Words in Deep Blue(70)

As I’m leaving, I see Michael sitting in the corner of the garden. He must have been there all along. When I get closer I see why he was silent. He’s been crying.

I let him have his privacy, and walk back inside. I look at the Letter Library for a long time, thinking about the catalogue, and how it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Because a record on a computer doesn’t record the way people have underlined. You can’t tell from a database the deep mark that Michael left under the words where Pip tells Estella that she’s part of his existence. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here.

That speech is underlined all the way through, and the notes in the margins are scribbled frantically. There’s no way I can record the reasons why people have underlined that speech, or how they felt when they saw that someone else had underlined it too. I can imagine by looking at it, but I can’t record that on a spreadsheet.

I can’t record the things I felt by holding the book. I can’t record the worn pages or the coffee cup rings or the circles around Auden and Eliot’s poetry. I know the poems meant something to people just by holding the book, and that’s what Michael wants to keep. A catalogue won’t keep it for him.

It can be saved, though. Just not in this form.

I tell Michael first, and he keeps crying as I explain.

Then I go upstairs to Henry. ‘Wake up.’ I say it close to his ear, so my lips kiss skin. ‘Wake up. I know what we have to do.’





Henry




the world has not ended I wake and the world has not ended and Rachel is whispering transmigration into my ear. At least I think she is. I can’t quite tell because I’m distracted by her mouth and the memory of what happened last night and the hope that it might happen again, very soon.

I sit up, and she says the word again. ‘Transmigrate. The Letter Library has to transmigrate. We have to break it up and leave it in other bookstores.’

It’s a nice idea, I tell her, but other stores won’t want them. ‘It’s Howling Books’ thing. The books are written all over, so it’s not like they can sell them. And if they kept them all they’d do is take up shelf space for stock that earns them money.’

‘So we won’t tell anyone,’ she says, and I listen as she describes the operation. We will disperse the Letter Library secretly, in all the bookstores around the city, and further.





Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith Letter left between pages 44 and 45

14 February 2016



Dear Cal

This isn’t a goodbye letter; let’s get that straight. I’ll be writing more letters to you over the years. You’ve become the person I tell everything to, and that won’t change.

I got your last letter – and the answer is yes. Yes, let’s meet. Let’s start at Frank’s café for breakfast, and then we can go to the Palace, where I see they’re having a Doctor Who marathon. Then we’ll head across town to the museum, I think.

I’m not disappointed. I thought it was you – at least, I was fairly sure, but then the letters kept coming after you’d moved, so for a while I wondered whether it was Tim. I didn’t want it to be Tim. I wanted it to be you.

Do you remember that day at school when we sat out in the sun, watching everyone play sport? It was our first and only, not on paper, conversation.

I was crying because of what happened at a party, and because Mum wasn’t at home anymore.

You: Hello

Me: What do you want?

You: To make you feel better Me: Impossible.

You gave me the Sea-Monkeys.

You: They’re fast-growing sea creatures. You put them in water and they grow really quickly. They get to be adults in about a week. They’re not actual monkeys. They’re a kind of brine shrimp. They start off as these cysts. If the conditions aren’t good in the lake, the females release dormant cysts; the embryos just wait in those for as long as it takes for things to get better. And then, when things are good again, the life cycle keeps going. They’re like time travellers, holding on until conditions improve.

Me: You’re so weird.

You: I know.

I really loved those Sea-Monkeys, but I didn’t say it then.

Love,

George





Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

Letter left between pages 78 and 79

Undated



Dear Stranger

If you have found this letter, then you have found this book. It’s an incredibly important book – all books are incredibly important – but this book, this particular copy of this book – started a shop. Howling Books. Don’t bother looking for it. By the time you read this letter, it will be gone.

This book was the first book on the shelf, the first book I gave my wife, and although we’re no longer together, it is proof of how we loved each other once. Proof that we walked into a florist one day, and dreamt into it another life.

So why haven’t I kept it? A girl called Rachel convinced me I shouldn’t. One morning, she found me crying in the reading garden. Weeping at the thought of my bookshop, my life, being knocked to the ground. It had been in our family for more than twenty years.

The bookshop is the building but not only the building, she told us. It is the books inside. People are not only their bodies. And if there is no hope of saving the things we love in their original form, we must save them how we can.