Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  They weren’t looking at me. I went slowly up the staircase.

  ‘Don’t try to make me the bad guy.’ Now I was out of sight my father’s voice was gaining volume. Normally I would have done something to make sure I couldn’t hear. My dad had given me his portable CD player when he stopped working away because he said he didn’t need it any more, and bought me Now That’s What I Call Music 43 when he got his forklift job. I could have put my headphones on.

  I let myself listen. I suppose I wanted to know where the money had come from too, and what it was for. I didn’t know how much a birthday party cost but I was sure it was less than three hundred pounds.

  My mother’s sigh came right up the stairs and around the side of the door, where I’d left it open. ‘I’ve been working, Pat. Just a little bit, now and then. Since school term began.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Ironing, mostly,’ she said. ‘Amanda Carter from the PTA has a business. She saw me ironing the costumes for Bugsy Malone and said if I ever wanted a job I should let her know. I thought maybe we could have a nice Christmas. That was all.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I wanted it to be a surprise.’

  Upstairs, I exhaled. Of course. That was the obvious explanation. I had learned, over the last few months, that Christmas was one of the things that Cost Money, along with: school trips, cinema tickets, butter, burgers, going to the hairdresser’s and new shoes. I had got new shoes for the start of the school year, as usual. When I’d shown them to Dad he’d said his were being held together by polish and the laces.

  It had gone quiet downstairs. I wondered if they were kissing.

  Then, my dad’s voice, low. ‘I haven’t seen you ironing.’

  ‘I’ve been doing it at her place.’

  ‘When?’ The pauses in between what they said were too long. It was as though they were playing chess, thinking about every move before it was made.

  ‘Some mornings.’

  ‘Which mornings?’

  ‘Just some mornings. There’s no fixed –’

  My dad, interrupting: ‘Do you think I came down in the last shower? You might have thought I was unemployable but I’m not stupid.’ He’d got loud. I put my hand on my headphones but I couldn’t make myself stop listening to my parents.

  The next bit came out in a rush. ‘Mornings when I’ve said I was at PTA meetings or when I’ve known you’ll be out. I go to Amanda’s, we stand and iron for a couple of hours, she pays me, I come home, I didn’t tell you. All right? I lied about where I was and I hid the money. I’m not going to be cross-examined, Pat. I’ll not be put in the wrong for trying to –’

  There was a strange sound. It took a minute or two to realise it was my dad, crying. Then: ‘To what?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I think it does. What’s it for?’

  ‘You need to ask?’

  The chess had turned to draughts, fast, like it is at the end of a game. Click, click, click and then you’ve lost.

  ‘This is your escape fund?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘So everything we’ve said –’

  ‘Do not,’ my mother’s voice was suddenly full of fury, ‘even think about the moral high ground, Pat. Ironing with a broken rib is not something that anyone would do unless they felt they had to. And if it had got worse, well, I needed to know I could get us away.’

  ‘Get you away?’

  ‘If I’d thought Loveday was at risk –’ My mother’s words, so quiet. My father made a moan that went through me like winter wind on the pier.

  ‘I’d never hurt her.’

  ‘I don’t think you ever thought you’d hurt me.’ Their voices had become gentle and I was suddenly aware that I was standing at the door, listening, instead of sitting on the bed. I didn’t remember moving.

  ‘You know I didn’t mean –’ He stopped, mid-sentence. I imagined my mother holding up her hand, like a traffic policeman in a picture book. She did it to me, sometimes, when she was talking to someone and I tried to interrupt.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, quietly.

  I almost relaxed, but there wasn’t quite time before my father’s voice, loud: ‘Well, it’s all about what you want, isn’t it, Sarah-Jane? That’s all that matters.’

  I looked around my bedroom door and down the stairs.

