Little Bird

by Camilla Way

But she makes the same mistake and looks anxiously up at Yaya, unable to continue.

  ‘Never mind, honey,’ Yaya smiles, wearily rubbing her temples. ‘We’ll come back to it later.’

  ‘Yaya, can I have a word?’

  They hadn’t noticed that Ingrid had returned and her voice makes all three of them jump.

  After the door has closed behind them, she and Colin go back to the book. ‘Elodie,’ says Colin, after a while. ‘Concentrate, please.’ But the voices on the other side of the door have grown so loud they’re impossible to ignore.

  ‘It’s just not good enough,’ she hears Ingrid say.

  And when Yaya replies, Elodie is amazed at the defiance in her voice.

  ‘You work her too hard,’ she says. ‘It’s ridiculous to keep up this pressure.’ Her voice rises higher still. ‘Doctor Klein, the child’s exhausted. She needs a break. When’s the last time she spent more than a few hours away from this place? Aside from the neurology ward, I mean? She should be outside having fun, meeting other kids, not cooped up in here.’

  At that moment, Colin puts down his book and leaves the room too, and Elodie hears the three of them move away from the door, further off down the corridor. She can still hear Yaya and Ingrid arguing, and now Colin’s deeper tones joining their voices, but she can no longer make out what they’re saying. She stares down at the book in her hands but the images swim in front of her eyes, and her gaze keeps returning to the closed door.

  The next day is a Saturday and when on Monday morning, Yaya and Colin fail to arrive, Elodie says nothing. She glances anxiously from the door to Ingrid’s face, but when Ingrid starts the lesson without them, as if nothing were amiss, she begins to feel a strange, gnawing doubt. But there’s something in the set of Ingrid’s jaw, the expression in her eyes, her brisk, no-nonsense manner that warns her not to broach the subject.

  On the second day, however, when still they don’t appear, she steals herself to ask, ‘Where is Yaya, Ingrid? And Colin?’

  ‘They’ll no longer be working with us,’ is the brief, terse reply.

  Elodie’s guts turn over uncomfortably, and although she knows she shouldn’t, she can’t stop herself from asking, ‘But why, Ingrid? Why not? When will I see them?’

  The distress is plain in her voice, and Ingrid’s head rises sharply. But she merely says lightly, ‘Oh, soon, no doubt. They have other work to do right now. You’ll have to put up with me for the time being, I’m afraid.’ And though she smiles brightly, her tone tells Elodie that the conversation is over. She bows her head again, but privately she thinks about being alone every day with Ingrid, cut adrift from the outside world, and her heart sinks. With Ingrid’s watchful gaze still upon her, she busies herself with her work, but still the sense of foreboding laps queasily in the pit of her stomach.

  The next day, a small, insipid young woman named Claire arrives at the schoolroom. She’s shy and meek and jumps whenever Ingrid speaks. She turns up again the next day, and then the one after that, and soon Elodie understands that there had never been any question of Yaya and Colin returning to High Barn.

  Soon the conference is almost upon them. She finds herself waking at odd times during the night, a nameless, restless anxiety forcing her awake, her mind spinning with a million nonsensical sentences. Sometimes she dreams that she’s about to speak in front of a vast crowd of people, but when she opens her mouth all that emerges is an endless stream of feathers. Now, when she makes a mistake – and she seems to make them more and more frequently – Ingrid’s exasperation is immediate. ‘No, Elodie!’ she says through tight lips. ‘Start again.’

  Most days, they work together long into the evening, repeating and repeating the day’s exercises until Elodie aches with tiredness. She feels the air between them grow tauter and tauter.

  And then, two days before the conference something snaps. Ingrid has left her to make some lunch, and she’s staring out of the window, watching a pair of jays build a nest in the branches of a nearby tree. And almost without knowing she’s doing it, she begins to call to them. It has been a long time since she’s uttered the old, comforting sounds, and, softly at first, but soon growing in conviction, she slowly works her way through her old repertoire.

  At first her throat – unused now to making the sounds once so familiar to her – resists. She can only manage odd, discordant rasps and weak whistles. But soon her larynx, throat, tongue and lips obey, like a dancer’s body remembering old steps from decades ago, and soon the almost supernaturally high sounds emerge from somewhere deep inside her, the low notes vibrating against her tonsils. The back of her throat seems to expand to channel the sounds. It is a strange magic, and she luxuriates in her ability, caught up in a sort of blissful trance.

