The Girl Without a Voice

by Casey Watson

  But with no other family in the area, it seemed Ben’s dad lacked either a choice in the matter or much support and, from what Gary Clark had told me, had taken to drinking too, in recent years, and when drunk would regularly point out to his frightened, bewildered son that if it hadn’t been for him his mother would still be alive.

  What a burden for a child to carry. No wonder poor Ben was angry all the time.

  It was Imogen who was bubbling to the surface of my mind again as I walked the short distance between the staff-room and Gary’s office. Imogen had actually started to say something to me on Friday, something my instinct told me might be important. I was therefore itching to see what the specialist had to say and what kind of strategies he might be able to suggest to help me coax her to say something more.

  Mr Gregory was an experienced speech and language therapist with a special interest in selective mutism, and I was pleased to see he didn’t look too scary. It was silly, and I always berated myself for it, but without a string of letters after my name I had always felt a little intimidated when faced with suited and booted professionals. I was confident in my abilities, I worked hard, and knew I was good enough to justify my position – I just couldn’t get past the feeling that I didn’t have the credentials to prove it, I supposed. Not a chip on the shoulder – I had nothing but respect for my colleagues; just that nagging voice – that women in particular are so good at – that I was lucky to count myself as one of their number, despite Mike endlessly telling me not to be so daft.

  But there was nothing to fear here, and I felt immediately at ease. He was a genial man in what I guessed was his early sixties, and straight away I realised the meeting wouldn’t be as formal as I’d thought.

  ‘You can put those away,’ he said, chuckling, seeing me and Gary both arming ourselves with pens and notebooks. ‘I haven’t come here to deliver a lecture; just to chat about what we already know about the girl and see if I can suggest some techniques you could try in order to get her to start talking again. Of course,’ he added, ‘whether that happens – not to mention when – will depend to a great extent on what made her choose silence in the first place.’

  ‘So that is a fact, then,’ I asked, ‘that the child actively chooses not to talk?’

  Mr Gregory made a yes and no gesture with his hands. ‘It’s probably too simplistic to talk in those terms, but, to an extent, yes – in that it’s an anxiety disorder rather than a physical one, whether it’s conscious or not. It’s usually something that happens to a child who already has a nervous disposition, and that in itself is often inherited from a parent.’

  Which parent in this case? I found myself wondering. Mum or dad? That in itself would be a useful thing to know.

  ‘Children with SM,’ Mr Gregory went on, ‘are characterised by their ability to speak normally in an environment in which they’re comfortable – say, at home – but unable to communicate in stressful social situations, of which school, for most children, is the most obvious example.

  ‘It often starts young, too – typically when a child first encounters school or nursery, and it needs careful, consistent management if it’s not to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s one of those mental health disorders, sadly, that feeds off itself, so the last thing to do is to leave it to sort itself out in the hopes that it will get better, because generally it won’t.

  ‘There is another type of SM, however, that can be brought on by a specific stressful life-event or sudden trauma. This is slightly different in that it tends to be more conscious a withdrawal of speech; they are choosing not to speak as a way of retreating from the reality of an unbearable situation. Again, if this is left unchecked, the prognosis tends to be poor, as it can then morph into the former type of SM, with all the negative ramifications that has.’

  Mr Gregory paused for breath, then smiled. ‘Does that all make sense?’

  Gary nodded, and I resisted the urge to reach again for my notebook. I was itching to write all this down. ‘Yes, it does,’ Gary said. ‘And I suppose the first thing we need to do is identify exactly where Imogen fits into this. She’s obviously not been mute since pre-school – well, as far as her records show, anyway – and from what we’ve heard from her grandparents’ – he glanced across at me – ‘she’s the antithesis of the shy, nervous type at home.’

  I nodded. ‘And I’ve seen that for myself, when I visited. From what I’ve seen, Imogen isn’t an anxious child, particularly – just a challenging and deeply unhappy one.’

  ‘So you heard her speak, then?’ Mr Gregory asked.

