‘We’ve been developing a different…philosophy.’
His hands finally emerged from behind his head; he signed the last word, a half-familiar hand-shape, borrowed from Ameslan—American Sign Language. This also hadn’t changed: Hinkley’s weakness for foreign signs. His spoken English is the same, peppered with chic French phrases or highbrow mottoes from Latin.
But usually mispronounced, or misshaped. ‘Miss-The-Point’ Hinkley, his deaf friends, of which there aren’t too many, like to call him behind his back.
‘Different how?’ I asked, in Sign. Auslan—Australian Sign.
Miss-The-Point stuck to spoken English: ‘New directions, new…frontiers. A lot of changes.’
I gave a mock-terror sign: Claw Hand over the heart, white-eyes.
He kept his eyes fixed on mine, refusing to acknowledge the mime. This was his show; my role merely to be grateful. To salaam, perhaps even kowtow, from time to time.
‘It may take time for you to, ah, re-orient, J.J. I’ve pencilled you in for Basic Auslan, Level 1. You can take the Wednesday night class.’
Another smug, high-beam smile. I had taught Miss-The-Point his first signs, and he wasn’t about to let me forget it. Some debts are too great to repay, let alone forgive.
‘I’d prefer to teach Advanced.’
I love to teach; I like to think it brings out the best in me. Given the disasters of my family life, perhaps my most satisfying relationships have been with students—with special students, gifted students. The best teacher–student bonds are a kind of love, I think, selfless and pure. And more equal than at first they seem—dependent on a likeness of mind, a journeying together.
‘I’m teaching Advanced, J.J.’
I shrugged. ‘So be it.’
He watched me, pressing the manicured fingertips of his slender hands delicately together. Hands are the voice you’re born with if you’re deaf: husky, whining, smooth, grating. Hands, and faces. I’ve watched hands so fluid that you can only describe their tone as musical, or melodious. I’ve watched bony, angular hands that give a clipped, exact kind of sign-speech. My own? A fat man’s hands: podgy palms, fingers like nothing so much as little party sausages, bursting out of their skins. They speak a plummy kind of Sign, deaf friends tell me, but easy on the eye. Because hands, above all, must be things you see through, things that don’t draw too much attention to themselves, don’t get in the way of sense.
Hands of glass, I tell my students. The glass might be tinted a little, even stained, but it must always, finally, be transparent.
Miss-The-Point’s hands were a huge distraction, especially to himself. The medium was the sole message. His voice was the same, all style, no substance: throaty and mellow, a newsreader’s smooth voice. He had married into the Deaf world and come to Sign late; he used his hands mostly as an adjunct to speech.
‘There are a few areas you might need to brush up on, J.J.’
I raised my eyebrows: Such-as, For-example?
‘For example, we’re encouraging Ameslan. I know it goes against your grain but we live in a global village. We can’t separate our small community from developments in the rest of the world.’
A practised speech. Absence makes the eye grow sharper; we see more clearly what has changed. What I saw after five years was this: the timelag, the gap between intent and action, a gap of self-regard, self-absorption.
He said abruptly, irrelevantly: ‘I was sorry to hear about you and Jill.’
‘Always on cards,’ I told him, sticking to Sign.
Signers keep their eyes at neck-level, taking in the face as well as the hands. He kept his eyes well above that, fixed on mine. An old battle, an old difference of priorities.
‘It may not be my business,’ he said. ‘But I think you’re well out of it. She must have been hell to live with.’
It was none of his business. Perhaps I agreed with him but I felt a lingering loyalty to Jill. She had been my wife for ten years, she was the mother of our daughter; he had been my employer for ten minutes. I wasn’t about to discuss our troubles with Miss-The-Point Hinkley.
I wasn’t about to discuss them with anyone, not even with myself. The split was still too raw.
‘Both at fault,’ I signed. ‘Takes two to dance.’
I gave the dance-shape a little extra tango-twist, a once-off improvisation. It went over his head. The sign for ‘miss-the-point’ is a simple mime: the Flat Hand passing backwards over the head, skimming the top of the head, a sign so simple, so eloquent, that even the hearing world has learnt to use it.
