The Lost for Words Bookshop

by Stephanie Butland

  Nathan put me up third. I was so preoccupied by his poem that I didn’t care that much about mine. Every time he stood up on that stage he said something that threw me for a loop. The idea that people might want to relax in a relationship, that it wasn’t all for show, or about not being found out – bits of my brain were dying at the effort of thinking about how that might be true.

  I’d picked a silly poem to perform: I thought it would be a crowd-pleaser. I’ve noticed that people laugh at rhymes. I think spotting them, or maybe anticipating then, makes them feel clever.

  When I stepped up, my guts were in my boots and my heart was in my throat.

  I came sixth out of nine. Honour was satisfied, as Archie says. But I didn’t like it. Everyone was looking at me, judging, and my voice sounded feeble, a far-off seagull-cry. I was pretty awful, wobbly, and my votes were sympathy votes, I’m sure. I’d been to the other poetry nights and thought about how the performers weren’t very good: they were compensating for something, they were lonely, they wanted to think they were a poet because it was better than accepting their lives as they were. Once I’d stood up there I had a lot more respect for them. And five of them were better than me. That was fair. Suck it up, Loveday, you deserved it.

  I watched the last round thinking about whether I should try harder or pack it in. I do like the shelves and the shadows. But I don’t want to be a coward.

  Nathan walked me home. On the way, he said, ‘I liked that your poem went in a circle, and ended where it began.’

  I said, ‘I like that you noticed. And I liked yours.’ Because I did, on both counts. I wasn’t flirting.

  I asked him in.

  Yes, he stayed. Just because I don’t like most people doesn’t make me a nun, you know. A bit of discernment doesn’t hurt. And I’d like to think that, after Rob, I learned to be very discerning.

  Chase

  As performed by Nathan Avebury at the George and Dragon York, April 2016

  I know I’m supposed to like the thrill of the chase,

  but – personally –

  I like it when the chase is over.

  I like the bit where no one has to go and get croissants for breakfast, or pretend they always have them in the fridge, and we just have toast, or Weetabix.

  I like unmatching underwear, and fuzzy armpits.

  I like being able to wear my old Hootie and The Blowfish T-shirt with reasonable confidence that no one is going to call a cab for me.

  I like the things that say: relax. We have arrived somewhere where we can both rest.

  Don’t get me wrong: I like a bit of tension, a bit of fizz. I might not enjoy the chaise longue but that doesn’t make me ready for the rocking chair.

  But I’ll be relieved when you’ve seen my weird-shaped toes and that potential deal-breaker is done with.

  So maybe we could skip the chase, and relax?

  Books Behave

  As performed by Loveday Cardew at the George and Dragon York, April 2016

  I like books cause they don’t care

  If your knickers match your bra

  If you’ve washed your hair.

  I like books cause they don’t invade your space

  They sit on your shelf

  They don’t get in your face.

  I like books cause they don’t mind

  What your heart contains

  Who you’ve left behind.

  I like a book cause it doesn’t give a shit

  When you get to the end what you think of it.

  Books don’t care if you’ve got a degree

  What you watch on TV.

  Books don’t judge if you’ve got tattoos

  If your friends are few.

  I like books cause they don’t care.

  I don’t mind admitting (well, I sort of do) that I spent the next few days in a mildly happy fug. The night with Nathan was – not to over-share – pretty good, sex-wise, but more importantly, he behaved like a normal person. He had bad breath in the morning and he looked like an idiot when he was half out of his trousers and, well, it was just nice. Better than nice. Basically, he was as good as his poem. No one was holding in their stomach and his two smallest toes are really weird – sort of folded over. It wouldn’t last – I wasn’t sure it was even going to be more than one night – but I did find myself a little bit cat-got-the-cream.

