His eyes held mine; the point was taken. ‘Perhaps. But there are some things she should know about. A little history, a little science. Some grounding in basic logic might not go astray.’
He tugged a closely typed list of book titles from his coat pocket; I scanned it briefly. One or two were familiar; most I hadn’t read. I was more than happy to study them—as much for my further education as for Wish’s.
‘I want you to know we’re pleased with her progress, J.J.,’ he repeated.
Meaning we’re pleased with your progress, an oblique compliment which I saw more as a kind of mid-term report.
Stella extracted herself from the huddle of wet animals, and wrapped a wet arm around me. ‘You’re very good, J.J.,’ she said, reassuringly.
13
I tried to be objective. If Wish spent those first few weeks studying my hands, I spent them studying her. Her hands, her dark eyes, the glossy pelt that covered much of her body. The black-crepe skin of her bare breasts and armpits. Her small, fine elf ears.
The acuity of her ears was disproportionate to their size. Several times, sitting outside in the sunshine, she paused mid-conversation and cocked her head towards the house. I could hear nothing, but on each occasion Wish signed ‘telephone’ to Stella. She used an archaic sign—a forefinger dialling mime—rather than the receiver-on-ear Ambivalent Hand of official Sign.
Lizard-rustle in a bush, a favourite song playing upstairs on the radio, a plane, fire-spotting beyond the ridge out of sight—her head often turned to catch sounds that were below, or beyond, the threshold of human hearing. The approach of a rare passing car on the distant dirt road would send her high into the trees, craving a look, long before the rest of us could hear the noise of the engine.
She clearly hungered for the world beyond the trees.
Her sight was less acute than her hearing. I was always able to read her hands at a greater distance than she could read mine. Eyes are possibly less important than ears as survival aids in the dense rainforest of the native habitat of her species.
Watching Wish pore over her books, I liked to imagine her in reading-glasses, but in fact her near-vision was fine. Longer distances were the problem. This deficiency meant that she had the ability to make sense of the images on a television screen. Animals with acute vision—dogs, say—find television meaningless, Stella claimed; they are in effect watching too closely, unable to separate the coarse pattern from the fine weave of 500-odd scanning lines.
Wish’s television viewing was rigorously censored. She knew the sign: T-V, two letters, finger-spelt.
But my suggestion one afternoon that we watch an educational programme was met with blank incomprehension.
‘We don’t watch a lot of television,’ Stella explained, apologetically.
‘We watched Clive’s interview the first night I came here.’
‘The second night,’ he corrected.
Stella ignored his pedantry. ‘We watch the news,’ she said. ‘And sometimes, rarely, current affairs. We never watch daytime television.’
‘Movies?’
She shook her head. ‘But I suppose an educational programme might be permitted.’
Clive didn’t agree. ‘Thin end of the wedge.’
An argument followed, although the pro and con were oddly parallel. Stella thought programming was the problem, that the programmes were uniformly idiotic; Clive thought that all programmes were beyond salvation, by definition—that the nature of the medium determined the stupidity of the programmes.
She demurred: ‘Some programmes are worth watching.’
‘I’ve never seen any.’
‘I have,’ she said. ‘From time to time.’
‘When?’
She turned to me, and winked. ‘Sometimes I watch a little television after Clive goes to bed. Secretly.’
His surprise deepened. ‘You never told me that.’
He was sitting on the sofa, she was standing behind him; she leant down and kissed him affectionately on the toupée, a favourite gesture. ‘There are a lot of things I don’t tell you.’
‘I watched a lot of television in childhood,’ I put in. ‘It didn’t do me any harm.’
Stella spluttered, suppressing her amusement; Clive scrutinised me as if he could see the evidence of harm, clearly written. I scrabbled about for arguments that sounded less banal.
‘It was my best friend. It was many friends.’
‘Any friend of yours, J.J.,’ Stella said.
