Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  *

  A week passed, and there were no takers for the Brian Patten. I was planning to take the sign down that afternoon. My plan was to tuck the book behind the counter and then give it to someone who was buying something that suggested they might appreciate it. I wasn’t going to sell it; that didn’t feel honest. Yeah, I sometimes over-think. There are worse faults.

  I was having my lunch in the back of the shop, which is basically: a tiny loo and hand basin behind an ill-fitting wooden door that needs a yank to close it and a shove to open it; an armchair in front of the fire exit; a shelf; a bin and the hoover underneath the shelf. The armchair is big and comfy, jammed into the space: I can sit cross-legged in it. I have cereal and a banana for lunch – which is also what I have for breakfast, but I like breakfast best, so why the hell shouldn’t I have it twice a day? – and I was halfway through it when I heard Archie calling my name.

  When Archie calls it’s usually because one of ‘my’ customers (i.e. one of the ones he doesn’t like) comes in. It won’t be a question about stock, because I swear he knows every single book in the shop, and where it is.

  Archie and I are alike in that we have a low tolerance for people who annoy us – not an advantage in the customer service game, as he says – but the good thing is that different categories of people wind us up. I don’t like people who giggle. He says there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of joie de vivre. He doesn’t like people who smell. I say you shouldn’t penalise people for their circumstances and books don’t care when you last washed. I don’t like people who try to knock down the price or bang on about how they could get it cheaper on the internet. Those people don’t realise that, for a lot of rare books, if they search the internet they’ll end up at us anyway, but we’ll charge them postage, too. I quite like it when that happens. A bit of schadenfreude really brightens up twenty minutes in a post office queue. I feel like Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair.

  Archie doesn’t like the people he calls superfans, but I like a bit of focus in my customers. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to own every edition of every book by a particular writer, and most of the authors who are being pursued through our shelves are dead, so if they’re not bothered by obsessive fans, I don’t see why we should be.

  I thought the visitor was probably a collector, who Archie would automatically pass to me, regardless of how far through my lunch I was. I overlook his minor infringements of employment law on the basis that his good points outweigh his flaws by a ratio of about three to one. The old lady gothic novel fan has a sixth sense for when she can ruin my lunch by interrupting me, so I was expecting it to be her, but as I rounded the end of the cookery section, I saw that Archie was talking to someone I had never met. I’d have remembered.

  Leather coat and a crew cut, metallic-blue DMs laced up differently, a laugh – Archie looked as though he was on a charm offensive – like sea over gravel. Archie saw me coming and he caught my eye.

  ‘Brace yourself,’ he was saying, ‘she doesn’t approve of people who aren’t good to books.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said the stranger. ‘I don’t approve of them either.’

  ‘Here she is,’ Archie said. ‘My straywaif.’ I thought for a horrible moment that he was going to launch into his how-I-met-Loveday story, but he managed to resist.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘You certainly can,’ said the stranger. ‘You already have, I believe.’ He smiled and his teeth were straight and even, middle-class teeth, braced into conformity at great expense, no doubt.

  ‘Really?’ He could work for it.

  ‘Loveday,’ Archie said, ‘this gentleman is in search of a missing poet.’

  ‘The sign in the window. The book.’ The stranger’s voice was clear and I couldn’t find an accent in it, not that it was exactly posh, either.

  ‘I found it on the pavement,’ I said. I sounded accusatory. I didn’t mind. Poetry has a difficult enough time without people throwing it away.

  ‘I think it fell out of my pocket,’ he said. ‘It’s quite deep but I was reading it on the bus, then I realised I’d nearly missed my stop, and I don’t think I put it away properly.’ He put his hand into the pocket of his coat and it disappeared up to the wrist. I noticed that his hands were long, even in proportion to the rest of him, his fingers tapering, the tip of his thumb arching away from his hand, as though it was going to do a runner.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said. I figured he could work a bit harder, though it amused me that he thought he had to make a case, as if he’d arrived late for a job interview.

  ‘And I love the Liverpool Poets,’ he said. ‘I studied them. People don’t realise they pretty much invented performance poetry. They invented The Beatles, come to that.’

