‘Ah, my little straywaif returns,’ Archie said, and wrapped me in a hug.
‘Hey,’ I said, and tried to sidle away.
I wasn’t quick enough to avoid the inevitable: ‘Straywaif?’ Kate asked, looking at me with a half smile.
Archie’s laughter followed me as I walked away. I didn’t need to listen, I knew the script.
‘I met her when she was fifteen. She came in with a school trip from Ripon and thought she could walk out with Possession without me noticing. I was standing outside smoking my pipe, so I collared her. Told her she could come with me to the police station or she could work for me for the afternoon. I kept an eye on her,’ pause for laughter, ‘and I told her she could come back and work, for money and books, if she so desired. Now,’ he did a sort of flourish, ‘ta-daa! Here she is, honest as the day is long. That, my friends, is the power of literature for you.’
More laughter, a murmur of approbation that I knew wouldn’t stop Book Group from keeping an eye on their handbags the next time they saw me. I got busy among the maps and the poetry books and cringed.
There were times when I heard the story and wanted to go out and give my version: I was on a school trip, an end-of-term no-agenda jolly, and I’d decided to go because the alternative was to stay in school with the kids who had been banned from going and weren’t exactly going to give me an easy time of it.
I had set off to York, planning to buy more books, but my purse was nicked out of my bag on the bus. One of the girls who usually snubbed me had sat next to me, briefly, asking about homework. Her friend had slid into the seat behind and, presumably, taken my money then. When I realised I was half furious, half relieved that they hadn’t taken anything else. Being hungry is one thing. Being ritually humiliated by the sharing of the loneliest bits of your diary is something else.
Possession was my obsession at the time. There wasn’t a copy in the school library and I’d been barred from taking it out of the public library again because there was a waiting list. I could live without the other things I wanted to buy – it’s not like having a new jumper would make me any more popular in the sixth form – but I needed a copy of that. Once my purse was gone I had a pound in my pocket. The book was two pounds. I left my pound on the table as I went. So I’m not saying what I did was okay, but there were extenuating circumstances. Archie leaves that bit out. To be fair to him, he also tends to leave out the bit about how after he’d torn me off a strip and put me to work, he brought me tea and a tuna sandwich and I did the full Oliver Twist, eating mine and then asking if he was going to finish his. I wasn’t constantly starving. But I hadn’t had any lunch because I didn’t have any money.
The boxes of books he’d left for me to sort through were taller than me. Ben had brought some of the boxes and others had been left on the step.
Most of the books in the boxes were rubbish, straight for the recycling. We don’t tell people that we get rid of excess books that way – even though they might ditch books, they wouldn’t put them in the bin and they don’t like to think that we do. But think about it. Five million paperback copies of The Da Vinci Code were published in 2003. How many of them does the world still need fifteen years later? A lot less than five million. The same goes for pretty much every book that’s been massive: Who Moved My Cheese?, Eat Pray Love, anything with a vampire. There’s an eternal surfeit of the things unless someone somewhere is taking them out of circulation when they get the chance. One of those someones is me. You should be thanking me. And yes, it does break my heart a little bit, even if it is James Patterson.
In among the once-bestsellers, though, one book caught my eye, partly because it was a bit different to the books it was boxed with, but also because we had had it at home. It had been my dad’s when he was a kid; it’s a really odd thing for a 1970s child to have owned. It’s a collection of rhymes for children called Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose and it’s all 1880s-style illustrations and references to petticoats and spinning. But he’d been attached enough to it to put it in the single suitcase of things he brought from his parents’ house in Cornwall after they died.
I turned it over in my hands. Photographs I’d seen of my father as a boy suggested that he was a grubby, tree-climbing little urchin. I was amused by the idea of him opening up this book and reading ‘Little Miss Muffet’ to himself. And then, in the next second, I wanted to cry.
