Ten Things I've Learnt About Love

by Sarah Butler

  I turn right down Willow Road – sandstone yellow, chestnut brown – because I am not quite ready yet. I need to think. I walk onto the Heath, up above the ponds, then loop west and back towards you.

  It will be a big house, I’m sure of it. I imagine pale London brick, tall windows, trees in pots. A grown-up’s house, and you so fragile-looking; I couldn’t help but think that. I want to take you to a cafe and put a plate of food in front of you. I want to sit and watch you eat. And when you’re finished – when I offer you something else: some cake, or another cup of tea, and you shake your head and say no – then I want to tell you everything.

  What first? How I tried to find you both – after she sat across the table from me in that cafe and told me we had reached the end, that there was nothing she could do, that she was sorry. How I raged and broke things. How I lost my job. None of that would reflect well. Maybe I’d tell you about that summer when I was a kid and all those bees died in our garden, with their soft black-and-orange fur and their delicate wings. I collected them up and made each one a grave, in a long line by the hedge. I picked flowers and made tiny grave-markers from cocktail sticks and cardboard. I sang a song which I considered to be suitably sombre as I buried them.

  Cannon Lane. Squire’s Mount. Holford Road. Cannon Place. Navy blue, gold. Olive green, black. Magnolia, chestnut brown. Back to navy blue, royal blue.

  Number 33.

  It is a double door – dark red.

  Two narrow panes of rumpled glass, a pattern of twisted ivy around the edges.

  A bell, brass, on the left-hand side of the frame.

  Tired grey steps, their undersides a mottled black.

  A bay tree blocks half the window, but I can see the edges of red curtains, the movement of people inside. A hand holding a wine glass. The back of a balding head.

  I have been looking for this house for nearly thirty years.

  She moved. He made her – of course he did. The woman I found living at Marina’s didn’t know where she was. Even if I’d threatened her – and I thought about it, I was desperate enough – I don’t think she could have told me.

  I stand on the opposite side of the road and imagine pressing the doorbell, an abrupt sound, like a man shouting in the street.

  I have come this far.

  I cross over and walk slowly up the steps to the front door.

  You are standing by the far wall, a glass of red wine in your right hand, talking to the short, bulky man – your sister’s husband. Your forehead is creased up; your left hand rubs at your jaw. I do that too, always have, when I am trying not to cry. You catch my eye, I’m sure of it, and then you are walking across the room, towards the hallway. Towards me. I try to smooth down my hair. I run my tongue across my lips so I am ready to speak. My heart strains at my ribs. I wait.

  You do not come to the door.

  You saw me, I’m sure of it.

  I wait. You will come.

  You do not come to the door.

  While she’s back. You are back from somewhere; you must be staying a few days at least. There’s a lot to sort out when someone dies. There’s time, I tell myself. I can get a haircut, find some new clothes. There’s time. And a funeral – it’s hardly appropriate, you have enough to be thinking about. At least I know where you are now.

  I wait until I am sure you aren’t coming, and then I back down the steps and walk slowly away. At the end of the road I find an empty cigarette packet. I pull the silver foil from the inside, and drop the cardboard box into a bin. I met a man, once, who collected pieces of wire – you’d be surprised how many you can find when you look – and twisted them into people’s names, into butterflies, into any kind of shape you could imagine. The other thing he did was make flowers from the foil insides of cigarette packets. It’s a fernickety business: tearing tiny squares and folding them into petals. It’s precise. Beautiful. It focuses the mind. He taught me how to do it, and I do it now, sitting on this bench in a space carved out from between the roads, studded with black bollards to keep the cars away. The bench has an armrest halfway along, to stop the likes of me from lying down. I arrange the tiny pieces of foil along the length of it and bend over them so they won’t blow away. I will make this for you, I tell myself. Then I’ll get myself to a shelter and put some food in my stomach, clean myself up, make a plan.

  I climb back up to the dark-red door with its brass doorbell. The room is still full of people, but I can’t see you. I place the flower on the low wall to the left of the steps, and turn to leave.

  Ten things in my father’s shed

  1) Green wellies, size eleven. I used to love putting my feet in them when I was a kid – all that space to wriggle around in.

