There’s a soft haze in my chest, a quiet I haven’t felt in a year now. I won’t ever put it together properly in words, but I understand it. Frederick’s story is different in the details, so it can only ever be his. But all the same, I hear myself in it.
I’m certain that E and F, on the pages of the Prufrock, are Frederick and Elena. As he speaks, I feel as though Elena is here in the bookshop with us. I think about Cal’s arrow on Sea, and all the other lines in the books, the pages where words are the same, thoughts are the same, where words are written so closely to each other that the curves of letters intersect. I wish Mum were here to listen in to the book club, to read the markings in the Library, to feel what I feel and know what I’m starting to know.
I help Henry clean up and put the chairs away, all the while waiting to see Frederick standing alone. When there’s a chance, I walk over and tell him that my brother, Cal, died.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ he says.
‘I can’t swim anymore. I don’t go near the ocean.’ As I say it, I wonder if it’s true. I wonder if I’m speaking in present tense, when really I should be speaking in the past. I wonder what I’d feel now, if I were there, looking at the water. I think I might walk in, not all the way, but enough to feel the water at my calves, and to imagine it rising, slowly.
After everyone’s gone, Henry and I sit together at my computer, and search for the Walcott. Both of us are desperate to find it, our hands knocking against each other in excitement every time we find a copy close by.
I make a list of locations, because I like making lists.
‘You’re very neat,’ Henry says, looking at my handwriting, and it feels like he’s said something sexy.
‘You’re very messy,’ I say.
‘And yet, I’m the one who passed Year 12,’ he says.
‘You’re very annoying,’ I say, smiling at him.
‘You’re very sexy,’ he says, like it just came out and he had no control over it.
‘So are you,’ I say.
‘It’s not the way I’m usually described,’ he says.
‘Tonight feels sort of unusual,’ I say.
We finish the list of Walcott sellers, and decide that since tonight is an unusual night, it might be the night when we locate the book. Henry scans the list and says we should choose a place now, and then visit it to look on the last night of the world. ‘That,’ he says, ‘is the time we’ll find it.’
‘I’ll choose which bookstore,’ I say, and immediately pick Beach Side Books.
‘It’s Beach Side,’ Henry says.
‘I can read, Henry.’
‘It’ll be by the beach,’ he says.
‘I had a vague idea.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘I don’t mind,’ I say. Or maybe I do, I’m not sure. But I want to find out. The store is on the coast, but the opposite way from Sea Ridge, and I can’t think of a safer way to test whether I’m ready to see the water again, than to go with Henry.
We get ready to sleep, my arm touching Henry’s.
‘Why would Frederick give the book away?’ he asks. ‘If it was so important?’
‘Things get lost,’ I tell him. ‘Or maybe you can’t stand to look at them.’
We lie quietly for a while, and then Henry remembers that there’s a story his dad wants him to read. He gets the book from his bag, and lies next to me, holding the book over our heads. The words could rain on us, I think. I have an image of us drinking them. Henry has changed me. He’s changed the way I cry about Cal. The way I see the world.
The story is called ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’ and it’s about a German Shakespearean scholar who has been offered the memory of Shakespeare from his boyhood to 1616. The scholar accepts the memory, but he doesn’t understand that memory is strange and chaotic. He feels as if he’s been offered the ocean, and in taking it, he doesn’t understand what it is that he’s accepting. Memory surfaces in sounds and images and feeling, and in taking someone else’s memory, he’ll have to lose parts of himself.
Henry finishes reading and closes the book. He doesn’t say what’s bothering him, but there’s something that is. He says he needs to sleep, but he watches the ceiling. Every now and then he turns his head to the side, and looks around the bookshop. ‘You’re thinking about what happens after you give this place away.’
He nods, but he doesn’t want to talk. He thinks I’m sleeping when he stands and walks around the store, running his hands along the spines as he moves.
After a while, he comes back with a book, starts to read, and falls asleep. He’s woken me, now, and I’m restless. I move quietly out of the store, towards the car.
I take the box out of the boot before I drive away. I put it on the seat next to me. I started thinking about the box while Frederick was speaking about Elena. He’s searching desperately for the Walcott. He’d give anything to have a box of Elena’s things and I’ve locked Cal’s away. If I’m my memory, then Cal is his too. I can’t look in the box tonight, but I like the feel of it being close to me.
I keep my eyes ahead, but I have this feeling if I looked across, Cal might actually be there. I could tell him that he was right and I’ve forgiven Henry. I could tell him about Mum and how his death has changed us forever. That’s the way it should be, I think. A death should change us forever. No two deaths should be the same.
I find myself in front of Lola’s house. It’s late, so I text her. She texts back to say she’s in the garage. I walk quietly through the garden towards the door.
She’s on the couch, legs folded beneath her. I sit beside her.
‘Have you finished recording the last song?’ I ask, and she says the plan was to tape it at their last gig on Valentine’s Day. ‘Only Hiroko hasn’t forgiven me for telling her I think she should stay. In her defence, I haven’t said sorry.’ She gives a sad grin. ‘Every time I start to text or call her, I think that maybe she’s considering staying, and if I keep my mouth shut, I’ll get what I want.’
I lean my head on her shoulder.
‘I know she can’t stay.’
‘She can’t,’ I say.
‘I don’t know you as well as Henry, but I know something hasn’t been right. You don’t tell me a thing about what happened with Joel. You haven’t spoken once about your science course. You haven’t been to the pool once since you arrived. I’m not stupid. I’ve noticed. I’m just waiting.’
I look at Lola’s posters of all the bands that she loves – The Waifs, Warpaint, Karen O, Magic Dirt. I remember how Henry and I sat here in the afternoon, lying on the couch while Lola and Hiroko played their songs for us.
Lola touches me with her toe, a gentle reminder that she’s here. I tell her about Cal. The words still hurt, but they hurt less than they did when I told Henry and Frederick, maybe they will hurt even less when I tell the next person.
‘I was trying to imagine the worst thing,’ Lola says. ‘What’s the worst thing that could have happened to you? Hiroko and I sat here trying to guess, so I could help you. We didn’t guess that,’ she says, and moves in close and puts both arms around me, and we fall asleep like that.