The Lost for Words Bookshop

by Stephanie Butland

  I turned it over in my hands. Photographs I’d seen of my father as a boy suggested that he was a grubby, tree-climbing little urchin. I was amused by the idea of him opening up this book and reading ‘Little Miss Muffet’ to himself. And then, in the next second, I wanted to cry.

  I suppose I was still in that not-quite-better place where everything gets to you. I was thinking about how I didn’t have anyone to ask how, exactly, a copy of this book had come to belong to my dad. Who had bought it? Why had he kept it? I checked and saw that it was a 1978 American reprint of an 1881 original. I would have thought it would have been bought by adults who were Kate Greenaway fans, or older people who remembered it from their childhoods and wanted to show it to their own grandchildren. So there was no obvious reason for my dad, who had no American relatives that I knew of, to have been given it.

  When your family explodes (implodes?) it’s the big stuff that hurts, for a while, like the impact of a slap, but that fades, quite quickly, because you have to get used to it, and the way to get used to it is, basically, not to think about it. It’s the little things like this that get you, forever as far as I can tell.

  I turned the pages, carefully – they weren’t brittle, but soft, almost bruisable, and they felt as though they could have come off in my fingers, like petals tugged from a daisy. I suppose it’s the fact that these small memories come from the kind of tiny reminders that you simply can’t predict, and so can’t protect yourself from, and they catch you, paper cuts across the heart.

  I don’t know whether Archie noticed that I was having a hard time with this particular book as I sat at the breakfast bar. I’m always amazed by what he can tell from the back of people’s heads: he can look at someone who’s browsing and predict with about ninety per cent accuracy both whether they are going to buy and whether they are going to try to haggle if they do. He claims he learned to read body language when he ‘got in with some grifters’ in London in the seventies.

  Anyway, he appeared at my elbow. ‘Hot chocolate,’ he said. When I get drinks from next door they come in take-out cups. When Archie goes into the cafe he comes out with their best china. ‘Take a break, Loveday. I don’t want to see you for half an hour.’

  Although I was, in principle, annoyed with him for (a) assuming that I wanted a hot chocolate (b) making me take a break as though he knew better than me what I needed, I still went and sat in the chair in front of the fire exit and watched the cream melt and the marshmallows float on top of the milky-brown chocolate. I fished out the marshmallows, sucked the outsides off them where they had been softened by the heat, and then dropped them back in, to melt some more. I was on my own – obviously. I wouldn’t have done it in company. I drank the chocolate, washed my hands, and took a good look through Mother Goose.

  I turned to ‘Jumping Joan’ and ran my hand across the page. ‘Here am I, little jumping Joan, when nobody’s with me, I’m always alone’. She was suspended in mid-air, dress ribbons flying, eyes closed. There was a mark on the corner of the page, a smudge of a thumbprint. My mum was always telling my dad off for leaving dirty fingerprints around the place. ‘Well, you check the oil in the car then,’ he used to say, at least before everything they said to each other was the start of a competition to see who could take most offence, most quickly.

  That thumbprint had to be a coincidence. I didn’t think about where my dad’s book might have been for the last twenty years, because there’s danger in trying to make everything fit with the story that you want to tell. (Nathan’s poem flashed into my mind, again.) You only need to look at Jane Austen’s Emma to see that – she decides what’s going on around her and arranges the facts in her head to suit, and look at what happens. Well, she lives happily ever after in the end, yes, but only after a nineteenth-century equivalent of having her head flushed down the toilet. And our book – mine and my dad’s – still had a dust jacket, even if it was in a fairly crappy state, and that was where he’d written his name, and I’d written mine underneath, on the inside of the front flap.