  ‘Yes and no. I heard her shouting, but I didn’t actually see her. Her grandparents told me she always was very vocal – and extremely demanding, too – but as soon as she was aware of my presence she stopped speaking immediately.’

  ‘I think you’ve probably just answered Mr Clark’s question, then,’ Mr Gregory said. ‘And having looked at the notes you emailed, the picture seems reasonably clear. Imogen’s selective mutism is probably a post-traumatic coping mechanism. In which case the key thing is to find out what’s caused it. Which is the poser, of course – since, unless we find a way in, she’s not going to tell you.’

  ‘She did try to speak to me, actually,’ I said. ‘At least I think she did. Last Friday.’

  I told them both about the few words Imogen had managed to get out, and how I’d been pondering what they might mean all weekend.

  ‘The mother, perhaps?’ Gary wondered. ‘It would be interesting to find out more about that whole situation, wouldn’t it? What actually happened there. How rare must it be for a mother to leave her child so completely?’

  ‘And so suddenly, come to that,’ I agreed.

  ‘It certainly sounds as if the mother leaving might be the root,’ Mr Gregory said. ‘Though this happened a couple of years back, did it not?’ We both nodded. ‘Yet the SM is fairly recent – a matter of months, isn’t it? What about the grandmother? How do you think things are there?’

  ‘Difficult to tell,’ I said. ‘Though I know both grandparents are at the end of their tether. As I suppose they would be, given their age and state of health. And there’s also the step-mum, of course – she was apparently also at her wits’ end; in fact, it’s the step-mum who appears to have been the main target of Imogen’s distress. That’s why the grandparents have her living with them now – because she simply couldn’t cope with Imogen’s tantrums any more.’

  ‘Of course, what we most need,’ Gary said, ‘is for Imogen herself to tell us what’s wrong, isn’t it?’

  I nodded. ‘Which is only going to happen if we can get her to speak while she’s in school. Which is the problem. Because as soon as she was aware she had my full attention when she did speak, it was like a physical shut-down. Wham! Shop closed till further notice, you know?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Gregory, ‘that’s mostly what I’m here for. To give you a selection of strategies to try, in order to bring that happy state of affairs about. So, to start …’

  Now I did open my notebook.

  An hour and a half and four mugs of coffee later Gary and I were armed with what almost felt like an information overload – it seems there were as many ways of trying to crack the code of a child’s selective mutism as there were reason for them ‘choosing silence’ in the first place. I learned something else, too – that a lot of the strategies I’d been reading about on the internet, and which I’d thought sounded logical, were, in fact, absolute no-nos. I grinned to myself as I headed back to the staffroom, thinking how I might not run that particular one past Mike. Being non-digital-age compliant almost as a career choice, my husband was always sceptical about my internet browsing and the ‘facts’ it threw up. ‘The internet isn’t God, Casey,’ he’d often be heard pontificating from on high. ‘Just because bloody googly, or whatever it is, says so, that doesn’t automatically make it right!’

  But it was with that in mind that I took advantage of the hour I had to kill before the lunch bell;
which I spent in a quiet corner of the staffroom, with both computer and books, to try and pull together – or at least make a start on pulling together – some sort of reference guide of strategies we could put in place for Imogen right away.

  I thought she might what? That was the first question I wanted to answer. Might come home again? Might send me back to Dad’s? Might have abandoned me? Answer that, instinct told me, and we’d be on our way.

  Chapter 10

  I was buzzing by the time I got home from work that evening. I felt all the new stuff I’d learned whooshing round in my head, and on the verge of a very important breakthrough. I knew that all I had to do was to work out and apply the right strategy, and bingo. What that was going to be exactly, I hadn’t quite worked out yet, but I was determined to keep up the momentum.

  ‘So, after tea,’ I told Mike as he washed his hands at the kitchen sink, ‘I’m going to set up shop at the dining table and finish writing up my plans – I know I can do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Get Imogen to speak, of course. Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying?’

  He had not long got home from work and he looked tired – he’d had an early start. I huffed even so, but he didn’t rise to it.

