Sign

by Colin Dray

  ‘Now you try.’ She showed him her hands, palms out, and shaped the sentence again. ‘Can you follow along?’

  He tried. Sort of. His hands felt numb. The shapes he made were sloppy and backward. Eventually Tracey rose and crossed to the couch, sitting beside him and taking hold of his fingers. Shaping them.

  He could smell cigarettes. She was a smoker. Like Dettie. He became distracted by the fuzziness of her hair. The tickle of it on his ear. In the other room the man watching television cleared his throat.

  Up on the bookshelf, behind Tracey, Sam noticed a line of encyclopaedias. They were the exact encyclopaedias that he had at home. Funk & Wagnalls. Black and gold spines. All snug in place on their shelf. Something about the sight of them made him choke. He started huffing. He snatched his hands back. Suddenly he couldn’t catch his breath.

  Tracey eased away. ‘That’s okay, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I know this is difficult. It’s a lot to take in. A lot all at once.’ She touched his knee. ‘Why don’t we take a break? Let’s have a hot drink of something.’

  She left to make him a cup—a Milo for him and tea for her. She promised biscuits.

  Sam sat alone, trying to slowly inhale. Exhale. Tucked behind Tracey’s empty chair the electrolarynxes were waiting. On the table the diagram of his neck, sliced in half, tubes rearranged, stared up at him. In the next room commentators were enthusiastically reciting someone’s statistics. Sam was shaking. His breathing was fast. Fierce. He couldn’t stop. Couldn’t catch his breath. The encyclopaedias that he had at home. That he used to research his school projects. They sat on the shelf. The man watching tennis coughed. Like his father on the tape. He coughed.

  The room was too small. Cluttered. Choking him. Tiny dolphins. Horses. Horse pulling carriages. Tethered. He was sweating under the bandages. He stared at the unicorn. His head was getting light. One of its legs was raised. His breath. He couldn’t. It hurt.

  He was crying.

  Gasping. Shaking. Sobbing. There was no way out. He was going to throw up. He tried to stop crying and cried harder. Silently. Wet, hot tears scalding his face. The waterfall painting and the dreamcatchers dissolved in a blur. His chest heaved. His neck whistled. Everything was getting dark.

  At some point Tracey returned carrying a tray with two mugs and a plate of biscuits. ‘Oh, no, sweetie, it’s okay,’ she said, setting them aside and easing down beside him again. ‘It’s okay. You’re okay.’

  He could barely hear her. He was doubled into himself. Eyes squeezed shut. Chest on fire. Trying to stop the sobbing. If he could just catch his breath. If he could just get control. What was going on? Was he dying? Was this what dying felt like? Dettie’s dark beyond?

  ‘It’s perfectly all right,’ Tracey was saying. ‘Shhh…’ She rubbed his back, but he couldn’t feel it. ‘We just need to get it out, don’t we?’

  But he didn’t. He knew it. He couldn’t get it out.

  He hated her.

  He hated her sign language. He hated her electric buzzing voice box. Her stupid burps. He hated her dreamcatchers and her ornaments and her husband watching tennis in the next room. He hated that she called him ‘Samuel’. He hated her unicorn.

  He hated Dettie for leaving him here. His mother for being at work. Katie for waving goodbye. The doctors. His school. Everyone. All of it. Everything.

  He was alone with all his hate. Crushed under it. Lost in it. Choking his way deeper into it. Alone.

  Eventually the sensation began to pass. Tracey got him to count out his breaths, and the choking steadily slowed to a shudder. Tears still welled in his eyes, streaked down his cheeks, but he could look around again. He could see the room and not feel so closed in. His stomach was sore, but the urge to vomit had passed.

  Tracey spent the remaining time gently showing him again how to sign his name—all of the letters—but he barely took it in. He felt wrung out. His head was burnt clean. Light. Nothing he did mattered anyway, he realised, and there was nothing he could do. He let the Milo go cold.

  When Dettie arrived to pick him up she honked from the street. Tracey led Sam back through the house, her hands on his shoulders, promising that everything would get easier with time and practice. He nodded because it seemed to make her happy to think that, and waved goodbye.

