Ten Things I've Learnt About Love

by Sarah Butler

  The man in the bed does not look like my father.

  My father has a strong face, a square jaw, thick bushy eyebrows. He is a big man: tall, not fat, but bulky. His shoulders are broad, his chest solid. When he hugs you – which isn’t often, but isn’t never – you can feel the strength in his arms. This man is too small to be my father.

  On the floor to the right of the bed is a slim white-and-blue box. A thin tube runs from the box, underneath the sheet that covers the man in the bed. A second tube ends in one of those plastic bags you see in hospitals, half full of yellow liquid.

  The man in the bed is breathing like an old person. His face is gaunt, the skin tight against the shape of a skull I don’t recognise. There’s a chair at the left-hand side of the bed. Someone must have brought it up from the dining room. It looks wrong in here, with its high slatted back and narrow cushioned seat. The dining room, too, must look out of sync, one man down.

  As I lower myself onto the chair it creaks loudly. I hold myself still. He doesn’t wake up. I want to touch his hand, but it’s underneath the sheet, and so I sit and look at my own fingers – stacks of silver rings, nails bitten to the quick.

  ‘I just got in,’ I say. My voice sounds thin, off balance. ‘From Mongolia. I just got in now.’ I feel a sudden sweep of fatigue. ‘I’m not even sure what day it is.’ I laugh, but it sounds wrong, and so I stop. ‘I came as quick as I could, I didn’t have mobile reception for a week – more than that.’ His hair is roughed up against his pillow; his lips are dry and cracked. I can feel the breath high and shallow in my chest. I want to cry. I want to lie down on the floor and close my eyes. I want to run away.

  ‘I came as soon as I got the messages.’

  I remember sitting in the back of a jeep in Mongolia, with a couple from Sweden and a guy from Palestine, my mobile phone useless and forgotten at the bottom of my rucksack, the road – it was hardly a road – jolting us back and forth, and all around us: nothing. Just miles and miles of nothing. The joy of it.

  ‘It’s so gloomy in here, Dad. Don’t you think it’s gloomy?’ I stand up and pull the curtains apart. It has started to rain, thin lines of water on the other side of the glass. ‘I see England’s having another great summer, then,’ I say.

  ‘Alice?’

  I spin around. ‘Dad?’ I stay where I am, one hand on the edge of the curtain. I wish I hadn’t opened them. The light picks out the shape of his face, casts deep shadows where the skin caves in. His skin is the wrong colour – too much yellow. ‘Dad. How are—’

  ‘Terrible.’ He sounds like he’s got a cold – phlegmy and hoarse.

  ‘My phone didn’t have reception,’ I say. He coughs and I see his face tense with pain.

  ‘What can I do? What can I get you?’

  He moves his head to the left.

  ‘This?’ I walk to the bedside table and pick up a wooden stick with a pink cube on the end.

  ‘Dip it – in the glass,’ he says.

  The glass holds a shallow layer of pink liquid. I dip in the cube and hand it to my father. He dabs the sponge to his mouth. I can see every bone underneath his skin. Maybe we did learn about the pancreas at school. I have a feeling it’s a dark, purply red, that it tapers to a point at one end. I can’t remember what it does.

  ‘I’m sorry – to ruin – your holiday,’ he says. He takes shallow, rattling breaths every few words. The pink sponge falls onto the sheet and spreads a wet stain across the cotton. I pick it up and put it back onto the bedside table.

  ‘It wasn’t a—’ I stop myself, sit back on the dining chair and wrap one leg over the other. I don’t know what to do with my hands, so I shove them underneath my thighs. The edges of my rings dig into the backs of my legs. ‘Do you know, in Mongolia, no one owns the land? There are no fences,’ I say.

  ‘Did that man – go with you?’

  ‘Kal?’

  ‘The Indian – chap.’

  ‘He’s British. I told you, Dad, we split up. I told you that.’ I stand and walk to the window, lean my head against the glass. It’s cold on my skin. I imagine sitting with Kal outside a yurt, watching the sun turn the earth a rich orange-pink. ‘There were eagles too,’ I say. ‘Massive eagles just by the side of the road – when there was a road. They had these huge claws. They could kill a mouse just by picking it up.’

