The Lost for Words Bookshop

by Stephanie Butland

  But then I realised that beautiful, nice Vanessa – with her stunning hair and a tiny gold heart-shaped necklace that I just knew cost more than a week’s rent – was wearing a bad bra. The seams made downwards curves and they showed through her blouse, so for all of her expensive loveliness her tits were frowning at me. And I felt better. Not in a judgey way, just because I can cope with non-perfection. Nathan was going to have to work on that, now I thought of it, because he was starting to look a bit too good to be true.

  ‘You work in a bookshop?’ Vanessa said. ‘I’d love that. Except I’d want to read all day, so I’d get the sack in a week.’

  ‘Where do you work?’ I asked. I wasn’t really bothered – I cut my own hair, in as much as I put it into a ponytail every six weeks, and whack the bottom inch off – but if I had a brother I’d want to know the far end of everything about his girlfriend and I wasn’t having that conversation.

  ‘Oh, I travel,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I thought you were a hairdresser.’

  Vanessa laughed. ‘I am,’ she said, ‘but I work for private clients so I go where they are.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. I didn’t, really. I thought hairdressers stayed in one place, unless they were the sort who went around and did wash-and-set for old ladies, which clearly wasn’t going to be Vanessa’s thing, unless I’d spectacularly misread her. We’ve established, I think, that I’m not a brilliant judge of character, but I was fairly confident on this.

  She waved her hand, a ‘what I’m about to say isn’t that important’ gesture. ‘I’m a colour specialist, so I quite often get booked for films and things.’

  Bloody Nathan, I thought. Vanessa’s a hairdresser in the same way that Prince Charles is a farmer. My hand went to my own hair. I wanted to cover it up.

  ‘I do my own hair,’ I said. ‘I always have. Well, my mum cut it when I was a kid.’

  She looked at my hair, like she hadn’t noticed it before, which I’m sure she had. ‘Burgundy Rose, right?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I braced myself for some sort of pep talk on home colouring and how we amateurs should know better.

  But she said, ‘It’s a good choice. It suits you. You’re naturally fawny-brown, right, and it goes reddish in the sun?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again. I was a little bit impressed, and I didn’t want to get tricked into talking about my mother again, so I asked, ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Your skin,’ she said, as though that was an answer, then, ‘I wish I had good skin like yours.’ I had no idea what to say to that. There’s some god-awful quote that Melodie spouts – dance like nobody’s watching, blah blah – but it ends with ‘love like you’ve never been hurt’ and I thought, looking at Vanessa and then at Nathan when he came back with the drinks, that’s what you two are like. You’re like little puppies playing in the sun. Your lives are so easy.

  Nathan left the drinks and then went off again, to do the rounds. We both watched him go. He wasn’t performing that evening: he said he deserved a night off.

  Vanessa said, ‘I’m so proud of him when I see him now – when I think about what happened to him at school. Has he told you about that?’

  ‘He’s mentioned it,’ I said, carefully. Not technically a lie: he probably had, in some oblique way. We talked, of course we did, but it was mostly here-and-now talking, poetry and books and magic and York and, well, chatting. I like the present (mostly) – I’ve constructed it carefully, like my little home library – and that’s where I try to stay.

  She looked at her drink, at Nathan, at me. ‘He was bullied at school. So badly that our parents talked about taking him out of formal education. That’s when he started with the magic. It was a sort of obsession with him. It was quite scary, for a while, to see the way he was. He hardly talked. He spent whole days, at the weekend, shuffling cards.’

  He’d tried to teach me how to shuffle – sending cards from hand to hand, making a rainbow of then. I hadn’t found the knack. He said all it took was time. He hadn’t said how much, or where the time had come from.

  ‘He’s trying to teach me,’ I said. I felt a bit bad: I’d assumed that the only reason you would end up doing magic was because some lovely old uncle indulged you with trips to see magicians and gifts of magic starter sets that came in a plastic top hat. Nathan had had more of a hard time than he’d let on. But then again, as nobody ever says, it’s not how you fall, it’s how many people are there to pick you up and clean your knee with disinfectant and tuck you up on the sofa with some hot chocolate and a book until you feel better.

