The Lost for Words Bookshop

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked, because I am the queen of the stupid question.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember thinking of … all you must be going through. I almost talked to you about it, but Annabel said she thought the shop was a place of escape for you, so I kept quiet. It wasn’t easy.’

  ‘I expect your spy training helped,’ I said. If you can’t cope, deflect.

  ‘Of course,’ he nodded.

  I had no idea what to think. I started out angry, as though he and Annabel had tricked me. And then I felt myself deflate, go fuzzy at the edges, as something I had always believed turned out to be a lie. My life at Lost For Words was not my own, not separate to my back story. And therefore not made, as I’d always thought, without pity or allowances.

  I should have been angry – I was angry, but I was also tired, so tired of it all. My past, my mother, the ache and pull of missing her, like stitches that never heal. I could feel that I was crying. The tears stung my face.

  ‘What about the books?’ I asked. ‘Whose bright idea was that? Because it really freaked me out.’

  Archie and Nathan looked at each other, at me. ‘What books?’ Archie asked. His face isn’t as good as hiding his feelings as he thinks it is. I could tell he didn’t know what I was talking about. Nathan didn’t, either.

  ‘So it really wasn’t you,’ I said to Nathan.

  ‘What?’ he asked, then, ‘No. I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, Loveday.’

  I looked from one to the other. Archie’s face was still, resting after a fit of coughing, and he needed to shave. He looked miserable.

  I explained about the Penguin Classics, the Kate Greenaway, Delia Smith, the postcard. How I’d suspected Rob of tracking down my mother to get one over on me, then I’d thought Nathan was on a mission masterminded by Auntie Janey. As I explained, I could hear how crazy my suspicions sounded.

  ‘How did you think I was getting the books to you?’ Nathan asked. ‘By magic?’

  ‘Um,’ I said, because I realised that that was pretty much what I had thought. Conan Doyle could have had some fun with me. ‘The books coincided with you turning up.’

  ‘We don’t exactly run a secure system,’ Archie said. ‘Anyone could have left them. Put them on the step. I don’t know what your mother looks like. She could have come in when you weren’t there.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. I hate it when Archie’s right. Except he wasn’t.

  ‘My mother isn’t allowed to know anything about me. How would she know where I worked?’ I asked. I didn’t know whether I wanted her to have delivered the books or whether I wanted there to be (yet) another possible explanation.

  ‘I don’t have all the answers, Loveday,’ Archie said. He closed his eyes.

  Nathan, who had been silent through all of this, though at some point had taken my hand, said, ‘I didn’t know any of this until after you’d gone to Whitby. I promise.’

  The idea of them talking about me behind my back made me feel a bit creeped out. I felt ten years old again. I felt the way you do – although you, dear reader, are unlikely to know – when social workers and judges and a whole lot of other people who don’t really know you at all are deciding what needs to be done with you, because your parents are suddenly unavailable. I felt sick.

  Archie said, ‘He pumped me full of Viognier and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Melodie had been in with her black eye. I was all at sixes and sevens.’

  ‘You sent me to Whitby,’ I said. He wasn’t off the hook yet. ‘Even though you knew.’

  ‘You said you wanted to go there,’ Archie said. ‘If you hadn’t, I never would have suggested it. You seemed to be – healing. A year ago wild horses wouldn’t have dragged you to a poetry night, and Mr Avebury here wouldn’t have stood a chance. I thought you could get some air, and some rest, and a break. I’d know where you were. You’d be safe and I could come to get you if you needed me.’

  I still couldn’t get my mind around how much they knew about me. ‘I’m not a bloody toy,’ I said. it was the closest I could come to expressing how I felt: picked up, posed.

  ‘No,’ Nathan said, ‘you’re someone we love.’

  I bit back all of the things I could have said to that and so something I hadn’t fully considered slipped out of the space. ‘Where’s my mother now? Do you know?’

