Ten Things I've Learnt About Love

by Sarah Butler

  The bridge heaves itself back into place. A cluster of motorcyclists, crowded right up to the barrier, rev their engines. The city crawls back into action.

  After the art gallery job, I starting driving a taxi. Not a black cab. My car had tired blue seats and a boot with a dodgy catch. I had a radio on my dashboard, its lead twisted like a telephone wire. A disembodied voice reeled off pickups and destinations.

  I worked nights. The traffic was better, the money was better, the passengers – mostly – were worse. I looked for you, I scoured every inch of the city, out to Heathrow, up to Golders Green, across to the Westway; every second I was looking for you. I’d watch the people who sat in the back of my car, fragments of their faces reflected in my mirror. I took comfort from their stories: a long-lost school friend sitting in the same Tube carriage, a former colleague discovered in a suburban cafe. London, passengers would say, it’s an amazing city: millions of people and yet you manage to bump into someone you know.

  I wait until the crowds along each side of the bridge disperse. I stop halfway across and lean my body into the railings, drop my head down towards the water. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never thought about it: stepping off the pavement into the hurtling bulk of a lorry; lying naked in the snow; sitting for a moment on the edge of a bridge, taking in the world one last time before letting myself go. But there is always the thought of you.

  I watch the water slip past beneath me. My father took me fishing once. I couldn’t tell you where or when, only that the sun was hot enough to burn my cheeks, that I hadn’t yet grown taller than him, that we ate sardine sandwiches from a yellow Tupperware box, that I caught a single, puny fish to his five, and that for once he didn’t seem to be disappointed in me.

  On Whitechapel High Street, men dismantle market stalls – a grate of metal against metal. They fold green and white covers into familiar squares, stack battered boxes into white vans parked half on the pavement with their hazards flashing orange. I pick up an apple, and two bruised bananas. I find an olive-green leather glove, the stitching loose where the thumb meets the first finger. A silver pen dropped outside the library. I pull a piece of chestnut-brown bark from a tree. Half a torn envelope, black writing on maroon paper.

  I cut up Vallance Road, by the brown concrete building lapped by green tarpaulin, and then into the park. In the central circle I choose a bench that looks towards Derbyshire Street; beyond that, Bethnal Green Road; beyond that, Hackney and the canal. I lay the glove on the seat and use the pen to weigh down the envelope, snap the bark in two and place the pieces on the green leather. I sit with it next to me.

  I would like to buy you a cup of tea, somewhere they have proper mugs and sugar in bowls on the tables, and I’d like to sit across from you and tell you everything.

  * * *

  Time to move. I leave the glove on the bench and walk towards Hackney. At the entrance to London Fields, at the end of the stretch of shops where the road widens out like an estuary, there is a square of paving, with a low brick wall and two wooden benches. By the benches are three trees: two small ones with slender trunks, and one large – a sycamore, still thick with leaves. In one of the small trees, in the crook where the trunk splits in two, I see a terracotta Buddha, about ten inches high. In the sycamore, barely visible amongst the leaves, I see a clock. Its batteries are finished. I know because I stand and watch it and the hands don’t move. Right now, I guess it’s about five hours fast, or seven hours slow. I imagine you walking past at the exact moment in the day when it is telling the right time.

  I sit on one of the benches and look up at the clock, and I wonder if there are other people, like me, who leave messages across this city in the hope that someone will understand them. I wonder what the clock and the orange, fat-cheeked Buddha mean. When I stand, I find an oyster shell, of all things, on the floor beneath the bench. I run my fingers over its perfect, pearl-white inside. It’s easy after that – a plastic bag with a hint of blue; a green cigarette lighter; a child’s sock, creamy white beneath the dirt; a length of charcoal-grey wire; a chestnut-brown hair-tie.

  I picture my father, standing at the window of the room he used as his study – as though he was some kind of aristocrat with a library, except the PVC windows gave him away. I just don’t know what to do with you, Daniel, he said. I was twenty-two, I’d just lost another job. You need to build foundations for yourself, Daniel, he told me, over and over. You need to have a stable base. You need to be able to provide, for yourself, for your family. He was a fucking hypocrite – I said as much to my mother after she found him in that same room, vomit congealed across the carpet, his skin as white as the stack of bills on his desk. She looked at me as though I’d slapped her.

