Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘would you mind telling me a bit more about your research topic? I know you said Renaissance Engineering but I’m guessing that there will be a lot of things that touch on that, so . . .’

  He smiled and turned to me, squinting into the early autumn sun. ‘It’s about the links between Brunelleschi, who built the dome on Florence Cathedral, and Leonardo da Vinci. None of Brunelleschi’s own writings survive and popular history has sort of written him out. I’m looking at his influence. People treat da Vinci as though he’s a genius in isolation, or some kind of god. I think he was a bit of a magpie, picking shiny bits from others.’ As he talked his hands made shapes in the air between us – steeples, prayers, books – and he looked at me and then up, and then back again, as he explained. His hair was brown, the same colour as the darkest parts of his eyes.

  ‘So it’s a bit like, if you didn’t have the Beat poets, you wouldn’t have Bob Dylan,’ I said. Not that we need Bob Dylan.

  ‘Exactly.’ Rob smiled again. ‘I like you.’

  Idiot that I was, I liked that he liked me. I should have known better. In retrospect, I think that maybe he didn’t like me much beyond the fact that I was talking to him about him and what he was interested in. I didn’t clock that until later, though. And it could be that that’s normal for relationships. My parents weren’t exactly run-of-the-mill. I’d gone on a few dates in sixth form. I felt like I needed to get my virginity out of the way, so I could think about more important things. A bit like, if you like books, you have to read Great Expectations at some point, and then it’s done and you can move on. I hadn’t really bothered with men since I got rid of my hymen. I’d read enough fiction to know that relationships were:

  –well disguised as the best thing ever

  –complicated

  –doomed to failure, most of the time

  –usually comprised of a winner and a loser

  I’d pretty much decided that I could live without them, even before you added the ‘do you love me for me or for my novelty value’ complication. So by the time I was back on my knees in front of the sagas, my head was brim-full of Brunelleschi. I was hardly thinking about Mr Rochester at all.

  I got a little bit obsessive about the books on the list. I like a different sort of challenge. Book enquiries tend to fall into four categories. The first is the misremembered/inaccurate. (‘I’d like a copy of Any Which Way But Loose by William Shakespeare, please.’ ‘Could you mean Much Ado About Nothing?’ ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s a play. Could you look in the drama section?’) The second is the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me. (‘There was a book I read in 1974, or ’75. It was a love story, set in America, I think, or Australia. Do you have it?’) The third is book-request-of-the-week. (‘I heard this programme on Radio 4, and it mentioned a book about Pythagoras, or maybe Prometheus . . .’) And the fourth is the sort of enquiry you can really get your teeth stuck into because it means tracking down something that’s hard to find. We don’t get many of those because people who need something really specific tend to use the internet, and a lot of our specialist stuff is online, so people don’t ring up and ask; they just look at our catalogue and pay online and my role is, basically, bubble-wrapping. So Rob’s list was a bit of a gift.

  I think I felt empty, then. I’d decorated the flat and it was exactly as I wanted it. I had a long-term lease on my home and a job that was just right for me. My life was sorted. I was twenty-two. I liked everything I’d found, or made, and I was comfortable; but I didn’t need to think about another fifty years of the same.

  It was better to think about Florence. I looked up the cathedral on the internet and it’s one of the only times I’ve wondered about getting a passport and going somewhere on a plane.

  CRIME

  1999

  A brassy, jangling clang

  I was nine when it all changed. I came home from school an hour and a half later than usual that Thursday, because of Bugsy Malone, our junior school play. My teacher, who was kind and encouraging most of the time, had started saying, ‘No, No, NO, Year 4,’ and shaking her head, and had arranged an extra rehearsal with what she called ‘the principals’ because, she said, if she could knock us into shape then the rest would follow. I loved performing and I knew all of my lines so I dodged most of the wrath, although I got told off for looking sulky when I should have been looking angry. From the mouths of primary school teachers.

  Mum let me walk to and from school with my friend Emma, who was also in the play, because there were no roads for us to cross. It felt like a huge adventure at the time, although I think the walk was less than two minutes.

