Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  As I started to take the Penguin Classics out of the box, l felt a bit odd. I was free-floating above myself, as though something important was happening. It was like the feeling I had when I checked inside the dust jacket of a recently delivered and ordinary-looking 1930s hardback to find that it was actually a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, disguised to get through customs. They’re really rare, because once they got into the country, the spurious dust jackets were thrown away. I knew it was worth hundreds of pounds and at the same time I couldn’t believe it was in my hands. But there was nothing in this box that was anything special for a collector, so the looking-down-at-the-sea-from-a-cliff feeling it was giving me didn’t make any sense.

  Then I realised what it was. They were all books that my mother had owned. Every single one. She knew books were important, my mother, and she liked that I liked reading, and she encouraged me to do it. She had a little set of bookshelves in the living room under the stairs – we lived in a tiny new build on the outskirts of Whitby, which probably looked quite big before the furniture went in, but felt squished even to little me.

  The top shelf was for the black-bound Penguin Classics, the middle shelf, for the books I didn’t keep in my bedroom – ponies, fairies, picture-books I refused to get rid of, even though I thought I was too old to read them – and the bottom was puzzle magazines and copies of women’s magazines that my mum’s friend Amanda passed on to her, though I don’t know that she ever read those either. On the top of the shelf unit were photos in frames, all permutations of twos – me and Mum, me and Dad, Mum and Dad – because Dad was very precious about his camera, so we only took photos when he was around, and when he was around he wanted us to spend time, just the three of us, no one else, so we could make the most of things. He was precious about us, too. Or was it that we were precious to him? God, I don’t love much but I love words. We all looked happy enough in the photos, I think. After the frames got broken there was nothing on top of the shelf unit any more.

  Like I say, the books weren’t unusual. You could get them in any bookshop, anywhere. But the fact that they were all ones we’d had at home made me feel . . . well, something. A pricking of my thumbs.

  I took the Penguin Classics and I stood them, spines facing out, against the wall at the back of the breakfast bar shelf. I wanted to see how they looked. Could they really be the ones I remembered, or was I trying to make something that wasn’t there?

  I wasn’t sure, at first.

  Then I remembered that my mother used to put things in alphabetical order by the first word of the title. I’ve sometimes wondered if we should do that here. Most people remember titles more than authors, so it might make sense. At home, I just go with ‘read’ and ‘unread’, and move books from one shelf to another. Why waste precious reading time on sorting, that’s what I say.

  But my mother started at Anna Karenina and ended at Wuthering Heights. She said her books looked tidier that way. She also organised clothes by colour, which was great if you wanted your vest and your tights to match, less helpful if you wanted to find one of everything. My dad used to tease her about it. ‘What’s your mother like, Loveday?’ he used to say, and I knew that was my cue to roll my eyes.

  When I rearranged the books by title, I felt dizzy. As though I’d stepped too close to the cliff edge, and the land was slipping away from the soles of my feet. Because they seemed right. As though they could really be the actual books that sat on the bookshelf in our house.

  I could smell the smells of that first home: salt from the sea, and the damp earth of my mother’s endless (endlessly dying, she never learned) potted plants. The house was rented and Mum was always saying how, when we had a place that was really ours, she would paint everything green. ‘There’s an upside to living like this, then,’ my dad would say, and sometimes he made it sound funny and sometimes he said it in a way that made Mum say, ‘Oh, Patrick,’ and reach out to touch his arm or his cheek.

  There were even twenty-six books on the bench in front of me. I counted them. And then I counted them again, like a man with a metal-detector who can’t believe he’s seeing the coins in his palm.

  Twenty-six books. The ones my mother bought, once a fortnight, for a year, beginning with a bright New Year resolution and ending with a cold New Year’s Eve, the year I was eight.

