‘You think, Sweet-Tooth?’
‘I know—not. Not yes. Not no. Maybe.’
There was more I could have shown, the standard theological vocabulary of resurrection and damnation, punishment and reward. I knew the hand-shapes backwards; I had been dragged to Sign Church at the Institute every Sunday as a child. The concepts seemed too cumbersome to foist on Wish; I might as well have tried to explain the Tooth Fairy.
‘Heaven—where?’
‘Know not. Learn after dead.’
I used her own blunt shape for death.
‘Long-tongue,’ she signed, with an impatient stamp of her feet, and thrust both her hands forcefully downwards, in the opposite direction to heaven.
‘Die in ground. Like B-I-L-L.’
My turn for puzzlement: ‘B?’
‘Dog,’ she signed, the Here-boy slap of Flat Hand against thigh.
She took me by the hand, and tugged me to the window. Her first-floor room looked down onto the back garden, a patch of grassy lawn, several beds of vegetables, and a rotary clothes hoist, enclosed by the circle of surrounding trees.
‘B,’ she finger-spelt again, and pointed.
I followed the direction of her finger. At the edge of the trees, a small patch of grass had been enclosed by a picket fence. At first glance I thought it another vegetable bed, more careful inspection revealed five or six small earth-mounds of various lengths and widths, arranged in two unequal rows. At the head of each mound a length of wood had been stuck, upright, in the earth. Grave markers, unmistakably. I was surely looking at the final resting place of the ex-members of Stella’s flock.
Wish mimed the act of digging, then pinched her nose between thumb and finger, and averted her face. She shivered slightly, and squeezed my hand—clearly uncomfortable with the bald facts of decomposition, even though they issued from her hands. I also sensed, as her eyes scrutinised mine, that she was crushing my hand as much for my comfort as for hers. She was giving the lesson, teaching me a tough truth of which she felt me ignorant, which I had clearly hidden from myself behind sentimental euphemisms.
15
‘I sign secret. Now you sign secret.’
A day has passed, but our informal contract had not been forgotten. Once again we were alone, shut inside her room.
‘What secret?’
‘J-I-L-L.’
She squatted, waiting. The door was closed, lunch still some hours away. There could be no escape.
‘I love Jill before. She love me. Now—not.’
A minimal version of the events of the last seven years of my life. Even so, I had said far more than I wanted to. I always say either too much, or too little. Even the simple shape for love I found enormously painful, and difficult:
‘Why? Why love—not?’
‘Love gone.’
‘Where?’
‘Vanish,’ I signed, a shape I call the reverse-rabbit, the right hand disappearing into the makeshift magician’s hat of the left hand.
It’s also the sign for drown, and, poignantly, for extinct. I had discussed these events with no one, especially not with my parents. Wish’s blunt, naive questions, free from expectation or assumption, were more difficult to evade. I averted my face, unable to sign further, then rose, and made the sign for ‘piss’, a stylised letter ‘p’, and excused myself. I hid in the locked bathroom across the hall, trying to recover composure.
After some minutes I returned to the bedroom, and my original schedule. Once again Wish seemed sensitive to my needs, and tactfully avoided the subjects of love, and family. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the practise of whispered speech.
This was to prove a losing battle in the coming weeks, not so much beyond my powers, as beyond hers—beyond the anatomy of that too-wide mouth, those sharp canines and thick pink ox-tongue.
She had mastered, quickly, a serviceable plosive ‘p’ of the lips parting. More slowly came the fricative ‘f’, a release of air between the lips, under restraint. Sounds produced further back in the mouth caused greater problems. Even the simple hiss of an ‘s’ between her gleaming teeth, or the tip of her tongue tapping ‘t’ against the palate proved non-negotiable, or uncontrollable. I spent some time with my fingers inside her mouth, moulding her big, clumsy tongue. I guided her thumbish fingers into my mouth, to feel my tongue and teeth positions. My efforts were largely wasted. The difficulties were not entirely mechanical; other objections began to surface. For one: the few sounds she did manage to whisper could have been produced by anyone. All whisperers sound the same, a shared, universal whisper-voice, incapable of drama or inflexion.