  2) A lawnmower with a lead long enough to stretch the length of the garden. I don’t think I’ve ever mown a lawn in my life.

  3) Eight identical glass jars filled with screws, nails, washers. They used to hold thick acacia honey. He always had honey on almost-burnt toast for breakfast.

  4) A spade – the wooden handle cracked along its length.

  5) A torch minus the batteries – the weight all at one end: unbalanced. He bought me a head-torch last Christmas. It’s in the rucksack I lost.

  6) Sixteen dead bluebottles; two dead spiders.

  7) A white saucer with a blue rim, grimy with cigarette ash. We never smoked together, except that one time just before he died.

  8) Cobwebs. It bothers me that they’re so beautiful when they’re new, but turn grey and powdery when you touch them; I hate how they stick to your skin and won’t let go.

  9) His red mug; a chip, like a white glare, out of the handle.

  10) A matchbox filled with black seeds. One year, he marked out a neat rectangle in the garden for me to look after. I wasn’t interested. I wish I’d at least pretended to be.

  It started after the funeral. Tilly saw the first one. A silver flower. Tiny, perfect, sitting on the wall by the front door, in the dip of mortar between two bricks. It was beautiful, folded out of silver paper, the petals delicate paper diamonds. There was even a leaf attached to the bottom of the stem.

  ‘I knew a girl who could make these,’ she said, and held it out to me. I thought maybe Kal— But it’s not the kind of thing he’d do.

  And then nothing for the next couple of days. I almost forgot about it until Tuesday, when I found a pink flower, real this time, in the same place. It had been pushed into a tube made from a Post-it note and secured with a thin nail. There was a bit of gold ribbon tied around the paper, and a scrap of material. Just rubbish, I told myself, but it looked deliberate. I put the flower in a wine glass filled with water. It fell onto its side, and floated on the surface, its petals darkening. The rest of the stuff I threw in the bin.

  Yesterday, it was a piece of electric cable, threaded with bottle tops, a circle of worn glass, and some bits of bark. I was coming back from the supermarket with a pile of cardboard boxes, their sharp brown edges digging into my armpit. When I picked up the cable I found a neat square of orange cardboard, punctured by the end of a biro – a pattern of tiny holes with faint ink marks around their edges. Maybe kids, maybe just kids.

  I arranged them on the windowsill. It made me feel a bit better, somehow.

  Today, when I open the door to the estate agent, I see a glint of gold foil on the wall. The man blocks the doorway. He’s earnest-looking, in his twenties, wears an expensive-looking suit and clutches his car keys, mobile, and a blue hardbacked folder like someone is threatening to steal them. I suspect his tan comes from a bottle.

  It is way too early for this, but Cee has gone into overdrive. It’s her way of coping, Tilly keeps saying. When I pointed out that Cee wasn’t the only one trying to cope, Tilly said I should move into hers for a while and let Cee deal with Dad’s house. Tilly lives in a one-bed flat in West Hampstead. It’s nice, but it’s tiny, and it’s hers. I’d mooch about on the sofa with the duvet scrunched up at one end, drinking too much coffee, getting in the way. She�
�d cook for me every night and look concerned the whole time, Toby would pretend not to be annoyed I was there, and I’d have to start temping again, or buy a plane ticket. When I told Cee it felt a bit disrespectful to get the house valued so soon after Dad had died she flushed red and said I was being unfair, and that maybe I should move into hers – God help me – while she sorted things out. And then she made a song and dance about being a working mother of three, the implication being I was a layabout, and so I caved and said that I’d do it. I’d show the estate agents round, I’d sort out the photos and the viewings and whatever the hell else you have to do to sell a house. She pursed her lips and said maybe I was right, maybe we should wait a few weeks, and I stormed off and called the first three estate agents in the phone book. They all offered to come round within the week.

  ‘Michael,’ the estate agent says, rearranging everything into his left hand in order to thrust his right hand towards me. ‘You must be Alice. Good to see you. Lovely house.’ He steps back and looks up. ‘Not the best time for the market, but it’s a great location.’ His eyes flit to each side as he speaks. His teeth are too neat. I wonder if he snorts coke, or grew up with over-demanding parents, or has been threatened with redundancy. I want to see what’s on the wall, but instead I shake his hand and invite him in.

