Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  The dust jacket was torn across the front, for a start. The tear made a jagged line from top left to mid-right, like a cartoon graph of a business making a loss, and it had been inexpertly repaired with Sellotape, short pieces criss-crossing the rip and then a long strip across the top. When I picked it up it was that feeling again, the one I’d had with the Penguin Classics and the Kate Greenaway. I’d assumed they had been chances, coincidences, because what are the odds, really, of those books ending up in my hands?

  But now, the past reared up in front of me as though it was going to attack. It was all I could do not to drop the book and run, the way I would if it had just burst into flames.

  I closed my eyes, took some deep breaths, and told myself I was being ridiculous.

  It couldn’t be ours. It couldn’t be.

  When I opened my eyes again I made sure all I was seeing was one of the bestselling cookery books of all time, which of course my mother had, because almost every other household in the country had one. I looked through the pages and remembered. There was the squidgy chocolate log that we loved, my mother laughing and sometimes doing her version of swearing (‘Oh, flipping Nora’) as she tried to roll it up without the sponge cracking. She never managed it. As soon as I was old enough to read the recipe I pointed out that Delia said it would crack, but that wasn’t good enough for my mother: ‘I wanted it to be perfect this time, LJ.’

  Then there was the pan-fried pizza that we sometimes had at weekends, though without the olives and anchovies. I suppose it was an odd thing but, to me, it’s still what a pizza tastes like, and you can keep your authentic sourdough hand-stretched wood-fired numbers. Whoever had owned this book had liked that recipe too; the corners of the pages were stuck together with what looked like tomato purée.

  As I flicked through I could almost taste the Whitby sea again, the kitchen door open to let the heat out, the smell of the beach blowing in with the cooler air. Whoever had owned this book had liked the things we liked. The pages fell open at the scones, the pork chops with sage and apple, the brownies and the parkin.

  I looked for the lemon meringue pie, because I remembered how much I liked helping to make it – there was a lot of ‘doing’, with the pastry then the filling then the meringue, and when we ate it, usually on a special occasion, I could never quite believe how lovely it was. Archie’s birthday was coming. He was impossible to buy for because he had everything he wanted, except for things I couldn’t afford, like crazy-expensive cigars and unpronounceable wine. But if I made him something, he’d know I appreciated him, without me having to say so. I hate saying stuff. That’s why I like poetry, I think. Minimum words. You can’t argue with a poem. And it’s rude to interrupt it.

  It was easy to find the lemon meringue pie page because it was already marked. There was a postcard of Whitby in it: a photograph of the crags, taken along from the place where we used to sit on the beach on a warm summer day, although I always thought the crags looked best when it was raining and the skies were grey. They sort of shone, and at the same time they were sinister. I felt as though they were on my side. I looked at the postcard and I swear my heart actually skipped a beat, which I’d always thought was a stupid phrase. I felt it move in my chest, though, up and back for a second, before it went back to doing its usual thing.

  I turned the postcard over.

  Four words: ‘Wish you were here’, written in a black ink faded to French navy where the strokes were less forceful. A wonky heart drawn around them.

  If my heart had skipped before, it bounced this time.

  Or maybe dropped down dead.

  It just wasn’t there. Neither was the air that had been in my lungs. My eyes still worked and they saw that my hands were shaking.

  My mother’s writing.

  It was plump, like her, all curves, most of the letters almost as broad as they were tall. I’d know it anywhere. On birthday cards, she always drew a heart around my name, and ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’. I’m not saying she had the copyright on that particular flourish, I’m saying that when I added it up – the postcard, the handwriting, the book . . .

  It was her book. Our book.

  Just to make sure – my lungs had started working again, except they’d turned up the volume, so I could hardly hear the shop noise for the sound of air heaving in and out of me – I went to the front of the book and started to leaf through the pages.