Why squander valuable time teaching her to whisper English if she could Sign, loudly, in her own unique ‘voice’?
I abandoned the project after several weeks of shrinking returns. I had no regrets, the idea had always smacked of the whimsical. Its cleverness had appealed more to me than its practicality. Clive and Stella were disappointed; a whispering gorilla would have more force, more shock value, than a signer—it would have more use.
‘We could try a speech therapist,’ Stella suggested.
‘How to find someone reliable?’ Clive said. ‘Someone…discreet?’
‘We found J.J.’
They both turned towards me, inviting me to enter the discussion. I had stayed for dinner, an occasional invitation which I never declined. Rain was falling in the darkness outside, Eliza was upstairs in bed, asleep, as always, the moment the sun set. My mouth was crammed full of beancurd; my friends waited, politely, while I chewed and swallowed.
‘I think you’re missing the point,’ I said. ‘We don’t have time to devote to whispering. We don’t have enough time for Sign as is.’
My protests won the day even though I was dissembling. For I had another, unstated objection. I was increasingly possessive of my star pupil, and unwilling to share her with anyone.
16
Longer nights, shorter days. The world was turning, yes—but in part the shrinking hours of daylight were also a matter of perception. My days with Wish passed all too quickly, my nights and weekends without her dragged by.
I spent less time at the Institute, I arrived earlier at the farm each day, sneakily increasing my contact hours. I had been rostered on the Sign translators’ panel, but the work was largely piece-work. If I didn’t work, I wasn’t paid. I felt no guilt. Access visits with Rosie caused me far more heartache. I was increasingly resentful of those endless Sundays of ice-creams and burgers and teenage movies and game parlours and ice-skating and zoo visits, and increasingly guilty that I felt such resentment.
Each Sunday night I spent long hours immersed in the sea, meditating, relaxing. And allowing the promise of Monday’s lessons, held in abeyance through the weekend tedium, to rekindle inside me, a glow of pure pleasure.
Those lessons still followed their own meandering path, unstructured—but I tried to keep an overview, a large-scale mental map of the regions we had visited, and those still to visit. Her introduction to music came in our second month together.
As usual she was waiting at the second gate; I arrived carrying a bulky, awkwardly wrapped package.
‘That what?’
‘Gift,’ I signed, a palms-up offering.
She followed, excited, into the house, gesturing to Clive and Stella. The four of us climbed the stairs to her bedroom; I handed over the package with due ceremony. Stella watched, curious; Clive’s expression was more cautious.
Wish ripped open the paper and extracted the guitar that I had bought for myself as an adolescent, and rarely used since. I tuned the strings, and strummed the first bars of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, a three-chord kindergarten version from The Bob Dylan Songbook.
‘Me?’
I nodded; she took the guitar, carefully, and propped it in approximate position on her thigh. I sat behind her, one hand reaching round her broad back to grasp her strumming hand, the other guiding her fingers into a basic G-chord. She strummed, clumsily, but enjoying t
he sound. I showed her a C-chord, an F7; we strummed the first bars of the song. I sang, she strummed; after a short time I released her hands, her fat thumb-fingers made the chord-changes slowly, but accurately, demonstrating a tactile memory, a position sense, far ahead of mine.
Shortly after that she began to croon along, tunelessly. The words were beyond her; it was more a form of scat-singing, a throaty woofly chuckle, rhythmic, but without melody.
‘I don’t know that I approve,’ Clive said.
Stella murmured to me: ‘Don’t mind him, he’s tone-deaf.’
He smiled, patiently.
‘Music doesn’t compute,’ she added, teasing him.
He held up a quibbling finger. ‘I beg to differ,’ he said. ‘Music does compute. The musical scale is nothing if not a table of logarithms.’
Stella laughed; a cue that he was joking, sending himself up.
