Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  I knew that if I went on the Saturday it would be a date. I didn’t know if I would stay, but I took my toothbrush just in case, along with a bottle of white wine that Archie brought in for me when I asked him what would go with fish. Rob’s flat was small and what you might describe as excessively neat – the pens on his desk were all the same brand, lined up with a precision that was clearly not accidental, and his bookshelves were more orderly than the ones in the shop. He asked a lot of questions about me – I hate that that’s the officially sanctioned way to get laid – but I talked about the shop, mostly, and asked more about university life. I’d always thought about university in terms of its impracticalities: the cost, the debt, the enforced sociability. I hadn’t thought about how you could pick a tiny part of the world – out of all its possibilities, its places and times and histories – you are going to spend the rest of your days digging around in. I liked to hear Rob talk about it.

  I stayed. It was nice enough. I didn’t stop to carve our initials in a tree-trunk on the way home the next morning, but I wasn’t surprised when he dropped into the shop on Monday and we did go out, to the cinema this time, that week. He invited me over on Saturday night again, and I went, but the questions were getting to be a bit much, and when I went to put my trusty black leather Mary-Jane shoes on before I left in the morning they had been not only lined up with their toes a perfect right-angle to the wall, but also polished. There was a big flashing ‘Emergency Exit’ sign in my head, and a fluorescent arrow pointing me in that direction.

  ‘What’s this?’ I said, when I saw the polished shoes. I don’t think they were that clean on the day I bought them.

  He shrugged. ‘I woke up early.’

  I laughed. ‘And you’ve finished your PhD already so cleaning my shoes was all there was to do? Not that I don’t appreciate it –.’

  He was looking at me very seriously, all of a sudden. ‘Have you got time to talk?’ he asked.

  I wanted to say no but he had just cleaned my shoes. And he knew I had to leave soon, so I reckoned if there had to be talking I may as well do it when I had a get-out-of-the-flat-free card in my hand.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  We sat down and he looked at me and I thought, wow, this must be what a woman looks like when she tells a man that their contraception wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  ‘You know I said I’d been ill, on our first date?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. It would have been churlish to point out that that wasn’t really a date.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a sort of – it’s a mental illness. I never really got better. I just got better at managing it.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘One of the big things for me,’ he said, ‘is control. I don’t like it when I feel – out of control.’

  I noticed that his hands were on his knees and that their positions were perfect mirror images of each other: the spread of the fingers, the palms on the same place on each kneecap. I was sitting sideways-on, one elbow on the back of the sofa, one leg tucked under me, one leg dangling. I wondered if I should move and make myself symmetrical. I thought about him eating spaghetti, the fork and spoon central on the plate when he had done.

  ‘So I control the things I can.’

  He looked at me, and I nodded. I understood that much. Making sure people who might want to find you can’t find you is an exercise in control, after all. ‘Like your flat,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and he smiled, so gratefully that I felt bad about the way I felt when I saw my lined-up, polished shoes. ‘I know it’s too tidy but – it’s the best way I have of managing. I’m sorry. I should have realised it would look weird if I cleaned your shoes.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ I said. I knew I’d never, ever be able to talk about myself the way he was doing it, so I listened.

  Rob told me about medication, therapy, his support network. He talked about the difficulty of admitting that the places in your life when you’re most productive, most excited, most brilliant are when you’re also most ill. He was at great pains to explain that taking anti-psychotics doesn’t actually mean you’re psychotic if you don’t take them.

  I listened. I felt for him. There were lots of stops and starts, pauses and deep breaths. I felt miserable and uncomfortable and I thought about how, if I ever told anyone about me, I would look exactly as Rob did right now: frightened, determined, pale. I thought about how he had got lost in his life, like me, and that books had rescued him too. If I had a tribe, Rob was one of my people. Except that he was telling me all this. I would never tell anyone anything, unless I had to. My story was silence, a secret.

