Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘Rob,’ I said, ‘I’m waiting for someone.’

  At his side, his hand clenched. I didn’t think he’d done it consciously but it made me wonder where he was in the cycle of illness, and whether he was taking his medication. I couldn’t ask.

  ‘You and Melodie make a nice couple,’ I said. I hoped it would be a safe topic, i.e. Not Me.

  ‘She’s not really my type,’ he said.

  I bit back the obvious question, because I think he’d made it obvious for me on purpose. If I said, why not, he would say, because you’re my type. If I said, why are you going out with her, then, he would say, you see, you do still care about me. I knew Rob wasn’t really carrying a torch. He just wanted to score a few points.

  ‘I don’t think I’m your type, either,’ I said, trying to make it light.

  ‘Or I’m not your type. You seem to prefer them . . .’

  I was tempted to complete his sentence for him. Sexier? Non-academic? Less creepy? Un-slappy?

  ‘Poetic.’

  I shrugged. Don’t engage, I told myself.

  ‘Well, it’s good that we’ve both moved on,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to be happy.’ And I did, in a no-effort-on-my-part sort of a way. And preferably a long way from me and Lost For Words.

  I was thinking that Nathan couldn’t possibly be much longer. Then I remembered how distinctive he is when he’s dressed as a magician; how everyone would be stopping him, asking him to show them something or other again, and how he wouldn’t forget about me but he couldn’t bear to be rude, either.

  And then, Rob’s expression changed.

  He smiled, but it was an odd smile; if it was in the book it would come at the end of a chapter, and canine teeth would be mentioned. I found I was holding my breath.

  ‘I suppose it’s harder for people like you,’ he said, ‘with your past.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ As I said it, I heard how I sounded shrill, and was already telling myself: stop. He’s the one that’s fishing, now, at Archie’s sodding fishing party. He’s trying to get a rise, and you’ve just given him one.

  Turns out I needn’t have worried. He already knew.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I know all about you, Loveday. I haven’t been sleeping that well, and one night I got to wondering about you. I put together what I knew, which wasn’t a lot – it was as though you were trying to keep secrets – but search engines are wonderful things. Cardew, Whitby – that’s all you really need –’

  ‘Rob,’ I said. I didn’t know what I was going to say next, but it didn’t matter, because he kept right on talking.

  ‘I can see why you’re a bit – warped. What you must have gone through, with your parents. Well, parent, singular, I suppose. And foster care. That really fucks people up. Did you know that kids from your sort of background are more likely to –’ he held up his fingers, marked things off, a shopping list of waiting failures – ‘have unplanned pregnancies, become addicts, end up in prison?’

  I was shaking, fear or anger or both, and the chill of being found out. I managed to get out, ‘Do you know that children from my sort of background are more likely to seek out a violent relationship?’ but the words went ailing into the air, and didn’t live long. I don’t know if Rob even heard. We looked at each other.

  I had one lucid thought. ‘The books,’ I said. ‘Was that you?’ My body was locked into place – I don’t think I could have moved if the settee was on fire – but my mind was spinning around a new idea. What if Rob had got hold of the books? I’d dismissed the idea before, but I hadn’t known that he knew my story. Plus, wasn’t planting books to creep me out just a natural extension of hiding my boots, or putting roses through letterboxes, or even threatening someone in the dark corner of a party while their boyfriend went to get some food?

  Could he somehow have got hold of the books? If he knew who I was, he knew who my mother was, and I don’t think she would be that difficult to find. Part of the reason I had never dared look for her was because I knew she would have made herself searchable, findable, on Facebook and in the phone book. All Rob would need to do was to pose as an old boyfriend with a sob story, or a university lecturer wanting to get in touch with a job opportunity, and my mother would welcome him with open arms, let him have anything he wanted. I could have kicked myself. I knew that Rob was cold and manipulative; I knew that he could hold a grudge. I hadn’t let him see that he bothered me, with his roses and his hanging-about, and so all I’d done was inspire him to find a more extreme way to make me uncomfortable. I could feel how cold my fingertips were, how the goosebumps were rising along my collarbones.