  ‘When I look at my brother now, I feel so proud.’

  Ah, I thought, there’s my warning. Fuck my brother if you like, but don’t fuck with my brother, because he’s had one nasty thing happen to him, and he needs to be protected from having anything else bad come his way.

  I knew then, sitting across from Vanessa, that Nathan and I weren’t going to last. Well, I’d always known it. To start with, I’d felt as though I was tricking him, by pretending to be someone who could have a normal relationship. Lately, I’d been tricking myself. I knew we were doomed but I was ignoring it. I’m good at ignoring things. Well, I am during the day. The nightmares can be bad. I’m standing in the churchyard at Whitby, and the sea is rising, and behind me the church is on fire. If I jump, I’ll drown. If I stay, I’ll burn. So I stand there, and I’m waiting to see what happens first, and I’m screaming for my mother, and she’s nowhere.

  Nathan and I were just too different. In his world problems came with rescue squads, and solutions were white rabbits and home education. I imagined him, lanky and spotty, sitting in a bay window with a pack of cards, practising his tricks over and over, while every so often his mother put a cup of tea and a slice of homemade lemon cake at his elbow.

  He stood at the front and clapped his hands, five sharp claps.

  POETRY

  2016

  Found

  Archie always pretends he’s not bothered about his birthday but he’s worse than a spoilt kid. About a month beforehand he goes around murmuring to all of those friends who treat the shop and the cafe as an extension of their homes that he’s going to have ‘a few drinks’ to ‘wave off another year’ and it’ll be ‘nothing special’. Selected customers get the nod too.

  Then he goes off to the post office with a carrier bag full of thick cream envelopes, printed invitations inside but handwritten addresses, each name a work of copperplate art. Another reason to love Archie: he has even less interest in the internet than I have. We didn’t have so much as an email address between us when we had the shop’s website set up.

  The first year I actually believed the ‘nothing special’ schtick and turned up half an hour late in the clothes I’d been wearing for work. Archie lives in a big old house in Bishop-hill, and I passed three men in black tie and a woman dressed as a can-can dancer on the way up the drive. Another woman in a ballgown with sparkly hi-tops on her feet answered the door and I realised my mistake. In fairness, the woman in the ballgown was overdressed, but she was probably nearer the median of the dress code than I was.

  Archie gets caterers in and he puts on one of his hideous old brocade waistcoats – I once told him he looked like a fat Oscar Wilde and he roared with laughter and said he didn’t know which of them I was insulting – and there’s a lot of wine and loads of that food that means you don’t stop eating all night but you have to make toast when you get home because you’re starving. The first year I stuck to the kitchen and the one after I stuck to Archie. These days I know a few more of his friends so I can usually find someone I can have an okay conversation with, which is made easier by the fact that it’s the same conversation every year – I’d love to work in a bookshop, isn’t Archie a character? That kind of thing. If all else fails you can always ask people how they met Archie. It’s never something ordinary, like, well, like ‘in a bookshop’. It’s usually: ‘we shared a cell when we were court-martialled’
or ‘we’ve known each other since we were hunt saboteurs’ … Also, Archie has a library where I can hide out if it all gets too much.

  After the first year I started buying something new to wear for the party. Nothing flash – I don’t really do dressed up or dressed down, it’s really just dressed or not dressed as far as I’m concerned – but I thought something new would show that I’ve made an effort. Nobody notices. However much I try I always buy a black dress, and though I like my tattoos, I’m not going to display them more than I have to, because then any idiot who’s had two glasses of wine thinks it’s okay to ask about them. By ‘ask about them’ I mean: talk about the tattoos they have/are too scared to have or ask me whether I’m worried that people will judge me, by which they mean they are judging me but think they somehow cancel that out by talking about it.

