Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  Mostly, that Sunday, I thought about my mother, and how much my father must have hurt her. And I’m not even talking about the whole betrayed-by-the-one-you-love hurt. I mean the pure and simple physical pain of being struck, being bruised, having the parts of you that are supposed to keep you strong, break. Rob gave me, frankly, a nasty, domineering little-girl slap. He’s about ten stone wet through and any strength he has comes from getting heavy books from high shelves. And that slap still hurt. It really did. I suppose it’s partly the shock of the impact, then every nerve-end standing up and howling at once. Followed by the humiliation. I don’t know why I was so ashamed. I felt as bad as if I had been the one doing the hitting.

  My dad was a big bloke, and he was made of muscle. He once grabbed my arm when he thought I was going to run into the road, and yes, it was a panicky ill-thought-out move on his part but I still don’t think he would have used more force than he had to. He was standing next to me; really all he did was put out his arm and hold. That bruised to blue, and my mother laughed and joked about keeping it away from social services. That, obviously, was long before the social services came.

  So when Dad did the things he did, with force and anger, they must have really hurt her. Of course, I knew that, in my head. Now I’d experienced it in my flesh and I felt a sort of retrospective pity for my mother. Not forgiveness. But – I felt.

  I sat in my flat that Sunday, with a bag of frozen peas held against my face and A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth balanced on my knees, and although I was supposed to be reading, I kept on thinking of my mother, hurting, and my father, hurting her, and how none of it was as straightforward as I wanted it to be. And I decided that relationships weren’t really ever going to be for me. I wouldn’t be staying over at anyone’s flat again any time soon, no matter how much they liked my research methods.

  Rob came into the bookshop on the Tuesday. My face had recovered and the scrapes on my feet were healing. Archie hadn’t noticed anything, which I was surprised by, because I felt more shaky than I would have guessed, and I couldn’t believe it didn’t show.

  Rob brought flowers. I could smell them before I could see him. The bouquet was mainly lilies. The scent of them was too much; it made me want to cry. I wasn’t going to, though. I wasn’t going to do anything to make him think I gave a fuck, because I really didn’t, except that I don’t know where idiots like him get off thinking that what he did was okay.

  ‘Loveday,’ he said. He wasn’t smirking, at least. He held out the flowers.

  ‘I don’t want them, thanks,’ I said. I tried to say it without edge, a statement of fact. Whatever the message of the flowers was intended to be, I didn’t want my flat to smell like an Angela Carter novel for the next three weeks.

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to say sorry.’

  I’d thought he would probably come in and I’d thought a lot about what I was going to say. My possible scripts veered from furious putdowns to gentle conversations about what was acceptable and subtle enquiries as to whether he was seeing his doctor and taking his medication properly.

  Looking at him, though, I realised I hadn’t decided on the line I was going to take. It turned out to be the line of least words. No surprises there, Loveday.

  Rob shoved the flowers at me. He looked sorry, but when it came down to it, he’d picked the wrong girl to hit.

  I took a step backwards. ‘I accept your apology but I don’t think what you did was okay,’ I said, ‘and I don’t want the flowers, thanks.’

  He looked at the flowers, and at me. ‘That’s not very nice of you, Loveday.’

  ‘Let’s not get started on not very nice,’ I said, and I took a deep breath, and another step away.

  ‘At least have a coffee with me,’ he said. ‘I can wait next door until you finish.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Really. I’ve nothing to say.’

  He sighed. His sighing was as bad as the smirk. I stood there wondering why I’d bothered at all.

  ‘Are you really going to throw everything away because of one tiny mistake?’ he said.

  I stood and looked at him, with his flowers and what I thought he probably considered to be an appealing expression. I thought he probably was ashamed of himself. If I had a coffee with him he would probably say so. But there was no ‘everything’ – we were barely dating – and as for ‘tiny mistake’, well, sisters, it made me want to spit teeth.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, finding a bit of one of my pre-prepared speeches that fitted. ‘I am going to throw it all away, because like I said, what you did is not okay. It was not a “tiny mistake”. If you think it was you’re in trouble.’ I tried to make my voice gentle. ‘Maybe you should talk to someone about what happened.’