  There was a noise, detached from the party and close by. Rob looked to see who was coming.

  ‘Does your boyfriend know?’ he asked, in a half-whisper that was more frightening than a shout.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t.’

  ‘Well, I suppose the only question, then, is whether you’re going to tell him, or wait for me to do it. No one likes a liar, Loveday. Even people who can cope with your background aren’t going to accept the fact that you’ve lied and lied about it. For months.’ Without waiting to see my reaction, he took his smirk and (I assume) his hard-on, and he turned around and walked away.

  CRIME

  1999

  refracted

  The flashing lights made patterns in the sky. I saw at least two police cars and an ambulance outside our house when Emma’s mum walked me back home that evening. We stopped at the end of the road, looking.

  It was dark, although it wasn’t late. Sunday was a school night, and our mums had agreed that I would be home by eight, with my mum adding the rider that I would go straight to bed when I got home. So I was worried about not being back on time.

  I couldn’t tell what was going on. The lights hurt my eyes, and illuminated the faces of the neighbours so they looked like ghosts. I’d never seen an ambulance up this close.

  The front of the ambulance was pointing towards the top of the road, so there was no chance of seeing inside. I still imagine my mother, sitting on the steps, wrapped in a blanket, crying and grey, the way people do on TV. I have to remind myself that it’s imagination, not reality.

  The reality could have been worse, of course. She could have been screaming. There might have been blood on her face, hair, hands, his blood, her blood. She could have been calm. She could have been smiling. I’m not sure which version of my mother I want on those ambulance steps. Later, I saw her in many modes, none of which I considered to be ‘her’: lazy-lipped with medication, jumping with nerves, lucid but frenetic with love and regret. All different. None of them the mother who baked and laughed and made me believe that I was the only thing that really mattered to her.

  There must have been a cordon, or something, or maybe Emma’s mother just stopped at the sight of the unexpected. A policeman was there almost straightaway, anyway, and I heard Emma’s mum’s explanation, the name of my parents, the number of my house. And then her hand got tight, spasm-tight, around mine and she said, ‘Yes, of course, I’ll wait.’

  And that was where my normal ended.

  A policewoman came over to join us, and she talked to Emma’s mum in an urgent half whisper, so all I could catch were the ‘s’ sounds. The next thing I knew we were walking back up the road, and Mrs Medland was saying, in a funny voice, as though the wind was taking it, although it wasn’t windy, ‘We’re just going to go back home, sweetheart, and then the police lady is going to come to see us.’

  ‘I don’t have any pyjamas,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ Emma’s mum said, and she burst into tears. So it was I who led her home, and knocked on the door, and it was she that her husband looked at when he opened it.

  He said, ‘What’s happened?’ looking from her to me and back again. From the look on his face – sharp, serious – it was hard to remember that he had pink toenails on one foot, yellow on the other, from where he had let me and Emma loose with her nail v
arnish.

  She cried harder. ‘I don’t know – exactly . . .’ she said, and I remember thinking, how ridiculous, to cry and cry like that when you didn’t know why. I presume the policewoman must have given her the gist; I don’t know what they let slip. Looking back, I suspect she knew that someone was dead, or dying. She probably thought it was my mother. Well, she would have done. Two and two do make four, most of the time.

  The details were fed to me like bread soaked in milk given to a Victorian invalid. A little at a time. Gentle, soft. Like that made a difference.

  The job of telling me that my dad was dead was shared between a policewoman, a social worker and Mrs Medland. Emma was at school. I suppose it was the next day. I had been upset that I wasn’t allowed to go to school, that I couldn’t go home either. Emma’s mum was holding my hand. They called him ‘your daddy’. I never called him Daddy – he was Dad, he always had been – so it took a moment to work out what they were saying. I felt as though I was trying to eat and the knife and fork were in the wrong hands.

