business,’ Sophia says. ‘We sat here and voted. And then you called me and said I should go ahead and look for buyers.’
‘We should look for buyers for the business,’ Michael says. ‘Not buyers who want to knock down the place.’ He turns to the rest of us. ‘Not even the building will be left. Developers are buying the place to demolish it, but don’t worry, it sold for an absolute fortune. We’re rich,’ he says, and then looks embarrassed by his sharp tone.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sophia says, looking at me and Lola and Martin. ‘This is very rude. We should discuss this later.’
‘Undo it,’ George says, speaking to Sophia. ‘Tell them the deal’s off.’
‘She can’t,’ Michael says quietly, his voice under control now. ‘It’s done. It’s gone.’
‘It can’t be gone. It’s our home,’ George says. ‘I didn’t agree that it be knocked down.’
‘You didn’t agree at all,’ Sophia says gently. ‘You didn’t say anything.’
‘I’m saying something now,’ George says. ‘And maybe I would have spoken up before if you hadn’t made me feel like I was in the middle of something. Henry?’ George asks, looking at him.
Henry looks like he’s in shock. I take his hand and hold it.
‘What’s everyone reading?’ Sophia asks to change the subject, but no one answers. The quiet is unbearable, so I tell her I’ve been reading Cloud Atlas. ‘Henry’s read it, too.’
‘It’s a good book,’ George says half-heartedly.
‘I’m with George,’ Sophia says. ‘Great book. The characters all share the same birthmark, don’t they? Aren’t they all the same person?’ Her eyes keep moving from us back to Michael, who is completely silent.
‘They’re not the same person,’ Henry says. ‘But they’ve got the same soul.’
‘Doesn’t that make them the same person?’ George says, looking at her dad. He shakes his head and doesn’t answer.
‘It’s about the transmigration of the soul,’ I say. ‘At least I think it’s about the possibility that a soul can move on to another body after death.’
‘Does anyone believe in that?’ Martin asks, talking for George’s sake. ‘That souls can transmigrate?’
‘I do,’ says George. ‘I think souls can be in books, too.’
For all my thinking about this, I’ve never changed my view on souls, or transmigration, or ghosts. But I’ve changed what I want my view to be. I love the idea that Cal’s soul could find a way to transmigrate. The moment on the beach, when I realised he was gone, would have been so much easier if I’d known that the centre of him, the thing that made him Cal, had travelled somewhere, disappeared, but not gone. Had turned into something else – even turning into clouds would have been better than ash.
‘Transmigrate comes from the Latin transmigrat,’ Michael finally speaks. ‘Meaning removed from one place to another. Trans means across or beyond.’
‘Or through,’ Henry says. ‘On the other side of.’
‘Exactly,’ his dad says. ‘Have you read “Shakespeare’s Memory” yet? That’s a transmigration of sorts. A transmigration of memory.’
‘I read it,’ Henry says, and he looks so sad. I knew he’d feel like this when he lost the store. It’s one thing to imagine being without a thing you love. It’s another thing when it’s really gone.
Everyone keeps talking to cover the terrible silence.
Lola says she read Fifty Shades of Grey and Henry blocks his ears and then excuses himself to go to the bathroom. George says she wants to read it and her dad blocks his ears, too. Martin says he read a Peter Temple that George suggested and the talk turns to literary crime, and all the while I’m only partly listening.
I’m thinking of the transmigration of memory. Not the transmigration that happened in the Borges story, but the transmigration of memory that happens all the time – saving people the only way we can – holding the dead here with their stories, with their marks on the page, with their histories. It’s a very beautiful idea and, I decide, entirely possible.
Henry
a small spot of light in the darkness
I want to cry when Dad tells us that the bookshop is destined to be demolished. I want to just fucking cry, and then I want to rewind to a month ago, and make a different decision. I’d give up my world ticket, I’d give up Amy, I realise, to have the shop back. I didn’t know what it would feel like. There’s a gap in me, a gap in the future.
I look into my future tonight, stare down the road of it, and I’m walking past a block of ugly high-rise, flats, and I’m telling my kids that there, right there, was the most beautiful building – the building where I grew up.
‘Where is it now?’ they ask, and I tell them I threw it away to be with a girl who didn’t like what I did for a living, a girl who was a little bit in love with someone else, a girl who only came back to me when she was lonely. In short, kids, your dad really fucked up. If Amy loves me then she has to love me working in a bookshop. I can’t believe I didn’t demand that before.
I can’t look at Dad tonight. I’m too ashamed. I’m too sad. I study the tablecloth, every inch of the pattern. I concentrate on the circles. I trace around them with my eyes, finding the end of one, and following it around to the other. It’s the same tablecloth that’s always been here. The whole restaurant has them. I’ve never noticed all the little circles before.
Rachel holds my hand, which is the only good thing about the dinner. I could get through quite a bit with her holding my hand, I think. She’s my best friend, poor or not. She’s my best friend, despite having seen me drool on pillows. She’s dragged me out of the girls’ toilets when I was wedged between a bowl and a sanitary disposal unit. She still wants to spend the last night of the world with me even though I ditched her the last time.
I try to look at the bigger picture. It’s not a choice between Amy and Rachel. Even if I can’t have Rachel as more than a friend, it occurs to me now, with extreme clarity, that I don’t want Amy. I don’t want to go overseas with her. I want to be here, with my family, helping them with the fallout of the sale.