Wish

by Peter Goldsworthy

  Clive said: ‘I think perhaps that is enough for today.’

  Stella added, on cue: ‘She’s easily overexcited, J.J. We were worried this might happen. She’s such a quick learner—and she has such an appetite for learning. But she gets into a state. We’ve found it’s best to take things slowly.’

  I couldn’t see why. Surely her excitement should be allowed full reign, used to fuel her learning. I kept my mouth shut. I was a newcomer, a guest. I didn’t feel confident enough to argue the point.

  ‘Sleep-time,’ Stella signed at her foster-child: the same sleep-mime I had seen Eliza use on video.

  Eliza shook her head, her eyes still fixed on me.

  I showed her another version for ‘sleep’: thumb and forefinger, at eye-level, shutting together; the eyelids closing.

  She copied, thrilled—a further discovery. Then shook her head, and grinned her weird grin, and performed the sign in reverse; the mime of eyes opening: ‘wake-up’.

  I laughed again. She had never seen the sign before, but had guessed that the hand-shapes, backwards, would mean exactly the opposite.

  ‘This is wonderful,’ I said. ‘She is wonderful. Can’t we talk a little longer? You can’t send her to bed.’

  ‘I must insist,’ Clive said. ‘She’s been up since dawn. She becomes unmanageable when she’s too excited. She always has a morning nap.’

  ‘Can I talk with her later? When she wakes?’

  They glanced at each other. I sensed that Stella was wavering, caught up in the emotion of the moment.

  ‘Trust us,’ Clive said, standing firm. ‘She’s been with us for some time now. We think we know best.’

  ‘Please, just an hour. It’s so—fantastic. Miraculous. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  Clive shook his head, polite, even friendly: ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Come at noon.’

  ‘I can’t come earlier?’

  ‘I need to work on my manuscript. And Stella usually makes house calls in the morning.’

  ‘Barn calls, mostly,’ she said.

  I turned back to Eliza, still watching intently. She couldn’t speak English, but could she hear it? Did she understand?

  ‘See you again,’ I signed, a smooth blend of ‘look again’, or ‘look twice’. Then added ‘tomorrow’.

  She looked puzzled. The ‘tomorrow’ sign is a little opaque, or symbolic, the Point Hand moving straight ahead, into the immediate future. How to make her understand? I was on familiar territory, classroom bread-and-butter for a teacher of Basic Auslan. I showed her the sign for ‘Sun’, a simple and beautiful hand-shape: the Round Hand bursting open, fingers spread; a sun and its rays of shining light.

  I traced an imaginary path with my sun across the sky towards the west, then jerked to the east, the radiant sun rising, followed by the signs: ‘You see me’.

  She somersaulted forward across the carpet and hugged me round the waist, pressing her head hard against my chest. Her massive arms were a vice; I was fighting for breath.

  Stella, alarmed, moved to separate us. ‘She doesn’t know her own strength, J.J.’

  Eliza stepped back and repeated my shape for tomorrow, but with the Wish Hand, I saw, not the Point Hand: the first two fingers crossed in hope. It was a beautiful touch, an improvised variation, another poem which moved me as much as anything else I had seen during that extraordinary morning.

  She watched me leave from the front window, her flat nose flattened further against the glass. I turned and waved from the tree line; she pressed her black palm hard against the glass. Clive and Stella escorted me through the trees, one walking each side of me; I had the feeling of being seen off the premises, politely bounced. The presence of their Pied Piper caused the usual commotion among the animals in the outer field; various invalids which had been grazing, or sheltering from the summer heat in the shade of the trees, began to hobble towards Stella.

  I unlocked the Fiat and climbed into its baking oven. Clive tapped on the window; I wound it down, he passed through a book. More required reading, it seemed. Another Set Text. I read the title: The Education of Koko.

  ‘You might find this of interest,’ he said. ‘Much of Penny Patterson’s work is twenty years old now, but still relevant.’

  ‘I’ll read it for my homework,’ I murmured, but irony, as always, was beyond or far beneath him.

