‘‘The silent ones, the ones for us.’’
‘‘Stock.’’
‘‘Like minded?’’ I smiled.
‘‘I meant to be kind, wanted to be kind.’’
‘‘Of course,’’ I agreed. ‘‘I know what you wanted.’’
‘‘Do you think she enjoyed them? I never knew, could never tell. She was a bit of a funny one.’’
‘‘Yes, when you say it affectionately, like that.’’
‘‘Oh, yes.’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘I like to think she might have enjoyed them.’’
I could have told him that she had a talent for pleasure, that it was her gift to see into its true nature. She was in equilibrium with the world around her. Its still objects filled her with their shapes, movement drew patterns in her mind, and colour and its complement were like inner light. She had a knack for it, a system of naming, and an appetite, but whether she needed slapstick and jokes, I don’t know. I remember she laughed appreciatively at Charlie Chaplin in The Circus, particularly when he went through the hall of mirrors and when he battled across a tightrope hampered by falling trousers and a clinging monkey, but then his face was so sad with disappointed love she wouldn’t have missed that. So, I decided to pass on her enjoyment: besides I was more interested in his enjoyment.
‘‘Tell me,’’ I whispered, as if inviting him to confess a guilty past, ‘‘why did you go inside the mine called Hilda?’’
‘‘Local history, an interest, just an interest.’’
‘‘We might have killed ourselves.’’
‘‘Young fools.’’
‘‘Unknowing.’’
‘‘Lucky I discovered you.’’
I flashed him an intent look, my eyes fixed on his. He flinched at it, flinched as if he had barely avoided being hit.
‘‘Something crossed my field of vision,’’ I explained. ‘‘Strange, unaccountable really.’’
‘‘What?’’
‘‘Oh, I don’t know. A trick of light disorients me. I think I see things. Not like a mad-woman, you understand, though you never know, more, I get deceived by things.’’ He shrugged but didn’t comment. I went on: ‘‘I’m easily deceived, yet I am in everything suspicious. How can that be?’’
‘‘Why, why are you suspicious? Has something happened to you?’’
‘‘So much is illogical, doesn’t really stand up to much examination, but you know that, being a movie watcher.’’
‘‘I just watch, I don’t make anything of them. I’m not like that. I don’t pretend to make anything of them.’’
‘‘You must be quite at home in the dark.’’ He moved back slightly, his sharp chin lifted, signalling effrontery, suspicion. I smiled and followed him with my eyes. ‘‘In a village language is like shadows in a cave where meaning flickers, cryptic and ominous, on grey walls, then falters.’’
‘‘What are you talking about?’’
‘‘Then there was lightness, lightness and sound.’’
‘‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’’
‘‘What did you do to her underground?’’
‘‘I saved her,’’ he said, his voice trembling, though whether with anger, heroism or defiance, I couldn’t say. For good measure he repeated it, no louder, his voice scarcely registering more than a whisper, but with obvious greater force: ‘‘I saved her.’’
*
We penetrate so feebly the mystery of this life, that the stars in the night sky might as well be wallpaper for a doll’s house.
I often think that, sitting in the hairdresser’s chair, watching everything in reflection, everything as absurd as Chaplin in the hall of mirrors, that I might be in a doll’s house, moved about by unseen fingers, made pliant in my pleasure seeker’s throne.
At times it is all so unreal the business of having my hair pulled back, held tightly between the first two fingers in small bunches and then trimmed, the scissors dancing around my head like a large egg laying insect.
My instinct tells me I shouldn’t be there, my desire counters with quite the opposite, and the strange internal war of who and what I am carries on in its oh so secret chamber, with myself an involuntary witness.
At those moments time in the salon rotates like one of Mr Drake’s reels, liable at any moment to run off the spool, leaving only the sound of missing life, which I would be fortunate to hear at the best of times.
Life then is always around the corner somewhere.