  Our kitchen was small and when Mum and I baked we laid the book flat on the table and put the ingredients around and, invariably, over it; Dad used to joke that if he liked what we’d made and fancied a bit more he could go and lick the recipe page. So we had left an evidence trail of everything we’d baked. And the evidence was here, in front of me, now.

  ‘My mother has that book,’ said Nathan, from behind me. I jumped, and wobbled on the stool. ‘Hey, steady.’ He put his hands on either side of my waist, left them there, stood behind me, his nose in my hair, his lips on the back of my neck. He’s very touchy, is Nathan, but not in an annoying way. He puts his hands on you and leaves them there. He doesn’t stroke or pinch or ruffle you. I like that. I’m not a chihuahua.

  ‘Mine too,’ I said. My voice sounded odd, as though it had got wrapped up in a cough on the way out of my mouth.

  I was trying to add everything up, when I hadn’t even realised it was a sum. The Penguin Classics. The Kate Greenaway. Now this. It couldn’t be coincidence – but if it wasn’t coincidence, what was it?

  My breath was coming fast. I felt Nathan feel it. He held a little tighter.

  ‘Hey, Ripon Girl,’ he said, ‘you need a little doorbell, or something, so people can warn you that they’re here. I always make you jump.’

  I just couldn’t think of anything to say. I was worried if I opened my mouth again the whole thing would blurt out, and everything I’d worked so hard to get away from would chase me down.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he asked. He was wearing his full magician monty: frock-coat, winkle-picker shoes, smart black trousers and lurid pink-and-green socks underneath – they weren’t visible unless he wanted them to be, but they made a flash of colour when he squatted or stretched and, I supposed, distracted people in the way his wrongly laced Doc Martens did. He was carrying a leather satchel and the night before he’d taken me through everything that was in it, showing me the tricks he was going to do. Even though I knew they were tricks, I still had no idea how he did most of them. It was frustrating and a little bit sexy. It had been a good night.

  My mother would put postcards in my father’s holdall when he went off to work on the oil rigs. I would draw pictures or write notes, and the two of us would tuck our missives into his bag, between the clothes that smelled of cold, hard work, and we would laugh as we thought about how surprised he would be when he found them. Which he wouldn’t have been, of course – he’d have been more surprised if we hadn’t bothered – but that never occurred to me. When he came home he would stick the postcards on the fridge, but I never saw the notes I’d written him again – not then, anyway, although they came back to me later when the house was cleared.

  I looked back to the book, my mother’s writing on the postcard. I felt as though my whole body was filled with tar. Just the thought of moving made me want to cry, and I don’t really cry any more. The thought of going to a party and watching Nathan pull chocolate coins out from behind little kids’ ears made the tar solidify.

  And, suddenly, I was frightened.

  Who could know about me? Who was watching? It was too much of a coincidence for my mother’s book to end up here in my hands – the hands with the same shaped nail-beds as hers – without someone having deliberately made a connection, wasn’t it? I’d assumed all of these momentoes had been lost when everything went wrong. I was afraid to move, or even look around, like someone from an Edgar Allen Poe story. I didn’t know what was going to happen but I felt sure it would be bad. All those years I’d believed I’d escaped from my past. Really it had just been a question of
time before it found me.

  I made my head twist on my neck so I could look at Nathan.

  ‘I can’t come. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I just – I can’t. There’s too much to do here.’ I looked at the boxes on the floor, piled up, the ones on the bench, waiting.

  ‘Loveday,’ he said, ‘we shook hands.’

  *

  We had, too, at the weekend.

  We’d been talking, in bed. We had stayed up late, drinking wine, and Nathan was telling me about growing up, summer holidays in Cornwall, camping at his mum’s friend’s house, and I was listening and thinking of my few memories of the Cornish sea and the things my dad had told me. When Nathan asked me what I remembered about holidays, I kissed him and said we should go to bed. Like I’ve said, I wasn’t a virgin when I met Nathan, but this was the longest time I had ever spent with one person, and I was learning what it was like to – well, to really get to know someone. Books are mostly about the falling in love and the longing, the first kisses and the first nights spent together. So I hadn’t really thought about how there might be a sweeter spot, one where knowing someone, being familiar with them, meant that everything was, actually, better than it was in the beginning.