  Archie asked if I was ‘in such a good mood because of Mr Avebury’, which annoyed me because (a) I don’t see why women still have to be happy because of a man in the twenty-first century, as though we’re not capable of our own, dick-free, joy and (b) he was right. I stuck my tongue out at him and bought him a cream bun from next door, even though his doctor says he isn’t supposed to eat them. (Well, not cream buns specifically, just general artery-furring crap. He takes no notice, of course. He says he’s been portly all his life and he’ll go out in a portly coffin.)

  Nathan started coming around to see me in the evenings. Not every evening; I didn’t always let him stay. He asked me to go to his place – he lived in Malton, a market town between York and the sea – but I just said, ‘Not yet’. I didn’t want to get myself into a situation I couldn’t get out of. Malton was a bus-every-half-hour place, and it took an hour to get from there to York. That’s okay for commuting if your day job is close-up magic, because not a lot of those gigs start at 9 a.m. I’d have to leave Nathan’s at seven o’clock to get in to work on time, which is, frankly, a little more than I would be prepared to do for love. Not that it was love. It was definitely more than I was prepared to do for sex. And that’s beside all of the self-preservation, make-sure-you-can-always-see-the-exit stuff. Also, if his place was like his cravat – the corollary of which, in home decor terms, would be boar heads on the walls and improbably huge armchairs – I thought I’d enjoy things for a bit before his flat put me off him. Nobody needs a boyfriend who lives in the endpapers of a first edition of The Picture Of Dorian Gray. Not that he was my boyfriend.

  When he came around he did magic for me and I tried to see how it worked. Sometimes I could. He did things with coins and variations on find-the-lady, and once I’d worked something out he’d show me the details of how to do it. To give him credit, he never once made a joke about if he told me he’d have to kill me. I think I liked him because he was basically classy, underneath the cocky.

  A couple of weeks in, Nathan invited me to go with him to a kid’s party where he was doing magic. I hadn’t thought of it as a real job, but it turned out he charged £250 for a party, £400 if there were more than twenty kids. I work most of a week for that, and nobody applauds me and gives me cake to take home. I thought I’d go because – well, why not? He’d seen me at work.

  I started early because I was taking the afternoon off. Archie said I could have the whole day if I wanted, but the boxes of unsorted books were piling up under the breakfast bar again and I wanted to try to get through them before we got into summer. Students clearing out their rooms always led to loads of books coming in. That morning I hadn’t been able to get to the door to unlock it for boxes piled in the doorway. Archie doesn’t accept textbooks but he buys other things by the box, without even looking, sometimes, and I knew for a fact that I would be trying to find space for more poetry, Russian classics in translation, and mass-market mildly anarchic comedy novels. I’m not stereotyping. There would be other stuff too. But this was my tenth summer in the bookshop and I had a sense of what to expect.

  Stupidly, I’d thought that because I wasn’t normally in on a Wednesday morning, I would be, somehow, invisible, and be able to ‘get on’, as my mother used to say. The first hour was quiet, in terms of customers at least, but when there aren’t any customers to talk to Archie talks to me.

  ‘Have you thought about a holiday, Loveday?’ he asked.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. Last time Archie asked me if I was planning a holiday it was so that he could make sure I was okay to look after the shop for a month because he’d been offered a bit part in a spy fil
m set in Vienna. I was shattered by the time he got back.

  ‘Well, there’s no harm in planning ahead,’ Archie said. And then, ‘Where have you been on holiday? Where would you go?’

  ‘Cornwall,’ I said, then, ‘I don’t really like holidays.’

  ‘Then you just haven’t found the right one,’ Archie said. ‘It’s like cocktails. Or card games.’

  ‘Okay, you need to stop talking,’ I said. ‘I’ve just had to go back three letters in the alphabet.’

  He was quiet for about five seconds and then: ‘If you could go anywhere,’ he asked, ‘where would it be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I haven’t got a passport.’

  ‘I have several,’ Archie said with a twinkle. ‘You never know when you’ll need to make a quick getaway.’