  Thursday night meant it was pasta night. I liked spaghetti bolognese and Mum liked the spirally shapes with tuna and peas, so when Dad was away we took it in turns. I liked Thursdays because pasta was quick to make and quick to wash up, so there was extra time for reading, or sometimes Mum would let me come downstairs in my pyjamas and read a book on the sofa, tucked under a blanket, while she watched EastEnders or a cooking programme. And pasta night meant that it was almost the weekend. I liked school but I liked home better, and the weekends were fun, whatever we did. This was going to be one of Dad’s weekends. They were the best kind.

  So I was surprised to get home from school and smell something cooking already. The aroma, rich and thick, was seeping out of the kitchen and waiting in the air around the door. Beef in beer, Dad’s favourite. And Dad’s boots were on the step. They were cracked around the toes, worn and warped and telling me that my suspicions were correct. (I may have been reading mystery stories at the time.) He was home, all right. His boots, which smelled of salt and oil, rubber and leather, lived outside, because my mother said they made the whole house stink. If it looked like rain she put them under a tarpaulin and weighed it down with stones, and he laughed at her and said it was a miracle that he was allowed into the house as he must smell worse than the boots.

  I went in and saw that the big cast-iron pot was out on the stove, a tiny flame under it. I knew I had to be careful with the cooker, and I knew the pot lid was heavy, so I didn’t peek. Not that I needed to. The smell of it was unmistakeable.

  Dad didn’t usually come home on a Thursday – the oil rigs were three weeks on, a week off, changeover on Fridays, and he went to work on a train then a plane then a helicopter, something that made me feel proud. No bus or car for my dad. But there were no other boots like these boots. I looked at the laces, fraying at the end. I loved it when Dad came home. Although Mum and I were happy when it was the two of us, when Dad was back it was as though someone had closed a door that had been standing ajar and letting the wind come in. With Dad home we were complete, contained. I wondered if I might get the day off school tomorrow.

  I heard steps from above and then my mother came down the stairs. Her dark hair, the same brown as mine, was loose, freed from its usual ponytail. She was wearing the jade-green satin dressing gown that Dad and I had chosen for her at Christmas. Her eyes were bright, and she was smiling.

  ‘LJ,’ she said, and she held out her arms. She cuddled me. She would always touch you if she could, my mum, hold your hand or stroke your hair. She was plump and soft, lovely to squeeze. Dad called her ‘butterball’ and now that I was growing, stringy and tall, he said we looked like the dish and the spoon who ran away together. My mother would laugh and he would grab at her, great handfuls of thigh and bum, and say: ‘I could eat you up.’

  Mum said, ‘I thought that sounded like you. Have you worked it out, love?’ She smelled of Dad: cedar and cigarette smoke and a tang of oil that never seemed to go away.

  I thought of how many stories started like this, something unexpected on an ordinary day. I felt a tumble of excitement as I pressed my face into the satin.

  ‘Dad’s home!’ I said, ‘I saw the boots.’ I pulled away and looked up at her, wrinkling my nose, because that’s what we did when we talked about the boots. Mum wrinkled her nose back and we laughed.

 
‘Clever girl,’ she said. ‘He’s asleep so we’ll leave him for a little while. I’m going to have a shower.’

  ‘It’s not the morning,’ I pointed out, ‘and it’s Thursday. Dad doesn’t usually come home on a Thursday. This is an intriguing day.’ I liked collecting words.

  Mum looked at me for a moment, puzzled, and then said, ‘Oh! Yes, it is! But you say it “in-TREE-ging”, LJ, not “in-trig-you-ing”.’

  I said it back to her, ‘In-TREE- ging.’ (Okay, this is a problem with books. But the only one.)

  ‘Lovely!’ Mum smiled, but then her face went serious; I know she was deciding something. ‘Dad’s not going to work on the oil rigs any more,’ she said, ‘so he’ll get a different job. That’s why he’s come home early. I thought we should have beef stew, to cheer him up.’ She smiled again, and touched my hair. ‘When I come down, we’ll make the parkin.’ Mum and I always made that on the afternoons when we knew Dad was coming home, and we’d eat it warm, with cups of tea for them and a glass of milk for me, when he arrived. He said that if he came home blindfolded he could find us by the smell of that cake. Then she was gone, back up the stairs, and I heard the shower running.