  He decided he would never come back. No matter what. He would fake stomach-aches, postpone dates, convince his mother he was fine without it. Anything. But he would never come back again.

  As he climbed back into the car it seemed like days since he’d seen his sister and aunt. While Katie told him about the park down the road he laid his head on the back of his seat and watched the door of Tracey’s house close. If she noticed, Dettie didn’t ask him why his face was puffy and his eyes were red, and he decided that he wouldn’t tell her anyway. He’d never experienced anything like that before, and the thought of it made him feel ashamed. He would leave it there. Behind Tracey’s door, its glass now dull and brown again in the distance.

  10

  The third Monday Sam was at home Dettie couldn’t babysit. She’d gone on a weekend church trip to the Blue Mountains and the bus had broken down before they’d started for home. The whole group had to stay a second night. Dettie was livid, calling from the hotel, raging at the disorganisation, saying she didn’t know why she got involved with such things anymore. She offered to take a train back in, to be there by morning, but Sam’s mother told her not to worry. Sam could come with her to work for the day.

  Sam was excited. His mother’s bank had always been one of his favourite places to visit. He liked seeing his mother at work. At home she always seemed slightly harried and breathless, but at work she seemed to glide. She smelt of hairspray and wore pantyhose. The things on her desk were always neatly aligned and her chair rolled on wheels across a plastic mat. She had a leather shoulder bag loaded with complicated documents that she seemed to be able to fill out with barely a thought. The way her co-workers said her name, ‘Joanne’, sounded different to the way Dettie said it, more playful, less pointed, and they would always bring her cups of coffee and ask her advice because she’d been there the longest.

  Two years earlier, the day after he had broken his wrist, he had spent most of the afternoon at the bank. It was before they knew anything about the cancer. Before the radiation had given him weeks of nausea and hair loss. Before the battery of tests. Back then he was just some kid who’d crashed his bicycle doing wheelies and busted up his arm.

  He remembered being shown to a conference room that no one was using, and being told it was his for the day. He got to spread out his books and pencils. People brought him snacks from the vending machine. The receptionist—an attractive woman with long earrings and heavy eyebrows who smelt of vanilla—gave him a bowl overflowing with Minties. There was a television set up in one corner where he watched daytime game shows and a knock-off Canadian version of Lassie while he folded Minties wrappers into little houses and cars and arranged them across the table. After lunch one of his mother’s co-workers even brought him a video of The Jungle Book, and at one point he stretched himself out under a few chairs and took a nap.

  In a weird way, he even remembered the injury fondly. There had been a dull, constant ache, and when he tried to twist his arm beneath the cast the pain was blinding, but there was always a feeling that he was steadily getting through it. ‘On the mend,’ his mother said. As he thought back on it now, feeling the hollow bite of his stitches and the discomfort of the vent pressed into his neck, he remembered scratching beneath the plaster with a ruler, or trying to carve some extra wiggle room for his thumb, and it all seemed so silly. A mere irritation, something chafing and sweaty they eventually sliced off into three discoloured, reeking shards and threw in the rubbish bin. Pain. What a joke pain had become.

  This time, when his mother led him through the bank’s foyer, behind the teller windows, and out to the back offices, the tone was immediately different. He remembered the whole place bustling previously,
with people wandering past to offer a happy welcome, to laugh and ask how he’d ‘banged’ himself up. To chuckle and shake their heads as his mother recounted the story, telling her ‘boys will be boys’ and shooting Sam a wink.

  This time, everyone was oddly quiet. When they smiled, it was with a short, firm nod, before they quickly turned back to count money, add sums or make phone calls. At first he thought it was just a busy day, but he heard more than one playful conversation stop as he drew near, only to restart with a whisper as soon as he had passed. Near the break room he thought he recognised someone—a red-haired man in a suit who, last time, had drawn a Smurf on Sam’s cast with blue biro—but the man didn’t seem to register him. Perhaps it was someone else, Sam thought. Maybe.