I recall, one day, my hairdresser was skipping with fun, admiring things in the looking glass, not necessarily herself, but things which she herself brought to mind. Being full of charity, which is after all her virtue, she wanted me to be part of it, and opted for the only route available: disclosure. She would permit me to know the scandalous behaviour that so amused her, but even as she began to tell me of her escapade with a young man, best friend of her current boyfriend, I had drifted away. She was simply a constellation in glass, her blond and black hair destinations in some far-flung firmament.
It didn’t take her long to realise that I hadn’t heard a word, but she took no offence, merely inquired whether I was all right, the incident with my nails still obviously on her mind.
I looked at her, though away from what, I can’t recall – I couldn’t have at the time – and she looked so lovely, brimming with hospitality and care, I had to explain myself, my drifting, my absence.
I said, when the stars are taken away, when clear night is overtaken by cloud, rain heavy cloud, do they cease to exist? Does the sea exist in Camden Town? Do tigers really survive in the wild? Does anything exist outside our sense of it? I am deaf to so much, you see, blind to so much I want to see, and I think I have spent a lifetime wanting to be touched, but somehow never affected the trick. Is that banal?
To my utter amazement, my beautiful, efficient, effervescent hairdresser began to cry. Really, she is so special, so burdened with charity.
I wanted to go on and say it is so pointless worrying about death when we haven’t even worked out where life came from, the tragedy being that it will be over before we even realise it has begun, but she looked altogether too beautiful to bother with such things.
Abby would have understood, eyeing us peaceably from her place of seclusion. Her beauty was of a different order, though whether one or the other is given to longevity, I really can’t say.
It is rare to see a star in London, recognise the pattern on the walls of the doll’s house.
It is only when I am faced with the northern sky, with Orion, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Cassiopeia, Pleiades, and the rest whose names elude me, that I realise I miss it, at all other times, I get by, thankfully.
Yes, we penetrate so feebly the mystery of this life, that the stars in the night sky really are wallpaper for a doll’s house.
*
He enjoyed telling us that if we had been born in Germany we would have been gassed.
As I said, he was always a tease.
I told him again. ‘‘You were always such a tease.’’
He warmed to it as if it were a compliment fit to make him blush. Besides, he was pleased I seemed to be back on solid ground. He visibly relaxed. He said: ‘‘I was never spiteful.’’ I agreed with him. He warmed to that too, repeating it, re-creating himself in imagination, the projectionist, one of a certain kind, who was never spiteful.
‘‘It gave you pleasure,’’ I suggested.
He seized on that. ‘‘Yes, and no,’’ he mused. ‘‘I hope it gave everyone pleasure.’’
Once again I had to agree with him. ‘‘Of course, I’m certain.’’
Not spite, but pleasure, pleasure in control, as if it were in his gift to sanction life: a charity, an indulgence, a weakness. It also implied what sort of people they were, the community he came from, a community who didn’t gas people.
‘‘It wasn’t true, what you said.’’
‘‘What was that?’’
I smiled. If I
said no more would he ever question his charity, or his community, because I was pretty sure he would never question his views on Germany? ‘‘That if we’d been born in Germany we would have been gassed.’’
‘‘Of course it was true. They gassed all people like you.’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘A people devoid of pity.’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘I don’t see why you should defend them.’’
‘‘No, I’m not, not really. The truth is bad enough, but they didn’t gas deaf people when it didn’t run in the family. They tried to put a stop to that, sterilisation, gassing, but not the others.’’
‘‘Like I told you, if you’d been born in Germany you’d have been gassed.’’
‘‘No!’’
‘‘All right, sterilised, then, sterilised.’’
‘‘No,’’ I said, finding myself in the ridiculous position of losing my cool over the truth of Nazi German crimes. ‘‘There was no deafness in the Sempie line.’’
‘‘Who said that, Martha Sempie? Well, ask her about her Aunt Hilda and see what she says.’’
‘‘She hates deafness,’’ I said, involuntarily, speaking before I’d thought.
