The Lost for Words Bookshop by Stephanie Butland

Author:Stephanie Butland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

POETRY

2016

no one has the key

Trying to work out how a book has got to the bookshop is a fool’s game but that didn’t stop me from playing it. Whitby to York isn’t exactly an epic journey, but it took Delia Smith’s Complete Illustrated Cookery Course fifteen years to make it, so you had to wonder what had happened in between. Well, I had to. I tried not to. But I did.

I bought a cake tin and mixing bowl, and I made the brownies Mum and I used to make. If you microwave them they go all gooey. If you put vanilla ice cream on them when they’re warm and eat them on the sofa with your boyfriend, it turns out there’s such a strong memory attached to the taste that you cry like a stupid baby, and you can’t even pretend it’s to do with the programme you’re watching, if it’s a documentary about René Descartes.

Nathan put his arm around me, and said, ‘Loveday, what can I do?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘it’s nothing.’

‘It’s not nothing.’ His voice was so full of worry that I cried harder.

And then I said, ‘The brownies made me think about my mother. I miss her.’

He pulled me closer, kissed the top of my head. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

And that’s the trouble with talking to people. They ask questions and before you know it you’re halfway to telling them everything.

‘I’m going to wash my face,’ I said.

This is what I worked out, about the books. After Dad died, the house was left empty until the landlord took it back. I can’t remember whether I was asked if I wanted to go back there, but I never went again. It was more than a year until I ended up at Annabel’s. When I got home from school one day, only a couple of weeks after I’d moved in, she met me at the door.

‘Your things are here,’ she said. I suppose she was intercepting me so that I didn’t get a shock. The boxes were stacked at the bottom of the stairs, and she’d moved the hat stand out of the way to fit them in. ‘I didn’t take them upstairs,’ she said, ‘in case you wanted to go through them first. If there are things you don’t want in your room we can put them in the garage.’

I opened the first box but just the sight of what was in there – my jewellery box of shells, the Furby, a couple of comics – made me want to cry, and I’d decided I was sick of crying.

‘I don’t want any of it,’ I said, and I went upstairs.

Almost eight months later, on my half birthday (which passed unmarked, of course), I spent the day going through the boxes. Annabel was the only person I knew who parked her car in her garage – all the other ones on the estate sat on the drives – but she opened the garage door to let the daylight in, and drove her Fiat Panda out of the way to give me some space.

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