Ten Things I've Learnt About Love

by Sarah Butler

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Go on.’

  I feel your legs around my ears. I start to stand and you grab at my head.

  ‘Are you sure—’ you say, but I’m standing. I haven’t felt so strong, so tall, so joyful for years. I want to shout. I want to shout: look at me, with my daughter. Look at us. You lurch a little, and I hold onto your shins. I walk closer to the tree and feel you reach up, your legs pushing against my hands.

  ‘Got one,’ you call. ‘And another.’ I feel the jolt as you pull each apple from the branch. ‘I can’t hold them all,’ you say and you drop one, two, three, four apples onto the ground. They aren’t ready for eating. ‘OK, OK, down.’ I bend my knees, ignoring the pain that stabs along my spine, and you tumble forwards and away, laughing. ‘We’ve got enough for a crumble,’ you say, holding up three apples and gesturing to the ones on the ground. I picture it, the two of us sitting at a table, with bowls of apple crumble and custard.

  The apples are sharp, acid green. We eat one each, wincing and smacking our lips as we do.

  ‘They’re cooking apples,’ I say. ‘They’re not really ready. I’m sorry.’

  ‘They wake you up,’ you say, and smile.

  ‘Maybe you can take the rest home.’

  You nod and gather them into the crook of your arm. I don’t want you to go. I didn’t mean that.

  ‘Let’s leave them in the—’ You gesture back towards the space. ‘I can pick them up later. I’d like to buy you a coffee, in return.’

  * * *

  I stand outside while you deposit the apples. When you come back out you’re wearing the string of plastic pearls around your neck. The bits of cardboard and plastic, the conker and the silk rose hang from it like awkward charms.

  Father.

  You buy me a cup of tea in a cardboard cup from a cafe on Swains Lane – I tell you I don’t like all those frothy, fussy coffees, and you laugh, in a kind way. We walk back to the Heath, all the way up to Parliament Hill. We sit on one of the benches looking over the city.

  ‘My nephew thinks you’re a magician,’ you say, and laugh.

  ‘Your nephew?’

  ‘I have three. The youngest one’s kind of my favourite, though Cee says I’m not allowed such a thing.’ You rub at a mark on your jeans. ‘He’s called Max.’

  ‘And you told him? About me?’ I can’t keep the excitement out of my voice.

  ‘Not really,’ you say. ‘He just saw the—’ Your hand strays to the pearls around your neck. A seagull swoops across in front of us, crying. ‘They always sound so sad, don’t you think?’ you say. ‘Like they’re mourning for someone.’

  I think about your mother standing on Brighton Beach, her dress soaked to her waist.

  ‘Maybe he’s mourning for the sea,’ you say. ‘I can’t imagine why you’d come to London, when you could be out there, on the water.’

  ‘Sometimes I think of London being like a sea.’

  You don’t say anything. You are staring out over the city.

  ‘Just that it’s always changing,’ I say. ‘It has moods.’ I sound like a fool.

  You turn slightly, to look at me. ‘I’m flying to Delhi,’ you say. ‘Next week.’

  My heart dives.

  ‘I thought about staying, maybe, but—’ You pull at a strand of your hair. ‘I’d like to feel that I could stay.’ You lift your feet onto the bench, tuck your knees to your chest and wrap your arms around your legs.

  The thought returns. You don’t need uprooting – that’s what would happen if I told you. You need stability, some kind of connection. I could do that much for you. I could offer you that much, I know it.

  Ten reasons to stay

  1) My sister is pregnant.

  2) My other sister is liable to be a cow about it.

  3) I’m tired.

  4) Sometimes I feel like I’m going round in circles.

  5) I hate hotel rooms.

  6) I hate jet lag.

  7) I might meet someone. Hell, I might even get married and have a kid myself.

  8) Dad would have liked me to; he worried about me, forever flying off to somewhere new.

  9) My sisters think I’m always running away.

  10) I would like to stop running away.

  I smooth the plastic beads against my chest and follow Daniel across the grass, down Parliament Hill. I don’t know why I put them on. I must look like an idiot. The conker knocks at my breastbone as I walk. I used to collect conkers as a kid, great glossy piles of them. Every year, I was disappointed when their skins turned dull and wrinkled, even though I knew they would.

