My Name is E

by Frederick Lightfoot

  After that, I would say a little more, nothing much, a comment on the weather, how quiet the shops were, the café, how everyone must be in the supermarket. Then one day I stopped him in the street and engaged in conversation, asking whether he ever used the supermarket himself, or did he stick out for the butcher, the baker and the other little retailers he seemed to favour. He was a little aggrieved, just as Harold had been over the same subject regarding his mother. Of course he used the supermarket, everybody used a supermarket, where else could you buy cleaning materials? Besides there was a bus went straight outside the door, so he often finished there. Had he never learnt to drive? He was quite content with the bus service, particularly as they were never crowded.

  I am sure that conversation put his mind at rest. Perhaps it was only coincidence, after all, that I should appear so persistently on his regular shopping trips. Besides he must have been fairly sure I wouldn’t be around for much longer. I presumed he wouldn’t be so guarded the next time.

  The next meeting was two days later. He had just come out of the greengrocer, carrying a straw handbag, unperturbed by its femininity.

  After a few initial comments about the coldness, but the clearness, and thank God the dryness of the day, I said: ‘‘The buses must be full of kids, so many people driving these days.’’

  ‘‘The buses are empty,’’ he replied, shrugging his indifference.

  ‘‘But on Saturdays, I know you’re a Saturday shopper as well, there must be loads of kids on a Saturday.’’

  ‘‘I don’t mind kids.’’

  ‘‘I know, I know that, I know you like kids, but do they not torment you, call you names, some of those school lads are big lads.’’

  ‘‘Of course not.’’

  ‘‘Funny, I thought they would.’’

  He made to walk on, but couldn’t resist asking: ‘‘Why, why would they?’’

  ‘‘Because they’ll know what you’re like, with kids I mean, messing with kids. Everybody knows. Agnes told me that everybody knows, knows what you’re like.’’

  He glared at me fiercely, the little colour he had draining from his pinched face, but quickly controlled himself, then eyed me with a look of accelerating spite and said: ‘‘Agnes said nothing of the sort, did she? See, I know that isn’t true.’’

  ‘‘Were you never scared of Harold finding out? Harold has a flaming temper.’’

  He grinned with increasing viciousness, then mused, repeating Harold’s name as if he couldn’t quite bring to mind the person I meant, and then declared: ‘‘I don’t remember Harold much caring for her. You have a filthy mind, really, a filthy mind that can’t work out that I was her friend, and all I did was show her pictures. Maybe you’re a touch jealous, is that it, a touch envious?’’

  ‘‘I know I was never your type,’’ I smiled wistfully.

  ‘‘Gangly, plain, mouthy,’’ he said, with unexcited triumph.

  ‘‘Exactly, able to speak.’’

  ‘‘Though not very well.’’

  ‘‘No, not very well.’’

  He pouted his lips, the smile still apparent, tilted back his head somewhat and made to move on, evidently quite pleased with the situation as he read it, and yet, strangely, he didn’t let it go but asked: ‘‘You’ll be heading off soon, I expect. Done your time.’’

  ‘‘No, Mr Drake,’’ I replied formally, ‘‘I’m not finished here. I have unfinished business.’’

  ‘‘I’d have thought you’d spent enough time.’’

  ‘‘I’m such a glutton for pleasure.’’

  He eyed me with a look of deliberate sympathy, a look that would have enraged Donald, and said: ‘‘You should stop bothering people, no one is quite what they were.’’ He said something more, but as he had turned his head away I missed it. As was so often the case, I was lip-reading. I never did hear half so well as I made out. He turned back, smiled again, and indicated his intention to go.

  I said: ‘‘She really did tell us everything, everything.’’

  He shook his head doubtfully, his look combining pity and scorn, together producing victory. ‘‘She never said a damned word, Harold told me, not a damned word, never.’’

  ‘‘She was fluent.’’

  He continued shaking his head, a note of temper entering the gesture. ‘‘Just shut up,’’ he snapped. ‘‘Shut up.’’

