Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  The strange/lovely thing was, he was right about me needing a break, and he was also right about Whitby.

  I hadn’t been back since the day I left temporary foster care – I’d stayed for the rest of the school year there, and moved to Annabel’s in Ripon during the first summer without my parents, ready to start my new school, where no one would know my history, in September.

  For a long time, going back to Whitby hadn’t been an option: I didn’t want to see people who would know me and, anyway, when you’re in care you don’t do things like propose a trip. Everything is too fragile, and too finely balanced. Annabel and I had strict operating procedures: that is, we left each other alone. I went along with most things she suggested and she didn’t suggest things too often. I kept to myself because that was the only way I could manage. To start with, I think she thought I would come out of my shell. I didn’t have a TV in my room and I think she thought that, eventually, I would be drawn downstairs by the desire to watch what everyone else was watching, or at least understand what everyone else was talking about.

  She assumed, of course, that people at school talked to me, and I talked back, although a few parents’ evenings soon put paid to that idea of hers. I stayed in my room and read. She waited, arm’s length, ready, I’m sure, to give me the emotional support that social workers and psychiatrists and everyone went on and on about. While she waited she made nourishing meals and was scrupulous about pocket money and timetables – she’d obviously decided that I could do without any shocks – and fairness.

  Every summer she suggested a holiday and I declined. She offered to take me to Cornwall and I slammed doors. She even offered to take me to Whitby and I told her she was heartless; I felt as though she was taunting me. Every day of my life up until I left Whitby I’d seen the sea, and I had hardly glimpsed it in all the years since, although I often dreamed about it. I went on school trips – London, somewhere in Wales – but that was as much holidaying as I’d done. I managed to get my first tattoo on my London trip, thanks to a brilliantly forged note from one of my fellow pupils. There were three of us who sneaked off from Madame Tussauds and went to Soho. I got my Anna Karenina and the other two, who had plans for some Chinese characters and the Kaiser Chiefs logo, bottled it when they saw the tattooing gun. Miraculously, the teachers didn’t notice we’d bunked off – or pretended not to – and I just didn’t mention it to Annabel. I didn’t try to hide it. She didn’t say anything about it. All was what passed for well.

  It wasn’t a long journey, especially not the way Archie drives. Some people might say I was sulking in the car. I might even say it was my plan to sulk. But it was irrelevant, because Archie talked the whole hour we were on the road, and even if I’d been feeling chatty, I couldn’t have got a word in. He started (no idea why) on the taste of the dust in the air in Berlin the night the wall came down, veered off into how many of the royal family still sleep with teddy bears, and then he was telling me about Clara, who worked at the bookshop when I first started, then emptied the till one Saturday and did a runner. ‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ he said. ‘If she’d have asked I would have given her the money. I was sorry she stole it.’ He paused, and then added, as though he was answering a question, ‘We met when we were walking the Great Wall of China, you know.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ I said, in a slightly sulkier version of my ‘I’m not listening to a word of this’ tone. Archie didn’t notice.

  And then he started talking about me. Which made me want to throw myself out of the car and take my chances on the tarmac. ‘I remember the first time you came into the shop,’ he said, ‘and I thought you were just an average teenager. But when you touched a book you did it as though the book mattered. You looked as though you couldn’t believe your luck, my lovely, just the fact that you were allowed to come and browse in my ramshackle domain. You went from Penguin Classics to History and you spent the best part of half an hour looking at a book on regimental insignia. I remember thinking: well, well, Archie, we have a true bibliophile here.’

  I’d turned, so I was looking out of the passenger window, rather than watching the road roll forward in front of me. I started to recognise the terrain. The moors don’t change, though they’re definitely easier to appreciate when you’re in a car with good suspension. The sight of the abbey, a skeleton on the skyline, felt more familiar than the sight of my own face in the mirror. The sea on the horizon, the colour of a well-washed pair of jeans, made me queasy with memories.