  ‘Case, love,’ he said, ‘you know what your “strategy” should be? Give her a dose of whatever it is you’ve got. Not too much, mind,’ he added, moving prudently out of punching range. ‘Or the poor kid won’t know when to shut up!’

  Kieron, who was sitting in the lounge, ‘apparently’ watching telly, hooted with laughter. ‘Nice one, Dad,’ he called.

  ‘Nice one, my foot!’ I said. ‘This is important!’

  ‘Love, I know it is,’ Mike said more seriously. ‘And I’m happy that you’ve had a good day. But all this bringing your work home malarkey – I thought you said you were going to try not to do it? Not quite so much, at any rate. What about just sitting down and watching EastEnders for a change? You know, like we used to. In the olden days.’

  ‘Yeah, Mum,’ Kieron chipped in. ‘What about us? We’ll be neglected children soon. Officially.’

  ‘Oh, give over,’ I told them. ‘And you’re hardly children any more. And it’s not like I’m doing it all the time, is it? It’s just that this is a complicated case and I really want to crack it.’

  Riley, also home from work and dishing up stew and dumplings from the slow cooker, snorted in a derogatory fashion. ‘Case to crack! Mum, who d’you think you are – Columbo? Honestly!’

  Suitably chastised, I accepted my bowl of stew and began to eat it. It tasted surprisingly like humble pie. I knew they were mostly just ribbing me but perhaps I was taking my job just a little bit too seriously. Or maybe I wasn’t – maybe taking it seriously was what was needed, but perhaps I should try to shut up a bit more about it once I was home. I watched Kieron and Riley laughing with their dad about something they’d all been watching last night on the telly with mixed feelings. I’d been doing paperwork, and perhaps I should have taken a break from it, but, actually, parts of my job were quite serious. And none of it would get done by itself. So perhaps I just needed to manage my time better. Stay a little later after school, perhaps, so that once I did get home finally, I could sit down with them all and watch EastEnders.

  Which, once tea was out of the way, I duly did.

  I did manage to sneak an hour in later, however, so when I got to school the following morning I was raring to go – I just hoped there would be less in the way of soap-opera style drama when I got there. The big thing that I’d learned, amid all the medical terminology and jargon, was that I had actually been going about things all wrong, and actually unwittingly reinforcing Imogen’s refusal – or, more accurately – her perceived inability to speak. By allowing her to retreat and not encouraging her to interact better with her peers and with myself, I had given her the green light to remain silent.

  It had seemed logical to me, of course. I was used to using a softly-softly approach with a child who was traumatised and self-conscious; giving them time to get used to their new environment and settle themselves into it a little before expecting them to come out of their shells. According to Mr Gregory, however, this wasn’t helping at all. I needed to use behavioural therapy techniques to show Imogen that remaining silent wasn’t an option – well, not for that much longer, anyway. Her silence wasn’t to be rewarded – that would just reinforce the behaviour; instead I must lavish praise at any and all attempts at communication; this would help retrain her unconscious mind so that speaking stopped being a source of fear.

  First off, I took a couple of days to orient myself, watching her various strategies for responding to attempts to communicate with her, both by myself and by the others in the group. With her fellow pupils, it tended to be a case of ignoring her – which was isolating, obviously – or over-compensating, allowing her to get away with not speaking, much as an older sibling often did with a younger child.

  With me, it was a case of mostly winging it. If I drew attention to her in class, she would habitually hang her head and look downwards, with the sort of ‘If I can’t see you, you can’t see me’ logic a much younger child would use. She’d blush as well – perhaps part of the reason why it worked, because, anxious not to further stress an already stressed and bullied child, I would ‘let her off’ by moving swiftly on.

  But now it was time for some tough love. Not an abrupt about-turn – that really would stress her too much, I judged – just a slow shift towards a more robust strategy. Now, if I called her name in class, I kept the spotlight firmly on her for as long as it took to get some sort of reaction, even if it wasn’t speech itself. It could be a nod or a head shake, an action, such as getting something for me, or passing something to someone else. The main thing was to make her a more dynamic part of the group, so she couldn’t retreat into herself.