  I think I nodded. ‘Where’s Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re looking after her,’ the policewoman said. ‘She can’t come home just yet, until we sort everything out. She’s all right, though. She isn’t hurt.’

  I thought about the money, the cigarettes, the pint. Maybe he had got into another fight, like he did on the oil rig when he was sent home. ‘Did someone hit him?’ I asked. He was dead the way a character in a book is dead: I was sad, but at the same time sure it wasn’t real. I hadn’t realised that I couldn’t close the covers and go back to life the way it used to be.

  ‘Why do you ask that, Loveday?’ the social worker asked. She was speaking to me but looking at the policewoman. ‘Who do you think might have hit your daddy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I wanted my mum so badly that the pain was chewing me from the inside out. ‘When can I go home?’

  *

  There’s a lot of time around that period I don’t recall, as though I went to sleep the day after it happened, and when I woke up a year later I was in my long-term foster home with Annabel. What I do remember has the quality of those moments in the night, at the end of a nightmare or the start of a flu, when you surface for a minute or two and whatever vestige of dream is in your brain is hyper-real.

  I remember one of the social workers coming back to Emma’s house. It was the thin one. She wore a perfume that was heavy with jasmine. Even now the scent of jasmine takes me back to that house, the TV on to mask the noise of the adults talking at the door, Mrs Medland saying, ‘As long as it takes’. When I remember that, I still get a spike of hope along with the jasmine, I think because I assumed that they were talking about me staying there until my mum came home. In retrospect, I can see that they were talking about me staying there until they found a place for me in The System.

  I remember being taken to see my mum when she was on remand. I was scared of her: she looked wrong, she smelled different, and she cried. Her face was swollen, thanks to medication or tears or both. When she saw me she put out her arms, and when I didn’t walk into them straight away she put her head in her hands and made a low, long ‘no’.

  I remember Auntie Janey coming to visit; I recall the Cornish hum and sing of her voice. That day was like a holiday, a bright change from the dismal misery of missing my parents, and having interviews with people who were trying to disguise how important the conversation was. I showed her around Whitby – she looked in the windows of the jet shops and counted the steps with me, and we had afternoon tea and she licked cream off her finger and said that she would get fat but she didn’t much care. When we met the tall social worker again, back at Emma’s house, there was another of those overheard conversations that I didn’t understand until much later: Auntie Janey crying, saying, ‘I just don’t think I can’, and the social worker making there-there noises. Now I assume that she was there to see if she would take me. Clearly the answer was no. I don’t blame her. By which I mean: I do blame her. I was ten. I had no one. I didn’t kill anyone. So what if she and my dad hadn’t been in touch much since he left school and joined the army? Who cared that I reminded her of my dad, or looked like my mum, or whatever half-baked thing she said to the social worker? So what if suddenly acquiring a ten-year-old isn’t in your life plan? It’s not like I was on my first-choice path any more either.

  I don’t remember a funeral. I found out later that he was buried in Cornwall. I didn’t go. I don’t know why not. I don’t remember being asked. I don’t know what I would have said. Now I’d say: dead is dead and it doesn’t matter.

  I remember my first night in temporary foster care. I was in a room with bunk beds and the little girl on the top bunk got into bed with me in the middle of the night. I lay like a plank as she tried to cuddle me; eventually, she got the message, climbed back up the ladder, and snivelled until it was time to get up.

  I remember standing in my room at Annabel’s for the first time, and her saying, kindly and calmly, that she and social services had agreed that for as long as I was with her there would be no other foster child. The room was bigger than my room at home, which seemed wrong. There was a bed, a desk under a pretend-Georgian double-glazed window, a noticeboard with drawing-pins in a line at the top, a blue rug on the floor, and the smell of the fresh pale-green paint on the walls. Annabel said that I wasn’t to bring food upstairs but apart from that I could do as I wished in my room and, so long as she saw me for meals, she wouldn’t disturb me. I suppose she thought that, in time, I would become more sociable, watching TV with her, talking to her about my parents.