  The clouds have grown heavy with water. They throw shadows down onto the streets. I can smell rain. There’s a shelter in Angel open tonight; I should be able to get there before it starts in earnest. I pull off a tiny square from the plastic bag, stand on the lighter until it breaks into pieces, and choose a triangle of green. I unravel a stretch of wool from the sock, curl the wire into a tight coil, and tie the hair-band in knots until it is a hard brown ball. Each colour sits neatly in the pearl-white cup of the oyster shell. I go back to the paved space at the edge of the road and reach up to where the third, empty tree splits its trunk in two. Then I balance the shell and its contents between the branches, closing off a tiny triangle of space. It will catch the rain when it falls. Perhaps, walking home, you will look up and see.

  Ten reasons to hate my sister (Cee)

  1) Her bathroom tiles have pictures of dolphins on them.

  2) If she did Desert Island Discs she’d choose Foreigner, ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’, as her can’t-live-without record.

  3) She has given her sons names starting with the same letter.

  4) When I used to ask her about Mama she’d look so pitying, and at the same time so smug, I could barely listen to what she was telling me.

  5) She buys eggs, takes them out of the box and puts them into a ceramic bowl shaped like a chicken, which sits on top of the fridge.

  6) She used to tell me our house was haunted.

  7) She makes me feel like I’ve done something wrong.

  8) She reads the Daily Mail. So you can imagine what she thought about me and Kal.

  9) She thinks I’m a fuck-up.

  10) Hate is maybe too strong a word. I remember her reading to me, when I had a cold or an upset tummy. She would do all the voices, pull funny faces to make me laugh.

  It’s a warbling, electronic sound, less shrill than my father’s doorbell, but all the same, when it rings, I head for the door. It’s only once I’m halfway down the hall that I realise it’s him, ringing from upstairs. My heart rams against my ribs and I run. When I get to his room, I find him propped against the headboard, a pillow behind his back, his eyes open.

  ‘Oh, Alice,’ he says, as though he hadn’t expected me to be there.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Well, I’m not – dead.’ He manages a weak smile. ‘I wanted to – talk – to Matilda – and Cecilia.’

  ‘I can help.’ He looks at me like I’m a child – too young to understand. ‘Tell me what you need, Dad, I’ll do it.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I just – have something I need – to say – to your sisters.’

  ‘Tilly’s at the supermarket.’ My oldest sister has already cooked enough for an army. The fridge is packed with Tupperware containers of soup, chilli, frittata, risotto, and Dad’s battered-looking cake tins are crammed with biscuits and lemon slices and muffins. There’s no need at all to shop, but when I said as much she looked so hurt I didn’t push it. ‘And Cee’s at work. She’ll be here later,’ I say.

  ‘It doesn’t matter – another – time.’

  I am standing by the narrow sofa, with its tired-out rose-patterned upholstery. ‘I don’t understand, Dad.’

  He shakes his head again. My Seamus Heaney anthology sits at an angle on his bed
side table. I’ve been reading him my favourites: ‘The Peninsula’, ‘The Salmon Fisher to the Salmon’, ‘Bogland’. Dad’s hardly a poetry fan, so maybe it isn’t fair, but he hasn’t protested.

  ‘Do you want me to read to you?’

  ‘I’d kill – for – a cigarette,’ he says.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘You sound – like your sisters. Always – sensible – your sisters.’

  Not like me.

  ‘It’s hardly going – to hurt – now, is it?’ he says.

  I get my cigarettes from my room.

  ‘Better – open the window,’ he says. ‘Or there’ll be – trouble.’ He grins, but I can’t smile back.

  I light one for him, and pass him the ashtray from the table by the sofa. He draws in a shaky breath, coughs. I sit and watch him, twist the ring on my middle finger round and round. He meets my gaze.

  ‘Let me – enjoy it, Alice. Have one – with me.’