  When he stuttered to the end, I said, ‘Thank you for telling me, Rob,’ and I meant it.

  He nodded. ‘Do you still want to go out on Thursday?’ he asked. We were going to the museum, a talk about architecture.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I didn’t exactly mean, ‘Of course I want to go out with you again’. It was more, ‘Of course what you’ve said doesn’t make a difference to how I feel about you, because I would never judge someone on the grounds of their mental health’. I can see how he took it to be more of a commitment than it was.

  CRIME

  1999

  Time is meaningless here

  My father didn’t find a job. By the time summer term started, I was having free school meals. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t the only one. I minded, though, when my half birthday came, on the first of July.

  Anyone born between Christmas and New Year will tell you that you may as well not bother with a birthday. You get afterthought presents and the people who come to your party – if anyone is free – look as though they’d rather be at home on the sofa watching cartoons and eating Ricicles straight out of the box. When I was seven, we started celebrating my half birthday. It was my mother’s idea. It was still school term so people weren’t away, and it was at the beginning of those winding-down weeks full of sports days and school trips, when the holidays are in sight and everyone is excited and happy. That’s how I remember it, anyway. I still got a present on New Year’s Day, but the first of July was where the real fun was.

  The year before it all went wrong, when I was eight-and-a-half, I’d had a party on the beach. It was a hot day, and there wasn’t a lot of wind, which was unusual for Whitby; the stillness of the air made the whole world seem different. I remember the smell of sea and sunblock, as Mum went from child to child, daubing noses and foreheads, the tips of our ears. There was a sandcastle competition and donkey rides and Punch and Judy. There were twelve of us and we carried our picnics to the beach on the end of canes, tied up in big red spotted napkins. People smiled and took photographs as we went past and I felt like the queen of the world. It was a week when my dad was home and he took the photos. Afterwards, looking through them, he’d shaken his head and said, ‘I tell you what, kiddo, your mother’s got class. If she ever realises she’s too good for me then I’ll be in trouble.’

  This year it was different. I got presents, of course. A Furby (Emma had one, and we all loved it, even though some of the kids at school, the ones who wore lipgloss, said Furbies were for babies) and the first three Harry Potter books. I’d read the library copies, but I didn’t have my own, and I’d said that I wanted to reread them. There was a receipt with them – the pre-order of The Prisoner of Azkaban, which came out a week after my half birthday. I loved my presents but there was no party. Instead, Emma and Matilda were invited back for tea. There was a barbecue, which my dad was in charge of, and he wore a paper hat and made us laugh but it just wasn’t a party. It was more like a summer holiday afternoon. Then it rained and we had to bring everything inside. The house felt smaller now my dad was in it all of the time.

  My cake was supposed to be a sort of fairytale cottage, covered in sweets, but my mum had hurt her wrist falling down the stairs, so my dad had had to help her with it and, awful kid that I was, all I could see were the places it had gone wrong: the wonky roof and t
he way the icing didn’t go right to the corners. Dad had found some sparklers, so he put all of those in the chimney and lit them, which was funny until one of them fell off and burned a hole in the carpet.

  That night I heard my parents arguing again.

  I knew what it was about. While they were getting the barbecue ready, Mum had said to Dad that she’d been looking in the newsagent’s window and she’d seen that one of the hotels wanted casual help over the summer. Dad had stopped fanning the charcoal and looked at her.

  ‘Casual help?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Cleaning, waitressing, I would imagine,’ my mother had said.

  ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he’d said.

  She had sighed and when she turned away from him her eyes were shadows.

  Before Dad lost his job I never used to listen to my parents after I’d gone to bed at night. But two things had changed in the post-employment world. One was that their voices were different, these days. They used to be quiet, conversational, making a gentle rumble like the sound of the sea, with only the odd word audible. Now, raised voices, or shouting followed by a ‘shush’ and my name from my mother, meant that the volume dropped then rose again. And that was difficult to ignore. Dad had given up smoking and Mum said it made him irritable. He said it was his bloody life that made him irritable.

