The Word

by William Lane

  ‘But you know I’ve been thinking about it awhile,’ Kenric persisted, ‘ever since I first witnessed it in the hall. I’ve thought it through –’

  ‘So it’s your idea, not Maria’s?’

  Robert, clearly still listening, slowly reached for another beer.

  ‘Maria seems quite against it, actually,’ admitted Kenric. ‘She’s said Lionel never did anything like that.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ said Robert from below.

  ‘Well, on this occasion I think I agree with her,’ said Tess. ‘People associate talking in tongues with religion – it’s seen as an expression of the Holy Spirit. Given our concerns here are not spiritual but philosophical, that’s going to blur the lines. Some of our members here are confused enough, I should think.’

  ‘But we could make it about language,’ said Kenric, ‘about using words in their purest form. When I was in advertising, I would try to listen not to a word’s literal meanings, but its inner meaning – not the shell, but the kernel. I would try to strip away everything to find a word’s core. Tongue-talking does that too, I feel. It’s about finding the verbal essence. And after all, it’s only speech. What’s to fear?’

  Tess had begun to smile as he spoke, and move a little from side to side. ‘But what might I say?’ she said, laughing and ducking her head. She took his hand and led him along the balcony, to her door.

  Tess’s room was simply and sparsely furnished, like most at The Word: a bed, a cupboard, a chair and a desk with a typewriter. Closing the door behind them, Tess reached up to kiss Kenric, leaning into him and looking into his face.

  A reversing truck began to beep outside, and Kenric stepped away, going to the window. Below, a B-double passed smoothly down the apron.

  ‘Maybe you’re right, Tess,’ said Kenric, ‘it’s a bad idea, it’s going too far. If it’s a flop, I’ll look a fool. I just think we need to keep exploring language – that was the idea behind it. Maybe we should just have a truth-telling.’

  ‘But you’ve convinced me about the tongue-talking now,’ said Tess, taking his hand, ‘I think it could be intriguing. You know I’m happy to try anything once. And I want to hear you talk like that! Krystal and Teddy will love it. But Justin will hate it. That’s reason enough to do it.’ She laughed.

  From within their embrace, he muttered, ‘Sometimes I think you want me to fail, Tess.’

  ‘Now why would I want to do that?’ she asked, lifting her face.

  After he left, she found he had left a little poem on her desk:

  I went to the shops

  But it made me feel crazy

  All those eyes bigger than their bellies

  I want to say something

  But my tongue deserts me

  Alpha, beta, gamma

  Is going to cure me of my stutter

  Sitting in silence before the TV

  Sitting in silence before the sea

  Sitting in silence inside a dream

  Alpha, beta, gamma

  Is going to cure me of my stammer

  The bad words chain

  And the good words set free.

  Connie had been told to take a rare holiday from cooking that evening. Having peeled a small mountain of potatoes throughout the afternoon, she had been persuaded to desist from any more food preparation, and Justin was completing the communal dinner.

  Justin was nearing thirty, sharply dressed and well groomed, with a carefully trimmed beard. He wore thick glasses that grew foggy if he became excited. He had a knowing, almost jaded air. Justin had a scholarship to write a PhD on the representation of advertising in the visual arts. It seemed incongruous that a young man as worldly and clearly ambitious as Justin should join an idealistic community, and one located at such an undesirable distance from the centre of the metropolis. The consensus was that he should be somewhere else. Justin, however, insisted he needed a place ‘invisible to the centre of things’ from which to concentrate on developing and writing his thesis (‘Intersecting Desires: Advertising in the Visual Arts, the Visual Arts in Advertising’). He needed space and time, and The Word provided that, in the empty heart (as he named it) of Greater Western Sydney. At times Justin did seem overwhelmed by the incongruity of his presence in the philosophical community, and would slip into derogatory talk about ‘living in a dormitory’ and ‘subsisting at an oasis in a cultural desert’. ‘I can’t keep going on this extended sabbatical,’ he would sometimes say, ‘I’ve got to get back to the real world – all my friends are in Newtown and Annandale.’ Justin got on best with Connie and Judith (The Word’s live-in accountant, who, along with Connie, was closest to Justin in age); he was also friendly with Robert, even if they related through cynicisms. Justin could only talk to Kenric with suppressed irritation, and he ignored Maria altogether.