  ‘She lives in Leeds,’ Archie said.

  Leeds. I closed my eyes. It was odd to think of my mother in a real place, somewhere I’d been to with Annabel, who had taken me to a Christmas market there. I was used to thinking of her in the abstract: ‘inside’ or ‘out’ but not in a real setting, somewhere where she might buy milk or wait for a bus.

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘No, but Annabel has. She’s doing well. She’d love to see you.’

  I put up a hand, panic rising, and Archie stopped talking.

  ‘No,’ I said. I didn’t need to think about it. Or want to.

  Archie nodded, as though he was agreeing. ‘A letter came for you, at the shop, when you were away. It had a return address on the back, so I guessed it was from your mother. I was waiting for the right moment to give it to you. Maybe after I’d heard your poetry performance, if it was what I thought it was going to be. But – events overtook.’

  I smiled at him, though it hurt the burned skin on my lip. ‘Thanks, Archie,’ I said. I held his hand in one of mine, and I was still clinging to Nathan with the other one. I looked into one round face with a singed moustache, one lean one with honest blue eyes and a mouth I would never get tired of kissing. ‘Thank you,’ I said again, and then I had to take my hands back to wipe my tears.

  ‘The letter is in my bag,’ Archie said. ‘It’s under the window. I think there might be some baklava in there as well, if someone would be so good as to pass it.’

  * * *

  When Nathan wheeled me back to my room, I got into bed and closed my eyes. I was doing it because I didn’t want to talk any more before I’d had time to think about everything. I didn’t intend to fall asleep. But I did. When I woke up it was twilight and Nathan had gone.

  I looked at the ceiling and I thought about my life, especially the bit of it since I’d left care, when I was eighteen. I had been so determined that I was on my own: once my parents had gone, I was someone no one wanted. And I made it so.

  Our pasts are as unfixed as our futures, Nathan’s poem had said, the first time I saw him perform. And then: the freedom to tell a different story.

  I thought about Annabel, and instead of seeing her as someone who had been getting on with her life the way that I was getting on with mine, I realised how much she’d done for me. She’d made a safe place for me. Her grown-up children had never come to stay when I was there. She’d gone to them, from time to time, when I was on school trips; I had never thought of how she was making sacrifices for the sake of my wellbeing. She sometimes had friends around in the evening and, more rarely, went to the cinema, once I was in sixth form.

  But because Annabel wasn’t my mother – because she wasn’t the person I chose to have looking after me – I didn’t see any care at all. I saw duty. I knew that I was lonely. It didn’t occur to me that she might be lonely too. It was only now that I saw how isolated I must have made her, and how much she did care, coming to Archie, checking him out – I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall for that – staying in touch. Finding a way. I’d written her out, but that didn’t mean she was gone.

  Annabel was there. Archie was there. My mother was there, even when she wasn’t.

  It was tempting to be angry, and part of me was. Nobody likes being lied to, and I hated the idea of people talking about me, plotting behind my back. But I lay looking at the ceiling and I wondered what other choices I had given them. I think we can agree that there weren’t that many. They moved me from Whitby to Ripon, they gave me a cover story and a safe place, and the rest was up to me. They led me to water. I wouldn’t drink.

  It wasn’t blo
ody-mindedness. Not really. Not to begin with, anyway. It was griefs and losses, piled one on top of another onto a little ten-year-old who didn’t know anything outside her cosy home, where her parents tried to protect her even if they didn’t know how to protect themselves. All I could do was create silence, because every voice that I heard wasn’t one of the two I wanted to hear. Nobody bothers children who read. I read. And when I started to un-numb, I had become the girl who reads, who writes, who likes her own company and doesn’t say much. I was the non-participative teenager, the self-sufficient loner. I was Ripon Girl, who went straight to her room. And I was, under all of that, the person who didn’t know how to ask anyone to help her.