  I hear him shift, and I turn back. He’s staring at me. The whites of his eyes are dull yellow.

  ‘You know – that I love – you,’ he says. ‘As much – as the others.’

  I close my fist around a handful of curtain and squeeze hard. It’s like there’s a weight in my stomach, bigger than my stomach even. I listen to his breath rasp in his throat. The water pipe has stopped ticking.

  ‘It’s important. I always – told – your mother – it was important.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘For you – to know, for – you to know – that.’

  He used to buy me a peppermint mouse from Thorntons every Friday afternoon. I don’t know why I remember it now, but I do: the crackle of plastic wrapping, the glee of biting off the nose – dark chocolate and sweet green mint beneath.

  Neither of us speak. His eyelids flicker, then close, and his breath pulls in in a faint snore. I walk towards the bed and look down at him.

  ‘Please don’t,’ I whisper. ‘Please don’t.’

  There’s a knock on the door. I expect it to be Tilly or Cee, but it’s a nurse, a short wide woman wearing blue trousers and a loose blue shirt.

  ‘You’re Alice,’ she says. ‘Mr Tanner’s been telling me all about you.’

  ‘He has?’

  She bustles past me. ‘Sleeping again,’ she says. ‘Let’s be getting this changed, shall we?’ I back away from the bed. She picks up the plastic bag and lifts the sheet. ‘You’ve got the curtains open today, Mr Tanner? That’s nice, isn’t it, a bit of light on the proceedings. And your daughter’s here, that is special.’

  ‘What did he say?’ I ask.

  ‘He’s sleeping now.’ She doesn’t even lower her voice. I can see my father’s body – thin beneath cotton pyjamas.

  ‘I mean about me.’

  She turns a valve on the bag and starts to pull it away from the tube. I watch the yellow liquid slosh against the sides.

  ‘I’ve got to—’ I wave my arm in the direction of the door.

  She doesn’t even look up. ‘Right you are, dear. It’s good you’re here, he’s been looking forward to it no end.’

  I close the door behind me. The corridor smells the same as it always has – wood polish and a hint of wet plaster. I head up the stairs, aiming for the attic, but Tilly intercepts me.

  ‘You met Margaret?’ she says.

  ‘The nurse?’

  ‘She’s good.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Cee’s made some tea.’

  Kal used to call Tilly and Cee ‘the Terms and Conditions’. How are the Terms and Conditions, he’d say when I got back from any kind of family gathering. Anxious and unreasonable, I’d say, and we’d laugh, every time.

  ‘I’d quite like to—’ I look towards the attic stairs.

  ‘Oh, Alice.’ She hugs me, my arms pinned tight to my sides.

  ‘He understands, doesn’t he? About my mobile. About not having reception. Tilly? He doesn’t think—’ I step away from her and stare at the woodchip wall in front of me. It looks dirty and old. ‘I just don’t want him to think—’

  ‘I made biscuits,’ she says. ‘The oat ones.’ They’re Dad’s favourite. I imagine him lying in bed, listening to Tilly in the kitchen, the smell of baking drifting up the stairs and into his room.

  ‘Lead the way, Captain.’ I touch my fingers to my forehead in a mock salute. Tilly gives me a weak smile, then turns and walks in front of me down the stairs.

  Ten things I’ve found that spell your name

  1) A book in Newington library with a cover the colour of glacier water.

  2) A row of mugs glazed meta
llic gold, in a shop window, Camden Town.

  3) A child’s magenta-pink plastic headband, on the concourse of Euston station.

  4) A school jumper with its arms tied around a tree on Southwark Bridge Road – navy blue.

  5) Thin slices of grey slate, by that new office block at the Angel.

  6) A shard of pale-blue glass on the river wall, Cremorne Gardens, Chelsea.

  7) A fake gold bracelet, the paint chipped around the edges, outside Battersea Park station.

  8) A burst balloon – bright pink, the rubber soft as skin – on the ramp up to the Tate Modern.

  9) A flake of dark-blue paint from a hoarding on Elephant Road, near the station.

  10) The end of a charcoal-grey leather belt, the stitching frayed, in the car park outside Waitrose, Balham.