‘Till Wednesday then,’ he said, and rose from his chair.
I followed him to the door, eager to escape, but he hadn’t finished batting me between his paws.
‘Feel free to take some of my classes, J.J.,’ he said. ‘I’d like to think I could be of help.’
Fuck you too, I thought. The Rude Hand quivered on the tips of my fingers, another Esperanto sign, universally understood. Somehow I managed to tighten my fists—purse my fists, keeping mum. To think the shape, to aim it mentally back at him as I walked from his office, was sufficient:
3
J-O-H-N J-A-M-E-S. A short name in English; a short story—a short novel—when the two words are signed, letter by plodding letter, in finger-spelling. Which is the problem with signed spelling, signed English; by the time you get to the last letter you’ve forgotten the first. Sign-spelling takes forever, but there’s no single hand-shape—no hieroglyph—for John, or for James.
The deaf world calls me J.J. Sign shorthand: the J-shape, repeated. Or sometimes Double-J, Twice-J: the Two Hand, followed by a J.
Friends use the sign-name my parents gave me: a pet name, a family name. Frozen on the page it looks a little like this: first the Good Hand, touching the lips—Good-on-the-lips, meaning ‘sweet’:
Then the Point Hand, tapping the front tooth.
Sweet-Tooth. Self-explanatory, if out of date: my teeth are nowhere near as sweet as they once were. I gave up sugar years ago, trying, without success, to lose a little ballast. A sugar-free diet was Jill’s idea, her reasoning, as always, unassailable. When the marriage ended I’d lost the taste. It still hasn’t come back.
The name stuck: Sweet-Tooth. The Deaf like to give each other names like that, names that mean something, like Red Indian names, Japanese names, nicknames. Sitting Bull. Lotus Blossom. Miss-The-Point.
My mother invented endless pet names, nick-signs, for me. Butter-Ball. Little-Bear. Big-Ears.
This last was a gentle tease, shaped with mock sympathy and mock sorrow. I was one of the handicapped, I was given to understand, born with a pair of ears that let in noise.
‘You hear, but you listen not,’ she would sign, half joking. ‘Your ears get in way.’
Congenital deformities, she liked to dub them. Ornamental flaps. Beneath the surface of those jokes lurked a great disappointment, even a minor family tragedy: I could hear.
Fear also lurked beneath those jokes. One day the world of the hearing, the wider world of speech, would surely take me from her, and never give me back.
Pressured by jokes and love, I tried hard to be deaf; tried my very best. The role was easy as a toddler, Sign comes effortlessly at that age: a pointed finger, a cocked eyebrow, a pursed mouth, the universal alphabet of gesture. It’s part of our nature, more natural to us, Deaf Pride would argue, than speech. And much easier to learn. The hand is quicker than the tongue in the first few months of a child’s life; the dumbest deaf babies learn to sign for ‘milk’ or ‘mother’ long before those with hearing can find the words to ask.
‘Milk’ is a simple milking mime, Spread Hand tightening into Fist Hand, tugging an imaginary udder:
Transparent, is the term used in dictionaries of Sign. My own preferred term: see-through signs. Even the non-deaf (poor handicapped cripples) can read the meaning in such simple hand-shapes, can see clear through them.
The Mother Hand is more opaque, a scout salute, roughly M-shaped if vi
ewed with the eye of faith:
The Mother Hand, the Good Hand, the Spread Hand, the Flat Hand—these are the true letters of our alphabet; the building blocks of Sign. The plodding A-B-C of finger-spelling belongs only to the edges, the frontier with the foreign tongue of English, a last resort when all else fails.
4
I found my mother downstairs, sharing a table in a far corner of the common room with various cronies—an impromptu meeting of the Deaf Library committee. Always clairvoyant, she looked up at the precise moment I entered the room, and raised her eyebrows, an unmistakable question. I lifted my hands and answered from the doorway:
‘Start W-E-D.’
