Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

  There are eighteen second-hand bookshops in York and so I decided to start with them. If I couldn’t find you, I would expand the search to Yorkshire. (Because, of course, if you lived in York it would be easy for you to travel by bus or train. You might have a car, although Annabel hadn’t mentioned you learning to drive. I have a lot of time to think about these things.)

  I started by ringing the bookshops and asking for Loveday, but after the first two I thought, what if you answer the phone? I didn’t want our first contact to be a shock. I think I owe it to you to be gentle. So I decided to take the train to York on my days off, and look.

  Your bookshop was the second one I went to, and when I was standing outside deciding whether to go in or to look through the window, I saw the sign about the lost poetry book, which said ‘come in and ask for Loveday’. Suddenly I was terrified. I went to have a cup of tea in the cafe next door and I watched people coming and going in the street, and I wondered what to do. I knew I couldn’t just come in, call your name, hug you tight, even though that was all I wanted to do.

  And then there were all of the things we had to talk about. Where would we start? How could we plunge in to that conversation when we hadn’t spoken for so long? And I know you’d made it clear that you didn’t want to talk. But I hoped that there had been enough time apart for us to try.

  So I made a plan. I knew you’d remember all the books we chose together. I still had them – they’d all been stored for me, by my social worker – and I’d read the prison library copies of every single one of them. So I thought I could come to see you, catch you after work, and bring them, and then if I did that we would have something to talk about, something easy to begin with.

  I arrived not long before the shop closed and I waited opposite and along the way a bit, at the bus stop. I had the books in a box, and it was heavy.

  You came out of the shop and locked the door behind you. I just looked at you: your face was serious, the way it used to be when you were colouring in or reading, learning lines or measuring out the ingredients for the parkin – but it was beautiful. Those eyes of yours, as bright as stars. The way you moved, the way you shook your hair back – everything was a memory, and I was pinned down by the shock and the pleasure of seeing you. You went down an alleyway and came back a few minutes later wheeling a bike. I tried to call your name but my mouth wouldn’t work. I was crying. A man at the bus stop offered me a tissue. Things like that – unexpected contact – scare me a bit, these days. By the time I’d recovered, you had gone.

  So I left the books on the step. I didn’t know if you would recognise them but I liked the idea of you handling them, and maybe remembering you and I in the bookshop near the bridge.

  Next time I came, I made it into the shop. You weren’t there but I talked to a lovely man in a mustard-coloured shirt, who I think must have been the owner. I left the book with some others in a box when he wasn’t looking.

  I was busy at work for the next month, and short of money, so I couldn’t come again for a while. When I did, I brought the Delia Smith and I left the postcard in it. I didn’t know whether I was going to dare to talk to you or not. I kept thinking about you, so grown-up, so beautiful, and I didn’t know how to approach you. I knew that you had hated me. I thought you might, still. I hoped the books might make things easier. I saw them as messengers. But the day I brought the cookery book, I saw you through the window and I knew I wasn’t brave enough to ever tap you on the shoulder or say your name, just like that, the way any of the people that you see every day would. I decided to write a letter. This is the letter. Well, it’s what feels like the hundredth version of it.

  I’m not going to try to tell you everything now, and I’m not going to try to explain anything away. I just want to try to say enough to tell you what you might need to know, so that you can decide whether you have a place for me in your life, or not.

  I’m back in the world now, and I don’t think my life will change much. I work in a bakery, and I have a little flat, and I belong to a reading group, and if I could change the past then I would. But I can’t. All I can do is tell you where I am, and wait, and hope.

  I’ve written a lot of letters over the years. To you, of course, and to Annabel. When I was first in prison I wrote to your dad’s family, and Janey wrote back and asked me not to write again. I didn’t, of course. She was quite polite, considering. I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, I do. I was thinking; I want people to understand. I want them to forgive me. But I know forgiveness isn’t easy.

