Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  Lying is such a terrible idea. Even the little ‘I don’t feel well’ ones grow fangs and crunch holes in you. I changed the subject to the real subject.

  ‘We need to talk,’ I said.

  ‘Wow, you must be ill,’ he said, and he laughed, and then he saw my face, and he stopped. ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t do this,’ I said. ‘Us.’ I’d made a plan but the plan had not, of course, taken into account what happened when I got within touching distance of Nathan. The plan had involved poise and calmness and a considered and simple explanation that a relationship was something that I wasn’t ready for, didn’t want, and needed to extricate myself from as of now. Nathan should consider himself – with regret – let go from the position of Loveday’s boyfriend. The plan had not fully taken into account what it was like to sit with Nathan, to look at his lovely face. Oh, how I wished I was a person who could love him, and that loving me was feasible.

  ‘What?’ he said. It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard. It was that he hadn’t believed. So I didn’t need to repeat it, at least. My voice wasn’t feeling very cooperative.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I took a drink. There wasn’t enough gin in it. When I put the glass down, I centred it, exactly, on the beer mat. I took my time. I didn’t want to raise my face. Nathan wasn’t making any noise.

  When I looked up his body was still. The only moving parts of him were his eyelids as he blinked and the inner corners of his collarbones, visible in the V of his open shirt, as he breathed.

  ‘Loveday.’ His voice had tears in it, and something rough: determination, or anger. I deserved anger. I was pretty furious with myself, for putting us both in this position. With Rob, for his part in it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. I tried to sound strong. I don’t think it worked.

  ‘Loveday,’ Nathan said. And he touched my hand, and I snatched it away, as though he had committed a crime by reaching for me. ‘I just don’t understand what I’ve done.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. He looked so shocked that I felt seasick with shame.

  ‘“I know?”’ He looked bewildered, as though someone had broken into his house while he was out and rearranged all of the furniture. There were tears in his eyes now but they had gone from his voice. ‘Is that all I get?’

  ‘I’m not very good at relationships,’ I said, my words quieter than I thought they would be. ‘I told you that.’

  ‘I don’t think you did,’ he said, ‘not in so many words, anyway.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Not in so many words. But you knew.’

  He rubbed his hand over his head and back again. I’d done that with my hand, before now, too. My palm itched with the memory of his bristly, close-cropped hair.

  ‘Is it because of what I told you?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ I had no idea what he was talking about. Conversations outside books are horrible. The other person doesn’t know what they are supposed to say. I wanted another drink but I didn’t think it would be right to go and get one.

  ‘At the party,’ he said. ‘I told you about my not-very-brilliant career, and then I went to get some food, and when I came back you had gone.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t that.’ I touched his hand, the back of it, just for a second, and he didn’t take it away. ‘You know how people say “it’s not you, it’s me”? It really is me.’

  ‘Don’t you think I should be the judge of that?’

  I looked at him. Those eyes, oh, those eyes, and that brow, and that mouth. Those teeth. All of those things books and poems say about eating up and drinking in and consuming? I got that, then. I wanted Nathan to be part of me. Right inside. Not like that. Well, like that as well. My body had got used to sex, and it wasn’t going to take the lack of it very well.

  And you know how everyone talks about heartbreak? Now I understood that, too. I had the full cartoon zigzag, right across my bloody heart, and looking at him, I felt every ragged, blazing millimetre of the cut. The fact that I was the one with the scalpel just made it worse.

  There was nothing I could say. Where would I start? ‘There’s something I haven’t told you?’ I knew – a small part of me did – that Nathan would get it. But that wasn’t the point. The point was, him getting it would change everything.

  ‘I thought you were happy with us,’ he said, quietly.