  When I look back I can see how carefully she was chosen. She was on her own – her husband had died – so the family situation I had come from wasn’t replicated. She’d had three children, who had all left home. She must have been in her fifties when I moved in. She’d fostered for years, short-term care when her children were small, dealing with children with more than the usual difficulties as time went on. The social worker told me all this in the car on the way, trying to make it sound as though I’d won a prize. I suppose – I suspect – I had. There was no other child for me to deal with. Annabel was patient, and kind – both things that went unrewarded. Her job was typing up transcripts for an agency; she would tap-tap away at her keyboard in the evenings, after I’d gone upstairs. When I came in from school she was always there, to make a cup of tea and ask questions that I mainly ignored, or sit quietly and listen if I did have anything to say. I almost never did. We would listen to the radio and drink our tea, and then I would go and do homework, and when I was called for supper I would go downstairs and we would eat together. It was my job to wash up and then I would go to my room again.

  Eight months at Elspeth’s had opened my eyes to all the sorts of damaged I could be. I could fail at everything. I could be angry at everyone and everything. I could set fire to a sofa, I could stop washing, I could eat myself fat or vomit myself thin. One thing was clear: I couldn’t be the LJ I had been, taking part in school plays and sure that I was loved. I went straight to Annabel after the sentencing. My name hadn’t been released by the courts and I had a cleverly-close-to-the-truth cover story that would allow me a ‘fresh start’. ‘Fresh start’, in case you’re wondering, is social worker code for ‘your life is now screwed but at least we can do something about the pointing and whispering’. I was to say, if asked, that my mum wasn’t well and my dad had died so I’d come to stay with Annabel. I made sure that no one asked, snarling my way between home and school and library. I was bullied – of course I was, I was a new kid who looked like a scared dog that would snap, satisfyingly, when poked with a stick – but it was manageable. Well, I managed. I shut myself in my room when it wasn’t a mealtime, I read and I wrote poems and I envied everyone who wasn’t me, but especially the ones who were in the drama club.

  *

  And while I was struggling through those first months, my mother was struggling too. I was told the facts, c
arefully, as judged to be suitable for a ten-year-old, by Elspeth Phipps and the thin social worker, whose name was Shanice. For the rest of that school year, before I was moved, I picked up the technicolour details: ‘My dad says your mother wants locked up and the key thrown away’ from the cruel kids, and titbits of kinder news from Matilda and Emma. Once I moved to Annabel’s and my new school, I didn’t have the information thrown at me any more, but I did have the computers in the school library at lunchtime, so I found out everything I wanted to, without having to look into someone’s concerned face while I absorbed it. Because no one was truly concerned about me now, except for the people who were paid to be, and I didn’t want that sort of care.

  POETRY

  2016

  Not magic

  I arranged to meet Nathan in the George and Dragon, on the evening after Archie’s party. I’d bolted as soon as Rob had left the library, texted Nathan to say I wasn’t feeling well, and gone home. I had locked the flat door behind me, taken the dress off, got under the duvet in my underwear, and cried until the neighbour had knocked on the wall. Then I’d got in the shower and howled. I howled for losing Nathan. For missing Mum. For not being able to have someone wrap me up in a towel and hold me tight, not caring how wet they got. For the fact that Rob had come to me, in my friend’s house – in a library, which should be a safe place – and put pressure on my fault line in the hope that I would break. I couldn’t even bear to think about the possibility that he might have found my mother, talked to her, taken the books. He would have made her hope.

  I’d gone back to bed and thought about writing Nathan a letter. Instead I sent him the text arranging the drink.

  Of course he was worried about me. ‘You look pale,’ he said, after he’d kissed me, sat me down, and slid my drink in front of me. ‘I got your usual but would you rather a soft drink? Have you taken any medication?’

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I didn’t sleep very well.’

  ‘It must have come on suddenly,’ Nathan said. ‘I got back and there was no sign of you. I knew I’d been a while, but you seemed fine when I left you.’