  The nurse came to check on me. It was nearing eight. Not too late to start a different story. I took my phone out of the bedside cabinet and switched it on. Before I could think about it too much, I dialled Annabel’s home number, which I’d never forgotten.

  ‘Hello?’ she said. Her voice was warm and soft, as ever.

  ‘It’s Loveday,’ I said. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  ‘Loveday,’ she said, like breathing out. Then, ‘Is everything alright?’

  Of course, I thought, she would think I was calling because there was a problem. I decided to ignore the question for now. There were more important things to say.

  ‘Archie’s told me everything,’ I said. ‘I’m calling to say thank you, and I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’ve nothing to apologise for,’ Annabel said.

  We talked for a little while. I got in first with the questions and she told me about her family, and Ripon, and how she was retired now, from work and fostering, and she was filling her days with gardening and volunteering. I thought about how lovely she was. And then, of course, she wanted to know how I was doing. I told her where Archie and I were.

  ‘Do you want me to come?’ she said. ‘I could come tomorrow.’

  And I said yes.

  It was that easy.

  I didn’t yet think what I would do about my mother, yet. But I knew that I would do something, and for the first time in a long time I felt warmth when I thought about her. I’ll never stop loving you, LJ, she’d written, in one of the last letters I read. I’d torn it up. But I’d never stopped loving her, either. And there was a new letter, now, when I was ready.

  I wasn’t stupid; I knew we were a long way away from a Louisa May Alcott ending. But maybe we could have something. I picked up the crumpled Whitby postcard, which was on the bedside table, propped against the water jug, still smelling of smoke. My mother was full of love for her family then. She would still be full of love for me now. She had tried to come for me but something had stopped her. I looked at her handwriting on the envelope Archie had had in his bag. I would open it tomorrow. I’d be ready then.

  Somewhere around five in the morning, I drifted off to sleep.

  The nurses woke me for painkillers at seven, then let me drift off again.

  The next thing I knew, there was mid-morning light filling the room and Nathan was sitting on the straight-backed plastic chair next to my bed. His sleeves were rolled back, his elbows on his thighs, his forehead in his palms. I saw writing along his forearm. He was close enough for me to reach out and touch it.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  ‘My tattoo.’ He stretched out his arm. I read, ‘The first primroses were beginning to bloom’, the words inked onto his skin in a flowing script. I couldn’t speak. It was the end of the last line of Watership Down.

  I kissed the back of his hand, found my voice. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘I worked out Possession’, he said, ‘and The English Patient.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said again, ‘that’s amazing of you.’ I meant it. In Nathan’s mislaced boots, I wouldn’t have been making any commitments to me.

  He looked at me and sort of smiled, but it wasn’t a real smile, and then he kept on looking at me, as though I was written in a foreign language and he was trying to find a word he recognised. He stood up, then sat down again, suddenly, as though he’d only just remembered he was standing.

  ‘Loveday,’ he said, ‘I went to see Archie. Just now.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m going to go back later. I’ve thought about everything. I’m lucky to have him.’

  And then Nathan’s eyes made a sort of wince and he was crying, shaking his head. ‘Loveday,’ he said, ‘Archie … Archie died.’

  ‘What?’ I’d heard wrong, obviously.

  ‘Just now. Just –’ He waved a hand, indicating the area behind his shoulder. ‘I went to see him, so I could tell you how he was doing, and one minute he was talking, saying how glad he was that everything was out in the open and how proud he was of you, and the next –’ Nathan was sobbing now, struggling to speak.

  ‘What? What happened?’ I got off the bed so that I could reach him properly, put my hand on his shoulder instead of touching the back of his hand with my fingertips.

  ‘He died,’ Nathan said. He took a deep breath and then he put his good hand over my hand, covering it. There was redness on his knuckles and two of the nails were jagged at the quick, black underneath, where the soot had worked its way into his skin.

  Everything stopped, for a second; even, I swear, my heart.

