Words in Deep Blue - Cath Crowley Page 0,2

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