  Archie introduced me to Jackson, who owned the caravan site – they met, allegedly, in a bar in Kentucky – and left me to it. He turned down an invitation to lunch. He was itching to leave, I could see that. I think he’d realised that leaving Melodie in charge of the shop was not his finest hour and he needed to get back and do some damage limitation before she turned it into a performance space.

  ‘Well, my straywaif,’ he said, ‘I’ll be back in a week.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. I let him.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I meant it. Just the sight of the sea made me realise how much I needed to be somewhere else, safe from echoes of Nathan’s presence and books my parents had owned.

  Archie couldn’t resist a double-blast on the horn and a wave of his hat out of the window as he pulled away. I was tired. So tired. It felt as though all the sleep I’d missed since I left Whitby almost fifteen years ago was waiting here for me to collect it.

  The caravan was one of those static numbers. It was probably bigger than my flat, but so full of maroon cushions and yellow-gold tassels that I could hardly move. I drew the curtains closed and got into bed. It was two in the afternoon, but I didn’t care. I went to sleep and I woke at nine, starving and glad of Archie’s cheese and olives. When I unpacked the shopping I saw that it wasn’t random. Nothing needed to be cooked. Bread, cheese, cured meat, cereal, bananas, milk. I couldn’t work out whether he was making life easy for me or trying to make sure I didn’t burn the place down.

  TRAVEL

  2016

  Memory stirred through

  The first few days were okay. I went into the town and I ate ice cream on the pier. I walked down the steps onto the beach and I measured myself against the big stone blocks there, where Dad used to take my photo. Guess what? I’m taller than I was when I was ten. As I was standing there I thought I heard my mother laughing. I’d almost forgotten that she ever laughed. In my mind she had become sad and frightened, cornered and incapable. I thought about asking someone to take a photo of me at the steps, but standing there was enough. And who would I show a photo to anyway? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

  I went to the abbey and looked at all of the tourists, wondering at the whalebone arches of the building. I couldn’t remember when this spectacular ruin was new to me. It had always been there. I walked around the shops. Some of them were unchanged, too, still selling postcards and rock, jet beads and gothic ornaments.

  I touched my necklace and wondered how my little bit of jet felt to come home. I had assumed I would have known how I felt. I didn’t. I wasn’t excited, or sad, or full of sudden memories. I was just Loveday, still, and it seemed that I was stuck with me. Coming back to Whitby wasn’t magic; it didn’t have any answers for me.

  Except that I liked being near the sea again. The water was the blue of inkstained fingertips. I felt so small beside it, and there was comfort in being certain of how little I mattered. It made thinking about Nathan a bit easier, for a minute or two. But I couldn’t be in love, because that was just a stupid thing to be. My parents had been in love, and look where that led. And no, I don’t think that all men are my father (or Rob) or all women are my mother (or me). But I am clever enough to see that anyone who takes me on is going to be either weird or very, very nice and kind and patient. I don’t like weird, and as I am not nice, or kind, or patient, so sooner or later, it will crash and burn. That’s not cynicism. That’s logic.

  The bookshop I used to go to with my mum was still there. The sight of it stung
. I made myself go in. There were the same wooden bookshelves, tall at the front, short for the children’s section at the back. I bought Dracula, which I’d never got around to reading, and had a slightly awkward ‘don’t I recognise you from somewhere’ conversation with the (same, but older) woman behind the till. Instead of playing it cool, doing a mildly puzzled face and strolling off, I said ‘no’ and bolted in a way that would make me much more memorable. I wished I’d asked her what it was like to work in the same bookshop for your whole life. She looked happy enough.

  As the days passed I got braver, if it was brave to go back to the old places. I think I’d worked out that nothing was going to hurt more for being in front of me than it had been for being in my mind all of these years. Maybe I needed to face it.

  I walked back to the house I grew up in, and I stood outside. There was a child’s bike by the door and a newish little Citroën on the drive. There didn’t used to be a drive, just a path and a scrubby little garden.