  ‘I can’t vouch for the dessert,’ Justin told those waiting at the table for dinner, ‘as someone has made off with the cream. And I bought two packets of Tim Tams yesterday, but one is already gone.’ He placed the dinner before Kenric, Maria (who had just returned), Robert, Connie and Judith.

  ‘Where is everyone else?’ asked Kenric. ‘I hope that newspaper article hasn’t provoked a mass exodus.’

  ‘Bruno and Barnabus are still at work,’ said Justin. ‘They’ll be back soon. They’re stayers.’

  ‘We should invite that journalist to dinner,’ suggested Robert, opening two bottles of wine and passing them around. ‘And we should ask him, do you think this is a cult? Is this how a cult acts? Are we abusive people?’

  They laughed, except Connie, who went on eating. Her hearing aid began to squeal. Maria caught her eye and signed to her. Connie loudly exclaimed ‘Oh!’ and began adjusting the earpiece, which faded in descending frequencies.

  ‘Look at how we treat Connie,’ said Judith. ‘That’th not abuthive.’ Tall and angular, Judith preferred the company of the men, and had an ambivalent relationship with the other women. Her lisp came and went.

  ‘Connie hears the Word better than any of us,’ said Kenric.

  ‘Oh, a smiley stamp for Connie!’ said Justin.

  ‘Talking about hearing, remember Mr Perfect Pitch?’ asked Robert, who had opened another bottle of wine and sent it on its rounds. ‘His ear was so perfect, he could not bear music – he had to avoid music. Something in every piece of music he ever heard was always out of key and at war with the other instruments.’

  ‘Remember how Connie used to play Mama Cass incredibly loudly?’ laughed Justin. ‘It was unbearable for Mr Perfect Pitch to hear Mama Cass sing, because Cass could hit such perfect notes the backing track always sounded just a little out of key.’

  ‘What was his actual name again?’

  Those listening could not remember.

  ‘Mama Cass was “so on key she jumped outside the accompaniment”,’ Justin recalled. ‘He said weird stuff like that – “You can hear Cass ignoring the backing track, she overrules it”. I wrote his stuff down, it was so odd. He should have been a music critic.’

  ‘He was,’ said Maria, ‘a successful one, too.’

  ‘“She cuts through every production like a warm knife through butter”,’ intoned Robert.

  ‘You may laugh at what he said,’ said Kenric, ‘but he got on well with Connie. She was sad when he left. His name was Piers.’

  ‘Piers, Pitch-Perfect Piers! That’s right.’

  ‘He wathn’t a thtayer,’ said Judith, smiling.

  ‘And remember the Leaking Pen?’ asked Justin, ‘the scraggy woman who could not stop talking –’

  ‘I don’t like the word “scrag”,’ said Kenric. ‘It sounds –’

  ‘You thcrag,’ lisped Justin, looking across the table at Judith, who giggled and blushed.

  ‘The Leaking Pen,’ said Robert, ‘would always use Latinate words, remember?’

  ‘I recollect accordingly,’ said Justin.

  ‘She thought we’d be impressed,’ said Robert. ‘She’d been a bureaucrat or something.’

&nb
sp; ‘She’d advised senior Canberra politicians, actually,’ said Kenric, ‘before she joined The Word.’

  ‘Thee thaw the light.’

  ‘No, Judith, she apprehended the luminescence of the Logos,’ corrected Justin.

  ‘And we told her again and again,’ said Robert, ‘“Don’t use the long, multisyllable Latin-derived words – they are false, they are pompous, they are corrupted by centuries of misuse by those in power, and now they ring hollow” – but she couldn’t help herself, she couldn’t change, she kept uttering a high percentage of those –’

  ‘Invidious multiple syllable excrescences.’

  ‘– words. Perhaps she simply had no ear for it; it had been worn out by misuse.’

  ‘Her ear had been corrupted,’ said Judith.

  ‘She wouldn’t or couldn’t change.’ Robert sighed. ‘She’d use Latinate language to ask when was dinner, or for someone to pass the salt –’

  Justin laughed. ‘Now, that’s impossible, Robert. Try to say that in the Latinate – bet you can’t.’

