by Cath Crowley
Pytheas
Henry
a watched phone never rings
Our opening hours at Howling Books are flexible. We’re open by ten in the morning, and we stay open till at least five, but sometimes we’ll stay open later. We’ll almost always open up for a late-night book emergency.
We close on Friday evening, though, because that’s when we have our family dinner at Shanghai Dumplings. Tonight, I’m bringing in the rolling shelves we keep on the street, getting ready for dinner, when Lola walks in and says she’s just seen Rachel.
I don’t need to ask her which Rachel she’s talking about. There’s only one Rachel. The Rachel. Rachel Sweetie. My best friend who moved away three years ago and forgot all about me.
After she left I wrote her letters – long letters – telling her all the news about the bookshop. I wrote about George and Mum and Dad and Lola and Amy. She sent me one-paragraph letters back, and then the letters turned into one-paragraph emails, and then she added me to group emails, and then she stopped writing altogether.
‘She’s ignoring me,’ I’d say to Lola every time Rachel sent her a long email. ‘Has she said anything to you?’ I’d ask, and she’d shake her head. Lola is a shit liar. Rachel had said something to her but since Lola was too loyal to tell me I was left to wonder.
‘She’s cut her hair short, and bleached it,’ Lola says, and now I’m trying to picture Rachel and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to wonder what she looks like or what she’s doing. ‘I still don’t know why we stopped being friends, but we did, so I don’t really want to hear about her.’
Lola turns her back to the counter and hauls herself up on it so she’s near the mint bowl. She takes one and says, ‘She’s back and I want to hang out so you need to get over it.’
‘I’m over it. I’m completely over it. I’m over that she wrote to you and not to me. Completely over that she wouldn’t take my phone calls. More than completely over that she left town without saying goodbye.’
‘The way I heard it, you texted her and said you’d slept in.’
‘Is that why she hasn’t written? Because I always sleep in. I’ve slept in almost every day of my life and Rachel knows that. She could have driven past the bookshop on her way out of town, woke me up, and said goodbye.’
‘You do seem to be over it,’ Lola says.
‘But you know what she did instead? She sent me a text saying that my copy of American Gods was on the front steps of her house. It rained before I got to her place. It was totally ruined.’
‘Lucky you work in a bookstore and you have five other copies on the shelf and two in your personal collection.’
‘Not the point,’ I say.
She passes me a flyer. ‘The Hollows are playing tonight at Laundry. Which is, for your convenience, just across the road.’
Lola and Hiroko have been playing together officially as The Hollows since the Year 11 formal. Unofficially, they’ve been dreaming of the band since Year 8. They’re a little like Arcade Fire meets The Go-Betweens meets Caribou and they’re good.
They play at Laundry on the Friday nights when the club has live music. The owner is a friend of Lola’s dad, so Lola made a deal with him – The Hollows play as support act to the main band and get a percentage of the door that’s taken before ten.
She slides off the counter. ‘Full disclosure: I asked Rachel. You should come and patch things up with her.’
I tell her I’ll try but I’m pretty sure patching will not be a possibility. You can’t patch up someone forgetting about you. For the rest of your life you’ll always be worrying that they’ll forget about you the same way they did before. You’ll always know that they’d be a hundred percent fine without you but you wouldn’t be a hundred percent fine without them.
I lock up after Lola’s gone and head to Shanghai Dumplings. On the way, I distract myself from thinking about Rachel by thinking about Amy. I’ve had my phone on silent all day and deliberately not checked, because it’s a truth universally acknowledged that a watched phone never rings, especially when you’re waiting on a text from your ex-girlfriend.
There’s a missed call from her, but no message.
I’m thinking about whether or not I should call back when I walk into Greg Smith. I’m looking down, and he’s standing in my way, so my shoulder knocks into his. I ignore him and keep walking. Greg was in my class at school and every time I see him he makes me question the universe. He’s a complete idiot but he’s got supernaturally white teeth and perfect hair. Why reward the idiots? Surely if you don’t want the idiots to win, don’t make them good-looking.
