Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  Izzy spilled a glass of red wine all over the carpet. They were all really apologetic about it. I told them it didn’t matter and when they’d gone I nipped to the corner shop a couple of streets away and bought two drums of salt, one to pour over the wine and one to keep in the back for the next time.

  ‘Morning, Loveday,’ Archie said when I came in at eleven the next day, and then he charged out of the door. His pipe was already primed and ready to go. I soon saw why he was in such a hurry. I’d left a note asking him to hoover up the salt when he got in, but of course he didn’t. When he came back from his smoke and stroll around the neighbourhood, having bought a bottle of port and a bag of Chinese pears, he claimed not to have seen the note. I’d taped it to the till, and I’d left the hoover out, so he must have climbed over it to hang up his coat, but Archie’s Archie.

  So, there was the pile of salt under the table, which had got scuffed and kicked around all over the place, and I was quite pissed off by the time I’d got it all cleaned up. When lunchtime came, I ate my cereal and banana and I hadn’t done a single book-related thing except show someone where the cookery books were and tried not to glaze over (haha! Archie joke!) while listening to a no-pause-for-breath monologue about the evils of wheat. Or maybe sugar. Okay, I wasn’t listening.

  After lunch I told Archie to disturb me at his peril and I went to the breakfast bar to do some valuations. He bowed and smiled, and brought me tea and a jam doughnut an hour later. Doughnuts are the natural enemy of the book – even if you don’t squirt the jam on the pages, you end up with sugar everywhere but I appreciated the implied apology.

  Post-doughnut I went through two boxes of sheet music – nothing rare but everything well kept. A lot of people ask for sheet music and I like selling it. I think I like the thought of houses with pianos in them; they feel like the sort of places where things don’t really go wrong. Sorting it cheered me up a bit, anyway. I was wondering about a music tattoo but I couldn’t think of the opening of any piece of music that I could live with forever. Whereas first lines of books are a different matter. I don’t regret any of mine, not even Jane Eyre and The Railway Children on my shoulder blades, which hurt like hell. The first one (Anna Karenina) seems predictable, now. But when I was seventeen and had only just discovered Russian literature I felt as though Tolstoy was speaking to my soul with: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. So I had it inked on my hip. The font is delicate and fine. And yes, it will go saggy with my skin one day, but I really don’t care.

  As I sorted I recited some of my poems to myself, in my head. Poetry night was making me think about them in a different way, as things that might belong out in the air, instead of written and re-written on a page until my careful handwriting and consideration of every syllable had made them stiff as boards. One Sunday evening, when I’d been thinking about Nathan, I got the whole lot out, from my late teens to now, and read them all aloud. Some of them were awful. But the more recent ones aren’t so bad. I started working on another one, and before I knew it it was gone midnight and I still hadn’t eaten my reduced-to-clear microwave tuna pasta thing. I almost texted Nathan to say hello, but it was too late and, anyway, it’s not like I’m his girlfriend or anything. He’ll have a girlfriend called Trixie or McKenna, who uses pure essential oil instead of perfume and also has a magician-type non-job, like making hats or dressing up as a princess for children’s parties.

  This is why I try to go to bed before midnight. I get ratty and stupid if I don’t.

  I skipped the next poetry night. It’s not like I’m legally obliged to go. Whenever I thought about the first poem I heard Nathan perform, and whether I could tell a different story about myself – although it’s a moot point because I don’t really talk about myself anyway – I felt antsy and I didn’t like it.

  I next saw Nathan when he came into the shop the following Wednesday. I realised I didn’t know where he lived, but I was starting to assume it was out of town somewhere, between York and Bridlington, maybe, as he usually tipped up on poetry-slam day, which would suggest that he wasn’t exactly around the corner. I always meant to ask when I saw him, but we ended up talking about other things: poetry and York, Archie and magic. And if I asked him where he lived we might get a bit more autobiographical than I wanted to.