  Before the running track Daniel veers left, past the tennis courts, the bandstand, the low glass-fronted cafe, and then right by the lido with its barbed-wire crown, and down towards Gospel Oak station. We stand at the lights and I wonder what the drivers of the passing cars think, whether they even see a young woman – who has slept alone under a tree on Hampstead Heath – standing with a man who is surely a tramp. They won’t notice, and even if they do they won’t care. I check the piece of cardboard is safe in my jeans pocket.

  We pass a brief oasis of brick terraces with neat paintwork, creeping wisteria and controlled privet, before coming up against high-rise flats in dark Seventies brick. Up and over the bridge. Daniel stops midway and we look through the metal mesh fence at the arrow-straight train tracks below.

  ‘Where would you go right now, if you could go anywhere?’ I ask.

  A train shoots past and the bridge shudders beneath our feet. Daniel runs his finger along the fence – small metallic thuds. ‘I’d stay here,’ he says, and looks at me.

  I dreamt about him – a vivid, disconcerting dream. We both took off our hands, as if we were dolls, and swapped them with each other. Except that when I looked down, I saw my own hands at the ends of my wrists. When I woke up and he was there, I felt strangely at home. There is an idea, at the very back of my mind, that perhaps he and my mother – but it’s stupid and I won’t think about it. I like him, that’s all.

  ‘I’d go to Inverness,’ I say. ‘Or further north. I’d go right to the top of Scotland and then I’d get a boat to Iceland, or somewhere in Norway. I’d go looking for the Northern Lights. I’ve seen photos and they never look real.’

  He smiles, but it’s a sad smile, so I shut up. We walk on, past a lonely-looking building bristling with To Let boards, a green sign for a city farm, a road of flats stretching off to the right, with bikes and plant pots and football flags pressed against faded glass balconies. We emerge into the chaos of Kentish Town Road, until he cuts onto the slow sweep of St Pancras Way, left onto Agar Grove. We don’t talk much, but in a strange way the rhythm of our feet feels like a conversation. Every so often Daniel stops and picks something up – a gold bottle top; a tiny yellow button with a star cut out of its centre; a nail, bent at a right angle. He looks at them for a moment, and then drops them into his pocket.

  ‘I like your jacket,’ I say.

  He laughs. ‘A man called Hunter gave it me.’

  ‘Hunter?’

  ‘Like the wellies. It was for—’ He looks at me. ‘It was for a special occasion.’

  On the corner of York Way he stops, and unhooks a small, pale-blue scrap of plastic which has caught on a wire fence. ‘You have a blue name,’ he says.

  A lorry hurtles past us and I feel that slight rush of adrenalin you get when your plane takes off, or when you’re standing on a station platform and a train races through without stopping.

  ‘Ice blue, like the water from a glacier,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit like this.’ He holds out the piece of plastic and I take it but I don’t know what to say. His face falls and he drops his gaze from mine. ‘That’s just how I see it,’ he says. ‘I guess you don’t have that.’

  I smile at him, but it’s forced and I’m sure he can tell. We turn onto York Way, walk underneath the bridge where the sounds of the lorries echo against the concrete. Daniel stops by a fence that gives a cross-h
atched view onto the back of King’s Cross station. A tall, dirty brick wall holds the memory of another building. Buff-coloured Portakabins hunker close to the ground, as if intimidated by all that space in the middle of the city. Further on, we stand opposite the undulating glass of King’s Place and look down at a solitary swan swimming in unhurried beats along the canal. A man lifts an empty fishing line from the water, and tosses it in again. Another man sits on a wooden bench watching the man fishing, a gold beer can in one hand. On the wall of the bridge a small toy aeroplane, with a pointed nose and orange wings, lies on its back. Daniel picks it up and hands it to me. It’s made of metal and is strangely cold and heavy. I place it on the wall, pointing west, ready to take off.

  ‘Did you meet my sisters, then?’ I ask. ‘When you knew my mother?’

  ‘Just one time,’ he says.

  ‘I asked them about you.’

  He puts his hand to his chest and winces as though he’s in pain.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I ask.

  ‘Fine. Did they remember me?’

  I shake my head. ‘No. I guess they were too young.’