  He wasn’t listening. ‘I thought better of you, Loveday. I told you I was ill. I thought you’d be more understanding.’

  ‘In fairness,’ I said, and I really was trying to be fair, ‘if you’d had the flu, or a broken hip, and slapped me, we’d still be having this conversation.’

  We looked at each other, properly, for a minute, and then I turned away and went through the door marked ‘private’, and for the first time in a long time I wondered where my mother was.

  When I left the shop that night the flowers were on the pavement by the door. I was going to put them in the bin by the cafe, but it was full, so I laid them down beside it. I thought about asking him to bring my boots back but I decided against it. They were getting hard up anyway, and some things really aren’t worth the grief.

  Rob disappeared for a while: he’d told me that he was going to spend some time in Italy and I assumed that was where he’d gone. When he came back he’d show up every now and then, shove flowers through the letterbox, let my tyre down, though that was only the once. In the three years since he’d slapped me, sometimes I hadn’t see him for weeks or months, and then he’d be in bad penny mode for a bit.

  Maybe Nathan being around made him worse.

  I hate to admit it, but I was scared of him.

  CRIME

  1999

  No book is without worth

  I suppose the social services must have planned the timing of their visit carefully, although I didn’t think about it then. It was the October half term. I would be ten when the year turned. I wasn’t keen on my new teacher and I spent a lot of time in the library. We didn’t go to the bookshop any more.

  My dad was at the job centre. My mum was in the kitchen. She didn’t do as much baking these days – the price of butter was, apparently, ‘criminal’. She used to say, ‘I don’t believe in margarine’, as though she was talking about yogic flying, or ghosts. But, for whatever reason, she was making a cake. Perhaps because it was the holiday, or maybe it was to sweeten Dad up when he came back from the job centre. I was going to Matilda’s later, for a sleepover, and I was too excited to settle to anything. Anyway, there was a knock on the front door, and I went to open it. There were two women standing there, one tall, one short, both wearing trousers and smart jackets. The shorter one looked a bit pink, as though she’d climbed a hill.

  ‘Hello,’ the taller lady said. ‘Is Mum in?’

  Of course, because the front door was about six feet from the kitchen, my mother’s face was already in the kitchen doorway, looking around to see who was there. Since she’d had a second black eye a few weeks ago she’d been keeping herself to herself a bit more, sending me on errands to the shop, letting me be collected by my friends’ mothers if I was going to their houses, asking my dad to pick me up.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. She came through to stand next to me, and put her hand on my shoulder for a moment, leaving a floury ghost-hand behind.

  The women said their names and checked my mother’s, and asked if they could come in. I heard them say they were from social services. They didn’t look as though they were going to be any fun, although they kept looking at me and smiling, as though it was their first day at school and they wanted to be my friend. It was cree
py.

  I was glad to be sent upstairs. I didn’t try to listen – I’d discovered Sweet Valley High in the school library and was reading more than ever. But I did hear my mother raise her voice in a complicated, garbled sentence that had my name and the words ‘perfectly safe’ and ‘no right’ in it. Shortly afterwards, the front door closed. I went to the window. As the women walked to the end of the path they turned back and looked at the house; they saw me and waved.

  My mother called me downstairs. She looked as though she had been crying. She said that she didn’t want us to tell Dad that the women had been to visit. ‘It’s a bit like when politicians come around,’ she said. ‘You know how cross they make him.’

  I did. My father had been, briefly, a star of local TV news when the Tory candidate knocked on our door in the run-up to a by-election, with a film crew in tow. He’d been asked if he would vote Conservative. ‘Absolutely,’ he said, and the candidate had smiled, too soon, ‘when hell freezes over. Get off my lawn.’ Before he said lawn there was a moment where his mouth was moving but all you could hear was a beep. Then there was a close-up of his fist clenching at his side.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I didn’t point out the whole ‘secrets are wrong’ mantra that my mother used to have. I was learning that there were new rules in this new world, and I just went along with whatever made everyone’s life easier.

