does love this about me. She genuinely does love this quality about me. I scratch my head and think about that. I almost laugh. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, standing up. ‘But that’s not enough. I can’t be with you, Amy. I need someone who loves more about me than the fact that I can always be located.’
‘It’s more than that,’ she says.
‘It’d have to be a whole lot more to be enough.’
I realise tonight how much Amy hates being alone. Her idea of torture is an overseas trip without a friend. I understand that. But the friend can’t be me. ‘You can’t take Greg overseas?
‘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