  ‘Nathan . . .’ I couldn’t have this conversation. I just couldn’t. If I let this happen now it was going to be worse later. And before you go all ‘giving in to bullies’ blah on me, remember this. I wasn’t giving in to Rob; I could have told Nathan the whole story if I wanted to. It was more that Rob putting his massive boot in reminded me of the whole, vast impossibility of me and a relationship. There were too many hurdles. The main one being: once I’d laid out my past – though I only lie by omission – I would never be sure that Nathan loved me for me. I wouldn’t know if it was pity that he felt, or whether he was too afraid of how broken I was to ever be honest. I’d imagine that the whole stupid history of my parents would always be there, and it might be like living in a forest, the trees permanently changing the quality of the light.

  I’d enjoyed myself with Nathan. It was never going to last. Rob had just been the reminder. It pissed me off that he had done it, but people piss me off all the time, so I was going to have to live with that. If I hadn’t got involved with Rob in the first place, none of this would have happened. A normal person would have nothing to hide. Rob would have nothing to dig up.

  I stood up, said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and walked away.

  Not quickly enough, though, because behind me, I heard Nathan say, ‘I love you.’ I pretended not to hear but I think he probably realised that I had. I suppose my next move, in Nathan-land, was to turn around and burst into tears and tell him everything and he would stroke my hair and we would – you see, that’s the problem. I really don’t know what comes after that. I can’t see any sort of an ending.

  So I kept walking, and I went home, and if I’d seen Rob on the way I’d have shown him what a proper slap felt like.

  *

  Here’s what I know.

  Just after six o’clock that night – as Emma and I were choosing nail polish colours – my mother dialled 999 and sob-said, ‘I think I’ve killed my husband.’

  He died of traumatic brain injury. What had actually killed him was the impact on his brain of the back of his skull hitting the stone floor, according to the pathologist who conducted the post-mortem. Of course, he wouldn’t have hit the floor if my mother hadn’t hit him on the temple with the cast-iron lid of the cooking pot. He was declared dead there, at the house, on the kitchen floor.

  My mother had tried to resuscitate him. She had to be pulled off his body.

  There was a cigarette lying near him on the floor, a box of matches still held in one of his big hands. He was lighting a cigarette, it seemed, when she hit him.

  She was arrested at the scene. She fought to stay with him; she scratched at the face of the police officer who was blocking her way, and drew blood.

  She was remanded on bail, and sent to a hospital for psychiatric assessment.

  She refused to say anything in her own defence. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter. There wasn’t a trial, just a sentencing hearing.

  She got twelve years. She would be out in six.

  When I googled us in the school library I was shocked by the sheer volume of coverage the case got. I’d refused to talk about any details with Annabel or Shanice, so by the time I was twelve I had hardly heard my parents’ names for a year and I missed them. A lot had been written about us. I found national newspaper articles, local TV footage, blogs and op-eds. There was I thinking our lives had fallen apart; search engines suggested we had caught the twenty-first century zeitgeist. Sunday supplement magazines interviewed domestic violence survivors and talked to experts. Odd-looking adults, who used to be the kid caught in the middle, were asked to speculate about what I, and my mother, were thinking. Th
ere were questions on Question Time. The wife of the man who my dad had got into a fight with on the oil rig sold her story. She came out strongly for my mum. It seemed that when my dad said that ‘you should see the other guy’, he wasn’t joking.

  A lot of people came out for my mum, as though she was some sort of warrior, or making a point, whereas, as far as I could tell, she was just trying to not get hurt again. Of course, I wasn’t there when it happened, something that was made much of by a lot of the people who got to have opinions on our lives (i.e. everybody): had my mother got me out of the way in order to carry out her premeditated crime? Clearly not. Because – apart from the whole finding-the-money-in-the-books-thing, which of course nobody knew about, because I didn’t tell anyone and there’s nothing in any of the reports to suggest that my mother ever did – a premeditated crime would, presumably, involve something a little more sophisticated than catching someone on the temple with a cast-iron pot lid and hoping for a lucky angle if he fell.