I suppose I was still in that not-quite-better place where everything gets to you. I was thinking about how I didn’t have anyone to ask how, exactly, a copy of this book had come to belong to my dad. Who had bought it? Why had he kept it? I checked and saw that it was a 1978 American reprint of an 1881 original. I would have thought it would have been bought by adults who were Kate Greenaway fans, or older people who remembered it from their childhoods and wanted to show it to their own grandchildren. So there was no obvious reason for my dad, who had no American relatives that I knew of, to have been given it.
When your family explodes (implodes?) it’s the big stuff that hurts, for a while, like the impact of a slap, but that fades, quite quickly, because you have to get used to it, and the way to get used to it is, basically, not to think about it. It’s the little things like this that get you, forever as far as I can tell.
I turned the pages, carefully – they weren’t brittle, but soft, almost bruisable, and they felt as though they could have come off in my fingers, like petals tugged from a daisy. I suppose it’s the fact that these small memories come from the kind of tiny reminders that you simply can’t predict, and so can’t protect yourself from, and they catch you, paper cuts across the heart.
I don’t know whether Archie noticed that I was having a hard time with this particular book as I sat at the breakfast bar. I’m always amazed by what he can tell from the back of people’s heads: he can look at someone who’s browsing and predict with about ninety per cent accuracy both whether they are going to buy and whether they are going to try to haggle if they do. He claims he learned to read body language when he ‘got in with some grifters’ in London in the seventies.
Anyway, he appeared at my elbow. ‘Hot chocolate,’ he said. When I get drinks from next door they come in take-out cups. When Archie goes into the cafe he comes out with their best china. ‘Take a break, Loveday. I don’t want to see you for half an hour.’
Although I was, in principle, annoyed with him for (a) assuming that I wanted a hot chocolate (b) making me take a break as though he knew better than me what I needed, I still went and sat in the chair in front of the fire exit and watched the cream melt and the marshmallows float on top of the milky-brown chocolate. I fished out the marshmallows, sucked the outsides off them where they had been softened by the heat, and then dropped them back in, to melt some more. I was on my own – obviously. I wouldn’t have done it in company. I drank the chocolate, washed my hands, and took a good look through Mother Goose.
I turned to ‘Jumping Joan’ and ran my hand across the page. ‘Here am I, little jumping Joan, when nobody’s with me, I’m always alone’. She was suspended in mid-air, dress ribbons flying, eyes closed. There was a mark on the corner of the page, a smudge of a thumbprint. My mum was always telling my dad off for leaving dirty fingerprints around the place. ‘Well, you check the oil in the car then,’ he used to say, at least before everything they said to each other was the start of a competition to see who could take most offence, most quickly.
That thumbprint had to be a coincidence. I didn’t think about where my dad’s book might have been for the last twenty years, because there’s danger in trying to make everything fit with the story that you want to tell. (Nathan’s poem flashed into my mind, again.) You only need to look at Jane Austen’s Emma to see that – she decides what’s going on around her and arranges the facts in her head to suit, and look at what happens. Well, she lives happily ever after in the end, yes, but only after a nineteenth-century equivalent of having her head flushed down the toilet. And our book – mine and my dad’s – s
till had a dust jacket, even if it was in a fairly crappy state, and that was where he’d written his name, and I’d written mine underneath, on the inside of the front flap.
I remembered how much I’d liked my dad’s copy of this book, as a girl. I could read it, easily, from when I was quite small. There are about sixteen words to a page and I liked spelling out the ones I didn’t recognise – tuffet, latch, swine – and asking Mum or Dad what they meant. And, oh, the pictures. Nobody was too pretty, too happy. The girls looked pinched and the dogs looked as though they would bite you. It was like no other book that I’d seen. My mother didn’t like it – ‘I don’t know how that doesn’t give you nightmares’, she would say – and no matter how often I took it to my bedroom, it would always end up back on the shelf downstairs. My dad said she was being soft. ‘We’re not soft, are we, kiddo?’, he would ask, and I would shake my head, solemnly, because I knew from other things he said that being soft was bad. He would read the book with me, growling and exaggerating, ‘We’re all jolly boys, and we’re coming with a noise’ and I would laugh.