  This time, though, I’d seen something I liked so much I’d deviated from the norm. I was on the way to the high street in my lunch hour when I saw a dress in a charity shop window. It was a dark plummy colour with a velvet bodice and gauzy sleeves and I just thought: yes. It’s the closest thing to a retail thrill I’ve ever had outside a bookshop. I paid twenty quid for it but from the label I’d guess it was two hundred, new.

  I took it back to the shop. The afternoon was quiet. The party was the next day. Archie and I were working side-by-side for a change – I was sorting books on the floor, then passing them up to him for shelving – and before I’d thought it through, I asked him the question that, I suppose, had been on my mind since I met him.

  ‘Archie, how do you do it?’

  ‘Do what, my little straywaif?’ He looked down at me. I sat back on my heels.

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ I said, ‘you’ll be all – relaxed. Like you are here. You’ll be able to talk to anyone. You sort of – glide – through things.’

  He put his hands in the small of his back, winced as he stretched his spine. ‘I think my gliding days are over,’ he said.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  He sat down on the nearest chair – I realised I’d just given him the cue for stopping what he was doing, so I stood up and took over his bit. I could listen and work.

  ‘Be yourself,’ he said.

  Oh great, I thought. I’ve been doing that for years and look where it’s got me. Oscar-level social awkwardness and no friends. ‘If I had a party, my flat will be too big for it,’ I said, ‘and your house will be too small for yours.’

  ‘And are you saying that that is a measure of our relative worth?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said.

  He was quiet for so long that I assumed he was napping, but then he said, ‘I once helped John Gielgud build a bread oven in his garden. Halfway through the second day, he said to me, “Archie, old boy, this is not what one would call a two-minute job”. Give yourself time.’

  ‘Time?’ I said. I could feel my voice was flat with disappointment. I wanted there to be a better answer.

  ‘And be brave, Loveday. Ask the questions you want to ask. Seek out the people you want in your life. It might not be as hard as you think.’

  And then he did go to sleep. I thought about what he’d said. I would never be brave. And then I remembered I’d performed some poetry, and I had what some people would call a relationship, and a year ago both of those things would have been completely out of the question. To borrow one of Archie’s phrases, perhaps he wasn’t as green as he was cabbage-looking.

  * * *

  Nathan was going to the party, but he was going to meet me there, because I was going home to change and collect the lemon meringue pie, which I’d baked during my morning off. He might be my boyfriend, but it doesn’t mean we have to go everywhere together. Archie had asked him to do a little bit of magic to warm things up at the start of the evening. He’d offered to pay but Nathan had refused to even discuss money.

  Of course I hadn’t thought about getting to Archie’s with a somewhat fragile pastry creation – not until I was standing in the street next to my bike, with my dress all tucked up, realising that there was no way it would survive the journey, as I couldn’t get it flat into my bike basket. I had to get the bus, so I was late. Still, as my mother used to say (still says?), someone always has to be last.

  The house is as solid as Archie is, and stone-built. I think it’s Georgian: it has big sash windows and big, square, high-ceilinged rooms and a staircase that curves. It’s basically a junior stately home. There are four steps up to the front door, which is massive, in case you’re wearing your hoopiest dress, I suppose. But once you’re in, it’s friendly. It smells of pipe-smoke and bread, and there’s a hotchpotch of coats and hats by the door, and yesterday’s newspaper on the kitchen table.

  I went straight to find Archie, who was admiring some odd-looking thing that he’d just unwrapped. When he saw me come in he left the people he was with, came over, and kissed me on the cheek, squeezing the top of my arm nice-tight.

  ‘You look lovely,’ he said in my ear. I was pleased to see him, and pleased by the contact; it made me feel safe. All I could feel were eyes on my back. It had occurred to me on the way that the person who’d left me my mother’s books might well be here. They needed to know me well enough to know where I worked. And if they knew that, they knew Archie. And if they knew Archie, wasn’t there a good chance they’d be at his party too? I took a breath.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, taking the object out of Archie’s hand.

  ‘It’s a cigar cutter,’ he said, as though that was a thing. He didn’t make a big fuss or introduce me to anyone; he just stood next to me, with his arm around my shoulder. I gave him the box with the lemon meringue pie it. When he realised I’d made it I thought he was going to cry. ‘My little straywaif,’ he said. He looked around the kitchen, which was filling up with happy noise. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘there’s something to adore in every single person who is here. Everyone.’