  Soon she can no longer see the schoolroom, or even the window and the garden beyond it. She is back there, in the forest, surrounded by green trees, the late afternoon sun streaming through the leaves, the evening chorus mingling with her own voice. So caught up in it is she, so profoundly comforted, that she doesn’t hear Ingrid’s footsteps as she mounts the stairs and approaches down the corridor, until there she is, standing in the threshold of the schoolroom. And mid arpeggio, Elodie turns to meet her gaze.

  Her mouth snaps shut.

  ‘Why must you persist in making those wretched sounds?’ asks Ingrid, striding across the room towards her. ‘When I have dedicated nearly three years of my life to helping you?’ She shakes her head in bewilderment.

  Elodie says nothing.

  ‘Is this what you want?’ Ingrid continues, her voice rising. ‘When you stand in front of all those people on Thursday, is this what you want them to see?’ Going over to Elodie’s desk she snatches up the little wooden bird. ‘And this!’ she says. ‘This hunk of wood you insist on carrying around with you still, like a souvenir. Why would you want to be reminded of that man? Of that place? When I have done so much for you? Do you understand, Elodie, the money and hard work that has gone into helping you? Do you?’ Abruptly she leaves the room, taking the wooden bird with her. The door slams shut behind her.

  thirteen

  Long Island, New York, 20 August 1998

  She stands in the wings of the university’s main theatre and is overwhelmed by what she sees. The auditorium is filled with people and the air seems to bulge and sag with their voices. Elodie notices that right at the back, behind the last row of seats, a couple of men stand behind enormous cameras on tripods, far larger than the one Colin used to film her with at High Barn. As she watches, the lights begin to fade, leaving the stage itself illuminated. A hush falls.

  At that moment Ingrid walks across the stage and takes her place beneath the spotlight. Her appearance is met instantly with a sudden burst of applause like heavy rain. There in the shadows Elodie wipes her damp palms on the new green dress bought specially for the occasion. When Ingrid begins to talk into the microphone her voice rings out loud and shrill across the rows and rows of people. A series of diagrams and pictures flash up upon a large white screen behind her, and as she points to them she uses many long, unfamiliar phrases that Elodie doesn’t understand – hemispheric specialization, neurological laterization, linguistic acquisition, cognitive development. On and on she talks: an unceasing wall of words.

  And then it happens. With the press of a button, the static images on the screen are replaced by moving film and the large speakers that hang above the stage crackle into life. Elodie gives a little gasp of surprise, because there she is, suddenly, for all to see, sitting at her desk in the schoolroom at High Barn.

  She can tell by the way she looks and speaks that it must have been made some time ago. In the film, Yaya is sitting next to her, pointing to a picture book and asking, ‘Elodie, what is this?’

  ‘Dog!’

  ‘And where is the dog, Elodie?’ Yaya continues. ‘Is he sitting on the table, or is he sitting under the table?’

  The strange, film version of herself replies, ‘Under the table!’

  F
rom where she stands at the side of the stage, Elodie gazes longingly at the image of Yaya, and feels her eyes begin to prickle. It’s a peculiar sensation, watching herself like this, and she gazes, fascinated, as the film cuts to a new shot of her in the hospital where the machine that Ingrid calls an MRI glides noiselessly over her head. Next, the camera focuses on Doctor Irving, one of the specialists. He’s talking to Ingrid, and pointing at a computer screen upon which she recognises the black and white, soft scale images of her brain.

  Ingrid freezes the film and turns back to the audience. It seems to go on forever, this part of the talk, and after a while Elodie feels her legs begin to ache and she claps a hand over her mouth to stifle a yawn. At last, however, Ingrid turns once more to the screen.

  And there she is again, back in the schoolroom. But this time the film is older, and shows Elodie as she was when she first arrived in America. Now, when she looks up at herself, a strange emotion floods her. Her hand flies to her mouth in a kind of horror, and though she can’t tear her eyes away, she longs for it to stop.