  I sat on the step and waited for her. At first I had been excited about Dad coming home early. The prospect of baking was always good. But I also felt upset. I knew what unemployment was, because my friend Lara’s dad was unemployed, and now she got free school meals and her birthday party was at home, instead of at the pottery cafe where she had said it was going to be.

  I had no real grasp of what was coming; I think I was tearful because of the simple confusion brought by the sudden changing of a rule that I didn’t actually know was changeable. If anyone asked me about my dad, I said, ‘He works on the oil rigs,’ because that was the easiest thing to say about him. My weeks were marked by his comings and goings, Fridays the brackets in my little life. Dad’s presence or absence dictated everything: what was on TV, what we ate (we ate more meat when he was home), when we ate it (we ate earlier when he was away), how we spent our time. Dad made the house feel smaller and smell different and I loved him being home, coming in and closing the door. But when he left, to take the train to Leeds airport, then the flight to Aberdeen to get on his helicopter back to work, it was good to be back with just my mother.

  All of these things had brought tears to my eyes. I was crying, quietly, when mum came downstairs again, smelling of shampoo and lemon shower gel, wearing a long, dark pink dress that he liked, feet bare. She used to paint her toenails, then. That day they were raspberry. It was my favourite of her colours and sometimes she did mine in the same shade, at the weekends, and said we were toe-twins. ‘Don’t worry, sweet,’ she said, ‘he’ll find another job. It will all be alright.’

  Wrong on both counts, as it happened.

  *

  When it was just me and Mum on weekends, we used to go to the beach if it was sunny (or just not raining), weaving through the Whitby weekend crowds, my hand always tight in hers. We’d laugh because we knew this place was our place; everyone else had to go back inland, away from the sea, while we got to live within the sound of its crashing and watery burr all the time. Mum would look over the water as though it might disappear if she didn’t keep an eye on it. I didn’t understand that, then. It’s almost tempting to look back and see her storing up those seascapes for the days that were coming. Almost.

  Mum would say, ‘See the sea, LJ!’ and I would say, ‘Yes!’, although I’d never lived anywhere else, and hadn’t yet learned what it was like to be anywhere where you couldn’t easily go and look at the sky touching a flat blue-grey horizon.

  My mother had grown up in Nottingham, and studied there too. She was working in a supermarket after she graduated when she met my dad. She came to Whitby for a university friend’s wedding. Dad was a friend of the groom; he’d not long since left the army and was sleeping in his soon-to-be-married mate’s spare room. So Mum used to come to Whitby to see Dad, on her days off, and they walked beside the sea and that’s where they fell in love. The sea was a part of their story. That, plus the fact that she’d grown up inland, meant that she was always full of happiness when we went to the shore, excited about the size of the sky, and the reach of the water.

  When we went to the beach we added to our collections. I collected shells but I was fussy, only taking the intact ones home, rejecting anything that had broken edges. My favourite thing was to find a pair of egg cockle shells, still joined. Every now and then, after a high tide, they’d lie like small, silent butterflies on the shore. There were hundreds of them, white with curving blue-grey lines along their shell-wings. I’d walk among them looking for the best, tiptoeing sometimes so as to make sure that I didn’t accidentally put my foot on perfection and shatter it.

  Mum collected stones, and her criteria were different to mine. Perfect wasn’t her bag; she liked things that were out of the ordinary, but what interested her wasn’t predictable. Sometimes it was colour, a flash of pink in a black pebble. Sometimes it was smoothness, sometimes shape – points and jags in which she saw faces that I couldn’t make out. Mum said we should only ever take two things home. She said that we had to leave enough for other people with collections, and I never looked beyond that to the tininess of our house, Dad’s complaining that he couldn’t move for clutter. My collection lived in a wooden jewellery box that had belonged to my Grandma Walker – Mum’s mum. It was full of trays and drawers and was perfect for nestling my shoreline finds in. Mum’s stones lived on the bathroom windowsill in a line that she rearranged every time she added another. I still have the jewellery box. I never look at it.

