‘I can do that. I’m very distracting.’
‘What’s your plan?’ I ask. ‘The life plan for after you sell the bookstore?’
‘There are several. I could go to university. Become a lawyer. Maybe a literature professor.’
‘You’ve never wanted to be a literature professor. You’ve always wanted to work in the bookstore.’
‘I’ll be poor, like Dad.’
‘Your dad’s got two great kids and a bookstore. He might not be rich, but he’s not poor.’
‘Mum left him. He’s working all day every day, trying to hunt down first editions so we can stay afloat. It just seems like a hard life.’ He shifts around. ‘Books can’t buy your girlfriend a good night out.’
They can’t buy Amy a good night out. ‘You know the best night out I’ve ever had? Hands down the best night? The time you read me “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.’
‘I seem to remember you saying you hated poetry,’ he says. ‘I distinctly remember you saying something along the lines of “poetry is pointless”. That we could lose all the poets from the world and no one would care. In fact, thousands of people would be very happy.’
‘You’re twisting what I said.’
‘What did you say then? I can’t remember.’
‘I said poems don’t make a difference to the real things.’
‘The real things?’
‘They can’t save people from cancer or bring people back from the dead. Novels can’t either. They don’t have a practical use, that’s what I meant. I loved that you read the poem to me that night, but the world remained unchanged.’
‘And yet you don’t think I should sell the bookshop.’
‘My theory isn’t perfect,’ I say, already in the blue before sleep.
I wake in the early morning, with Henry’s arm slung around me, and Lola tapping on the shop window. I open the door and see she’s still in the clothes she was wearing last night. She’s here for Henry, but when she sees me she looks excited. ‘I sense there’s gossip to be had.’
‘No gossip,’ I tell her after we’re sitting at Frank’s. It’s seven. I haven’t been up this early for the longest time. It’s cool, but the light promises heat. We order coffee and toast and a large orange juice to share.
‘Big night?’ I ask, and point at her clothes.
She tips a heap of sugar in her coffee and stirs. ‘We played till three. Then Hiroko and I went out to eat. Two gigs to go till we’re gone.’
‘You should record all your songs,’ I tell her as Frank brings our food. ‘Make a permanent record of everything you’ve ever written and played, from start to end.’
‘I don’t know if I want to record the end,’ she says, buttering her toast. ‘I’ll think about it. So I saw you and Henry lying together on the floor.’
‘We’re back to being friends.’
‘You two were never just friends,’ she says. ‘You were inseparable till Amy arrived.’
‘What about you and Hiroko?’ I ask. ‘You’re inseparable.’
‘We’re not girlfriends,’ she says eventually. ‘She’s the only person I can write with. We’re Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Hervey and Goodman, Sleater-Kinney. At least we were. Now we’re nothing.’
I tell her again that they should record their songs. She licks some jam from her thumb, and says, ‘Maybe.’
I drive home to shower and change. Rose has left a note for me on the kitchen bench.
I saw you yesterday, walking straight out of the ER. I was about to come after you but I saw Gus. Is something wrong? Call if you need me to come home today. P.S. Your mum called. There’s a message from her on the answering machine.
I press the button and listen to Mum talking about Gran and Sea Ridge and her new classes at school. She says she’s planning a trip to the city soon. ‘I miss you,’ she says, in a voice that’s flat and sad. I delete the message and take a shower.
Henry’s behind the counter when I return. I take the coffee cup he offers and sit with him to drink it. Michael joins us after a while, along with Martin and George and Frederick and Frieda. Sophia arrives with croissants, which makes two breakfasts I’ve had this morning.
I ask Michael if we can close the Letter Library for the duration of the cataloguing. ‘It’s too hard to record the comments if people are looking at the books,’ I tell him, and it becomes clear that Sophia doesn’t know about the job that Michael’s asked me to do.
‘Why?’ she asks him.
‘My reasons are no longer your concern,’ he tells her, and gives me permission.
I tape a notice to the front window – The Letter Library is closed for cataloguing. Howling Books is sorry for the inconvenience – and then start work.
I’d lose all sense of time if it weren’t for George and Martin, who keep walking over to put notes in The Broken Shore. I’ve decided the restriction on the Letter Library doesn’t apply to the staff, so I don’t say anything. At first George shyly places her letters in the book, but after a while, she’s angrily shoving in paper.
To give her some privacy, I concentrate on recording the notes in Prufrock and Other Observations. It takes a long time to catalogue everything people have written, and in the end I have to leave out some small notes.
From what I can tell, the poem that Henry read to me that night is the love song of someone who doesn’t think very much of himself. He’s a man debating whether or not he should tell a woman how much he wants her. The notes along the side are mostly from people worrying that life has passed them by. Or, to quote Henry, people who feel a bit shit about themselves.
‘Is that why you like it?’ I ask Henry when he’s on a break.
‘I think you’ll find a lot of people like T.S. Eliot for reasons other than that they feel a bit shit about themselves. Read the language. It’s beautiful.’
‘But it’s basically about him wanting sex isn’t it?’
‘I think it’s about him debating whether or not to take a risk.’
Henry stays with me this afternoon to help and to argue more about Eliot. There are so many comments on the book that my hands are tired, so I read out the comments and Henry types. Eventually we get to the last one and Henry walks back to the counter.
I’m too tired to start cataloguing another book. I proofread what I’ve done today, and make sure it’s formatted. Then I save the database and shut down the computer. Martin’s not ready to go yet, so I pass the time looking through the books.
The one I really want to look at is Mark Laita’s Sea. I noticed it on the first day. It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen and I can’t believe someone would leave a copy of it in the Letter Library for people to write on.
I take it off the shelf today. The creatures are hypnotic, glowing off pages in brilliant light. I sit on the floor and look through. I stop when I get to page with the North Pacific Giant octopus, a red spectacular creature, with no eyes that I can see, the end of its body a mouth, open in a kind of blind wonder. I’m staring at that mouth for a long time before I notice a tiny hand-drawn arrow in the margin, pointing to the creature. There’s a word next to that, written in small neat letters, the kind of letters that Cal used: this I love.