by Joanna Walsh
You will come downstairs at midnight, looking for a glass of water, and find it there. Although surprised, you will not call the police, set off the fire alarm, scream, ‘Stop, thief!’ You will recognise ‘it’ instantly, shamefacedly, though you will not be able to say whether ‘it’ is ‘he’ or ‘she’. You will have no opportunity to retreat, or to fail to confess your guilt, which you will see reflected, instantly, in its hollow eyes. Unable to think of an excuse to leave, you will fall into conversation warily. At first you will attempt to entertain it but your bookself will appear to find you trivial, its nose deep in some tome.
You will take down a volume and try to show it who’s boss. Your choice will be, perhaps, Journey to the End of the Night in the original French, a book you have only previously attempted when drunk. You will be annoyed to find your copy unpredictably well-thumbed as well as casually stained with something brown and sticky, once liquid. Your bookself reads, not like you, but like an ideal reader. Little distracts it. It holds its paperback between thumb and index finger. Its large, knob-knuckled claw dominates the volume single-handed, casually as a cigarette, a cocktail. As it curls the cover of the paperback against its spine, you watch in silent fury. Sitting opposite you set your book flat on the table, elbows weighting its edges to prevent lift-off. When you imitate your bookself’s poise, your book rebels, splutters from your fingers in a spree of pages.
However.
After some time spent reading together a surprising thing will happen: a secret feeling of superiority will begin to grow within you. You will recognise your bookself’s habit of opening a work some way from the beginning, at the exact point, indeed, that you lost interest and, furthermore, of reading on but stopping short of the very last page. Your confidence will increase as you discover it has devoured all the books you have thrown aside: ill-judged gifts from well-meaning relatives; friends’ recommendations you have loathed from the very first page; gardening manuals; thick books of instructions for obsolete electrical devices; the memoirs of politicians. It has been through the charity bag. It has scraped every word from torn and mouldering volumes streaked with tea and bacon fat at the bottom of the dustbin.
You will begin to pity its terrible appetite.
Your growing feeling of superiority will generate within you at first a patronising empathy that will lead you to quiz it. But, as you discover how much information your bookself possesses that you do not, your mood will first change to grudging respect then to genuine interest.
You will sit down together, friendly now, to exchange information, opinions. You will switch from coffee to alcohol and offer your bookself a glass. Conspiratorially, you will admit you have neglected its areas of knowledge. Your bookself will be strangely wistful for all those missed pages, all those openings, all those endings.
After several more glasses of whisky or wine or beer, you will lead your bookself to your bookshelves, which after years of accumulation reach, like those of your parents, from floor to ceiling. You will feel you are showing it a kingdom, a new horizon that will, uniquely in your joint presence, unfold for both of you at the same instant, its peeling wall of spines curling with aged contracted glue revealing – not a beach – but a forest of yellowing bound signatures which will part, flopping like flaccid palm trees. In the cracks beyond them will be only dark. You will feel that, if you could break through, together, you might… well… break through the paper to the words and then through the words to… to… whatever. Your bookself will have the same idea. You will hand your bookself book after book until its insubstantial arms are spilling but then (perhaps it was the whisky or the wine or beer or whatever your tipple) you will remember the book, the one book, that it absolutely must read and (after all your tastes are not so dissimilar) you will begin to search for it, to pull books down in handfuls. Though you both know the book (which you too have not read, but had always intended to), neither of you will be able to quite remember the title or to identify its author. Books will fly to the floor past, no through, your bookself, rending, abandoning, abstracting themselves until the shelves are as bare and as yellow as sand, until behind the bookshelves there is nothing to be seen but woodchip wallpaper, slightly discoloured, a tidemark of dust showing the height limit of your erstwhile library.
You will both sit down in your disaster of bookshelves, to contemplate their ruins. You will agree: had you always the right book to hand, oh what reading you would have done!
Only after a few more glasses of wine (or beer or whisky), will you both admit that, after all, perhaps you do not really like books.
Postcards from Two Hotels
The First Hotel
I
The first hotel is expensive; I am not paying for it.
There are notepads by the pillows; the chair is far too low for the desk.
II
Small things disappear: this is normal.
The towels are changed although I do not put them in the tub.
III
Schedule: ‘Down time at the hotel’.
(No further instructions.)
IV
I run the bath, pile my books by the bath, get in.
Once in I do not read my books.
V
I get out. Something in the room had changed: perhaps it is the distances.
It is easy to lose things in a blank space.
VI
I regret:
A tiny phial of perfume.
Some hairpins.
VII
I am told always:
Outside the hotel, things are getting worse.
