The Lost for Words Bookshop

by Stephanie Butland

  First, I of all people should know that there’s nothing better, more important, than a book, and working for Archie pretty much saved me, so I had no business thinking that it didn’t matter. Second, there’s nothing wrong with working in a shop. And, statistically, given the kind of life I’ve had, it’s a towering achievement; I should be, at best, unemployed, at worst, drinking fortified wine straight out of the bottle, or shooting up in a railway station entrance while people scurry past me in case I mug them. Or in prison, obviously. I’m not stupid; I know that Archie and his books are the factor that have made the difference. So I’m embarrassed at the thought of myself thinking that Rob, with his endless banging on about da Vinci being the tallest tree in the forest rather than some freak-show out-of-time genius, was somehow making me a better person.

  I suppose I wanted to think I was important. I was probably just at the point where I’d stopped scraping through days and was looking up and forward, and I wanted there to be more than forty years of waiting for the A Level reading lists to come out so I could make up little packs with all of the texts in, ready for the stream of parents coming in to look for them. (Heaven forbid a sixteen-year-old should do their own donkey work.) At least Rob helped me to see what I had.

  It’s tempting to say it went bad because of the new tattoo, but, actually, it was never good, it was just that the badness revealed itself slowly, and the thing with the tattoo was the first time it got into plain sight.

  I’d read The Wee Free Men three months before, and kept going back to it. So I took myself off to get the first line inked on my right thigh.

  It takes about an hour to get a line of text tattooed, in case you’re interested, and yes, it hurts, because it’s a needle going in and out of your skin like a drill bit. It’s chosen pain, of course, which makes it slightly different, but in no way thrilling, whatever E. L. James has to say. It hurts less if it’s going into a plump place and the nice thing about a single line is that you can feel the progress; I imagine that with coloured-in tattoos there’s no way of knowing how much longer you’ve got to go. I take Paracetamol beforehand and while I’m having it done I count to a thousand and back to zero, slowly, in my head. It takes a few days before the redness goes.

  Rob was the first person who’d seen all of them, and he hadn’t really commented. He’d seen me dress in the morning, read some of the words on my body, as though he was reading newspaper headlines, but that was it.

  I arrived late for our date the next Saturday night.

  I thought I’d left my place on time, but I missed the bus and it was twenty minutes until the next one. Then there was a hold-up on the city ring road. Rob had told me that he was making his special osso bucco, which had to be marinated for two days and then slow-cooked for a third, so I assumed it wasn’t going to spoil. I was half an hour later than I said I would be. I hadn’t texted because – well, because I didn’t think to. I’m not what you’d call an experienced dater and I suppose I thought as Rob knew I was coming by bus he’d also know that buses got held up – we had a sort of running joke about public transport. We must have been on about six dates at this point. Long enough to have a running gag, a confessional conversation about mental health issues and, apparently, a false sense of security.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I said when he opened the door. I started to explain about the bus but he cut me off with a nod that very clearly did not mean ‘I accept your apology’.

  ‘Well, I don’t think it’s quite ruined, though I can’t say the same for the risotto alla Milanese,’ he said, and he turned, and I followed him into the flat. I took off my boots at the door – they were metallic DMs, almost falling apart with years of wear, and I’d wiped them clean before I left my place. I lined them up at right angles to the wall, toes not quite touching the skirting board.

  Rob had set the table and lit candles and clearly gone to a lot of effort, so I apologised again, and then realised that I’d forgotten the wine, which was sitting in a bag on the worktop in my flat. I’d said that I would bring it. Rob shrugged and said it didn’t matter, but I could tell that it did. He huffed around his kitchen, finding wine, and I thought, I don’t need this.

  I said, ‘Rob, I’m sorry I was late and I’m sorry I forgot the wine. Should I go? If the evening’s ruined we may as well cut our losses.’ I wasn’t being bitchy about it, I was just asking because, frankly, I could always be eating a pizza and reading a book. I can’t be arsed with people who don’t say what they mean and Rob knew that.