  I looked up to what had been my parents’ bedroom window and imagined my mother there, looking out, watching me walk to the school that was visible from the front gate, imagining myself independent. Well, be careful what you wish for, LJ. I waited for the slap of emotion to hit me but it didn’t. I felt sorry, and sad, but I don’t think I was any sorrier or sadder for standing there. It’s only a house, after all.

  After a while a woman came out, a baby in her arms. ‘Can I help you?’ she called. Her hand was shading her eyes from the afternoon sun so I couldn’t really tell whether she was being genuine, but it seemed that she was. I almost said, ‘I grew up in this house,’ but I stopped myself just in time. Because either she knew the story or she didn’t. If she did, it would be tea and sympathy and her watching my face to see where I looked, what I remembered, poised for a drama; if she didn’t, then I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her, and that would make answering any ‘when did you live here/where did you go’ questions tricky.

  I smiled and shook my head, and walked away. I should have done that with Nathan, earlier, before my heart and his were going to get mashed. I was hurting for myself, and for him. My mind looped around and around the fact that if I did tell him everything he would take it in his stride. But it would change our world and I would never, ever know for sure whether he was loving me, or whether he felt sorry for me. Writing a new ending is all very well in the abstract. Some plot twists you just don’t recover from.

  I slept and I read and I tried not to think about Nathan. And on my last day I did the thing I’d been thinking about, and avoiding, ever since I’d arrived in Whitby. I went to church.

  I had tea and chocolate cake on mismatched china in a tea-shop playing Vera Lynn. There was parkin on the menu and I thought about ordering it, but I knew it wouldn’t be as good as the one that Mum and I used to make for Dad’s homecomings. And then I went to St Mary’s Parish Church, up on the cliff. I walked up the hundred and ninety-nine steps to get there. I used to walk up counting them. If I was with Mum she would count along with me. If I was with Dad he would stride ahead, three steps at a time, and I’d lose count while I hurried to catch him up, both of us breathless and laughing at the top. If the three of us were together, Mum and I would walk and count, and Dad would walk beside or behind us, calling out numbers to put us off. I would laugh but Mum would mock-glare and say, ‘Patrick, you’re not helping. For that, you can buy the ice creams.’

  I took the steps slowly, remembering, tasting the brine in the air.

  *

  The church, of course, was no different to the way it had been fifteen years ago. It looks very traditional from the outside, built of stone with a square tower, tall stained-glass windows in the walls. The churchyard is full of gothicky headstones that look as though they belong in comics, until you remember that they are the originals. I stopped at the memorial to the Marwood family, and looked at the names there. I remembered my mother and I talking about Marmaduke; I knew about family graves and thought at first that the cat was buried with them, as I had a book with a cat called Marmaduke but had never heard of a person with that name. My mother had explained. If she ever thought my questions were funny she never showed it. I read out the dates – Marmaduke didn’t live long even by cat standards, born in September 1871, dead in January 1872 – and my mother pointed out the word ‘son’ that I’d missed and said, gently, that sometimes people did die before they grew up, especially in the olden days, before there was good medicine.

  I don’t know why I was surprised to see that the Marwoods, and Marmaduke, were still there – it’s not as though his baby bones would have moved on. But I stood and looked at his name, and then I walked on, into the church porch, where I smiled at the ladies in the shop full of pamphlets and postcards, put a pound in the donations box, and passed through the doorway into the church itself.

  St Mary’s is the only church I ever went to as a kid. It has wooden box pews, built at odd angles to each other, so you can’t see anyone else and you can only see the vicar if your pew is at the correct angle. I know it’s unusual, but it just feels like normal to me. Whenever I see churches on TV, with their orderly rows of bench pews, and all that space between them and above them, they seem all wrong.

