Words in Deep Blue(43)

Mai Li comes over and I explain it’s just the two of us, so she seats us on a tiny table near the toilet. People keep hitting the back of my chair with the door. There’s no room for my elbows on the table. There’s barely room for the menu, which I look at for the first time in my whole life because I have to decide what to order for one.

It doesn’t seem right to talk about books without the family here, but it doesn’t seem right not to, so I tell Martin about the Borges that Dad gave me earlier. I hand it over so he can look at it. I try to explain ‘The Library of Babel’ but I can’t quite put it into words. ‘It’s about a universe in the shape of a library, full of all possible works, even ones that don’t make sense. Rachel would have been able to explain it better.’

‘You’ve known her a long time,’ he says.

‘Ten years, if you count the three when she was away.’ I do count them. ‘She’s the closest friend I have.’ I’m not sure if the word ‘friends’ really covers us. I don’t know what word does, exactly. We’re us. Now that she’s back, I feel more like me.

‘Did you? I mean, have you ever?’

‘With Rachel? No. Definitely not. People ask. I mean, people ask all the time. But Rachel would never. I’d never. It’s always been Amy.’

‘How are things with her?’ he asks.

‘I haven’t heard anything since the text,’ I tell him.

I actually haven’t thought much about her this week, I realise. I’ve been thinking too much about Cal. About how he followed me around all the time when he was a kid, asking me questions, and then, when he was about 12, he turned into this super brain and the dynamic shifted. I miss him, and because he’s been away for so long, it feels a bit like a piece of the world has broken away.

‘Do you know anyone who’s died?’ I ask.

‘My grandmother,’ Martin says. ‘We were close. I miss her.’

We stop talking to order, and then I lean in and ask the question that’s been bugging me since Rachel told me the news. ‘Where do they go? I mean, they’re here and then they’re not. I can’t get my head around it.’

‘Did someone you know die?’ he asks, and I want to talk about it with him. I want to get some explanations from someone who’s as logical as Martin. But I promised Rachel, so I can’t.

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ I say, and ask him how things are going with George.

‘Things are better,’ he says, and I’m surprised. They don’t seem better. ‘Around this time last week she was telling you to fuck off.’

‘And I told her that I had decided not to fuck off.’

It’s an interesting tactic. ‘What did she say?’

‘She told me that if I didn’t fuck off, she would.’

‘I’m confused about how things are better.’

‘I was nice to her all week and this afternoon we had a breakthrough. I think we might be friends again.’

Before I can ask what that breakthrough was, exactly, Mai Li gets a break and takes it with us, and the subject shifts to her latest poetry performance and the university course that’s starting and whether or not fried wontons are better than steamed.




It’s easy hanging out with Martin, so when we leave the restaurant and he points to a poster advertising Pavement, a club not far from here, I agree to go with him for a little while. There’s time before I have to be at Laundry, plus Pavement isn’t the kind of place a guy like Martin should go to alone.

It’s walking distance from Shanghai Dumplings. It takes us about ten minutes. When we arrive there’s a line out the front filled with a lot of very angry-looking people. I saw Pavement once listed on the top of ‘The Most Violent Places in Gracetown’ in the local paper.

The line moves. It’s free to get in because no one would pay and we stick to the carpet as we walk through the club, all the way over to the far side of the room. There’s a live band that threaten to eat kittens on stage and everyone claps at the suggestion. ‘Put your back against the wall,’ I tell Martin, who’s looking around like he’s expecting to see a friend. He watches two guys walk past us; one of them is leading the other one by a chain. ‘It’s really best not to stare, Martin,’ I say.

He leans over and yells, ‘When will George be here?’

‘What?’ I yell back.

‘George. When will George be here?’

‘George wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this,’ I yell. ‘She was at Mum’s tonight but she’s probably back at the bookshop by now playing Scrabble and drinking warm cocoa.’

Martin nods and says, ‘Riggght,’ like something’s just become clear to him.

Something’s just become clear to me, too. ‘George told you she’d be here? That was the breakthrough this afternoon?’

‘I bought her coffees all week, and those doughnuts she likes. Is it unreasonable to think that if a person drinks the coffee and eats the food you buy them that you’re on the way to being friends?’

‘This is not unreasonable,’ I tell him.

‘So this afternoon I asked her if she wanted to maybe meet up somewhere and she said she might be at Pavement.’