  Nathan’s summer coat is khaki canvas and smells of outdoor things, as though it’s been stored in a hay bale over winter. It’s a good smell. It’s not a bad coat, though I like the leather one better. Today he stood and talked to Archie for about twenty minutes. They started on York and wandered into politics, global warming, theatre and football. I liked listening to them. It’s not often that Archie has much of a conversation: it’s usually a performance with an audience of one or two. Here’s how it ended:

  Archie:

  Well, my good man, you didn’t come in here to talk to old Archie.

  Nathan:

  It’s always good to see you.

  Archie:

  Too kind, too kind. Nevertheless, you’ll find Loveday doing some valuations, at the breakfast bar.

  Nathan:

  Thank you.

  Archie’s assumption that Nathan was here to see me made me feel mildly flattered, and slightly annoyed, and I wasn’t doing valuations, anyway, I was reshelving the show-business biography and autobiography sections into one, because people don’t necessarily differentiate; they just want ‘that book about David Beckham/Michael Caine/thingy from Coronation Street’. I reckoned that combining the two would buy me a shelf of space, which I was going to need because Ben had just brought in two boxes of nice first editions of actor biographies from the seventies. I heard Nathan walk to where he thought I was, stop, pause. I decided that if he went back to Archie to report my absence and ask where else I might be, I would never go to poetry night again. I’m not a wayward chicken who isn’t where you left her and I can’t be arsed with people with no initiative. I found that I was holding my breath.

  He must have stood there for a minute, and then I heard his footsteps again – the shop doubles as a museum of squeaky floorboards – and he came straight to where I was.

  ‘Hello, Ripon Girl,’ he said. ‘I saw the books on the bench and I figured you’d be making space for them. I was hoping you would come to poetry night tonight.’

  I went.

  On the Buses

  As performed by Nathan Avebury at the George and Dragon York, April 2016

  I’ve only ever lost one thing on a bus.

  Well, getting off a bus.

  It was a book.

  I know, I’m a terrible person.

  Since then I’ve been watching for the things that get left on buses.

  I think pockets have a lot to do with it.

  Things slip out and down into nooks of cushion-joins, onto the floor, without making a loud enough sound of falling to be missed.

  Pound coins.

  I bet if you turned all the buses in York upside down and shook them, you’d have enough loose change to pay a nurse’s salary.

  Bus passes.

  Obviously.

  I suppose they could find their way home if anyone bothered to look the owner up.

  I wonder if they do.

  Cinema tickets.

  There’s a well-planned first date up in smoke.

  House keys.

  Here’s hoping you’re on good terms with your neighbours, and they have a spare set.

  And then there are the bigger things, that in a moment of panic or tiredness or my-stop-alreadyness get forgotten.

  Today, a Debenhams bag with a pair of satin pyjamas inside, silver-grey, size 14.

  Maybe leaving that behind has ruined someone’s evening.

  Or maybe it’s changed it.

  Changing and ruining are not the same.

  Without the pyjamas someone might be lying between a cotton sheet and their lover’s skin.

  Nakedness might be better.

  Next time you leave
something behind, you might have just begun a whole new adventure.

  HISTORY

  2013

  slightly crooked

  The second time I saw Rob it was three weeks after he first dropped off his list of books and his hair was long enough for him to need to brush it out of his eyes. I’d put aside an exhibition catalogue I’d found with a few more of the books from his list. As he looked through them I watched his face. He looked down at the titles and up at me, and his eyes were wide and bright.

  ‘Quick work,’ he said, ‘thank you,’ and he smiled.

  Already his eyes were drawing back down to the books. I don’t think I fancied him. Maybe a bit. I’m not much of a fancier, more of a take-it-or-leave-it sort of a girl. But I did like that he liked books. I think I quite fancied that. I was still young enough to think/hope that love of books equalled fundamental decency. Librarians had always been good to me.

  ‘There’s something else,’ I said, ‘but it wasn’t on your list.’