  I didn’t need to hear his dissertation. ‘I’ll just go and get it,’ I said. I had a spoonful of cereal when I went through to the back, but it had gone to mush.

  ‘Our neglectful new friend is a poet himself,’ Archie said when I returned.

  ‘Then he should know better than to fold down the corners of poetry books,’ I said, and gave him his Brian Patten back. I wasn’t going to be impressed. I’ve got a couple of notebooks of my own poems at my place; I wouldn’t tell people I’m a poet. I’d tell them I work in a bookshop. If I thought it was any of their business.

  ‘I know, it’s a terrible habit,’ said the leather-coat-poet, and he smiled and I smiled back, even though I didn’t really want to. Smiles give too much away. More than your teeth.

  He tucked the book into his pocket and pulled the flap over the top, as if to show me that he’d learned his lesson. It was the beginning of March, cold still. I wondered what he wore in summer.

  ‘Well, I’ll be more careful in future.’ He made a gesture – I thought he was saluting, but then I realised it was a sort of hat-tip, though he wasn’t wearing a hat, so it came off slightly stupid, or it should have done. Then he held out his hand to me to shake, and I shook it. He said, ‘Thank you, Loveday. Nathan Avebury.’ His wrists were slim, straight.

  ‘No problem,’ I said. This is why I don’t like talking to people. I never think of anything interesting to say. I need time to find words, and that’s hard when people are looking at me. Also, I don’t like people much. Well, some are okay. But not enough to make it a given.

  He turned away and I realised there was something in my hand. A chocolate coin, wrapped in gold foil and thoughts of long-ago happy Christmas mornings. If he’d been looking at me when I realised, waiting for a reaction, I would have written him off as a stupid show-off. But the bell above the door had already jangled out the message that he’d gone, and when I looked up there was no sign of him outside.

  ‘Well,’ Archie said. ‘Nathan Avebury.’

  ‘Do you know him?’ I asked.

  There aren’t a lot of people in this corner of York that Archie doesn’t know. He’s friends with the publicans, though they’ve started to change over the last few years now the pubs have become more like restaurants, run by foodies rather than drinkers. He makes a point of shopping in all the nearby places, buying cushions and paintings of the coast, artisan chocolates and lots and lots of cheese. His doctor is always talking to him about cholesterol and losing weight, but Archie says good relationships are more important than being able to see your feet.

  ‘I only know him by reputation,’ Archie said. ‘Time was, he was the next big thing.’

  I knew he was waiting for me to ask for details, so I didn’t. I went back to the armchair and ate the rest of my banana, and when I came back into the shop I took the ‘Found’ notice down. Then I got stuck in to the box of music biographies again.

  There were no more treasures among the pages, no pressed flowers or postcard bookmarks or names on the flyleaf that made me wonder. My favourite, ever: a 1912 edition of Mansfield Park, which had ‘Edith Delaney, 1943’ written in the careful, joined-up writing of a child on the inside front cover. The ‘Delaney’ was crossed through and ‘Bishop’ written
underneath. Then ‘Bishop’ crossed out and another name, a longer, double-barrelled one, scored through so thoroughly that it’s impossible to make out. ‘Brompton-Smith’ is my best guess. Then ‘Humphrey’ underneath that. All the same handwriting, but you can see she’s getting older. I’ve got the book at home. Along with my wages I get a book allowance and this was one of the first ones I took. I look at it and I think, well, Edith Delaney-Bishop-Brompton-Smith-Humphrey, I hope you married them all because you liked them, even if Brompton-Smith turned out to be a bastard, by the looks of it. Good for you for taking no shit off anyone.

  *

  Wednesday is Archie’s bridge night so he left early, putting on his Crombie coat with the moss-green velvet collar and shouting, ‘Toodle-oo, Loveday’ as he went. I stayed a bit late, getting through the box, putting aside the books that I thought were worthy of Archie’s attention. I always lock myself in at five, because late afternoon is Rob’s favourite time for coming in and talking about how I should go out with him again as we got off on the wrong foot. He wouldn’t try anything nasty – he wouldn’t dare – but I can’t be bothered with him. Well, I can’t be bothered with men in general, so if I’m not getting any of the alleged thrills, I’m sure as hell going to do without the aggro.