  The second thing that changed was how I knew now that the way my parents talked, and the things they said, made the shape of the next day. If they were reconciled then the next morning would be smooth, there would be games after tea and maybe ice cream. Life would feel like it used to feel, before Dad lost his job, or very similar to it. If they didn’t make up after their quarrel, though, the next day would be a different story: an excess of love directed at me from my mother, a silence like a sea-fret from my father, impossible to ignore, muffling our little house.

  Once I told my mum that she looked ‘peaky’, which was a word that she used to me sometimes, usually on days when my throat or ears had started to hurt but I wasn’t actually ill yet. She smiled and told me she was a little bit tired, then went into the living room where Dad sat hunched over the jobs pages of the local free paper, and said pointedly, ‘Your daughter says I look peaky.’ A second later there was a bang as his fist slammed onto the table. He got up and dashed all of the framed photographs off the top of the bookshelf on his way to the door. Mum cut her fingers clearing up.

  That was, needless to say, the day after an unresolved quarrel. It had got bad again, that night. I think I might have been sent to bed early, because the argument couldn’t wait. I never dared to suggest that my mother looked peaky again.

  Sometimes I looked at the wedding photo that hung on the wall in the living room and wondered at how different they looked now. It wasn’t a formal photograph, and my mum wasn’t wearing a wedding dress, but a pale-blue suit and a straw hat. She was holding a bouquet of white roses and looking at my dad, who was standing next to her in a navy suit, and they were both laughing as they looked at each other, confetti falling down over them. Once, when I was little, I asked Mum what they were laughing about. She said they were bursting with how happy they were, and the smiles were the explosions where the happiness couldn’t stay inside any longer. When I asked her where I was, she pointed to her stomach in the photo and said, ‘You were there, LJ. All curled up, sleeping, as tiny as a mouse.’ They had lived in Whitby, to begin with, because Dad’s friend Jim – the one whose wedding my parents had met at – had let them stay in his house when he and his wife moved away to army barracks in Wiltshire. My parents had lived there for a year until the house – my first home – was sold.

  I was as beautiful as a peach, according to my mother, and like a funny bawling prawn, if you believed Dad. Mum was in love with Whitby by the time they had to move, and Dad had started working on the oil rigs and could get to and from Leeds to catch his flight easily enough, so they found a place of their own to rent, and there we were. A chance meeting at a wedding, a couple of dates, an unplanned pregnancy, enough love for my parents to think it was worth a shot, and there was LJ, Whitby Girl.

  Lying in the dark, the night after my so-called party, I couldn’t help listening, even though listening made me feel anxious, as though I’d got on a fairground waltzer and realised I’d made a mistake, but it was too late to get off. I’d been on one once, when we went to a funfair for Matilda’s birthday. Up until the last few months it had been the most horrible experience of my little life. I’d felt sick and scared and it had all been made worse because on either side of me Matilda and Emma squealed and laughed, and as soon as it stopped they had wanted to go on again. I’d waited with Matilda’s mum the second time and watched them as they shrieked happily, around and around, without me. ‘I’m with you,’ she’d said. ‘You couldn’t pay me enough to go on one of those things.’ But it hadn’t made me feel any better about watching them.

  My father was the first to raise his voice. This was the usual pattern. ‘You’re not going to cook and clean for strangers.’

  ‘I cook and clean for you,’ from her, ‘and standing at the school gate isn’t really the best way for me to use my time at the moment.’

  ‘Because I’m not earning, you mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a sigh, ‘that’s what I mean. But I don’t mean anything by it. I’m just stating a fact, Pat.’

  He went quiet for a minute. Then: ‘We agreed when LJ was born. You said you wanted a decade to be her mother, that it was the most important thing –’

  ‘I did.’ Her voice was calmer than his, and calmer than when she said the cook-and-clean thing, oil on water. ‘But look at us. What would be the harm? Three months of summer work would see us through to Christmas, if we’re careful. She’ll be ten at New Year. And you’ll be with her. It’s not as though we’d be farming her out to strangers.’

