Only bits of us are left in the tomes we leave behind

We live with books, books live with us, but only one half of this relationship can live forever.

Detail from the cover of Biggles Learns to Fly!, by WE Johns.

“The world is full of a number of things

I think we should all be as happy as kings”

— Robert Louis Stevenson,

A Child’s Garden of Verses

Frank died when he was quite young, somewhere around the age of my own sons now, but he died many years ago, and I never knew him. I have his books before me, tales of mystery and adventure, some with award labels stuck to their endpapers, commemorating his achievements in sport and at school.

He had evidently shown early academic promise, and I imagine the pride his parents must have taken in these modest trophies, each some manifest reassurance of a transition to a distant adult independence.

I am in the secondhand book trade. I deal in the detritus left behind when lives cease, and I understand that the things with which we accoutre our lives, and to which we ascribe such importance and significance, endure beyond us, that we are transient custodians.

I handle many books every day, many harbouring clues to their provenance in the form of inscriptions to past friends and lovers. I have sifted through the belongings of people I have loved and who have died. Insensate objects carry stories, are archeological artifacts resonant of once simple or complex psychologies, but they can rarely be read as such. They are mute, reduced, after our death and when removed from their contexts, to their material value, a value contingent on their apparent beauty, or rarity, or as a relic of a time past that evokes a sense of nostalgia.

I kept, for many years, a plate decorated by my father, a man who built factories and devised the architecture of industry. He had fashioned this object when he was in psychiatric respite. I’m not sure — or perhaps simply don’t want to examine too closely — what this object signified for me. At a later time of cynical purging, possibly after he took his own life, I discarded it. It didn’t possess the requisite signifiers that would have ensured its endurance, once I dispatched it. I am sure it is now dust, distributed into the mineral waste of the world.

When my mother died, my siblings and I devised a fair and equitable method of dividing her possessions. But each new object brought forth from some dark cupboard evoked an astonishing and complex array of emotions.

The milk jug. My eldest brother was the great milk drinker. He was renowned in our family for his consumption of milk, drunk sometimes straight from the jug while he stood at the fridge door. I always suspected that he thought that if he drank enough milk, he could defy his genetic legacy and grow tall, much taller than his tiny mother. Perhaps he would grow tall enough to defy my father, who, when possessed by his demons, would change from our loving, nurturing parent into a being consumed with uncontrollable anger.

Later, when the demons departed, he became a desiccated husk, his head lying on his arms at the end of the kitchen table. We all thought that our brother should take that milk jug. But he said no. There were few things among that huge mountain of possessions that he claimed for himself, and even then he did so almost apologetically, as if embarrassed at the emotions and memories that this odd assortment of objects evoked in him.

I have seen similar milk jugs in junk shops and antique shops. But should a prospective buyer find that jug on some dusty shelf, they will not be able to read its history, read the story of four young children growing up in country Victoria in the 1960s, one of whom was excessively fond of milk.

I know that Frank had a brother, but I am not sure whether there were other siblings. My forensic inspection of his books gives no clues. A couple bore bookplates awarded to his brother, the gentle middle-aged man who brought them to my shop. He had travelled to my country bookshop with this small collection of books in a cardboard box. He had seen the children’s books in my shop — the Enid Blytons, the May Gibbs and Peg Maltbys — and had decided this was the place he wished to dispose of the books that had belonged to his brother, and which had remained untouched since his death, when they were both young boys.

Once I bought some beautiful children’s books that had belonged to a woman named Alice. I remember Alice. I have lived in this city for most of my life, and when you have lived in one place so long, the webs of association and recognition become tighter and denser.

Alice would buy a single ticket to every amateur theatre performance in our small provincial city. She was a tiny woman, with one leg shorter than the other, requiring her to wear one shoe with a thick fat heel, like the huge, shiny black shoes worn by Alice in Charles Blackman’s paintings.

Alice had left an astonishing collection of beautiful children’s books. She had collected nearly every book by Mary Grant Bruce. Some of these bore inscriptions dedicated to her when she was a child.

It was abundantly clear that these books were Alice’s great source of joy and delight. On some, she had written in large, bold black text: “This book belongs to Alice! If you are reading this, please contact the police, because this book has been STOLEN!!! Please return this book IMMEDIATELY!!!’’

But they have all now been sold, her collection broken up and scattered.

One day I visited an elderly couple who lived in a conventional brick veneer in a quiet street, set among similar houses, all with trim lawns and tidy garden beds and neat concrete kerbs. In the garage were hundreds of books that had belonged to their son, who had recently died.

The elderly man had spent weeks endeavouring to sort these books into categories and subjects. There were books on surrealist and experimental fiction, books on existential philosophy, beautiful cookery books with complex recipes and a broad range of classic literature. There was a scattering of children’s books, the usual sort of books belonging to a boy born in the 60s, someone of, or close to, my age.

I expressed my sympathy to the elderly couple, who resembled, not only in age, but in apparent education and experience, my own parents. They were good, honest, hardworking people, bowed under the magnitude of their grief but resolute in their determination to disperse their son’s property properly.

I said, “It’s a beautiful collection, you must have been so proud of your son.’’ And the father emitted an involuntary noise, a guttural grunt that had its source somewhere deep within him, and I knew, without knowing them or their son, that a great gulf had carved itself in their lives some time before their son had died, some time after he had read and moved beyond those children’s books that his parents had given him when he was a boy.

He had evidently voraciously, greedily sought more knowledge from more esoteric, more complex, more difficult tracts, something that had caused a great fissure of misunderstanding, an absolute, irrevocable chasm that had removed him from them, and that, perhaps, provided the chaotic maps that aided and abetted the path of his own dissolution.

The father handled those books, he sorted them, and endeavoured to classify and arrange them logically, but they defied him, they refused to give up their secrets, or to cast the light of understanding on their owner. They were like bricks, each one forming the small part of a great wall that segregated two loving parents from their brilliant, precocious and deeply, fatally, troubled son.

I carried them to my car, and, as I reversed down the driveway I saw the father standing there, bowed, shrugging off the arm that his wife had placed around his shoulder.

Frank’s books were much narrower in range. They were all children’s books: WE Johns, Enid Blyton. Was Frank reading one of those books when he died? Will I find a bookmark, a football card, a scrap of paper torn from a comic and placed at the page he had read up to? Was he ill, dying, lying in his bed as his grieving parents or older brother read to him?

Or did some catastrophic calamity destroy him? An accident? Was he Biggles, valiantly sitting aboard his Sopwith Camel on the roof of a house in some tree-lined street when his makeshift plane plummeted down the terracotta roof tiles and left him lying broken on the ground, beneath the house’s eaves?

Was he high up in the Faraway Tree, searching for lands among its highest branches and he lost his footing?

Where was the magic promised again and again in children’s books that failed to raise him, pale, but recovering, from his sickbed? Where was the magic slide that would have borne him safely and thrillingly down from the treetop on to the forest floor?

So vulnerable we are within our thin packets of flesh, so easily damaged, but strangely so resilient in the cage of our bones. Will we unravel from within, betrayed by some aberrant event in our biologies, in our complex psychologies, or will some external adversary slay us?

We spin through the orbit of our lives, getting and spending, acquiring and accumulating, shoring up our lives with things. But at our lives’ ends, when even breath itself must be surrendered, our possessions will become impenetrable middens, mounds from which meaning will be sought, but which will always tender insufficient clues.

Michelle Coxall is bookseller, writer and editor.