  I think he got the non-bitchy thing because he came over, gave me a kiss and said, ‘I’m sorry, Loveday, it’s just that I’d planned everything.’

  He seemed twitchy. When I look back, I can see that he was definitely different to his usual self – by which I mean, more different than me being late should have made him. Even with risotto alla Milanese ruining on the hob as my bus struggled through the traffic.

  It didn’t occur to me that he might not be well. I suppose I thought it was just the inevitable dropping of the other (metaphorical) boot.

  ‘I can see that,’ I said. I almost said, I didn’t ask you to, but that would have sounded nasty, and anyway, I wasn’t sure that anyone had ever lit a candle for me in a non-birthday-cake scenario.

  The evening looked as though it was recovering. The osso bucco was amazing and Rob could obviously tell that I appreciated it. He went into a long explanation of its history, but that’s academics for you. I didn’t much mind. One thing I was realising from seeing Rob was that if you don’t talk about your past and you work in a bookshop, then your topics of conversation are, basically:

  1. Books I’ve read and liked and why

  2. Books I’ve read and not liked and why

  3. Books I want to read but haven’t yet and why

  4. Books I have decided not to read and why

  5. Customers

  6. Archie

  7. (Melodie)

  All rich seams well worth mining, to be fair, but a limited range, so I wasn’t going to object to Rob talking about Italian culinary traditions and osso bucco he had eaten, though they all started to blur into one big meal after a while. Then he started talking about his research, and writing.

  ‘I’ve been working through the nights,’ he said, and his words leapfrogged over each other with excitement. ‘I’m almost at the heart of it, I know I am. It will be a breakthrough.’

  We went to bed. That was a given. I’d shaved my legs and taken the dressings off my new tattoo; it was a little bit crusty, still, but the redness had gone down and you could see the words.

  When Rob’s hand ran over my thigh, he stopped and said, ‘What’s this? Have you hurt yourself?’

  I said, ‘It’s okay. New tattoo.’

  ‘I’d say that was hurting yourself,’ he said.

  He put the light on. We always had sex in the dark. That was what I’d done on my virginity-losing exploit, too. My relationships had not, as yet, lasted long enough for me to get comfortable with day-sex, morning-sex, all-day-Sunday-in-bed sex of the sort that films and TV suggested were the norm. He rolled me towards the lamp – it was really a shove – and had a look.

  ‘I can’t read it,’ he said.

  ‘“Some things start before other things”,’ I said. ‘It’s the first line of The Wee Free Men.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he said.

  ‘I like it,’ I said. ‘I like that the book’s full of strong women, for one thing, and the thing with Pratchett is –’

  ‘Oh, you’ve got a PhD in Pratchett, have you?’ Rob’s voice was one hundred per cent sneer.

  That was it. I got off the bed – he reached for me but he was too slow – and I started to put my clothes on.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘You’re the one who’s nearly got a PhD – you tell me,’ I said. He got up – he still had his boxer shorts on – and left the room. I dressed as fast as I could and went back into the living room.

  I tho
ught maybe he was putting the kettle on, or something – I’d like to think that adults could have conversations, even about things that had started with childish tattoo overreactions, and if he’d offered tea or an apology, I would have accepted. But he was just standing, leaning on the door frame, with the smirk that I would later come to know so very well. His mouth was handsome at rest, but he pulled it into ugly shapes. It seemed to appear around the ends of bookcases before he did, like the Cheshire cat’s grin. I’d like to think this was the first time I encountered it, because I’d like to think that I’d have had more sense than waste my time on a smirker.

  ‘Are you leaving?’ he asked.

  ‘I was going to ask you what the hell all that was about,’ I said, ‘but I’m easy.’

  ‘I just thought,’ Rob said, ‘that getting a tattoo would have been something you might have mentioned to me.’

  ‘Why?’ I said, and I laughed, because even then I hadn’t completely got what he was like. ‘Was I supposed to ask your permission?’