  The receptionist with the Minties had been replaced by an older, heavier-set woman with thin, drawn-on lips. She gave him a tiny wave, but stayed firmly on her side of her desk. When she spoke, it was in a loud, slow voice: ‘Hello, Sam. Good. To. Have. You. Here. Today.’

  Sam’s mother let out a quiet sigh and ushered him quickly on. It was only later, thinking back on the moment, that he wondered if the receptionist had assumed that he was deaf too.

  The same conference room had been set aside, but now it seemed smaller, darker and more tucked away. The only people who passed by seemed to be on their way to the bathroom, meandering along, unaware that he was in there. When they did look up to see him, his neck bandaged, peering out at them through the unfrosted portions of glass, they ducked their heads and quickened their steps. The man with the sandwich cart who sold Sam’s mother their lunch merely stuck his head and arm through the door wordlessly, sliding Sam’s plate onto the table, before backing out again. This time no one gave him fizzy drinks or lollies. The only film in the video player was an instructional video on mortgages.

  As the day wore on Sam started to feel, in a strange way, like the girl behind the curtain at hospital. Locked away behind her plastic screen. Under the fluorescent lights his skin even looked pallid and yellow like hers. And it didn’t help that everyone seemed to be acting as though they thought he might infect them—nervously recoiling whenever he emerged to use the toilet, stepping out of his way as though they thought he might bite.

  The only person who actually spoke to him—like he was a human being, and not some lifeless ghoul haunting the back room—was Roger. He was his mother’s new friend—at least, that was how she introduced him. They dropped by for their lunch break, Roger eating a salad from a styrofoam container, his mother a sandwich and slice of carrot cake. Sam had lukewarm soup and yoghurt. Roger was tall and broad-shouldered, with dark skin, a beard and long legs. He seemed nervous, but not like everyone else. Rather than ignoring Sam, or smiling while avoiding his eyes, he asked him lots of questions. What was his favourite subject at school? English? Maths? Science? He nodded at history. What sports did he play? He nodded at soccer, shrugged a little at cricket. What TV shows did he like? He wrote Star Trek on his mother’s brown paper bag. And Roger would always reply. He was horrible with history; his memory was terrible. He used to play soccer too, when he was younger; he was goalie. And even though he hadn’t watched Star Trek, he liked the first movie—the one Sam found boring. After a while, it almost seemed like Roger was trying to impress him. And when he and Sam’s mother gathered up their rubbish and left to head back to work, Roger said he hoped to catch up again soon.

  Having not brought his homework with him, Sam spent much of the afternoon reading through the new Choose Your Own Adventure book his mother had bought him. It was a tale about searching for an underground kingdom, and as he scanned its pages, reading ahead while keeping his fingers threaded into the decision points he had left behind, he eventually followed each narrative to its often grisly end. Most times the main character—the you—seemed to die in some spectacular fashion: frozen to death, killed in raging rapids, thrown into lava, shot into space, choked on poison gas, sucked into a black hole, lost on an icy tundra…There appeared to be almost no way out, and even the ‘good’ endings frequently involved giving up, or getting stranded under the earth’s surface forever.

  The only other thing he had to look at was a booklet on learning sign language. It was one of the information pamphlets Tracey had given him, alongside the phone numbers for some local support groups. For most of the day he avoided looking at it, but after reading about himself getting eaten by mysterious spider creatures for the third time, he fished it from his bag and started flicking through.

  There were squares showing how to perform simple words and letters, with cartoons of grey-skinned figures standing stiff and expressionless. In some drawings their fingers seemed to be hooked into claws, in others flattened or balled into fists. They were often surrounded by lines that denoted movement in vague, confusing ways.

  The alphabet in particular was a jumbled mess. Not even faces, just diagrams of fingers interlocked, crisscrossed or layered over one another, seemingly at random. There were circular shapes, and pointing at certain spots, and one looked like calling for a timeout. Even the letters he had practised with Tracey didn’t look right. The letter ‘P’ at least resembled a ‘P’—sort of—but he was pretty sure he was using the wrong hands, or doing it the wrong way around, as he stared at his reflection in the switched-off television, stretched in its convex screen.

  He felt his breath start to quicken again.

