‘He stripped you and gaffer-taped you to a pole. He threw you in a car boot.’
‘He did,’ I say. ‘You really need to wait for someone better.’
‘If Rachel’s who you want, you’re wasting your time,’ she says. ‘She doesn’t love you, she just hates me. I have the letter to prove it.’
‘What?’ I ask, remembering the letter that Rachel spoke about on the first night she arrived. ‘What letter?’
Amy doesn’t answer.
‘If you ever felt anything for me, please, tell me about the letter.’
She gives in, and to her credit, looks ashamed. ‘She left it for you on the last night of the world in Year 9. You took me up to your room and while you were in the bathroom, I flicked through the book on your bed. Rachel had left a note in there telling you to look in a book in the Letter Library. I can’t remember the title.’
‘Was it the Prufrock?’ I ask.
‘That sounds like it,’ she says. ‘I found it when we went downstairs. I took it. I wanted to spend the last night with you and I thought if you read it, you’d go to her.’
‘And the letter said?’ I ask, but I know what the letter said – I love you. ‘Do you still have it?’ I ask, and she says she put the letter into another book, one she didn’t think I’d look in.
‘A book with a yellow cover,’ she says, and I close my eyes in frustration. ‘The author had a Japanese name that started with K.’
‘Kazuo Ishiguro?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Never Let Me Go?’ I ask.
‘Possibly,’ she says, and I leave her behind.
I push my way into the bar and through the crowd to find Rachel. As I do my optimism takes over. I’m thinking about a lot of things and one of them is Rachel’s letter. She loved me once. If the past is as real as the present, if the growing block universe theory is right, and I choose to believe it is, then somewhere on my time line, Rachel still loves me. She’s putting that letter in the Prufrock and waiting for me to reply. And somewhere up ahead there’s a future that’s waiting to be written. And now? Now is ours if we take it.
I call her name as I move through the crowd, not caring what I look or sound like. I call her phone but get no answer. I leave a message telling her I’m coming to the warehouse and she should meet me there.
I’m about to leave but I see Lola standing on stage, alone. She’s barely strumming loud enough to make a sound, and people are starting to yell things at her. I wave, and she finds me in the crowd, and smiles sadly. The lights have a diamond glint to them. She looks lost in their glow.
I push my way close to the stage, and she comes close and bends down so she can hear me. ‘She’s not coming?’
‘I didn’t apologise, not directly. I left a message on her voicemail to say I needed her tonight. She left one on mine to say she thought it’d be easier to say goodbye to a machine and skip the whole thing. Fuck it, I do put the music before her but she is the music.’
I don’t say I told you so. What’s the point in that? I haul myself up on stage instead. The Hollows might have played their last song, but I’m still here. I can’t sing, but fuck it, at least she won’t be alone.
Lola starts a song that I know by Art of Fighting. We finish that one and start on some Ben Folds. We’re almost at the fourth song when Lola stops because the crowd is yelling for me to stop singing and it’s seems unlikely that Hiroko will show up now.
Lola’s apologising to the crowd and taking off her guitar, putting it away, when there’s the sound of clapping. It catches on and everyone’s clapping and then we see Hiroko pushing her way through the crowd, carrying a triangle.
‘Didn’t have time to bring my glockenspiel,’ she says when she’s on stage.
‘Thank God,’ Lola says.
I leave the two of them up there, playing their last song.
It might not be the last night of the world, but it feels like I don’t have any time to lose.
Rachel
Love is important. I was wrong.
I smile until I’ve walked away from Henry and Amy and then I cry like the idiot I am. I push my way through the crowd. I find a space at the back of Laundry where Henry won’t see me. I watch with my breath held while Lola stands on stage alone, waiting for Hiroko. Then I watch as Henry climbs on stage to sing with her. He’s got many talents, but singing really isn’t one of them. Even so, he’s spectacular.
The place goes crazy when Hiroko gets onto the stage. The lights sway with the voices of the crowd. Lola strums a chord, and I recognise the song as the first one she and Hiroko ever wrote. They sang it to Henry and me one day in her garage. I need the music to be louder so I don’t keep hearing myself say I love you, hearing Amy thank me for keeping him warm.
He must have been thinking about her all day. With me in the shop and on the beach and in the car. The urge to kick him comes back. You gave it all away, the bookstore, the Letter Library, the thing you love, for her.
I go to the bathroom and wash my face. Katia’s in there. ‘Did it work out with Shakespeare?’ she asks, and I tell her he’s going overseas with Amy.
‘Well, that’s a shame,’ she says. ‘He missed out on you.’
I walk around the club, and then out into the street. I could go home to the warehouse, but I want to be in the store. I want to catalogue more of the Letter Library. It’s more important now than ever to record those voices on the pages. It’s not that they’ll be lost. They were written, so they’ll always exist. But they’ll be lost for Michael, and I can’t stand that thought.
My plan is to keep cataloguing all night to take my mind off Henry and Amy. I open my computer and take a stack of books off the shelf. I look through the first one and try to concentrate, but I’m too restless.
I take out Sea and look through it, searching again for notes from Cal. There’s a small mark next to some jellyfish, but it’s not his writing. I know his as well as I know my own. He was always scribbling things. On that last day, a minute before he went into the water, he was writing. He was lying down, propped up on one arm, wearing Mum’s floppy hat and her Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. He was writing in one of the notebooks he always used, the ones with the perforated edges so he could tear the pages out neatly.
I feel someone standing behind me, and I turn to see George. She’s staring at Sea and I explain that I was wondering if Cal had left a letter in the book at some stage or other. ‘It’s not important,’ I lie.
‘He did,’ she says, and holds up the copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I see Elizabeth on the cover, face half-eaten away, so her teeth and vocal chords are showing.
George holds up a letter.
It’s written on the kind of paper that Cal used, the kind of paper that he was writing on that day. It feels so frail, which might be my imagining, or it might be that George has read it so many times. I’ll catalogue it later, I know. I’ll catalogue it more carefully than any of the other letters I’ve found in the Library.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Letter left between pages 44 and 45