  He turns away and starts walking again. I follow him through the hustle of King’s Cross, up along the Euston Road to the scaffolded shape of St Pancras Station. He keeps his palm pressed against his heart.

  I walked on a glacier in Canada. One of a group of strangers; we had piled into a coach with tyres the width of my body and then climbed up and up, off the road and onto the slick blue-white ice. We were released for half an hour, and I took slow, careful steps away from everyone else, turned my back on them and the coach so that all I could see was ice, like cracked skin, like dirtied, frozen tears; like nothing I had ever seen.

  ‘So what colour’s your name, then?’ I ask.

  He stops walking, but he doesn’t answer. I must have got it wrong. I’ve upset him. We are standing on Euston Road, the orange and white bricks of St Pancras to our right, a noisy stream of traffic to our left.

  ‘I thought you said my name was blue.’ I have to raise my voice to be heard. ‘So I just wondered if your name had a colour too?’ Crazy, he’s crazy. I’m crazy. This is not a place to stand still. We are in the way, bumped into, studiously avoided. This is not a place for a conversation.

  ‘It’s orange,’ he says at last. His voice is so low I have to lean towards him to make out the words. ‘Pale orange, almost transparent, almost not a colour at all.’ I wait for him to say something else, but he doesn’t. A lorry belches, cars mutter against the tarmac, a mobile phone trills into a jacket pocket, a baby cries.

  I think about Dad, lying in that bed with the curtains closed, and those horrible red-carnation letters in the hearse. ‘My dad used to look at me sometimes, like—’ Daniel’s watching me closely. I start walking and hear him hurry to catch me up. ‘We had a bit of a— He wouldn’t tell me something, and I wouldn’t let it go, and what does it matter, really? Who gives a shit? I mean there’s only now, isn’t there, there’s only the moment.’

  ‘I met a man who told me exactly that, once,’ Daniel says. ‘He was a Buddhist.’

  ‘Maybe I’m more spiritual than I thought.’ I try to laugh it off.

  ‘I’m sure he understood,’ Daniel says.

  I swallow and walk faster, my head down. Gower Street. Drury Lane. Aldwych. Lancaster Place. We pause on Waterloo Bridge, the concrete blocks of the National Theatre to our right, and Somerset House quiet and majestic to our left. I stare down into the water. It moves more quickly than you’d expect.

  ‘What happened to your friend?’ I say.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I can’t remember his name: the Polish man, with the daughter.’

  Daniel is leaning on the railings, his chin cupped in his palm. He chews at his bottom lip and says nothing. I turn to watch a dark-haired man with a camera who gestures to his girlfriend – left, more, a bit more. She stands, hands tucked into skintight jeans, shoulders hunched up towards her ears, an embarrassed grin on her face.

  ‘He has a job,’ Daniel says at last. ‘He’ll go home.’

  A police boat emerges from the bridge underneath our feet, six men packed into the narrow space, like boys playing at war in a rubber dinghy.

  ‘That’s nice.’ I watch the boat. The driver stands at the back, his body relaxed, his gaze on the horizon. I have a sudden, strong desire to be held by a man who is taller than I am, to rest my head on his chest and breathe him in. I tug at the beads around my neck. ‘So which letter’s white then?’ I say.

  I see him tense his hands into fists.

  ‘I’m sorry. Is this annoying?’

  ‘F,’ he says. ‘F for father. It’s white, sort of mother-of-pearl.’

  I scratch at a mark on the railings with my fingernail, and watch the digital display on the side of the National Theatre, pixelated orange letters chasing each other across the screen. I could ask him again: who are you? How did you know Mama? What are you trying to tell me?

  I look at his hands next to mine. We have the same-shaped nails. I glance at his face. He doesn’t look well – pale and sweaty, almost grey. He opens and closes his fists. To either side of us clots of tourists congeal around guidebooks and cameras, then peel off in search of something new to see. Birds wheel across the sky. What did he say? London’s like the sea.

