‘‘I’m not saying they weren’t, I’m saying, it’s surprising.’’
‘‘We can’t all bugger off to London.’’
‘‘You said you fancied it.’’
‘‘But I didn’t do it.’’
‘‘Why not?’’
‘‘I had kids.’’
‘‘Before?’’
‘‘I didn’t know anything about it, not till the black told me.’’
‘‘The black?’’
‘‘I wouldn’t say out against them. I liked him. We got on well.’’
‘‘I remember, remember hearing, you talking.’’
‘‘Funny, I don’t remember telling you.’’
‘‘Well, it wasn’t Abby.’’ He flashed me an angry look. I laughed and went on: ‘‘I mean, it couldn’t have been Abby, could it?’’
‘‘No, I don’t recall telling her,’’ he replied slowly, but with triumph, pleased with himself.
‘‘I don’t suppose you do.’’
‘‘Which means what exactly?’’
‘‘Nothing. It means nothing.’’
‘‘Is there a point to your being here?’’
‘‘Just visiting family.’’
‘‘But we just carry on. We don’t know you’re gone. Only you know that. Only you know you’re not here. We don’t know it. So don’t expect a big welcome, the red carpet, because we didn’t know you weren’t here all the time.’’
‘‘Was it like that with Abby?’’
‘‘Abby was different.’’
Yes, she was different.
*
She was here and away, never entirely present but not absent either. We were never sure about the other places, what she saw whilst listening to her name, listening to the voice that urged her, made her part of saying. When I recall her now in one of her spaces, relentlessly and tirelessly staring, she doesn’t seem to be looking but interrogating, not content but not disappointed either. It’s as if she were certain there were things behind things, that she could peel away the sky, the sea, the mud-flats, the rail lines, the walls, to reveal … to reveal what? We could never fathom it.
At times Grace became angry with her and demanded an explanation, access, I suppose. Sometimes she answered with her name, pronouncing it over and over, in ecstasy with the vowel, her face twisted with the pleasure of it, and other times she turned her shoulder, tucking Poppy closer to her with the same rough compassion she always showed her and refused to divulge anything of her secret. Grace was determined though. She was sure the things Abby saw must be like the things in her picture books. Grace had lots of picture books.
Her father, Seamus, Nora’s eldest, set great store by reading. He was an avid reader himself and had completed numerous evening classes at a Technical College, managing to become pit deputy in his thirties and eventually, in his late forties, a primary school teacher. He read the first and second readings and the psalm in church every Sunday. He was an awkward, troubled man, devout and disciplinarian. Despite the uncomplicated faith of his two brothers, Peter and Paul, he believed the deaf were incapable of proper education and therefore of true religious experience. He considered Grace’s deafness a punishment, his rather than hers, though he never declared the nature of his sin. He handed her the picture books with an air of hopelessness and regret, but Grace accepted them gratefully, in her own feisty, offhand way.
He refused to learn sign, refused to acknowledge there was a great deal of deafness in his family. We never realised he was ashamed of it, in fact, considered nothing strange about his attitude at all.
Grace put her idea to the test and brought a book and shoved it into Abby’s arms, displacing poor put upon Poppy. She pointed to the cover picture and demanded to know if that was the kind of thing Abby saw. It was a book of angels. Grace opened it onto a white robed angel leading a red robed child over a two plank bridge, the child carrying a small willow basket and clutching the angel’s robe. There was a prayer written underneath, but as none of us could read that remained a mystery. Grace asked Abby in her savage, frustrated voice, whether that was it? Did she see angels in the sky? Abby cringed, turned away and tried to thrust the book from her, but Grace wouldn’t allow it. She was convinced Abby was possessed of visions, but then she was only a child and possessed of visions herself, visions that even she couldn’t find the sign for.
Grace’s own favourite book was the Boy’s Book of Marvels with its fantastic and grotesque pictures, which included an etch of five different breeds of snake strangling the body of a cow, a picture of Pizarro’s terrified crew contemplating the New World, the flat earth on the backs of elephants, and Dr Faustus signing his soul to the devil. She brought this one to Abby and showed her each picture in turn, then back to the first and through them all again, and then she cross-examined her, demanding to know whether they were the things she saw, the flat world, the undiscovered world, the violent world, a world of devils? Abby studied those images with much more interest than she had the book of angels, peering at them as if they too were surfaces, a sheen covering another truth. She giggled and then she moaned, but she was attentive, enthralled by the images, and then she marked it off with her name.
