You could never properly get a rise out of Elspeth. I wouldn’t have tried, because I was too locked in my own head at that point to fight with anyone, too homesick for my old life to really bother to engage with the new one that had been forced on me. But some of the others, the scary-angry ones, took everything out on her. There was a kid who tried to set fire to the sofa once. It didn’t catch, but it did leave a black, smouldering hole. She just said, ‘Well, that’s a shame, we’re all going to have to take turns to sit on the floor, now, because we’ve one seat too few.’ Nathan seemed to have the same sort of niceness, underneath his swagger and his purchases from the last remaining Dandy Gentleman’s Outfitters in York.
So I tried to make amends. ‘How does it work?’ I said.
Nathan smiled, as if he knew I was saying sorry. ‘Any poetry goes. Everyone has a three-minute slot, then we vote on paper slips, and the top two go again, with a different poem, and we vote by applause. The prize is the money from the door minus the room hire. Which tonight looks like about –’ he looked around the room, getting a sense of the people there ‘– a princely thirty quid.’
‘That’s not bad,’ I said. That’s two brand-new hardbacks, or a month’s electricity, in summer.
‘Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,’ he agreed.
‘Yes,’ I said. My dad used to say that. He also used to talk about getting the shitty end of the stick, although if I was in the room and my mother caught his eye before he said it, he would swap out the ‘shitty’ for ‘stagged’. I asked him what it meant, once, and he said it meant that the other guy always wins. I had meant that I didn’t know what ‘stagged’ meant – it wasn’t in the dictionary at school, and Miss Buckley always encouraged us to look up words we didn’t know. It was years later, reading Daphne du Maurier, that I came across it again, and I realised it was a Cornish word. It gave me a funny little stab of remembering, one of those that isn’t entirely painful.
It seemed unlikely that Rob was going to show up now. I thought about leaving but I had my drink and, anyway, I might be antisocial, but I’m not rude. My mother had manners and so did Annabel, the long-term foster-carer I lived with for almost eight years. I remembered that I hadn’t paid, and put three pounds on the table in front of him.
‘It’s okay, he said. ‘I’ve paid yours.’
I hate that sort of thing. ‘I didn’t ask you to,’ I said.
‘I always pay for people’s first times,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing personal, Loveday.’ He smiled and got up, stepped onto the stage, and clapped his hands together, five times, perfectly spaced claps, fingertip-matched, that made everyone in the room look around.
‘Take your seats, please, ladies, gentlemen and poets. This is your five-minute call.’ Then he went around the room and spoke to, I guessed, everyone who was going to perform. No one came back to the table I was sitting at, but someone did take one of the extra stools away so they could add themselves to the group at the next table. My drink was almost gone. I was sitting with my back to the wall. I looked around the room to see who I recognised. Melodie was at the back with a group of people who I thought I knew from the tourist-tour crowd: they sometimes stop outside the shop, with some semi-factual yatter about how old the buildings are.
And five minutes later – it was exactly five minutes, I checked – there was Nathan, three sharp claps this time. ‘Ladies, gentlemen and poets, allow me to start by reminding you of the rules…’
I realised I didn’t dislike him. Which is quite a big deal, for me. I don’t really do ‘nice until you prove you’re not’ – I find it saves time to work it the other way around, in the normal way of things.
I quite liked his poem, too, though the way he did it was a bit cocky. There was a lot of winking and pointing at people: he came across as insanely over-confident. Which made me like him a bit less again. So he was, basically, on the exact neutral point between ‘liked by Loveday’ and ‘disliked by Loveday’. Not that he’d have cared. Not that I did.
The whole thing was nothing like I imagined it would have been, if I’d spent any time planning to come rather than using it as a Rob escape hatch. Nathan was the most ‘poetical’ person there, in terms of dress sense, at least. Everyone else was relatively normal, except in the sense that poetry attracts people with some difficult shit to say, sometimes.
An older woman recited a poem about the birds in her garden, standing with her eyes closed, as though she was reading from the back of her eyelids. The audience applauded too loudly and enthusiastically for the quality of the poem, I thought. Nathan leaned over and whispered to me that she was deaf and she always brought the same poem. There was a guy who did something closer to comedy than poetry, hopping from foot to foot as he spoke; there was some whimsy about clouds from a girl who didn’t look old enough to be in a pub, something about buying coffee that made me really properly laugh out loud; someone quite spitty and finger-snappy who needed to learn how to edit. It was weird, in that I didn’t feel completely uncomfortable, and I should have, because I don’t like being in big groups of people and I don’t tend to go anywhere near anyone saying how they feel.
I voted for Nathan. During the break while the votes were being counted he asked if he could buy me a drink, but I said no thank you and bought my own. Then he asked if I wanted him to introduce me to some people, and I said no thank you again, so he left me to it. I was thinking of what I would have been doing at home. Reading, writing, thinking about tidying up but not bothering. (I hope you’re not feeling sorry for me, because I just described my ideal evening.) He didn’t win, but he didn’t seem to mind. I left after the winner was announced, when everyone was going back to the bar.