  I always liked the topsy-turviness of St Mary’s, and the names on the sides of the pews, telling you who went where: pews for church maids, stewards, and visitors. At the time when the church was built, you knew your place, and you stayed in it. I know the world is supposed to be better now, but be honest: isn’t there something about knowing where you belong, whether it’s up in the grand Cholmley Pew looking down, or sitting in the pew ‘for strangers only’? Except, I suppose, it wasn’t much fun being a stranger, and that’s what I was.

  I went into the pew that I used to sit in with my parents. We didn’t go often, but they used to go to church on the closest Sunday to their anniversary, because the church was where they met and where they married.

  Dad would show me the corner, inside one of the pews, where he’d carved a P and an S-J and made a rough-and-ready heart around them, on the day they had their banns read.

  ‘I cut my finger,’ he said, ‘and your mother had to suck it all through the service to try to make the bleeding stop.’ She’d laugh and he’d laugh and I’d laugh, although I never felt I really got the joke, and they would hold hands on the way down the steps again.

  So many of my memories are happy ones.

  The pew was under a stained-glass window, with a curly-headed saint with a sword and cloak. The light fell in blue and red pieces on my skin when the sun shone. My parents had got married in the summer before I was born, so it was often sunny when we came on the anniversary trips. This was the church they were standing outside, in that laughing wedding photo we had on our living room wall.

  Like Marmaduke, the carving of their initials was still there. I put my hand on it and I felt everything that I had half-expected to feel back at the house. Their initials were etched into pale-brown paint and there were other carvings around it. PR loves JL, KEM 4 SAS. I wondered how many others of those linked initials were still together, still happy.

  Everything I’d lost came and sat with me, as I sat in the boxed-in pew. I wasn’t the one who’d killed anyone, yet it felt as though I was the one who’d lost most.

  I’d always pushed those thoughts away. If there’s no one who cares about you then there’s not a lot of satisfaction in dwelling on all that you’ve haven’t had, or seen, or done. Once you’re in the system, people are paid to care for you, and that’s fine when it comes to breakfast and new shoes, but not with feelings. My mother had been someone I’d always been able to talk to; my dad was bursting with unconditional love for me. A quiet foster-mother didn’t compare. A counsellor wasn’t going to cut it. And there was no point crying over spilled blood anyway.

  So I’d kept my eyes forward and not looked too far ahead and so far, so good. Like I’ve said, I wasn’t pregnant, in prison, an addict. I wasn’t a ful
ly functioning human being either. But, be honest: are you? Is anyone?

  It all got a bit Scottish Play in that pew, that afternoon, the ghosts coming to visit, one by one. There was my father, his kind eyes and big, rough hands. My mother, round and smiling, Dad’s arm slung around her shoulder, her hand tiny on one of his thick thighs. There was Aunt Janey, the one who came to spend the day with me and decided she couldn’t give me a home. There was my mother’s mother, who had been a widow for as long as I had known her: a source of comfort and skilfully-palmed cough drops, as she and I were the only ones who liked them.

  And there was the gut-deep thought of Nathan, his poet’s words and his slender magician’s hands, his patience and confidence and his general too-good-to-be-trueness. The week of sleep and food and sea air might have made me calmer but it hadn’t made me miss him any less. This was where my ‘I’m broken but I can still stand up’ position fell down. I wanted to be with him. But I didn’t know how. I couldn’t go on the way I was.

  And of course thinking of Nathan meant sometimes thinking of Rob, mean and manipulating, and suddenly I could see where I was going wrong. It was as though the mop-headed saint had given me the answer, shaking it out of the light his cloak was holding.

  I hadn’t seen until now that I had a choice.

  Rob didn’t get to make my decisions and run my life. He knew what I would do and I’d done it, as sweetly and predictably as a waitress in a white apron bringing tea to the table. But if Rob was going to tell Nathan about me anyway, surelyI had nothing to lose by telling him myself. I’d be in the same position. Our relationship would still be screwed. But I would have done the right thing, at least. It’s the thing that Nathan would have done, because Nathan didn’t think twice about trusting me. I used to watch him sleeping, so soundly, in my bed, and want to be him.