Wish

  A frequent joy: Wish would shake her head from side to side after I had signed, and suggest a better alternative, or some new blend of old signs, a hybrid shape. Her inventiveness astonished me, her sense of humour, her playfulness, charmed me.

  I still attempted, against the odds, to keep those lessons in some sort of order. I wanted to map her areas of understanding, find the gaps and weaknesses—the absences. She could read a little, she could comprehend at least some spoken words, she had a large, if eccentric, vocabulary of Sign. In the third week of lessons, or visits, I made another startling discovery: she had been taught to count. I stopped her rapid hand movement as she reached a hundred.

  If she could count, could she add? Could she, say, add two and two?

  Answers to small problems of arithmetic are obvious in Sign. Sign is counting on your fingers. Wish instantly gave the correct answer:

  Above five arithmetic becomes less obvious, the shape for six is not six fingers, spread across two hands.

  ‘Three and three?’ I asked.

  Wish showed the six-shape. Opaque and arbitrary at first glance, it looks, with the eye of faith, a little like a stylised 6.

  Clive said: ‘We’ve taught her basic arithmetic.’

  I wasn’t fully convinced. ‘Perhaps it’s just a memory association.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m certain she think things through—logically. We taught her using fruit, individual grapes. Adding and subtracting to the pile.’

  Stella grinned. ‘She gets to eat the correct answers, J.J.’

  I tested her again: subtraction, fifteen take away six. She was eager to show off her ability, glancing up for approval. I gave her answer the thumbs-up.

  ‘Some believe that the ability to count is innate,’ Clive said.

  I smiled, politely sceptical: ‘Surely mathematics is something that is taught.’

  ‘There have been experiments done with babies,’ he said, ‘that seem to suggest the opposite.’

  This was news to Stella; she screwed up her face: ‘Experiments with babies?’

  ‘Harmless enough. A familiar object—a bright toy, or rattle—is hidden behind a screen. Another identical object is brought into view, the baby watches the object placed behind the screen. When the screen is removed, and both objects are revealed, the baby shows no surprise.’

  Stella, with sarcasm: ‘Gee, that proves a lot.’

  ‘I’m not finished. If when the screen is removed, there is only one object, the baby looks astonished.’

  ‘What are you saying? Babies know, instinctively, that one plus one makes two?’

  ‘They know that one and one don’t make one, anyway.’

  Wish was watching, intensely alert. How much was she taking in? Very little, surely. Clive pressed on, oblivious: ‘Those results have been reproduced with subtraction, also. You can surprise a baby with the wrong answer to a subtraction.’

  A confirmation of my own recent thoughts: ‘So babies can think before they can speak?’

  ‘Isn’t that obvious?’ Stella said.

  ‘Not at all. Some claim that since animals, say, have no language, they have no thoughts. No mind.’

  She bent and fondled the ears of the nearest sleeping dog. ‘Anyone who has a dog knows otherwise.’

  We were outside, among the roses. Most of those first afternoons were spent outside, at Wish’s insistence, soaking up the late summer-cum-early autumn sun. Having spent her early life imprisoned in a laboratory, she clearly hungered for the open air.

  Clive was watching Wish. ‘My point is that we have an immense opportunity here. Wish can allow us to re-examine some of the standard linguistic pieties.’

  Stella said: ‘Let’s not lose sight of our goal, Clive. We mustn’t find ourselves at cross-purposes. Wish is above all an animal.’

  I was still watching Clive watching Wish. I sensed, suddenly, that all three of us were at cross-purposes. Stella wanted a spokes-ape for Animal Rights; Clive wanted, at least in part, a guinea pig to test certain theories of language acquisition; I wanted a single, happy student.

  The obvious question: what did Wish want?

  ‘She’s not a guinea pig,’ I said.

  Wish picked up the last word, and signed, clowning, the snout of a pig, her fist clenched over her nose.