  I laughed, and looked around for people I recognised to put him to the test. ‘Melodie?’

  ‘Confidence. Self-belief. Excellent headwear.’

  ‘Victor from the cafe?’

  ‘Patience. Shapely calves. Exceptionally good at logic. Did you know he’s won more than five grand in Sudoku competitions?’

  ‘No,’ I said. How would you find that out, during the course of buying a coffee, a tea, and two banana muffins? I saw another familiar face, though I turned my head away before he could see me. ‘Rob.’

  Archie sucked his teeth. ‘I almost didn’t invite him, to be honest. There’s something about him that’s never smelled quite right, but old Archie likes to err on the side of kindness. But: tenacity.’

  ‘I’m not sure tenacity is what I’d call an adorable quality,’ I said. Then, ‘What about me?’

  He laughed. ‘Don’t fish, Loveday.’

  ‘I’m not fishing,’ I said. I really wasn’t. I work hard, but I know that I’m also hard work, and I’m never really sure how I got lucky enough to get my job, and keep it, in this customer service world.

  Archie squeezed me again. ‘You’re clever, you don’t compromise, and you seem to genuinely believe you’re invisible. And you’re quite lovely to look at, if one likes pale-and-interesting. No wonder our good magician is transfixed.’

  I didn’t know what I thought he was going to say, but I was dumbstruck. Fortunately I didn’t need to reply, because I was rescued by the next guests, who were carrying a huge stuffed monkey cuddly toy between them and shouting something about how it had been a long time since Borneo. Archie bellowed with laughter when he saw it. He let go of me and set off to greet them, but not before he’d kissed me on the top of the head and said, ‘Adore, Loveday. That’s my advice to you.’

  * * *

  I went to find a drink. There was a bar set up in the dining room, and I had a gimlet in my hand before I could remember asking for it. I went to look out of the window, my back to the room, hoping that I really was invisible.

  After the poetry night
the previous week, Nathan and Vanessa and I had had another couple of drinks, and then we’d all got into her Mini Cooper – Nathan insisted on folding himself into the back seat, which was probably not as hilarious as it seemed at the time, but there’s the curse of alcohol for you. Although, come to think of it, Vanessa had switched to water after her one gin and tonic, so maybe it wasn’t just the gimlets laughing.

  She’d dropped me off and then driven him home. I hadn’t asked him in, and he hadn’t assumed, which is one of those really nice things about him that gets on my nerves, because if you’re going to have to start disliking someone, or at least letting them out of your life, it’s more helpful if they piss you off now and then. I didn’t want him to slap me, obviously, but a bit of mild inconsideration would have helped nudge things along.

  Since the poetry night I’d been thinking a lot about how he’d sneaked into my life. Well, let’s take responsibility, Loveday – how I’d let him. I suppose he’d crept up on me or it wouldn’t have got so far. The first night he stayed over, he nipped down to Tesco and bought a toothbrush, and he left it in my bathroom. That was just one of those things. Of course he wanted to clean his teeth. It would have been churlish to chuck the brush away. Me buying porridge oats because he said when he was home he always made himself porridge in the morning, even when it was summer? I can’t blame anyone else for that. He’s bought more coffees than I have, and that’s partly because I’m at work and he’s visiting, and being nice, but I could have given him the money, or asked him not to, and I didn’t.

  I’d let one night a week creep up to two or three. I’d told him that my father was dead, and I missed my mother. I’d met his sister. More than all of those things, though, was the way we looked at each other. How we felt.

  If I wasn’t careful I was going to be in way too deep. I was going to adore him. I couldn’t admit it, to myself or to him. And Archie might have the kind of life where adoration should be the norm, but that wasn’t my life. I was in danger of forgetting that there was only one way this thing with Nathan was ever going to end, and it wasn’t the one where he spends the weekends building a treehouse for our kids. We were going to have to talk.