  When we had chosen our two treasures we’d buy chips from the cafe near the stone steps, and sit on the pier or on the beach to eat them, depending on how busy it was, and how windy. I used the chip fork but my mother ate with her fingers. She said she was a tough cookie but sometimes they were so hot that she dropped them back in the polystyrene tray and blew on her fingertips. The smell of hot vinegar made the seagulls circle us but we ignored them. In our last good year, I would practise my lines as we ate, explaining the action as I went along, and although I’m sure my mother must have seen Bugsy Malone, she never let on, paying attention and asking questions and saying my lines back to me, as though she’d just heard the cleverest thing anyone had ever said.

  On the weekends when Dad was home, we’d get into our old Ford estate car and go further. At Robin Hood’s Bay, Dad chased me up sand dunes while my mother stood at the bottom and watched and laughed. On those days we’d have pub lunches and play games that Dad would cheat at. I thought he was joking, but sometimes, half sleeping in the back seat on the drive home, I’d hear them talking, my mother saying, ‘Pat, it wouldn’t actually kill you to lose once in a while, you know. She’s a child.’ And sometimes my dad wouldn’t say anything, and at other times he’d say, firmly, ‘Sarah-Jane, I wasn’t cheating’, and my mother would snort and say, ‘Come off it, even your daughter could see that you were, and she’s only nine. If you were fitter you’d have made sure you beat her to the top of the sand dune, as well.’

  I didn’t mind the cheating; it was part of the fun. Dad was generous with cream teas and comics, so I didn’t mind that he was stricter about bedtimes than Mum was. I’d get into bed and fall asleep in no time at all, listening to the murmur of their voices coming up through the floor.

  So that Thursday when he came home unexpectedly and I cried, I suppose it was because I knew that things were going to change.

  When Dad woke, Mum and I were downstairs. We’d made the parkin and there had been time to do brownies, too. I loved baking with Mum, because she let me do everything, and she never fussed about mess, and if things didn’t look the way they did when Delia Smith baked them, she just laughed and said it looked as though Delia could learn a thing or two from us. I’d already had my beef stew, and was allowed to wait up to see Dad, but Mum had laid the little table in the corner of the living room for two, and put a
candle in a candlestick in the middle, folded red paper napkins into shapes that she said were swans, although they looked more like ducks to me: their necks weren’t long enough for swans. I was lying against Mum, reading my book, and I could hear her stomach rumbling. At the sound of his bear-stretch and his feet hitting the floor above us, she sat up straight and said, ‘Your dad’s had a bit of an accident, love, but it looks worse than it is. These things usually do.’

  His smile was the same, but a tooth was missing. His hug was the same, but he held his face away from mine, a bit, because it was swollen. The way he roared my name, all three parts of it, with exclamation marks (‘Loveday! Jenna! Cardew!’) was exactly the same, and that was what gave me the courage to sit next to him, take a good look. If I couldn’t be an actor or a detective when I grew up, I was considering being a vet. This looked like good practice.

  ‘Smile,’ I said. There was blood crusting around the place where his front tooth used to be. I put my finger in the space, not touching the edges. ‘What happened?’ I felt my voice wobble. His breath smelled terrible; blood and something worse.

  He laughed. ‘You should see the other guy,’ he said.

  My mother said, ‘Pat!’ and sort of laughed, and told me I should be thinking about bed. She went off into the kitchen and I waited for Dad to send me upstairs, but he just sat there and looked at me while I examined him, first by looking and then with tentative touch. His smile looked wrong – it was the missing tooth – and his eyes weren’t right, either, one of them half swollen shut. The black eye, being fairly fresh, I suppose, wasn’t too bad, though over the next two weeks it would become a spectacular thing: indigo-black, his skin shiny and stretched to almost-bursting. It shifted and faded to purple, blue and then, worst of all, a bilious green-yellow. I tried to draw it but a nine-year-old’s pencil case doesn’t really have that palette. My dad laughed at the drawing when I showed him but it had disappeared when I looked for it the next morning.