  The book I had found was a vanity-printed travel diary from the 1890s. I only remembered it because the author was called Florence and so I’d been amused by the fact that she’d gone to Florence, and written about it (‘Florence’s Italy’), and wondered whether there was a special sort of nominative determinism in people with place names that compelled them to be interested in the places they were named after.

  Florence Bicknell’s prose was florid at best, and she didn’t feel the need to be constrained by anything as helpful as chapters or even topic. I realised, after hopping from art gallery to Roman ruin to country walk and then back to another gallery, that she had probably just written about things in the order in which she had seen them. If she had a motto, it was ‘more is more’, and she recorded everything, from what she was wearing to the possible character of waitresses and guides. She obviously prided herself in being Interested with a capital I. So it took me another week to plough through the book and find the section I was looking for. It wasn’t a huge book, but the print quality was poor, and the style meant that a little went a long way, like Joyce.

  I had marked the page with a slip of paper, and a couple of other places where there were things that might be relevant.

  ‘Something else?’ Rob said, and he grinned, and rubbed his hands together, like a hungry man in a cartoon. And then I remembered that he was working towards a PhD and I’d left school after my A Levels, and I hadn’t even known Renaissance Engineering was a thing until three weeks previously. I was clever enough for university – in fact, it was talked about, by teachers and Annabel and social workers. But it meant three more years of being in the system, three more years of being unable to start the only real life I could have – one where I would be totally self-reliant. Plus, even if I had a degree I’d probably still want to work in a bookshop.

  I looked at Rob’s face and realised the longer I left it the more he was going to think I’d found something really spectacular, like a lost notebook from Brunelleschi with a letter from Leonardo da Vinci inside, as though we were actually characters in Possession. So I held out the book and said, quickly, ‘It’s probably nothing. It wasn’t on your list. I don’t know anything about this really. I just thought – this is from a short-run of a vanity press – there’s quite a detailed description, and the author went to some lectures about Florentine architecture – that’s all—’

  Rob was already looking through the pages I’d marked. He looked up at me and grinned. ‘Have you ever considered a career in research?’ he asked. ‘You could teach some of the people I work with a thing or two.’

  ‘Loveday already has a job, and she isn’t looking to go anywhere,’ Archie’s voice came from behind a shelf-stack. He had said he was going to do some sorting out but from the lack of noise I’d assumed he was napping.

  Rob pixie-laughed, a little nervously. ‘I wasn’t trying to poach her, Archie,’ he said. And then, to me, ‘Thanks. Really. This is – thanks.’

  ‘It’s half an hour until we close,’ I said, ‘if you want to see if they are going to be any good to you.’

  ‘Right.’ He sat at the table and I went back to the breakfast bar and sorted what I’d done that afternoon. There was a first edition of Ulysses and a signed copy of Midnight’s Children to go on the website, a box of overs, and another three boxes ready for my attention in the morning. I did the website update and put the overs box at the bottom of the stairs. When I went back to the front of the shop Rob was standing at the desk, talking to Archie. They both turned to me as I approached.

  ‘. . . really helpful,’ Rob was saying. He was holding the travel journal. Archie, cool as a cucumber, was ringing up forty-five pounds for it on the till, bringing Rob’s total to £60. Archie’s a great believer in market forces. He says that if there’s a book that no one is likely to want, you may as well price it high because if the person who does want it finds it, they won’t care about what it costs. Even so, I made a mental note to tell him off about taking the mickey, at the same time as I asked him not to talk about me in the third person when I was actually three feet away and he was butting into my conversation.

  ‘Rob’s just saying what an outstanding job you did, Loveday.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. Rob handed over sixty pounds. I shook my head at Archie. I knew what he’d say: ‘supply and demand dictates the price’. True up to a point, I argued, in that if you ran a restaurant of course you would charge more for the rare things. But you wouldn’t up the price of a fishcake depending on how hungry people were.

