As far as she was concerned the Shaughnessys were from somewhere else. It didn’t matter where. The difference was what mattered. The problem was they were making here there, stamping themselves on everything. Honor with her quiet devotional ways symbolised the complaint. She was so childlike in her submission to the practice of her faith she was altogether in her own world, devoid entirely of nostalgia or regret for any other. There could be no real telling where she came from because her reality was always the here and now. In truth it wasn’t God who was with her, who was altogether too great an idea for her to comprehend, but candles, saints, the altar – trappings.
Of course, Martha refused to concede that Honor wasn’t actually from anywhere, but lived in the village in which she was born. Nor would she concede that Honor could be anything but a simpleton, an imbecile, despite having never made any attempt to really know her. Honor’s only saving grace was that she hadn’t married, because as Martha proclaimed it, her sort should never be allowed to marry, never bear children, then as if to excuse Aidan blame of that indiscretion added, certainly not with each other, anyway.
*
With Poppy held firmly, if roughly, in her arms Abby watched the tide close in, green, turquoise, with filthy cream streamers, the wind blustering across the coal pocked sands. She felt exquisitely alone, triumphant, released, though none of those words would have come naturally to her. The only natural word would have been no word at all – a groan, a groan of recognition, a groan of non-recognition. She had an undisclosed knack, call it a talent, for ambiguity. It was the essence of her charm.
After that we always knew there was a place to find her. She had discovered her element. She was drawn by depth and weight and farther still by the defining and containing horizon. It all rose in her mind from below and formed itself into a note, a voice and ultimately a vision. She lived between pig-shed and shingle, between punishment and pleasure, and the mid-ground was a sequence of discovered confinements. We were all to learn more as time progressed.
We never realised at first, even though we were sisters, that she could hear the sea, at least its floor, the lowest notes it could sound. We had no inkling that it called her name.
The frustration was that it sounded from such a depth, the tragedy that it called to her more and more, time after time.
It is certainly the persistence of time that brings me back here, having served my time, my long hours in so many hallways, work-rooms, behind locked doors, each space as absurd as the one before. In time everything returns, though never the same, never freely, always with intent, as I have returned, as I returned, with the certainty that someone was to die, something I felt, sensed, as only someone with a special sense could, because reading time is a special sense, very special indeed.
*
My name is Judith Salt. I am sixty years old. My hair is dyed supposedly pale russet-brown, but tends to have a copper, metallic, unnatural sheen. I have been advised by my hairdresser, who is an incredibly talkative young woman who seems to find the greatest pleasure in the minor skirmishes of life, to soak it with avocado and vegetable oil, which she reliably informs me will bring back the natural tint, texture and shine. She assures me that thirty minutes soaking is enough, followed by thorough washing of course; but my natural tint is grey, my natural texture like wire, and I have no recollection of shine, so I politely decline her well-meant suggestion.
Standing on this shore it is something of a relief to bring her to mind, visualise her posturing around me, talking to my reflection in the mirror, though well aware of her own alluring presence in the glass, generously listing the options for new styles, new images, a new me. I know what she’s getting at, what she means without actually saying it. Why don’t I hide my hearing aid? Why do I simply sweep back the hair from my face into a neat little bun? As she says, there are so many possibilities.
I listen appreciatively and even smile from time to time, warmly, without pique or embarrassment, as if to say, no it’s just not me, and all the time I watch as she sweeps back each strand from my face and think, it doesn’t matter, I have worn much worse, a small behind the ear device is really nothing at all and, after all, wouldn’t I be something of a let-down if I started hiding it now? My God, what would Donald’s face look like, knowing I had listened so quietly to such beauty tips? Even after all these years – can it be so many? – I can hear the storm of rage.
It is almost comical letting it wend and knot itself with the waves. The waves are so simply suggestive of time, and yet also of time’s opposite. That is such a pleasing thought.