  Today, my heart is strong. I follow the shape of the river, looking for colours. As long as I’m discreet, no one will take too much notice of an old man filling his pockets with rubbish. There are people in my situation who stick to the same place, who draw an invisible line around themselves and won’t go outside of it, but I don’t know where you are, so I keep moving.

  Each letter has a colour. I’m not sure if it’s the same for you. I’m not sure if you will understand, but I don’t think on that too much. Here, by the flood warning sign – a pale-blue sweet wrapper still sticky with sugar. The letter A is the colour of glacier water. Here, by the windowless wooden building with its whirling top, a single gold hoop earring. L is gold. And by the abandoned jetty, a pink ribbon and a glossy blue flyer. I is magenta pink; C is navy blue. E is charcoal grey – I pick up a tiny stone shaped like an arrowhead.

  There’s a yacht club, not quite new any more, which sits out on the river like a woman lifting her skirts away from the water. I arrange the colours as best I can, on the path just by the entrance gate, and then move on. Around the corner, there is a beach full of treasure.

  I’d like to meet you here, stand next to you with the city’s junk at our feet. It’s a good place for colours. Here: a sun-bleached orange belt; a scrap of plastic just the right shade of purple; a piece of material so pale the blue is almost white; a length of bright-green string. Lower down there is glass and ceramic. A burnt bottle, the glass turned black. Lower still there is stone and metal and broken bricks. Nails rusted up so thickly they lose themselves. If you hit them, hard – like this – you can break off the warm-orange rust and see the shape underneath. I find flint, the corner of it bulked out like a knuckle. Magnolia, amongst the scraps of torn-up paper.

  The first letter of each word gives it its colour; you can still see the rest, only they’re fainter. So it’s good that the pale-orange belt is the largest; it’s not always so easy to get the balance right. Five holes, rimmed with metal. I make another two. There is more cotton and string in this city than you’d credit – I use it to tie the words together. I collect it as I walk, roll it into a multicoloured ball which lives in the right-hand pocket of my jacket; not the same pocket as the picture – I have learnt to take care of the things that matter.

  I walk down to an old inlet for unloading boats, past a leather boot, cowboy style, with stitching up each side, a chunk missing from the heel like someone’s taken a bite. The water is the colour of steel. The red light blinks mournfully on top of Canary Wharf, and the mirrored blocks reflect back a blank, colourless sky. It’s been a wet summer: I can feel the rain stored deep in my bones; my boots have suffered.

  I close up the belt, careful not to snap the strings, then bend down – something it gets harder to do, you’ll find that out one day – and place it onto the water. For a moment, I think it will sink and I’m ready to fish it out, even if it means a day or more with a sodden boot. It hesitates, then catches the current and it’s away. I watch it, and think of a picture I saw once, a frenzied pattern of thin black lines: a map showing twenty-four hours’ worth of journeys made by buses in the square mile centred on Waterloo Station – or at least that’s what the label said. It was more beautiful than you might imagine.

  As I turn away from the water I see a coconut, with hessian skin, up by the wall. I picture a boy standing on the deck of a ferry, tossing the coconut between hands that will one day be scarred by wind and salt and life, but right now are as soft as the skin just below his ear. I picture him throwing it from palm to palm, feeling the scratch and the satisfying curve of its shape. He has run up from the bowels of the ship, away from the roar of gas hobs and the slap of meat against chopping boards, the flash of knives and the hard, clipped words of his co-workers. The wind whips the sweat from his forehead, plays with his hair the way his mother used to, and he has a sudden memory of a scratched wooden sideboard, red plastic roses in a brass vase, dust tucked into the creases between the petals. He should be in the kitchen raising a hammer to smash the coconut into pieces. Instead, he fixes his eyes on the horizon – a shimmer of blue, almost merged with the sky, lifts his right arm and throws the coconut in a high, wide arc.

  I balance the coconut on a flat stone and break it open. I’ve never been one to save things up. Perhaps it’s an inheritance from my father. Even so, it serves me well these days – hesitate, and someone will take it from you. I don’t like coconut much, but I eat the lot. Flakes stick between my teeth and I have to dig them out with the edge of my fingernail. When I’m done, I walk back to the shore and place each piece of husk on the water. They float like tiny boats out to sea.