  ‘No,’ I said. It was like someone, somewhere had just taken a photograph of Loveday’s worst day ever (2) and the world had paused at the shutter-click.

  Then, I got it. Then, I really started to hurt. I was standing with my hand on Nathan’s shoulder and he cried and I didn’t, just listened to the sound of the world collapsing around me. Being trapped in a burning bookshop had nothing on this.

  ‘It was his heart,’ Nathan said. He looked up at me. I felt myself swaying – that ‘was’ did it, I think – and he put out his arm and I sat on his lap. I couldn’t say anything, but I rested my cheek against the top of his head, and I – well, I don’t know what I did. It was like someone had taken away my sky.

  Nathan’s arm went around my waist and I felt the strength go out of me. ‘He had a heart attack. Right there in front of me. They did the – everything they do – but he died.’

  I opened my mouth to say: ‘Stop saying died’. But no words came. I just started to cry and, even though the salt hurt on the outside and the effort hurt on the inside, the physical pain was nothing compared to the way that my feelings were ripping at me, and it was a long, long time until the tears stopped.

  MEMOIR

  2016

  Choose

  My precious Loveday,

  It wasn’t hard to find you. Annabel and I have written to each other many times. Once she told me that you worked in a second-hand bookshop. Another time she mentioned York. She was scrupulous about protecting you – something that comforted me more than you can imagine – but I had nothing to do but analyse her letters, and I made a connection that might be true. It was worth exploring.

  There are eighteen second-hand bookshops in York and so I decided to start with them. If I couldn’t find you, I would expand the search to Yorkshire. (Because, of course, if you lived in York it would be easy for you to travel by bus or train. You might have a car, although Annabel hadn’t mentioned you learning to drive. I have a lot of time to think about these things.)

  I started by ringing the bookshops and asking for Loveday, but after the first two I thought, what if you answer the phone? I didn’t want our first contact to be a shock. I think I owe it to you to be gentle. So I decided to take the train to York on my days off, and look.

  Your bookshop was the second one I went to, and when I was standing outside deciding whether to go in or to look through the window, I saw the sign about the lost poetry book, which said ‘come in and ask for Loveday’. Suddenly I was terrified. I went to have a cup of tea in the cafe next door and I watched people coming and going in the street, and I wondered what to do. I knew I couldn’t just come in, call your name, hug you tight, even though that was all I wanted to do.

  An
d then there were all of the things we had to talk about. Where would we start? How could we plunge in to that conversation when we hadn’t spoken for so long? And I know you’d made it clear that you didn’t want to talk. But I hoped that there had been enough time apart for us to try.

  So I made a plan. I knew you’d remember all the books we chose together. I still had them – they’d all been stored for me, by my social worker – and I’d read the prison library copies of every single one of them. So I thought I could come to see you, catch you after work, and bring them, and then if I did that we would have something to talk about, something easy to begin with.

  I arrived not long before the shop closed and I waited opposite and along the way a bit, at the bus stop. I had the books in a box, and it was heavy.

  You came out of the shop and locked the door behind you. I just looked at you: your face was serious, the way it used to be when you were colouring in or reading, learning lines or measuring out the ingredients for the parkin – but it was beautiful. Those eyes of yours, as bright as stars. The way you moved, the way you shook your hair back – everything was a memory, and I was pinned down by the shock and the pleasure of seeing you. You went down an alleyway and came back a few minutes later wheeling a bike. I tried to call your name but my mouth wouldn’t work. I was crying. A man at the bus stop offered me a tissue. Things like that – unexpected contact – scare me a bit, these days. By the time I’d recovered, you had gone.

  So I left the books on the step. I didn’t know if you would recognise them but I liked the idea of you handling them, and maybe remembering you and I in the bookshop near the bridge.

  Next time I came, I made it into the shop. You weren’t there but I talked to a lovely man in a mustard-coloured shirt, who I think must have been the owner. I left the book with some others in a box when he wasn’t looking.