  I sat back on my heels and laughed. ‘What, if the second-hand-bookshop mafia comes after you because they’ve finally realised you were the one who stole the missing first folio Complete Works of Shakespeare, accidentally murdering Lord Mountbatten in the process?’

  Archie was laughing too, but then he looked as though he was going to cry. He eased himself up to standing. ‘I’m sorry, Loveday,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Everything. Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’ I wondered if he was hungover: that could make him maudlin. He didn’t usually mind that he was interrupting me. Maybe I’d sounded rude. I hadn’t meant to.

  He had turned away. I didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t want to leave it like this. I took a breath. ‘Archie,’ I said, ‘I’d go to Whitby. If I was going on holiday.’ I didn’t realise until I said it that it was true.

  I was still pondering what Archie might be sorry for, and what would happen if I did go back to Whitby, when Melodie arrived.

  ‘Loveday,’ she said. It always amuses me to hear her say my name because she can’t play with it. Almost every name she says she elongates, a sort of flirtation. ‘Archeeeee’, ‘Naaaay-than’; she even manages to roll the ‘r’ in Rob. But ‘Loveday’ she can’t do anything with. Today she tried elongating the first ‘o’ but it just made her sound mad(der), and she knew it.

  ‘Melodie,’ I said. ‘Hello.’ I was tempted to stretch out the final ‘e’ a bit but I didn’t. I am many lousy things but petty isn’t one of them. I know how much petty shit there is in the world and if I have an aim in life – apart from keeping my head down – it’s not to add to it.

  ‘You going to poetry night tonight, with you handsome boy, Nathan?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said. ‘I haven’t decided.’

  I had, as a matter of fact, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. I had a poem that I’d been running in my head, thinking about how I could perform it. Nathan had helped me to practise. I knew it inside out. I don’t like being rubbish at things and I was rubbish on my first go. I still wasn’t sure that I was going to like performing but I thought if I was prepared, I was at least giving myself the chance to make a fair judgement.

  ‘I will be there,’ she said, ‘with my boy Rob.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ I said. I thought she looked pissed off, but she was wearing a bowler hat so I couldn’t really see her eyes.

  I thought afterwards that maybe she wanted me to care about her love life, which I had failed to do, apart from to be (slightly) grateful to anyone who was going to take the roses out of my letterbox, so to speak. Maybe she had got wind of him following me, and thought it was all my fault, with my well-known temptress qualities of ignoring people I didn’t like and generally not giving a toss.

  Then I thought about what Rob could be like, and whether, if I liked Melodie more, I would try to warn her. I probably would.

  ‘Are you and Rob getting on okay?’

  ‘He a clever one,’ she said, with a smile, ‘and good eyes.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and then I paused, thinking carefully about how to say it. ‘But, Melodie, is he – is he kind? Because –’

  She held up a hand. ‘I will not discuss my love with you,’ she said. ‘We see you later.’ She walked off. As soon as she’d rounded the corner I wondered if I should go after her. But what would I say? ‘Your boyfriend sometimes comes out of the cafe when I come out of the shop’? ‘Rob sometimes walks behind me when I’m going home’? Very easily explained away. Unless I told her everything it was going to come over like sour grapes.

  I snuck to the breakfast bar before Archie could start on about whitebait-before-it-was-fashionable and lobster-cooked-on-the-beach, his current favourite topics of conversation after a weekend in Devon somewhere.

  There was a box of cookery books waiting for me. Well, there were lots of boxes waiting for me, but cookery books was the biggest box with the smallest number of books in it. I’d clocked them when I hauled them in off the step with the other donations that morning. Archie won’t let me put a ‘We are not a charity shop. Do not fly-tip books here’ sign on the door, because he says it won’t do any good. He’s probably right.

  I emptied the box and put them into piles by author. There were a few good finds. No treasure, but books from the 1990s by authors who are still popular, which means that people will actually buy them.