I am sixty years old. I have been deaf since I was four or there about – scarlet fever, influenza, measles, I don’t know which, no one said. I have hidden it, hated it, denied it, hugged it, loved it. I have never been without an opinion. I still have an opinion.
I smile at my hairdresser, who really is so vivacious and lovely in a clumsy, informal way, with her blond and black hair cut so waywardly around her head that it always brings to mind a cactus, which isn’t fair on her at all. I think I get my hair trimmed so regularly simply to enjoy her company, her brazen certainty and her ridiculous incredulity. Why should I abuse her? Besides she is so gentle as she eases the comb behind my ear, around my aid, as if she were afraid of hurting me, which is misguided, but kind. Really I would like her to be rougher. I like my face pulled slightly tauter than it is.
To be honest, I don’t think my face has ever looked better. I am obviously thin enough for its natural shape to emerge without looking ill and skeletal. The cheekbones are smooth and look almost polished beneath the somewhat reptilian eyes. I suppose I look as if I have had a face job, but I haven’t. I am lucky though. I smoked far too much as a young woman. I guess that accounts for the yellow, mahogany tint the skin has, but at least it hasn’t wrinkled up like most. Maybe I gave up in time. Funny but I never missed it. Absurd that I should ever have started, but people did then, started things they couldn’t easily stop, though we didn’t call ourselves addicts, or even consider there might be a problem. Funny how easily everyone forgave themselves.
I was still smoking the last time I was here. In fact, I was frankly chain-smoking. In my memory I see myself calmly taking a cigarette from the pack – I smoked Rothmans in those days – and putting it to my lips so slowly and thoughtfully that the whole process is charged with deliberation. I strike a match – always matches never a lighter – and guard it from the wind, then inhale so deeply that it feels like drawing a life breath. The mind reels with it. I am capable of anything. I can kill what it is necessary to kill. I can stand up for my moral right. To hell with it! If there was a God he left us to it when we took to residing in caves. Besides, the existence of evil doesn’t assume the necessity of its opposite. So, I had few qualms. I had to be right, though. I had to work it out.
Donald was always trying to get me to quit. I knew I should have. I was pregnant for God’s sake, but then no one stopped smoking because they were pregnant, not then. I don’t know if it was the baby that prompted him. I can’t remember that. I just remember his attempt to smile as if I were being a stubborn teenager, though behind that easy gesture I knew there was real anger. Donald was always smiling and angry. It was a disastrous combination really. I don’t mean angry over smoking, but angry over everything, everything and anything that didn’t fit with how he wanted things to seem, and I believe it was the seeming that mattered, the surface of things, the bright shiny outside of existence.
I had already been living in London for almost five years when we met. I was seeing someone called Michael at the time, a well-meaning, churchgoing boy who collected for Christian Aid and took me to church dances in a large basement hall in Somers Town where I was noticeably made to feel welcome. The small world of Christian charity throws wide its arms to all who are heavily burdened. Of course the very welcome points to your difference, points to the fact that you are being owned.
It gives me goose-bumps now to think I finished with Mi
chael because of Donald. It stands for something, even if it is only prestige. That Michael was hurt doesn’t subtract from that. – Was he hurt because he couldn’t even keep hold of a poor little deaf girl, or because his charity was found wanting? Or am I being deliberately uncharitable and he was hurt as a human being can be, as human beings learn to be, let down, disillusioned, betrayed. What would we ever feel without our knowledge of suffering?
I felt physically sick at those dances. He thought I was shy and nervous. On the contrary, I was overconfident. One of the many things I believe is that there is an absolute lack of separation between mind and body. I suffered from nausea because of the overfullness of mental capacity. I still suffer from bouts of nausea, nausea being far worse than actually vomiting, but perhaps not with the frequency I once did.
