Words in Deep Blue Read online

  About Words in Deep Blue

  Second-hand bookshops are full of mysteries

  This is a love story.

  It’s the story of Howling Books, where readers write letters to strangers, to lovers, to poets.

  It’s the story of Henry Jones and Rachel Sweetie. They were best friends once, before Rachel moved to the sea.

  Now, she’s back, working at the bookstore, grieving for her brother Cal. She’s looking for the future in the books people love, and the words they leave behind.

  Sometimes you need the poets

  The new novel from the award-winning author of Graffiti Moon.

  Contents

  Cover

  About Words in Deep Blue

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Rachel

  Henry

  Rachel

  Henry

  Rachel

  Henry

  Henry

  Rachel

  Henry

  Rachel

  Henry

  Rachel

  Henry

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  Henry

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  Acknowledgements

  About Cath Crowley

  Also by Cath Crowley

  Copyright page

  To Michael Crowley and Michael Kitson, with love

  A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. KAFKA

  The Pale King

  by David Foster Wallace

  Marking found on page 585

  Every love story is a ghost story.

  Prufrock and Other Observations

  by T.S. Eliot

  Letter left between pages 4 and 5

  12 December 2012

  Dear Henry

  I’m leaving this letter on the same page as ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ because you love the poem and I love you. I know you’re out with Amy, but fuck it – she doesn’t love you, Henry. She loves herself, quite a bit in fact. I love that you read. I love that you love second-hand books. I love pretty much everything about you, and I’ve known you for ten years, so that’s saying something. I leave tomorrow. Please call me when you get this, no matter how late.

  Rachel

  Rachel

  salt and heat and memory

  I open my eyes at midnight to the sound of the ocean and my brother’s breathing. It’s been ten months since Cal drowned, but the dreams still escape.

  I’m confident in the dreams, liquid with the sea. I’m breathing underwater, eyes open and un-stung by salt. I see fish, a school of silver-bellied moons thrumming beneath me. Cal appears, ready to identify, but these aren’t fish we know. ‘Mackerel,’ he says, his words escaping in bubbles that I can hear. But the fish aren’t mackerel. Not bream, not any of the names we offer. They’re pure silver. ‘An unidentified species,’ we say, as we watch them fold and unfold around us. The water has the texture of sadness: salt and heat and memory.

  Cal’s in the room when I wake. He’s milky-skinned in the darkness, dripping of ocean. Impossible, but so real I smell salt and apple gum. So real I see the scar on his left foot – a long-healed cut from glass on the beach. He’s talking about the dream fish: pure silver, unidentified, and gone.

  I feel through the air for the dream, but instead I touch the ears of Cal’s labrador, Woof. He follows me everywhere since the funeral, a long line of black I can’t shake. Usually he sleeps on the end of my bed or in the doorway of my room, but for the last two nights he’s slept in front of my packed suitcases. I can’t take him with me. ‘You’re an ocean dog.’ I run my finger along his nose. ‘You’d go mad in the city.’

  There’s no sleeping after dreams of Cal, so I climb through the window and head to the beach. The moon is three-quarters empty. The night is as hot as day. Gran mowed late last week so I collect warm green blades on my feet as I move.

  There’s almost nothing between our house and the water. There’s the road, a small stretch of scrub, and then dunes. The night is all tangle and smell. Salt and tree; smoke from a fire far up the beach. It’s all memory, too. Summer swimming and night walks, hunts for fig shells and blennies and starfish.

  Towards the lighthouse, there’s the spot where the beaked whale washed ashore: a giant at six metres, the right side of its face pressed against sand, its one visible eye open. There was a crowd of people around it later – scientists and locals, studying and staring. But first, there was Mum and Cal and me in the early cold. I was nine years old, and with its long beak it looked to me like it was half sea creature, half bird. I wanted so badly to study the water it had come from, the things it might have seen. Cal and I spent the day looking through Mum’s books and on the internet. The beaked whale is considered one of the least understood creatures of the sea, I copied into my journal. They live at depths so deep that the pressure could kill.

  I don’t believe in ghosts or past lives or time travel or any of the strange things that Cal liked to read about. But every time I stand on the beach I wish us all back – to the day of the whale, to the day we moved here, to any day before he died. With what I know of the future, I’d be ready. I’d save him, when the danger came.

  It’s late, but there’ll be people from school out on the beach, so I walk farther up to a quiet spot. I dig myself into the dunes, bury my legs past my hips, and stare at the water. It’s shot with moon, silver leaking all over the surface.

  I want to go in but I can’t. I want to be close to the beach and far away. I’ve tried to swim without thinking about the day Cal drowned, but it’s impossible. I hear his words. I hear his footsteps through the sand. I see him diving: a long frail arc that disappears into sea.

  I’m not sure how long I’ve been here when I hear Mum walking over the dunes, her feet struggling to find traction. She sits next to me and lights a cigarette, cupping it from the night.