‘I’m serious. Television showed me the world outside the world of the Deaf. Wish is in a similar predicament. It seems unfair—cruel—to keep that from her.’
‘We can show her the world in books,’ Clive said.
‘She can’t read.’
‘Yet. She can recognise a few words. Besides, there are picture books. She can see the world in books.’
‘That’s like trying to read Sign,’ I said. ‘It’s inert. Lifeless.’
‘We’re trying to teach her to think critically, J.J.—not lie on a couch, hypnotised.’
‘We could still censor what she sees,’ Stella suggested. ‘J.J. can translate the programmes into Sign for her.’
I said: ‘It’s a much richer medium than you seem to think. The opportunities for education are too great to ignore.’
Clive watched us, considering. An advantage of that cool mind—it had no emotional prejudices. Its beliefs were never more than provisional hypotheses; they were always open to reason, to disproof.
‘We must be careful,’ he finally pronounced. ‘There is an immense bath of rubbish out there. An ocean. We swim in it without even noticing. It determines the limits of our thinking—allows us to think only certain things. Feel certain things.’
The last phrase brought another amused splutter from Stella. He pressed on, regardless. ‘All of us live within that system of beliefs. We breathe it like air—we don’t even notice it. I want Wish to stand outside of all that, looking back in.’
The subject under discussion squatted on her haunches on the carpet between us, hugging herself, watching intently. And, apparently, listening, her black head tilted to one side. I wondered again how much she understood.
Clive continued, still in lecture mode. ‘Wish is the first animal mind that can tell us what it sees.’
‘It?’ I said, hoisting him on his own petard.
He smiled, grateful, if anything, to be corrected: ‘She is outside human culture, looking in—free from the preconceptions, the acculturation. We can learn much by looking at ourselves through her eyes.’
‘Her mind seems mostly human to me,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that by teaching her a human language surely we are setting limits to what she can think. We are supplying the frame. Perhaps she can only see what language permits her to see…’
He nodded, waving away my arguments a little wearily—one of the few times I had seen any trace of impatience in him.
‘Of course, J.J. Of course. We’ve all read Whorf. She can’t avoid some contamination. But that’s the advantage of Sign—it’s a young language, still evolving. It’s open to improvisation. Wish is free to invent as much as she learns—she can mould the language to her consciousness, rather than have her mind trapped by the language. I think we see the evidence of that already.’
Wish waved her signature hand in front of us, then, holding our attention, pronounced a smooth sequence of hand-shapes: ‘Change-speech-into-Sign’.
I considered demonstrating the Auslan ‘interpret’, but the sign is opaque, and lacks the simple bluntness of her own invention.
‘We speak about speech,’ I explained, in Sign.
She shook her head. ‘I hear name Wish. Saint speaks name Wish.’
Sign permits different word orders: subject-object-verb, even object-subject-verb. The signing of Wish was less flexible—she showed a marked preference for the subject-verb-object order of standard English. I wondered again how much
she could hear, and comprehend; how much her signing had been affected—infected—by the patterns of spoken English. Or was the word order natural? Creole languages the world over, I knew, fell, as if by instinct, into subject-verb-object as they developed.
I signed: ‘Saint say Wish very clever. Very—inventive.’
The strangeness of this new sign confused her; I tried to explain it in terms of the more familiar shapes of ‘new’, and ‘making’, and ‘find.’
‘I don’t think we should talk about a particular person in front of that particular person,’ I said aloud. ‘I think a particular person understands far more English than we realise.’
Wish grinned, toothily, as if on cue. The effect was unsettling; I had to persuade myself the timing was a mere coincidence.
Stella rose and switched on the television; the picture slowly formed. Wish watched, amazed; having trouble grasping the notion that she might choose to watch something other than the National News. Or perhaps grasping the notion that there was anything other than the news on television.
Cartoons were screening: Daffy Duck and some droll ironic dog whose name I didn’t know were taking turns battering each other senseless. Wish watched, fascinated. A small bleat of terror escaped her open mouth as a falling anvil shattered Daffy into a thousand shards; she turned her face up to me, worried.