  ‘I wanted to be safe,’ she said, ‘and Loveday too. That’s all.’ Mum was sitting on the floor, hands spread out in front of her, palms up, head down. I could hear her crying. I don’t think the word ‘despair’ was in my vocabulary then, but when I come across it now, I think of that sound, I see my mother sitting on the floor, crying, my father pulling on his coat. When he came back towards her, to pick up the money from the sofa, she moved backwards, out of his way, a scuttle of a movement.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ He wasn’t shouting, but I could tell that he wanted to. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ He stood still for a minute, and I could see how his shoulders were rising and falling, making his black leather jacket move, catch the light. His voice, when it came again, was quieter, but not calm: it was a bulldog straining at a lead. ‘I’m going to buy forty Marlboro and have a pint,’ he said. The door banged behind him. I went downstairs.

  Normally Mum would have made an excuse, said she was tired or he didn’t mean it, but she just looked at me and said, ‘Oh, Loveday, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘We should have the scones,’ I said. ‘They’re best when they’re still a bit warm.’ That was what she always said about scones. I think it was the only thing I could think of: the only action in the power of an almost-ten year old. I couldn’t go after my dad, because I didn’t know where he would buy cigarettes or have a pint, and anyway, I didn’t think Mum would let me go. I didn’t know what to say to her about the money. I didn’t want to ask why she thought our house wasn’t safe. But I did know that scones were best when they were warm.

  ‘Yes,’ Mum said, her voice flat, ‘the clotted cream is in my bag,’ but she didn’t move.

  I went into the kitchen and I got three of the pretty china plates, one in case Dad came back in time. I didn’t know how long having a pint took. I took the plates into the living room and put them on the table, then went back for the cream and the scones, the knives and the jam. Mum got up and put the books back on the shelf, though I noticed they weren’t in the right order. I thought about the school trip letter I had hidden from my parents.

  When I’d set the table, she said, ‘Well, let’s make a start, Dad might be a while,’ and she gave me a hug, but I stood stiff in her arms. I didn’t know what to think. Well, maybe it’s more accurate to say that that was the beginning of not knowing what to think; I’m probably much the same now. I mean, I have thought things – a lot of things – about my mother, and my father, since, but nothing really sticks. I wish something would.

  POETRY

  2016

  no one has the key

  Trying to work out how a book has got to the bookshop is a fool’s game but that didn’t stop me from playing it. Whitby to York isn’t exactly an epic journey, but it took Delia Smith’s Complete Illustrated Cookery Course fifteen years to make it, so you had to wonder what had happened in between. Well, I had to. I tried not to. But I did.

  I bought a cake tin and mixing bowl, and I made the brownies Mum and I used to make. If you microwave them they go all gooey. If you put vanilla ice cream on them when they’re warm and eat them on the sofa with your boyfriend, it turns out there’s such a strong memory attached to the taste that you cry like a stupid baby, and you can’t even pretend it’s to do with the programme you’re watching, if it’s a documentary about René Descartes.

  Nathan put his arm around me, and said, ‘Loveday, what can I do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘it’s nothing.’

  ‘It’s not nothing.’ His voice was so full of worry that I cried harder.

  And then I said, ‘The
brownies made me think about my mother. I miss her.’

  He pulled me closer, kissed the top of my head. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

  And that’s the trouble with talking to people. They ask questions and before you know it you’re halfway to telling them everything.

  ‘I’m going to wash my face,’ I said.

  This is what I worked out, about the books. After Dad died, the house was left empty until the landlord took it back. I can’t remember whether I was asked if I wanted to go back there, but I never went again. It was more than a year until I ended up at Annabel’s. When I got home from school one day, only a couple of weeks after I’d moved in, she met me at the door.

  ‘Your things are here,’ she said. I suppose she was intercepting me so that I didn’t get a shock. The boxes were stacked at the bottom of the stairs, and she’d moved the hat stand out of the way to fit them in. ‘I didn’t take them upstairs,’ she said, ‘in case you wanted to go through them first. If there are things you don’t want in your room we can put them in the garage.’