  She started smoking again after Cal died. I found her and Dad hiding behind the church after the funeral. I’d stood silently between them, holding their free hands, and wishing that Cal had been there to see the strangeness of our parents smoking. Dad’s been working with Doctors Without Borders since the divorce ten years ago. Mum’s a science teacher at Sea Ridge High School. They’ve called cigarettes ‘death sticks’ all our lives.

  We watch the water. Mum won’t go in anymore, either, but we meet at the edge every night. She was the one who taught Cal and me how to swim: how to cup the water, how to push it back and control its flow. It was Mum who told us not to be afraid. ‘Don’t ever swim alone, though,’ she said, and apart from that one time, we didn’t.

  ‘So you’re packed?’ she asks, and I nod.

  Tomorrow I leave Sea Ridge for Gracetown, a suburb in Melbourne, the city where my aunt Rose lives. I’ve failed Year 12, and since I don’t plan to try again next year, and since I’m lost here, Rose got me a job in the café at St Albert’s Hospital, where she’s a doctor.

  Cal and I grew up in Gracetown. We moved to Sea Ridge three years ago, when I was fifteen. Gran needed help and we didn’t want her to sell the house. We’d stayed with her every holiday, summer and winter, since we were born, so Sea Ridge was like our second home.

  ‘Year 12 isn’t everything,’ Mum says.

  Maybe it’s not, but before Cal died I had my life planned, down to the last detail. I was getting A’s and I was happy. I wante
d to be an ichthyologist and study fish like the beaked whale. I wanted Joel, travel, university, freedom.

  ‘I feel like the universe cheated Cal, and cheated us along with him,’ I say.

  Before Cal died, Mum would have explained calmly and logically that the universe is all existing matter and space, ten billion light-years in diameter, consisting of galaxies and the solar system, stars and the planets. All of which simply do not have the capacity to cheat a person of anything.

  Tonight she lights another cigarette. ‘It did,’ she says, and blows smoke at the stars.

  Henry

  the sounds of turning pages

  I’m lying next to Amy in the self-help section of Howling Books. We’re alone. It’s ten on Thursday night and I’ll be honest: I’m currently mismanaging a hard-on. The mismanagement isn’t entirely my fault. My body’s working on muscle memory.

  Usually, this is the time and place that Amy and I kiss. This is the time our hearts breathe hard and she lies next to me, warm-skinned and funny, making jokes about the state of my hair. It’s the time we talk about the future, which was, if you’d asked me fifteen minutes ago, completely bought and paid for.

  ‘I want to break up,’ she says, and at first I think she’s joking. Less than twelve hours ago, we were kissing in this exact spot. We were doing quite a few other very nice things too, I think, as she elbows me.

  ‘Henry?’ she says. ‘Say something.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whatever you’re thinking.’

  ‘I’m thinking this is entirely unexpected and a little bit shit.’ I struggle into an upright position. ‘We bought plane tickets. Non-refundable, non-exchangeable, plane tickets for the 12th of March.’

  ‘I know, Henry,’ she says.

  ‘We leave in ten weeks.’

  ‘Calm down,’ she says, as though I’m the one who’s sounding unreasonable. Maybe I am sounding unreasonable, but that’s because I spent the last dollar of my savings buying a seven-stop around-the-world ticket: Singapore, Berlin, Rome, London, Helsinki, New York. ‘We bought insurance and got our passports. We bought travel guides and those little pillows for the plane.’

  She bites the right side of her lip and I try very hard, very unsuccessfully, not to think about kissing her.

  ‘You said you loved me.’

  ‘I do love you,’ she says, and then she starts italicising love into all its depressing definitions. ‘I just don’t think I’m in love with you. I tried, though. I tried really hard.’

  These must be the most depressing words in the history of love. I tried really hard to love you.

  I should ask her to leave. I should remind her that we had a deal, a pact, a solid agreement when we bought those tickets that she would not break up with me again. I should say, ‘You know what? I don’t want to go with you. I don’t want to travel the lands where Dickens wrote, where Karen Russell and Junot Díaz and Balli Kaur Jaswal are still writing, with a girl who’s trying really hard to love me.’

  But fuck it, I’m an optimist and I would like to see those homelands with her, so what I say is, ‘If you change your mind, you know where I live.’ In my defence, we’ve been on and off since Year 9 and she’s dumped me and come back before. More than once, actually, so history’s given me some reason to hope.

  We’re lying in the self-help section, a room at the back of the shop that’s the size of a small cupboard. It’s just big enough for two people to lie side by side with no space to spare.

  There’s no other way for her to leave than to climb over the top of me, so we do this weird fumbling dance as she gets up – a soft untangling wrestle. She hovers over the top of me for a second or two, hair tickling my skin, and then she leans forward and kisses me. It’s a long kiss, a good kiss, and while it’s happening I let myself hope that maybe, just maybe, it’s a kiss so great that it changes her mind.

  But after it’s done she stands, straightens her skirt, and gives me a small, sad wave. ‘Goodbye, Henry,’ she says. And then she leaves me here, lying on the floor of the self-help section – a dead man. One with a non-refundable, non-exchangeable ticket to the world.