  He walked on. I called to him: ‘‘Would you believe everything Harold says?’’ He turned back and cocked his slim face questioningly. ‘‘He calls himself a Sempie, after all.’’ He grimaced, bored by the comment. ‘‘Did the Sempies ever own a mine?’’

  He shrugged and screwed up his face: ‘‘In a way. They owned land above one anyway. Why?’’

  ‘‘Because they would have claimed they did, I guess.’’

  He shook his head. ‘‘You don’t know anything do you?’’

  ‘‘How little did Martha not mind Aidan?’’

  He grimaced again, turned away and walked on, his straw shopping bag banging against his knee.

  *

  I have a dream in which I am just on the verge of being discovered of having murdered someone, on the point of being found out. It has nothing to do with being twenty-five and deciding someone must die. It started before then. In my mind I assumed it was to do with the fact that I was unfaithful to Donald.

  He wouldn’t have believed it, of course. It went so much against the grain of how he saw me, how he wanted me to be seen, his naïve girl who didn’t know how to be independent and then, when she was, was wrong. Perhaps that’s why I did it. That and difference. A respite. An affair has no future, no reality, so you can make yourself up, be as the fancy arises. With Peter I had no fears, no misgivings, but then I had no past, just a pleasure seeking present. Perhaps all of life should be just such a fantasy, but then, perhaps it already is.

  We met in the deaf club. To be honest he wasn’t the first. I don’t think I had a reputation for promiscuity, but I can’t say for certain. I know I had a desire to lay the ghost of Somers Town church dances and put Michael’s charity to rest. I was deaf, extremely hard of hearing, relatively skilled in lip-reading, capable at signing, with Grade II, certainly IIb, hearing, not a freak, inferior or stupid. The occasional relationships with boys from the deaf club eradicated the whole business.

  Following the disastrous night in Hampstead Donald was more abrupt and angry than ever before. We only saw each other a couple of times leading up to Christmas and rowed on both occasions. I started going to the deaf club more. I didn’t see him at all over Christmas then, a few days after New Year, he called in on his way from work unannounced. I was just about to leave. He wanted me to cancel. I shook my head. It was already arranged. How could I not go? He flew into a rage. He told me I didn’t need the club – I don’t know that he ever called it the deaf club – I was having them on, scarcely deaf at all. He accused me of being attitudinally deaf.

  He was so pleased with the charge that he calmed down. I thought he had actually made it up, one of his own, a clever swipe. I didn’t answer. He must have thought my silence a victory. He went on more reasonably, describing the club as a form of segregation, apartheid, surely I saw that. I didn’t need it, I was post-lingual deaf.

  I asked him who he was trying to convince, me or himself.

  With that he flew into another rage. He said I only went there for pity, and it disgusted him.

  He was wrong. I was deaf, am deaf.

  I wasn’t going to the deaf club for pity, I was going for sex.

  There is something thrilling about making love in sign. Peter could mark my whole body with pleasure, his shape fastening across me, the tip of his tongue on my clitoris, then my nipples, his knees either side of my torso, one way then another, rump and groin, his hands extending down, then up, forming a signature of himself, a presence, and then penetration, a double sign, pleasure and identity. He also smoked, smoked a great deal, so we could taste addiction in each other’s mouths.


  I didn’t love him, though, and never felt any need to.

  I didn’t think I loved Donald, until I returned that night and found him still there. Bizarrely, I had walked out on him, but left my own place. I hadn’t expected him to stay.

  He made the caustic comment that the club went on late. I shrugged. He wondered if it always went on so late. I replied that it wasn’t usual, not the norm, but it was the New Year. He scoffed and said we must all be such party animals. As he spat that out he went for a drink and the penny dropped; he had been drinking a great deal, probably all night. I wondered why and asked him, why he felt the need to drink.

  Because I had abandoned him.

  The triteness of that disappointed, rather angered me.

  I told him that I had simply kept an appointment.

