a computer doesn’t record the way people have underlined. You can’t tell from a database the deep mark that Michael left under the words where Pip tells Estella that she’s part of his existence. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here.
That speech is underlined all the way through, and the notes in the margins are scribbled frantically. There’s no way I can record the reasons why people have underlined that speech, or how they felt when they saw that someone else had underlined it too. I can imagine by looking at it, but I can’t record that on a spreadsheet.
I can’t record the things I felt by holding the book. I can’t record the worn pages or the coffee cup rings or the circles around Auden and Eliot’s poetry. I know the poems meant something to people just by holding the book, and that’s what Michael wants to keep. A catalogue won’t keep it for him.
It can be saved, though. Just not in this form.
I tell Michael first, and he keeps crying as I explain.
Then I go upstairs to Henry. ‘Wake up.’ I say it close to his ear, so my lips kiss skin. ‘Wake up. I know what we have to do.’
Henry
the world has not ended
I wake and the world has not ended and Rachel is whispering transmigration into my ear. At least I think she is. I can’t quite tell because I’m distracted by her mouth and the memory of what happened last night and the hope that it might happen again, very soon.
I sit up, and she says the word again. ‘Transmigrate. The Letter Library has to transmigrate. We have to break it up and leave it in other bookstores.’
It’s a nice idea, I tell her, but other stores won’t want them. ‘It’s Howling Books’ thing. The books are written all over, so it’s not like they can sell them. And if they kept them all they’d do is take up shelf space for stock that earns them money.’
‘So we won’t tell anyone,’ she says, and I listen as she describes the operation. We will disperse the Letter Library secretly, in all the bookstores around the city, and further.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Letter left between pages 44 and 45
14 February 2016
Dear Cal
This isn’t a goodbye letter; let’s get that straight. I’ll be writing more letters to you over the years. You’ve become the person I tell everything to, and that won’t change.
I got your last letter – and the answer is yes. Yes, let’s meet. Let’s start at Frank’s café for breakfast, and then we can go to the Palace, where I see they’re having a Doctor Who marathon. Then we’ll head across town to the museum, I think.
I’m not disappointed. I thought it was you – at least, I was fairly sure, but then the letters kept coming after you’d moved, so for a while I wondered whether it was Tim. I didn’t want it to be Tim. I wanted it to be you.
Do you remember that day at school when we sat out in the sun, watching everyone play sport? It was our first and only, not on paper, conversation.
I was crying because of what happened at a party, and because Mum wasn’t at home anymore.
You: Hello
Me: What do you want?
You: To make you feel better
Me: Impossible.
You gave me the Sea-Monkeys.
You: They’re fast-growing sea creatures. You put them in water and they grow really quickly. They get to be adults in about a week. They’re not actual monkeys. They’re a kind of brine shrimp. They start off as these cysts. If the conditions aren’t good in the lake, the females release dormant cysts; the embryos just wait in those for as long as it takes for things to get better. And then, when things are good again, the life cycle keeps going. They’re like time travellers, holding on until conditions improve.
Me: You’re so weird.
You: I know.
I really loved those Sea-Monkeys, but I didn’t say it then.
Love,
George
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Letter left between pages 78 and 79
Undated
Dear Stranger
If you have found this letter, then you have found this book. It’s an incredibly important book – all books are incredibly important – but this book, this particular copy of this book – started a shop. Howling Books. Don’t bother looking for it. By the time you read this letter, it will be gone.
This book was the first book on the shelf, the first book I gave my wife, and although we’re no longer together, it is proof of how we loved each other once. Proof that we walked into a florist one day, and dreamt into it another life.
So why haven’t I kept it? A girl called Rachel convinced me I shouldn’t. One morning, she found me crying in the reading garden. Weeping at the thought of my bookshop, my life, being knocked to the ground. It had been in our family for more than twenty years.
The bookshop is the building but not only the building, she told us. It is the books inside. People are not only their bodies. And if there is no hope of saving the things we love in their original form, we must save them how we can.
Every single book from our Letter Library, all of them marked with lives, has transmigrated to other shops. One by one, we snuck them into shops, and placed them on the shelves. Sometimes, the end begins.
Michael
Rachel
the specks of him travelling
We spend all of February working on the transmigration.
We are moving the books to preserve the memories in them, the thoughts on the pages. We secretly place the books in other stores, around the city.
At night, when I can’t sleep, I think about those books, and I like the thought that Michael’s copy of Great Expectations now belongs to someone else. They are reading Michael’s thoughts – his passion for Sophia, in the passion Pip had for Estella. His passion is there in his underlining, in his notes, in the inscription on the title page.
In April, Henry drives us all to Sea Ridge. We are returning to scatter Cal’s ashes. Lola, George and Martin are in the back of the van. Rose is following in her car. Frederick and Michael and Sophia are coming too.
We will take them to the water and let the current have them. I will love the idea that a speck of Cal might make it to Mexico, given the right weather and conditions. I’ll think about this over the years, the specks of him travelling.
Hiroko is in New York, but we’re playing the CD of her and Lola’s musical history as we drive. I’m not thinking about endings, though. I’m thinking about beginnings. Rose has agreed that Mum and Gran and me can all live with her next year, while I do Year 12 again. She’s started building walls in the warehouse, in preparation. Each room, because of the way it’s designed, leads into another room, though. Rose doesn’t love the idea, but she’s coming around to the fact that she and Gran will be connected.
Henry puts his hand on my knee as I wait for the water to appear – first in small triangles and then in deep scoops. Henry is worried, because I’m going back to the water, to where I lost Cal. It will be fine and it won’t be. It will be terrible and good.
The past is with me; the present is here. The future is unmapped and changeable. Ours for the imagining: spreading out before us. Sunlight-filled, deep blue, and the darkness.