There was no sign of Rob. But my front tyre had been let down. I walked my bike home instead of riding it, and I was cold and really pissed off by the time I got into bed. March looks like spring but it isn’t really, not once the sun has gone down.
The more I thought about Nathan’s poem, though, the more I thought how clever it was.
Book
As performed by Nathan Avebury at the George and Dragon York, March 2016
I sometimes think I want to write a book of my life
So that when I meet you – or anyone new – I can
hand it over and you can read it
Instead of trying to read me.
You can take it away and decide whether it’s worth giving me your time.
You can think about if, the next time we are walking towards each other, you’ll smile without slowing down
Or cross the street and pretend you haven’t seen me
Or stop and put an arm round my shoulder, steer me into the nearest pub, and buy me a pint of stout.
Because you’ll know, having read the book, that stout is what I drink.
You see the elegance of my proposal.
But every time I sit down to write the book, I hit a snag.
I could tell so many stories.
I could be a poet or a magician or a failed mathematician.
I could be happy or soul-sore or lonely.
I could start when I was born, when I was twelve, when I left university.
And the book would be different for each story I choose.
And the book would be true, and untrue, for each.
Our pasts are as unfixed as our futures, if you think about it.
And I like the freedom I have to tell a different story.
HISTORY
2013
You do not yet know
Rob didn’t look like an academic. He looked like a young Mr Rochester, handsome enough to make Bertha leave her world behind. The first time we met, I was summoned by Archie’s cry – ‘Love-DEEE!’ – from the front of the shop, loud enough to reach through to the back. Actually, I was only two yards away, trying to bring some semblance of order to the sagas section, which makes me feel like Dorothea in Middle-march, but without the sense of divine purpose. Every time you think those fat, worn tomes
are under control, another boxful comes in, the covers all fishing nets and grubby urchins holding hands. Archie won’t turn them down because he likes nothing more than being flirted with by a saga-loving old dear.
‘I’m here,’ I said. ‘No need to shout.’ They both laughed when they saw me – I was on my knees, and I looked around the bottom of the shelf unit. Rob’s laugh was actually a pixie giggle, which made me laugh too, just because it wasn’t a sound you expected to come out of a grown man. Especially one that looked the way he did. The giggle didn’t go with the stubbled chin. I didn’t fancy him, or anything, but there was definitely something about him. The bright-brown eyes, maybe.
I was twenty-two, and I’d been working at Lost For Words full time for four years. It was early September. The city was still hot and busy but the shop was a dark, cool sanctuary. I think I was starting to feel safe for the first time in a long time. Maybe that’s why I let my guard down.
I’d been decorating my flat. The landlord had offered to pay to have it done; I’d taken the money for materials but done it myself, because I didn’t like the idea of strangers being in my place. The only person who had been over the threshold except me was Archie, and that was how I liked it. Not that the flat was anything special. It was basically a square, where one corner was a tiny bathroom and the rest open-plan, with a galley kitchen and a bed-settee that I didn’t always bother to open out to sleep on. It was full of books (it’s fuller now), some on an old bookcase Archie gave me, most of them piled up against the wall. It might look like chaos but I know where everything is. I have a really good reading lamp and a little table with two chairs that I hardly ever use, but the table has a plant on it. It’s a weeping fig. I bought it in a fit of reminiscence when I moved in, because my mother liked them, and I confidently expected it to die within weeks, but no, it soldiered on.
For the two weeks before Rob’s first appearance I’d been sanding and painting. The walls were now the blue-green of sea-glass, the woodwork bright white.
I’d been in the flat for as long as I’d had my full-time job. When I’d finished my A Levels, I fought my way out of the care system, even though they try to hold on to you until you’re twenty-five, if they can. I was done. I was an adult. Archie had claimed he’d been under-paying me while I’d been working part-time for the three previous years, and he gave me a lump sum. I’m not sure I believed him, but I’ve been a beggar, not a chooser, since I was ten years old, and when I found a flat, the money paid my deposit and my first month’s rent. I’d saved most of my wages and all of the allowances Annabel had been scrupulous about giving me. The local authority gave me £2500, too. So I bought a sofa bed, towels and pans, a TV, a second-hand hoover and a charity-shop bike, and I still had money in the bank.
I was happy in the flat, and working in a bookshop was, I suppose, my dream job, once the other dreams had realised they were on a hiding to nothing and found someone else to bother. Rob chose a good moment to come in to my life. I was ready for something new.
I got to my feet. ‘Hi,’ I said.
‘I’m Rob,’ he said.
‘Loveday,’ I got ready to go in to the explanation.
‘Ah, a good Cornish name,’
‘Yes,’ I said, and I thought, there’s a turn-up. The usual response is a question-mark look or a crack about my parents being hippies, which is so far from the truth it would be funny, if it wasn’t. Still, an unusual name is handy in that it stops people from asking other questions about you. ‘How can I help?’
Rob smiled, with a sorry-this-may-take-some-time expression. ‘I’m starting on a PhD,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the academic papers more or less tracked down and the university libraries are good, but I wouldn’t mind trying to find my own copies of some others. And I do need some books that are more…’
I thought he was trying to be tactful. ‘Mainstream?’ I asked.