  When you started to miss visits it broke my heart, but I wasn’t surprised. It was all explained to me. The rights of the child. The panic attacks, the nightmares. Trauma. Time. Patience. I threw things and I screamed; I was medicated. I imagined them saying, well, there’s a temper on her for sure. Six of one, half a dozen of the other in that marriage.

  I had counselling. I was seen, at least partly, as a victim of my circumstances. You can read books about domestic violence until they come out of your ears but unless you’ve been there you never understand that you might love someone who hurts you, because you know that it’s the best part of them that loves you and the worst part of them that hurts you and they really, really want to be the best them. Your father was a good man with a good heart and a bad temper. People told me I was in denial. Maybe I was. All I wanted to talk about was you, because that was a new pain, every day. Thinking about your father was a rumble, like the sea when we lived so close to it, but thinking about you was like starting each day to find I’d woken up outside, in a hailstorm. It shocked me, it made me panic, and it hurt.

  I thought a lot about what would have happened if he hadn’t found the money that day. I had a lot of thinking time, and when wondering what you were doing hurt too much, that was what I thought about. (Were you going straight home from school? Did you have a friend to walk with yet? Had you joined any after-school clubs? Were you going to be in a play? When Annabel started writing, she told me some of the answers, but they weren’t the ones I wanted.)

  I think if your dad had got a job then things would have got better. Not perfect, but good enough. He knew that he was wrong when he hurt me. He never would have touched you, although I was scared you would get caught up in it, and that was why I thought I might need to get you away. Or maybe I would have left him. Then you would have had a more ordinary broken home. What I wouldn’t give now for that to have been your world.

  I didn’t intend to hurt him. But I did. Which is what he would have said about hurting me: I didn’t mean to. Not that that makes it right. But it makes it – grey. Not black and white. So when the police asked me what happened, and when the lawyer and the barrister tried to get me to tell ‘my side’, as though it was a competition that you and your father hadn’t already lost, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t defend myself. I let things happen. It was what I deserved. Though not, I see now, what you deserved.

  I thought you might want to see me when I was released from prison, but my social worker soon put me straight. Severe panic attacks, she said. The rights of the child. Patience.

  I was not patient. I was distraught, and I was vengeful, not at you, but at myself. I couldn’t sleep, didn’t eat, missed a probationary meeting. My social worker came to see me. She coaxed me into her car and drove me to hospital. I spent three months in whatever mental hospitals are called these days. I got a little bit better. There was a counsellor there who helped me to think about my own life, separate from yours, until you were ready to come in to it. I was too tired to fight the idea in the way that I wanted to. Why, I wanted to scream, why should I wait any longer? I didn’t ever mean to hurt my daughter. No, said the counsellor, but is not meaning to hurt the same as not hurting?

  They helped me to find a little place to live and I remembered how much I liked to bake. I got one of those halfway jobs in a factory and then another in the bakery, where they kept me on. I got fat again. I fed the birds in the park and I joined a reading group
and started working at a community garden. I tried finding you online but either you were the only person in their twenties not on Facebook or you’d changed your name.

  You are the treasure of my life, Loveday, the best thing I ever did, and knowing that I’d destroyed all of the things I’d worked so hard to give you – the confidence, the security, the sense of being loved – is what broke me every single day that we’ve been apart.

  I worked. I waited. I never found patience, but eventually, patience found me.

  I’m here, sweetheart, and I love you.

  Mum x

  POETRY

  2016

  Heal your heart

  Archie’s funeral was insane. I’d been out of hospital for five days. It was too sunny – the hottest October day on record – and as we waited for the hearse to arrive, the churchyard looked as though a moody circus had moved in. Silver shoes, frock-coats, someone with a rabbit on a lead. A couple of actors and three people important enough to have bodyguards. There’d been a security sweep in advance too. I suppose that was the royal. I’m not sure if the royal was the one who came in the helicopter or if that was some other dignitary. Not that any of it mattered.