‘Heard Amy dumped your arse,’ he calls after I’ve passed him. I find it’s best not to engage with Greg. But every time I see him, I engage anyway. I engage when he calls my sister weird. I engage when he calls me weird. I engage when he calls Lola a lesbian like there’s something wrong with that. I engage when he says that all poetry is shit. I’m willing to admit that some poetry is shit. If Greg wrote poetry, his poetry would be shit. But Pablo Neruda, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson – just to name a few – are as far from shit as you can find.
‘She didn’t dump me, actually. We’re still together. Flying out on 12th of March,’ I tell him, and keep walking before he can say anything else. He’ll find out sooner or later that I’m lying, but it’ll be sometime when I’m not standing right in front of him. One of the great things about finishing high school is that you can finally get away from the dickheads.
I’m only in a bad mood till I get to the restaurant. We always get the pork dumplings, the pan-fried dumplings, the wantons with hot chilli sauce, the salt-and-pepper squid, the prawns and greens, and spring rolls.
Since Mum left, we’ve kept up the tradition. She’s moved out of the bookshop but she still comes to dumplings, and for an hour at least we’re a family again.
Mai Li’s working the door, the same as always. Her family owns the place. I know her from school. She’s studying journalism this year, but her main love is performance poetry that she writes on her phone while she’s walking around. I can’t work out if she speaks like a performance poet or if that’s just the way I hear her.
‘How be life, Henry?’ she asks, and I tell her, ‘Life be shit, Mai Li.’
‘Shit why?’
‘Shit because Amy dumped me.’
She stops handing out menus to customers and gives the news the pause it deserves. ‘Life be fucked then, Henry,’ she says, and gives me a menu. ‘I think they’re fighting.’
‘Really?’
‘No one’s eating. They’ve been yelling,’ she says, and I start climbing the stairs.
Mum and Dad don’t yell. They’re the kind of people who quote literature and try to talk about their problems. Even when Mum was leaving, they didn’t yell. The silence in the bookshop was so loud George and I went next door to Frank’s to get away from it, but even when they were alone, I’m pretty certain they fought in silence.
I arrive at the table and see that Mai Li’s right – they are fighting.
Usually at Friday-night dinners we talk non-stop and about books and the world. Last week we started with George. She’d read 1984 by George Orwell and The One Safe Place by Tania Unsworth. She’d started The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
The first rule of our family book discussions is you can’t spend forever explaining the plot. You get twenty-five words or less for that but endless time for what you thought about it. ‘Orwell – a world controlled by the state. Unsworth – set in a world after global warming. McCarthy – father and son surviving post-apocalypse.’
I asked her what it was about those terrible worlds that fascinated her, and she thought about it for a while. The thing I love about George is that she takes ideas and books and the discussion of those things seriously. ‘It’s the characters, mostly, not the world. It’s how people are when they’ve lost everything or when it’s dangerous to think for themselves.’
Th
e conversation turned to me, and what I’d been reading. Where Things Come Back, by John Corey Whaley. I’d brought the book with me so I passed it around. I didn’t want to give away too much so I just told them it was about Cullen Witter, a guy whose brother disappears. The book starts with the narrator talking about some of the first dead bodies he’d ever seen, and after that opening, I couldn’t stop reading.
Mum talked about Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and she looked sad when she explained to George and me that time is the goon because it pushes us around. George had to look up goon to find out it meant a kind of gang member. Dad had read the book and he looked sad too and it occurred to me that maybe love is the goon that pushes us around. ‘Maybe,’ Dad said when I mentioned it to him later. ‘But I like to think of love as being slightly more forgiving than time.’
Tonight is a whole different thing. There’s no book talking. Dad’s stabbing a prawn dumpling straight through the middle. ‘We need to talk to you,’ Mum says, which is the same way she brought up the divorce. ‘We need to talk to you’ is never good news.