He laughed, that funny giggle again. ‘I wish,’ he said. ‘I’m going to say … niche.’
Usually when people use the word ‘niche’, it’s their way in to a request for erotica and I had a vision of spending months trying to track down some bit of Victorian porn or other. I think my sigh was audible.
‘I’m researching Renaissance Engineering,’ he said.
‘Oh, okay,’ I said. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, ‘Is that a thing?’ but then I thought that Rob probably heard that as often as I heard the hippy parent gag, so I didn’t. Instead I said, ‘That’s interesting.’
‘It is,’ he said, and his eyes got brighter. ‘The maths is fascinating and so is the political context. It’s…’ He stopped. ‘Sorry.’
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘don’t apologise. Do you know what you’re looking for?’
‘I’ve brought a list,’ he said, handing over a sheet of paper in a clear plastic folder. ‘I found you online and I thought it was worth having a walk down, as I’m not too far away.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Can you leave this with me for a few days? I’ll have to root around in the storeroom upstairs.’ We’d had a few boxes come in from a da Vinci enthusiast a couple of years previously. The big, shiny Leonardo-the-genius type books had gone quickly. We knock coffee-table books out for a fiver because, second-hand, they’re an impulse purchase at best: there’s not enough substance for anyone who’s really interested and most people don’t want to give a second-hand gift, but they might blow a few quid on something big and shiny. It’s insane. You could get the complete works of Rupert Brooke for that money. I’d choose poetry over glossy paper and big photographs any day.
I thought there was a good chance the other books that had come in in the Renaissance boxes were still around, though.
‘Thanks,’ Rob said, and he touched my elbow. ‘I appreciate it.’
I don’t like it when people touch me without being invited. I nodded. He was heading out of the door when I thought to ask the obvious question. I caught up with him in the street, outside the cafe.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘would you mind telling me a bit more about your research topic? I know you said Renaissance Engineering but I’m guessing that there will be a lot of things that touch on that, so…’
He smiled and turned to me, squinting into the early autumn sun. ‘It’s about the links between Brunelleschi, who built the dome on Florence Cathedral, and Leonardo da Vinci. None of Brunelleschi’s own writings survive and popular history has sort of written him out. I’m looking at his influence. People treat da Vinci as though he’s a genius in isolation, or some kind of god. I think he was a bit of a magpie, picking shiny bits from others.’ As he talked his hands made shapes in the air between us – steeples, prayers, books – and he looked at me and then up, and then back again, as he explained. His hair was brown, the same colour as the darkest parts of his eyes.
‘So it’s a bit like, if you didn’t have the Beat poets, you wouldn’t have Bob Dylan,’ I said. Not that we need Bob Dylan.
‘Exactly.’ Rob smiled again. ‘I like you.’
Idiot that I was, I liked that he liked me. I should have known better. In retrospect, I think that maybe he didn’t like me much beyond the fact that I was talking to him about him and what he was interested in. I didn’t clock that until later, though. And it could be that that’s normal for relationships. My parents weren’t exactly run-of-the-mill. I’d gone on a few dates in sixth form. I felt like I needed to get my virginity out of the way, so I could think about more important things. A bit like, if you like books, you have to read Great Expectations at some point, and then it’s done and you can move on. I hadn’t really bothered with men since I got rid of my hymen. I’d read enough fiction to know that relationships were:
– well disguised as the best thing ever
– complicated
– doomed to failure, most of the time
– usually comprised of a winner and a loser
I’d pretty much decided that I could live without them, even before you added the ‘do you love me for me or for
my novelty value’ complication. So by the time I was back on my knees in front of the sagas, my head was brim-full of Brunelleschi. I was hardly thinking about Mr Rochester at all.
I got a little bit obsessive about the books on the list. I like a different sort of challenge. Book enquiries tend to fall into four categories. The first is the misremembered/ inaccurate. (‘I’d like a copy of Any Which Way But Loose by William Shakespeare, please.’ ‘Could you mean Much Ado About Nothing?’ ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s a play. Could you look in the drama section?’) The second is the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me. (‘There was a book I read in 1974, or ’75. It was a love story, set in America, I think, or Australia. Do you have it?’) The third is book-request-of-the-week. (‘I heard this programme on Radio 4, and it mentioned a book about Pythagoras, or maybe Prometheus…’) And the fourth is the sort of enquiry you can really get your teeth stuck into because it means tracking down something that’s hard to find. We don’t get many of those because people who need something really specific tend to use the internet, and a lot of our specialist stuff is online, so people don’t ring up and ask; they just look at our catalogue and pay online and my role is, basically, bubble-wrapping. So Rob’s list was a bit of a gift.
I think I felt empty, then. I’d decorated the flat and it was exactly as I wanted it. I had a long-term lease on my home and a job that was just right for me. My life was sorted. I was twenty-two. I liked everything I’d found, or made, and I was comfortable; but I didn’t need to think about another fifty years of the same.
It was better to think about Florence. I looked up the cathedral on the internet and it’s one of the only times I’ve wondered about getting a passport and going somewhere on a plane.
CRIME
1999
A brassy, jangling clang
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