  We used to go to the bookshop near the bridge in the centre of Whitby, every other Friday after school. It was a little shop, cramped, with just a shelf or two for everything, but the lady in charge always smiled and said she could order anything we wanted. It was a warm place. I could choose a book for me, and Mum would have a long chat with the bookshop owner about what she was going to add to her collection. I don’t think she ever told her that she didn’t read them, but then again, I know she wouldn’t have lied. And she meant to read them, I’m sure, she just never did. After a year she stopped buying them. Her resolution the next year was to learn to dance. She didn’t do that either. She found a class but my dad didn’t like the idea of her dancing with other people.

  Anyone who’s worked in a bookshop for longer than an afternoon will tell you that people buy books for all sorts of reasons. There’s the simple love of books, of course: the knowledge that here is an escape, a chance to learn, a place for your heart and mind to romp and play. Recommendations, TV shows, desire for self-improvement, the need to impress or the hope of a better self. All valid reasons, none of them guaranteeing that the book will be opened at all. I think my mother liked the covers, the word ‘classics’, and the possibility of other worlds.

  Of course, I have no one to talk about these things with. No one would remember the bookshelf, or if they did, they wouldn’t remember which books and which order.

  Sitting there at the back of the shop I also felt my world overlap with my only real childhood home, smelling the vanilla pot pourri that was supposed to disguise the cigarette smoke, listening to my mother pottering in the kitchen. I would pull out the books and look at the covers, spell out the titles. The Mill on the Floss sounded strange, because I didn’t know that the Floss was a river. ‘You’re a little young yet, angel,’ my mother said when she looked through the doorway and saw me turning the pages. I remember the words were crammed on to the pages like sweets in a jar.

  ‘Loveday,’ Nathan said, behind me.

  I jumped. I mean, really, physically, arse off the stool for a nanosecond.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘I’m just . . .  I was busy.’

  ‘My parents have Penguin Classics,’ Nathan said. ‘There are hundreds, aren’t there?’

  ‘Yes.’ I could have added, ‘My mother had some’ – the words were almost in my mouth – but I don’t talk about myself. So I just sat there, doing a fair impression of the sulky emo-goth I look like.

  ‘Well,’ Nathan said, ‘I found this.’ He held up a copy of Penny Arcade by Adrian Henri. The slender spine was cracked, and there was a brown ring left by a coffee mug on the cover. ‘I don’t have it. I should. Unless I dropped it getting off a bus.’

  I smiled. Yes I did. ‘It’s got “At Your Window” in it.’ Anyone who likes Henri likes ‘At Your Window’. I can talk about what’s in books.

  ‘I saw,’ he said. ‘Genius.’

  ‘Over-used term,’ I said.

  ‘Couldn’t agree more,’ he said – he can smile and talk at the same time – ‘but in this case, justified.’

  I didn’t agree, but I didn’t say so. ‘At Your Window’ is about a cat who can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want a dead mouse. It made me think of Rob and his roses.

  Nathan did the hat-tip-without-a-hat and turned away, but then swung back. ‘I left a leaflet last week, about a poetry night. It’s on Wednesdays at the George and Dragon. It’s tonight.’

  ‘I found it,’ I said. ‘I put it on the noticeboard at the front, next to the one with the book finds.’ I pointed, helpfully, in case he didn’t know where the front of the shop was,
or what a noticeboard looked like. I despair of myself sometimes. I’d like to blame the shock I felt at seeing those twenty-six books. But I don’t know that I need an excuse to be incapable of sensible human interaction.

  ‘I know,’ he said, and he stopped smiling. ‘Thanks, but I meant it as an invitation for you.’

  ‘Me?’ I thought for a horrible minute that he knew I wrote poetry, that I’d transmitted my dream/nightmare: me on a stage, me reciting my poems, the lights coming up and all the faces – my mother’s and my father’s, half of the auditorium him, half of it her, not knowing where to look . . .