‘I want Wish to develop an appreciation of music,’ he said. ‘But this is just tricks on a guitar. An organ-grinder’s monkey.’
Stella hustled him, still protesting, from the bedroom, following him out and closing the door.
I gently took the guitar from Wish.
‘Play too much,’ I said. ‘Fingertips—bleed.’
She showed me her fingertips, human fingerprints embossed on inhuman skin, as thick as calf leather. She could have played all night without damaging those tough pads.
She handed the guitar back, I strummed through another song from the same book: ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.
‘Your music sad,’ she signed. ‘Cry-hurt here,’ she tapped her chest, ‘wants out.’
She listened a little longer. I could only remember the words of the chorus, I hummed through the verses. Perhaps some plaintive quality in my singing touched her, when I finished she returned again to the personal questions that had been suspended some weeks before.
‘You not live J-I-L-L—why?’
As with the signing of my parents, it seems inadequate to represent Wish’s language as a kind of pidgin English. It was not fluent Auslan—but neither was it simple Koko-speak, or Washoe-speak. It was a hybrid: her own improvisations, her own inventions, grafted onto an Auslan frame. And it was always quick and intelligent—often far quicker than I could cope with. To recreate it in a richer, more poetic English would be no less false than my terse pidgin, but there was a gentleness in her movements and her tone that day to which I cannot do justice. ‘Would you like to tell me about it?’ is perhaps the closest I can get.
What to tell her? When I remember my years of marriage I remember only stupid things. Trivial things.
‘J. make me eat less,’ I signed.
‘You eat more,’ she signed, and tumbled her own stout frame forward across the floor, surfacing from the somersault at my side, and hugging me gently around the shoulders, her face buried in my shoulder.
‘Cuddly,’ she signed. ‘Tickle good.’
She held my hand as Clive and Stella walked me to my car later that evening. For the first time, instead of a farewell hug at the tree line, she followed me through the inner gate and into the field, still clutching my hand. I could sense anxiety, even terror, in her tight grip as she stepped into the open—but she refused to release my hand.
Clive stopped, and peered towards the road. No passing cars were in sight, none could be heard approaching, but her exposure, standing in the stubble, clearly concerned him.
‘I come,’ Wish signed.
‘You stay,’ I said.
‘You stay. You sleep here.’
I hugged her, squeezed breathless by those massive arms. At last I extracted myself and left her squatting, a forlorn figure at the edge of the trees. At the outer gate I turned and waved; she stared back impassively, refusing to acknowledge the gesture.
‘I think she’s got a crush on you,’ Stella said, and chuckled.
A weakish pun, but also an articulation of something I had been half-denying: Wish’s growing puppy-love, adoring even when she was teasing me, added immensely to the pleasure of those days.
17
Attendance at my night classes was in steep decline, a reflection, surely, of my distracted state of mind. On one of the last and wettest nights of autumn I arrived to find a completely empty classroom. The rain seemed a legitimate excuse for the absentees. I sat at the desk, twiddling my thumbs, an unofficial sign of boredom, as if telling myself how I felt. I yawned once or twice—the textbook sign.
After half an hour, when no one had appeared, I began packing my books. Miss-The-Point poked his head through the door.
‘Where the hell is everyone, J.J.?’
I offered a weather-mime, ten fingers of rain, a two-handed downpour.
He wasn’t impressed. ‘You don’t think it a little convenient to blame the weather?’
I continued packing my books, irritated. A lecture was clearly in the offing.
‘I have to say, J.J., I’m not surprised that no one has shown. I’ve had one or two complaints of late. Students say that your lessons are too complex.’
‘Which students?’
‘I can hardly mention names, not without their consent.’
My indignation rose even further. Wish needed my company, night and day. Why was I wasting my time in an empty classroom? I should have been living in that house in the Hills.
‘They want to be spoon-fed, Jeremy. They dabble their toes, learn a few signs—and they think they’re doing their deaf relatives a huge favour.’
The criticism was aimed at him, obliquely. It went over his head.