  5

  How many nights since I had last slept my full eight-hour quota, unbroken? I read The Education of Koko till one, slept only briefly, but woke, refreshed and recharged. Morning couldn’t come soon enough; the remaining hours crawled past, less small hours than infinitely large. At five I jerked on my wetsuit, sneaked from the house, and floated in the dark ocean for an hour or so. Back in bed, temporarily calmed, I reread certain passages in the book, key Sign exchanges—American Sign—between the gorilla Koko and her human family.

  How do gorillas feel when they die? Koko was asked.

  Her answer: ‘Sleep.’

  ‘Where do gorillas go when they die?’

  Koko: ‘Comfortable hole bye.’

  ‘When do gorillas die?’

  ‘Trouble old.’

  I would have treated these transcriptions with extreme scepticism a day before. I would have criticised Patterson’s methods, her statistics, data collection, lack of controls—but my third meeting with Eliza had made me become a convert, a believer. Contact with Eliza had also raised my expectations. I felt only impatience as I read of the crude pidgin-signings of Koko; I wanted to ask those same deep questions of Eliza.

  At eight I teletyped a message to the Institute, claiming illness. My excitement was growing again; I couldn’t face the tedium of work. I buried myself in breakfast, distracted, incommunicado. My father came and ate and read through the morning paper and left for work without a single sign. Without a textbook sign, at least. The righteous force with which he smeared his toast with anchovy paste was more than eloquent.

  My mother finished her own breakfast shortly afterwards, rose from the table and routinely kissed the top of my head.

  ‘Work,’ she signed: the standard chop and saw carpentry-mime, always an odd description when applied to her work in the library. Even the most transparent signs often lose contact with their origins, become as stylised as words.

  I signed back: ‘Wait. I’ll come too.’

  She looked worried.

  ‘Flexiday,’ I lied, using my own invention, a sign I had been trying to sneak into the language, or at least into the next edition of my slim dictionary: simply the sign for day, bent.

  I walked with her along the esplanade. Another fine warm morning, the sky pool-blue, unflawed by cloud. The usual steady westerly breeze was blowing in off the gulf, refreshing, invigorating. I had scarcely slept, but I felt no tiredness; I felt as high as the small red kite that floated in the breeze further along the beach. I felt far too exhilarated to concentrate on the small-talk signs my mother aimed my way from time to time.

  She unlocked the library doors; I headed straight into the Natural Science section. Dewey Decimal 899.8846, G for Gorilla. Various titles caught my eye: The Year of the Gorilla. The Natural History of the Gorilla. The Great Apes: A Study of Anthropoid Life.

  In three hours I was due at the farm; I wanted to cram as much knowledge as possible into that time. I sat and began to read, and, shortly, to scribble notes. Natural Habitat, Gestation Length, Brain Size, Behaviour, Social Structure.

  There was much to absorb; far too much to swot in those swift-flying hours. At eleven, increasingly restless, wanting to be in the Hills as soon as permitted, I pocketed my notes, and lugged my stack of ape-books to the borrowing desk. My mother turned them this way and that, then signed, puzzled: ‘Gorilla?’

  Several readers glanced up at her, astonished; their demure, deaf librarian was beating her chest with clenched fists.

  ‘Popular books,’ I signed back. ‘People like gorillas.’

  She lifted the back cover of The Natural History of the G
orilla and stamped the due-date. The sticker was crammed with previous dates.

  ‘See,’ I signed.

  I continued to read, on and off, at red lights as I drove, the book perched on the lectern of the steering wheel. A discrepancy still teased at me: the intelligence of adult gorillas was given as equivalent to a three or four-year-old human infant. The sign-speech of Koko was no exception, her conceptions of death, of heaven, her conception of self, all seemed roughly pitched at that level. Sophisticated, yes, even human—but a child-human. A three-year-old intelligence at best.

  Which left Eliza where? Her intelligence, her creativity—above all her sense of humour—were light-years beyond this. As I left the city limits I cast the book aside and pressed my accelerator pedal hard against the floor. The tiny engine complained, the car shook and shuddered, but obediently climbed the long winding road to the ridge more quickly than ever before.

  6

  I was surprised to find Eliza waiting for me, alone, only partly screened by the trees behind the second gate.

  ‘You see me?’ I signed.

  ‘I hear you,’—her hand cupped emphatically to her ear.

  ‘Good ears.’

  Stella appeared, approaching through the trees, a proud, beaming parent, followed by her small flock of dogs.