  The details in the press gave me the bones that my imagination could hang some flesh on. I reconstructed constantly, barely noticing that I was doing it. At any moment, awake or asleep, it was as though there was a film running against the backdrop of my eyelids. Her crying, him trying to comfort her, her relaxing, admitting that she thought he might hurt me, him going crazy. Him giving her a hard time for depriving me of things, her walking into the kitchen, him following her, her turning. Him hitting her and her hitting back. The scenes in my head had different soundtracks, different paces, as though they had been set as homework in a film school. Sometimes when she hit him it was black-and-white, balletic, almost beautiful as he fell in slow-motion to the floor. Or the scene was gritty, close-up, her crying, him crying, and the blow an accident. There was an out-and-out self-defence edit when my mother was cowering, then flailing, but I had loved my father too much for that to stick. At some point – and I couldn’t say when – my version fixed itself. They were both angry. He hit her. She went to the kitchen. Maybe she was on her way out, her hand on her coat by the door. He followed her, apologetic, tearful, the way he always was afterwards. She softened. He said something else, something unkind, then turned to light a cigarette. She, who had taken so much, had had enough. She picked up the lid and, frightened, in pain, she swung.

  Looking at what had been written about our family made me feel ill. We were not an example, or a case study, or a sign of the times. We were us.

  The thing that really shocked me, though, was not the reporting or the endless manipulation, distortion and magnification of our sad little story. What shocked me was that, while we thought our lives were made up of just the three of us, it was clear that our trio had been circled by concerned people who didn’t have the wit or the balls to stop what was coming. My teacher had called social services because I was ‘withdrawn’. My father’s job centre records showed that he was inclined to be aggressive under pressure. When my mother was examined, traces of bruises and signs of broken teeth and broken ribs made my father a monster and my mother a victim. A report to the court said that my mother was suffering from anxiety and depression but was basically of sound mind, and that made her the monster and him the hapless innocent.

  She wouldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t defend herself, not a word. I’m not an expert but I would have thought that would call her mental health into question.

  I reconstructed. I imagined. I tried to forgive, but I couldn’t forgive one without blaming the other. Most of all, I wished for the world that had gone, where my dad went to work in a helicopter and my mum and I collected stones and shells on the shore.

  *

  The week after I ended things with Nathan was wretched. I couldn’t sleep, or concentrate, or do anything vaguely sane. Rob was having the wit to keep out of my way, it seemed, so I didn’t even have the satisfaction of taking it out on him. I’d seen him once, when he’d come in to talk to Melodie, but he didn’t look for me. I’d got the impression that she was trying to avoid him, but maybe that was wishful thinking on my part. He’d obviously decided to stop dropping off the books, now he’d played his trump freak-Loveday-out card. Or maybe my mother had got wise to him, only let him take a box or two. I wished I could ask him where he’d got them from, but I couldn’t bear the thought of even looking at his face.

  I hated to admit it, but I missed Nathan. I really, really missed him. Gaze-lost-in-the-middle-distance, can’t-sleep-can’t-eat gloom. I knew it was ridiculous but I genuinely couldn’t seem to help myself. And I hate to make the comparison, but the only thing I’d ever experienced like it was the proper, full-on grief when my dad died and I lost my mum. Not anywhere near as bad, of course, but bad enough. Because nothing else in my life had changed, I realised how much time I’d spent with Nathan, and how used I was to seeing him at work, at home.

  I’d decided not to go to poetry night on the Wednesday evening, of course, but that was only a couple of hours a week. It was all of the other things. Him meeting me after work and coming back for supper, staying the night. The way he made it easy to talk about nothing much, for hours, and feel as though we were making a world. Listening to him read poetry, his gravel-and-honey voice making every word alive. Him dropping into the shop with a coffee and the sound of him and Archie laughing. The stupid chocolate coins. Even undressing, looking at my tattoos, remembering him trying to figure out the first lines, where they were from, why I had chosen them. Everything seemed a loss, a miss, and even though I tried to wear myself out with cycling when I wasn’t at work, or cleaning and reshelving when I was, I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t think, unless I was thinking about Nathan and my mother’s books and bloody Rob and the fact that my life is so fucked up that my chances of having a normal relationship are about as likely as a copy of Pericles signed by Shakespeare turning up. That is, zero, unless he invented time travel as well as ten per cent of the English language. And I’d put myself in a position where I’d seen what a relationship could be. A different story. Lovely in a poem, a shitty, impossible idea in real life.

