Words in Deep Blue(2)

‘So you’re packed?’ she asks, and I nod.

Tomorrow I leave Sea Ridge for Gracetown, a suburb in Melbourne, the city where my aunt Rose lives. I’ve failed Year 12, and since I don’t plan to try again next year, and since I’m lost here, Rose got me a job in the café at St Albert’s Hospital, where she’s a doctor.

Cal and I grew up in Gracetown. We moved to Sea Ridge three years ago, when I was fifteen. Gran needed help and we didn’t want her to sell the house. We’d stayed with her every holiday, summer and winter, since we were born, so Sea Ridge was like our second home.

‘Year 12 isn’t everything,’ Mum says.

Maybe it’s not, but before Cal died I had my life planned, down to the last detail. I was getting A’s and I was happy. I wanted to be an ichthyologist and study fish like the beaked whale. I wanted Joel, travel, university, freedom.

‘I feel like the universe cheated Cal, and cheated us along with him,’ I say.

Before Cal died, Mum would have explained calmly and logically that the universe is all existing matter and space, ten billion light-years in diameter, consisting of galaxies and the solar system, stars and the planets. All of which simply do not have the capacity to cheat a person of anything.

Tonight she lights another cigarette. ‘It did,’ she says, and blows smoke at the stars.





Henry




the sounds of turning pages

I’m lying next to Amy in the self-help section of Howling Books. We’re alone. It’s ten on Thursday night and I’ll be honest: I’m currently mismanaging a hard-on. The mismanagement isn’t entirely my fault. My body’s working on muscle memory.

Usually, this is the time and place that Amy and I kiss. This is the time our hearts breathe hard and she lies next to me, warm-skinned and funny, making jokes about the state of my hair. It’s the time we talk about the future, which was, if you’d asked me fifteen minutes ago, completely bought and paid for.

‘I want to break up,’ she says, and at first I think she’s joking. Less than twelve hours ago, we were kissing in this exact spot. We were doing quite a few other very nice things too, I think, as she elbows me.

‘Henry?’ she says. ‘Say something.’

‘Say what?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever you’re thinking.’

‘I’m thinking this is entirely unexpected and a little bit shit.’ I struggle into an upright position. ‘We bought plane tickets. Non-refundable, non-exchangeable, plane tickets for the 12th of March.’

‘I know, Henry,’ she says.

‘We leave in ten weeks.’

‘Calm down,’ she says, as though I’m the one who’s sounding unreasonable. Maybe I am sounding unreasonable, but that’s because I spent the last dollar of my savings buying a seven-stop around-the-world ticket: Singapore, Berlin, Rome, London, Helsinki, New York. ‘We bought insurance and got our passports. We bought travel guides and those little pillows for the plane.’

She bites the right side of her lip and I try very hard, very unsuccessfully, not to think about kissing her.

‘You said you loved me.’

‘I do love you,’ she says, and then she starts italicising love into all its depressing definitions. ‘I just don’t think I’m in love with you. I tried, though. I tried really hard.’

These must be the most depressing words in the history of love. I tried really hard to love you.

I should ask her to leave. I should remind her that we had a deal, a pact, a solid agreement when we bought those tickets that she would not break up with me again. I should say, ‘You know what? I don’t want to go with you. I don’t want to travel the lands where Dickens wrote, where Karen Russell and Junot Díaz and Balli Kaur Jaswal are still writing, with a girl who’s trying really hard to love me.’

But fuck it, I’m an optimist and I would like to see those homelands with her, so what I say is, ‘If you change your mind, you know where I live.’ In my defence, we’ve been on and off since Year 9 and she’s dumped me and come back before. More than once, actually, so history’s given me some reason to hope.

We’re lying in the self-help section, a room at the back of the shop that’s the size of a small cupboard. It’s just big enough for two people to lie side by side with no space to spare.

There’s no other way for her to leave than to climb over the top of me, so we do this weird fumbling dance as she gets up – a soft untangling wrestle. She hovers over the top of me for a second or two, hair tickling my skin, and then she leans forward and kisses me. It’s a long kiss, a good kiss, and while it’s happening I let myself hope that maybe, just maybe, it’s a kiss so great that it changes her mind.

But after it’s done she stands, straightens her skirt, and gives me a small, sad wave. ‘Goodbye, Henry,’ she says. And then she leaves me here, lying on the floor of the self-help section – a dead man. One with a non-refundable, non-exchangeable ticket to the world.




Eventually, I crawl out of the self-help section and make my way towards the fiction couch: the long, blue velvet day bed that sits in front of the classics. I hardly ever sleep upstairs anymore. I like the rustle and dust of the bookshop at night.

I lie here thinking about Amy. I retrace last week, running back through the hours, trying to work out what changed between us. But I’m the same person I was seven days ago. I’m the same person I was the week before and the week before that. I’m the same person I was all the way back to the morning we met.