  I opened the first box but just the sight of what was in there – my jewellery box of shells, the Furby, a couple of comics – made me want to cry, and I’d decided I was sick of crying.

  ‘I don’t want any of it,’ I said, and I went upstairs.

  Almost eight months later, on my half birthday (which passed unmarked, of course), I spent the day going through the boxes. Annabel was the only person I knew who parked her car in her garage – all the other ones on the estate sat on the drives – but she opened the garage door to let the daylight in, and drove her Fiat Panda out of the way to give me some space. By that time, the grief was no longer a forest fire, but a constant flame, never going out but steady, manageable.

  I think I was trying to work out a way to think about my mother; I wanted to find a key that would click in a lock and make it all make sense. But what would have made me forgive her was written on her body, or stored in her heart, and all I found in the boxes was evidence of our happy family life. The plates we all made in the pottery cafe with our handprints on were there – I’d insisted we all do one, and my dad had sat among all the children and chattering women and solemnly painted his hand blue before letting me press it onto a dinner plate. There were loose photographs of us on the beach or piled on the sofa at Christmas, and birthday cards, certificates of this and that, blankets and lavender bags that smelled of dust. There was nothing to help me forgive her. Old happiness plus the new miseries I’d had to navigate on my own – my first period, low-level bullying at school, living in a strange house with a kind woman who had no reason to be kind to me, grief – made me sure that forgiving my mother was more than she deserved. I tried, that weekend. She failed me.

  And there were no books of my mother’s in the garage. I suppose, hypothetically, during the innocent until proven guilty phase, she could have had the social worker collect them – I remember her wearing her own clothes when I was taken to see her. Before the Whitby Postcard Incident five days previously, I’d assumed they’d been lost, or thrown away by whoever cleared the house, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

  So let’s say, hypothetically, someone had looked after them for her, and she’d cared about them enough, in all that hell she was in, to ask the question about having them put aside for her. I suppose she thought she was going to have more reading time. She didn’t ask for photographs. She might have been leaving them for me, or maybe she couldn’t look at our faces and remember that we had been happy.

  I couldn’t even think about my parents’ faces, for years and years, and I didn’t bring the photographs I had at Annabel’s when I moved to York. When I think about them now, I find myself thinking about how Dad didn’t like us to spend time with anyone else when he was home, and wonder whether that was not just one little quirk or sign of love, but actually something – I hate to say it – that showed the side of him that made life so difficult for my mum. I might start to wonder if they were ever happy, really.

  Someone looked after the books for her, then. Either she was able to collect them from that person, or she wasn’t. Here’s a fork in the road. If she was able to collect them – why give them to a house clearance company now? And, more to the point, if she was able to collect them, why not collect the other things she’d had to leave behind, like – to pluck an example from the air – her daughter? The last time I saw her, on an arranged prison visit when I was fourteen, she promised she would come for me: shouted it, almost a threat, as I walked away – ‘I’ll come for you, LJ, whether you want me to or not’.

  But if she had collected the books herself then she hadn’t made good on that. I may have hidden myself away but there must be a trail of breadcrumbs. She could have found me, when she was ready. And she did promise me that she would, although she didn’t know when.

  She didn’t want me to lose both parents, she said, in one of those missives filled to the perimeters of the paper with her handwriting, that I read and wept over before I started turning her letters, unopened, aside, a month after that last visit, when I’d decided with all of the sense of power of a fourteen-year-old that I had had enough of my broken, ugly family and I would be better off on my own.

  In that last letter that I opened, she wrote that she understood I didn’t want to see her right now, but perhaps one day, when things had calmed down, I would understand a bit more about how we had come to be in the situation we were in. She wished she had done things differently, she said. I was living in a foster home, and having my own room was the loneliest thing in the world. I’d never felt like that before. I’d always had the option of curling up in my parents’ bed after bad dreams or on weekend mornings, warm as a pebble on the summer tideline.