Poor Grace persisted with her books but was never satisfied. She nagged Abby time and again, her voice inflexible and absurdly grown-up. Sometimes she threatened to take Poppy away unless Abby co-operated. At those moments Abby held Poppy more loosely, whether to feign indifference or because she accepted Grace’s authority to claim ownership, I don’t know. I do know that Grace never would have taken her. No one could have loved Poppy with the same unsentimental devotion Abby showed her, and no one could have shared such visions as those two did, cuddling together. Still, it was always amusing to hear Grace admonish Abby, as if Grace were a tiny, strict adult – which she would have learnt from Seamus – confounded and infuriated by Abby’s behaviour.
Indeed, Abby’s stubbornness rankled more than Grace.
*
I smiled at Harold, the smile enriched by Abby’s image between us, which I wanted him to know, willing him to see it, share it and wonder about it. He recognised it all right, recognised the strength in the smile, the outline of the figure in its making, but decided to outface it.
‘‘Did you love her?’’ I asked, the question arising spontaneously, because of that deliberately vacant gaze of his, but I regretted it immediately. It gave him power, released him from me. The word was so stupid. He didn’t know anything about love, only impulse and instinct. My using it, uttering it in that quietly melodramatic way, removed me, allowed him to think of me as an intruder, albeit one that used to belong. ‘‘She could be very stubborn,’’ I said, trying to retrieve something.
‘‘Yes, she could.’’
‘‘Is that why you hit her?’’
‘‘I thought she was playing games, having me on. I didn’t like that.’’
‘‘And what do you think now?’’
‘‘She liked games.’’
‘‘I suppose she did.’’
*
I don’t know that it is possible to call such intensity of feeling a game, but I suppose it was. We never thought we were playing games. We were sisters engaged in battle, in conflict with a recalcitrant nature. We knew it could yield secrets, but it was stubborn and niggard, determined not to give up its pearls, but we were dogged too. We crossed the fields like Pizarro’s conquistadors, clambering amongst escarpments of exposed iron-ore we called cliffs, dropping into craters we called valleys, mapping out the extent of our world, the boundaries of our existence, and they were vast, we found them so, and named them, Red Steps, Hawk Cliff, Ghost Valley, Lost Plateau, Frozen Fields, Waste Land, No Man’s Land, Lost Girl, signing them like pathfinders, scouts, enthralled and frightened by our finds.
Beneath Hawk Cliff there was the rusted gut of an abandoned car, little more than the metal frame and busted seats. We had no idea how it had appeared so far from any road or track. It stunk of mould, satura
ted horsehair, dank leather and rust. Nevertheless, we sailed for miles in her, feasting on stolen turnips, Grace signalling rapids, giant squid, hurricanes, jumping from running board to roof to bonnet, whilst I held the wheel, and Abby crouched on the ripped up bench in the rear, shielding Poppy, sometimes eyeing the dangers with a look of grim resistance, sometimes violently rocking and moaning aloud, signalling fear, enthusiasm, ecstasy, we weren’t exactly clear which. We called our vessel The Inca because Grace’s father told her that’s what the caption read in the Book of Marvels beneath a picture of a tall, lean, hollow cheeked Pizarro standing over his newly baptised enemy, the Inca king, though he fell short of admitting it was just prior to his garrotting him, and how we would have felt about that, I can’t say.
At the time Pizarro was a hero. The Book of Marvels said he had been abandoned as a baby on the steps of a church and suckled by a pig. That made him like us, intimate with pigs, though Grace did sign that it was pretty disgusting, all the same, even if he was only a baby and didn’t know any better. Grace’s father went on to explain to her that lots of people had been brought up by animals, he knew a few himself, it wasn’t so rare: Tarzan by apes, Mowgli by wolves and the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus also suckled by wolves. Learning such things about wolves was strange. It forced us to rethink our geography and rethink our dangers. The Wasteland had always been overrun by them and we had considered that terrible. We had to rethink everything that frightened us or pleased us. I don’t remember who was the first to wonder about Pizarro and Atahualpa, the Inca king, but eventually we all did – but, maybe I’m making up the past now as much as we made up the present then, and always made up the future, though whether we ever recognised we were in the future, I really don’t know. We certainly never knew when it had begun.