I wondered about taking the book as part of my allowance, but I decided against it. When I held it I was back on my father’s lap, back in our little house, my mother laugh-tutting, me giggling, my dad’s voice coming at me not just through my ears but through the front of his big chest and vibrating the tines of my ribs. And although that was sort of nice, it was also sort of unbearable, and I can do without that.
I don’t know whether it was having been more isolated than usual because of the cold, or the way looking at the book made me feel, but I was actually looking forward to poetry night. I’d been living in my own head too much, and the books I’d been reading – Heart of Darkness, The Colour Purple – were basically trapping me in other people’s heads. So I didn’t debate with myself about going along, I just did it. If I was a chimney sweep I would have been whistling as I locked up the shop. It was the first evening I’d felt properly like myself in ages, despite Mother Goose and her funny sour-faced minions shaking me up.
Rob accompanied me, uninvited, to poetry night again, popping out from the cafe doorway as if by magic just as I came out from around the back of the shop with my bike. I hadn’t seen much of him since I got back from being ill, or given him a thought, really, so I jumped when he appeared, and he laughed, which annoyed me, so instead of ignoring him, I said, ‘You shouldn’t have let my tyre down, Rob. That was a really mean thing to do.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Loveday,’ he said. Too fast.
‘We both know that you do, Rob,’ I said. I looked him in the face, something I don’t often do with anyone. Those brown eyes. He blinked first. ‘Are you looking after yourself properly?’
He snorted. ‘I’m not about to start losing it with people, if that’s what you mean.’
I felt myself go cold, even though it was a warm evening, and I started walking. ‘I didn’t say you were,’ I said. I just meant . . .’ I gave up. I’m no good at kindness.
He was quiet for a bit, and then he said, ‘I’m alright. I had an . . . episode . . . over Christmas but I’m better now. I have help and I know when to ask for it.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘And you and Melodie?’
‘It’s not really serious,’ he said. I realised he might interpret that as me giving a damn – all this is so bloody complicated – so I said, ‘I don’t really like it when you put flowers through the door.’
‘Okay,’ he said. I was going to ask whether that was ‘Okay, I won’t do it any more’ or ‘Okay, but I don’t care and I’ll keep doing it.’ Or even ‘I’ll stop it with the flowers and do something else, which you will also dislike, because whether you dislike it or not is not really the point’.
We walked on in silence.
It was just before 7.30 when we reached the George and Dragon and I was chaining up my bike when Nathan appeared in the doorway.
‘Feeling better, Loveday?’ he asked.
‘It was only a cold,’ I said. Nathan nodded, smiled. He has a good smile – it looks as though he means it, even if he does over-use it a bit. I couldn’t help but smile back. Rob had stopped with me. He looked between us.
‘What’s this thing you’re going to, Loveday?’ he said.
I thought, look at me. Two men in a stand-off over my evening plans. One has some fairly serious mental health issues and lectures in Early Renaissance Studies and the other one’s wearing a cravat. You couldn’t make it up.
‘It’s a poetry night,’ I said. ‘Melodie sometimes comes.’
‘I saved you a seat,’ Nathan said. He looked at me, then Rob, and got a funny look in his eye. I suppose Nathan clocked that all of my body language was telling Rob he wasn’t wanted. Which was more than Rob could see, obviously.
Either that or he saw an opportunity for showing off. He stuck out his hand to shake Rob’s hand. ‘Nathan Avebury,’ he said. ‘Will you be joining Loveday and me?’ Then he put his other hand, very lightly, on the small of my back – it made me wonder if men went to finishing school. It was a genius move.
Rob took a step back and shook his head.
‘Don’t touch my bike,’ I said.
Nathan and I walked up the steps and into the pub. Rob hadn’t moved. He was looking from Nathan to the chocolate coin in his hand.
‘Thanks,’ I said to Nathan when we stood at the bar. ‘You didn’t have to.’
‘I know,’ he said. Then, ‘My sister’s beautiful too, and she gets a lot of hassle. I’ve seen it for years. I just like to help out when I can.’