  I remembered how much I’d liked my dad’s copy of this book, as a girl. I could read it, easily, from when I was quite small. There are about sixteen words to a page and I liked spelling out the ones I didn’t recognise – tuffet, latch, swine – and asking Mum or Dad what they meant. And, oh, the pictures. Nobody was too pretty, too happy. The girls looked pinched and the dogs looked as though they would bite you. It was like no other book that I’d seen. My mother didn’t like it – ‘I don’t know how that doesn’t give you nightmares’, she would say – and no matter how often I took it to my bedroom, it would always end up back on the shelf downstairs. My dad said she was being soft. ‘We’re not soft, are we, kiddo?’, he would ask, and I would shake my head, solemnly, because I knew from other things he said that being soft was bad. He would read the book with me, growling and exaggerating, ‘We’re all jolly boys, and we’re coming with a noise’ and I would laugh.

  I wondered about taking the book as part of my allowance, but I decided against it. When I held it I was back on my father’s lap, back in our little house, my mother laugh-tutting, me giggling, my dad’s voice coming at me not just through my ears but through the front of his big chest and vibrating the tines of my ribs. And although that was sort of nice, it was also sort of unbearable, and I can do without that.

  I don’t know whether it was having been more isolated than usual because of the cold, or the way looking at the book made me feel, but I was actually looking forward to poetry night. I’d been living in my own head too much, and the books I’d been reading – Heart of Darkness, The Colour Purple – were basically trapping me in other people’s heads. So I didn’t debate with myself about going along, I just did it. If I was a chimney sweep I would have been whistling as I locked up the shop. It was the first evening I’d felt properly like myself in ages, despite Mother Goose and her funny sour-faced minions shaking me up.

  Rob accompanied me, uninvited, to poetry night again, popping out from the cafe doorway as if by magic just as I came out from around the back of the shop with my bike. I hadn’t seen much of him since I got back from being ill, or given him a thought, really, so I jumped when he appeared, and he laughed, which annoyed me, so instead of ignoring him, I said, ‘You shouldn’t have let my tyre down, Rob. That was a really mean thing to do.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Loveday,’ he said. Too fast.

  ‘We both know that you do, Rob,’ I said. I looked him in the face, something I don’t often do with anyone. Those brown eyes. He blinked first. ‘Are you looking after yourself properly?’

  He snorted. ‘I’m not about to start losing it with people, if that’s what you mean.’

  I felt myself go cold, even though it was a warm evening, and I started walking. ‘I didn’t say you were,’ I said. I just meant…’ I gave up. I’m no good at kindness.

  He was quiet for a bit, and then he said, ‘I’m alright. I had an … episode … over Christmas but I’m better now. I have help and I know when to ask for it.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘And you and Melodie?’

  ‘It’s not really serious,’ he said. I realised he might interpret that as me giving a damn – all this is so bloody complicated – so I said, ‘I don’t really like it when you put flowers through the door.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. I was going to ask whether that was ‘Okay, I won’t do it any more’ or ‘Okay, but I don’t care and I’ll keep doing it.’ Or even ‘I’ll stop it with the flowers and do something else, which you will also dislike, because whether you dislike it or not is not really the point’.

  We walked on in silence.

  It was just before 7.30 when we reached the George and Dragon and I was chaining up my bike when Nathan appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Feeling better, Loveday?’ he asked.

  ‘It was only a cold,’ I said. Nathan nodded, smiled. He has a good smile – it looks as though he means it, even if he does over-use it a bit
. I couldn’t help but smile back. Rob had stopped with me. He looked between us.

  ‘What’s this thing you’re going to, Loveday?’ he said.

  I thought, look at me. Two men in a stand-off over my evening plans. One has some fairly serious mental health issues and lectures in Early Renaissance Studies and the other one’s wearing a cravat. You couldn’t make it up.

  ‘It’s a poetry night,’ I said. ‘Melodie sometimes comes.’

  ‘I saved you a seat,’ Nathan said. He looked at me, then Rob, and got a funny look in his eye. I suppose Nathan clocked that all of my body language was telling Rob he wasn’t wanted. Which was more than Rob could see, obviously.

  Either that or he saw an opportunity for showing off. He stuck out his hand to shake Rob’s hand. ‘Nathan Avebury,’ he said. ‘Will you be joining Loveday and me?’ Then he put his other hand, very lightly, on the small of my back – it made me wonder if men went to finishing school. It was a genius move.

