The Lost for Words Bookshop

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘It’s not that simple.’ My father’s voice was low, but it was furious, like a growl from Ricky, the little Jack Russell on the corner who terrified me. I crossed the road every time I walked past and saw he was in the garden.

  My mother’s voice in response was quieter. I couldn’t hear the words but I could sense that she was upset. As my ear tuned, I picked out my name, ‘holiday’, ‘shoes’.

  I didn’t know what to do. If I went into the house I might be able to hear more than I wanted to, and it might be considered ‘snooping’ – another new word – which I knew was a bad thing to do. So I closed the gate loudly – the metal latch rattled – and I sat on the step. I could pretend that I was enjoying the sun, which was something that adults seemed to consider a worthwhile use of time. I took The Famous Five book I was reading from my blue school backpack. Dad had given it to me because he said The Famous Five were the best thing about his childhood. His name was in careful capitals on the inside front cover. I opened it, but I wasn’t reading. I was listening, despite myself.

  It had gone quiet upstairs. I can remember the feeling still, painful, unnatural, as though my stomach was consuming itself. The world I was living in was becoming different to the one I’d always known, and I didn’t like it a bit.

  Before he lost his job, when my dad went off to work I used to get upset that he was going away, sometimes, and he would scoop me up and say, ‘You see, LJ, if I don’t work, then there’s no money, so I have to go.’ No money then had seemed an abstract concept. I was just starting to see why it mattered. We had gone to the beach at the weekend, like we used to, except that we had taken sandwiches with us for lunch, come home in time for oven chips for tea; pub lunches and fish suppers, it seemed, were no more. I didn’t mind that, but there had been something in the way my mother laid out the picnic lunch – ‘Isn’t this lovely!’ – and my father’s response – ‘Don’t rub it in, love, this won’t last forever’ – that made it feel like a strange sort of meal. It was a bit like going to a friend’s house for the first time, and finding that you had to have different manners but you weren’t quite sure what they were and you spent the whole mealtime watching and hoping that you didn’t do anything wrong, and nothing felt comfortable.

  It was still quiet upstairs. I was hungry. I was just starting to think about going inside when I heard the sound of my dad’s footsteps, down the stairs, through the kitchen. Mum’s footsteps always sort of bounced, as though she was doing a little jump between each step, but Dad’s were a solid sound, one step overlapping the other. My mum said he had elephant feet. He said that she was spring-loaded. I didn’t understand what that meant.

  The door opened at my back and I lost my balance for a second. Dad reached to steady me and then he said, ‘Budge up, Whitby Girl.’

  He sat on the step beside me, and there wasn’t quite enough space, so my leg and shoulder were squashed against the brick of the doorway.

  ‘Have you got enough room?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I was like that, then. And the warmth and solidity of him on one side sort of made up for the scratching of masonry against my bare arm on the other.

  He felt in his shirt pocket and brought out cigarettes and matches. He smoked Marlboro and I liked the red on the top of the packet. He put a cigarette between his teeth and then passed the matchbox to me. He knew I liked to strike them. Mum always told him off when she saw me lighting his cigarettes, so we did it when she wasn’t looking.

  ‘Good day?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I knew that that was all he wanted me to say. Mum sat me down when I got in, and said, ‘Okay, I’m ready. Daily report!’ but Dad only needed a headline.

  He inhaled, exhaled, and the smoke and the smell mingled with the warm air. ‘Your mother says I should stop smoking,’ he said.

  ‘She’s always said that,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t like the smell.’ He mostly smoked on the back step, but the smell still got into the house.

  ‘She doesn’t like that I’m burning money, either,’ he said, ‘and she’s got a point.’

  ‘We did about smoking at school,’ I said. ‘You know you could die?’ Everyone who knew someone who smoked had had to raise their hand. I had felt as though I was confessing a crime.

  Dad sighed. ‘I know,’ he said. I didn’t like it when he was sad – when either of them were – so I tried to change the subject.