  He flared, and raged that it was an appointment over him.

  I shrugged and carelessly accused him of jealousy.

  His rage intensified, but to my amazement he agreed. Yes, he was jealous, insanely jealous, jealous that I wanted to go off with my own kind.

  Even that didn’t disgust me. I reminded him that he had insisted they weren’t my kind.

  He turned on me, his eyes ugly with drink, flabby, unfocused, his mind greedy on crumbs. He retorted that I wanted them to be my kind, though, wanted the whole stinking world to make out that we were different, disabled.

  I smiled and said that if I had been born in another country at another time I would have been gassed.

  He evidently knew his history, because he immediately countered that I wouldn’t, I personally would have been all right.

  I shrugged.

  I would have wanted to be gassed, though, he added snidely, wanted to be a martyr, a saint.

  How could I have said, I just wanted sex. The thought was amusing. I was being accused of all the wrong things. My faithlessness was of a completely different order. Maybe I should have said it, blurted it out, confessed that I had been with a deaf man for the last six hours and we had drunk London Gin, smoked Rothmans and had sex twice. As the admission formed itself in my mind though, the thought struck me that he didn’t even believe it possible. His jealousy wasn’t about sex. He didn’t associate any such possibility with the club. The very notion was incredible. He just didn’t want me to belong to something, anything, certainly not of his making. It was the usual contradiction with him.

  I chose not to pursue it. I made light of it. I said the deaf club was pleasant, that was all, a break, a chance to just … I ran out of words, because I didn’t quite know how to finish the sentence without being contentious. In the end I said it was a chance just to sign and be happy.

  He came up to me, face to face. He smelt of whisky, his breath hot and acrid. He spoke slowly, a deliberate speech. The problem of opposition, he said, was belonging: to be against something forces you to belong to something, even though that something might not be natural at all.

  I told him I wasn’t against anything, I was for something. I really did believe in the deaf club, insisting on the word deaf. Deaf clubs had been the guardians of the deaf for generations.

  He shouted out his objections. I wasn’t deaf in the same way.

  I simply nodded.

  I had no need to scream.

  In that moment I was politicised. I understood what belonging meant. I knew then that I had to go home and do what I had to do. They had to pay, those who had made Abby suffer. My love called out for retribution, correction, restitution.

  I burst out laughing. Donald flared. I immediately reached out and touched him, tracing my fingers along the outline of his face, the face that drink was making slack and flabby. I smiled coaxingly and told him everything would be all right. He actually fought against my touch, or made a show of it, as if it were magical and he couldn’t quite free himself, despite his twists and objections.

  I gazed at him sympathetically, fulfilled by my mission, my desire to kill.

  He met my gaze with weary, pleading eyes. He asked about the baby. It was obvious from his expression that he just couldn’t make sense of the baby.

  What, what about the baby, I prompted?

  Will the baby be able to hear?

  I shook my head.

  He wailed incredulously.

  I smiled, thinking to myself, how would I feel if it was Peter’s baby I was carrying, if the chance the baby couldn’t hear was greater.

  I didn’t have an answer.

  I said that I meant I didn’t know, that was all, didn’t know. There was perhaps more deafness in my family than I thought.

  He said he wanted me to have a termination, he would arrange it, insisting it wasn’t because the baby might be deaf, not that at all.

  So what, I asked, gesturing the question, what?

  He wasn’t ready, that was all. He wasn’t ready and didn’t know if he wanted to stay with me.

  In that moment, having not loved enough, I loved too much, spurred on in imagination by his absence. I felt it in my stomach, absence, the emptiness absence creates. I touched him as gently as I could and suggested he leave.

  He did go, without speaking, but gesturing the need, the desire to put something into words, something that wasn’t near the mark. I shook my head. There was no need. The discomfort and the relief were writ large for anyone to read.

  The very next day I set off home.