I don’t speak the language.
VIII
Inside the door: three locks.
And:
‘If the smoke is heavy, seal the door with wet towels.’
IX
Things I should have brought with me:
An umbrella.
Things I should have brought with me:
Pyjamas.
X
The hotel safe growls when it closes. It acquiesces when opening.
‘As a courtesy, we will brilliantly shine your shoes.’
The Second Hotel
I
The second hotel is further out. It is still within the city.
The outskirts are safer than the centre: it’s beyond I’m told to worry about most.
II
The notepads, also by the pillow, are smaller.
The towels are threadbare: I try to ignore this.
III
The chair is also too low for the desk; the safe does not work.
As in the last hotel, I rearrange my small possessions constantly.
IV
There are two bottles of water in the bathroom.
(In the first hotel there was only one.)
In both hotels, booked into a double room, I remain single.
V
I close the bedside drawer. I go into the bathroom.
I return. The drawer is open. I close the drawer.
VI
The toiletries are named after the city of the last hotel.
It is only when I get to the second hotel that I miss the first.
VII
The mosquito screen slides across the window.
The window slides across the mosquito screen.
VIII
In the courtyard, the birds swallow their voices, which I do not recognise.
I can hear the ring road. Some things still cannot prevent themselves from being beautiful.
IX
There is no one in the swimming pool.
A small piece of skin from my foot flakes onto the floor. I will not have a bad time here.
X
Tomorrow I return to the first hotel.
It is in the second hotel that I did all my writing.
Worlds from the Word’s End
We need to talk.
I’m writing to you so you’ll understand why I can’t writ
e to you any more.
I could never talk to you. We didn’t exactly have a meaningful relationship. Perhaps that’s why I have all these words left when so many others have none at all. The postal system’s still going so I expect you will get this letter. Bills continue to be sent by mail (figures accompany icons: an electric light bulb, a gas flame, a wave for water) as do postcards (wordless views). And letters do still arrive so I’ll take this opportunity to get my words in edgeways while I can, folded into a slim envelope. When they drop through your letterbox, I hope that they don’t fall flat.
It’s the old story: It’s not you, it’s me. Or, rather, it’s the place we’re at. We don’t talk any more, not now, not round here. You know how things have changed. But I have to tell you all over again because what happened between us seemed to be part of what happened everywhere. It’s never useful to lay the blame but I do feel somehow responsible.
It was more than a language barrier. We were reading from the same page, at least that’s what I thought, but it was really only you that ever had a way with words. Sometimes you put them into my mouth, then you took them right out again. You never minced them, made anything easier to swallow, and the words you put in for me were hardly ever good. They left a bitter taste. As for mine, you twisted my words and broke my English until I was only as good as my word: good for nothing, or for saying nothing. I stopped answering and that was the way you liked it. You told me you preferred your women quiet. You studied the small ads: INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER! Trouble was, you didn’t know your own strength.
Communication went out of fashion about the same time as we stopped speaking. It started, as does almost everything, as a trend. Early adapters, seeking something retro as usual, looked to their grannies, their aunties: silent women in cardigans who never went out. Who knows if these women were really quiet? Whether their adoption of these women’s silence was a misinterpretation of the past or a genuine unearthing, it happened. Initially gatherings – I mean parties, that sort of thing – became quieter, then entirely noiseless. Losing their raison d’être, they grew smaller and eventually ceased to exist altogether in favour of activities like staying in, waiting in hallways at telephone tables for calls that never came.
We scarcely noticed how the silence went mainstream but if I have to trace a pattern I’d say our nouns faded first. In everyday speech the grocery store became ‘that place over there’; your house, ‘the building one block from the corner, count two along.’ A little later this morphed into, ‘that place a little way from the bit where you go round, then a bit further on’. We began to revel in indirectness. Urban coolhunters would show off, limiting themselves to ‘that over there,’ and finally would do no more than grunt and jerk a thumb. They looked like they had something better to do than engage in casual conversation. We provincials were dumbstruck.
Grammar went second. We tried abbreviations, acronyms, but they made us blue, reminded us of the things we used to say. Not being a literary nation, we’d never quite got our heads around metaphor, and our frequent grammatical errors were only one thing less to lose. We said ‘kinda’ a lot, and ‘sort of’ but, y’know… We lost heart and failed to end sentences.
We have no sayings, now, only doings, though never a ‘doing word’. Actions speak louder than words (a wise saw: if only I’d looked before I ever listened to you), especially as we can’t remember very far back. We have erased all tenses except the present, though for a while we hung on to the imperfect, which suggested that things were going on as they always had done, and would continue thus.