  How perfectly that simple comic gesture suited the moment, deftly sabotaging our disagreement and joining us together in laughter. She was laughing herself, baring her teeth, sharing our pleasure. Sitting there with my new friends I was struck by a bizarre realisation: the friend whose company I enjoyed above all others was an eight-year-old gorilla. I felt a little giddy at the thought, and reached out a hand to grip the edge of the barbecue table; not so much to steady myself, or to touch wood, but to re-establish contact with something suburban and mundane, that lay squarely within the realm of everyday experience.

  12

  The long Indian summer ended, finally, in late April. The week had been hot, the hottest of the year—and it was humid-hot, last-gasp hot, the heat harvesting cloud from the gulf, stacking it in high thunderclouds. I spent the morning in my cubicle in the Institute, catching up on paperwork, maintaining the pretence of full-time employment. The gloom of the sky surprised me when I emerged at noon. I drove up into the Hills beneath gathering clouds. Towering high and loose above, their dark undersides seemed sheared off, or ironed flat. I parked at the outer gate of the farm and looked back towards the city. Beyond the ridge, the flickering of lightning could be seen, connecting cloud to ground.

  Thunder rumbled, distantly, felt rather than heard. As I crossed the field and skirted the near-empty dam the first rain of autumn began to plop onto the dirt track: big round single drops, as warm and heavy as pigeons’ eggs.

  Wish was waiting at the tree line, behind the second gate, untroubled by the rain. Her coat seemed waterproof; the drops that splattered against her head and shoulders ran from her fur as if from oil-cloth. We walked hand in hand to the house through rain drops that were almost big enough and sparse enough to dodge, individually.

  Stella stood on the verandah, eyeing the weather; I followed her into the lounge. A flash of light outside, a deafening thunder-crack directly overhead. Wish clutched Stella’s hand, agitated by the sound effects; I took advantage of the opportunity for a quick Sign lesson. The vibrating, ground-shaking Spread Hands of thunder:

  The downward zig-zag of the Point Hand, a lightning strike:

  She mimicked my movements, and to name those fierce elements seemed to calm her. And also, magically, to calm the storm: the thunder rolled again, but more distantly, as if driven off by the power of language.

  Wish tugged me towards the stairs, signing, one-handed: ‘Show my room Sweet-Tooth.’

  Weeks had passed, but I had not yet been permitted, or invited, upstairs. Did some sort of house-rule operate: upstairs was for sleeping, out-of-bounds during the day? Rules of such rigidity might be expected from Clive. I glanced to Stella; she glanced to Clive. He nodded to her; she nodded in turn to me—then grinned, self-consciously, at this absurd chain of command.

  Wish beckoned me up the narrow stairwell; I followed close on her heels. Or were they wrists, hind-wrists?

  The room might have belonged to any human child, if more spartan in style. The bed was uncovered; Wish, after all, carried her own quilt on her back. Several soft toys sat on the bare mattress: a small blue elephant, a mid-size tiger, an enormous green frog. There were no toy primates. I found it curious that despite the mature age of Wish, the decor of her bedroom was that of a small child. It seemed an inconsistency, at least on Clive’s part. Shelves lined one wall, crammed with wide, flat picture books. A small plastic radio sat at one end of a shelf, playing music that was middle-of-the-road, soothing and melodic, barely audible above the drumming of rain on the roof. Elevator music. A glass aquarium stood on another shelf, a stream of rising air bubbles at one end, two plump goldfish at the other. A low desk was covered by thick stacks of drawing paper and a miscellany of
crayons and paintbrushes. Drawings and paintings created, apparently, from these materials were taped to the walls. Clive and Stella watched from the door as I examined the artworks. Wish squatted at her desk and pretended to sketch a new drawing—but I knew her better, she also was watching out of the corner of her eye, intensely interested in my reactions.

  The artworks seemed arranged in a rough chronology, the earliest pieces taped low on the the walls, the later, more sophisticated pieces higher up. An abundance of green crayon had been splashed about on the paper, a jungle of lushly leafed trees. The house featured in several pictures, the uncrossable ‘moat’ of empty stubble that surrounded it, the tree-house. The animal figures—horses, kangaroos, the three-legged deer—had a childishly naive quality. There were also representations of human figures which although schematic were quite obviously portraits of Stella and Clive. Their sign-names—recent additions—had been sketched above them: a small star for Stella, a halo for Clive. Highest on the wall—the most recent drawings—was a sketch of another figure, a pale fat man, as wide as he was tall, waiting at the front gate.

