Lola and Hiroko have been playing together officially as The Hollows since the Year 11 formal. Unofficially, they’ve been dreaming of the band since Year 8. They’re a little like Arcade Fire meets The Go-Betweens meets Caribou and they’re good.
They play at Laundry on the Friday nights when the club has live music. The owner is a friend of Lola’s dad, so Lola made a deal with him – The Hollows play as support act to the main band and get a percentage of the door that’s taken before ten.
She slides off the counter. ‘Full disclosure: I asked Rachel. You should come and patch things up with her.’
I tell her I’ll try but I’m pretty sure patching will not be a possibility. You can’t patch up someone forgetting about you. For the rest of your life you’ll always be worrying that they’ll forget about you the same way they did before. You’ll always know that they’d be a hundred percent fine without you but you wouldn’t be a hundred percent fine without them.
I lock up after Lola’s gone and head to Shanghai Dumplings. On the way, I distract myself from thinking about Rachel by thinking about Amy. I’ve had my phone on silent all day and deliberately not checked, because it’s a truth universally acknowledged that a watched phone never rings, especially when you’re waiting on a text from your ex-girlfriend.
There’s a missed call from her, but no message.
I’m thinking about whether or not I should call back when I walk into Greg Smith. I’m looking down, and he’s standing in my way, so my shoulder knocks into his. I ignore him and keep walking. Greg was in my class at school and every time I see him he makes me question the universe. He’s a complete idiot but he’s got supernaturally white teeth and perfect hair. Why reward the idiots? Surely if you don’t want the idiots to win, don’t make them good-looking.
‘Heard Amy dumped your arse,’ he calls after I’ve passed him. I find it’s best not to engage with Greg. But every time I see him, I engage anyway. I engage when he calls my sister weird. I engage when he calls me weird. I engage when he calls Lola a lesbian like there’s something wrong with that. I engage when he says that all poetry is shit. I’m willing to admit that some poetry is shit. If Greg wrote poetry, his poetry would be shit. But Pablo Neruda, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson – just to name a few – are as far from shit as you can find.
‘She didn’t dump me, actually. We’re still together. Flying out on 12th of March,’ I tell him, and keep walking before he can say anything else. He’ll find out sooner or later that I’m lying, but it’ll be sometime when I’m not standing right in front of him. One of the great things about finishing high school is that you can finally get away from the dickheads.
I’m only in a bad mood till I get to the restaurant. We always get the pork dumplings, the pan-fried dumplings, the wantons with hot chilli sauce, the salt-and-pepper squid, the prawns and greens, and spring rolls.
Since Mum left, we’ve kept up the tradition. She’s moved out of the bookshop but she still comes to dumplings, and for an hour at least we’re a family again.
Mai Li’s working the door, the same as always. Her family owns the place. I know her from school. She’s studying journalism this year, but her main love is performance poetry that she writes on her phone while she’s walking around. I can’t work out if she speaks like a performance poet or if that’s just the way I hear her.
‘How be life, Henry?’ she asks, and I tell her, ‘Life be shit, Mai Li.’
‘Shit why?’
‘Shit because Amy dumped me.’
She stops handing out menus to customers and gives the news the pause it deserves. ‘Life be fucked then, Henry,’ she says, and gives me a menu. ‘I think they’re fighting.’
‘Really?’
‘No one’s eating. They’ve been yelling,’ she says, and I start climbing the stairs.
Mum and Dad don’t yell. They’re the kind of people who quote literature and try to talk about their problems. Even when Mum was leaving, they didn’t yell. The silence in the bookshop was so loud George and I went next door to Frank’s to get away from it, but even when they were alone, I’m pretty certain they fought in silence.
I arrive at the table and see that Mai Li’s right – they are fighting.
Usually at Friday-night dinners we talk non-stop and about books and the world. Last week we started with George. She’d read 1984 by George Orwell and The One Safe Place by Tania Unsworth. She’d started The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
The first rule of our family book discussions is you can’t spend forever explaining the plot. You get twenty-five words or less for that but endless time for what you thought about it. ‘Orwell – a world controlled by the state. Unsworth – set in a world after global warming. McCarthy – father and son surviving post-apocalypse.’
I asked her what it was about those terrible worlds that fascinated her, and she thought about it for a while. The thing I love about George is that she takes ideas and books and the discussion of those things seriously. ‘It’s the characters, mostly, not the world. It’s how people are when they’ve lost everything or when it’s dangerous to think for themselves.’
The conversation turned to me, and what I’d been reading. Where Things Come Back, by John Corey Whaley. I’d brought the book with me so I passed it around. I didn’t want to give away too much so I just told them it was about Cullen Witter, a guy whose brother disappears. The book starts with the narrator talking about some of the first dead bodies he’d ever seen, and after that opening, I couldn’t stop reading.
Mum talked about Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and she looked sad when she explained to George and me that time is the goon because it pushes us around. George had to look up goon to find out it meant a kind of gang member. Dad had read the book and he looked sad too and it occurred to me that maybe love is the goon that pushes us around. ‘Maybe,’ Dad said when I mentioned it to him later. ‘But I like to think of love as being slightly more forgiving than time.’
Tonight is a whole different thing. There’s no book talking. Dad’s stabbing a prawn dumpling straight through the middle. ‘We need to talk to you,’ Mum says, which is the same way she brought up the divorce. ‘We need to talk to you’ is never good news.
‘Your mother thinks it’s time to sell the shop,’ Dad says, and it’s pretty clear it’s something he doesn’t want to do.
‘There are people making serious offers,’ Mum says. ‘We’re talking substantial money.’
‘Do we need substantial money?’ Dad asks.
‘Second-hand books aren’t exactly a thriving industry,’ Mum says. ‘What were the takings today, Henry?’
I put a whole dumpling in my mouth to avoid answering.
It’s true that second-hand bookshops aren’t thriving and it’s clear Mum thinks they won’t thrive again. Like Amy says all the time: Wake up and smell the internet, Henry. But does that mean we should sell? I don’t know. ‘Substantial’ and ‘money’ are two words that make a strong argument.