  ‘She was hard on the ear,’ said Robert.

  ‘And hard on the eye,’ said Justin.

  ‘Let’s lift the tone,’ suggested Kenric. ‘We’re being vulgar.’

  ‘Or just vulgate.’ Maria smiled.

  ‘Or jutht bitchy,’ giggled Judith.

  ‘Although it’s not abusive.’ Justin grinned, looking at Robert.

  ‘But who spoke to the newspaper?’ asked Maria, looking about. ‘The journalist knew things Regina did not know.’

  Everyone around the table looked blank – except Connie, who kept eating and did not look up.

  ‘Like what?’ asked Justin.

  ‘Such as our source of income.’

  They heard a door open above, and Bruno appeared on the balcony. He cleared his throat in the silence, marking his entrance, and turned to carefully close his bedroom door before collectedly descending the stairs. Bruno was stocky, swarthy, always dressed in blue working clothes. He had a closed face and bearing, and was usually silent – yet he took up a lot of space, if unwillingly, in his person, and appeared always to be trying to rein himself in. He drove a forklift in a warehouse across the highway. Bruno had changed his name several times since joining The Word.

  ‘Barnabus just got in,’ he said, sitting at the table, helping himself to the meal. ‘He should be down soon.’

  In the silence, soft, hesitant footsteps began descending the stairs; Tess was coming to join them. ‘There are cockroaches,’ she said, sounding prim, ‘I can see them on top of everything as I’m coming down.’

  ‘It used to be a meat-packing factory.’ Robert shrugged. ‘It can’t be helped.’

  Then down the stairs ran young Barnabus, who, in his lanky country-boy openness, hailed everyone with a sunny ‘So, what do you know, folks?’

  ‘Fuck-all, Barnabus,’ muttered Robert, draining his glass, pouring another.

  At The Word, new ‘acolytes’, as Robert and Justin called them, were ‘initiated’ into a series of communal activities, such as defacing (‘correcting’ was Kenric’s term) advertising billboards; participating in ‘sorties’, in which Kenric led a party of members around the streets and declaimed against the words splattered everywhere; joining in truth-telling sessions; studying dictionaries and grammar books; and playing word games. The Word generally encouraged a culture of critical analysis of language whenever two members of the community met. Kenric taught that words are the chief means by which we place ourselves in relation to the external world. Language, he argued, repeatedly recreates our relationship to the exterior, and hence recreates how we experience the world itself. The group’s tampering with ‘misleading signage’ was ‘an outward activity’ that ‘recalibrated’ the external world. It sometimes involved brushes with the law and fines. Maria had convinced the naturally timid Kenric not to worry too much about this, since they found encounters with any external authority only had a coalescing, collegiate effect on The Word.

  Those members who did not have to go to work began to collect around the kitchen table the next morning, where they joined ‘Ashram Teddy’, who had not left the table since eating a late breakfast. Teddy had spent his adult life moving in and out of a series of ashrams, sects and spiritual communities. His grey hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he wore a tropical-inspired shirt and patchwork pants of the kind bought at markets. He greeted Justin and Robert with a prayerful placing together of his hands as the pair came down the stairs. Judith followed, then Tess appeared with the middle-aged Krystal, who had twice been married to Teddy; for years now the couple had been following one another in and out of various groups.

  ‘Where have you been all this time, Mr Supermarket Packer?’ Krystal asked her twice-ex.

  ‘Oh, you’re talking to me again, are you?’ replied Teddy. ‘They’ve put me on nights. I only got back at breakfast time. Hey, someone said we’re going to be talking in tongues this morning. Anyone done that before?’

  No one had.

  ‘It’s a new initiative,’ said Krystal. ‘I only hope it doesn’t replace truth-telling and dictionary exercises. They’re tried and tested.’

  ‘Depends how it goes, probably,’ said Justin, who yawned, wiped his glasses and got up from the table to look in the fridge. ‘What the fuck? The Tim Tams have gone again. Someone’s eaten them all.’

  Connie was next down the stairs, discreetly eyed by the men, who looked away as Barnabus followed after her.

