Words in Deep Blue(3)

Amy came from a private school across the river. She moved to our side of town after her dad’s accounting firm downsized and he had to shift jobs. They lived in one of the new apartment blocks that had gone up on Green Street, not far from our school.

From Amy’s new bedroom she could hear traffic and the flush of next-door’s toilet. From her old bedroom, she could hear birds. These things I learnt before we dated, in snippets of conversations that happened on the way home from parties, in English, in detention, in the library, when she stopped by the bookshop on Sunday afternoons.

The first day I met Amy I knew surface things – she had long red hair, green eyes and fair skin. She smelt flowery. She wore long socks. She sat at an empty table and waited for people to sit next to her. They did.

I sat in front of her in our first English class together and listened to the conversation between her and Aaliyah. ‘Who’s that?’ I heard Amy ask. ‘Henry,’ Aaliyah told her. ‘Funny. Smart. Cute.’

I waved above my head without turning around.

‘And eavesdropper,’ Amy added, gently kicking the back of my chair.

We didn’t officially get together till the middle of Year 12, but the first time we kissed was in Year 9. It happened after our English class had been studying Ray Bradbury’s short stories. We’d read ‘The Last Night of the World’ and the idea caught on in our year that we should all spend a night pretending it was our last and do the things we’d do if an apocalypse were heading our way.

The principal heard what we were planning and told us we couldn’t do it. An apocalypse sounded dangerous. Our plans went underground.

Flyers appeared in lockers with the end set for the 12th of December, the last day of school. There’d be a party that night at Justin Kent’s house. Make plans, the flyers told us. The end is near.

I stayed up late on the night before the end, trying to write the perfect letter to Amy, a letter that’d convince her to spend the last night with me. I walked into school with it in my top pocket, knowing I probably wouldn’t give it to her, but hoping that I might.

I had a brilliant best friend called Rachel back then, who I don’t have anymore for reasons I don’t completely understand, and my plan was to spend the last night with her unless some miracle happened and Amy became a possibility.

No one listened in class that day. There were small signs all over the place that things were coming to an end. Signs that the teachers overlooked but we saw. In our homeroom, someone had turned all the notices on the board upside down. Someone had carved THE END into the back of the boys’ toilet door. I opened my locker to find a piece of paper with one day to go written on it and I realised that no one had bothered working out the finer details of when the world would actually end. Midnight? Sunrise?

I was thinking about that when I turned and saw Amy standing next to me. The note was in my pocket but I couldn’t give it to her. Instead I held up the paper – one day to go – and asked her what she was planning on doing with the time she had left.

She stared at me for a while, and eventually said, ‘I thought you might ask me to spend it with you.’ There were several people in the corridor listening when she said it, and no one, me included, could quite believe my luck.

Amy and I decided the end should be when the sun came up – 5.50 in the morning according to the Weather Channel. We met at the bookshop at 5.50 in the afternoon, to make it an even twelve hours. From there we walked to Shanghai Dumplings for dinner. Around 9 we went to Justin’s party and when it got too loud we walked to the Benito building and took the elevator to the top – the highest place in Gracetown.

We sat on my jacket and watched the lights and Amy told me about her flat, the smallness of the rooms, the birdsong she’d left behind. It’d be years before she told me about her dad and his lost job and how terrible it had been to hear him crying. That night, she only hinted at her family’s worries. I offered her the bookshop, if she ever needed space. If she sat in the reading garden there might be birds. And the sounds of turning pages are surprisingly comforting, I told her.

She kissed me then, and even though we didn’t date until years later, something started in that moment. Every so often, when she was alone at the end of a party, we’d kiss again. Girls knew, even if Amy was with some other guy at the time, that I belonged to her.

Then one night in Year 12, we became something permanent. Amy came to the bookshop. It was late. We were closed. I was studying at the counter. She’d been dating a guy called Ewan who went to school in her old neighbourhood, but that afternoon he’d broken up with her. She needed someone she could rely on to her take to the formal. So there she was at the bookshop door, tapping on the glass at midnight, calling my name.





Rachel




soft pencil moons

Mum goes back to the house, but I stay on the beach with Woof. I take out the letter I’ve been carrying around since I decided to go back to the city – the last letter that Henry sent. I kept it, along with all his others, in a box hidden in the back of my sock drawer. After I moved to Sea Ridge, Henry wrote every week for about three months, until he got the message that we weren’t friends anymore.

‘There’s no point writing back unless he tells me the truth,’ I’d say to Cal every time I got a letter and every time Cal would stare at me, his eyes serious behind his glasses, and say something like, ‘It’s Henry. Henry your best friend; Henry who helped us build the tree house that time; Henry, who gave us free books; Henry, who helped us both in English, Henry.’