Lost For Words

by Stephanie Butland

I’m an honourer of books and, anyway, how hard is it to find a bookmark? There’s always something to hand. Bus ticket, biscuit wrapper, corner off a bill.

I don’t think a Bookshop Proficiency Test would go amiss. Just some basic rules: put it back where you found it, treat it with respect, don’t be an arse to the people who work here. It’s not that hard. You’d think.

I think window seats are one of those things that are always better in books,

The beach we used to go to near Falmouth – where my dad was from – was like a beach from a story-book: in my memory, the sand is yellow, the sea felt-tip-pen blue.

It might have only been a fiver but I’d bet good money that all of my fiver book sales add up to more than Archie’s precious first editions.

I find the fact that I’ll never know quite comforting.

It’s good to be reminded that the world is full of stories that are, potentially, at least as painful as yours.

This is why I don’t like talking to people. I never think of anything interesting to say. I need time to find words, and that’s hard when people are looking at me.

He turned away and I realised there was something in my hand. A chocolate coin, wrapped in gold foil and thoughts of long-ago happy Christmas mornings. If he’d been looking at me when I realised, waiting for a reaction, I would have written him off as a stupid show-off. But the bell above the door had already jangled out the message that he’d gone, and when I looked up there was no sign of him outside.

I don’t love much but I love words.

Anyone who’s worked in a bookshop for longer than an afternoon will tell you that people buy books for all sorts of reasons.

as if to say: allow yourself to relax, traveller, we are fractionally less judgemental up here than we were downstairs.

Our pasts are as unfixed as our futures, if you think about it. And I like the freedom I have to tell a different story.

I was still young enough to think/hope that love of books equalled fundamental decency.

‘Have you ever considered a career in research?’ he asked. ‘You could teach some of the people I work with a thing or two.’

made me feel as safe as if I was pressed in the pages of an encyclopaedia.

I certainly don’t remember wanting to get away. I suppose that – and I know I sound like every victim of domestic violence that there’s ever been – when things were okay, it was hard to believe that they would go bad again.

So although it seems that they didn’t have the self-control to stop hurting each other, they did their damnedest not to hurt me,

Don’t get me wrong, I know the world doesn’t need another wannabe poet. It was just going to be interesting.

So maybe we could skip the chase, and relax?

like books cause they don’t mind What your heart contains Who you’ve left behind.

which annoyed me because (a) I don’t see why women still have to be happy because of a man in the twenty-first century, as though we’re not capable of our own, dick-free, joy and (b) he was right.

I think I liked him because he was basically classy, underneath the cocky.

poetry, Russian classics in translation, and mass-market mildly anarchic comedy novels.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I haven’t got a passport.’ ‘I have several,’ Archie said with a twinkle. ‘You never know when you’ll need to make a quick getaway.’

And, statistically, given the kind of life I’ve had, it’s a towering achievement; I should be, at best, unemployed, at worst, drinking fortified wine straight out of the bottle, or shooting up in a railway station entrance while people scurry past me in case I mug them. Or in prison, obviously.

first lines did not define last pages in real life the way they did in books.

By that time, the grief was no longer a forest fire, but a constant flame, never going out but steady, manageable.

But then again, as nobody ever says, it’s not how you fall, it’s how many people are there to pick you up and clean your knee with disinfectant and tuck you up on the sofa with some hot chocolate and a book until you feel better.

I don’t really do dressed up or dressed down, it’s really just dressed or not dressed as far as I’m concerned – but I thought

‘And be brave, Loveday. Ask the questions you want to ask. Seek out the people you want in your life. It might not be as hard as you think.’

And that’s pretty much where I start and I end. This is my story, so far. I didn’t know how to tell you. I don’t tell anyone. I don’t know where to start I don’t know how to write another ending.

A Bookshop A bell over the door: a brassy, jangling clang. There should be no clock. Time is meaningless here. No book is without worth. Let there be a marbling of the light, refracted through old windows, to remind us that nothing is ever true. Here is all that you do not yet know. Everything is slightly crooked, except the lines of words on pages. Here is food. This place is crammed with what is unlooked-for. There should not be music, but there should not be silence. Fingers must not be shy. Touch spines. Turn pages. A door that no one has the key to is in the corner. Giggling. And little cries of ‘Oh!’ when something forgotten is found. A bookshop is not magic, but it can steal away your heart. The air is not like any other air. It has memory stirred through it. There is something here for you. All you need to do is choose it. That smell. You know. Patchouli. Honey. Salt and violets. And oh, the people. They must be forgiven their sins because they are here. A bookshop is not magic, but it can slowly heal your heart.

I had two criteria: books that would have meaning for Loveday, and books that had a powerful, meaningful-to-Loveday first line that wasn’t too long!

‘Some things start before other things’