Social worker came but Mum did the full Tammy
Standing by her man till she didn’t
Mum said it was an accident
And I think that’s right
Things were bad, but not that bad
It was just another night
The courts and police and the foster care
wasn’t a picnic but I didn’t much care
I’d lost them both – first Dad, then Mum
Got moved to a new place where no one knew my name
Grieved and sulked and waited
Saw my mum in prison but I hated it
Decided I was better off with my books
Tried a boyfriend, he was awful.
Met another, he was you
I had another verse but I couldn’t get it out. It was a sort of ‘now you know’ stanza, and I think I’d thought I would say it with an eye on Rob, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Nathan and he nodded when I said ‘he was you’ and I thought he might be crying. So I stood still. I couldn’t do anything else. There were pins dropping all over the place.
I’d thought a lot about the poem, and standing up and saying it, and whether I could do it. I hadn’t thought about afterwards. I suppose I was jumping off a cliff: it was all about making my feet do the opposite of their instinct for firm ground. I guess I’d assumed that once I was in the air I wouldn’t have to make any more decisions.
Then Archie was on his feet, applauding, shouting, ‘Brava!’ as though he was at the bloody opera.
Rob was on his way down the stairs, so mission accomplished there.
Melodie was crying. Melodie cries at pictures of hedge-hogs in teacups that she finds on the internet, but these tears were different. She smiled at me.
Nathan stood up. He nodded and started coming towards me. I thought about how I’d chosen a poem because it’s a way of not talking and I wasn’t up to the conversation. Not then.
So I bolted off the little stage and past the members of the audience and headed for the loos and I waited. I ran a tap, washed my face, and thought about the sea. I thought I knew what would happen next and, sure enough, the show went on. After a minute or two the next poem was filling up the air I’d left, looking for attention: I heard laughter, applause, and I thought about how weird it was to no longer have a secret.
The door opened. Vanessa.
‘Hey,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ I said. I was braced but she didn’t come in for a hug.
She just said, ‘That was brave.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘I do,’ she said. ‘I know I have no right to say this, but I’m proud to know you, Loveday. I can’t imagine.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Nathan’s waiting,’ she said. ‘He says the poets can take care of themselves, and you don’t need to talk about it, but he wants to see you. He’s downstairs.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
He was standing outside the pub on the pavement. He offered his arm, like an old-fashioned, cravat-wearing gentleman, and I took it. I felt the way you feel when you go out for a walk when it’s just been raining: as though everything is different, better, even unremarkable pavements and buildings you walk past every day.
‘Where to?’ he asked. I knew that in the fairy tale I would say, ‘your place’, but I wasn’t ready for that. And now that I didn’t have secrets, I wanted to show him everything.
‘I left something at the shop,’ I said, ‘something of my mum’s. I want to go and get it.’ Suddenly I needed the Whitby postcard to be in my hand. I felt as though I had moved a step closer to my mother tonight.
‘Okay,’ he said. We walked on, quietly, his hand on my hand where it peeped through the crook of his arm. I had thought I might feel more than this: some sort of great sense of unburdening, relief, giddiness, tears. I suppose I’ve been reading too many books. I just felt tired.
When we reached the shop he said, ‘Why don’t I get something to drink? I could come back to your place. I wouldn’t expect to stay.’ There’s a smart, too-expensive-for-me off-licence on the corner.
‘Okay,’ I said. God, he was so easy to be with. I wondered if I would become easier, now that I wasn’t protecting my softest place any more. It was too soon to say. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘You amaze me,’ he said. ‘You’re brave. Not just tonight. Going back to Whitby like that. All those awful memories.’ And he kissed the top of my head, and headed for the off-licence.
I locked the door behind me but I didn’t put the light on; the streetlight was enough for me to get to the noticeboard. I took the pin out of the postcard and let myself think of all I’d lost. I felt homesick, and angry.
I folded the oblong of card, handwriting in, Whitby Abbey out, and put it in my pocket, next to the heart-stone.
And then I realised.