  ‘And there’s another thing,’ she said. ‘Your friends, LJ. And their mothers. Just – be careful about what you say to them.’ My mother spoke slowly, as though her words were picking their way across stepping stones, ‘Families are all different, and sometimes people whose families are different to yours think they know things about you, but they don’t.’ She looked at me, stroked my hair. ‘People get the wrong idea. Because Dad and I sometimes argue, then some people might think we are unhappy or – or that we hurt each other.’ I nodded, because she’d just described exactly what I thought. ‘So we need to be careful that no one thinks the wrong thing about our family. If any of your teachers or the other mums ask you if everything is okay at home, I want you to tell them that everything’s fine, but Dad is still working hard to find a job. Okay?’

  I nodded, although I wanted to shake my head. I wondered what the women in the jackets had said to her to make her talk like this. I knew I was a child and that meant I didn’t always understand everything, even when I thought I did. But I also knew, belly-deep, that what my mother was saying was wrong. I think she knew it too, because her eyes looked sad, and they wouldn’t look at my face.

  ‘Do you understand?’ She put her hand on my head, and looked at my hair as she stroked it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but –’

  ‘That’s enough, LJ,’ she said, not crossly, but not kindly either, and even though I caught at her hand, she turned away.

  And I did as I was told, although I sobbed my heart out at Matilda’s later. Her mum came up to the bedroom to see what the noise was about. She hugged me and told me everything would be all right. Her sweater was scratchy against my face and I thought about my mother’s softness and sobbed harder.

  Our life went to a flat, dead calm for a while. My parents didn’t talk much but they didn’t shout either. I spent a lot of time in my room, sorting out my shells, rereading The Railway Children.

  Then my dad got trained as a forklift truck driver. He grumbled about having to go on the course, but when he came home he was full of chat about it. He got a couple of weeks’ trial in a warehouse. He said he might start smoking again, and when Mum glared at him he laughed and called her a ‘dow’, which he said was Cornish for ‘cross old lady’. Mum said, ‘Less of the old’, and then they smiled at each other the way that they used to.

  They gave him a full-time job at the warehouse and there was talk of Christmas presents and there being life in the old dog yet. I hoped that might mean we were getting a puppy. I would call it Bobbie if we did. My mum started baking again and they laughed a lot, in the evenings, when I’d gone to bed. It felt as though the house breathed out.

  We ate fish and chips on the beach, even though it was November and the wind was freezing cold. It was just us and a couple of dog walkers, and the sky the colour of a school shirt that had been washed with Mum’s black dress. When we got home we lit the electric fire and played Scrabble. I won. I don’t think they let me.

  I think that Saturday was the last happy day.

  *

  The next evening, I was going to go to Emma’s for tea and to watch the video of Toy Story. The afternoon was dragging. Dad was watching a war film and I was pretending to watch it with him, just because it was nice to sit with him, and I liked it when he explained something about the history. Mum and I had baked scones; she had gone to the shop, and said that she wouldn’t be long.

  It wasn’t an interesting film, or Dad wasn’t talking as much as usual, or maybe after months of him being at home the novelty of him being there every Sunday afternoon was wearing thin. I went to the bookshelf. We hadn’t started up the bookshop trips again, and I hadn’t been to the library that week, so I looked through the pile of my books that were starting to seem too childish for me, or had been reread so often that I wasn’t interested in picking them up again. The Secret Seven had lost their charm, and so had Captain Underpants.