  At five fifteen, there was a tap on the door, and there was Rob’s grinning face, making a ‘let-me-in’ gesture. I shook my head, pointed at the ‘closed’ sign, and went back to what I was doing. He knocked a couple more times but I ignored him. Then there was a sort of crunching, rattling sound and I realised he was pushing a rose through the letterbox. It’s one of his regular tricks. He also brings in chocolates for me and leaves them with Archie because he knows I won’t take them from him. I don’t eat them; I put them on the big table with a ‘help yourself’ sign and they’re gone within an hour. I’d like to think that Rob would read the sign as a bit of advice for him – as in, ‘please get yourself some help’ – but if he comes in when the chocolates are out he just looks pissed off.

  Rob stood there for a bit longer waiting for me to go and get the rose, but I didn’t, so he went away, giving the door handle a last, vicious rattle as he went. I picked up the stem and crushed petals from the desk and was taking them through to the bin when the letterbox rattled again and I jumped. I turned around and saw the back of a leather coat swirling away, and there was a leaflet sticking through the letterbox.

  Poetry Night at the George and Dragon

  Wednesdays from 8 p.m. £3 entry. Open mic.

  There were Facebook details at the bottom. I put it on the community noticeboard, which is next to my noticeboard of things we’ve found in books, and I locked up and left. I pass the George on the way home; it’s on the corner before the cycle lane starts.

  I didn’t go in.

  I wondered if that twirling-away of leather was the last I’d see of Nathan Avebury. But no. He came back the next week.

  *

  ‘Hello, Loveday,’ he said.

  I turned around and nodded, then went back to what I was doing. I’m not paid to pass the time of day with any old poet who wanders in. That’s Archie’s job.

  I was tidying up the Sci-fi section – it never stays neat for more than half a day – and had my back to the door when he came in, though I’d heard Archie greeting someone. I hadn’t bothered to look; Archie greets most people as though they are a visiting foreign dignitary, a lover, or someone recently returned from the dead.

  Nathan didn’t move away. He was still there when I got to Wilder, Wyndall and Zindell. I stood up. He was looking at the shelves, idly, as though he was killing time waiting for something. A bookseller, for example.

  His boots were still laced up differently, one criss-crossing on the front, one straight across. I wondered if he noticed, or cared. He noticed me looking.

  ‘Magician’s trick,’ he said. ‘If people notice the lacing it distracts them. Also, if people notice that, I know they’re the noticing sort, and I have to be careful.’

  I nodded. I could see the sense in that. I liked it better than carelessness, or affectation. If I cared, which I didn’t.

  ‘Magician?’ I asked, and then remembered. ‘The chocolate coin.’

  ‘Close-up magic,’ he said. ‘It’s sort of my day job, though it’s quite a lot of evenings. Afternoons are kids’ parties; evenings are corporate events. Poetry doesn’t really pay the rent.’

  I laughed. I’m not sure why. I think I was amused by the idea of being a magician as a day job. Most people with a day job work in a shop or a call centre, or serve cream teas to tourists while wearing a mob cap, around here at least.

  ‘I thought I’d come and take a look at the poetry section,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ I said. The shop isn’t huge but it’s twisty, and it’s easier to take people than to explain where to find things. The poetry books live along the back wall, with the plays and the old maps. Archie isn’t a fan of poetry and plays because he says they shouldn’t be written down, so he’s put them in the darkest corner he can find. The walls all have shelves built along them, in a mishmash of a way, different heights and depths in different places. Fiction goes all around the walls, and then the middle of the shop is filled with freestanding bookcases, back to back and at right angles with each other around a central table. They’re all different, but what they have in common is that they are all some kind of old, solid wood, uncomplaining, doing the heavy lifting of non-fiction in all of its glorious forms. Although, give me a novel any day.

  I led Nathan to the back wall. His boots squeak-squeaked behind me, and I was suddenly aware of my spine, my arse, the back of my neck where I’d bunched my hair in an elastic band to keep it out of my face. I stood straighter, and turned when we got there.