There had been nothing in my poem about Whitby. Archie might have told Nathan I was on holiday there, but nobody knew why it would be significant to me. As far as Nathan was concerned, I was Ripon Girl.
No wonder he was so calm. He knew.
Now the world really did spin, and not in a good way, in a panicking, please-don’t-throw-my-schoolbag-off-the-bus way.
I thought back to when I met him. It was only after that that the books started to come in, first the Penguin Classics, then the book of my dad’s, then the cookery book with the postcard in it.
Rob hadn’t admitted to having anything to do with the books, and it wasn’t like him not to point out how clever he was.
Nathan had always looked too good to be true.
He had spent summers in Cornwall.
His family had stayed with a friend of his mother. She was called Jane.
Okay, it’s not an unusual name. But: what if Nathan’s mother’s friend was my Auntie Janey? If Janey had got hold of my mother’s books, in the jumble and panic of the house-clearing …
There was a rattle at the door, Nathan’s voice: ‘Loveday!’ I stepped behind the nearest bookcase so he couldn’t see me. He tried the door, rattled it, stepped back, looked both ways down the street, tried the door again. He pulled out his phone. I knew mine was off so I watched him wait, looking at the screen.
He walked off again. I suspected he was going to go on to my place. He’d need an hour, there and back. So all I needed to do was wait in the shop for forty minutes, by which time he’d be nearly back here, or he’d have returned to the pub. He’d go the short way, I’d go the long way. Easy.
My head was saying: Well, Loveday, if it looks too good to be true, then it probably is. My heart was different.
Not Nathan. Not Nathan. Not Nathan.
Over and over, my heart chanted those two words, as though they could take the truth back.
Nathan knew more about me than I’d told him. Whenever my parents’ books had showed up, Nathan had been close by.
I sat on the floor, my back against the bookshelf, legs stretched out in front of me so the toes of my boots caught the streetlight, and I thought back over everything I could remember him saying, not saying. No bloody wonder he was so laid-back about the fact that I wouldn’t tell him anything. He already knew it all. I wondered why he would have done it. And then I tried to think of a man I knew who’d been good to women they supposedly loved. Not my father. Not Rob. Even Archie loved them and left them.
I thought about my father, and the way my mother used to talk about him, before things were disastrous: ‘At least with Dad you always know how he feels, Loveday.’ I think it was probably after an outburst about work, a job not got. I was scared by his shouting. I didn’t understand what she said then but I did now.
So. Here I was. Single, but I was single six months ago. I had a job that I loved and a boss who looked after me and a flat that was fine. I liked my own company well enough, and I still had that. I may have just told a room full of wannabe poets my deepest, darkest secret but I wasn’t stupid enoughly to think that it mattered much to anyone but me. Apart from that, things were th
e same.
Rob was off my back. Archie would go all touchy-feely for a bit. Melodie would be a nightmare, trying to catch the gossip and what she would perceive as the glamour. But I could wait that out.
And Nathan could piss right off.
I felt around the place where I kept my thoughts about my mother, my father, the massive mess they made of their lives and, by default, mine. Bringing it into the light didn’t seem to have done anything new to it. It hadn’t grown, or shrunk. If I was Cinderella, then I’d stayed out after midnight and my carriage was still a carriage after all. Except in my story it never really stopped being a pumpkin. Do I sound jaded? Well, let’s swap places and we’ll see how you do.
I was still shaking. And then, just as I’d rationalised myself into waiting another fifteen minutes, then going home and making beans on toast, the panic attack started.
My breath wouldn’t come and my chest hurt. My hands were cold, my throat closing, as though it was trying to strangle me. I thought about standing up but there was no way I could do it; I was as good as nailed to the floor, everything stuck, no power, no agency over my limbs.
I would have cried out if I could, but my mouth wouldn’t move and, anyway, there was no one to hear me.
Instead I counted to a thousand, slowly, and then I counted back to zero again. By the time I got there, I was not calm, exactly, but I was in a state where I was able to get myself out of the bookshop and back to my flat. I wanted to think; about Nathan and about my mum, about where I went from here.