  No, I wasn’t in love. I was just – enjoying the intimacy.

  The next morning, Nathan woke up first. I was flat out on my stomach on the bed. The night was hot: the duvet was on the floor. I woke to the feeling of a kiss on the back of my neck. Time was that would have freaked me out, but I just stretched and stayed where I was. Nathan sat back, and his finger traced the words on my back, first one shoulder blade and then the other.

  ‘I like your tattoos,’ he said. His voice was as warm as the morning. His own skin was unmarked, pale, like Edam cheese when you pull the wax off.

  ‘You don’t have any,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m too scared it would hurt, and I’d end up with half of something. And I wouldn’t know how to decide.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ I said. I wasn’t getting into the whole ‘but you’re stuck with it for the rest of your life’ conversation. You could say the same about having a baby, but you don’t.

  ‘Why these ones?’ he asked.

  My skin stopped tingling and went cold. That was one conversation that could lead anywhere. And mustn’t go there. And yet there was part of me – a whisper from the back of my brain, the hidden place – that asked, why not just tell him? Tell him all of it. I ignored it, obviously, because nothing good would come of that confession. Nathan was a holiday from being me. I was going to enjoy it while it lasted.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said, ‘you tell me which books they are from and I’ll tell you why I got them.’

  ‘Deal,’ he said. He kissed my left shoulder blade. My skin tingled. Then he read the words: ‘“They were not railway children to begin with.” I’m going to go crazy and I say: that’s from The Railway Children. Do I have to know the author?’

  I pulled myself up onto my elbows so I could talk more easily. He kept on running his fingers up and down my shoulder blades, my spine. I felt as though my skin was rising up to meet him. I arched my back a little. He spread his hands wider, started to caress the sides of my ribcage. This Sunday morning I wasn’t going anywhere fast.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Just the book. It’s because I like that her dad comes back in the end.’ If he heard the beginning of tears in my voice he didn’t show it. His palms were flat on my back now, rubbing, massaging. I’d told him that my dad was dead. I suppose a teary voice was acceptable, ‘Nesbit,’ I said. ‘I thought you were educated.’

  He gave his attention to my other shoulder blade, first with a kiss, then tracing the letters. ‘“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” I feel as though I ought to know that one. Can I have a clue?’

  I thought about Jane Eyre, how trapped she was, how my mother had no possibility of taking a walk. I thought of the Penguin Classics on the shelf in Whitby. I didn’t think I liked this game, after all, and I wished I hadn’t started it. I reminded myself that a beginning and an ending are two different places and, in real life, you might be able to make your own ending, whatever had gone before. Yes, I had thought of that before Nathan’s poem. That’s partly why it got under my skin, I think.

  ‘No clues,’ I said.

  Nathan laughed. ‘I thought there might not be. Why are all the fonts different?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘because I let the people who do the tattoos choose them. I just care about the words, really.’

  I turned over and lay back down, my hands behind my head. Nathan had showered before I woke up, and his skin was a little damp still. He’d used my shower gel, so he smelled of grapefruit, sharp with a sweet undertone. The towel around his waist had come undone. He wasn’t exactly broad but he wasn’t skinny, either, just the perfect width of chest, scattering of hair in the centre. I put the sole of my foot against his sternum and his hands went around my ankle and started to stroke their way up my leg. I knew he didn’t know the origins of my collarbone tattoos. On my left side was: ‘The book was thick and black and covered with dust’ from Possession. I loved that book because it showed that love was complicated, and even when it didn’t go to plan, it could still be real. Also, it had poetry at its heart. The fact that it was partly set in Whitby brought both comfort and pain. Which is what a good book should do. On my right clavicle sat: ‘The primroses were over’ from Watership Down. I’d read that when I was probably too young to, while I lived at Elspeth Phipps’s house, and it frightened me but it also told me that things changed. When I re-read it, when I was eighteen, I got the tattoo as a sort of salute to that scared kid who kept turning the pages even though she was afraid.