  ‘Poetry,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks,’ Nathan said. He smiled. He seemed to smile a lot.

  ‘All part of the service,’ I said.

  Then Melodie appeared. When we’re swamped, Archie pays her to do a bit of shelving, and she does a good job, but she witters on the whole time, like a trapped chaffinch, and it drives me demented. When she’s not doing her main job – leading tourist walking tours – she treats the shop like her living room, sitting at the table with a coffee, making impossible-to-ignore phone calls, using the Wi-Fi. You couldn’t pay me enough to be herded around York and yammered at by Melodie, but I think she probably does quite well. She’s big-eyed and big-mouthed and tiny, a pert kitten of a thing. I think her mother’s Malaysian, though I have no idea why I’ve remembered that. When she’s in the shop she keeps up a constant monologue, which I try to drown out by turning my own mental chatter up, but some things must permeate. She’s not backward in coming forward, as my dad used to say.

  ‘Loveday showing you the poetry section?’ Melodie asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Alphabetical order,’ Melodie said. ‘I did it last week. I like my poets stay in line.’ She talks in this pirate patois that I think she must have picked up from a film, because I know for a fact that she grew up in Pickering.

  ‘Noted,’ Nathan said. ‘I won’t disturb the line.’

  ‘Hello.’ She held out a little hand, palm-down, fingers draping, as though she thought he should kiss it.

  He shook it and smiled. ‘I’m Nathan Avebury,’ he said.

  ‘Nathan Avebury,’ Melodie said, ‘it lovely to meet you. I am Melodie. Like in music.’ She held the chocolate coin up to the light, turning it slowly, cool as you like, as though its appearance in her palm was exactly what she had expected.

  ‘Melodie works here sometimes, when we’re busy,’ I said.

  ‘Loveday work here all the time,’ Melodie supplemented, ‘every day. This her world. I come and go, as I please.’ She turned away, with a cat-eye look, and I found myself looking at Nathan to see what he was making of it all. He watched her go – she was wearing denim shorts over black tights, plimsolls, a striped jacket – and then he looked at me and h
e smiled.

  ‘It’s a great world to spend every day in,’ he said. His eyes were the kind of blue you find on self-help book covers, to suggest clarity and calm.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I liked that he didn’t bitch about Melodie. I don’t like her but I don’t like people who are nasty either, especially about easy targets. Like women with tattoos and a nose-ring, for example. Still, if I take a bus, I mostly get a seat.

  We looked at each other for a minute and I wished I was like Archie, who can start a conversation with anyone, about anything. Half the people who come into the shop are people he’s got talking to at art gallery openings or while buying sausages at a farmers’ market. He’s just at ease. I’m not. Well, not with new people. It takes me a while to get comfortable with them, and in the bit when I’m getting comfortable I don’t say much, and what I do say is pretty everyday. Archie says I keep all my interesting bits well hidden and getting to know me is an exercise in faith rewarded. I think he thinks he’s being nice.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I said, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘Great,’ Nathan said.

  Another box had come in. It was full of run-of-the-mill 1990s mid-range paperbacks, Penguin Classics, the ones with the black covers and the National Gallery chocolate-box paintings on the front, hardly touched. Nothing special, or at least, nothing remarkable: Eliot, Trollope, Dickens.

  We have what Archie calls the ‘breakfast bar’ at the back of the shop. It’s basically a deep shelf fixed halfway up the wall, and a high stool to sit on while you work there. There’s a couple of old mugs, filled with pens and bits of paper for notes. The breakfast bar is where we sit to sort the books that come in. I say ‘we’ but Archie’s not a fan of this part of the business. We (I) can work as well as keep an eye on the shop: there’s a convex mirror fixed over the top so we can see who’s coming and going, if there’s only one of us here. He lets me do the first sift and look over anything interesting that comes in. I was eighteen and I’d worked here for three years before I was allowed to do it on my own. ‘Off you go, Loveday,’ Archie said that day, ‘consider yourself qualified’. It felt better than my A Level results did, better than the applause at the end of the school play when I was a kid. I didn’t go straight back to my flat that night. I went to the river and I sat by the water and I thought; Loveday, it might be okay.