  I saw from his face that was exactly what I was supposed to have done. He didn’t say that, of course. He said, ‘I just thought you would have talked to me about it. If we – like each other, I would think that was what we would do.’

  ‘We’d talked about tattoos,’ I said. It had been when we had dinner after the talk on architecture. Rob had started by saying he’d never felt the need for one and asked what my criteria were. I’d said: things that mean something to me. I didn’t say the other bit, about reminding myself that first lines did not define last pages in real life the way they did in books. That felt like too much information, like none of his business. And if I’d thought about that a bit sooner I wouldn’t be standing in a flat on the outskirts of York with my bra in my pocket, thinking about the hour I was about to spend with the drunks on the bus on the way home.

  ‘You remember?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. Suddenly I felt shaky. It was like being questioned by the police, or lawyers; it all looked civil enough, they were gentle as anything, but a part of you knew that if you slipped up, you’d get someone into real trouble. In this case, with Rob, the someone was me. His eyes were too bright. I picked up my bag.

  ‘I said,’ Rob said, pretend-patiently, ‘that I didn’t really like tattoos.’

  I swallowed the ‘oh for fuck’s sake, I haven’t got time for this’ that was in my mouth and instead I said, ‘And you don’t have any. That’s up to you. What I do is up to me.’

  He made a ‘well, if that’s how you see it’ face and I walked towards the door. I thought he was going to block me but he didn’t. I stepped out into the hallway and realised why he was letting me go so easily. I turned back to him.

  ‘Where are my boots, Rob?’

  The smirk again. ‘I don’t know, Loveday.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ I said, ‘what are you, twelve? Give me my boots.’

  And his face went from pretend-amused to dark, and he hit me.

  Well, slapped, really, across my cheek, with his palm; it sent me sideways, but it didn’t knock me over, and as I returned to standing, the skin of my cheek stung. My perfectly balanced opposing instincts were to hit him back – my hand was already a fist – and to run. The net result was paralysis. It was the first time anyone had raised a violent hand to me. It hurt in more ways than one.

  I looked at him. I suppose I thought there would be agitated apology; in my world, violence is a flare followed, instantly, by regret. But: ‘Come back to bed,’ he said, ‘and we’ll say no more about it.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I said. Archie says I’m Anglo-Saxon under stress.

  Rob shrugged and turned away, going back into the bedroom. I think he thought I had no option but to follow him. Apparently he knew me as little as I knew him.

  I left the flat, without my boots. I had my socks on and I didn’t have to wait too long for a bus, but even the walk to the bus stop and then onwards to home cut my feet in three places and made me feel filthy. When I got back – it was after one the next morning – I took a shower and then I soaked my feet in the washing-up bowl with salt because they still didn’t feel clean. I held a cold flannel to my face.

  I laid low the next day. I half expected Rob to show and I wasn’t going to let him in. I hadn’t given him my address but I’d told him I lived in a flat above a new Tesco and there was precisely one place in York that fitted that description, so he could find me easily enough. He’d said he knew where I meant.

  I was beyond pissed off. He’d hit me; he hadn’t cared that he’d hit me; and there wasn’t so much as a bruise to show for it. If I decided to go to the police I’d have no evidence.

  I did think about the police. I thought about it a lot. I wasn’t under any illusions that Rob would be charged with anything – it was the classic my-word-against-yours scenario, and we all know how that ends – but I didn’t want him to think it was okay, either. And then I thought about him being ill, and got myself in a knot about responsibility. He had said things got weird if he didn’t take his medication. I’d assumed he’d meant double vision, or something, but maybe it was the sort of weird he’d been last night. And that’s where I got tangled up. Because surely it’s not as simple as: you take a pill to stop you from hitting people? My head ached, in a way that was nothing to do with the slap.

  I thought about telling Archie, but that would have been another drama altogether, and not one that I was really up for. Though I would have liked to see Rob’s face when he opened his front door to Archie and the rabble he’d have roused from the bridge players, book lovers and restaurateurs of York.

  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 idio
ts 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 put-downs 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.’