Words in Deep Blue(50)

We decide to walk home. We’re less than an hour away, and if we get tired we’ll get a taxi. There are loads of people on the street. This is the time that I love the city. The heat is soft. I hate it in the day when the sun bounces off concrete.

We walk through the streets without talking, the kiss making things awkward between us. I decide to put him out of his misery. ‘It didn’t mean anything, Henry. I was helping you out. It’s not worth being embarrassed about small things.’

I try to explain what it’s like to see your brother on the beach, looking empty like Cal did. ‘Nothing seems important after that. Or, the small things don’t seem important,’ I say, trying to convince myself at the same time.

‘I disagree,’ he says.

‘You don’t know what I know.’

‘I disagree that love and sex are the small things. I don’t need to have seen a dead body to know I’m right about that.’

We take the short cut through the park. The sprinklers are on, and we rest near one and hold our legs over the soft specks.

Henry points to the park light and the moths that are flying around it. ‘What is it about the light?’ he asks, and I tell him that moths are phototactic.

‘Phototaxis is when something automatically moves to or away from light. Moths are positively phototactic – they’re attracted to light.’

‘But why?’ he asks.

‘No one knows for certain. Some people think that migrating moths use the night sky to navigate. They follow the lights in the sky.’

‘But they’re flying around a streetlight.’

‘They’ve been using the moon as a guide, flying towards it, but never expecting to reach it, and when they hit the lamp or the fire, they get confused. They think it could be the moon.’

‘It’s nothing like the moon,’ he says.

‘But they don’t know that.’

We sit here for a long time. Henry takes off his shoes and socks to feel the water on his feet. We look at the moths. Henry points out the water’s shadow on the grass, the blackbird singing at night, the lights in the buildings. He’s picking up parts of the world and showing them to me, saying, See? It’s beautiful.




We get back to the bookstore around two. George and Martin and Lola took a taxi, so they’re home ahead of us. George and Martin are talking in the reading garden. Lola is zonked out on the fiction couch. According to George, Hiroko didn’t take it well when Lola ordered her to stay in the country. ‘Lola drank a lot, very quickly,’ she says.

I put a glass of water next to the couch, and leave her sleeping.

I text Rose and tell her I’m sleeping here and she texts back a winking smile. I think about the kiss and how Henry hasn’t spoken about Amy once since we left the club, and I’m hopeful. I think about the amount of times he’s spoken about her in the past, and I’m not.

Henry’s already lying on the floor when I put down my phone. I lie close beside him. ‘Remember how your dad used to tell us the place was haunted?’ I ask, as we listen to the sounds in the store.

‘Second-hand books are haunted according to him. Ghosts in the pages.’

‘You believe in them,’ I say.

‘I don’t disbelieve in them. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

‘Hamlet?’ I ask.

‘Very good,’ he says, and I tell him it’s underlined in the Letter Library.

‘So maybe there’s something to it,’ he says.

‘Maybe,’ I say, thinking about the arrow on Sea.

‘I’ve seen Cal since he died,’ I tell him. ‘He’s a hallucination but he seems so real. I can actually smell apple gum.’

‘Is that possible?’ he asks, and I tell him it is.

‘You can hallucinate sights and smells.’

‘And you’re sure he’s not a ghost? You never thought he might be?’

‘I know he’s not, but I can’t help hoping that he is. Sometimes a television show will come on, one that he loved, and I’ll get so sad because he’ll never know how it ends. I think, if he’s a ghost, then at least he can watch Game of Thrones.’

‘Maybe there’s Game of Thrones on permanent stream wherever he is.’

‘That’s what we think because we can’t imagine what it’s like to not exist.’

He stretches out his arm so I can lie on it, and that makes the thought of not existing slightly less terrifying.

‘You’re warm,’ he says.

‘It’s a warm night,’ I say.

‘Cal believed in them,’ he says, and we’re back to ghosts.

‘Cal believed in all kinds of things,’ I say, and he laughs as if he’s remembering those Sunday-night dinners at our place.

‘He used to love messing with my head, telling me the theories of time,’ he says. ‘Like the growing block universe theory. I still don’t understand it.’

‘The growing block universe theory of time states that the past and present are happening simultaneously,’ I say, thinking about that night when Cal was explaining it to us. He was reading all kinds of books, like Objective Becoming by Bradford Skow. That book told the reader to imagine time as another dimension, a dimension like space. It told them to imagine they could see the universe from above, get outside the universe and look down. If they could do that, then they’d see all the events of their life spread out like they see things in space spread out. I imagined time as like the landscape seen from a plane.