At least schooling is easier now there are only numbers and images – and shapes, their dimensions, their colours. We don’t have to name them: we feel their forms and put them into our hearts, our minds, or whatever that space is, abandoned by language. We trace the shapes of the countries on school globes with our fingertips. And they all feel like tin.
Being ostensibly silent, for a while social media was still a valid form of communication, though touch-keyboards began to be preferred to those with keys. On websites, people posted photos of silent activities, as well as those involving white noise – drilling, vacuuming, using the washing machine – during which communication could patently not take place. Some questioned, in the comments boxes below, whether these photos might be staged but doubts were put to rest when the majority began to frown even on the use of writing. Some of us wondered whether internet forums could have themselves been the final straw: the way we’d wanted what we said to be noticed and, at the same time, to remain anon: the way we’d let our words float free, detach from our speech acts, become at once our avatars and our armour.
Trad media was something else. The first to go ‘non-talk’ were high-end cultural programmes: those ‘discussing’ movies and books. Popular shows featuring, say, cooking, gardening, home improvement, and talent contests, relied on sign language and were frowned upon by purists. On highbrow broadcasts, critics’ reactions were inferred from their facial expressions by a silent studio audience. Viewers smiled or frowned in response but their demeanours remained subtle, convoluted, suited to the subjects’ complexities. Fashions in presenters changed. Smooth-faced women were sacked in favour of craggy hags whose visual emotional range was more elastic. As all news is bad news, jowly, dewlapped broadcasters with doleful eyebags drew the fattest pay packets. This was considered important even on the radio.
There were no more letters to the editors of newspapers. There was no Op to the Ed, then no Ed, but newspapers continued to exist. Their pages looked at first as they had under censorship when, instead of the offending article, there appeared a photograph of a donkey. But, after a period of glorious photography, images also departed and the papers reverted to virgin. Oddly, perhaps, the number and page extent of sections remained the same. People still bought their daily at the kiosk; men still slept under them in parks. Traditions were preserved without the clamour of print. It was so much nicer that way.
Not everyone agreed. There were protests, often by unemployed journalists and photographers, but these were mostly silent: we had internalised the impoliteness of noise and were no longer willing to howl slogans. The personal being the political, this extended to domestic life. Fewer violent quarrels were reported. With no way to take things forward, relationships tended to the one-note. Couples who got on badly glared in mutual balefulness; the feelings of those in love were reflected in one another’s eyes.
If, at an international level, there was no news, at a local level there was no gossip, so most of us felt better. We ceased to judge people, having no common standards. The first wordless president fought her (his? its? As we could no longer name it, gender scarcely mattered any more) campaign on a quiet platform, gaze fixed on the distant horizon. He (she? it?) knew how to play the new silence. The opposition, opting to fill the space left by speech with random actions, was nowhere. A more liberal, thoughtful community emerged. Or so some of us believed. How could we tell?
Of course there were conspiracy theories. Old folks have always complained that a man’s word isn’t worth as much as it used to be, that promises nowadays are ten a penny, but radical economists charted a steep devaluation. Once, they proposed, you could have had a conversation word for word, though a picture had always been worth a thousand. That was the system: we knew where we stood, and it was by our words, but the currency went into free fall: a picture to five thousand, ten thousand words, a million! Despite new coinages, soon it was impossible to exchange a word with anyone, unless you traded in the black market of filthy language. And, if you did, there was always the danger you’d be caught on street corners, unable to pay your respects.
Some clung to individual words to fill the gaps as language crumbled but, without sentence structure, they presented as insane, like a homeless man who once lived on the corner of my block and carried round a piece of pipe saying, ‘Where’s this fit? Where’s this fit?’ to everyone he met. Except that the word-offerers didn’t even form phrases, t
hey just held out each single syllable aggressively, aggrievedly, or hopefully.
As for the rest of us, words still visited sometimes: spork, ostrich, windjammer… We wondered where they had come from, what to do with them. Were they a curse or a blessing? We’d pick them up where they dropped, like ravens’ bread on soggy ground.
Of course the big brands panicked, employed marketeers to look into whether we had ever had the right words in the first place. Naturally, we never read the results of their research. The new government launched a scheme (no need for secrecy as there’s no gossip). Bespoke words were designed along lines dictated by various linguistic systems, and tested. As someone who, until recently, had lived by her words (if there are words to live by: as you know, I actually live by the church), I was involved or, perhaps, committed. Under scientific conditions, we exchanged conversations involving satch, ileflower, liisdoktora. We cooed over the new words, nested them, hoping meaning would come and take roost, but meaning never did.