Then the door rattled again. Nathan had made it back quicker than I thought. I wasn’t going to face him now, when I was frightened and unprepared. I would work out how he’d got the books, why he was messing with my head like this, and then I would deal with him the way I’d dealt with Rob in the cafe earlier. I pulled my knees up so that my feet were out of the light and I held my breath, as though that would make a difference. There was a knock, another rattle, a pause, silence. I closed my eyes. Pictures moved behind my lids: the sea, St Mary’s church. I tried to breathe deep. I thought about the postcard in my pocket but I didn’t need to get it out to look at it. I could see it in my mind, as clearly as I could still see my mother’s face.
Books burn slowly.
Especially old books.
You get smoke first. The pages are so dense that there isn’t that surrounding air that would make loose papers erupt. And the shop always smelled of smoke anyway, because of Archie, who carries pipe tobacco in his pockets and smokes his pipe in the shelter of the shop doorway when it rains.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t realise straight away that that second person at the door, with their rattle-knock-rattle, wasn’t Nathan. It was someone with an alcohol-soaked hand-kerchief that they pushed through the letterbox, leaving a corner outside, and then lit, allowing the flames to flicker and rush down to the books and papers on the desk below.
No, there will not be a prize for guessing who struck the match.
* * *
By the time I worked out, with a jolt of terrified shock, that the smoke was more than eau de bookshop owner, the fire had taken hold. There wasn’t a lot of flame but when I came out from behind the bookshelf where I’d hidden from Nathan, there was pretty much a wall of smoke. The pile of books and papers on the desk was on fire, and some of them had fallen on the floor, blocking my way to the door.
I half ran straight through the bookshop to the back where the fire escape was, and of course I couldn’t move the bloody armchair.
It was dark and it felt as though the smoke was coming after me; suddenly the place was as unfamiliar as a forest in fog, impenetrable, full of witches.
The chair back was jammed into the space and I just couldn’t shift it. I ran back towards the front of the shop – there was a fire extinguisher next to Archie’s desk – but I couldn’t get to that for the flames. I’d started to cough and couldn’t stop. It had been quiet, but now there was a cackling: the wooden table and chairs burning, I thought.
I needed to go back to the back door and make the damn chair move, whether it wanted to or not. Archie always managed to shift it when the fire inspectors came, though when I thought about it I remembered that last time he’d had to get someone to help him with it. He’d joked that it was like the sofa stuck on the stairs in whichever Douglas Adams book that was. Still, I would just have to do it. I wasn’t dying in a fire when I had Nathan’s lying arse to kick.
When I turned around I saw that the smoke had sneaked in behind me, too, though it wasn’t as dense at the back of the shop as it was nearer the front. There was a solid mass of flames where Archie’s desk used to be.
I bowed down, lower to the ground, wondered if I should be crawling or if that would make me more vulnerable. My eyes had started watering – not that that made the stinging any less – and I started to grope my way, as good as blind, dizzy and disorientated. Back towards the fire escape.
I made a map in my head, combining what I knew with what I could feel, and wondering what the next best thing to getting out would be, if I couldn’t get as far as the door. I thought of the corner at the back. Poetry/plays/maps. If I squeezed in under the bench there would I be protecting myself or clambering into my grave?
The smoke was getting thicker. The heat was coming, moving faster than I could in the dark. I thought I could hear the fire alarm but it might have been part of the ringing and roaring in my ears – I couldn’t trust my senses. I could feel my back, my calves, getting warmer; my stomach, in contrast, felt granite-cold, my heart salt-white. How long did I have before the ceiling came down? How long did I have? Maybe smoke inhalation would get me first. These were sober, calculated questions, Stephen Hawking thoughts. Curiosity.
And then, panic.
Not ten minutes ago I would have said I didn’t much care whether I lived or died. Now I wanted to live. To see Nathan, walk on the beach, read all the books I hadn’t read yet. Find my mother. Not necessarily in that order.