  ‘Oh ye of little faith,’ the tideline swell of my father’s anger, ‘not even my wife thinks I’ll be in work by Christmas.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, where’s the harm? Or, if you don’t like that idea then I’ll get a real job. Full-time. The call centre is hiring and it pays well. You can stay at home. I wanted her to be looked after by a parent, not sent to breakfast clubs and childminders. That was what I thought was important then, and I still think it’s important now. You were making more money, and I wanted to be with her. Don’t make this a – don’t make it –’

  ‘Don’t make it about how you’re more employable than me?’

  ‘I did not say that.’

  A pause, then my father’s voice, in a tone that I would get told off for if I used: ‘You’d have to travel to the call centre. You’d be exhausted. I wouldn’t have the car all day.’

  ‘I’m not saying I have all the answers.’

  ‘If you’re saying it’s okay that I wouldn’t have the car, then you’re saying there’s no chance of me getting work.’

  ‘You know it’s not. For heaven’s sake, Pat.’ She didn’t sound angry, she sounded tired.

  It went quiet, then, and I tried to go to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come fast enough. On my bedside table the Furby snored.

  ‘We agreed,’ my father said more gently, so I had to lift my head from the pillow, use both ears, ‘that you would have ten years. I promised your mother I’d look after you.’

  My mother, a sigh that carried up the stairs, ‘That was different. You know it was.’

  ‘Why?’ His voice was rising again. He was like this, now: suddenly cross, even with me. I was learning to think twice before I spoke. The previous week there had been a letter about a school trip to York. I had folded it up, small, and put it in my pocket, then put it in the bin, because I was afraid that it would start another argument about money. I didn’t mind. If you didn’t go on the trip then you just went to school, as though it was a normal day, but there were no proper lessons. I might be able to help in the library. I liked that.

  ‘When you said that to my mother, wha
t you said was that you’d look after me. You meant keep me safe. You didn’t mean make us rich. That was what she needed to hear, at the end.’

  I remembered my mum’s mum dying. It had been the summer that I got my first school uniform. She had been ill for as long as I could remember. When the funeral was over my mother cried a lot and said ‘blessed relief’ a lot. She started to cry now, but the sound was different to the way that she mostly cried these days, gentler. I heard my father speak, low, a growl of comfort. I imagined that he was cuddling her.

  I was nearly, really asleep, when my mother spoke again. I thought she said ‘we’re a parsnip’ but when I thought about it afterwards I realised the word must have been ‘partnership’, which was something I’d heard on the news.

  ‘And you have to let me pull my weight,’ my father said.

  ‘And you have to let me support you,’ my mother said.

  My dad’s voice rose again, something I didn’t catch.

  ‘Now you’re wilfully misunderstanding me,’ she said. Her voice was the one rising this time, in frustration. ‘You’re your own worst enemy.’

  ‘That’s right, judge me. That will help.’

  I knew from his tone that it could go either way.

  It went the bad way.

  You’d think, because it’s a significant thing, that I’d remember the moment I first sussed out that my dad was hitting my mum. But I don’t. When I think back to that time, I remember, most of all, the feeling of wariness, of making myself small. After that, I remember how our family was tossed in the shallows where my father’s moods met likelihood of work.

  Things improved, briefly, after he got a job labouring on a building site that August. ‘I’m not proud,’ he would say, carrying fish and chips into the house, the hot, sharp smell filling the living room so that we would breathe it in, deeply, the way we would breathe the clear air when we got out of the car after a long drive. But the job didn’t last – I don’t think it was his fault, I think it was always going to be short-term – and soon we were back to toast and Marmite with Philadelphia cheese spread on top at teatime, although my mother didn’t have the heart to pretend it was a treat any more.