  The adverts came on, and Dad’s attention switched from the screen to me. ‘Maybe you should try one of your mother’s,’ he said, and he reached into the top shelf, pulling out Jane Eyre, the easiest one for him to reach, although I suppose it could have been any of them. ‘There’s a lot of words in here, kiddo. Rather you than me,’ he said, ruffling through the pages. And then he paused. He flicked back through the book, and pulled a ten-pound note from between the pages. Flicked again, found another. He looked at the money in his hand, his whole body still. And then he looked up at me, and he smiled a not-smile. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘there’s gold in them there hills.’ He put the money in my hand, the book by his feet, and took another book from the shelf, flicked through. A twenty-pound note, a five-pound note, a ten-pound note. Madame Bovary joined Jane Eyre on the floor. And so we went, through the books, more and more notes in my hands. I had never seen so much money.

  When the shelf was empty, Dad looked at me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s a lot of arghans.’

  I nodded. Usually I liked it when he used Cornish words but this time it made me feel cold. I had been keeping count. I was holding almost three hundred pounds, which was more money than I had ever seen, and seemed an unfeasible sum to be contained on one small bookshelf in our pinched living room. There had been a lot of talk about money while Dad wasn’t working; pound coins rescued from handbags and coat pockets on a Sunday evening when my parents did their planning; lists of sums on backs of envelopes. Such a great pile of notes – hundreds of pounds! – should have been a great thing, but I knew that it wasn’t.

  Dad was looking from the books to the money to me. ‘Did you know this was here?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. I’d wonder, later, whether I should have said yes. For a long time it was one of the places where I thought I might have influenced the outcome. If I’d said that I did know, then this hidden money would have been a game, a harmless secret, nothing more. But I said no, because it was true, and I had learned the habit and the value of truth all my life. I had been thinking about the women in jackets a lot and every time I did I felt certain that bad things were coming, as though I was reading a ghost story. Up until that knock on the door, I thought that truth was fixed, simple, a harbour wall rather than a tide.

  The door clicked open and closed. ‘Clotted cream!’ my mother called. ‘I had to go to two places. But I thought we deserved a treat.’ There were the everyday noises of her putting down a shopping bag on the kitchen bench, hanging up her coat on the back of the door. ‘It’s very quiet in here,’ she said as she put her head around the door, then, when she saw the two of us, the books, the money still in my hands, ‘oh.’ Her eyes were round
and fixed on the money. Dad and I were looking at her face. Her mouth wasn’t quite closed.

  ‘There’s quite a lot of money hidden here,’ my father said. ‘We were surprised. We didn’t know what to say. Did we, Loveday?’

  I was mute. I only got my proper name on proper occasions, like at parent-teacher evenings or the doctor. My parents called me LJ, short for Loveday Jenna, and my dad called my mum SJ, short for Sarah-Jane, unless he was angry with her. So even without the ghost-story feeling, I’d have known that it was serious.

  I shook my head, looked at my mother, hoping she would say the simple thing – because surely there was one – that would put it alright.

  But she had sat down, opposite us, on the sofa. She looked at her hands, drew a breath. ‘Not now, Pat,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about it later.’

  ‘Actually,’ my dad said, ‘I think, now.’ His voice was quiet and that was more frightening than if he had shouted.

  ‘Wait until she’s gone out,’ my mother said. She was almost whispering, looking at her hands, still.

  ‘Don’t use her as an excuse.’ Dad’s fingers were tapping against his leg, a rat-a-tat of flesh and denim. I felt more scared than I was when they were arguing.

  ‘She wants to know, too. Why she’s been eating scrag-end stews and her arms growing out of her sleeves when you have enough money to make things easier around here?’

  ‘Now who’s using her?’ my mother said. She put out her hand to me. I tried to move but Dad had his other arm around my waist, a solid bond that I couldn’t easily get myself out of. I couldn’t get up. I don’t think he noticed he was holding on to me.

  ‘I want to go upstairs,’ I said.

  ‘You heard her,’ my mother said.

  The pressure on my waist increased as my father squeezed and then slackened his hold. I went to the stairs, although suddenly I wasn’t sure whether I should leave the room. I thought about helping my dad to tie his work boots, my finger on the knot, and how if I slid my finger out too soon it would all go wrong.