  I examined this for a time, puzzled—blind to the most obvious portrait of all, my own. Even the unmistakable bubble-car sketched in the background failed to register. Only when I read the letters scrawled at the top did the penny drop: J.J.

  Highest on that first wall was a sketch of the same tubby figure—mine—swinging through trees, flying between branches, airborne, with wings of crayon sprouted from my back; and Wish herself waiting, hands outstretched, to catch me.

  I covered my eyes in mock terror; Wish, still pretending not to watch, couldn’t prevent herself gurgling, amused.

  The next wall displayed several crayon-sketches of another figure I didn’t recognise, male, bearded, stick-thin. Vegetarian-thin.

  ‘His name what?’

  Wish finger-spelt the name, the first finger-spelling I’d seen on her hands for some days: ‘T-E-R-R-Y.’

  ‘Who T?’

  ‘Friend,’ she signed, her right hand shaking her left.

  I looked to Stella, surprised.

  ‘Terry Wallace,’ she said, as if that were sufficient.

  I stared meaningfully at her, she smiled and added: ‘Terry is the friend who rescued Wish. Who first brought her to us. Terry is Clive’s, ah, protégé.’

  I turned back to the artworks. The self-portraits interested me most. The human figures were close simulacra of their subjects, but the self-portraits seemed at first glance more fanciful and impressionistic. The subject was Wish, clearly, but the legs were longer, the stance more upright, the face paler—and each figure was hairless. The irony took my breath away—was the gorilla herself guilty of the sin of anthropomorphism? In several she was even wearing human clothing, although I had not yet seen her in those forbidden items. I made a mental note to study the self-portraits more closely later. Clues to the workings of her mind could surely be discovered there by even the most amateur psychologist.

  ‘Beautiful drawings,’ I signed—the shape for paint, or sketch, given emphasis by a sudden intake of breath; more literally: paintings which fill the viewer with awe.

  She continued scrawling large shapes on her sketchpad, feigning indifference.

  Clive said: ‘She’s very talented.’

  Stella added: ‘It’s a kind of language itself, don’t you think? You draw the signs instead of shaping them.’

  I had other things on my mind. ‘Could she learn to write, I wonder? Or even read?’

  ‘She recognises some words,’ Clive said. ‘We have a number of word-cards. Flash-cards. She can match the word with the thing, although we’re not exactly sure what kind of understanding she has of the process.’

  Wish clearly understood the spoken word ‘card’. She somersaulted to the bookshelves—two easy rolls, her preferred method of travelling small distances—tugged down a small shoe-box, and lifted the lid. She rolled back to my side, and scattered the cards at my feet: an alphabet of animals, pictures on one set of cards, names on another. Aardvark, Buffalo, Cheetah…

  I pointed to a name at random: Kangaroo. She scrabbled briefly among the picture cards, producing the correct match.

  I brandished the sign: a pair of kangaroo-paws, hopping. She smiled and copied, exactly. More cards, more pictures, and more signs, followed. Aardvark was beyond me, but zoo visits with Rosie had nourished my menagerie of animal-shapes. Lion, tiger. The double-handed antler-shape of antelope.

  The curved beak of eagle, a sign made with the rare Hook Hand.

  Wish absorbed the new shapes, twenty or so simple animal representations, with ease. Clive sat on the edge of the bed, making notes, Stella practised the signs herself.

  A more difficult test: I chose a name-card—Owl—and asked her to shape the matching Auslan sign with only the clue of the written word. A leap forward—a cognitive shift, once removed, from the simple memory-association of sign and picture.

  Wish responded, almost immediately tracing large owl-eye circles around her own eyes.

