Words in Deep Blue(6)

‘There’ll be other girls, Henry,’ Dad says.

‘Why does everyone keep saying that? I don’t want other girls. I want this girl. Not another one. This one.’

‘Amy doesn’t love you.’

George says it gently – like she’s sympathetically sticking a piece of glass straight through my left eye.

Amy does love me. She did love me. She wanted to spend an indefinite amount of time with me and that’s basically the same as forever. ‘If a person wants to spend forever with you, that’s love.’

‘But she didn’t want to spend forever with you,’ George says.

‘Now. Now she doesn’t want to spend forever with me. But then she did and forever doesn’t just disappear overnight.’ If it does, then there should be some sort of scientific law against it.

‘He’s flipping out,’ George says.

‘Take a shower, son,’ Dad says.

‘Give me one good reason.’

‘You’re working today,’ he says, and I take my heartbroken self off to the bathroom.




According to George, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that our family is shit at love. Even our cat, Ray Bradbury, she points out, doesn’t seem to get it on with the other cats in the neighbourhood.

Mum and Dad have tried six times to get back together but finally, last year, they signed the divorce papers and Mum moved out of the bookshop into a small flat in Renwood, a couple of suburbs away. When George isn’t at school, she spends all her time sitting in the window of the shop, writing in her journal. Dad’s been on the down side since Mum left, with no sign of stopping his post-divorce habit of eating whole blocks of peppermint chocolate every night while he re-reads Dickens.

I don’t agree with George. It’s not that I think we’re great at love, but I think the whole world is fairly shit at it, so, statistically speaking, we’re average, and I can live with that.

Amy did love me. Sure, she leaves me every now and then, but she always comes back. You don’t keep coming back to someone you don’t love.

I stand in the shower and try to work out what I did wrong. There must have been a moment when I messed up, and if I could find my way back to it, maybe that moment could be fixed.

Why? I text Amy when I’ve dried off. There must be a reason. Can you at least tell me that?

I press send, and head downstairs to the shop.




‘He looks better,’ Dad says when I rejoin them.

George looks up at me and decides it’s best not to answer.

‘What’s that wonderful Dickens line from Great Expectations?’ Dad asks. ‘The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.’

‘That’s hugely comforting, Dad,’ George says.

‘The terrible days get better,’ he tells us, but he doesn’t sound all that convincing.

‘I’m going book hunting,’ he says, which is unusual for a Friday. I ask if he wants some company, but he waves me off and tells me to look after the shop. ‘I’ll see you tonight for dinner – eight o’clock at Shanghai Dumplings.’

Since I finished Year 12 last November, I’ve worked in the bookshop every day. We sell second-hand books, which is the right kind of book to sell for this side of town. Dad and I do the book hunting. It’s getting harder. Not harder to find books – books are everywhere, and I’ve got my particular spots to look, spots Dad showed me – but harder to find the bargains. Everyone knows the worth of things these days, so you don’t just find a first edition of Casino Royale sitting on someone’s shelf that they don’t know they’ve got. If you want to buy it, then you buy it for what it’s worth.

I keep reading articles about the end of second-hand bookshops. Independent bookshops selling new books are hanging in there, doing well again in fact. But second-hand shops will be relics soon, apparently.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because, since the divorce, Mum’s been talking about selling the shop. Every time she talks about it her arguments convince me a little more. I love this place but I don’t know that I love it as much as dad does – he doesn’t care if it makes money. He’s willing to work some place else to keep it.

He and Mum bought the place twenty years ago, when it was a florist. It was priced cheaply for a quick sale. The owner had walked out for some reason. When Mum and Dad came to inspect it, there were still buckets on the floor and the place smelt of old flowers and mouldy water. The notes had gone from the till, but there were still coins in the drawers.

Mum and Dad kept the wooden counter running along the right as you walk in, as well as the old green cash register and red lamp that the florist had left behind, but they changed almost everything else in the long, narrow space. They put in windows along the front of the shop, and Dad and his brother, Jim, polished the floorboards. They built shelves that run floor to ceiling the whole length of the shop, and huge wooden ladders that lean against the shelves so people can reach the books at the top. They built the glassed-in shelves where we keep the first editions, and the waist-high shelves in the centre of the shop at the back. They built the shelves where we keep the Letter Library.

In the middle of the shop, in front of the counter, there’s the specials table, and next to that is the fiction couch. At the back on the left are the stairs to our flat, on the right is the self-help cupboard, and then through the back glass doors is a reading garden. Jim covered it, so people can sit out there no matter what the weather, but he left the ivy and jasmine growing up the bluestone walls. In the garden there are tables with Scrabble boards and couches and chairs.