  ‘Well, you obviously have a fine appreciation for poetry,’ he said, ‘rescuing books dropped by feckless poets, so I thought you might enjoy it.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m not very sociable,’ I said. I’ve found this is the best way to stop people asking me to do things, because there’s not really a response, in the way that there is when you say that you’re busy (‘It’s only a couple of hours!’), you’re skint (‘It’s only a fiver! I’ll treat you!’) or you don’t think you’ll like it (‘You never know! Give it a try!’).

  ‘Okay,’ Nathan said, with a shrug (see?), ‘but if you change your mind, come along. We’ve got a Facebook page. Message me or text and I’ll keep you a seat.’

  ‘I don’t do Facebook.’ There are enough people to contend with in real life without adding virtual ones. Or ones who might remember you from way back.

  ‘Okay, text then,’ he said. I didn’t point out that I didn’t have his number. I thought about how that just went to show how much he meant it.

  When I turned back to the row of books, I saw that there was a business card sticking out of the top of Jane Eyre. ‘Nathan Avebury: close-up magic’, it said; there was a picture of a top hat and a mobile number. I swear he never moved his hands. One was holding the Adrian Henri, the other was in his pocket the whole time.

  There were probably eight hundred Penguin Classics in print the year Mum was buying them. But small booksellers would have carried maybe the hundred most popular ones, so actually, anyone buying twenty-six Penguin Classics in Yorkshire in the 1990s would have had a limited choice. My mother hadn’t gone far away from the mainstream – there had been at least one television adaptation of every single book on the shelf in front of me – and so probably anyone buying the books would have had much the same selection. And that was assuming I’d remembered all the titles correctly as hers.

  I sat there for a while, looking at the unbroken black spines, and first I convinced myself that there was no way they could be her books, and then I decided there was no possibility that they weren’t. I didn’t like either answer. I put the twenty-six books into the classics section.

  I didn’t go to the poetry night. Obviously.

  *

  The next week, I locked up the shop later than usual because we’d had a couple of big online orders. Selling online was my idea, which means I’m not really entitled to complain about what a massive pain in the backside it is. It’s mildly thrilling to package up a book that’s two hundred years old and send it off across the world on the next part of its journey. Except that you don’t know where it’s going, whether it’s going to be pored over and treasured, or put in a temperature-and humidity-controlled cabinet as part of a collection, added to the insurance documents, and ignored. What’s the point of a book that isn’t read? You wouldn’t buy a pear and then just look at the outside forever, would you? Presumably the person who finds a book they’ve been searching for online does a happy little dance or an air-punch or, at least, grins like an idiot. I get to see that when they come into the shop. I can’t get that from an email.

  But, I’m not complaining. Really not. Just bored, because packaging and addressing is . . . boring. It’s not bookish. I could just as well be wrapping up candles, or toolkits, or wooden spoons. I put some music on, loud (I like folk music, so what?), and I stood at the breakfast bar and wrapped and taped until there was a pile of packaged books. Archie would take them to the post office the next day. He likes that job more than I do. He would come back trailing more customers, no doubt, tourists he’d charmed in the queue. He wears a lot of tweed, and I suspect he was born with his moustache. He sometimes gets asked for his autograph – which he always gives, graciously, with a flourish to his signature – and I wonder who people think he could possibly be.

  Rob had put another rose through the door. I couldn’t be bothered to bin it so I left its bits on the desk where they had fallen, locked the door from the outside and went around the back to get my bike. There’s a shed that all six shops in the parade share, and I leave it in there, with the cafe’s summer pavement-tables. When I came back around to the main street, there was the man himself, leaning on the corner.

  ‘Did you like the rose?’

  ‘Hello, Rob,’ I said. I went to self-defence classes when I was in sixth form. One of the main things I learned was: avoid getting yourself into a position where you’ll need to defend yourself. Although that particular horse had bolted as far as Rob was concerned, I wasn’t going to make things any worse.