‘‘She certainly didn’t find much wrong with Aidan Shaughnessy, and I don’t recall he was much a one for music.’’
‘‘What do you mean?’’
He leaned forward again and smiled, for the first time without hesitation. ‘‘The other one, the bad one, she’d have been gassed, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’’
I returned his smile, grimly, but determinedly: ‘‘You always liked to tease.’’
‘‘That’s right, don’t mind a word of me.’’
‘‘You saved her.’’
‘‘Saved you all, all three, young fools.’’
‘‘Why do you think she never went back into the mine?’’
‘‘She must have got a fright.’’
‘‘That’s what I think.’’
‘‘But she could never say. Sad, that, in a way.’’
‘‘You’re wrong again, Mr Drake, we could never get her to shut up.’’
He sat back and simply gazed at me, all expression slowly seeping out of his face. I said I would see myself out. He made no reply, not that I heard anyway.
Chapter Twelve
For many years we received all of our education from Mrs Gunn, a peripatetic teacher who came to the village three times a week. She was a woman of endless complaints and misery who, as far as we could tell, seemed thoroughly to enjoy her desperation. She peered at the world as if it were a place of intrigue and corruption, its many obstacles personal and disgusting. She moaned about manure and mud on the roads, stating that all farmers should be fined and made to clean it up, that the pollution was deliberate and malicious, she knew, she came from that stock. It was dangerous for her Austin, she insisted, which would slide right off the road on a whim, talking of the car as if it were yet another disobedient child: her personal experience, the claim by which she measured everything, having taught her that all children were disobedient; deafness, blindness, limbless, notwithstanding. Sub-normality was no guarantor of goodness. Of course she was right about that. I might even say I was grateful to her for that judgement.
I was the first to come under her instruction, not because I was the eldest, simply because my parents put up no opposition: my father, coming from the Salts, had no opposition to anything, and my mother, from the easy Sempie line, saw no harm in it. We were already sisters when Grace joined me. Seamus had to be threatened with action from the school-inspector before he would relent. He didn’t quote Aristotle who maintained that the deaf could not be educated, or St Augustine who claimed that deafness was a sign of God’s anger at the parents, but he was insistent that it was futile to even try to educate the girl – a point of view he held as both a parent and teacher himself. The fact that Grace was as quick-witted as any child her age was simply ignored. He was certain she couldn’t have an aptitude for true intelligence, which was a relationship with God – and, unlike Abby, I don’t ever recall that Grace was much given to God, not in anything but a mechanical way.
Later, it was Seamus who insisted Grace attend school – at first the local village school – when her interest in the mines opened his eyes to the fact that although his deaf offspring may never learn the revelation of Christ’s ministry, she undoubtedly had a thirst for knowledge. Martha, on the other hand, would never countenance a school, least of all a special school, a step that had been pressed on her ever since the audiology tests proved conclusively that Abby couldn’t hear. She maintained that if you put deaf-mutes together they would breed, forming their own deaf-mute race. No Sempie, as long as she could help it, was going to put their name to such an ancestry. As regards Mrs Gunn’s lessons she was simply dismissive. There was no need to waste the woman’s time, the child was fit for nothing and never would be. It was Agnes who finally brought the sisters together, educationally speaking – Martha having forced her to defy the school-inspector for years – not out of any conviction, simply for the relief of getting Abby out of the way. As she explained to the matriarch, Martha couldn’t know what it was like day in day out, to which, thrusting her fist through the air, Martha had to agree.
Mrs Gunn would come and collect us, house to house, and then take us to the Reading Rooms, a nineteenth century village hall used for Parish Council meetings, Sunday School groups, baby clinics and, for two afternoons a week, the travelling library, the meagre stock of books changed by three or four every fortnight by the visiting librarian. Mrs Gunn would plod along, her centre of gravity heavy as if she were stepping through mud, her head lowered, her face framed with thick grey hair shaped like a bonnet or German soldier’s helmet, never acknowledging us until we reached our destination where she told us to sit around a large mahogany desk which was so high for us, perched on our small fold-away Sunday School chairs, it came up to our shoulders.