A milestone—she had turned to me for help, rather than to her foster-parents.
‘Not hurt,’ I signed. ‘Pretend.’
Pretend: literally ‘true-not’. I wondered if crayons and paper would help, a demonstration of the principles of cartooning, even a riffling of pictures scribbled in page corners.
But for now reassurance was unnecessary; the duck had already reconstituted his separate pieces. Resurrected from the dead, he was rushing towards the next catastrophe. Wish sank back onto the carpet, mesmerised.
‘I don’t know if this is a good idea,’ Clive said. ‘Cartoons can’t be good for her.’
‘Nonsense,’ Stella said, and gave me a teasing look. ‘J.J. has watched cartoons all his life.’
14
‘You live alone, Sweet-Tooth?’
Her phrase was literally ‘house-you-one-you?’ I shook my head and held up three fingers. ‘With my mother my father.’
‘Me meet those?’
‘Future day.’
For the first time we were alone together. Clive was working in his study downstairs, correcting the proofs of Primate Suffrage; Stella had taken her black bag of vet tools and headed out into the rain to answer a distress call in one of the nearby towns.
A new daily schedule had been negotiated. I had asked for more time with Wish; Clive and Stella had agreed, with certain stipulations. I was to brief them on my plans each morning; in the late afternoon we would lunch together and review the day’s progress. The hours between were mine and Wish’s. Their consent had been given with surprising quickness. Had I bored them into submission, or were they merely grateful for the baby-sitting? Clive claimed to need time with his book, Stella with her veterinary work—‘I’ve been neglecting my practice.’
A new intimacy was apparent between us from the moment I shut the door of her room and sealed us in—a feeling that was somehow awkward and liberating at the same time. Wish’s first tentative probings about my personal life, delivered shyly, avoiding eye contact, were clearly questions she had been desperate to ask.
She signed again: ‘You own children—not?’
‘I own children—yes. I own daughter—one.’
I set aside the implications of that word ‘own’. It intrigued me, I planned to come back to it, to explore the implicit sense of her own self, and her place in the world.
‘Her name what?’
‘Rose.’
The familiar flower-shape caused no problem.
‘Rose where?’
‘Rose lives with mother.’
She waited, quizzical, I fingerspelt J-I-L-L. ‘Rose lives with me—Sunday.’ The shape for Sunday: flat palms together, a simple prayer mime.
‘You live with Jill—not?’
She squatted on her bed, watching intently, waiting. I was momentarily lost for signs. I could teach her the simple shapes for ‘daughter’ and ‘wife’. I could teach her to count. I could teach her the annual rainfall of the Congo—but how to explain my complicated family life? And what mind was I trying to explain it to: human or gorilla? What family-norm would she measure my answers against? Nature-norm, or nurture-norm? The norm of a troop of promiscuous gorillas with a single dominant and various sub-dominant males—the norm whose imperatives were surely in her blood? Or the norm of Clive and Stella, a married couple, monogamous as far as I could tell—the norm of human culture?
Food for thought: if she had seen more television, daytime television especially, might she have a better grasp of the variety of domestic living arrangements, my own in particular?
I signed: ‘Tell me your mother.’
I too had been hoarding questions for these first moments alone with her—questions which Clive and Stella had always managed to deflect.
‘Star?’
Did she believe that Star was her mother? If so, exactly what did the word mean to her?
‘Before Star. Sign me your people.’
‘Forget,’ she signed, her fist exploding out from her temple, knowledge, escaping.
The sign was fluid, unhesitating, but her eyes avoided mine.
‘Long-tongue,’ I signed.
She shook her head, pressed a closed fist against her chest, and shielded it, protectively, behind her Flat Hand. ‘Secret.’