  And by the Thursday I was already seeing progress. So much so that by the time Friday morning came around I thought I’d try something more radical that I’d read about.

  We were doing work on emotions; something that cropped up in the unit often, for obvious reasons. I’d had the children cut out a giant paper firework the previous afternoon, which we were going to use in the exercise this morning. It would be Firework Night before long, after all. That said, this was more about empathy than Guy Fawkes. Unlike the hapless gunpowder plotter, empathy was a perennial.

  ‘Right,’ I told the children, having pinned up the rocket and grabbed a pen, ‘what I want you to do is tell me words that describe negative emotions, okay? I’ll call out names and I want you to shout out a word, then I’ll write them all on this magnificent rocket, ready for us to whoosh off into space. Got that?’

  Heads nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ben. ‘But what about the tree?’

  I’d also had the children cut out and paint a big tree, plus a pile of apples, all ready to be written on as well. ‘We’re going to do that next, Ben,’ I explained. ‘Once we’ve got rid of all the negative feelings we’re going to accentuate the positive. And “accentuate” means what? Does anybody know?’

  ‘Make more of it, Miss,’ Shona supplied quietly.

  ‘Exactly, Shona,’ I said, turning round to face the rocket. This part – facing away from them – was key. ‘Right, then,’ I said, pen poised, ‘um … let me see … Ben. You can start. Let’s have a word, please.’

  ‘Um, angry, Miss?’ he suggested.

  ‘Very good, Ben,’ I said. ‘That’s a great word to send off to space.’ I then wrote it down, and remained facing the wall. ‘So … Shona. You can be next. A word, please?’

  ‘Lonely, Miss,’ Shona supplied.

  I wrote that one down too. ‘Henry, next. Can you come up with a word for me, Henry?’

  ‘I was going to say angry, Miss, but Ben already pinched it.’

  ‘I didn’t pinch it. I just thought of it!’

  ‘Yeah, well, fighting, then, Miss,’ he sniffed. ‘My word’s goin
g to be fighting.’

  I resisted the urge to turn back round and check that they weren’t actually doing any. ‘You’re on the right lines, Henry,’ I said, ‘but it needs to be a word that describes how you might feel. Not so much do, as feel, you know? Can you think of one like that?’

  ‘How about scared, Miss?’ he said eventually.

  ‘Scared is excellent, Henry. Thank you.’ I added it to the rocket. ‘Okay, so now it’s … let me see. Imogen. Yes, Imogen. What’s your word going to be?’

  I remained with my pen poised just below Henry’s ‘scared’, knowing that all eyes, bar mine, would be on Imogen. The silence lengthened, but I stayed where I was.

  ‘D’you mean me, Miss?’ asked Molly eventually. ‘You haven’t had my word yet. My word’s upset. I’d already thinked it.’

  ‘No, sweetie,’ I said, pretending to go over the lines of the words already up there. I felt sure they were all bewildered by my refusal to turn around. ‘That’s a great word, and we’ll definitely use it, but Imogen was next on my list. Imogen, have you thought of one?’

  Again, the silence was deafening. And I came within a whisker of turning round and moving on, when, in the tiniest voice imaginable – a voice that was nothing like the one I’d heard through the front door of her grandparents’ house – I clearly heard the word ‘sad’.

  ‘What was that, Imogen?’ I said quickly, hoping against hope that it had been her, and not just one of the lads, mucking around. But the silence told me it was her who’d spoken.

  ‘Sad,’ she said again, ever so slightly more loudly. ‘Sad,’ I repeated. ‘Excellent word, Imogen. Well done.’

  I quickly added it and now I did turn around finally. Imogen looked fraught – I could think of no other word to describe it – and as if she might at any time burst into tears. Molly, sitting next to her, was staring at her, open-mouthed, and the other children were looking at each other, all obviously astonished. I would now have to quickly get them back on track before the attention on Imogen became completely unbearable.