  ‘We were sitting outside in the sun, J.J. Clive and I didn’t hear a thing. Eliza pricked up her ears and headed off like a shot.’

  ‘What’s to stop her running away?’

  ‘She never ventures beyond the trees. She hates open space—it seems to be some deep-seated instinct.’

  Eliza, excluded from conversation, thrust a flurry of excited hand-shapes in my face. I’d seen that same excitement, that same joy before—in deaf children exposed to Sign for the first time, discovering the existence of a new world.

  ‘She’s been impossible,’ Stella said. ‘I don’t think she slept all night.’

  I tried to read the fast-forward of those hands: Good Mornings and Beautiful Mornings and various quickfire questions scattered among the blur of shapes.

  ‘Slow down,’ I signed, pronouncing the deceleration-shape slowly and carefully.

  ‘Sorry,’ she signed, followed by the ‘remember’ shape, but using crossed fingers: an odd, improvised blend of Wish and Remember, her own quick shorthand, it seemed to me, for ‘I’ll try to remember’.

  ‘Start again. Back to start.’

  ‘Beautiful morning,’ she signed.

  ‘Perfect,’ I signed back—the Okay Hand—then added: ‘Later hot’ and wiped my brow.

  Did gorillas sweat? The sign might be meaningless to Eliza; I stuck out a panting tongue as well.

  ‘Where would you like us all?’ Stella asked. ‘Inside the house?’

  I hesitated, thrown momentarily by the phrase ‘us all’. I had hoped to have Eliza to myself; to explore her world of signs free of parental interference, or interpretation.

  Stella, always alert to body language, said: ‘You don’t mind us sitting in?’

  ‘Of course not. You don’t have work commitments?’

  ‘Finished for the day. I’m trying to keep the afternoons free.’

  ‘And Clive?’

  His slightly stooped figure, in striped running shoes, was approaching more sedately through the trees.

  ‘He’s his own man these days. An apex without a pyramid. He needs one or two hours with his new book each morning—after that he’s free. I think it’s important we keep abreast of her progress, J.J. We need to learn the language that she learns. We don’t want to lose touch with her.’

  Clive raised his Good Hand, I returned the greeting, we walked through their small forest. Late morning, late summer, a clear enamel-blue sky, the sun in full flood pouring through the leaves. The day was hot already—the walk across the open paddock and up the hill had left me sweating—but the air beneath the trees was still cool and refreshing, even slightly knife-edged.

  ‘Stay outside in sun,’ Eliza signed.

  She used the same shape for a radiant sun that I had taught her the day before, but added her signature-sign: ‘Wish’.

  The Wish Hand is not a common shape; the effect was distracting, once again I was reminded of someone speaking with a lisp. I asked to see her hands again—perhaps some deformity was responsible: a fracture incorrectly set, which caused the middle finger to ride over the index. She rested them gently in mine; I found nothing more than I had found the day before: eight thick fingers, two short, thin thumbs. Plus a slight greasiness of the skin on the backs of those fingers, a natural lubricant to aid in knuckle-walking. The Natural History of the Gorilla, chapter 3, Structure and Function.

  I signed: ‘Many wishes in these hands.’

  ‘Crowds of wishes,’ she signed back, then touched the tips of her fingers to her forehead: ‘Here.’

  An expression of great beauty, a Sign poem. I shivered suddenly, involuntarily; the shit-insult on video had astonished me, but the poetry of these shapes was exhilarating, magical. Goose bumps pricked my neck and back; it seemed, once again, an overturning of natural law, like being spoken to by a stone, a tree, a hill.

  Or perhaps by a human in a gorilla-suit. A gap had opened between what the eye saw, and what the brain permitted itself to comprehend—between image and understanding. Things seen no longer matched things known. Watching Eliza I felt momentarily disorientated, even a little giddy. I half-expected, even half-hoped, that she might twist off her head, and reveal the whole thing to be an extended practical joke, a clown act, or gorilla-gram.

  Stella spoke up: ‘She wants to stay outside?’

  ‘We’ll sit in the arbour,’ Clive decided.