  She hardly recognises her; this small, thin, wide-eyed child with the long wild hair. Worst of all though are the noises she makes, the whistles and the grunts, the slack-jawed babbling. It’s awful to see; grotesque. The camera turns to Ingrid. ‘A’ ‘E’ ‘I’ ‘O’ ‘U’ she says, over and over, ‘Tuh, Ess, Ruh, Puh,’ she repeats, emphasising each sound, her lips exaggerating their shapes. The camera returns to Elodie, to her pitiful attempts at aping her. As she watches unseen from the wings, she feels her cheeks burn with shame.

  On the stage, the screen fades to black, and once again Ingrid addresses the audience. ‘And now,’ she says, ‘I’d like you to meet a very special person indeed.’ She turns to where Elodie stands, waiting in the shadows. She raises her hand in an encouraging, beckoning gesture and smiles warmly as she says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Elodie Brun.’

  There’s an expectant murmur from the audience. It’s only a few metres, the distance she has to walk, but each one feels like a mile, every second an hour. At last she stands beside Ingrid, flinching from the bright spotlight. A cold panic engulfs her. After watching herself as she once was, she is now desperate to show how much she’s progressed, to prove to all these strangers that she’s no longer that same, grunting little girl. She opens her mouth, acutely conscious too of the need to not let Ingrid down, but her mind is entirely blank, her throat as dry as sand.

  Taking a deep breath, she begins to speak. ‘My name is Elodie Brun,’ she says, ‘and I am fifteen years old.’ It is not very long, the speech they have rehearsed, and as soon as she has begun, she finds her way through it easily. When she comes to the end she says, as she has been instructed, ‘I would like to thank Doctor Ingrid Klein, and her colleagues at the hospital for everything they have done for me.’

  She’s shocked by the applause she receives. It seems to go on forever, filling the auditorium, growing louder and louder as she stands there, blinking back at all the faces. At last she turns to Ingrid, who takes her hand and leads her from the stage.

  ‘Well done,’ she says, when they reach the wings. ‘You did very well.’

  Elodie looks up at her teacher’s approving smile and swallows hard, dizzy with relief.

  It’s strange, returning to High Barn alone after all the excitement. At first, after Claire has dropped her off, she wanders from room to room feeling flat and listless. At last she takes a seat on one of the large, elegant sofas in the living room, and switches on the TV, quickly becoming engrossed in an episode of Friends. It’s only when Robert clears his throat and says her name that she turns and sees him looking in at her from the door.

  ‘Hi,’ he says.

  ‘Robert!’

  ‘So how’d it go this morning?’ he asks. He leans against the doorframe, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Her eyes flicker across his chest.

  ‘Good, thank you.’ She tries to think of something else to say, but her tongue feels heavy and shy.

  He nods, and stares for a few moments at the TV screen. ‘And where is my dear wife?’ he asks then. ‘Receiving her public I suppose?’

  She hesitates, unsure of his tone.

  He smiles and crosses the room, flopping down heavily in the seat beside her. She notices the way the hairs on his wrist catch around his metal watchstrap, the fine wrinkles around his eyes. If she reached out her hand, she could touch him.

  They stare at the TV in silence for a while, but out of the corner of her eye, Elodie continues to watch him. She thinks about how nice he was to her, the day they all played baseball, how friendly his smile is whenever she sees him. But still, a little niggling doubt persists. Could this be the same man whose angry voice she hears so often, who causes Ingrid such sadness?

  He breaks the silence first, saying, ‘Tell me, Elodie, are you happy?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, immediately.

  He leans a little closer. ‘Really?’

  She smiles hesitantly, searching his face, unsure of what he wants her to say.

  ‘You do know,’ he says after a moment, ‘that there is more to life than being my wife’s performing monkey?’ He stares at her, and then adds quietly, ‘You do know that, right?’

  She doesn’t like talk like this. Where a person says one thing, but means another. ‘I am not a monkey,’ she says flatly.

  He smiles apologetically. ‘Of course not,’ he tells her. ‘No, of course you’re not. Sorry.’

  They turn back to the TV. After a while, Robert continues, ‘I just meant, you shouldn’t be cooped up in here all the time, that’s all. You should be out, meeting other kids, going on dates, that kind of thing.’ He winks at her then, and adds, ‘pretty girl like you.’

