There’s Frieda, who’s been playing Scrabble here with Frederick for ten years. She’s about his age and wears severe stylish dresses, and you just know she used to be one of those English teachers who had fifty eyes in the classroom and a supernatural knowledge of Shakespeare. She started the monthly book club, which Howling Books hosts but doesn’t run.
The same people come every time. I set up the chairs, open the door for the teachers and librarians, put out a whole lot of wine and cheese, and then stand back. I hardly ever join in the discussion, but if it interests me, and it pretty much always does, I read the book afterwards. Last month they read Kirsty Eagar’s Summer Skin. George read it after the book club because they talked about the sex scenes, and maybe I read it partly for that reason, too. But mostly I read it because of the way Frieda talked about the main character, Jess Gordon. She reminded me, just a little, of that best friend I had once, Rachel Sweetie. I liked the book – George did too – so we put a copy in the Letter Library.
The Library is the thing that Howling Books is known for, at least locally. We get a write-up every now and then, on sites like Broadsheet, as something special to do in the city.
It’s up the back, near the stairs to our flat, separate from the rest of the shelves. In it we keep copies of books that people particularly love – fiction, non-fiction, romance and sci-fi, poetry and atlases and cookbooks. Customers are allowed to write in the books in the Letter Library. They can circle words that they love, highlight lines. They can leave notes in the margins, leave thoughts about the meaning of things. We’ve had to get multiple copies of works by people like Tom Stoppard and John Green because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Fault in Our Stars are crammed with notes from readers.
It’s called the Letter Library because a lot of people write more than a note in the margin – they write whole letters and put them between the pages of the books. Letters to the poets, to their thief ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend who stole their copy of High Fidelity. Mostly people write to strangers who love the same books as them – and some stranger, somewhere, writes back.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Written on title page: This book belongs to George Jones. So don’t sell it in the bookshop, Henry.
Letters left between pages 44 and 45
23 November – 7 December 2012
Dear George
You’re probably surprised to find this letter in your book. Maybe you’re wondering who put it here. I plan to leave that a mystery, at least for now.
I haven’t actually left it, yet – I’m still in my room writing it – and I’m sure getting it into the pages won’t be easy. I’m thinking I’ll put it in when you’ve excused yourself from class to go to the bathroom and left the book on your desk. But I know you like to find things in second-hand books, so I’ll give it my best shot.
And here it is, you’re reading it, so I must have been successful.
I know you’re curious, so I’ll tell you this much -I’m a guy, your age, in at least one of your classes.
If you’d like to write back, you can put this book into the Letter Library at your bookstore and leave a letter between pages 44 and 45.
I’m not a stalker. I like books. (I like you.)
Pytheas (obviously not my real name)
To Pytheas – or Stacy, or whichever friend of hers wrote this. Stay away from me. If I catch you in my shop, I’ll call the police.
George
Dear George
Thank you for writing back, even if it’s only to say that you plan to call the police on me.
I don’t want to make you angry, but I’m not one of Stacy’s friends. I don’t really like Stacy and she definitely doesn’t like me. This isn’t a joke. You’re funny, and smart and I’d really like to write to you.
Pytheas (Would any of Stacy’s friends call themselves Pytheas?)
Pytheas
So you’re not a friend of Stacy’s? Prove it.
George
Dear George
That’s a hard one. How can I prove to you that I’m not playing a joke? If we were a mathematical equation, then it would be easy. But since we’re not, you might just have to take a chance.
I’ll tell you some things about me. Maybe that would help? I like science. I like maths. I like solving problems. I believe in ghosts. I’m particularly interested in time travel and space and the ocean.
I haven’t decided what I want to do when I leave school, but I think I’ll either study the ocean or space. Before that, I’ll travel. The first place I want to go is the Atacama Desert. It’s 1000 kilometres long, running from Peru’s southern border into Chile. It faces onto the South Pacific Ocean and it’s known as the driest place on earth. There are parts where it has never rained and since things don’t rot without moisture, if something died there, it would be preserved forever. Imagine that. You can see the desert on page 50 of the atlas in the Letter Library. (I’ve also marked some other places I want to see in South America.)
Will you tell me some things about you?
Pytheas
Pytheas
Why are you writing to me? According to everyone at school, I’m a freak.
Dear George
I quite like freaks.
Pytheas
Rachel
a dream of my past
I drive out of Sea Ridge early on Friday afternoon in Gran’s car. It’s old – a 1990s dark blue Volvo – but it’s mine. It was Gran’s idea for me to move in with Rose and as a way of encouraging me to go, she gave me transport.
In one of our sessions, Gus, my counsellor, asked me to imagine how I’d feel leaving the ocean. ‘Light,’ I’d told him, thinking about the road winding away from the sea. Gran’s house is built so every window catches a glimpse of water. I wake every morning in the blue briny air and have to remember that I hate it.
In the city I won’t have to run into my ex-boyfriend, Joel, or the teachers I’d disappointed, or the friends I’d drifted from. I wouldn’t have to see people from the beach lifeguard club where I’d worked before Cal died, or see the kids I’d taught to swim at the local pool.
But everything’s working against relief today – the colour of sky, the light. It’s the exact time that Mum, Cal and I arrived here three years ago. We looked for the ocean as we approached, the way we always did, spotting it first in small triangles and then in deep scoops.
Cal had one of his atlases open on his lap, an old one, drawn in the nineteenth century. He’d found it at a second-hand store that day. I turned to the back seat and saw him smoothing his hands across the pages of the Southern Ocean, paler at the edges, dark blue in the deep.
We pooled facts about it as we drove. Fourth largest ocean. Has seventeen thousand nine hundred and sixty-eight kilometres of coastline and an area of twenty million three hundred and twenty-seven thousand kilometres squared. An average depth of between four thousand and five thousand metres. I remember the three of us went quiet for a moment, excited by the scale.
In the boot there’s a box of Cal’s things that Gran put in there before I left. I wonder if the atlas is amongst his things, but push the thought away. I didn’t want the box with me but Gran didn’t give me a choice. It’s full of items that Gran can’t categorise so she wants me to sort through it. There’s a question mark on the side of the box and the word miscellaneous written under that. I hate that Cal’s life ended as a set of boxes with words written on the side like sporting goods, hobbies, computer equipment and entertainment. I think about pulling to the roadside and hurling it over the cliffs.