  There was quite a lot of air-kissing and crying before the service began, and I was afraid it would be awful. I mean, awful as in ‘not what Archie wanted’ as opposed to the grim, awful goodbye that it was always going to be.

  But, of course, it was an Archibald Brodie production, and it went like clockwork. It seemed as though Archie had given a lot of thought to organising his funeral. Everyone received their instructions from his solicitor in the days after he died. They came in envelopes of thick blue paper, with typed letters inside. It was a bit like being given a part in a play.

  Everyone did as they were told on the day. It made me laugh, and cry, because it was so perfectly Archie: unbridled showing-off balanced by a thoughtfulness that meant no one had to do anything that they couldn’t cope with. The funeral directors, the caterers and the horse-and-carriages people had all been paid in advance. The church was filled with chrysanthemums – the most showy-offy flowers that there are – and it smelled of those, and of incense, which is very like pipe-smoke if pipe-smoke is the thing you would rather be smelling. There was one instruction common to us all: ‘Everyone, but everyone, must go back to my house and eat, drink and be merry for as long as they can manage’ when it was over. The plans had last been updated eight months ago. His solicitor told me that Archie went through them every year.

  I was the first follower of the coffin. I had Nathan on one side of me, and Annabel on the other, and they both held my hands, tightly. When the coffin got to the front, we sat in the second pew, and those who were reading or singing or doing a burlesque routine – yes, really – sat in the front pews so that they were ready to step up when it was their turn to pay whatever tribute Archie had assigned them. The vicar was another friend of Archie, of course, because there’s no way you’d get fire-eaters in a church without some inside help.

  Once I sat down I broke my heart with crying, again, the way I had every day since Archie died. I could feel Annabel and Nathan looking at each other over the top of my head. Then Nathan’s arm came around my shoulder and Annabel handed me a tissue, and I slowed my breathing down, and imagined the sound of Archie shouting ‘Love-DEEEE’.

  The organ music – which was ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’, in case you’re interested – stopped. Everyone hushed, a taffeta-and-silk sound. The vicar moved forward and put his hand on the coffin, looked down at it, sighed.

  ‘Well, Archie,’ he began, ‘what are we going to do without you?’

  *

  Although I was dreading the funeral service and burial, afterwards was worse, because my usual level of social awkwardness was amplified to the power of ten by grief and the absoluteness of the loss of my friend and protector. I was The Girl Who Got the House, so everybody wanted to talk to me. Some of them were less pleased than others by my inheritance, largely because Archie had lost the house in poker games to at least a dozen people over the years, and they’d generously allowed him to live in it until his death. He’d shaken hands with them all, and signed nothing.

  My bequest, however – the house, the business, and the money in the business account, which was, I’m sure, many tens of thousands of pounds more than the shop ever made – was legally bomb-proof, and when it came to it, there was something in Archie that made decent people behave decently. So there was the odd jibe about the house – did I fancy a game of cards, double or quits – but nothing to worry about. And Archie had had more than enough to go around: there were a couple of other houses, paintings, many things that looked like tat but turned out to be priceless. Melodie got his hat collection, Annabel a diamond bracelet and an instruction to sell it and go on a cruise. She laughed and said that was what she had always wanted to do. (Why hadn’t I known that?) Archie was as generous in death as he had been in his larger-than-life.

  I sat on the sofa and either Nathan or Annabel were with me the whole time. After the first hour, everyone was too drunk to bother with me much, any more. After the third hour I slipped away to the library and lay down on the Chesterfield. I was aware of Nathan following me; the next thing I knew, he was waking me, and the house was, if not quiet, at least quieter. The caterers had left and there was a card game going on in the kitchen, with bodyguards at the door, so there was still a royal in residence.

  Nathan steered me up the stairs. I stopped. ‘I can’t stay here,’ I said.

