Words in Deep Blue(34)

Drunk boys in tuxedos cartwheel across the road in front of us. Girls, sheeny and strapless, applaud.

‘I like your dress better,’ I say to George, and start the car to go home.

My plan is to deliver George to the bookstore and keep driving. But when we arrive I look through the window and see Michael talking to Frederick and Frieda.

It reminds me of nights in Year 9 when they all helped Henry and me with English. The bookstore was always a hub of people who loved words and ideas and wanted to talk about them. Michael charged other students for tutoring, but he said I was like a daughter and refused to take my money.

Henry’s right. I don’t have a sense of humour anymore. I lost my friends in Sea Ridge because of it. They tried to hang in there with me but I pushed them away, the same way I pushed Joel.

‘Are you okay?’ George asks.

‘Not really,’ I say, and follow her inside to talk to Michael.

I ask if I can speak to him alone for a minute.

‘Certainly, Rachel,’ he says, and we walk towards the Letter Library. He puts his hand on the books, the way a person might do to feel the heat from something. ‘There’s twenty years of history here,’ he says. ‘More, if you count the history of each author.’

I already knew all the things that Henry reminded me of earlier. I knew that Sophia and Michael had divorced. I knew they were selling the bookstore. But my skin is thick since Cal died. All the sadness of losing him is sealed in and no one else’s sadness seems to get through.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been rude this week,’ I say, and he accepts my apology without question.

‘I know it’s a difficult job. That’s why I chose you.’

His words weigh me down but I want them anyway. ‘I’ve finished the alphabetising,’ I tell him. ‘It took me all week.’

I try to strike the right tone – gentle, kind – but I’ve lost those octaves and my voice sounds harsh. ‘I still think it’ll take longer than six months, even with overtime.’

‘The job’s too big,’ he says, with all the octaves I’ve lost.

It is, but that’s not what I’m trying to tell him. ‘If you give me a key to the bookstore, I could work double time. I could catalogue when it’s quiet, that way I won’t be interrupted by customers.’

‘Thank you,’ he says, and runs his eyes over the spines of the books. ‘It’s a library of people, really,’ he explains, and gives me a spare key.




George and Michael go upstairs, and Frederick and Frieda go home. I stay and continue work on the Letter Library, trying to see it as a library of people. If it is, it’s people who Michael doesn’t know. It’s like Cal’s box in the car. It’s the leftover things that don’t add up to anything that matters.

I’ve promised, though. The Letter Library is the heart of the bookstore, and the bookstore is Michael’s life, so I’ll try. It’s Henry’s life too. I don’t know how he’s planning on living without it. I keep imagining the whole family returning to the shop the same way Mum and I drifted in and out of Cal’s room.

I’ve been going for an hour, entering people’s thoughts and notes into my database, when I pull out the copy of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations. I turn to page 4, but of course my love letter’s not there. I pull out some books and search behind them for it. I flick through the books on either side of the Eliot, but I don’t find anything. A lot of people visit the Library. It’s most likely some stranger took the letter without knowing the worth of it.

Henry read me ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ once, on a night in Year 8. We were lying on the floor of the bookstore, and I’d told him that I didn’t like poetry. ‘I can’t understand it, so it never makes me feel anything.’

‘Hang on,’ he’d said, going over to the shelves.

He came back with the Prufrock. The poem did sound like a love song. As I listened I stared at a mark on the ceiling that looked like a tear-shaped sun. The mark somehow got mixed with the words.

I didn’t know exactly what ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was about, but lying there next to Henry, with his voice so close, I wanted to disturb something. I wanted to disturb us, shake us out of him seeing me as just Rachel, his best friend. I loved the poem for making me feel like disturbance was possible. And because it said something to me about life that I wanted to know, but didn’t understand.

‘Explain it to me,’ I’d said.

‘Do you need to understand it to love it? You think it’s beautiful. That’s enough,’ he said, and closed the book. ‘Proof that you don’t hate all poetry.’

He closed his eyes and I took the book from his sleeping fingers and read the poem again.

Tonight, I see the words and phrases that Henry has underlined over the years. I see also that other people have done the same, marking their loved ideas. Back in Year 8 I didn’t notice those markings. I didn’t notice the title page, either, but tonight, I read the inscription:

Dear E, I have left this book in the library, because I cannot bear to keep it, and I cannot throw it away. F

I know without any real proof that E is dead. I know that some of the lines on the love song are hers. She has been on the same page as me, the same page as Henry, and she has loved the same words that we have loved.