  Do I sound angry? Well, I wonder why that could be.

  I woke at five the next morning, trying not to think about what might have happened at poetry night the night before, and I got ready and was at work by six, because why lie and look at the ceiling when you can be sorting out the Health section. At four in the afternoon, all the saved-up tiredness came over me and the next thing I knew Archie was saying my name, gently, his hand on my arm.

  ‘Loveday,’ he said, ‘you need to wake up. I almost locked you in.’ It was six o’clock. I had been asleep with my back against the maps. Those two hours had felt like the first real sleep I’d had in weeks.

  It took me a while to swim back up to life. When I did, I almost wished I hadn’t. My arm was numb, my neck hurt and my legs were stiff. And physical aches were nothing compared to the other stuff.

  ‘I’m going,’ Archie said, ‘but I’ll wait for you.’

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ I said, and I got to my feet.

  ‘I’m not sure that you will,’ he said. When I was standing he pulled me in for a moment, his arm around my shoulder: a side-by-side hug. I let him. He said, ‘Take some time off, Loveday. Get away. Think about things.’

  ‘I don’t know, Archie,’ I said.

  I did know. I don’t really do holidays – I went to a literary festival, once, and I didn’t much like it. Too many people, and I was all wrong – everyone is equal when they’re reading a book, but not when they’re chatting in a queue to meet an author or knowing which cider to ask for at a bar. I’ve been saving for as long as I’ve been working, because I know there won’t always be Archie, and I’m not sure that anyone else would give me a break. Holidays seem like a waste of money. Especially when there’s nowhere I want to go. Wherever you go, there you are, or whatever the stupid saying is.

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘You need some perspective. If you come in next week I’m going to send you away.’

  I laughed. My thr
oat hurt.

  ‘I mean it,’ he said, then added, ‘I can lend you a tent, if you like. Give yourself some time.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I want time,’ I said, ‘or a tent.’

  ‘Take it from a friend,’ he said, and he turned so he was facing me, his hands on my shoulders. ‘You need some time. You need to think about what you want. If you don’t fancy a tent, I can work with that.’

  I sometimes think that because I don’t live in a detached Georgian mansion with landscaped grounds, Archie thinks I’m a small step up from an itinerant peasant, selling ribbons and begging for bread. ‘Tents don’t have bathrooms,’ I said, ‘and I could have my stuff nicked or be trampled by cows.’

  ‘Campsites have shower blocks,’ Archie said, ‘and anyway, you could get trampled by cows anywhere.’

  I nodded, though I’m not sure why. Archie has this way of making you go along with things, even the possibility of out-of-control cows in an urban setting. ‘I don’t know about a holiday. I don’t know where I’d go,’ I said.

  ‘Go to Whitby,’ he said. ‘Like you said you wanted to. Get some air.’

  It had been a heaven of a place to grow up: seagulls, beach, and nooks and crannies; the feeling, when the town was full of tourists, that you were lucky because this place was your home. Archie was looking at me as though he was going to cry, as though me taking time off was some life-or-death scenario, so I nodded, and we left the shop.

  When I got in the next day I found that my beloved boss had done the whole nine Archie yards. He chose to misinterpret my nod, which had meant ‘I will consider your suggestion, but probably not act on it,’ as he well knew. In his version it became a nod that said, ‘Please ring up your friend who has a caravan site on the cliffs on the outskirts of Whitby, book a caravan, leave Melodie – Melodie! – in charge of the shop for the morning, and then when Loveday turns up for work, bundle her straight in the car, drive her home, stand over her as she puts some things in a rucksack, and drive her to Whitby whether she wants to go there or not, via a posh supermarket where you buy random food for her without asking what she wants, or even likes.’