Words in Deep Blue(5)

We hailed a taxi and dropped Lola off first. I was checking my phone obsessively by the time I reached my place. I imagined Henry’s voice and how it would sound with the knowledge of me in it. I fell asleep waiting.

Lola woke me around three, asking if he’d called, which he hadn’t. He hadn’t called or come around by the time we left at nine, later that morning. At ten, when we were on the road to Sea Ridge, he sent me a text: Sorry I overslept!! Will call soon.

Henry doesn’t use exclamation points, I thought, staring at them. He doesn’t like the look of them unless they fill a whole page, in which case they look like rain. He especially hated when people used two, and at that moment I understood why. Two is trying too hard. Two is false.

Amy loves exclamation points. I read a short story of hers once and she used them every time someone spoke. She wrote the text. I imagined her reading my letter over Henry’s shoulder and telling him how he should reply: ‘Ignore it. She’s leaving anyway.’

Henry never mentioned my letter and what I’d told him that night, not once, in all the letters he wrote. They were full of Amy. I ignored every one.

Henry doesn’t know about Cal. If he’d heard, nothing would have kept him from the funeral. But I haven’t told him and neither has Mum. Rose can’t say the words without crying and she never cries in public. Cal wasn’t on Facebook. He had an account, but he wasn’t interested.

Tim Hooper, his best friend from Gracetown, moved to Western Australia a couple of months before Cal died, so I wrote him a letter with the news. I didn’t need to tell him not to post it on social media. I didn’t have to say that I couldn’t stand the idea that Cal’s death would be gossip for people to comment on. Tim just knew.

‘Henry used to tell me we were so close we could talk by mental telepathy,’ I say to Woof and the night around me. I only read the start of the letter before I fold it up, dig a huge hole, and bury it in the sand.



Dear Rachel

Since you never write, I can only assume you’ve forgotten me. Again, I refer you to the blood oath we took in Year 3.





Henry




second-hand books are full of mysteries

I wake Friday morning to see my sister, George, standing next to the fiction couch, where I fell asleep last night, and where I plan to keep sleeping all week.

Not surprisingly, I haven’t taken the break-up well, and I have no intention of taking it well in the future. My plan is to stay on the couch, getting up for toilet breaks and the occasional toasted sandwich, until Amy comes back to me. She always comes back to me. It’s just a matter of time.

Last night I collected all the books I thought I’d need before I took to the couch, so they’re all piled up around me – there’s some Patrick Ness, an Ernest Cline, some Neil Gaiman, Flannery O’Connor, John Green, Nick Hornby, some Kelly Link and, if all else fails, Douglas Adams.

‘Get. Up,’ George says, gently shoving me with her knee, which is her version of a hug. I love my sister, but, along with the rest of the world, I don’t really understand her and it’d be true to say I fear her, just slightly.

She’s seventeen, starting Year 12 this year. She likes learning but she hates her school. She got a scholarship to a private one on the other side of the river in Year 7 and Mum makes her stay there even though she’d rather go to Gracetown High.

She wears a huge amount of black, mostly t-shirts with things like Read, Motherfuckers on the front. Sometimes I think she likes post-apocalyptic fiction so much because she’s genuinely happy at the thought that the world might end.

‘Is the plan to get up sometime soon?’ she asks, and I tell her no, that is not the plan. I explain the plan to her, which is basically to wait, horizontally, for life to improve.

She’s holding a brown paper bag soft with grease and I’m fairly certain it has a sugar-and-cinnamon doughnut inside. ‘At this point I don’t have anything to get up for,’ I say as I reach for it.

‘No one has anything to get up for. Life’s pointless and everyone gets up anyway. That’s how the human race works,’ she says, and hands me a coffee to go with the doughnut.

‘I don’t like how the human race works.’

‘No one likes how the human race works,’ she says.

I finish eating and lie back on the day bed, staring at the ceiling. ‘I have a non-refundable round-the-world ticket.’

‘So go see the world,’ George says as dad walks past.

‘Get up, Henry,’ he says. ‘You’re fermenting. Tell him he’s fermenting, George.’

‘You’re fermenting,’ George says, and pushes me over so she can sit next to me. She lifts my legs and puts them over her legs.

‘I don’t understand,’ Dad says. ‘You were such happy children.’

‘I was never a happy child,’ George says.

‘True, but Henry was.’

‘I’m not anymore. It’s actually hard to imagine how my life could be any more shit at this point,’ I say, and George holds up the copy of the book she’s reading. The Road.

‘Okay. Sure. It could get more shit if there was some kind of world-ending event and people started eating each other. But that’s a whole different shit scale. On your average human-emotion scale, my life is registering as the shittiest of the shit.’