My body, suddenly, wanted to hyperventilate and sob and cry and do all of the other things that are really not wise if you’re stuck in a burning building. I was having a hard time stopping it. I might not have had much of a life plan but dying in a fire sure as hell wasn’t in it.
A crash of glass made me jump; I assumed that one of the windows had broken. A whoop of burning followed the crash, as the evening air cheered the flames on. So this could be it, for me. I might not have been very good at physics but I know that fire is faster than people, especially when they can’t get the damn door open.
A rush of noise came in with the air. I heard sirens that seemed like a very long way away, and then shouting, closer. It took me a second or two to pick out my name. Even the air felt hot. Seeing and hearing hurt.
But there it was, fighting through the smoke to find me. My name. And Archie, calling it.
I turned, even though putting my face towards the heat burned. I could feel the fire drying my tears as fast as the smoke was making them. The thought of Archie turned me into a little girl, desperate for rescue, and I opened my mouth and yelled, although very little sound came out and I got another lungful of smoke. I started to really cough then, and I think that’s probably the sound Archie followed, because I’d never coughed like that before: a furball-hack, rasping through the smoke. I dropped to my knees.
He was almost on top of me before I saw him. He was doing a pretty good impression of the Angel of Death, with his Crombie coat over his head. He held his arms open and crouched to me, and I stood into the shape they made, under the shelter of the coat, which was holding a pocket of cooler air. I breathed in, too much, coughed again, fell against him.
He held me – the coat fell over my head, not cool, exactly, but not yet burning – and I felt him turn, pivoting around me. The smoke was coming at us from the side now: the shelves rammed with sci-fi and graphic novels had caught fire. Nathan was behind Archie, leather coat held over his head, and Archie pass-the-parcelled me into Nathan’s ha
nds. Archie shouted something, or tried to, but as soon as he opened his mouth he took a lungful of smoke and started coughing. Nathan turned on the spot the way Archie had done, wrapping the coat around me, and there, in front of us, was the broken window above the window seat, and the way back to life.
Nathan shoved me forward and I was halfway through to where Melodie and Vanessa were on the other side, reaching out to coax me through, steadying me as I stepped over the edges of the glass.
Then there was a crash and a cry from the shop. Archie. Nathan let go of me and I sort of fell onto the pavement. I heard the sirens get closer and I felt the heat on my back, making the October air chill in comparison.
I couldn’t get up; my arms and legs could do nothing, and all I was was lungs and heart and mouth, as I hacked and howled the smoke and panic out of me. There were hands in my armpits and I was pull-dragged further down the road, away from the fire.
I wanted to call Archie’s name, Nathan’s, but my throat wouldn’t let anything out. I could see that the fire was blazing through the shelves now, eating the books alive, and the street was filling with smoke. My eyes were streaming and it was only now, out in the air, that my body was starting to tell me all of the places where it hurt: eyes, throat, fingertips, the place where my lungs used to be. I coughed and hacked and, as the air burned my nose as I breathed in, I willed my legs to work, to turn me around and get me back in there. I was aware of talk around me – Nathan’s name, Archie’s – and of more people gathering.
There was too much of the wrong things in the air: coughing, ash, voices calling, the crash of, I assumed, a falling bookshelf, and the sirens and the lights, deafening now. I was thinking of what the crash, the cry might have been. And Nathan was too stupid/good to leave Archie in there. Then I remembered that Nathan wasn’t good after all. Still, the thought of him trapped in there made my heart shake.
I saw two shapes emerging from the bookshop window, one tall, one round as a pheasant, and I saw them double over, coughing.
The next thing I knew, there was someone with a kind face but a grip that wasn’t taking no for an answer, holding my arm, guiding me up into the back of an ambulance, putting an oxygen mask on my face. My hands, on my knees, were shaking, cold now, dirty and unfamiliar. The oxygen felt as though it was hurting my throat more than the smoke had; whatever it was doing in my lungs didn’t feel as though it was helping, though I knew that if I tried to get the mask off, the steely paramedic would have something to say. Also, I doubted I could lift my hands.
The Lost for Words Bookshop Page 21