  She ducks her head, feeling her cheeks redden.

  ‘You should be in France, with your mother,’ he continues, his eyes on the TV once more.

  The word hangs in the air. Mother. Elodie feels a confusing stab of longing as the two syllables float around and around her brain. Mother.

  Robert shrugs, glancing at her. ‘But what do I know?’ he says, his voice cheerful again. ‘Ingrid’s the expert, right?’ He gets up. ‘I was going to make some coffee,’ he adds, leaving the room. ‘Want one?’

  In the weeks that follow the conference, life at High Barn begins, slowly and subtly, to change. Ingrid is more frequently away from home, often leaving Claire to carry on with Elodie’s lessons without her. And Elodie begins to recognise a new fervour in Ingrid’s manner, a new excitement and purpose in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry to have to leave you again,’ she tells Elodie one evening, when they are eating supper together. ‘But life has become so incredibly busy lately.’ She chews her food thoughtfully and then adds with a flush of pleasure, ‘I have a series of radio and television interviews to give, more lectures than ever, and then there’s the new book I’ve been asked to write.’

  Elodie nods dully, and asks, ‘Can we go out, tomorrow? To the beach?’

  ‘Of course,’ Ingrid replies. ‘Or, if not tomorrow, then the day after.’

  She notices that the more often Ingrid is away, the more Robert is to be found at High Barn. He tells her that he no longer needs to travel so much these days, that he can work from his offices in New York, or from home. Often, Elodie will watch Ingrid’s car disappearing down the drive from her bedroom window, then wander down to the living room at almost exactly the same time Robert emerges from his study, which also has a window with a clear view of the drive.

  ‘You want a coffee?’ Robert will ask her, smiling broadly as if surprised to see her there. And the two of them will sit on the sofa together with their mugs, watching the television. Eventually, Robert will begin to talk.

  What she loves, especially, is the way Robert talks to her. As if she were an adult, a friend. The confiding tone he uses, the little glances and touches of her arm to emphasise a point. A conversation. Not watching other people on television, or listening to Claire’s or Ingrid’s instructions.

/>   One morning he begins to talk about Anton, and her heart twists with pity.

  ‘I blame myself, of course,’ he tells her earnestly. ‘Anton was always such a troubled boy. He and his mother …’ But he shakes his head without continuing.

  ‘You know what he did, once? He stole all her clothes from her closet, took them out into the garden, and burnt them! I suppose you’ve got to admire his balls.’ He laughs sheepishly. ‘God knows where he gets them from.’

  She waits.

  ‘Another time he got high and stole a car and crashed it right into a pet store. Broken glass and squashed goldfish all over the sidewalk! Soon he was being picked up by the police almost every weekend.’ A shadow falls across his face. ‘But of course, when he hit his mother … that was, well. That was not smart. That was wrong. Very wrong.’ He stares off into space and it strikes Elodie that Robert doesn’t look very much like he thinks it was wrong. He looks rather like he thinks it was understandable.

  A couple of weeks later, it’s Ingrid who is the subject of their conversation. ‘I guess you’ve heard us arguing,’ he says, apologetically. Elodie looks at her hands, embarrassed. It’s a warm afternoon, a Saturday. As Ingrid is spending the day at the hospital, the two of them are sitting on the lawn outside, sipping iced teas. Robert sighs, and lies down on his back. A faint breeze lifts the curls away from his forehead.

  ‘She was so attractive when we met,’ he tells her. ‘And the complete opposite to me. So cool and clever and … ambitious.’ He laughs. ‘We met at university, were married by the time we were twenty.’ He smiles his boyish, rueful smile. ‘I think she was rebelling.’ He turns on his side, propping his chin in his hand and gazing up intently at Elodie. ‘She’d had a sheltered upbringing. Her father was very strict. And rich of course.’ With a dismissive wave towards High Barn and its wide, sloping lawns, he adds, ‘Hence all this.’

  After a while he continues, ‘I guess I can’t blame her for the way Anton turned out. She never really wanted a child, not really. I talked her into it because I thought it would be good for us. Then, just after Anton was born, her career really took off. And there was this animosity between them from the start. Motherhood just didn’t come naturally. And a child needs his mother.’