In my memory it is Abby who first wondered about Atahualpa, Abby and Poppy, indefatigable investigators of the Book of Marvels, Abby’s index-finger tracing the outline of the soon to be garrotted king, after which, the sketch being complete, she moaned aloud like a mourner expressing the magnitude of her loss. I seem to recall that our games were spiritual that day. We sensed that the wastes of bog land, escarpments, shallow ponds, the dun coloured earth conjoined to the low lying, leaden sky, was overviewed by a sad and disappointed watcher, though whether from the highest cliff or higher still we couldn’t say. Perhaps it was the spirit of Atahualpa himself, his or like his, perhaps made up of many.
Maybe I am being fanciful, though. How could we have thought that? We never knew the word, the sign, for Atahualpa, which is knowledge of a much later life altogether, though we certainly could have touched the top of our heads with the fingertips of a curled hand and lifted it indicating king, though if someone were to insist we didn’t, I wouldn’t argue.
I would insist on the day though, and many others like it. So many lead heavy, flint-grey days, days when the silence was almost complete, when colour was bleached from everything, leaving only a tincture of pale blue, days that made us aborigines. It was invariably Abby who set the tone, initiated those strange, sombre games, ourselves haunting ourselves and relishing the terror. Grace sometimes objected, but never for long, rarely marching off in a huff at Abby’s intransigence, her spook filled gloom.
Grace did regularly stamp her feet and berate Abby when she refused skipping or hopscotch. Grace liked those, the faster the better, but at the start of the game Abby was always reluctant and hugged Poppy tightly to her as if her sense of responsibility wouldn’t allow her to put Poppy down for a moment. That made Grace livid who would start her war dance and sign all manner of insults at Abby. If Abby looked crestfallen Grace would relent and try to coax her, pointing out that Poppy could watch. No sooner would Abby begin, rotating the rope in her right hand, than excitement invariably got the better of her and she would make the crudest noises of enthusiasm. Sometimes she went too far and the rope was too fast even for someone as proficient as Grace, then the recriminations and insults would start again. The peace was usually restored by reverting to hopscotch, which again Abby always refused then overdid, which more often than not ended up with her stamping her foot on a numbered square as if it were an insect she wanted to trample under foot. Grace would calm her by signalling that Poppy was watching, implying that she wasn’t setting a good example. That tended to cow her. She recognised from very early on that there was something in Grace’s expression demanding, be a good girl, and that it was imbued with the question: Have I been a good girl? I am sure Abby always hated that question.
*
‘‘She was a good girl though,’’ I said, ‘‘stubborn, but good.’’
He didn’t respond, but eyed me steadily, letting me know he was refusing me, wasn’t going to play games.
‘‘Did you not think she was good, a good girl. That’s what she wanted to be, a good girl. She always said that.’’
‘‘I don’t remembering hearing it,’’ he replied coldly.
‘‘But she said it all the time. Have I been a good girl? It was pathetic, really. Have I been a good girl, over and over, the same awful question.’’
‘‘I said, I don’t remember hearing it.’’
‘‘Now that you mention it, I don’t think it was her. Silly me. She wanted to be a good girl, but then she didn’t. You’re right, it wasn’t her who said it at all. Your memory’s better than mine. I wonder what else you remember, better than me I mean.’’
He raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips and looked thoroughly bored. He finally sat down, slumping heavily into an armchair that was pulled up close to the electric fire at a slight angle to a television on the other side of the grate.
‘‘What do you want?’’ he asked, complaining, telling me of his boredom and impatience, his indifference to everything.
‘‘I don’t want anything. I’m in the area. I thought I should see you.’’