‘Your mother thinks it’s time to sell the shop,’ Dad says, and it’s pretty clear it’s something he doesn’t want to do.
‘There are people making serious offers,’ Mum says. ‘We’re talking substantial money.’
‘Do we need substantial money?’ Dad asks.
‘Second-hand books aren’t exactly a thriving industry,’ Mum says. ‘What were the takings today, Henry?’
I put a whole dumpling in my mouth to avoid answering.
It’s true that second-hand bookshops aren’t thriving and it’s clear Mum thinks they won’t thrive again. Like Amy says all the time: Wake up and smell the internet, Henry. But does that mean we should sell? I don’t know. ‘Substantial’ and ‘money’ are two words that make a strong argument.
The thing about our family is we all get a vote, so Mum and Dad can’t make this decision without us. George is staring at her plate with ferocious intensity, like she’s hoping she can make it into a portal and disappear. I’m guessing she hasn’t cast her vote yet. She plays Scrabble with Dad every night, and she loves reading in the window with Ray Bradbury on her lap. But she misses Mum so much I’ve heard her crying in her room. She’ll vote with me, because she doesn’t want to take sides. That makes mine the deciding vote.
‘Do you want to work in the bookshop until it dies, Henry?’ Mum asks, and Dad says he doesn’t think that’s a fair question, and she says he’s free to make a counter-argument, and he says, ‘If we all gave up on the things we love when it gets hard, it’d be a terrible world.’ We’re talking about more than books, here, which is why George is voting with me.
I look into the future – twenty years, say – and I know it’s unlikely we’re still making a go of it. I see myself sitting behind the counter reading Dickens in Dad’s spot, talking to Frieda, the sun coming in the window, lighting up universes of dust and the relics that are second-hand books. I see myself going off at night to work a second job to pay the bills, like Dad’s had to do more than a few times over the years. Eventually, I see a world without books, definitely a world without second-hand bookshops. I have a flashback to Amy and me talking when she loaned me the money to pay for travel insurance. ‘If you want to have a life, Henry, you need to get a proper job.’
‘How bad is it really?’ I ask Mum. She does the accounting. She’s the practical one who thinks about the future.
‘It’s bad, Henry. We barely make ends meet some months. I want to be able to pay for George’s university fees next year. I want to retire some day. I want to leave you and George with a future.’
And suddenly it’s a no-brainer why Amy broke up with me. I’m destined to be unemployed. She’s destined to be a lawyer. At the moment, my plan is to live with my dad and my sister long-term in the shop. Her plan is to buy her own flat. The reason she broke up with me can’t be as simple as that, but it must have something to do with it. I hardly ever have money to take her out.
I love second-hand books; I love books. But if things are as bad as Mum says then selling’s the best thing for all of us. ‘If there’s a huge offer on the table, maybe we should just think about it,’ I say, avoiding Dad’s eyes.
‘Maybe we should just talk to the agents,’ Mum says and she takes our silence as agreement.
George goes to the bathroom, mainly to avoid the discussion. While she’s gone Mum tells me that she’s hired a couple of people to catalogue the books so we know what stock we have. ‘You know one of them, in fact – Rachel.’
I don’t have to ask her which Rachel. Again, there’s only one Rachel.
‘I saw her aunt in the supermarket last week,’ Mum says. ‘She told me Rachel was moving back to the city, but the job Rose lined up for her at the hospital café fell through. Rachel’s good with computers, so I told Rose she could have the job.’
I listen to Mum and try to think about what conditions would have to exist for Rachel to accept a job working with me at Howling Books. Maybe she suffered a blow to the head and she’s got amnesia.
‘I thought you’d be happy,’ Mum says when I don’t respond. ‘You’re best friends.’
‘That was before she moved,’ I tell her. ‘We haven’t spoken in years.’