  ‘Would you like to come and have a drink with me?’ Rob asked.

  I assumed he was talking to Archie, who has the knack of making you feel as though you’re his best friend, and really special, and so people always want to spend time with him. To begin with I thought it was an act but I soon realised that it’s how he really is. He’s interested in people, and they pick that up, whereas from me they pick up that I, generally, couldn’t give a toss.

  I’d probably been working at the bookshop for a year before I realised that Archie was bothered about me. I think it was when I was going to miss the bus – he’d asked me to check over the first editions in the locked cabinet behind the desk, and I was so absorbed that I forgot the time – and he insisted on driving me home, even though it was way out of his way, and when I got out of the car, he said, ‘You’re a real asset to me, Loveday. I hope you know that,’ in a serious, quiet way that made me feel as safe as if I was pressed in the pages of an encyclopaedia.

  But Rob was talking to me, not Archie. I was trying to think of how to say ‘no’ to the drink without sounding too rude when he said, ‘I’d love to know more about these books, and how you came to think of them,’ and because that was exactly what I wanted to explain, I said yes.

  ‘Off you go, then,’ Archie said. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ and I laughed because I couldn’t think of a single thing Archie wouldn’t do, at least once. I went to get my coat and he followed me out to the back and gave me the three twenty-pound notes that Rob had just given him. ‘You earned these,’ he said.

  ‘You’re right, I did,’ I said, but I smiled too, because I appreciated the gesture, and the fact that I had money in my pocket. I could pay my way tonight, and save the rest.

  When I went back out to the shop to meet Rob, he said, ‘I don’t want to take up your whole evening if you have plans, but shall we go and have something to eat?’ He looked really nervous – he kept pushing his hair out of his eyes – so I smiled and said that would be lovely. Two breakfasts don’t sustain you very far beyond 6 p.m., and I didn’t want to drink on an empty stomach.

  We went to an Italian place and we both had meatballs, which were hot and spicy, with parmesan grated over them at the table by a waitress who looked as though she had many better things to be doing this evening.

  Rob started with, ‘Tell me about you, Loveday.’

  I had to take avoiding action. ‘I work in a bookshop, as you may have noticed,
’ I said, and I smiled, and so did he, spaghetti between his teeth. ‘I started there part-time when I was fifteen. I really like it, most days. Tell me about you.’

  ‘When I was fifteen,’ Rob said, ‘I was desperate to get a job, but my brother and I lived with my grandmother and she was really strict about homework. I would have loved to have worked in a bookshop.’

  ‘You lived with your grandmother?’ I said, and I could have bitten off my tongue, because I of all people should know not to pry. But he seemed happy to talk. And, though I had had what could be conservatively described as a crappy start in life, his wasn’t great either. He and his brother had been brought up by his grandmother after his parents got on the wrong end of the Manchester bombings when he was seven. His grandmother died when he was nineteen; he wasn’t in touch with his brother any more. He said he’d been ‘ill’ quite a lot. I didn’t ask questions about that; he could tell me more if he wanted to, but I kind of hoped he wouldn’t. He’d worked his way through sixth form and university with evening and part-time jobs, one of which was reshelving books in the university library, which he described as ‘sneaky research time’. I laughed and told him about Archie finding me reading Annie Proulx when I was supposed to be tidying up, and letting me get away with it.

  Rob had managed to get grants and juggle things so that he could keep studying; even so, his first degree had taken him six years. I felt bad about the money Archie had just taken off him and tried to pay for dinner for both of us but he refused. In the end we split the bill, because I wasn’t going to be paid for, which had nothing to do with my earnings on the books.

  It was after ten when we left and although I wouldn’t let him walk me home I did say I would go over to his place for dinner on the Saturday night. He typed his address into my phone, asked me if I liked fish (yes, as long as it doesn’t still have the head on), and attempted to kiss me, which I saw coming from far enough away to sidestep without looking like I was avoiding him. I like to think about these things.