  Kenric appeared from the office. ‘Maria can’t be here,’ he told them, ‘she’s had to attend to another family crisis this morning. She sends her apologies. Where’s Bruno?’

  He had been called in to work, Barnabus said.

  After some minutes of chatting around the table, talk Kenric did not participate in, Krystal said rather anxiously, ‘I heard this morning we are talking in tongues?’

  Silence braced the group. Most frowned at the table. Justin made grim faces at Robert, but Robert looked down.

  ‘You just can’t start talking in tongues,’ argued Krystal, ‘there needs to be a context.’

  ‘The Word is the context,’ Kenric offered.

  ‘My family went to a Pentacostal church a few times when I was a kid,’ said Krystal, ‘and people only ever talked in tongues after they’d been there awhile, after they’d been singing quite a bit. You know, they’d sing, and start to move and repeat certain words. And then out it would come.’

  ‘I went to Quaker gatherings as a child,’ said Tess, ‘and actually, after everyone sitting around in silence for who knows how long, I heard a woman suddenly break into tongues.’

  They sat in silence.

  Connie’s hearing aid began to whistle. A truck repeatedly beeped as it reversed outside. Barnabus began looking from one face to another; he had been under the impression they were intending to attempt some sort of vocabulary exercise, and clutched a dictionary and a thesaurus.

  ‘So we jutht thtart, like thith, do we?’ asked Judith almost aggressively, ‘othneclinopreenafiddup …’

  She stopped, and they laughed.

  ‘Why are we so self-conscious to speak?’ Krystal asked.

  ‘Because we need a form to speak in,’ suggested Tess.

  ‘But you’ve made a start,’ said Kenric, ‘only we should give voice to what wants to speak, or be spoken.’

  The squeal of Connie’s hearing aid descended, flattened, grew gradually inaudible.

  ‘Affulporinchafapelodeefty –’

  ‘What, Judith?’ asked Connie in her thickly articulated voice, squinting at Judith and leaning towards her over the table.

  ‘Just say something – it doesn’t have to make sense,’ Judith yelled in Connie’s ear, ‘podepozimakla!’

  The truck no longer beeped. Connie sat mute; they all did, and began to listen as in the newly quiet morning, something like an approaching wave swelled towards them. Waiting in silence, they seemed to be sucked back under the approaching wall – then Robert b
egan talking or blabbing in a stream; he halted, before Judith, Tess and Barnabus began babbling together, and Robert rejoined them, and then Krystal and Ashram Teddy were swept in. Connie looked from one person to another, her mouth open. Then she started too.

  Justin, growing pale, sat back hard against his chair. His glasses were fogging up. At last he found his feet and bounded up the stairs. At his departure, the voices receded – yet gradually, in a long, staggered declension that occasionally started up again, for diminishing intervals. Then they sat in silence around the table, listening to the long wake of the withdrawing wave.

  ‘Make them coffee, Connie,’ croaked Kenric, in a voice barely recognisable as his; he hurried from the kitchen towards his room.

  ‘Where’s Kenric running off to?’ asked Robert, stretching, rising to get the day’s first beer from the fridge. ‘He should be congratulated. That was awesome. A big breakthrough.’

  ‘You all look touched,’ said Bruno, coming in from work, wiping his hands on a towel. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Such a spiritual experience,’ breathed Krystal, ‘better than sex.’ She went up to Ashram Teddy, who stood against the sink, and she placed herself against him.

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Tess, and left them, trotting up the steps to her room.

  But what was actually said? Tess thought as she ascended. Nothing – it was simply spilling out the, yes, verbal essence, as Kenric said, or spilling something – but nothing was articulated, there was no form. Yet she felt light and free; she might be a honeyeater, hovering over those below. Then she was looking at the notebook and pen on her desk and suddenly knew she was going to write, start something that day. She recalled what she had long been meaning to draft – a play, she could not think why she had not yet begun. Her idea for a play, long a seed, had at last split open, and now pushed for the light. In a moment she would sketch the outline. She began to laugh and pace her room, pausing to jot and collect words, the words that would sprout into the shoots of her work. Passing the window, she seemed to see the forest that had once grown over the plain, where now the tiled roofs overlapped like so many scales.