  Whoever the books in the box had belonged to, their cookery had been ambition rather than practicality. There were very few signs of use – no pages stuck together, no bits of paper marking often-used recipes, no marginalia about pastry quantities. They must have largely been bought for display purposes on a shelf in a smart kitchen. I thought I might stack them up on the main table, a ‘just in – get them while they’re hot’ type thing. Archie likes a quick win too, though he doesn’t really need to think about money. He’s not relying on the bookshop to make a living; he doesn’t even take a salary, he only pays the rent and the bills and me, and we cover those, most months.

  But I knew that selling a dozen cookery books at £8 a go, or two for £15, would put a smile on his face. I started carrying them to the main table, stacking them up in a staggered column so they looked interesting from every angle. As I put them out I double-checked for signs of wear that I might have missed. Archie haggles, but I don’t, so if the price is fair to begin with, I stick to my guns.

  I realised that Delia’s Complete Cookery Course wasn’t in especially good nick. It still had its dust jacket, which was why I’d assumed it was of a piece with the other books in the box. But even before I’d opened it I realised it was different to the others. It had been used. It had character. Not only that – it had a character recognised. It had a character I recognised.

  The dust jacket was torn across the front, for a start. The tear made a jagged line from top left to mid-right, like a cartoon graph of a business making a loss, and it had been inexpertly repaired with Sellotape, short pieces criss-crossing the rip and then a long strip across the top. When I picked it up it was that feeling again, the one I’d had with the Penguin Classics and the Kate Greenaway. I’d assumed they had been chances, coincidences, because what are the odds, really, of those books ending up in my hands?

  But now, the past reared up in front of me as though it was going to attack. It was all I could do not to drop the book and run, the way I would if it had just burst into flames.

  I closed my eyes, took some deep breaths, and told myself I was being ridiculous.

  It couldn’t be ours. It couldn’t be.

  When I opened my eyes again I made sure all I was seeing was one of the bestselling cookery books of all time, which of course my mother had, because almost every other household in the country had one. I looked through the pages and remembered. There was the squidgy chocolate log that we loved, my mother laughing and sometimes doing her version of swearing (‘Oh, flipping Nora’) as she tried to roll it up without the sponge cracking. She never managed it. As soon as I was old enough to read the recipe I pointed out that Delia said it would crack, but that wasn’t good enough for my mother: ‘I wanted it to be perfect this time, LJ.’

  Then there was
the pan-fried pizza that we sometimes had at weekends, though without the olives and anchovies. I suppose it was an odd thing but, to me, it’s still what a pizza tastes like, and you can keep your authentic sourdough hand-stretched wood-fired numbers. Whoever had owned this book had liked that recipe too; the corners of the pages were stuck together with what looked like tomato purée.

  As I flicked through I could almost taste the Whitby sea again, the kitchen door open to let the heat out, the smell of the beach blowing in with the cooler air. Whoever had owned this book had liked the things we liked. The pages fell open at the scones, the pork chops with sage and apple, the brownies and the parkin.

  I looked for the lemon meringue pie, because I remembered how much I liked helping to make it – there was a lot of ‘doing’, with the pastry then the filling then the meringue, and when we ate it, usually on a special occasion, I could never quite believe how lovely it was. Archie’s birthday was coming. He was impossible to buy for because he had everything he wanted, except for things I couldn’t afford, like crazy-expensive cigars and unpronounceable wine. But if I made him something, he’d know I appreciated him, without me having to say so. I hate saying stuff. That’s why I like poetry, I think. Minimum words. You can’t argue with a poem. And it’s rude to interrupt it.

  It was easy to find the lemon meringue pie page because it was already marked. There was a postcard of Whitby in it: a photograph of the crags, taken along from the place where we used to sit on the beach on a warm summer day, although I always thought the crags looked best when it was raining and the skies were grey. They sort of shone, and at the same time they were sinister. I felt as though they were on my side. I looked at the postcard and I swear my heart actually skipped a beat, which I’d always thought was a stupid phrase. I felt it move in my chest, though, up and back for a second, before it went back to doing its usual thing.