‘Should I un-hire her?’ she asks. ‘I don’t think I can un-hire her.’
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see Rachel. Lying if I said I hadn’t missed her. And if she’s taken the job then maybe she feels the same way. ‘Don’t un-hire her,’ I tell Mum as George comes back and says she’s not hungry anymore and wants to go home.
Mum leaves with her, so it’s just Dad and me. We sit at the table with too many dumplings and a whole heap of quiet. ‘You’re disappointed,’ I say. ‘I haven’t officially cast my vote yet.’
‘We all have a vote. We’re all part of the decision. Don’t look so worried.’ He puts his hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m not disappointed in you.’
‘I read an article that said second-hand books will be relics eventually,’ I tell him, still trying to make excuses for how things went tonight.
‘Do you know what the word relic actually means, the dictionary definition?’ he asks, offering me the prawn crackers.
I take one and tell him I don’t know.
‘It means sacred,’ he says, breaking his cracker in half. ‘As in “the bones of saints”.’
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Letter left between pages 8 and 9
Undated
To my love
If I knew where you were, I would post this letter. But I don’t, so I will have to leave it here. I know how you love F. Scott. More than you love me, I think. I searched every inch of the bookshelves. I feel certain you’ve taken our copy. We bought it together. Don’t you remember? So it wasn’t really yours to take.
Your letter arrived. It was better than a text, I suppose, but you’re wrong. It wasn’t the kinder way to end things. It would have hurt just the same if you’d said goodbye to my face, but it would have stung less.
Where have you gone, my love? After ten years together I think knowing this is more than my due. Write me one line to let me know where you are. So that I do not wonder, for the rest of our lives when I imagine you, what is the background to your face.
John
Henry
shit days generally get more shit
I walk back from the restaurant towards Laundry thinking about Rachel and the bookshop, about whether or not I should sell, and about what I should do when I see her.
The problem with the bookshop is that selling makes sense. I’ve been thinking it for a while now. Mum makes a good argument, and she’s always been the practical one in the family.
The problem with Rachel is that I don’t know what to say when I see her. I don’t know if I can be her friend again if she doesn’t say that she missed me, or give me a good explanation as to why she didn’t write. I don�
��t have a whole lot of dignity, but I’ve got some.
I’m worrying about this when I walk straight into her. We collide on the street, and I’m in the middle of apologising before I realise it’s her.
The first thing I think is: thank God she’s back. The second thing I think is: she’s grown up gorgeous. She always was gorgeous, of course, but she’s grown up even more gorgeous than I thought she would. There’s something different about her, and I can’t stop my eyes from roaming all over her, checking out the changes – her hair’s short and bleached, she’s wearing an old black t-shirt and black jeans, she’s taller, or maybe it’s just that she’s thinner, or maybe it’s both.
‘Hi,’ I say.
‘Hi,’ she says, and then looks away, like she barely recognises me.
‘Henry,’ I say. ‘Henry Jones. Best friend for seven years. Ringing any bells?’
‘I know,’ she says, still not really looking at me.
She takes a flyer from her pocket and unfolds it. ‘I’m here for Lola,’ she says, and I can’t help feeling the end of that sentence is, ‘not you.’
‘Same,’ I say. ‘Yep. I’m here for Lola. Who is,’ I tell her, ‘my best friend now, since my other best friend left town and forgot all about me.’ I scuff at the ground. ‘How much time does it take to write a letter?’
‘I wrote letters,’ she says.
‘Yeah, thanks for those paragraphs with basically nothing in them.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she says, and points over my shoulder. ‘The line’s moving.’
We pay our money, get our wrists stamped, and walk inside. The club’s set up in the shell of an old laundromat: the machines are spread around the bar and in some corners you can still smell cheap detergent and half-dried sheets. It’s small, so I’m not following Rachel; I’m walking behind her to the bar. Still, she turns back to look at me like I’m a stalker.