  I remember Cee’s campaigns to stop him smoking. She’d cut out articles with graphic pictures of blackened lungs. She’d cry at the dinner table. She’d steal his cigarettes and cut them into pieces. Maybe that’s why I started – to be closer to him. I shake out another from the packet and light it.

  He smokes half of his and then drops it into the ashtray. I stub it out for him, take another drag of mine and then stub that out too.

  ‘What are you – going to – do?’ he says.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘With your – life. You’ll go back – to – Malaysia?’

  ‘Mongolia. I don’t know. I’ll decide once—’ I press my fingers to my lips. ‘Dad, didn’t you know something was wrong? I mean, these things take time to get this bad, don’t they?’

  ‘Don’t bite – your nails – Alice.’

  I slide my hands underneath my legs. ‘But you’re a doctor,’ I say.

  ‘I need to – lie—’ He struggles beneath the covers, trying to lever himself down.

  ‘Wait, I’ll help you.’

  He feels like a child, fragile and light. I wrap my arms around his chest and lower him onto his back. It takes no effort at all. I stay sitting on the edge of his bed and stare at the ink drawing of an anvil on the front of the poetry book. I listen for birdsong, but I can’t hear any, only my father’s breathing, rough as sandpaper.

  ‘Do you remember the peppermint mice you used to buy me?’ I say. ‘I haven’t eaten one of those in years.’

  He takes my hand. I watch his yellow thumb stroke the line of flesh in between my thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Will you tell me what it is?’ I say.

  His thumb stops moving.

  ‘I can tell Cee and Tilly later.’

  ‘You – remind me – of your mother,’ he says.

  He almost never talks about my mother. I have no idea what to say.

  ‘Your – hair,’ he says. ‘Your sisters – were always jealous – of that.’

  I shaved my head when I was seventeen, in the school holidays. I stood in the bathroom, the sink full of auburn curls, and stared at my pale scalp and the unfamiliar shape of my skull in the mirror. That will show them, I’d told myself. Exactly what I thought it would prove I can’t really remember. It was just me and Dad in the house, though, and when I went down for dinner, psyched for a fight, he just looked at me, barely raised his eyebrows, and continued as if nothing had happened.

  ‘What was she like?’ I say. I try to keep any hint of desperation out of my voice.

  He is staring up at the ceiling. I’m not sure he’s heard.

  My mother died when I was four. She was supposed to be driving to pick me up from a ballet class. I remember standing in a church hall holding a pink bag with a ballerina embroidered onto the front, listening to the music of the next class and the girls’ feet on the wooden floorboards, waiting. It blurs then, except for Dad’s face, white and frightened – the way he looked at me as though he didn’t know who I was.

  It was Ella Summers from ballet who told me Mama had been buried in the ground with the worms, all nailed up in a dark box, and that I’d never see her again. I cried, screamed, held my hands clamped against my ears and told Ella Summers I hated her, but I knew, by the way the triumph faded in her eyes, that she was telling the truth. I had nightmares for weeks afterwards. Tilly and Cee took it in turns to lift me from my bed and into theirs, hold my hot shaking body and whisper soothing words into the top of my sweat-stained head, until I fell asleep again. Ssshh, don’t upset Daddy. Ssshh, Mama’s safe. It’s not your fault – no one thinks it’s your fault.

  ‘Dad? I asked you about Mama.’

  ‘Difficult,’ he says. ‘She was – difficult.’

  Like me.

  ‘I wasn’t – fair – maybe. I promised—’ He frowns. ‘I promised her – love you – just as much – Alice.’ His eyes droop closed. His mouth turns slack. I feel a swoop of panic. How do you tell if— And then I see the sheet rise just a fraction, and fall again. I want to shake him awake. I put my hand on his shoulder, but he’s so thin and so tired, I can’t do it. I sit a while longer, and then I close the window, collect the ashtray and our half-smoked cigarettes, and leave.