  ‘Right, yes, let’s get a good gander, shall we?’

  He shoves the pile of post strewn across the doormat to one side with his foot. They are all addressed to Mr M. Tanner. I can’t touch them. I look up and out of the front door. The sky is so clogged with clouds it’s white. A breeze slips into the hallway and makes me shiver.

  I follow Michael around the house. He touches the walls, sniffs around the windows, peers at light fittings and electricity sockets. He turns on the shower, flushes the toilets, stamps his feet against the squeaky floorboards. He makes notes with a blue biro, in tiny cramped handwriting. I imagine Dad, watching us with a wry expression on his face. Don’t get so worked up, Alice, he’d be thinking, it’s business. Just business.

  We end up in the kitchen. I can see the sneer on Michael’s lips as he takes in the lino floor, the Seventies cupboards, the collection of flowers and bits of rubbish from the front wall that I’ve arranged on the windowsill. They’re my charms, I want to tell him, but he wouldn’t understand.

  ‘So, what do you think, then?’ I say.

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ He nods and forces a smile.

  ‘You don’t think it’s a bit dark?’

  He laughs, nervously. ‘Nothing a lick of paint couldn’t sort out.’

  ‘I was always a bit—’ and now I laugh at nothing. ‘Scared of it, or something.’ I shake my head. ‘Coffee. Do you want coffee?’

  He drinks his black with three sugars. I put chocolate digestives onto a plate; they look a bit pathetic. He eats four. A cluster of crumbs clings to his cheek. I find it hard to concentrate on what he’s saying.

  ‘The thing is, Alice, you have to think about the buyer; you have to imagine yourself in their—’

  I stare at his shoes. They taper to a gentle point – soft brown leather with pale-blue laces.

  ‘ – so I appreciate it might seem like a lot of effort, Alice—’

  His hands duck and dive in time with his words. He has thin fingers, cropped nails, no rings.

  I found a picture of my mother yesterday, in an unlabelled box in the attic. I’d been trying to convince myself to start sorting things out, and so had pulled the boxes out from the angle of the roof. The first was full of books: Fahrenheit 451, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Brave New World. The second contained a full set of crockery – scalloped edges, brown glaze. The third revealed a flash of colour. Turquoise silk. Gold thread. I had heard about these cushions – Tilly and Cee used to put them on their heads and pretend to be princesses; they thought Dad had thrown them away with everything else. There were three cushions in the box, and at the bottom, a framed picture of my mother. A line drawing, in fine black ink. Her head is turned a fraction but she is looking straight at whoever is drawing her, smiling. There’s no signature.

  I told my sisters about the cushions, but not about the picture. It is propped up on the desk in my room, its back edge leaning on the window. The woman at the funeral was right: I have her small, almost snub nose, her almond-shaped eyes, her rounded chin and thick, curly hair. I wonder if that’s why Dad didn’t seem to want me around, those months after she died, if that’s why I’d catch him looking at me so oddly sometimes.

  ‘ – so, what do you think, Alice? You’re happy to do that?’

  ‘Sorry?’ I offer an apologetic smile.

  His face falls, and I imagine him as a boy, endlessly disappointed.

  ‘About the painting? And the carpets?’

  ‘The carpets?’

  He narrows his eyes. I wonder if he’s going to tell me off. Instead he says with exaggerated patience that I need to think about painting the place white, getting new carpets in. It will make a difference, apparently, to the price.

  ‘White?’ I say.

  ‘Magnolia, it’s a warmer colour, people feel more comfortable with magnolia. Like you say, Alice, it’s a bit dark right now.’

  I nod. I imagine throwing a tin of white paint across the living-room walls. It makes my heart race.

  ‘So.’ He takes a blank piece of paper from his folder and starts to write. ‘Painting, as much as you can, really, but definitely the hall and landing, and the living room. Carpets – hall, landings, living room. Get rid of that red and green, put something neutral in. Furniture.’ He bites the end of his pen. His eyes flick up to the ceiling. ‘I think let’s lose the furniture before we get people around. What do you say, Alice?’