Arms fully extended, high above her head, she shook her hands—Deaf-applause—then clasped them tightly together, a triumphant ‘Congratulations!’
I filled a cup with water from the urn, stirred in a spoonful of coffee, and glanced about with growing confidence. The strange larynx noises and explosive laughter of the Deaf filled my ears, the bird-flutter of their hands filled my eyes. I knew everyone gathered in that large room, or everyone above the age of five. Heads began to turn towards me, smiles of recognition bloomed here and there, hands began to wave greetings.
‘Welcome back, J.J.’
‘Looking good!’
‘Don’t use all the sugar, Sweet-Tooth.’
I sipped my unsweetened coffee with one hand, and pressed the palm of the other over my heart: heartfelt thanks. Warmth welled from some deep internal spring, overwhelming me; I suddenly loved them all. I could even spare a small sentimental ration for Miss-The-Point, sitting alone in his upstairs office, practising his American signs.
I set down my coffee and returned those Good Hand salutes, thumbs-up, in two-handed stereo, both arms spread high and wide. It was, simply, wonderful to be back.
Less simple was understanding why I had left in the first place—but I had my excuses ready, a plausible version of the truth. Jill—my ex-wife—is a linguist, a student of Aboriginal languages. To learn the language of a Stone-Age people of the central desert of Australia, she was forced to travel to the Massachussets Institute of Technology, in America. Of course I followed—a loving, supportive husband. (This part would be easy to explain.) In Boston her honours degree became a masters, her masters grew into a doctorate—and love slowly contracted into duty. The struggle of those years—the imperatives of study, rearing a young child, scratching a living from a sequence of part-time jobs—still bound us together, but artificially. Each day brought new difficulties, or if not, we managed to invent them, as if sensing that we needed their glue. When Jill finally returned to Adelaide, a tenured academic, and I followed her back, less supportive than relieved, self-scrutiny could no longer be postponed. For the first time in our married lives we had time on our hands, time to find the differences between us, and leisure to argue over them.
The shape for marriage is a simple two-handed mime, the Okay Hand fitting a ring to the third finger of the Spread Hand.
Divorce is even more evocative: that imaginary ring ripped from the finger and tossed aside, hurled back across the shoulder, into the past.
5
I first learnt English—the noise of English—from television. I knew the look of English from books, but television was my conversation partner for years. It arrived in the living room when I was three, and from that day squatted in the corner, permanently switched on, like background music—muzak—for the eyes. This was long before the days of TV captions, or teletext TV. My parents couldn’t hear the set but they liked to bask in its flickering presence, an electronic fire in a corner of the room, warming them with a constant glow. There was always plenty to see. Rare late-night silent movies were a must: Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy. Sport was good to watch—any sport. They liked dance movies, which were another kind of sport. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, ballet programmes on the ABC, jive movies, rock’n’roll—their taste was catholic. The music was beyond them, but not the rhythms. They turned up the volume, pulled off their slippers and socks and pressed their bare feet against the vibrating floorboards like swollen ears.
My mother loved wildlife documentaries; my father preferred cartoons. Road Runner was his favourite. Road Runner was made for the Deaf, surely, probably made by the Deaf. He sat glued to the set each night, laughing his high-pitched laugh—the too-loud laugh he couldn’t hear himself—and missing nothing but the quick gobble of the bird, that blurty empty beer-bottle noise.
They both watched The Golden Years of Hollywood every Wednesday night, and Movie of the Week every Sunday night. From the age of five I translated those movies, sitting on a cushion between my parents and the set, slightly to one side, cribbing English dialogue into the shapes of Sign whenever my father’s toes pressed against the small of my back, prompted.
Foreign movies—movies with subtitles—weren’t much use to them. They couldn’t tell who was speaking the words that appeared on the screen. TV captions were a gift from heaven. My father bought the first decoder in the city, and possibly in the whole country.
‘Expensive,’ my mother signed, worried—an eloquent blend of the hand-shapes for ‘money’ and ‘pain’.