  Rob took a step back and shook his head.

  ‘Don’t touch my bike,’ I said.

  Nathan and I walked up the steps and into the pub. Rob hadn’t moved. He was looking from Nathan to the chocolate coin in his hand.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said to Nathan when we stood at the bar. ‘You didn’t have to.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. Then, ‘My sister’s beautiful too, and she gets a lot of hassle. I’ve seen it for years. I just like to help out when I can.’

  I think I must have imagined the ‘too’. Nathan ordered a pint of Guinness and a gimlet. When the barman brought them I handed Nathan a fiver and said, ‘That’s for mine, thanks.’

  He said, ‘Why don’t you get drinks after the first half, then we’ll be quits.’

  Nathan was fourth again, which I thought was a shame. I thought about my poems and wondered what would happen to them here, if I said them out loud. Miss Buckley used to talk about the oral tradition – not in so many words (haha!), but she’d say, ‘Remember, in the olden days, before people could read and write, we used to tell each other stories, and remember them. If you write a story you should read it out, to see how it sounds.’ I never forgot that; I used to whisper my English homework to myself, under my breath, if the library was quiet.

  Words do sound different in the air. One time a teacher read something I’d written out to the class. It was a description of the sea and the way it’s always the same but never the same. Hearing my words aloud made me feel proud, exposed. I loved school plays, at least until being looked at started to have other implications, and meant whispers and rumours. So, up to and including my critically acclaimed (by my parents) performance as Blousey Brown in Bugsy Malone. But other people’s words are safe and easy. Speaking what you’ve written is something else: your own words can eviscerate you as they come out.

  My favourite poem that night, apart from Nathan’s, was one about how complicated it is to choose wine in a supermarket.

  Melodie came to sit with us during the break: ‘Archie tell me you still sick, Loveday, but here you be, with handsome Nathan.’ I was tempted to ask her why Rob wasn’t with her, but I don’t gossip.

  I think it was the prospect of escaping Melodie that made Nathan come down with me when I left. Or maybe because I’d told him about Rob and the tyre. Anyway, my bike was fine, and we stood on the pavement, talking, while the other poetry fans had another drink, and couples full of conversations about their evenings wended past.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you where you’re from,’ he said. ‘You sound like Yorkshire, but not exactly York.’

  I went with the letter of the question, rather the spirit. ‘I’m only about twenty minutes from the shop,’ I said. ‘It’s a newish development. It’s nice.’

  Nathan smiled, gently, as though he knew I was trying to dodge the question, as though I was flirting. ‘And where are you from?’

  ‘Ripon,’ I said, which was not untrue.

  ‘I grew up in Bridlington,’ Nathan said.

  I tried to think of something to say about Bridlington. I’d never been there. ‘It’s on the coast, right?’

  That smile again. ‘Yes. I miss being beside the sea. I miss it. Even the North Sea.’ His voice filled with laughter. ‘When we were kids we used to go to Cornwall. My parents had a friend who lived there. It was the first time I’d realised that you could actually play in the sea.’

  I didn’t want to talk about Cornwall. ‘You should have got a better result tonight,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said, and his smile changed, from something soft to something showy. If I was one of those people who gave away touches, I’d have play-punched him on the arm as a way of saying, ‘Don’t be an arse’.

  ‘Are you always this sure of yourself?’

  He looked at me then and his face changed back, from the public version to the one I saw when it felt as though we were the only people that there were. ‘Not everyone pays attention, like you,’ he said, ‘and because I’ve been around for a while, I’m like part of the furniture. People know my schtick.’ He didn’t say it the way Rob would say it, self-pitying; he just stated a fact.

  We were looking at each other. We weren’t stopping. It was turning into gazing. I don’t gaze.

  ‘Well, I’m going to head home,’ I said. It was a cold sort of relief to look away from his face.

  ‘It was great to see you, Loveday,’ he said. He put his hand on my shoulder and then he kissed me on the cheek, very gently. It wasn’t passionate but it was pretty sexy. If I’d been in the market for a boyfriend I might have liked it. I unlocked my bike.