  I like the idea that something so big and heavy as Dad’s furniture could be lost. He would have wanted us to keep it all. I imagine one of his mahogany wardrobes in Cee’s house, with its thin walls, its pine and chrome, or the sofa from his bedroom squeezed into the corner of Tilly’s flat.

  ‘We can lose the furniture,’ I say.

  ‘Great!’ Michael claps his hands. I want to punch him. ‘You need to think blank slate, Alice. We want the buyer to walk in here and picture themselves coming home from work, opening a bottle of wine, eating dinner. It’s just that at the moment it’s – well—’ He waves his hand in a way that dismisses the entire house.

  I eat a biscuit and then lick the chocolate from my fingers. He watches me, and when I catch his eye he coughs and looks away. ‘And then the last thing is the kitchen,’ he says. ‘It would be worth your while gutting it.’

  I tell him I’ll think about it – the painting and the carpets, the furniture and the kitchen, and whether we’d like to go with his agency. He looks scared when I say that, tells me again what a reputable outfit they are, how being small allows them to offer a hands-on, personal service, how their rates are very competitive.

  I show him to the door. The gold foil isn’t there. It’s not on the steps either. It must have blown away, or been taken back. Perhaps, I tell myself, it was never there in the first place and I am going insane. I watch Michael walk down to the street, and imagine Dad’s house as five photos and a badly written paragraph in an estate agent’s window.

  They moved here when Mama was pregnant with me. Cee used to tell me about the old house. It was nicer, she said, brighter and happier than this one. She took me there once and we stood at the end of the drive and stared. Pale London bricks; wide windows with white frames; the front garden thick with flowers. Why did we move? I asked, and she shrugged and said she didn’t know. The way she said it made it clear she thought it was my fault.

  I get myself to the kitchen. I slot bread into the toaster, and watch the elements glow orange and the heat shimmer upwards. I scrape butter across the darkened bread, and slice it into triangles like Dad does. Like Dad did. As I eat, I walk around the kitchen, opening cupboard doors, scattering crumbs. I put the kettle on. It’s an old, plastic, straight-edged thing, with stains that look l
ike tomato sauce up one side. It grumbles and rocks, spews steam. I spoon coffee into the cafetière, and breathe in the rich brown smell. The place looks ransacked already, and I haven’t moved a thing.

  The smell of coffee reminds me of airports. I’ll go, I tell myself. As soon as I’ve done here, I’ll go.

  I start off OK. I transfer the contents of three cabinets onto the kitchen table, then stand and consider them. The plates are the same white-and-green plates he’s had for as long as I can remember. I pick one up, and then put it down. There’s no use getting sentimental over crockery. I spray the shelves with disinfectant and rub them free of dust, grains of rice, spilled flour, sticky rings. Then I stand on a kitchen chair to empty the cupboards higher up. The first glass I drop might have been an accident. It doesn’t break, just bounces half-heartedly and rolls towards the sink. The second one is thinner – a wine glass with a slender stem – and it shatters dramatically, shards flinging themselves across the floor. The third does the same; the fourth is less satisfying. I empty the entire cupboard, one glass after the next after the next, until I am surrounded. It is quite beautiful, all those edges reflecting back the light.

  Ten places I’ve spent the night

  1) In the porch of St Peter’s Church, off the Walworth Road.

  2) Myatt’s Fields Park, underneath the big fir tree, by the greenhouse.

  3) On a foldaway bed in the crypt of St John’s Church, on Duncan Terrace, Islington.

  4) Roundhay Park, Leeds. It’s big enough to lose yourself in – miles of manicured grass.

  5) Clapham Common, just south of the bandstand.

  6) That hostel near Southwark station – I can’t remember the name of the road, but I’d recognise it: narrow and a bit claustrophobic, security mesh on the windows.

  7) Hampstead Heath.

  8) In one of the arches underneath Waterloo Bridge, where there’s a wall covered with a backlit picture of another wall.