  Nathan was giving some attention to my right thigh. ‘“Some things start before other things”,’ he read. ‘Nietzsche?’

  I laughed. ‘Cheeky git,’ I said. ‘That’s profound.’

  And then he started to trace the words on my hips. ‘“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” – everyone knows that,’ he said.

  ‘Including you?’

  ‘Now who’s cheeky?’ he laughed. ‘Anna Karenina. By Leo Tolstoy.’

  I took my hands out from behind my head and applauded. ‘I think that one speaks for itself.’ Now that my hands were free, I reached up for his face, and I pulled him to me and kissed him. Kissing Nathan was something I always wanted to do these days. Also, I didn’t really want to have to explain the first line of The English Patient, which was inked on my other hip. ‘She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.’ I didn’t know whether Nathan would get that a book about people hiding gave me comfort. I didn’t want to let him know that the idea of looking into the distance was something that I would never dare to do.

  Fortunately, the kissing escalated. Half an hour later, we were lying in the sunshine that was coming through the window and pooling on our skin.

  ‘I think we’re getting the hang of each other, Loveday,’ Nathan said, with a smile. I nodded.

  Then his face got serious and I braced. ‘You don’t say much about yourself, though,’ he said. ‘All I really know is that you work in a bookshop. You come from Ripon. Your father died. You don’t see your mother. And you’ve read seven books. Or at least the first lines of them.’

  I laughed. Nathan made me laugh because he teased me. Archie teased me a bit, sometimes, but it was teasing-with-a-point, like teasing me about the state of my flat or dying my hair, so I took no notice of it.

  ‘That’s all you need to know,’ I said. ‘That’s about it, really.’ And if you boiled it down, it was. If you substituted ‘Whitby’ for ‘Ripon’ anyway.

  He looked at me, then he took a breath and I thought, here come the conditions, and I was right. Except it was one condition and I liked it.

  He said, ‘I don’t care if you don’t want to tell me things. But I do care
that what we do tell each other is the truth.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and I had the kind of feeling that I used to get as a kid, on the beach, when there was hardly anyone else there, and I could do one of my rubbish, arse-sticking-out cartwheels with no one noticing. ‘Any other deal-breakers?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. He stuck out his hand and I shook it. It’s weird, shaking hands with someone when you’re both naked – inappropriate, in the context. He just about got away with it, like the hat-tip.

  *

  ‘We shook hands,’ he said again, now. Tell me the truth.’

  I looked at the Delia book and I looked at him, his seaside eyes, and I said, ‘Something’s happened that’s made me feel – shaky. Nothing bad. I just don’t feel as though I want to go out anywhere. I couldn’t smile and meet new people. I need some time to think about – the thing.’

  He nodded. ‘Have I upset you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, because you’re not the centre of the world.’

  He laughed, just a light touch of sound. ‘Will you tell me about it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. That might be what’s technically known as a white lie.

  ‘Is it anything I can help you with?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  The shop was quiet. Archie was standing just outside the doorway, glad-handing passers-by like he’d won an Oscar for ‘Best Character Actor (Bookshop Owners)’.

  ‘Are you going to be okay here? Will you still take the afternoon off?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll work. I really have got a lot to do.’ It’s never-ending, and that’s what I like about it: the circle of book-life. People come in to find them, other people bring in the ones that have outlived their usefulness in that life, but can be reincarnated into another one. I make the whole system work, like a Saint Peter of books, or . . . oh, I don’t know. Sheep, goats, wheat, chaff. Choose your biblical metaphor for getting rid of the crap.