Words in Deep Blue(24)

‘Rachel and I are friends. Just friends. It’s you,’ I tell her. ‘You.’

She smiles and holds my arm a little tighter.

‘What if I changed?’ I ask, and she hesitates before she answers.

‘I don’t think it would matter. It wouldn’t matter,’ she says, but it’s the first part of that answer that’s the truth. She doesn’t think it would matter, meaning it might matter. It could matter. Before she leaves I make her promise that if I change, and it does matter, that she’ll come back.

She kisses me goodbye and I decide to take it for a yes.




There’s not one part of me that doesn’t hurt this morning: my teeth, my head, my heart, my pride, my eyeballs. The backs of my eyeballs hurt. I put my head under the water stream and try to wash out the thought of Amy always being a little bit in love with Greg.

I get out and dry off, then sit on the edge of the bath, and let the leftover steam clear my head. Dad walks in as it’s clearing and asks if he can use the mirror.

‘Rachel told me about Amy,’ he says.

‘She’s only with Greg temporarily.’

‘Sometimes you have to let go, Henry,’ he says, tapping his razor on the side of the sink. He doesn’t believe that, though. If he did, he’d be moving on with his life instead of re-reading Great Expectations and hoping for another chance with Mum.

I watch him making roads through the foam on his face, trying to figure out how to say what I want to say, now that I’m certain I want to say it. ‘How much would we get, Dad?’ I ask.

‘We own the building, Henry. It’s double-storeyed with a big backyard. I’d say well over a million.’

I go quiet while he finishes off his face, wiping it with the towel that I pass him. ‘It’s okay to want to sell,’ he says.

In my perfect world I wouldn’t worry about money. In my perfect world, books would be with us forever, and everyone would love the second-hand ones as much as Dad and George and I do. Amy would love them. But it’s not my perfect world. ‘I think maybe we should sell. Mum thinks we should, and she knows about the business.’

He nods, and waits. Because I can’t answer with a maybe. It’s a yes-or-no question. It reminds me of how he told me once that the thing he loved about fiction was that there were rarely yes-or-no answers when it came to characters. The world is complex, he told me. Humans are too.

He and I have had hundreds of conversations about the characters in books. The last one we had was about Vernon God Little, a book by D.B.C. Pierre. I’d loved it enough to read twice.

‘What did you love?’ Dad had asked.

‘Vernon,’ I’d said, naming the main character. ‘And the way it’s critiquing America. But mainly it’s the language. It’s like he’s left the words out in the sun to buckle a while, and they don’t sound like you’d expect.’

‘You might like to be a writer one day,’ Dad had said. ‘What do you think?’ Anything, in our bookshop, was possible.

But anything isn’t possible. Clearly, it’s not, or Mum wouldn’t want to sell. She loves the shop as much as we all do, and she accepts that the business is dying. Anything will not be possible if, for the rest of my life, I earn the same wage I do now. Anything won’t be possible for George.

‘Yes,’ I say, running my toe along a crack in the tile. ‘I want us to sell.’

‘And what will you do after?’ he asks.

‘There’s still the possibility of travelling with Amy. I’ll probably study next year.’

‘Then it’s decided,’ he says sadly. ‘I’ll get things underway.’




I walk downstairs and start to detach myself from the bookshop. I don’t look at the Letter Library on the way past. I don’t check the Prufrock for strangers’ thoughts. I don’t look behind me into the reading garden.

I walk straight to the front counter where George is yelling at the new guy: ‘If you don’t get your computer out of the way, I’ll shove it up your arse.’ It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen so I take the stapler away from George because we’re a second-hand bookshop and we can’t afford to replace an eye.

The new guy – Martin – is about George’s age. He seems like a neat, good-looking, computer geek.

‘Hi,’ he says to me, and smiles.

He seems like a nice, neat, good-looking, computer geek. Or maybe he just looks like a geek next to George in her black clothes and her black hair with a blue stripe running down it. Away from my goth sister, he’s probably more popular guy in high school than geek, which might account for why she doesn’t like him.

‘I’m Henry,’ I say, holding out my hand for him to shake.

‘Martin Gamble,’ he says, and George says, ‘Martin Charles Gamble,’ in the same way she might say the words complete and utter dick.

Martin doesn’t look angry; he looks kind of amused. ‘Your mum hired me to help in the store and to catalogue the books. Which is why,’ he says to George, ‘I need to charge my computer.’

‘Mum doesn’t live here anymore,’ George says. ‘Henry is the manager today and he’s about to fire your arse.’

‘Excuse me,’ I say to Martin. ‘I just need to talk to my sister for a minute.’