  * * *

  The problem with cities, or at least with cities like this one, is that they’re near enough impossible to write on. That’s not to say I don’t try, just that it isn’t simple.

  As a rule, I don’t tell people about you, or the writing. The last time I spoke of it was to a man I hadn’t seen in a long time, a man who drank cheap cider out of thin ring-pull cans. He asked how I knew you were even here, in London. How do you know she’s not in Milan, or Dubai, Paris or Tokyo, he said, Manchester or Rotterdam, Barnsley or New York? He went on for some time, listing the name of every city he could think of, shifting his eyes upwards as if looking for places hidden amongst the grubby ceiling tiles. She might not even be in a city at all, he said. I asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t, and so I stood up and walked out of the church hall, with its laminate floor and felt-covered noticeboards, its long foldaway tables and hard plastic chairs.

  * * *

  I send you a birthday card each year. I don’t know the exact date, but I can make a good enough guess. The hardest thing is the envelope: all that blank white. I write your name – I have that at least – but I don’t have an address. I drop it into a postbox, and dream, those nights, of the envelope pushed through a letter box, and you, walking along a hallway towards it.

  Ten foods that stress me out

  1) Any kind of shellfish you have to crack open or pull apart – all that fuss for so little reward.

  2) Chinese mushrooms – slick wet balls in your mouth, they give me the creeps.

  3) Kal’s prawn curry, not because I don’t like it – it’s delicious – but it’s his mum’s recipe and so he’d always mention her, and then I’d have to make a comment, and then we’d fight.

  4) Glacé cherries, because they’re nothing like cherries.

  5) Watermelon, because I feel like I should eat the seeds, but I can’t, and so I end up spitting them into my hand and not knowing what to do with them.

  6) Anything that I have to cook, if it’s for more than one other person.

  7) Birthday cake. Ugly candles. Fondant photographs. Crappy icing handwriting. They’re never right.

  8) Breakfast cereal. Sugary or wholesome, it is boring as hell. I’m a toast and Marmite girl.

  9) Tilly’s double-cream, sugar-fest sherry trifle. She spends so long making it look perfect you don’t want to touch it, and then she gets upset when Cee says she only wants a spoonful.

  10) In fact, eating pretty much anything in the company of my sisters stresses me out.

  I wake early, in the
single bed I used to pretend was an ocean liner, and it’s like someone’s dumped a skipful of rubble right on top of me. My stomach’s growling, but I don’t want to see anyone, and so I creep up to the attic. It’s stuffed full of rejected furniture and old cardboard boxes. The rocking chair still sits underneath the skylight. I used to curl up in it and rock, faster and harder, hoping for disaster. Usually Dad or Cee would shout up the stairs and tell me to stop. Sometimes they weren’t around and I’d rock until I felt sick, or bored. I sit in the chair now and let the weight of my body move it back and forth. It’s dusty up here, and warm, despite the rain and the cool edge of the air outside. The carpet is the same carpet – an ugly, too-bright green. It’s worn underneath the wooden supports of the rocking chair. The rain taps Morse-code messages onto the skylight. I always loved sitting here, listening to the rain; I used to find it calming.

  Kal calmed me down, even Cee must have recognised that. Every time we went out, for drinks or dinner with friends, there would be a moment when I’d look over at him – waving his arms about, telling some story or other – and feel a kind of stillness. I miss that.

  I stretch out my legs and think about my rucksack. I’d intended to tell someone about it, but there was a queue at the desk. I hate queues. And anyway, there wasn’t time. I wonder if they’ll ever bother trying to trace me, or whether my rucksack will just sit in a room somewhere. What will they do with it? Unpack it? Give the stuff away to charity? See if they fancy anything and then chuck the rest of it in the bin? I suppose a bag can just get lost in a system. Though it would have to be somewhere. Even if you don’t know where a thing is, it is still somewhere.

  I’ve forgotten whether the straps are the same blue as the body, or black. I screw up my eyes and try to remember. I tell myself it isn’t important, but it bothers me.

  Downstairs, the front door bangs shut. Cee. She lives in Berkhamsted. Husband. Three kids. A part-time job in HR for an engineering firm. They’ve given her time off. Compassionate leave, and he’s not even—