Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  I read The Railway Children, and was struck when the children were only allowed jam or butter, not both. Bobbie’s version of poor, which involved having servants and benefactors sending hampers, didn’t really read across to my life. I still loved the book, though. Especially the bit when her dad came back, at the end.

  But there was no single moment when it hit me that he hit her. I just went through the days, in my shrinking way, and although, when I was interviewed later, I did say that I thought my father had hit my mother, I really couldn’t remember when it started, or give any examples of times or places when it had happened. I wasn’t there when my mother fell down the stairs and sprained her wrist. Yes, it does look a bit suspicious in retrospect, but if you’re nine I think it’s reasonable to assume that your parents are telling the truth.

  My mum’s black eye did mean a lot of questions at school, and Miss Buckley kept me in one break time, gave me a biscuit, and asked me if there was anything that was making me unhappy. I knew it was wrong to talk about money so I said that there wasn’t. When I was invited to Matilda’s or Emma’s houses for tea, there were often hugs from their mothers, and whispered goodbyes that included something along the lines of: ‘You can come for a sleepover any time, just tell your mum that you’re always welcome here.’ I smiled and said thank you but there was something comforting about home still. I certainly don’t remember wanting to get away. I suppose that – and I know I sound like every victim of domestic violence that there’s ever been – when things were okay, it was hard to believe that they would go bad again.

  And I do believe that, despite everything that happened afterwards, my parents were good people, and they had loved each other, and they did love me, and they wanted to protect me from the worst of themselves. So although it seems that they didn’t have the self-control to stop hurting each other, they did their damnedest not to hurt me, and however badly that turned out, I like that they tried.

  This, by the way, is my official line. It works and I’m sticking to it. It’s how I sleep at night. I suppose Nathan would say it’s my story.

  POETRY

  2016

  Turn pages

  I bit the proverbial bullet. When I got home from Book Group the next Tuesday I looked at my phone and there was a text from Nathan:

  Shall I keep you a seat tomorrow night?

  Cheeky git. I was tempted to ignore it but I wasn’t going to cut off my nose to spite my face. And I had thought that one of these days I might ask him about what led him to write the one about writing a different story for yourself. It was a weird idea. I didn’t know if I liked it.

  Anyway. I took a deep breath and texted:

  You can if you like. And can you put me down on the list?

  I waited, then ‘Done!’ came back. I didn’t analyse what he might have meant by that exclamation mark because I’ve got better things to do.

  I spent most of Wednesday wondering whether I’d really perform my poem. It’s not like I was legally obliged – Nathan’s the only one with the list, so no one except him knows if you put your name down and bottle it – and exposure isn’t really my thing. I hadn’t been on a stage since Bugsy Malone, and all the stuff that came later really put me off the limelight. But Wednesdays were reminding me that poetry’s a living thing and I was just wondering what it would be like to put my poems out there, in shared air, and see what they did. Don’t get me wrong, I know the world doesn’t need another wannabe poet. It was just going to be interesting.

  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 film 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-o
n-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.