  He gave up. Shoved it aside. He stared down at his hands, two fists that had slackened into red clumps, prickled with sweat. It was impossible. He’d never remember it all.

  He’d fail.

  Already exhausted, sore, and with the stitches in his throat tasting even more like old yoghurt and chalk, Sam tried to sleep under the table for a couple of hours. The churning of the office just beyond the wall kept him awake; its chatter and laughter and footsteps were giving him a headache. Eventually he turned the television on and switched it to a channel of pure static, hating himself for liking the way it filled his head with a soothing nothingness.

  11

  His first day back at school, Sam was moved to the front of the classroom. His new desk, a large wooden side table that used to hold a fish tank, was twice as big as anyone else’s. It was decided that he needed special facilities, and so the computer that usually sat at the back of the room, the machine everyone took turns playing Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? on at recess, was moved beside him. Its fat green face buzzed ceaselessly in the corner of his vision, cursor blinking, expectant, waiting for him to type something worthy to be seen. Sam tried to keep away from its keyboard as much as he could, because every time his fingers neared the keys his teacher would gravitate towards him, eyebrows raised expectantly.

  At least sitting up the front meant that people weren’t constantly staring at his neck. The bandages were mostly gone, but he still wore a patch around the incision, and a velcro strap held his vent in place. In particular, his friend Paul, who used to sit next to him at the back of the room, and with whom Sam played Battleship in the blank pages of their workbooks, seemed unable to stop staring. At recess Paul kept asking him if it hurt when he ate. During lunch, Susan Pally asked him if he had to drink through the hole now, while her gaggle of friends looked on, curious. In the bathroom, where Sam waited in a stall for the bell for class to ring, he heard a couple of fourth-graders talking about the kid who had come back to school after having his throat hacked open with a butcher’s knife.

  The next day Sam wore a loose skivvy under his school uniform, letting his neck heat up with every exhale into its material.

  As the weeks wore on, the novelty of his situation faded. Although his classmates remained reluctant to be partnered with him for group activities, they scrutinised him less, and seemed more perplexed by the new vice-principal, who had only one arm. Paul went back to drawing little stick-figure action scenes with him in their notebooks at the library, and they would still play handball and share soggy meat pies with too much sauce at lunch. Still, Sam stil
l felt lonelier than he could ever remember being, surrounded by a room full of noise with only the clatter of his keyboard to pronounce himself over the din.

  12

  At the beginning of spring Sam’s mother revealed she was dating. Her boyfriend was Roger, the friendly man who had eaten lunch with Sam and his mother at the bank, but it was a few months before either Katie met him or Sam saw him in person again. For the longest time he was just the man with the beard they would watch through the lounge-room window, driving off in his silver car as their mother waved goodbye from the footpath. One day their mother had a new necklace—from Roger, she said. Most evenings she’d spend half an hour on the phone, laughing. Twice he sent flowers to the house.

  Dettie hated him.

  ‘The ink,’ she said one night while babysitting, ‘is not even dry on those divorce papers she sent your daddy, and there she is, out gallivanting around.’

  Dettie was washing up as she said it, and the shudder that shook through her arms with each word was so ferocious, Sam worried she might smash the dishes on the drip tray.

  ‘I mean—what would he think?’

  As he stood beside her, wiping mugs dry with his tea towel, he watched her reflection in the kitchen window.

  ‘One day,’ she said, ‘you kids are going to go to Perth to be with your father again. And all this nonsense—dating strange men, children getting confused, unfaithfulness—will be put to an end. Once and for all. You mark my words.’

  Dettie had never remarried, and as Sam stared up at her image, paled in the glass, watching her take each slow, deep breath, he thought of the photo she kept of her husband—crumpled and sticky-taped around the edges—tucked in the bottom of her handbag.

  Seething for the rest of the night, Dettie sat in the kitchen, hunched over endless cups of tea, asking Sam and Katie to keep the television down in the next room. When the sound of their mother’s keys finally jangled on the other side of the door, Dettie forced a tight smile, woke Katie, who had fallen asleep on the couch, and led the children into the hall to greet her.