Words in Deep Blue(57)

The book club is at the part where the group has finished the book under discussion, and they’re ready to start in on individual suggestions. Josie goes first. She started coming here about eight years ago, the first time to buy a copy of James and the Giant Peach. I was ten, a Roald Dahl expert, and Dad sent me over to the shelves with Josie to locate the book. We had a conversation about all of Dahl’s works, the most frightening of them being The Witches, and I remember her laughing as I checked out her feet. I told Josie that we had all of the books, and she told me it was all right, she just wanted this one. ‘But thank you.’

After she’d gone, Dad explained that she’d lost her son, and said it was nice of me to spend time with her. I remember feeling slightly guilty. I’d spent time with her because she knew every sentence of the Roald Dahl books. I wasn’t actually trying to be nice.

Josie’s book suggestion to the group tonight is When Things Come Back. She holds up the book to show the cover, and I realise she’s going to talk about her son dying. I start to warn Rachel, but she puts her fingers to her lips to make me quiet. When I’m not, because she needs to hear that this might upset her, she covers my mouth. I cover her ears without thinking. ‘What you doing?’ she whispers.

‘It’s about death,’ I whisper back.

‘It’s okay, Henry,’ she says, and pulls my hands away from her ears.

I pull hers from my mouth.

We’re close up, eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose, holding hands. She doesn’t seem sad, at least not the kind of sad she’s been looking since she arrived. ‘I want to hear Josie,’ she says, and turns to the front, without dropping my hand.

When Rachel’s interested in something she leans forward, and I can almost hear her humming. She is the smartest, sharpest girl I know. I hold her hand tighter, because Josie is talking about her son. I’ve heard the story of how he died, and it’s terrible – the bike, the car, how he was here in one second and then gone in the next.

Rachel is mesmerised. So is the group. Josie starts off a round of people talking about their lives, sometimes connected to the books they’ve brought with them and sometimes not. Every one of them is talking about death.

‘I’m okay,’ Rachel says, because I’m staring at her, waiting for signs that she’s not. She points at the group, signalling that I should pay attention. When I look back, Frederick is standing in that formal way he has.

‘My wife Elena died twenty years ago,’ he says, and the room is so quiet. ‘We ran a shop together.’

He tells the group about the night she died, when he sat next to her, and read from her favourite book. I can see him, reading in that soft, careful way he has, saying every word completely, before starting on the next.

Rachel looks over at me. ‘The Walcott,’ we say together.





Rachel




the words could rain on us

I am a strange mix of things tonight. I am spark from Henry’s hands and the memory of his kiss. I am warmth, blush from his stare, and calm, because I’m almost certain that he’s mine and I’m his. He walked inside, and took my hand and held it in a way that let me know. It seems impossible at the same time that it seems like the thing that I knew was always going to happen. I’m all these good things, and aching, too, and sad, because Josie is talking about her son. ‘He was seven,’ she says. ‘Riding his bike. I was, cheering him on. Then a car came round the corner and went up onto the footpath. Just collected him right up,’ she says, and looks shocked, as if all the years haven’t dulled that moment. She’s staring at a spot of air in front of it, and I know, in that spot of air, is her son. At this moment, he might be lying on the footpath, as she saw him that day. But I’m certain that at other times, he’s in that spot, grinning at her.

I’m crying, I realise, but I don’t care.

Frieda talks about her brother next, who died in a plane crash. Another woman talks about her cousin who has cancer and will, most likely, be dead soon. Henry’s agitated beside me but I squeeze his hand to let him know I’m okay. He squeezes back and I ache more and smile again and think about death in my head and love in my skin.

Frederick talks last. He stands to share his story, and as he speaks, he solves some mysteries for Henry and me. ‘My wife Elena died twenty years ago. We ran a shop together.’ He tells us that he’s searching for a book because it was his wife’s favourite. ‘Elena read from it on our wedding night, and I read to her from it years later, as she died.’

‘The Walcott,’ Henry and I say together.

There’s a soft haze in my chest, a quiet I haven’t felt in a year now. I won’t ever put it together properly in words, but I understand it. Frederick’s story is different in the details, so it can only ever be his. But all the same, I hear myself in it.

I’m certain that E and F, on the pages of the Prufrock, are Frederick and Elena. As he speaks, I feel as though Elena is here in the bookshop with us. I think about Cal’s arrow on Sea, and all the other lines in the books, the pages where words are the same, thoughts are the same, where words are written so closely to each other that the curves of letters intersect. I wish Mum were here to listen in to the book club, to read the markings in the Library, to feel what I feel and know what I’m starting to know.