  ‘Sam in my class has a new baby sister,’ I said, ‘and he says his mum says it was an accident. But I don’t understand.’ I knew the basics. Having a baby seemed anything but accidental.

  I’d cheered him up. He smiled. ‘Sometimes you get the chance to plan for a child and sometimes they just come along by themselves.’

  ‘Was I an accident?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘we always would have had you. You were sooner rather than later, is all.’ Before I had the chance to work out what this meant he took another draw from his cigarette and asked, ‘Did you hear me shouting, just now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He sighed and his free arm came around me, gathered me in, solid and strong. I could hear his skin rasping against the brick. If it hurt he didn’t let it show.

  ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about,’ he said. ‘Your old dad’s in a bad temper because he hasn’t found a new job. That’s all.’

  ‘Are the oil rigs finished?’ I asked. I knew about jobs finishing from Emma’s dad, who was a builder. I liked using grown-up words, if I could.

  He laughed. ‘When the oil rigs are finished, we’ll all be finished,’ he said. ‘But that’s a while away yet. No, I’ve blotted my copy-book there, that’s all. You’re not supposed to fight. If you do, they send you home, and get someone else instead. There’s always someone waiting to take your place.’

  ‘Miss Buckley says fighting’s always wrong,’ I said. Some of the children in my class didn’t like Miss Buckley but I did. You knew where you stood with her, and she was generous with her praise, as well as her rules.

  ‘Well, maybe Miss Buckley should be in charge of an oil rig, then. She’d get on okay.’

  I was going to ask what the copy-book thing meant but in the silence while I tried to remember the words came the sound of my mother crying. I looked at Dad. I could tell he was listening too. The tears were the sort that get even louder when you try to stop them. He looked back at me and his eyes were sad, as though he was the one who should be crying.

  ‘I need to go and say sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to make her cry.’

  ‘Why did you?’ I asked. My teacher was very firm on this. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you meant to or not’, she would say about spilled water for painting, books caught with an elbow and crashed to the floor, ‘someone is still going to need to clear that up’.

  He stood up and for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. ‘I let my temper get hold of me,’ he said, ‘and I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Like when you hit the man who gave you the black eye?’ I said.

  His face went dark for a moment and then he laughed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he hit me first. He deserved what he got.’ He bent down to me, touched my hair. ‘But I don’t always think before I speak, and I’ve upset your mother. Are you all right here, if I go and say sorry? Then we could get the Lego out.’

  I nodded. I was getting too old for Lego, but Dad really liked playing with it. ‘I could have free school dinners,’ I said. I knew that if there was no work then that meant there was no money coming in, and I’d been watching, seeing how often it was spent.

  I thought about the glass jar that came out at Christmas, and how the sweets from my stocking and the contents of my selection box went into it. I would choose one thing a day until it was empty, usually around the middle of February. By the end I was stretching out my hand for the bottom of the jar, my fingers chasing the final blackjacks and drumsticks.

  He made a funny noise, a wet cough. ‘It won’t come to that,’ he said. ‘I’ll
find something.’

  POETRY

  2016

  There should not be silence

  I came down with a bug after that night at the George and Dragon. No, not the poetry bug, smartarse, I already had that.

  By Friday afternoon I felt like death warmed up. I knew it was bad because Melodie, whose sphere of interest usually begins and ends entirely with Melodie, pointed out that ‘Loveday have a not-well look on her today’. I’m not ill very often, but when I am, I really go for it. I was tempted to blame walking home with my bike, but it was March, so not exactly freezing, driving rain. Plus, I read in one of the many hundreds of half-read popular science books that come into the shop that being cold and catching a cold has no relationship, so I’ll let Rob off, though next time I see him I might tell him exactly what a shitty thing it was to let my tyre down.

  Archie sent me home early on Saturday. I slept all of Sunday and most of Monday, which is my day off, so I thought by Tuesday I would be okay, but I felt worse.