‘J.J., we can’t afford to alienate the wider community.’
‘Fuck the wider community.’
He took a step back, feigning shock—as much perhaps at the vulgarity of the accompanying sign as at the words.
‘Is it Jill?’ he said. ‘Want to talk about it?’
‘It isn’t—and even if it was, not with you.’
The directness of the insult surprised both of us—but the process of saying what I thought I found therapeutic, the verbal equivalent of poking a garden sprinkler through a bedroom window and turning on the tap. Uttering the thoughts also clarified what those thoughts actually were. I realised that I didn’t give a fig for his job.
‘Keep your shirt on, J.J., I was only trying to help.’
‘My private life is none of your business.’
‘It is when it begins to affect your work.’
‘If my work isn’t up to scratch, I’d better resign.’
I could see the idea appealed to him.
‘Ah…Let’s not rush into things. But it might be best if you took the rest of the term off. Have a bit of time to yourself. Sort out your life. There seems to be a lot of anger there, J.J.—a lot of unresolved feelings you need to deal with. I’m more than happy to cover for you here.’
Miss-The-Point could even make a sacking sound a philanthropic act.
‘No, I’ve had enough. It wasn’t a good idea—it was never going to work out.’
He waited, hiding behind his mask of smug concern again.
‘I don’t think we can work together, Jeremy.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re up yourself,’ I signed—literally ‘you-up-you’, an improvisation, but clearly, for once, not over his head.
Exhilarated by my new-found sense of freedom, I felt I could say anything.
‘Take job and shove job,’ I added.
There could be no mistaking that eloquent gesture either, the same ‘fuck’ hand-shape, re-orientated, literally shove-it-up-your-arse.
18
‘Teaching tonight—not?’
‘Class cancelled.’
Had my mother heard something on the grapevine—seen something on the grapevine? We sat at the kitchen table eating dinner. I busied my hands with knife and fork, not wanting to discuss the matter further; my father chewed his meat steadily, his gaze tigerish, waiting to pounce. My mother picked at her food with suppressed agitation. Always diplomatic,
she wouldn’t raise the subject till I was ready, instead she gave me cues, provided conversational openings into which I might choose to insert the news myself.
‘Holiday?’ she signed.
Holiday is a Rude Hand variant on the shape for lazy—literally, a lazy time in which you do bugger-all.
My father’s impatience with her approach was clear, despite her pleading glances. After some minutes he threw down his own knife and fork, unable to contain his frustration any longer.
‘Beat around bush—not! Sacked why?’
Sacked: the brush-off mime of dismissal, made with terse force.
I set down my own cutlery more carefully. ‘Sacked—not. Resigned.’
The opaque, emotionless shape failed to soothe him. He repeated the interrogative: ‘Why?’
‘Miss-The-Point.’
He rolled his eyes; shook his head. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ he signed—literally, beggars not allowed to make a choice.
‘Me beggar—not!’
My protest went ignored. ‘Your mother did huge work,’ he signed. ‘Find job. Bend backwards to help.’ He almost fell backwards himself, emphasising the point. ‘You throw job in face. You live here, our house, you eat here, our food.’
‘I pay rent.’
‘You pay nothing else. Nothing important. You here never. You give company—not. Use home like hotel. Now you throw away good job.’
He shaped a good job with his hands, and tossed it towards the door with derision.
‘I have good job—teaching private student.’
‘If you not beggar—maybe choose another hotel to live.’
‘You kick me out?’
‘Not kick. Give you time—to choose another hotel.’
My mother seemed to agree with the message, if not the harshness of the signing. ‘We love you—but you need to stand on your feet.’
A lull, then she added: ‘J. is right—maybe. You never grow up.’
To quote Jill at me I found infuriating—the first time, ever, that I could recall my mother taking the side of my ex-wife. I stood and leaned across the table, reaching my hands into their Signing Spaces, shouting in their faces, so to speak. If the truth was to be uttered, then I could utter it with the best of them.
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