I was living in a rented room in a house in Camden Town, sharing with a midwife and a nun. They were good women. On the night I moved in I wrote on a piece of paper: Tonight as I lie down to sleep I have never been happier. I had eaten fish and chips and drunk a couple of glasses of London Gin. I slipped the piece of paper inside the lining of my suitcase. I still have it to this day. Tonight as I lie down to sleep I have never been happier. Such an amazing sentiment really. It points to the ability to sleep – with or without the assistance of London Gin – and to the ability to feel at peace, not removed from life, but as a participant, a willing traveller.
Of course, it also points to a past where such a feeling of excursion was impossible, points to the stunning panic of childhood, the abysmal hours of its unwinding filled with the filthy images of Victorian and Edwardian sentimentality. Nothing quite provokes nausea as much as those horrible colour plates in children’s nursery rhyme books. There is nothing I hate more – unless, it is childhood itself, anybody’s, everybody’s.
I would like to kill it, but then resurrect it, see it live in exactly the same sentimental plate. After all, I was pregnant, stuffed with the happiness of Donald’s child, possessed of the genes of Donald’s dark brooding, and my own fiery, quiet temper.
Did Donald ever realise how much I detested nursery rhymes?
He came from a solid Scottish Presbyterian background, which maybe didn’t take nursery rhymes quite so seriously. He spoke about his parents, his life in Argyll, with fondness and regret, his regret one of disappointment and anger rather than nostalgia. He was always at war with himself, contradicting himself. His father was at once sincere and sham, too easily instilled in the Calvinist dogma that there was no salvation outside the church, yet principled, holding an idea that went with the name, McCloud: his mother, a nurturing compromise of pleasure and virtue, a person constituted by time and place, yet befitting it. History had made them, and they knew it, trusted it and bequeathed it, but the younger son needed to disclaim it, Donald’s elder brother staying put whereas he had to go.
Donald didn’t know what to make of my assertion that my family believed in nothing, nothing except perhaps a permanent present, time fixed forever and ever, recounting the same stories day after day. He would insult me with his mother’s reading – how many books a week was it? – and his father’s speeches and maxims, such as the whole world’s inability to hold the stick by the thick end. What did I have to put up against that?
My name is Judith Salt. My father is Robert Salt, an iron-ore miner who worked permanent nights in a paper-mill when the mines closed in the early seventies. My mother’s boast was that her man never drew the dole. There is contempt for existence itself in that assertion. There is no salvation outside survival. There is no past or future, just an endless struggle with time present. My mother would have been ashamed of anything else, the same way she would have been ashamed of love, the same way she would have been ashamed of any sentiment other than contempt for those who drew any sort of dole.
Not that she was ashamed of me. I was like the mine, the paper-mill, or the thermometer factory where she worked, another factor of the permanent present, simply her disabled offspring on whose part she was never angry, down-trodden or in love – nothing to resist, nothing to condemn, nothing for which to hope, nothing to stand up for. I was another of the life events that you just had to get on with, though I suspect there was an inkling of pride in her ability to say such a thing, another version of never drawing the dole; after all she was a Sempie, Flora Sempie, she couldn’t help but be proud.
Donald didn’t believe it. I was overdoing it, the primitive world from which I had fled to eventually lay down to sleep happier than I had ever been; but then, he didn’t trust anything. He certainly didn’t trust my happiness, and never trusted his own. I have to take much of the blame for that. At first I refused to believe. I berated myself, devalued myself – though I never meant a word. I openly declared my doubt and distrust of his wanting to date a deaf girl. It wasn’t about the ears at all, though. In fact the ears were attractive in their own way, not too large, nicely hugging the side of the head. It was the face, the plumb-line stance, the whole essence of Judith Salt, clerical assistant in a social services office, fulfilling the 3% rule of disabled staff, the whole essence that I had learnt to love and hate, pity and revile, respect and reject.
