meant a kind of gang member. Dad had read the book and he looked sad too and it occurred to me that maybe love is the goon that pushes us around. ‘Maybe,’ Dad said when I mentioned it to him later. ‘But I like to think of love as being slightly more forgiving than time.’
Tonight is a whole different thing. There’s no book talking. Dad’s stabbing a prawn dumpling straight through the middle. ‘We need to talk to you,’ Mum says, which is the same way she brought up the divorce. ‘We need to talk to you’ is never good news.
‘Your mother thinks it’s time to sell the shop,’ Dad says, and it’s pretty clear it’s something he doesn’t want to do.
‘There are people making serious offers,’ Mum says. ‘We’re talking substantial money.’
‘Do we need substantial money?’ Dad asks.
‘Second-hand books aren’t exactly a thriving industry,’ Mum says. ‘What were the takings today, Henry?’
I put a whole dumpling in my mouth to avoid answering.
It’s true that second-hand bookshops aren’t thriving and it’s clear Mum thinks they won’t thrive again. Like Amy says all the time: Wake up and smell the internet, Henry. But does that mean we should sell? I don’t know. ‘Substantial’ and ‘money’ are two words that make a strong argument.
The thing about our family is we all get a vote, so Mum and Dad can’t make this decision without us. George is staring at her plate with ferocious intensity, like she’s hoping she can make it into a portal and disappear. I’m guessing she hasn’t cast her vote yet. She plays Scrabble with Dad every night, and she loves reading in the window with Ray Bradbury on her lap. But she misses Mum so much I’ve heard her crying in her room. She’ll vote with me, because she doesn’t want to take sides. That makes mine the deciding vote.
‘Do you want to work in the bookshop until it dies, Henry?’ Mum asks, and Dad says he doesn’t think that’s a fair question, and she says he’s free to make a counter-argument, and he says, ‘If we all gave up on the things we love when it gets hard, it’d be a terrible world.’ We’re talking about more than books, here, which is why George is voting with me.
I look into the future – twenty years, say – and I know it’s unlikely we’re still making a go of it. I see myself sitting behind the counter reading Dickens in Dad’s spot, talking to Frieda, the sun coming in the window, lighting up universes of dust and the relics that are second-hand books. I see myself going off at night to work a second job to pay the bills, like Dad’s had to do more than a few times over the years. Eventually, I see a world without books, definitely a world without second-hand bookshops. I have a flashback to Amy and me talking when she loaned me the money to pay for travel insurance. ‘If you want to have a life, Henry, you need to get a proper job.’
‘How bad is it really?’ I ask Mum. She does the accounting. She’s the practical one who thinks about the future.
‘It’s bad, Henry. We barely make ends meet some months. I want to be able to pay for George’s university fees next year. I want to retire some day. I want to leave you and George with a future.’
And suddenly it’s a no-brainer why Amy broke up with me. I’m destined to be unemployed. She’s destined to be a lawyer. At the moment, my plan is to live with my dad and my sister long-term in the shop. Her plan is to buy her own flat. The reason she broke up with me can’t be as simple as that, but it must have something to do with it. I hardly ever have money to take her out.
I love second-hand books; I love books. But if things are as bad as Mum says then selling’s the best thing for all of us. ‘If there’s a huge offer on the table, maybe we should just think about it,’ I say, avoiding Dad’s eyes.
‘Maybe we should just talk to the agents,’ Mum says and she takes our silence as agreement.
George goes to the bathroom, mainly to avoid the discussion. While she’s gone Mum tells me that she’s hired a couple of people to catalogue the books so we know what stock we have. ‘You know one of them, in fact – Rachel.’
I don’t