  ‘Where have you put the chocolate coin?’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘I only do that the first time I meet someone,’ he said. ‘It gets old. I make an exception for the under-tens.’

  * * *

  The next Tuesday night, Book Group got quite emotional. They were reading After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell, though they didn’t really have a proper discussion about it, just said whether they’d liked it (five to two in favour, six to two if you count me). She, the divorced one, has taken a lover. The rest of them are agog, and jealous. I can only see trouble, especially as the divorce isn’t finalised yet.

  Izzy spilled a glass of red wine all over the carpet. They were all really apologetic about it. I told them it didn’t matter and when they’d gone I nipped to the corner shop a couple of streets away and bought two drums of salt, one to pour over the wine and one to keep in the back for the next time.

  ‘Morning, Loveday,’ Archie said when I came in at eleven the next day, and then he charged out of the door. His pipe was already primed and ready to go. I soon saw why he was in such a hurry. I’d left a note asking him to hoover up the salt when he got in, but of course he didn’t. When he came back from his smoke and stroll around the neighbourhood, having bought a bottle of port and a bag of Chinese pears, he claimed not to have seen the note. I’d taped it to the till, and I’d left the hoover out, so he must have climbed over it to hang up his coat, but Archie’s Archie.

  So, there was the pile of salt under the table, which had got scuffed and kicked around all over the place, and I was quite pissed off by the time I’d got it all cleaned up. When lunchtime came, I ate my cereal and banana and I hadn’t done a single book-related thing except show someone where the cookery books were and tried not to glaze over (haha! Archie joke!) while listening to a no-pause-for-breath monologue about the evils of wheat. Or maybe sugar. Okay, I wasn’t listening.

  After lunch I told Archie to disturb me at his peril and I went to the breakfast bar to do some valuations. He bowed and smiled, and brought me tea and a jam doughnut an hour later. Doughnuts are the natural enemy of the book – even if you don’t squirt the jam on the pages, you end up with sugar everywhere but I appreciated the implied apology.

  Post-doughnut I went through two boxes of sheet music – nothing rare but everything well kept. A lot of people ask for sheet music and I like selling it. I think I like the thought of hou
ses with pianos in them; they feel like the sort of places where things don’t really go wrong. Sorting it cheered me up a bit, anyway. I was wondering about a music tattoo but I couldn’t think of the opening of any piece of music that I could live with forever. Whereas first lines of books are a different matter. I don’t regret any of mine, not even Jane Eyre and The Railway Children on my shoulder blades, which hurt like hell. The first one (Anna Karenina) seems predictable, now. But when I was seventeen and had only just discovered Russian literature I felt as though Tolstoy was speaking to my soul with: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. So I had it inked on my hip. The font is delicate and fine. And yes, it will go saggy with my skin one day, but I really don’t care.

  As I sorted I recited some of my poems to myself, in my head. Poetry night was making me think about them in a different way, as things that might belong out in the air, instead of written and re-written on a page until my careful handwriting and consideration of every syllable had made them stiff as boards. One Sunday evening, when I’d been thinking about Nathan, I got the whole lot out, from my late teens to now, and read them all aloud. Some of them were awful. But the more recent ones aren’t so bad. I started working on another one, and before I knew it it was gone midnight and I still hadn’t eaten my reduced-to-clear microwave tuna pasta thing. I almost texted Nathan to say hello, but it was too late and, anyway, it’s not like I’m his girlfriend or anything. He’ll have a girlfriend called Trixie or McKenna, who uses pure essential oil instead of perfume and also has a magician-type non-job, like making hats or dressing up as a princess for children’s parties.

  This is why I try to go to bed before midnight. I get ratty and stupid if I don’t.

  I skipped the next poetry night. It’s not like I’m legally obliged to go. Whenever I thought about the first poem I heard Nathan perform, and whether I could tell a different story about myself – although it’s a moot point because I don’t really talk about myself anyway – I felt antsy and I didn’t like it.