You don’t love me, I accused him, immediately regretting the use of the word, the presumption of it, the scale of it, wishing I had said something else. Of course if I had said, you don’t care for me, he would have flashed me his impatient, energetic look and told me plainly that I wasn’t a candidate for care. I was relentless though, picking up his unguarded looks, the expression of wistfulness, pleasure, pride. You don’t love me, I’d say, you love some ridiculous image you have of yourself. I cast him in the role of twisted, holy pervert, his martyrdom my deafness.
He could see through me though, but then, he was a radiologist. He worked in the basement of small hospital on Hampstead Road. He complained of never seeing the daylight, of not knowing one season to the next. Sometimes he would rant about it, but I never believed it. He wanted to be in a small space complaining about the urge to a wider world. He was domestic and conservative, but couldn’t bear that in himself, couldn’t bear to be seen in that light. When I said the only reason he wanted me was for the conspicuous fact of my hearing, he looked me over with his eyes as only a radiologist could, boring right through the skin, right through soft tissue and flab, to the naked core, the grey bone, and uttered: But you love me pitying you, though I don’t, not for a second.
The trouble was, his great flaw, his human reversal of fortune, was that he did pity, pitied greatly. In fact he was worn-out by pity. I remember on one occasion sitting in a café with him when he couldn’t eat, and finally had to give up and leave, because on the next table there was a man with an almighty tic and twisted face who kept letting morsels of food drop from his slack lips. There was no way Donald left because he was in any way offended or disgusted. His pity drove him away. The radiologist wanted the world to be a beautiful place for all of its teeming life, but as that struck him as impossible he instead chose to hate it.
Pity like that stinks of bigotry.
He took my head between his large, yet sensitive hands, making sure his great fleshy fingers hugged my hearing aid and said: You have to let me in, trust me, believe me.
And then there was the baby. It took away all the other questions and concerns, such as: why he didn’t turn up for days and when he did was so morose and timid? Why he had so many nightmares, shouting aloud in the night and waking panicked, insisting the next day that he couldn’t recall a thing? Why he drunk quite so much, helping himself to copious amounts of my London Gin? Why he was so flirtatious with the midwife and the nun? They all vanished away, sucked up into the one great question: Will this child be deaf?
But you weren’t born deaf, he said, reminding himself, reassuring himself, convincing himself. Nor was one of my sisters, I replied, teasing him with it, taunting him, but the other was. There was a great deal of deafness in my family.
I believe I wanted him to say, get rid of
it, get rid of his own child taking form within me, the radiologist who couldn’t examine it in its amniotic pool and shout at it to see if it would turn its head or not. I wanted him not to want it, to reject that portion of himself, to give up and deny his enormous pity. I know I wanted it.
Why else would I have crawled over him, naked, the child yet hidden, tiny in the womb, and licked his easily masculine body, his solid, down enriched body, from belly to chest to neck to earlobe then whispered, as if it were an intimacy, a secret sexual desire: Of course, it might not be able to hear; then immediately deserted him, my lips wrapping around his penis, surprising him, shocking him, providing him with dubious pleasure?
Chapter Three
Of course, there was a great deal of deafness in my family, the family my sisters and I knew we were, no matter how violently the matriarch would object, which I imagine would leave her decidedly unsure whether she should shout the denial at the top of her voice, which was her natural predilection, or simply mouth it in an attitude of quiet menace, though the gangster was never her natural style – which isn’t to say she wasn’t capable of horrific crime, because she was. Though I was the one to serve so much time, so much silent, solitary confinement, I was never as criminal as Martha.
She was the first person I went to see when I returned here, twenty-five years old and pregnant; unless Abby’s outline can be counted, crouched then standing, curved lines in air recounting her, replaying all of those people she had been whilst listening to her name. I even spoke to her, determined she had to be the first person to hear my voice on returning, determined someone should die.
Why do we return here, you and I, I said, bruising ourselves with this unpretty, clumsy, unmerry, murderous dance, scarcely able to tolerate our hand in each other’s, our self in each other’s pockets, in each other’s debt?
My Name is E Page 3