  Eventually, I crawl out of the self-help section and make my way towards the fiction couch: the long, blue velvet day bed that sits in front of the classics. I hardly ever sleep upstairs anymore. I like the rustle and dust of the bookshop at night.

  I lie here thinking about Amy. I retrace last week, running back through the hours, trying to work out what changed between us. But I’m the same person I was seven days ago. I’m the same person I was the week before and the week before that. I’m the same person I was all the way back to the morning we met.

  Amy came from a private school across the river. She moved to our side of town after her dad’s accounting firm downsized and he had to shift jobs. They lived in one of the new apartment blocks that had gone up on Green Street, not far from our school.

  From Amy’s new bedroom she could hear traffic and the flush of next-door’s toilet. From her old bedroom, she could hear birds. These things I learnt before we dated, in snippets of conversations that happened on the way home from parties, in English, in detention, in the library, when she stopped by the bookshop on Sunday afternoons.

  The first day I met Amy I knew surface things – she had long red hair, green eyes and fair skin. She smelt flowery. She wore long socks. She sat at an empty table and waited for people to sit next to her. They did.

  I sat in front of her in our first English class together and listened to the conversation between her and Aaliyah. ‘Who’s that?’ I heard Amy ask. ‘Henry,’ Aaliyah told her. ‘Funny. Smart. Cute.’

  I waved above my head without turning around.

  ‘And eavesdropper,’ Amy added, gently kicking the back of my chair.

  We didn’t officially get together till the middle of Year 12, but the first time we kissed was in Year 9. It happened after our English class had been studying Ray Bradbury’s short stories. We’d read ‘The Last Night of the World’ and the idea caught on in our year that we should all spend a night pretending it was our last and do the things we’d do if an apocalypse were heading our way.

  The principal heard what we were planning and told us we couldn’t do it. An apocalypse sounded dangerous. Our plans went underground.

  Flyers appeared in lockers with the end set for the 12th of December, the last day of school. There’d be a party that night at Justin Kent’s house. Make plans, the flyers told us. The end is near.

  I stayed up late on the night before the end, trying to write the perfect letter to Amy, a letter that’d convince her to spend the last night with me. I walked into school with it in my top pocket, knowing I probably wouldn’t give it to her, but hoping that I might.

  I had a brilliant best friend called Rachel back then, who I don’t have anymore for reasons I don’t completely understand, and my plan was to spend the last night with her unless some miracle happened and Amy became a possibility.

  No one listened in class that day. There were small signs all over the place that things were coming to an end. Signs that the teachers overlooked but we saw. In our homeroom, someone had turned all the notices on the board upside down. Someone had carved THE END into the back of the boys’ toilet door. I opened my locker to find a piece of paper with one day to go written on it and I realised that no one had bothered working out the finer details of when the world would actually end. Midnight? Sunrise?

  I was thinking about that when I turned and saw Amy standing next to me. The note was in my pocket but I couldn’t give it to her. Instead I held up the paper – one day to go – and asked her what she was planning on doing with the time she had left.

  She stared at me for a while, and eventually said, ‘I thought you might ask me to spend it with you.’ There were several people in the corridor listening when she said it, and no one, me included, could quite believe my luck.

  Amy and I decided the end should be when the sun came up –
5.50 in the morning according to the Weather Channel. We met at the bookshop at 5.50 in the afternoon, to make it an even twelve hours. From there we walked to Shanghai Dumplings for dinner. Around 9 we went to Justin’s party and when it got too loud we walked to the Benito building and took the elevator to the top – the highest place in Gracetown.

  We sat on my jacket and watched the lights and Amy told me about her flat, the smallness of the rooms, the birdsong she’d left behind. It’d be years before she told me about her dad and his lost job and how terrible it had been to hear him crying. That night, she only hinted at her family’s worries. I offered her the bookshop, if she ever needed space. If she sat in the reading garden there might be birds. And the sounds of turning pages are surprisingly comforting, I told her.

  She kissed me then, and even though we didn’t date until years later, something started in that moment. Every so often, when she was alone at the end of a party, we’d kiss again. Girls knew, even if Amy was with some other guy at the time, that I belonged to her.

  Then one night in Year 12, we became something permanent. Amy came to the bookshop. It was late. We were closed. I was studying at the counter. She’d been dating a guy called Ewan who went to school in her old neighbourhood, but that afternoon he’d broken up with her. She needed someone she could rely on to her take to the formal. So there she was at the bookshop door, tapping on the glass at midnight, calling my name.

  Rachel

  soft pencil moons

  Mum goes back to the house, but I stay on the beach with Woof. I take out the letter I’ve been carrying around since I decided to go back to the city – the last letter that Henry sent. I kept it, along with all his others, in a box hidden in the back of my sock drawer. After I moved to Sea Ridge, Henry wrote every week for about three months, until he got the message that we weren’t friends anymore.