  ‘Loveday,’ Nathan said, ‘Annabel’s got one of the guest rooms ready for us. You’re going to have to stay here sometime. Anyway, there are still people here. We can’t go.’

  I was too tired to argue, so I let him propel me upwards. ‘I still can’t believe this is my house,’ I said.

  ‘It’s weird,’ Nathan agreed. Then, ‘Annabel says she’ll call you tomorrow evening. The cleaners are coming in about eleven in the morning. They can tidy the poker school away if it’s still going.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Archie, always a fan of Douglas Adams, had stated that the party must go on for as long as it wanted to. I was assuming it would run out of steam somewhere around the twenty-four-hour mark. If it went on any longer, it was going to have to sort out its own food.

  *

  Nathan woke me at nine. The room Annabel had put us in was one of the five bedrooms, and it was the smallest, with matching double bed, wardrobe and dressing table. I would say they were 1950s, warm dark wood and smooth curves. The wallpaper was William Morris-ish, or maybe even original William Morris, knowing Archie. In the en-suite shower room, everything except the wooden floor was bright white. The shower was the best one I had ever used, with high pressure and a disc shower-head fixed in the ceiling so you could close your eyes and pretend you were in a good, hot thunderstorm. The windowsill was wide and deep, the perfect place for a collection of shells or stones. I might make it my room. I shook my head. It was too soon to think about any of this.

  After I’d dressed, Nathan and I sat in the sunny kitchen, with pork pie and New York cheesecake left over from the wake. The bodyguards were gone. Someone was asleep on a chaise longe in the main living room, someone else sprawled on the floor in the dining room. I hoped that the lurcher wandering around the garden belonged to one of them.

  ‘Do you want me to come to the shop with you tomorrow, for the insurance assessor?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Yes please,’ I said. Did you see that? I was getting better at accepting help. Well, let’s face it, I’d have been burned to a crisp in a bookshop without it.

  Once the insurance company was done, I could hire a skip and start chucking out all the dead, wet, scorched, charred remains of the place that had kept me safe. In an odd way, I was looking forward to it. It was a job of work that had to be done. It wasn’t abstract. Whatever I decided about the shop, it would still have to be cleared.

  The house was a different matter altogether. I knew I
ought to live in it, but it felt ridiculous for me to rattle around in Archie’s dear old mansion. Drifting off to sleep, I wondered about making it into something else – a respite home for kids in care, a place where bereaved people could grieve, a halfway house for women clambering back from prison or abuse – but on waking I couldn’t imagine ever being up to such a task. Whereas filling a skip, or scrubbing a floor – that was achievable.

  ‘Vanessa says she’ll help,’ Nathan said. ‘So does Melodie.’

  ‘That’s kind,’ I said. I meant it.

  The morning passed quietly. Nathan and I talked about going to Cornwall; he would show me the places I remembered and the ones I didn’t, and we would visit my father’s grave. I looked at some of the inscriptions in the books in the library while Nathan napped on the sofa. I rubbed my palm over his head as I passed him and he didn’t stir. I wandered through all the rooms where Archie wasn’t. Part of his ‘when I die’ plans had included booking a cleaning company to strip his bed and wash the sheets and laundry and throw out the food in the fridge and any partly used toiletries. He really had thought of everything, except the fact that every inch and atom of his home exuded him, and I had no idea how I was going to get past that. I’d said as much to Annabel.

  ‘One foot in front of the other, Loveday,’ she’d said, and I’d wished I’d learned to talk to her when I was eleven, instead of wasting all this time.

  I read my mother’s letter again. It made me miss her like I had in the beginning, a scared ten-year-old with everyone who was precious gone from her. When I wasn’t breaking my heart over Archie, I was thinking about how monumentally alone Mum and I had been, and breaking my heart about that.

  Nathan and the stragglers roused when I started cooking bacon and eggs. Once we had all eaten, he offered to open a bottle of champagne, which I thought was a risky strategy, but it worked, because both of our guests went a bit green and called cabs.