‘‘I told you, we didn’t know you weren’t here, had no idea, you might have been round the corner, not in London at all.’’ He sat forward, his right palm cupped around his right knee, his left elbow across his left thigh, and tried to smile, the effect being one of a muscle spasm around his jaw which merely contorted his face, making him disjointed. He shuffled further forward until he was on the edge of his seat, both elbows on his knees now, his fingertips touching, forming an inverted v across his lips. His eyes were moist and sharp, weighing me up, quartering me. The fingertips slipped and became a fence of eight digits across his chin, the thumbs hidden behind. He smiled again, more successfully, all the pleasure within. ‘‘Everyone wants something, don’t kid yourself.’’ The smile broadened out vividly. ‘‘And don’t kid me.’’
I repeated that I didn’t want anything.
He reached across the space of the grate, his backside scarcely in touch with the chair anymore, and placed his right hand on my knee. ‘‘You know, you really are looking well, really well.’’
‘‘Despite everything.’’
‘‘Now why do you say that?’’
I half-cocked my face, inquiring, but almost smiling, the gesture of it, no more. He warmed to it though and pressed his fingers into my flesh.
‘‘Will Agnes not be back any minute?’’
He grinned triumphantly, but sat upright, his torso full and straight. ‘‘She just might at that,’’ he said. ‘‘But we’re not finished?’’
‘‘No?’’ I queried, my attention coquettish, submissive and amused, all for him to see, to interpret.
‘‘We all want something,’’ he pronounced, satisfied, wanting to show it, ‘‘no one’s any different to anyone else, as far as that goes.’’
‘‘Except Abby.’’
He scoffed and looked offended, distrustful of my going over old ground, angry at me.
‘‘You said, that’s all, said Abby was different.’’
He pursed his lips severely, acknowledging, distastefully, that it was certainly the case.
*
Sometimes with her contortions,
her body like a rag-doll, with less definition than Poppy, less solidity, her muscle tone absent, a soft yielding bag of a being, I felt she was enacting the Book of Marvels, mutating into a species of snake, strangled cow, flat world, demon, scuttling across the dunes or shingle banks, terrified to be found in such a metamorphic state. I failed to grasp the honesty and confession involved.
Our changes, Grace’s and mine, melted one into another, the past sloughing off, shed like dead skin cells, but with Abby it was a struggle, a fight between forms, her, the owner, uncomfortable with any, and her nature was offended, embarrassed by such incompleteness. I guess it was her knowledge of the world of transformations that drew her so doggedly to the marvels, to those moments of transition, things that she saw through and was amazed by, though never shocked by.
Nothing shocked Abby, not since she had witnessed Harold and Agnes butcher a pig in November, neither of them revealing any compunction as Agnes pinned it down and Harold passed a knife across its throat. Abby obviously had no awareness of the fart of air, the animal’s squeal and the dying whistle, but couldn’t escape the redness of its blood, the pale tincture of its nude pink skin, its kicking body. All her protests and anguish simply resulted in a backhand from Harold and a glare of disgust from Agnes. She ran from it and discovered the shoreline where she rolled around on the sands like the animal in its death throes, her soul wedded to the creature.
There was no talking to her then, no knowing what she wanted, what her attempts to fit into ever smaller spaces amounted to, though Grace tried and tried again to reason with her, until Grace lost her temper and left her to her immediate fate, which made no difference at all.
I never said Abby wasn’t stubborn.
*
‘‘We both know what we want, don’t we?’’ Harold announced, keeping his torso braced, upright.
I shrugged mildly. It amused him. He saw that the gesture wasn’t denunciation, rejection or threat of exposure, simply non-committal. Of course, at first, I had been taken aback, shocked that he should be propositioning me, Judith Salt, deaf, grade II, but I very quickly recognised that, as always, he was acting on impulse and instinct. Nothing else motivated him. The realisation was liberating. I knew exactly what he wanted, and it wasn’t sex with Judith Salt but control of Judith Salt, authority over a deaf, grade II woman. Well, I could cope with that. I held up my hands, palms facing my body, and then moved them forward and outwards, as if I was indeed offering him something. He grinned at the possibility, the sign.
My Name is E Page 6