I think I must have imagined the ‘too’. Nathan ordered a pint of Guinness and a gimlet. When the barman brought them I handed Nathan a fiver and said, ‘That’s for mine, thanks.’
He said, ‘Why don’t you get drinks after the first half, then we’ll be quits.’
Nathan was fourth again, which I thought was a shame. I thought about my poems and wondered what would happen to them here, if I said them out loud. Miss Buckley used to talk about the oral tradition – not in so many words (haha!), but she’d say, ‘Remember, in the olden days, before people could read and write, we used to tell each other stories, and remember them. If you write a story you should read it out, to see how it sounds.’ I never forgot that; I used to whisper my English homework to myself, under my breath, if the library was quiet.
Words do sound different in the air. One time a teacher read something I’d written out to the class. It was a description of the sea and the way it’s always the same but never the same. Hearing my words aloud made me feel proud, exposed. I loved school plays, at least until being looked at started to have other implications, and meant whispers and rumours. So, up to and including my critically acclaimed (by my parents) performance as Blousey Brown in Bugsy Malone. But other people’s words are safe and easy. Speaking what you’ve written is something else: your own words can eviscerate you as they come out.
My favourite poem that night, apart from Nathan’s, was one about how complicated it is to choose wine in a supermarket.
Melodie came to sit with us during the break: ‘Archie tell me you still sick, Loveday, but here you be, with handsome Nathan.’ I was tempted to ask her why Rob wasn’t with her, but I don’t gossip.
I think it was the prospect of escaping Melodie that made Nathan come down with me when I left. Or maybe because I’d told him about Rob and the tyre. Anyway, my bike was fine, and we stood on the pavement, talking, while the other poetry fans had another drink, and couples full of conversations about their evenings wended past.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you where you’re from,’ he said. ‘You sound like Yorkshire, but not exactly York.’
I went with the letter of the question, rather the spirit. ‘I’m only about twenty minutes from the shop,’ I said. ‘It’s a newish development. It’s nice.’
Nathan smiled, gently, as though he knew I was trying to dodge the question, as though I was flirting. ‘And where are you
from?’
‘Ripon,’ I said, which was not untrue.
‘I grew up in Bridlington,’ Nathan said.
I tried to think of something to say about Bridlington. I’d never been there. ‘It’s on the coast, right?’
That smile again. ‘Yes. I miss being beside the sea. I miss it. Even the North Sea.’ His voice filled with laughter. ‘When we were kids we used to go to Cornwall. My parents had a friend who lived there. It was the first time I’d realised that you could actually play in the sea.’
I didn’t want to talk about Cornwall. ‘You should have got a better result tonight,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said, and his smile changed, from something soft to something showy. If I was one of those people who gave away touches, I’d have play-punched him on the arm as a way of saying, ‘Don’t be an arse’.
‘Are you always this sure of yourself?’
He looked at me then and his face changed back, from the public version to the one I saw when it felt as though we were the only people that there were. ‘Not everyone pays attention, like you,’ he said, ‘and because I’ve been around for a while, I’m like part of the furniture. People know my schtick.’ He didn’t say it the way Rob would say it, self-pitying; he just stated a fact.
We were looking at each other. We weren’t stopping. It was turning into gazing. I don’t gaze.
‘Well, I’m going to head home,’ I said. It was a cold sort of relief to look away from his face.
‘It was great to see you, Loveday,’ he said. He put his hand on my shoulder and then he kissed me on the cheek, very gently. It wasn’t passionate but it was pretty sexy. If I’d been in the market for a boyfriend I might have liked it. I unlocked my bike.
‘Where have you put the chocolate coin?’ I said.
He laughed. ‘I only do that the first time I meet someone,’ he said. ‘It gets old. I make an exception for the under-tens.’
*
The next Tuesday night, Book Group got quite emotional. They were reading After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell, though they didn’t really have a proper discussion about it, just said whether they’d liked it (five to two in favour, six to two if you count me). Sue, the divorced one, has taken a lover. The rest of them are agog, and jealous. I can only see trouble, especially as the divorce isn’t finalised yet.
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