  * * *

  My father’s house is not small; there are plenty of rooms to wander through, and settle in, but I can’t seem to stay in one place. I pick up Tilly’s newspaper, flick through it, and put it down again. I start the washing-up and get bored halfway through. As soon as Margaret arrives I grab Dad’s keys, slip my feet into flip-flops and scribble a note for Tilly. As I wait to cross East Heath Road I consider lifting my hand to the next cab I see. I could go to Heathrow, find a ticket desk and ask the clerk to pick me a destination. I imagine it – the hustle of the airport, the dead time of the flight, then walking down the steps into the smell of a new country, excitement pushing at my throat. My passport’s in the house, I tell myself. My father’s sick. I cross the road, through the car park and onto the Heath. I march along the path in between the two ponds, and then up towards the trees. An old man wearing a red waterproof coat and leather boots walks in front of me. I turn right, along a narrow, untarmacked path, because I can’t bear to look at him. I kick off my flip-flops and feel tiny stones stab at my skin. It is better than crying. I walk faster, stamping my feet into the earth.

  At the top of Parliament Hill, three women wearing tracksuits stand by the sign detailing the view. A man dressed in black is packing away a huge orange kite. Another man, with wild hair, lies on the grass with his hand shading his eyes. There are maybe eight other people, a couple of dogs sniffing at each other, a kid wearing a green jumpsuit, strapped into a buggy. I sit on one of the benches that perch on the slope overlooking the city, pull my thighs up towards my chest and stare at London. A million panes of glass mirror the sun. I pick out St Paul’s, the Gherkin, Canary Wharf. When I travel, I always say I’m from London; it never feels quite true.

  I brought Kal here, after that first Sunday lunch. We sat, maybe even on this bench, and tried to locate his flat amongst all the other buildings. Your family seem lovely, he said, I don’t know why you were so worried. I didn’t say, because Cee thinks you’re a terrorist, because my dad doesn’t trust you not to bundle me off to India and lock me in the kitchen, because none of them get it. I just shrugged and smiled, and said I was looking forward to meeting his family. I still hadn’t realised, at that point, how things were going to be.

  I take my phone out of my pocket and scroll down to Kal’s numbers – mobile, work, home. There’s a phone in the hallway of his flat. I imagine it ringing, and a woman, barefooted, walking towards it. He used to paint my toenails for me, a different colour for each toe. Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we could find a way that would work.

  I hold my finger over the call button and look out at London, but I don’t press it. I’ve been through all this already, and there’s no point. I know that.

  * * *

  When I get back, the house smells of onions, tomatoes, beef. Spaghetti Bolognese.
Dad loves Tilly’s spaghetti Bolognese. I find a pan of pasta and one of sauce on the kitchen table, but no sign of my sisters. I imagine the three of them upstairs, talking, but when I get up there it’s just Dad and Tilly. The door’s open. Tilly’s sitting on the chair by his bed, a plate of spaghetti in her lap.

  ‘Just a mouthful, Dad? I chopped everything up as small as I could,’ she’s saying.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘But it’s your favourite. Isn’t it your favourite?’

  Dad’s eyes flick towards me and Tilly turns. There’s guilt on their faces.

  ‘He won’t eat,’ Tilly says. ‘He’s so thin.’

  ‘Don’t fuss, Matilda.’ He coughs, a thin rattling sound that makes my heart ache.

  ‘Where’s Cee?’ I ask.

  ‘She’s gone home. She brought this.’ Tilly holds up a small bottle with a pump spray. ‘It’s fake saliva.’

  I fold my arms. ‘You told them what you wanted to tell them, then, Dad?’

  ‘Alice, what have you done to your feet?’ Tilly says.

  I look down. They are covered in dirt, and maybe dried blood, too, it’s hard to tell.

  ‘Where are your shoes?’ she says.

  My father is looking at me as though he can see through me. I feel five again.

  ‘There’s loads of food downstairs,’ Tilly says. ‘Why don’t you get some? I’ll be there in a minute.’ As I leave the room she shouts, ‘You might need to heat it up.’

  I go into the bathroom, lock the door and run hot water into the sink. The water darkens as I rub my hand gently over my right foot. I have to try hard to stop myself from crying. Not because it hurts. It doesn’t hurt. I clean my left foot in a fresh basin of water, and then walk damp footsteps downstairs.