  I tilt my head up so I can take in the whole of the view: Blackfriars Bridge, Southwark Bridge, the Gherkin, St Paul’s, the blinking light on top of Canary Wharf in the distance; and I imagine it all turned to water, the bricks and the tarmac, the carved window-surrounds and the sharp metal railings. I imagine the BT Tower wavering then falling, reappearing tall and glistening, wavering, falling again; the whole city rising and falling, row upon row of white-crested, endlessly breaking waves; and underneath it all, a current tugging.

  * * *

  We turn a corner and see a yellow bulldozer scraping its nose into the edge of a building: old offices – pale-green tiles torn apart like split earth, breaking glass. There’s something intimate in the way it moves: whispering sweet nothings into the empty rooms, scraping out rubble with the attention of a lover. I stand and watch. I can feel Daniel looking at me, but I ignore him. The bulldozer nuzzles ineffectually, once, twice, three times, and then a new piece of wall gives in to its touch and crashes down, a flurry of dust swirling in its wake.

  We walk past the Old Vic and I remember going there with Kal – his thigh pressed against mine, his fingers tapping an impatient rhythm on my palm all the way through whatever it was we’d gone to see: something with corsets and parasols and white-powdered faces. In the park on the corner someone’s barbecuing meat; swirls of smoke rise up through the trees. We walk past the Cuban bar with its wall-high mural: a woman standing on top of the world with her arms raised high. My phone rings. I stand on the pavement and look at the screen flashing blue.

  ‘The builder again?’ Daniel asks.

  ‘It’s Kal.’ The phone keeps ringing.

  ‘The one who made you feel claustrophobic?’ Daniel says and I look at him, and then back to my phone. It stops halfway through a ring. I wait. No message. I think about the bulldozer pawing at the broken building.

  ‘You shouldn’t go backwards, my dad always said,’ I say. ‘We were only going to go backwards.’

  ‘What do you want?’ He is standing next to me, close enough to reach out a hand and touch my arm, but he doesn’t.

  ‘I don’t know. I just want to feel – I don’t know.’

  He smiles, and then he does touch me, briefly. A fleeting brush of his fingers across my forearm. He snatches his hand back, hides it between his elbow and the side of his body. Then he jerks his head as if to say, come on, let’s go, and he starts walking again. We are heading for Elephant and Castle. I can see cranes worshipping the growing shape of the tower block, swathed in blue plastic.

  ‘He lives just down there,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure I want to—’

  He nods and takes a left down a narrow street, lo
ops us back towards the river.

  ‘You can always change your mind,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realise that for a long time.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He shrugs. ‘Just that you might decide that the thing you thought you wanted might not be right after all.’ He coughs. ‘Just that you can change your mind about things.’ He looks at me. ‘Like my father, for instance,’ he says. ‘I’ve hated him for so long, I thought I’d die hating him, except I’ve started to think maybe it’s more complicated than that. I’ve started to think maybe he was doing the best he could.’

  ‘So you don’t hate him any more?’ I say.

  He shrugs. ‘I don’t know. I’m trying.’

  We follow the river to Hungerford Bridge. Up the steps, over the heads of the men who blow foot-tapping rhythms from their trumpets in the darkness beneath. The bridge like a metal honeycomb under our feet. A train runs past, sliced into triangles by the metal struts. Thick white wires reach up over our heads and converge in the sky.

  ‘Imagine building a house here,’ I say.

  ‘On the bridge?’

  I stop. ‘Yes, right here, in the middle. Imagine waking up to this each morning.’ I lean on the metal railings and look downriver towards Westminster. ‘Why are you—? I mean how did you—?’ I falter.

  ‘Some stuff happened, and then I made some bad decisions, that’s all,’ he says. He stands next to me. I think about the piece of cardboard in my jeans pocket, punctured with stars. ‘And then – well, it turns out it suits me,’ he says. ‘Not all the time, but – I’d rather sit by the canal and watch the sun set than spend an evening in some of the shitholes I’ve lived in.’

  ‘Maybe we’re the same,’ I say. I feel him tense, as though I’ve startled him. ‘I mean, I could buy a flat, couldn’t I? We’re selling Dad’s house, so I could. But it’s like I’m in the habit of wandering, and I don’t know how to stop. Maybe we’re the same like that.’

  He says nothing.

  ‘You must think I’m a spoilt brat.’

  ‘No. I’m glad for you. Having a place of your own – that’s a good thing.’