Words in Deep Blue(15)

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.’

The 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.