Somehow they found the money and suffered the pain. A handyman, my father was always interested in devices for the Deaf. He works as a draughtsman—like many of the Deaf he has a special talent for design, a keen feel for the dimensions of space. He likes to tinker in his toolshed at night and on weekends. He once rigged up his own flashing-light door ‘bells’, and sold a few to deaf friends. He built his own baby-alarm when I was born: a small microphone screwed to my cot activated a vibrating device inside my mother’s pillow. The Mark I alarm was a great success; soon he was selling Mark II to deaf communities all over the country.
The first signing videos, teletext decoders, and captioned programmes came as no surprise. He’d already thought of these concepts himself, he just didn’t have the electronic nous, and possibly the working capital, to solder them together.
The shape for ‘father’: the letter F, repeated, an upper-case emphasis.
Of course something, perhaps everything, is missing from these cartoons I keep sketching among the words. Sign is lifeless the moment it hits the page: a language as dead as any hieroglyphs painted on the walls of a tomb. It’s no longer even Sign; Sign moves and breathes, whispers, shouts, pirouettes, jives…
6
The shape for ‘house’ is a child’s simple sketch, a finger-painting written in air:
My parents’ house, exactly: a red-brick box on the Glenelg esplanade, as neat and square and orderly as a doll’s house, and filled with little doll-ornaments.
The garden is equally well ordered, a smooth square of billiard-felt lawn, a single military rank of rose bushes behind the front fence. Atten-shun! Pre-sent blooms!
As always I could show this small, neat world much better with my hands. I could shape each room, each neat garden bloom, hold up objects in the bright light of Sign, turn them this way and that, polish them with gesture. I could almost shape the perfume of that garden.
Above all, I could show the world across the road, on the far side of the esplanade. The undulating Flat Hand of wave. The Spread Hand forward roll of collapsing surf. Sand: an invisible trickle between the fingers. I have always loved the sea; it seems my natural element, more natural to me than land, as if I am part-amphibian. Overweight and awkward on the shore, in the water, at least, I am beautiful. And unsinkable.
I swim each night, sheathed in a wetsuit, rubber flippers stuck to my feet, more seal than human. The sea soothes me at the end of the day; I like to think, to meditate, floating weightless in the dark.
My mother would use a different set of signs to describe the beach. She hates the crunch of sand underfoot in her house, the salt-blight in her garden. I have never known her to swim, or even paddle in the shallows. Her raised Flat Hand, a cruising dorsal fin, was a constant warning to me as a child.
She works part-ti
me as a librarian, a perfect job for the Deaf. She runs the Deaf Library as a volunteer, after-hours; nine to five she works in the local council library. As a child I would walk there after school each day, and study or browse till closing time. She moved through those quiet aisles with the grace of a dancer—the Deaf can always dance—shelving books from trolleys, surrounded by mysterious notices on every wall: Silence, Please.
The hearing have a hush-sign for silence: a single finger pressed to pursed lips. The shape means nothing to the Deaf, it has no entry in dictionaries of Sign. What is silence?
Her library was my second home. I was a loner, a fatty, a bookworm; my best friends were the friends I met in books. Much of my childhood (the childhood I spent on land) was spent reading at those big wide tables, or borrowing books to read at home. Television taught me to hear, but the library taught me to read. It was a strange sort of reading—I wasn’t to hear the sounds of many of the longer words I saw in books till much later. I never learnt to pronounce them properly; I still can’t. I saw them rather than heard them as I read. They came through my eyes long before they came through my ears; I knew them by look, not sound.
Even when I spoke new words, I pronounced them wrongly. For years I said character as it’s spelt. Chocolate, church, character. I still hear it that way in my head: chattanooga character. I prefer to hear it that way: I think it has more character, a richer sound. Misled is the same. Others hear Miss Lead when they see the word on a page, I hear mistled. As in mistletoe.
Books mistled me. Classmates laughed out loud when it was my turn in reading-time at school, or when I spoke long words that no one could recognise.
My parents had no conception of this. How could they? And yet I blamed them—or began, slowly, to blame them.
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