  We turned into a small rose-arbour before reaching the house. The morning papers were stacked on a wooden barbecue table; a silver coffee pot glinted in the sunlight. An ashtray was filled with butts. We sat among the roses: a profusion of half-wild blooms, small and unpruned. These feral flowers bore no resemblance to my mother’s military roses; I felt I was sitting in the middle of an unroofed room, walled on all sides with a tangle of thorns.

  I demonstrated the sign for rose; Eliza copied eagerly; I added the gardening sign, touching an imaginary flower to the nose, sniffing.

  Stella and Clive sat together on a narrow garden bench behind the table, Stella leaning forward, legs apart, elbows on her knees, her dogs lying at her feet, Clive’s posture more upright.

  ‘Ignore us,’ Stella said. ‘Pretend we’re not here.’

  She shook a cigarette from a packet, lit it, inhaled. ‘We’ll be exemplary parents—seen and not heard.’

  Easier said than done. I felt as if I were still auditioning, or worse, on trial. That barbecue table lacked only a gavel.

  ‘More signs,’ Eliza demanded. ‘You sign me.’

  Where to begin? She was more advanced than the beginners in my Basic class, but it seemed best to start from scratch, if only to measure exactly how much she did know. There was also a need to correct her mispronunciation. Misshapen—mishandled—signs were the norm.

  A retreat into tried and tested teaching habits also had another advantage. I was on unfamiliar territory. I had taught Sign to children who could neither hear nor speak. I had taught Sign to adults, the parents of the deaf, who could both hear and speak.

  I had never before taught a student who could hear but not speak.

  I began with a test of common nouns, pointing out various familiar objects in our vicinity: flower, tree, hose, bush. It was soon evident that despite the occasional inspiration, and snatch of Sign poetry, Eliza’s vocabulary was haphazard, a random patchwork. I could detect neither order nor method. She knew various obscure hand-shapes—‘lawn-mower’, ‘snail-bait’, even, memorably, ‘venetian-blind’—but she didn’t have a sign for ‘cloud’. She could name every individual tree in sight—spotted gum, lemon-scented gum, blue gum, pointing to her gums, the gums of her mouth, each time—but she had no general sign for tree.

  I demonstrated the hand-s
hape, another borrowing from American Sign. Auslan uses the Claw Hands to sketch a fluffy silhouette of foliage; I’ve reluctantly followed the herd to the more see-through Ameslan:

  Eliza’s grammar was as unsystematic as her vocabulary, a pidgin application of English sign-order of the kind often seen in those who sign as a second language. Subject-verb-object is seldom necessary in Sign; who is doing what to whom is made clear from the position of the nouns in Signing Space, and the direction of the verbs.

  Her grammar needed work, assuming that her ape-brain was capable of absorbing grammar. I knew of any number of linguists who would deny the possibility, utterly.

  Another early discovery: she liked to hear language spoken.

  ‘Talk and sign,’ she demanded, then added her signature hand-shape: ‘I wish.’

  Those crossed fingers spiced her signing with a special flavour, a mix of hope and wistfulness, a subjunctive mood of ifs and coulds and shoulds not often found in Sign. Eccentric, perhaps, even ungrammatical—but always moving.

  I turned to Clive and Stella: ‘I’d like to suggest a name for her.’

  They waited silently, an odd couple on a narrow bench, even now determined not to interfere.

  ‘You—Wish,’ I signed to Eliza, and to put it in context added, ‘Me—Sweet-Tooth.’

  I squirmed a little at the baby-talk feel of the signs, a Sign version of Motherese, the language parents speak to infants. Or perhaps not so much Motherese as Tarzanese. The name seemed to fit, however—she aimed her own Wish Hand at herself, repeatedly.

  ‘Name that,’ she signed, pointing to her foster-parents.

  My turn to pass judgement. Clive first. The mime-sign for robot tempted me, briefly: two stiff, jerkily moving arms. The sign would be over Eliza’s head, surely, a private joke; the connection of robot and cold intellect would mean nothing to her. A sudden inspiration: I circled my scalp with the Point Hand, tracing the imaginary halo: ‘Saint’.

  Wish copied, perfectly; Clive managed a tight smile; Stella laughed her husky infectious laugh. She proved easier to christen; a simple translation of her name. ‘Star’, a handful of twinkling fingers held high above the head.