The Reading Rooms were two wood panelled rooms, separated by a wood and glass sliding partition, both rooms decorated with sombre portraits of stern faced men, and in one an award to a drama group dating back to 1928, though no one we knew could ever recall a drama group, nor in the case of my parents really knew what one was. Each room was as equally dark, damp and cold as the other. Sometimes she would light a paraffin-heater, though more usually we simply kept on our coats.
Her first task, standing in front of us, her face outwardly severe, yet not concealing an inner sadness, her lips puffed and rounded downwards, was to ensure that our hearing aids, our large Medresco aids were switched on and working. – What styling advice would my vibrant, life loving, life affirming hairdresser give if faced with a wire dangling from my ear to my pinafore pocket?
In the early days we were uncomfortable, Grace and I, with our aids, both of us since our illnesses having become accustomed to a muted, hushed world, but the discomfort didn’t last long. As Mrs Gunn never tired of telling us, we lived in a hearing world, hearing was normal, hearing was correct. It was the world we began in. We had learnt speech and sound. The hearing aid may not have been lovely to look at, but I wouldn’t deny its beauty. Abby hated it though. I can’t imagine what sensation she felt – could it really have been a remote sound, the dreadful, indecipherable sound of life? – but she couldn’t bear it. It cut through her like pain. The first time it was inserted she ripped it out, but Harold struck her, glaring at Agnes as if Abby’s ingratitude proved the wilfulness of her lack of hearing. Every time it was replaced she repeatedly pulled it out, only to receive ever heavier blows from Harold. The nurse suggested it would simply take time, but Harold insisted she was stubborn by nature. Between coaxing and punishment the hearing aid remained in place. In class she inevitably sat to attention as if the thing were delivering her an electric shock. Over time Grace and I taught her to be patient. Our lessons with Mrs Gunn weren’t long or arduous, in fact were concluded pretty quickly, then she could dispense
with it, with sound – if sound it was.
It is impossible to know what the pain was Abby felt, what that suggestion of sound was doing to her. We can all be hurt by meaning, by what the signifier intends, but with her it was as if an element of existence itself was crippling her, running through her like electricity, scattering her nerves and displaying her like a spray of lights, yet failing entirely to reveal her, in fact leaving her more in the dark than ever. She could only respond with tantrums, something she had learnt from Martha and Harold, hitting out as best she could. No one had ever offered another way. There was no suggestion that light has many forms, one perhaps more suitable than another. There was a mantra, you live in a hearing world, a mantra that for her didn’t apply. So, they were wrong, except they were in no position to be wrong, so naturally, she had to be wrong, wrong in all she did, despite her agony, despite her vision, and certainly in the face of her beauty. She had to be wrong. You must talk, Mrs Gunn demanded, talk is the world you must live in, even if it is not the world you want to live in.
Behind the panelled walls of the Reading Rooms Mrs Gunn displayed an angry eloquence, willingly exposing to us, who were inexpert in hearing, the fatalism of her misery. You must do as you are told girls, she commanded, that’s all that counts. The child, she announced, the two year old, the three year old, uses gesture, and though this may be its mental salvation it is also the greatest threat to its future mental life – without words there is no thinking, without words there is no world. So, you must do as you are told, girls, and that is speak. And you must learn to speak correctly and well, just like everyone else.
The first time we were given this speech – which afterwards was repeated endlessly – Grace put her hand up to ask a question, only to find herself slapped across the face. I never did learn what that question was going to be, though I assume it would have been simply a request to go to the toilet, which I also assume would have been refused.
Mrs Gunn taught us our prayers. We were expected to end each lesson with the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t see God, I saw sky. I didn’t know what to make of it. As Mrs Gunn began in her slightly high pitched, twining voice, Our Father, who art in heaven, I saw sky.
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