  I don’t think, now, that my dream, a dream I still have on a regular basis, was the fear of being found out for having an affair. It was about being found out as a fraud. It was about discovering that the grown-up woman known as Judith Salt was really that same Judith Salt who traipsed a coal infested shoreline thinking this is the extent of the world, the extent of knowing, deaf to all else. Judith Salt, nothing and never. I have suspicions. I surmise that is true.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Judith Salt made a weapon. She needed an act of creativity to make sense of Abby’s life.

  Strange that I should disassociate myself like that, by naming me, casting myself in the role of character. Judith Salt and all that went into the understanding of that name made a weapon. As if her mind had reverted to the most archaic period of human development, she took herself off into a cave and fashioned an implement that she endowed with magical properties, a weapon charged with the mystical task of vendetta.

  I need to correct myself. I made a weapon. I have no intention of trying to suggest that I wasn’t in my right mind, my actions those of an automaton, driven mad by vagaries and skirmishes. I am not about to claim that Judith Salt would have been a wholly different woman if circumstance had only allowed. Circumstance did not allow. I was what I was made and acted on that mission. I made a weapon, a weapon capable of killing my enemies, who were legion but had to be made specific. I made a weapon; I was creative.

  I went to the old mine buildings at dawn. They remained as I remembered, dilapidated locked sheds and the tower, its iron gate long breached, still twisted on its hinges. Appropriately the sky was blood-red, deep red, black-red, the air bitterly cold, the iron soil solid, though devoid of visible frost. I waited by the tower entrance, viewing the morning sky, thinking of Abby, the day we lost her close by, and Grace Powers crying for her mother, neither of us yet knowing Abby had discovered burial, the hidden history of our world. Eventually there were spangles of yellow light across the horizon, their sudden brilliance veining the crimson, then overwhelming it. It was time to seek shelter.

  I ducked through the door, a brush shank in my right hand and small tool-bag in my left. The tower still had the same stink of rotten vegetation and clay as it had years before, as if its atmosphere were caught in time. I climbed to the upper chamber. A streak of brittle winter light poured through one of the square openings, a shaft insufficient to eradicate the gloom. It was colder than I remembered, the outside world more intrusive.

  I lay the shank along the ground, measured it with my eye, walked around it three times, then knelt on the clay floor and measured it with my two hands, spreadi
ng them from the centre to the two apex, mythologizing it, personifying it. After that I picked it up and placed the base into my lap, which had a metal clasp for the brush head to fix into. I tipped the contents of my tool-bag onto the floor beside me. There were a pair of pliers, a ball of string, dress-maker scissors, a roll of electrical tape and a carving knife. Everything had come from home, but only the knife would be missed, the rest having been stowed away in an old shed in the yard. Still, the knife would be returned soon enough, put back in its drawer to become another everyday object, having been washed of its ritual significance.

  I took the pliers and eased open the round clasp to make room for the thicker, square shaped knife handle, which I jammed in as far as I could get it, carefully avoiding grasping the blade with my fingers. It went in almost two thirds of its length. I tapped it firmly against the rear of the clasp with the pliers, using them as a hammer, and then pressed the clasp with the pliers to seal it as best I could. Then I took the string and plaited it around the clasp and the handle, criss-crossing it from front to back until there were two tight, neat chevrons to either side, then I cut the string with the blade of the pliers and knotted it together.

  I stood up and thrust the blade into the clay. The fixture remained solid. I pulled it out as if I were dragging it back through viscera, measured its height against myself, which despite my stature, was up to my ear, and then laid it against the wall in readiness. I put my tools back into the bag and put that with the weapon and left, risking their discovery.

  I didn’t think it was so great a risk. It was a weekday so there wasn’t likely to be any kids exploring there, and I didn’t envisage anyone else blundering in. It would have been very unlucky.

  I wandered to the pond and walked along its bank. I considered walking along the back of the drainage tube, maybe even climbing inside, but dismissed the idea as fanciful. I didn’t need to look for Abby, she was everywhere, shapes of her, patterns, her figure rotating against the early morning sun, substance and shadow, action and result, indelible – evidence.