  Before The Incident, I wouldn’t have thought I’d ever need to worry about Rob – he’s tall, but he’s got the physique of a wet teddy bear and is about as scary – but something I had learned without the aid of a self-defence instructor is that you never really know who’s a threat and who isn’t. I was on a darkening, quietish street with a man who thinks it’s normal to repeatedly push unwanted roses through letterboxes, and that’s on one of his good days. Not ideal. The next thing was to not piss him off. So I wasn’t going to talk about the rose.

  ‘Do you want to come out for a drink with me sometime, Loveday?’

  ‘No thank you, Rob. I’m not very sociable.’

  ‘I think we should try again.’

  ‘Rob,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to. I’m sorry. I’ve . . . I’ve moved on.’ I looked at him for a second.

  ‘You’re seeing someone else?’ He has nice eyes, but they were tired. I hoped he was sleeping, taking his medication. I like to think I’m not a monster. And I don’t think he is, either.

  I laughed at the idea of me seeing someone else. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m just . . . I’m okay on my own.’

  I tried to do the face Archie does, when someone comes in selling something he’s not buying. He listens to the patter, says no thank you, then if whoever’s selling tries again, he presses his mouth into a line and shakes his head, just a tiny bit. People pack up their wares and go. But it did’t work. So I started wheeling my bike between us but he just swapped sides so he was walking next to me.

  ‘Please, Loveday. I’m a nice bloke.’

  ‘How’s work?’ I asked. I thought if I could get him talking about himself I might avoid an argument. Rob is one of those people who hang around in academia because it’s safer than the world. I know, I know, as opposed to those people who hang around in second-hand bookshops because it’s safer than the world.

  ‘Busy,’ he said. ‘Exams coming up. My students are going to do well, I think. They’re a bright lot.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, and I meant it. Rob’s a clever guy. When he’s not being a knob – when he’s talking about the stuff he knows about, the Renaissance and Italy – he’s worth listening to.

  ‘But I don’t want to talk about work,’ he said. ‘I want to talk about us.’

  He put his hand on my back. He doesn’t usually touch me. I could feel myself getting rattled. Next line of defence was to get on my bike and ride away, but I was just about to hit a bit of busy pavement, so I didn’t fancy it. I was starting to feel like telling him what I thought of him, but confrontation freaks me out. My palms were getting damp and my feet were scuffing the ground, as though they were so busy getting ready to run that they’d forgotten how to walk properly.

  And then I saw the George and Dragon. I checked my watch: 7.45. Wednesday.

  I chained my bike up at the railings outside.
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  ‘I’m meeting a friend,’ I said.

  ‘I could join you,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Goodnight.’

  He put out his arm, as though he was going to touch me again, take hold, but I flinched away, turned, and went up the steps and into the bar without looking behind me to see whether he was following.

  It was so fashionable I almost went back outside to run Rob’s nasty little gauntlet – it would have been slightly less uncomfortable. Stripped floorboards, mismatched chairs, dark-grey paint, glittering black glass chandeliers, mirrors with unnecessarily camp frames. I had a horrible feeling that my drink would be served in a jam jar.

  I remembered from the leaflet that the poetry slam was upstairs. There were twin metal spiral staircases, one for up and one for down. The function room was fairly small, a bar in the corner and half a dozen tables, a couple of sofas covered in cracked black leather. Smaller chandelier, less camp mirrors, as if to say: allow yourself to relax, traveller, we are fractionally less judgemental up here than we were downstairs.

  I went over to the bar. I didn’t think Rob had followed me. If he had, of course, I’d just made things worse because there was no reason why he wouldn’t buy a drink and join the audience. I realised the windows overlooked the entrance. I could see if Rob had gone. If he had, I could just duck out again –

  ‘Loveday,’ said Nathan. ‘Good to see you. I thought you were going to text me if you were coming.’

  ‘I just . . .’ The prospect of explaining was too much, as was, by then, the possibility of leaving, so I said the only other thing that was in my head: ‘You haven’t got your coat on.’