  I practically crawled to my bag to get my phone out, and rang Archie. He offered to come and pick me up and take me back to his place so he could look after me. It pisses me off when he does things like that. Just because he wouldn’t live in a bedsit doesn’t mean I’m not happy here. I sleep. I read. I write, a bit. I watch TV and I heat up stuff I buy in the Tesco Metro downstairs. It’s peachy, thank you very much.

  I thought about going to the doctor on Wednesday morning, but if I’m going to get something, it’s this: rasping throat, sore ears, high temperature, and coughing up luminous phlegm. I knew what to expect and I waited it out. Archie turned up on the Wednesday evening. I almost missed him because I was dreaming about a house being demolished, the tiles from its roof falling into the sea, and his knocking got amalgamated into that. Or maybe caused it. Anyway, I staggered up to wakefulness and let him in. He had a pot with him. I didn’t realise how miserable I was until I nearly cried when I saw his big, round, I-had-a-moustache-before-it-was-fashionable face. His smile went from ear to ear but he had a concerned look in his eyes.

  ‘You look atrocious, my darling,’ he said. He put the pot on the hob and opened the leather Gladstone bag he’s carried everywhere for as long as I’ve known him. He took out a loaf of bread and a navy-and-white striped apron, which he put on; it barely fastened at the back. He opened the window. It was freezing but I didn’t complain. I’d been breathing the same air since Saturday and even I could tell it was getting a bit rank.

  ‘I think I feel a bit better,’ I said. It was true – I’d been sitting up in bed for a bit that morning, and thought about having a shower, though I’d gone back to sleep before I could do anything about it.

  ‘I’ve brought some chicken soup,’ he said. ‘Go have a shower while I heat it up. Make it as hot as you can stand. It’ll help your chest.’

  ‘I was just about to,’ I said. I was going to tell him off for marching in uninvited and overstepping the boss-mark by about fifteen employment laws but, to be fair, he is my only real friend, as well as my boss, and I hadn’t bothered to charge my phone. And anyway, just the prospect of his chicken soup was enough to make me feel better, or at least mellow me a bit.

  Don’t go thinking I eat cold baked beans out of a can, because I don’t, but I’m your basic assembly cook: pasta and a sauce, cheese on toast. Archie claims that he learned his chicken soup from a Swiss cook in the merchant navy in the seventies. I’d happily eat the soup every day for the rest of my life. He starts with a whole chicken and puts a whole load of other stuff in the pot with it: rice, carrots, peas, sherry, thyme, parsnip. The finished result is something else.

  When I came out of the shower he’d set two places at my tiny table, washed up the stuff in the sink, and sorted out the sofa so it looked less like a nest for tramps.

  ‘Thanks, Archie,’ I said.

  ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Chicken soup for my little chicken.’

  Afterwards he washed up and talked while I sat on the sofa and listened, or rather, let his commentary wash over me. I heard Melodie’s name, and Rob’s, and I pricked up my ears: apparently they were ‘an item’. I hoped Rob would treat Melodie better than he had treated me. She has a bit more sass than me, on the outside, at least, and I hoped he’d learned something from what happened between us about managing himself better. The fact that he let my tyre down didn’t bode well, admittedly. But my brain was too tired to think about it.

  And the Archie conversational circus had moved on. He was telling me how he’d sold the umpteen-volume partial Complete Works of Shakespeare that’s been gathering dust for as long as I’ve worked in the shop. Romeo and Juliet was missing, which I desperately wanted to say something witty about, but my wits were still too ill to bother, and just waved a metaphorical white handkerchief in defeat. Before I could ask whether he’d told the customer about the missing volume, he was on to the next thing: Ben had brought in ‘a couple of boxes, mostly rubbish but there might be something worth finding’. That’s Archie code for ‘I can’t be bothered but you might enjoy sifting through them.’ I liked Ben. He didn’t say a lot but when he brought boxes in he put them down carefully, and the books inside them had been stacked so that they wouldn’t get damaged in transit.

  ‘Nathan Avebury came in today,’ Archie said, as he started on the drying-up. I was annoyed with my stomach for tensing up at the sound of his name. ‘He said to tell you to remember that you’re paying for your own ticket next time.’