Clive arrived with the midday sandwiches, asparagus, interrupting our mutual interrogation. One thing at least had been learnt: we each wanted to know much more about the other than we were prepared to reveal about ourselves. After Clive had left, we steered clear of the subject for the remainder of the afternoon. I kept her hard at work reading flash-cards, but there was probably no need. She seemed to respect my reticence.
I arrived in rain again the next day. Delayed by a lengthy summer, the normal scattered showers of autumn had been concentrated into the last days before winter, as if required to meet some sort of statistical rainfall quota. Several days of steady rain had transformed the unsealed roads of the Hills into long shallow lakes, the gullies were raging torrents. I parked outside the first gate, trudged past the rapidly filling dam and up the hill. The second gate was open, Wish was standing in the gap, offering me Clive’s umbrella.
‘Outside today?’ she asked with her free hand.
‘Too cold,’ I signed, two tight, shivering fists. A smile spread slowly across her wet face; I realised, belatedly, that she had been joking.
I left my muddy shoes on the verandah and reported to Clive and Stella in the lounge. The day’s agenda was discussed—arithmetic, vocabulary. Clive suggested one or two amendments, Wish tugged me upstairs, closed her bedroom door, thrust sketchpad and crayons into my hands, and the agenda was instantly forgotten.
‘Draw Rose.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Please.’
I sketched, reluctantly, a stylised stick-figure, personalised by a pony-tail. I considered adding purple lipstick, but put an ice-cream in her hands instead.
‘Rose likes ice-cream,’ I signed.
‘Me too.’
Wish took the paper from me and examined it. An odd sensation: of tables turned, of my artwork being scrutinised, searched for psychological clues. I extracted my wallet from a coat pocket, and offered her a more objective, less self-revealing portrait of my daughter.
‘Photograph,’ I signed: the Good Hand a camera held at eye-level, the thumb pressing down, a shutter button.
She studied the snap, then handed it back.
‘Photograph J-I-L-L?’
I shook my head: ‘J. likes camera—not.’
I reached for the sketchpad and scratched a few aimless strokes. She was still watching me—my face, not my hands. She signed, ‘
You sad inside?’
I forced a smile, irritated. ‘Happy inside.’
She was my pupil, not my confidante. I loved being with her, loved exploring the language of Sign with her, but to cry on her furry shoulder seemed beyond the pale.
Her hands moved again. ‘Sign me about Jill.’
‘Forget,’ I signed.
She caught the irony, her own answer of the day before thrown back at her.
‘Long-tongue,’ she signed, and bared her teeth, grinning. Those powerful canines were always a startling sight, and a reminder of her animal status.
A stand-off; we watched each other for a long moment. Finally she signed: ‘You show secret, I show secret.’
‘You first.’
She jabbed the finger-pronoun. ‘You. You!’
I shook my head, holding firm. ‘I ask before. I ask yesterday.’
The smile faded from her mouth, a slow unstretching of those wide lips that made my scalp tingle. Clive might argue against ascribing human emotions to the expressions of a non-human face, but to me there was no mistaking the signs of sadness.
‘My mother—dead.’
Sign offers a choice of shapes for death, possibly even more than the numerous euphemisms of English. They range from the evasive—gone-to-sleep, passed-on—to the laconic: waving bye-bye to an imaginary hole in the ground, or simply two stiff forefingers, legs in rigor mortis, lying parallel. Wish used her own version: the hand keeling over, belly-up, stiff-legged.
A joke in the hands of humans, its terseness seemed poignant in hers.
There is a third category of shapes for death, more hopeful, and full of promise. I think above all of the Point Hands, aimed heavenward, a sign that is half flight and half pointing the way. I performed the shapes; she wrinkled her black nose, puzzled.
‘Sign again. Sign twice.’
I repeated the shape; she copied slowly, clearly unable to make sense of it.
I tried to explain: ‘People think—after die—go to heaven.’
Heaven above, a sky-variant that only added to her puzzlement:
Wish Page 15