  I shook my hands high above my head, surprised that she knew the shape, amazed that she had made the connection. She nodded, a token bow.

  She seemed ready for another quantum jump. I spoke the names of the animals, in English—in several cases she responded by pointing to the correct picture, or shaping the correct sign.

  A thought: why limit her to the words printed on those cards? I handed her the sketchpad and crayons and began to name, aloud, other random objects. I was careful not to offer cues by looking at the object, or equally, by looking everywhere but the object.

  ‘Tree,’ I said, staring at a blank wall—she sketched a quick, deft cartoon-tree. Then showed me the hand-shape, distorted a little by her grip on the green crayon.

  ‘I can’t see why she shouldn’t be taught to read and write,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve always thought it possible,’ Clive said. ‘What we needed was some sort of intermediate language—a language we could teach reading and writing in—a language we could resort to when reading and writing failed.’

  ‘That’s where I came in?’

  ‘That’s where you also come in. We see Sign-language, above all, as her primary means of communication—as I’m sure you do.’

  I suddenly wasn’t so sure: ‘There is another possibility. You say apes lack the anatomy to make speech—they lack a human larynx?’

  Clive nodded; I finally put words to an idea which had been crystallising, slowly, for some weeks. ‘Perhaps they could be taught to speak un-voiced speech.’

  Stella looked at me, puzzled; Clive also watched, more interested. Wish turned back to her sketchpad, bored by our talk; a few spoken words were within her grasp, but complex sentences were clearly not.

  ‘Why couldn’t she be taught whispered speech, using tongue and lip movements only? She obviously has the brain for it.’

  Stella was still puzzled. ‘I don’t follow.’

  I took her hand in mine, gently bunched her fingertips and pressed them to her own larynx.

  ‘Say sss…Now zzz…Feel the difference? Same lip and tongue positions, but one unvoiced, one voiced.’

  In my early twenties I had helped teach speech to deaf children. It’s a specialist’s job; I was more a go-between, a translator, but I picked up a smattering of anatomy from those endless hours of manhandling little mouths and lips, moulding chubby faces into correct shapes, even at times reaching inside their mouths and sculpting their tongues. Then having them press their fingers to their voice-boxes and generate vibrations that they were able to feel but not hear. Such programmes have fallen out of fashion, washed away, not before time, by the high tide of Sign—but I remembered the techniques.

  ‘The rain in Spain,’ Stella said aloud, then repeated the words in a whisper, fingertips still pressed to her throat.

  ‘The larynx isn’t used in whispering,’ I said, unnecessarily.

  Clive tried the same trick, fascinated. His judgement, delivered after a b
rief deliberation: ‘You’re welcome to try to teach her to whisper.’

  ‘I teach Sign. For speech you’d need a professional. A speech therapist.’

  ‘Surely you could make a start,’ Stella suggested. ‘See how it goes—if it looks promising…’

  The rain was still falling when I left, a constant, steady downpour. Stella pulled on a Driza-Bone and a wide-brimmed hat, Clive unfurled an umbrella and took my arm, sheltering me through the dripping trees and across the outer field. The dirt track had turned to slippery mud, his steps were slow and painstaking. He placed his words as carefully as his feet, clearly he had something he wanted to get off his chest. He was pleased with Wish’s progress, he said, but he wanted to stress again the need for caution, for objectivity, the need to avoid getting carried away by enthusiasm.

  ‘I think we need more structure in the lessons, J.J.’

  So did I, but I resented being told so.

  ‘I think it important we become friends first,’ I said.

  He nodded, conceding the point, but added, ‘If you aren’t her friend already, I don’t know who is.’

  ‘I’d prefer to do things in my own way. Softly, softly.’

  The reference went over his head; Stella, following behind, retarded by the animals and the mud, missed it altogether.

  ‘Of course. You’re the boss. But I think we should cover some of the reading list.’

  He was overstepping the mark—my job description had been Sign teacher, not translator. I have trouble criticising people directly—as always, it took a bent form, a circuitous route.

  ‘I thought you wanted her animal mind to develop free of cultural prejudices.’