  I didn’t say anything but I did think it was quite funny. Cocky git.

  * * *

  I went back to work on Saturday. I arrived mid-morning and the shop was full. Sue, Kate and Izzy from Book Group were sitting at the table with Archie. They sometimes brought him a cake, to say thank you for letting them use the shop. Technically it should have been my cake, but if you work on being invisible, you can’t really be annoyed when people don’t take any notice of you.

  ‘Ah, my little straywaif returns,’ Archie said, and wrapped me in a hug.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, and tried to sidle away.

  I wasn’t quick enough to avoid the inevitable: ‘Straywaif?’ Kate asked, looking at me with a half smile.

  Archie’s laughter followed me as I walked away. I didn’t need to listen, I knew the script.

  ‘I met her when she was fifteen. She came in with a school trip from Ripon and thought she could walk out with Possession without me noticing. I was standing outside smoking my pipe, so I collared her. Told her she could come with me to the police station or she could work for me for the afternoon. I kept an eye on her,’ pause for laughter, ‘and I told her she could come back and work, for money and books, if she so desired. Now,’ he did a sort of flourish, ‘ta-daa! Here she is, honest as the day is long. That, my friends, is the power of literature for you.’

  More laughter, a murmur of approbation that I knew wouldn’t stop Book Group from keeping an eye on their handbags the next time they saw me. I got busy among the maps and the poetry books and cringed.

  There were times when I heard the story and wanted to go out and give my version: I was on a school trip, an end-of-term no-agenda jolly, and I’d decided to go because the alternative was to stay in school with the kids who had been banned from going and weren’t exactly going to give me an easy time of it.

  I had set off to York, planning to buy more books, but my purse was nicked out of my bag on the bus. One of the girls who usually snubbed me had sat next to me, briefly, asking about homework. Her friend had slid into the seat behind and, presumably, taken my money then. When I realised I was half furious, half relieved that they hadn’t taken anything else. Being hungry is one thing. Being ritually humiliated by the sharing of the loneliest bits of your diary is something else.

  Possession was my obsession at the time. There wasn’t a copy in the school library and I’d been barred from taking it out of the public library again because there was a waiting list. I could live without the other things I wanted to buy – i
t’s not like having a new jumper would make me any more popular in the sixth form – but I needed a copy of that. Once my purse was gone I had a pound in my pocket. The book was two pounds. I left my pound on the table as I went. So I’m not saying what I did was okay, but there were extenuating circumstances. Archie leaves that bit out. To be fair to him, he also tends to leave out the bit about how after he’d torn me off a strip and put me to work, he brought me tea and a tuna sandwich and I did the full Oliver Twist, eating mine and then asking if he was going to finish his. I wasn’t constantly starving. But I hadn’t had any lunch because I didn’t have any money.

  The boxes of books he’d left for me to sort through were taller than me. Ben had brought some of the boxes and others had been left on the step.

  Most of the books in the boxes were rubbish, straight for the recycling. We don’t tell people that we get rid of excess books that way – even though they might ditch books, they wouldn’t put them in the bin and they don’t like to think that we do. But think about it. Five million paperback copies of The Da Vinci Code were published in 2003. How many of them does the world still need fifteen years later? A lot less than five million. The same goes for pretty much every book that’s been massive: Who Moved My Cheese?, Eat Pray Love, anything with a vampire. There’s an eternal surfeit of the things unless someone somewhere is taking them out of circulation when they get the chance. One of those someones is me. You should be thanking me. And yes, it does break my heart a little bit, even if it is James Patterson.

  In among the once-bestsellers, though, one book caught my eye, partly because it was a bit different to the books it was boxed with, but also because we had had it at home. It had been my dad’s when he was a kid; it’s a really odd thing for a 1970s child to have owned. It’s a collection of rhymes for children called Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose and it’s all 1880s-style illustrations and references to petticoats and spinning. But he’d been attached enough to it to put it in the single suitcase of things he brought from his parents’ house in Cornwall after they died.