  Mum couldn’t have collected the books, because if she had, she would have collected me. Maybe the person who was keeping them for her had lost touch with her, or moved, or died, and in the melee of house clearance no one had realised who the books belonged to. That made sense. Except, of course, if that was the case, wouldn’t they have come in together? Not a box of paperbacks one week, then an old book of my dad’s, three weeks later, and then a Delia Smith two months after that. And of all the second-hand bookshops in all the world . . . all of the charity shops within a stone’s throw of the bookshop, even: why mine?

  I asked Archie who had brought the cookery books in but of course he couldn’t remember. He said he thought it might have been someone in a blue coat, or they might have been left on the step. So that narrowed it down. I snapped at him. He looked hurt. I knew that I shouldn’t take things out on him. This is why I shouldn’t think about the past. Well, one of the many reasons. I asked Ben, too, and he shrugged and said, ‘They’re all just boxes with books in to me, darling.’

  Great.

  I was in such a glowering mood that I almost didn’t bother to go to poetry night that Wednesday. But Nathan’s sister was going to be there, and I might not know a lot about relationships but what I do know is: don’t piss off anyone’s sister.

  So I did what I used to do, although I haven’t had to do it for years. I sat in the chair by the fire escape and I closed my eyes and I imagined a dial where my heart should be. The dial was set to how much I was hurting. It could go anywhere from 1 to 10, but I had to be honest about where it was set. Today it was a 6. I took a deep breath and I imagined the dial clicking down, from 6 – breathe; 5 – breathe; 4 – breathe; 3 – breathe. I let it be at 3; that’s probably my default. I don’t think there could ever be a zero. And yes, I do know it’s not really any way of dealing with things properly, but it can get you through the next couple of hours, and sometimes that’s all you need.

  I hadn’t met Nathan’s sister. I knew he had a sister, and two parents, who are both alive and have been married for thirty-five years, and still hold hands when they watch TV in the evenings, although they often play backgammon by the Aga or do a cryptic crossword after dinner. Okay, I’ve made up everything after ‘thirty-five
years’ but you can tell, just looking at Nathan, that he’s from the kind of happy family that no one would ever write a book about because nothing ever happens, except picnics and weddings and people having lovely giggly babies with unruly auburn curls and sea-green eyes.

  Nathan’s sister is twenty-eight, two years younger than him. When he asked me about my family I just said Archie was my family, which is true, if you apply the your-family-is-the-people-who-remember-your-birthday-and-look-after-you-when-you-are-ill filter. He didn’t look at me like I was an orphan, or anything, which was good, but he did go on about his sister quite a lot. She sounded nice enough but I hadn’t really planned to meet her. Not that I minded, exactly, but the trouble with meeting new people is that they ask you a lot of questions and when it comes to answering those questions, I just don’t have many options.

  Either you have to be honest, which feels like too much for a ‘nice to meet you’ conversation, or you tell lies. Lies don’t much matter if you’re never going to see someone again, but if you are, then you either have to be a really good liar, which I’m not, or you get found out, which leads to the conversation you were trying to avoid in the first place, but with sinister background music.

  If I was better at social stuff I would be able to do that chatty, deflecty, ‘oh let’s talk about you’ thing that I’ve seen others do, but the fact is, I don’t like most people, and it shows if I try to do anything clever.

  And I was still freaking out about the cookery book, obviously, which wasn’t helping my social skills any. Wouldn’t you be spooked? If you were in my position – oh, never mind, you wouldn’t be in my position. Here’s what the book was. If it wasn’t a completely coincidental arrival from a house clearance, wasn’t it was someone saying, ‘I know all about the thing you’ve been trying to hide, that you’ve spent the best part of sixteen years running away from. And guess what, Loveday? It’s not a secret. Now you just have to wait to see what happens.’ I did wonder whether the sending of the books might have a good intention behind them – but surely anyone with good intentions would just walk up to me, introduce themselves, and explain what the hell this was all about?